The madness of a blind Germany is back, scrubbed up and dressed to look respectable. My name is Hans. I was born in Torgau, Saxony, and today I find myself reckoning with the madness of a blind Germany.
The Madness of a Blind Germany
The neo-Nazis are back, and anyone still trying to play down the vote just cast is a fool. This is how it started last time. First came the promise of restoring a moral order, dreamt up by men whose political programme was anything but moral. Today, that same poison has been repackaged for the times: sleeker on the outside, seemingly sanitised, but unchanged in its soul.
A Smart New Suit, the Same Old Soul
It no longer wears polished jackboots. It need not march in uniform. It does not raise its arm in salute. It turns up in a suit, gets its message out through the socials, trots out carefully scripted lines, turns fear into votes and resentment into an election manifesto.
The 43.8 per cent polled by the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt is not a passing protest. It is not a sudden fever. Nor is it the careless vote of a confused people. Nearly one voter in two knowingly backed a far-right party. They did so amid sky-high turnout, knowing full well what they were voting for.
The Madness of a Blind Germany
Anyone who keeps calling it a “protest vote” is letting those voters off the hook far too easily. A vote is a responsibility. Inside the polling booth, nobody is forced to put a cross in a box. Every cross carries political, moral and historical weight. Germany, more than any other nation, ought to know that.
Hitler did not smash his way through the doors of power in a tank. The ballot box made him indispensable, the establishment reckoned he could be useful, and conservatives fancied they could keep him under control. By the time the penny finally dropped, Germany was already burning — and Europe with it.
The Madness Is Back
I was born in Torgau, the town where American and Soviet soldiers met on the Elbe in 1945. That handshake heralded the end of the Nazi monster. Today, in the very regions that should have guarded that memory most fiercely, the ghost is taking on flesh again: a body, a voice and millions of votes.
Meanwhile, Germany is rearming, ramping up defence spending and once again speaking with pride of power, security, discipline and the national interest. All this is happening while support for the far right doubles. You would have to be blind not to see the danger. Only a fool could shrug it off as a mere coincidence.
The Madness of a Blind Germany
I am not saying that 2026 has already become 1933. I am saying something far more uncomfortable: when 1933 arrived, almost nobody grasped straight away that it really was 1933.
History does not come back wearing the same clothes. It changes its language, its symbols and its tools. It smartens itself up, gets itself a seat on the television sofa and demands to be treated with respect by the establishment.
Yet the poison remains the same: a humiliated nation, an enemy to point the finger at, a minority to go after, a past to rewrite.
Germany is not blind because it cannot see. It is blind because, once again, it chooses to look the other way. The greatest madness of all would be to wait for the swastikas before calling Nazism by its name.
© Hans CPC