The last border for the AfD

I have been making political art for 16 years. The few words in Article 5 of the constitution on the freedom of artistic expression should not refer so much to the songs of Helene Fischer as to the works of the Center for Political Beauty. For, we are not only using our constitutional rights in the fight against the AfD – we need them. From this perspective, I would like to pour clear, cold spring water over the possibilities of art. The most important point is that art is completely powerless. We are absolutely powerless in the face of the political abyss we are facing thanks to the AfD.
The AfD could soon get its hands on the state. And the only “power” we would then have would flow from the delusions of our opponents: Totalitarian parties tend to consider the arts dangerous, just like totalitarian states do. There is something hilariously ironic about this: The Nazis covered Germany and territories they occupied with a network of concentration camps, tortured hundreds of thousands of people, started a world war and destroyed millions of lives on an industrial scale. But art, of all things: Art is supposed to have posed a threat to the Nazis?
The fact that the enemies of democracy vastly overestimate the potential of art has led some of my colleagues to consider themselves dangerous. Just as Nietzsche considered some of his ideas more explosive than dynamite, some artists consider their work more dangerous than Stauffenberg's briefcase.
I am not a follower of this doctrine. In fact, there is not only a conservative self-overestimation, which led to Hitler's rise to power, but also a progressive, humanistic one. In view of the crimes committed by Germany in the 20th century, I consider it more appropriate to dampen expectations: Art is absolutely innocuous to that part of the human soul that harbors brutality and barbarism. The arts cannot burn arsonists with fire.
Of course, someone who built an entire Holocaust memorial in front of Björn Höcke's house will not be spared by the “national revolution” in 2029 or (perhaps more historically fitting: in the federal election that follows the next one) in 2033. Of course, in 1933, works of art were also thrown onto the fire in place of their authors. But that didn’t make these works powerful. Or dangerous. That is perhaps how they appear to us, the next generation. But not to the Nazis. 
In the face of the magnitude, violence and decisive precision of a fascism that built Auschwitz, humanism can usually do nothing, absolutely nothing. The only power I would recognize as the “power of fiction” is art's ability to see reality differently and make it bearable. In the face of fascism, however, the exact opposite applies: Reality must be depicted in all its intolerability. This does not require art. Every chief prosecutor, every criminal defense lawyer, every public prosecutor dismissed by the AfD can do a better job of denouncing the AfD state, castigating its crimes and hating those who stand by, those who collaborate.
Sure, we can dream of resistance. And when the AfD state is bombed to rubble by the Allies, preferably in 2045, researchers will pore over our beautiful dreams and exploit them. The center will then get a Hollywood film. That is, if Hollywood still exists and films are not already being produced in five seconds and created ready-made by TikTok AI.
But that's not being honest. The honest truth is that we have absolutely no power and these lunatics are only persecuting us because of their delusions. Not because of our “power.” What is beautiful is delicate and fragile, what is ugly is sometimes indestructible. The beautiful falls over with the first gust of wind. It breaks. The only ones who don’t know this are those who hate beauty with their obsession with art.
You may be familiar with Brandolini's law, which states that it’s 10 times easier to spread a lie than to refute it. According to Brandolini’s law, combating false information objectively takes 10 times as long as it takes the AfD to come up with one of its religious “ideas,” such as the doctrine of population replacement. While we are preoccupied with correcting one falsehood, the AfD has already invented 10 new gospels. In the book “Es ist 5 vor 1933,” I refined this point somewhat, adapting a bon mot from Mely Kiyak: “Lies only need a second to find their way into the human heart, but a generation of war to leave that place again.”
Removing a lie from the heart sometimes requires a good old world war. Under the conditions set by nuclear weapons systems, of course.

So, there’s no good news. Where does that leave hope? There’s something here that I don’t understand. And that sometimes contains the seeds of hope: I was born in Dresden in 1981. Like most of you, I lived through the last eight years of the GDR. The fall of the Wall was the defining media event of the 1990s, celebrated on television in a continuous loop: Every day, people danced on the Berlin Wall, so to speak. This continued well into the 2000s. Things have calmed down a bit since then. At most, we are served up these images on New Year's Eve.
But the second German democratic revolution, which in an irony of history took place exactly 71 years after the first revolution – that of November 9, 1918 – was not a Wende, a “turning point”; like the first one, the revolution was driven by the people. By the citizens of the GDR. The driving forces were the civil rights movements. Not Helmut Kohl. He played absolutely no part in November 9, 1989. We, you fought for freedom and democracy for the former territory of the GDR.
And now this part of the country of all places is longing for dictatorship? Many in the West are now completely appalled: In the polls, the AfD stands at 25% nationwide. If federal elections were held today, it would enter parliament as the strongest party. What can you say to that? The AfD already won 30% of the vote in some parts of the country in 2019! Or 40%. In some areas, it was even a little more: the absolute majority. No one in political Berlin was particularly alarmed. Olaf continued to sleep soundly in the chancellery.

