65 years after the Berlin Wall was built, Germany’s east-west scars help feed a rising far-right party
It’s been 65 years since the Berlin Wall divided a city and country overnight.
On Aug. 13, 1961, more than 10,000 police and army personnel began constructing the wall. It cut through Berlin, splitting East and West Germany, severing streets and neighbourhoods, families and friendships, democracy and communism.
Before it fell 28 years later, at least 140 people lost their lives because of the wall, including people attempting to escape, bystanders and border guards.
"Nobody could imagine that it would be up 28 years," said Hartmut Richter, whose family was trapped in the East that Sunday morning.
Richter eventually escaped to West Berlin in 1966 by swimming across a freezing river, later returning to smuggle 33 people out of East Germany in the trunk of his car.
Now, more than six decades later, Richter says his fight for freedom has become more than a memory: he sees it as a warning.
"I am afraid for our freedom we have here."
That freedom could face a stark test in upcoming state elections, where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is poised for a historic breakthrough.
Analysts say the AfD has successfully weaponized long-standing resentments between the former East and West Germany, framing itself as the champion of east German identity while pursuing radical policies that test the boundaries of Germany’s post-war democratic order.
Recent studies, including one by economic research institute DIW Berlin, also link the rise of the AfD to economic disadvantages, demographic shifts and collective grievances in the country's eastern states.
"I think it's an irony that we talk so much about reunification in Germany and becoming one people again, and now we have a party that really splits German society," said Justus Bender, a Frankfurt-based journalist and political analyst who specializes in the AfD.
WATCH | New divisions emerge in Germany:
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Sixty-five years after the Berlin Wall divided Germans between east and west, and over 30 years after its fall heralded reunification, Germany faces new divisions as the far right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party surges in popularity, especially in the formerly communist east.Polls suggest the AfD is likely to win a majority in the state election on Sept. 6 in Saxony-Anhalt in eastern Germany.
If it succeeds, it will be the first time since the Second World War that a far-right party holds that position.
"This is a party that is right-wing extremist, it's xenophobic, it's a party that has been seen to be and declared by courts to be hostile to the German constitution," said Germany’s former ambassador to Canada, Sabine Sparwasser. "So it's deeply concerning that a party like this is having such an appeal, in particular in Germany."
The AfD is polling nationally at 28 per cent, making it the leading party, seven points ahead of the governing coalition parties the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU).
The AfD’s political manifesto outlines its stance on nationalist social policies, immigration and ideas that go against some EU laws, including separate schools for immigrants.
The party also explicitly targets what it calls non-traditional lifestyles, stating strong opposition to the promotion of single parenthood or progressive family models.
Its policies include proposing large-scale deportations of anyone who is of non-German-heritage and pushing for what it calls a patriotic cultural policy that cuts funding for projects not deemed suitably national, such as certain Holocaust remembrance programs.
"We Germans — our people are the only people in the world to have planted a monument of shame in the heart of its capital," Björn Höcke, leader of the AfD in the state of Thuringia, said about the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.
Höcke has been fined by German courts twice for using a banned Nazi slogan, "Everything for Germany" ("Alles für Deutschland").
A judge ruled that Höcke could be described as a fascist without fear of defamation because that description was a "value judgment based on facts."
WATCH | The origins of AfD:
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Alternative for Germany (AfD) is on course to become the second-largest player in the country’s parliament after Sunday’s election. CBC’s Margaret Evans breaks down where the far-right political party came from and why Elon Musk is getting involved."It's not that the AfD is in any way like the Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler," Bender said. "It's more the similarity that there is a right-wing extremist party as the Nazi Party was, and that they are promising that they would never do anything illegal. That is exactly what the Nazi Party did in the 1930s.
"As a German, I'm always concerned when I see an extremist telling me that I shouldn't be concerned, and that they would never do anything illegal," Bender said. "This is a historical parallel that really puts shivers up my spine when I think about it."
If the AfD wins a state majority in Saxony-Anhalt, Bender said it could have a major impact not only on politics on that region, but also on Germany's federal politics.
In Germany, states have control over many aspects of daily life. If the AfD is successful in Saxony-Anhalt, the party would have control over education, policing and culture there.
"If that works out for them, then there won't be any checks and balances," Bender said.
Winning the election would also give it seats in Germany's upper house, the Bundesrat, where it could call for initiatives at the federal level, including on issues such as foreign policy and defence.
Divisions fuelling political power
When the wall fell in 1989, divisions between life in East and West Germany didn’t end for many.
"People have underestimated how much of a difference there still is," said Katja Hoyer, a historian and author of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990.
"We're now looking at over 35 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, and still any survey that you look at, be that what people eat, what they drink, how they behave, how they feel about things and how they vote, it still tends to be different between the former East and the former West Germany.
"Surveys have shown that large numbers of east Germans feel like second-class citizens."
This is something the AfD has been capitalizing on, Bender said.
"Some politicians of the AfD talk about the fact that they imagine that the only real Germans live in eastern Germany, and the west Germans are merely German-speaking Americans, as one of them put it just a few weeks ago."
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In the last state election in Saxony-Anhalt in 2021, the CDU garnered 37.1 per cent of the vote while the AfD received 20.8 per cent, making it the second-largest political force in the area.
Right now, according to polling firm PolitPro, the AfD is polling at 42.1 per cent in the state, nearly double the governing CDU, which sits at 23 per cent.
"What they're doing is specifically addressing east Germans as east Germans," Hoyer said. "They will use both positive and negative experiences from the GDR [German Democratic Republic] because they know that they're unique to people in east Germany and use them as part of their election campaign."
Hoyer said some of those tactics include likening current issues to past GDR issues and sentiments many in what was East Germany feel are unique to their experiences and not understood or respected by the rest of the country.
"It's an interesting one where they use the ambiguities, I suppose, that people have in their own memories of what they experienced, directly addressing them in something that makes them unique as a group and playing into those feelings of resentment that were there beforehand."
Former ambassador Sparwasser watched the wall come down in 1989 and witnessed the fallout.
"The unification has been incomplete," she said. "Maybe we focused too much on the materialistic kind of unification, creating the motorways, creating the infrastructure, doing all of these things, and we didn't focus enough on an emotional, a mental kind of connection.
"In many ways, we would have hoped that Germany is more immune to this kind of populism because of Germany's history and because of our occupation with the past."
For Bender, the state election could be a signal of more to come for the AfD.
"If the AfD achieves a position where they are allowed to govern, and then governs and then the world doesn't end in that part of Germany, it could become a symbol for them," he said. "It could really help them convince Germans that they can vote for them in the future without risking a lot.
"That's what they are trying to achieve by running a state first, and then maybe the country later."
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