Rechts und Radikal - Warum gerade im Osten?
Today this period of time is called "Basballschlägerjahre". The early 1990s in Eastern Germany were marked by right-wing violence and right-wing radicalism. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, leading neo-Nazis from West Germany came to the sinking GDR. While they were only able to gather a few supporters in the old FRG because democratic civil society strongly opposed it, in Eastern Germany they met with great interest and much more fertile ground with their ideas of a brown revolution. Nowhere did reunification work as well as in neo-Nazi circles. The reasons for this lay in the concealment of a neo-Nazi scene that had already became stronger in the 1980s and which officially was not allowed to exist in the, on paper, anti-fascist GDR. Failure to come to terms with the National Socialist past as well as the complete lack of an disput of the Holocaust in schools and in society over the past 40 years were further reasons. The understanding of democracy was alien to large parts of the Eastern German population. The strengthening of the neo-Nazis after the fall of the Wall is still having an impact till today and extends well into the middle of society. Nowhere else in Germany had right-wing extremist political parties achieved such great successes in the new millennium, see the NPD in the 2000s and the AfD in the 2010s. The film authors trace the connections between the GDR past, the time of the reunification and the situation in Eastern Germany today.
