Description

Although political parties of the extreme right closely connected to (Neo)-Nazism have drawn most of the attention of researchers and pundits for a long time, the German public became aware of the self-stylized “New Right” only with the recent rise of new right-wing populist movements. However, immediately after the Second World War, intellectuals constituted a “New Right” that replaced National Socialist ideology of racial supremacy with concepts of ethnopluralism, referred to volkish movements, specifically the “Conservative Revolution,” prior to National Socialism, and adopted new strategies in the struggle for cultural hegemony. While antisemitism, a key element of Nazi ideology, allegedly has been erased from the “New Right’s” political agenda, it still functions as an important ideological and mobilizing factor. In this talk, Marcus Funck will discuss recent developments in the antisemitic discourse of the political right in Germany.

Marcus Funck, historian, is a research associate and Graduate Program Director at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism, Technische Universität Berlin. From 2006 to 2010, he was the DAAD Visiting Professor at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at York University. He is the co-editor of the Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung and has published in the fields of modern German and European history. Currently, he is engaging in a “history of the present” exploring the historical archives of present-day radical nationalist thought and is preparing a book-length essay on the history of difference and sameness in Germany since 1800.