Why is it that the very part of our country that fought for democracy and human rights for themselves and their children in 1989 is leading a totalitarian movement in 2025? Don't worry, I don't intend to shed light on the counterintuitive element of history. Or the counterrevolutionary one. What I'm interested in is the simple question, because there is something in it that can help us.
The forces that fought for freedom are not dead. At least not all of them. They are tired. If you ask me, they already looked completely exhausted in October 1990. I was very disappointed when, in the 2000s, I saw how the revolutionaries couldn’t find the decency or strength to transform the civil rights movement into human rights movements. Actually, this should have happened much earlier, in 1992-95, during the genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Srebrenica.
Wolfgang Thierse, for example, never really grew beyond being a civil rights activist to become a less self-centered human rights activist. These forces now need to be awakened. The forces of 1989. The forces of democracy and freedom that were and are still at work here in Chemnitz. Not the civil rights activists, don't worry. They will continue to suffer from their post-reunification burnout and complain about the fact that a better constitution was not adopted in 1990. Whatever exactly it was they wanted to change in the constitution.
And yet, there still remains that struggle for freedom from 1989. And yet, pride in the Wende of 1989 is enough to keep the embers burning. Pride in the successful revolution for democracy and freedom. Not Thierse's pride. Our pride – in October 9, 1989 in Leipzig. In Bornholmer Strasse on November 9. Our pride in the goose bumps we felt when democracy was not only demanded but achieved. With humanist militancy.
This pride is likely to be more historically significant than the AfD's push to achieve power. This pride may carry us to where we want to go: to a political boundary for the AfD that its amateur Nazi troupe cannot climb over. A boundary that keeps the enemies of freedom in check. A wall that the – predominantly Western, incidentally – counter-revolutionaries will no longer cross.
The CDU politicians, with Maischberger and Lanz in tow, want to build a new border? Please, here: Let's build a border. Here and now. But one against the AfD.
Perhaps art can indeed capture thoughts that are more powerful than their enemies. But let's not forget the deceptive nature of hope: What happens when you and I do nothing. When the last line is not drawn. What we lack today, in contrast to the civil rights movement of October 9, 1989 in Leipzig, and what we have been trying to use to revive society for 16 years, is humanist militancy.
Because society – instead of saying “Never again!” – wants to do it all over again: It wants to sit back and do nothing against the new Nazi party. It wants to once again pursue appeasement with political right-wing extremism – to talk to Nazis. And let's not forget the latest fashion: Our new chancellor now wants to overtake the Nazis on their own ground.
Instead of humanism, he is, in a sense, relying on anti-humanist militancy: Policies to deter refugees, remigration, violations of international and constitutional law at the borders. CDU politicians are already celebrating themselves as the “last chance for democracy.” Friedrich Merz and Markus Söder as champions against AfD fascism? The image of two sheep would be more credible.

Our world, our beautiful Germany, as its opponents like to emphasize, is dying of malnutrition. We lack humanity and militancy. In our thoughts. In our debates. In our politics. The legacy of the fall of the Wall, the democratic intolerance of 1989, is under constant attack from the AfD. It’s time for the spirit of 1989 to feel under attack too and to defend itself against the enemies of freedom.

Philipp Ruch gave this lecture on May 21,2025 as part of the event “The Art of Staying Many. Forum for Art, Freedom and Democracy: Germany and Europe” in the 2025 European Capital of Culture, Chemnitz. The panel discussion that followed with playwright Sasha Marianna Salzmann and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung feature writer Simon Strauß, moderated by Natascha Freundel, was recorded by rbb/radio 3 and is available as a podcast in the series “Der Zweite Gedanke” (The Second Thought). The contributions by Salzmann and Strauß are also available to read in our online magazine.