AfD attacks Bauhaus, and modern fascism repeats the old script
By Josie Calloway · Reporting from Pittsburgh ·
The Old Slogans Are Back in the East
If you spend enough years watching triage bays fill up with people who put off care because they couldn't afford the co-pay, you learn to spot the vital signs of a system in freefall long before the flatline. You see it in the language first—the way politicians start talking about human beings like they’re bad inventory. Over in Saxony-Anhalt, ahead of a landmark state election this Sunday, the Alternative for Germany party is running that exact playbook against a ghost that died nearly a century ago. According to reporting from AP News, the far-right outfit has fixed its crosshairs on the iconic Bauhaus school in Dessau, labeling the cradle of modern design an “aberration of modernism” and running on a nativist slogan of “Think German” against the state’s current “Think Modern” campaign.
It is the same cultural panic we watched ripple through the streets during the Chemnitz protests, only now it’s wearing a tailored jacket and running for parliament. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, the party's cultural policy spokesperson in the state legislative body, declared during a 2024 state parliament debate that “the Bauhaus violated the human need for security and comfort in every conceivable way.” Ulrich Siegmund, the lead AfD candidate in the upcoming election, chimed in at a campaign event in Moeser to whine about a “policy of a lack of identity,” insisting that “we just mustn’t limit our culture and our history to it. We are much, much more than just the Bauhaus.” They look at a foundation drawing up to 150,000 visitors annually and see an enemy because it refuses to march to the drum of blood-and-soil mythology.
A Century-Old Script Dusts Off Its Old Boots
This isn't just conservative hand-wringing about art; it’s a direct rehearsal for the Degenerate Art exhibition. When authoritarian political movements weaponize populist resentment against modernist aesthetics, they always frame avant-garde design as a symptom of national decay and moral subversion. Walter Gropius founded the school in Weimar back in 1919 to marry craft with mass production, preaching a gospel of utility, openness, and transnational exchange. But the Nazi Party came to power in 1933 and shut it down because fascists have never been able to stomach an idea that doesn't fit inside a barracks. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the school's last director, ended up fleeing to the United States in the late 1930s just to keep his work alive.
Now, the modern successors to those book-burners are trying to finish the job. As German Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer pointed out in an interview highlighted by the Ottumwa Courier, “The AfD is attacking the Bauhaus, using the very same words the Nazis used 100 years ago.” Weimer didn't mince words about the mechanics of this bigotry, noting that “this idea, which is very modern, of bringing together elements from different disciplines has always been hated by the far right,” and adding bluntly: “The Nazis banned and persecuted it. And today we have new Nazis … growing stronger, and attacking the Bauhaus all over again.”
The Blueprint Still Holds Against the Bricks
You don't need a degree in political science to know what happens when you let the wrecking ball swing at the foundations of public pluralism. As reported by The Joplin Globe, a pro-Bauhaus manifesto initiated in August has already drawn signatures from more than 2,500 groups and individuals, pushing back against a nationalism that is fundamentally hostile to culture. Barbara Steiner, the director and CEO of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, put it plainly when she noted that the far-right’s accusations are “very stereotypical” and that they are fighting a phantom version of the school “that never existed historically and, of course, doesn’t exist today either.”
The manifesto got it right: the school stands for intellectual, social, and aesthetic openness, and that resilience is the best defense we have against the jackboot revivalists. Following Sunday's election, the AfD is going to double down on its efforts to starve regional cultural institutions of funding and political legitimacy, turning every historic site into a battleground for demographic grievance. But if the people who saved our hospitals through the worst of the pandemic taught me anything, it’s that infrastructure—whether it’s a rural clinic or a progressive design school—only survives when the community refuses to let it be looted by the loudest bullies in the room.