Yet the Thuringian affair did not just delineate a political frontline running right through the population in both east and west: alongside this new shared experience, the affair made clear the different viewpoints from which people perceive a common conflict because of their different histories, political experiences and learning processes. All the same, this emerged much more clearly on one side than on the other.

Whereas, locally in the east, ideas about the political substance behind the concept of bürgerlich or ‘middle-class’ mentality had to be sorted out first, reactions in the west reflected a legacy inherited from the old federal republic. The fact that the Thuringian government crisis dragged on for weeks, even after the resignation of the state premier who had been elected thanks to the AfD, was a farcical double-bind in which the CDU parliamentary group was marooned only because it was forced by its federal chair (who came from the Saarland) to stick to the incompatibility of any coalition with either left or right.

How could Mike Mohring (CDU leader in Thuringia) help the left-wing minority cabinet into the saddle without dirtying his hands by breaching the required ‘equidistance’? The party nominee for chancellor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, had dug her own grave, with her mantra-like repetition of ‘neither one nor the other’—which, given the person of Bodo Ramelow, the worthy Christian trade unionist from Hesse (and Left party state premier), proved wholly unrealistic. It was most truly a ‘pretty rich’ piece of western history which ran head-on into current realities in the east.

The western CDU, which had plastered its election posters from the very first federal elections with denunciations of Herbert Wehner (social-democrat party general secretary) and the SPD under the slogan ‘all roads lead to Moscow’, still found it hard to say a long overdue goodbye to a moralistic discrimination against leftists—a discrimination which had long worked as the prophylactic antithesis of an obvious historical discrimination towards the far right in light of the Nazi period. In the old federal republic, for the CDU the symmetrical moral devaluation of right and left (a symmetry which during the cold war had even received academic blessing in the guise of the theory of totalitarianism) had been an important programmatic building-block en route to becoming a natural majority party. In the geopolitical constellation of the cold war, the first federal chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, used an anti-communist front to bind in the old Nazi elites which had preserved or won back their old positions in virtually all administrative functions, armed with the feeling of always having been on the right side.¹

In fact, in those days anti-communism enabled large parts of the population which had supported Hitler right up to the bitter end by an overwhelming majority to evade any self-critical coming to terms with their own enmeshment in his crimes. The ‘communicative refusing to mention’ one’s own past behaviour facilitated an apparently co-operative adaptation to the new democratic order—an opportunism which, naturally, proved all the easier to sustain with growing living standards and under the nuclear umbrella of the US.

This dubious success was so embedded in the Christian-democrat party’s DNA that, decades later, in the 1994 federal elections, its general secretary, Peter Hinze, could play the anti-communist card once more in the form of his now almost legendary ‘red socks campaign’. An electorate in the east that had always been overwhelmingly sceptical in its attitude towards the rule of the communist SED should thereby be kept in line. But by that time the revolutionary slogan directed against the party dictatorship, ‘We are the people’, had long morphed into ‘We are a people’.

As early as the first free East-German parliamentary elections of March 1990, when GDR market squares were submerged from the west in waves of spotless, black-red-gold national flags, one saw the national issue move centre stage. Even then the emancipatory citizens’ movement frayed at the margin towards the right, egged on by neo-Nazi cadres who had come over from the west.² During 40 years of an anti-fascism dictated from above, the GDR could never have enjoyed the type of public discussion which, like a Leitmotiv, is woven into the history of the old federal republic.