What was revealed in Thuringia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg is, of course, not an east-German problem alone. The authorities had already comprehensively failed throughout Germany in pursuing the National Socialist Underground—in a series of crimes the extent and circumstances of which have not been clarified even yet by the judiciary. The far-right riot in 2018 in Chemnitz and the strikingly circuitous dismissal of the head of domestic state security triggered a learning process everywhere in the country. As the hesitant proceedings against far right networks in the armed forces, police and security agencies show, the first signs of an infiltration of core institutions of the democratic state are not just a matter for east Germany alone.

The fact is that this recent development was preceded in the east German Länder by a spate of outbreaks of violence from the far right, unhindered Nazi parades and disturbing cases of politically preoccupied prosecution. The brutal and often life-threatening cases of rightist violence were already bad enough: the ‘mob chase of Mügeln’ (in Saxony) of a group of (eight) Indians in 2007, or in the following year the excesses of the ‘Storm’ fraternity which wanted to create in and around Dresden ‘national liberated zones’, or a year before the end of the NSU the arson attacks and car chases by the thugs of Limbach-Oberfrohna, or in 2015 the attacks by more than 1,000 massed people against a refugee shelter in Heidenau, or the similar disinhibition of a xenophobic mob in Freital and Clausnitz.

But even worse were the reactions on the part of the state: a police force which advises victims not to take out proceedings; a biased court which recognises no difference between attackers and victims; a domestic intelligence service which subtly differentiates between behaviour ‘critical towards asylum’ and that ‘hostile towards asylum’; the federal prosecutor having to remove a state prosecutor’s office from a scandalous terrorism case because, despite the obvious group connections of the accused, it could only identify individual perpetrators; or the office that orders up such scant numbers of police officers for a pre-announced demonstration that participants in the inevitable riots could not even be proceeded against. If I then go on to read that in these eastern regions a ‘silent acceptance of right-wing violence’ is spreading, then I do feel reminded of a ‘Weimarian’ state of affairs.¹