Postdoc-Project
Part of the project "The Radical Right in Germany, 1945-2000" supported by the Volkswagen Foundation
The small right-wing parties that formed in the western occupation zones after 1945 and shortly after the founding of the Federal Republic are generally regarded as politically failed and historically rather irrelevant. This study shows that, despite their relative weakness, these parties, whose acronyms are largely forgotten today, shaped the democratic reconstruction in the Länder from 1946 onwards and later also the emerging democracy in Bonn in many respects.
On the one hand, despite many restrictions, they succeeded in rebuilding nationalist party structures, some of which harked back to the late Weimar Republic and others to the ‘Third Reich’, and whose very existence contributed to shifting the political and social balance of power to the right. On the other hand, they contributed significantly to the realization of nationalist politics, for example by appropriating right-wing demands from other parties. This reactivated a nationalist potential that the NSDAP in particular, but not only, had accumulated since the end of the Weimar Republic.
To project website: https://projekt.radikale-rechte.de/
