firstly, the majority of afd voters have been born after 1990. secondly the modern german state is pretty much defined by opposition to the gdr:

• our national holiday is “reunification day” with the day of the attempted counterrevolution of 1953 previously filling that role in the west

• almost all members of the former gdr state apparatus were purged in the 90s, including people like teachers and university professors.

• the entire east german military was purged and there were criminal cases initiated against people formerly serving in the border troops. no such things had ever been done by the frg government against nazi troops btw. also unlike former personnel of the nazi army, officers of the former gdr military are not allowed to be addressed by rank.

• gdr mass organizations like the “ernst thälmann pioneer organisation” have been declared “unconstitutional” while far-right parties like the afd are left unscathed despite creeping ever closer to actual political power

• the gdr is constantly being demonized and equated with nazi germany. schoolchildren are made to participate in performative denouncements of “the two dictatorships on german soil”. but while remembrance of the hitler regime is oftentimes paired with platitudes like “at least he built the autobahn”, media about the gdr is filled with -level horror stories about the stasi. in modern german history curriculum the role of communists resisting fascist tyranny is consistently played down or even ignored.

• class consciousness is being combatted by the media propagating racism. first against vietnamese people in the 90s and now against people of middle-eastern descent, thus working in conjunction with the massive efforts of west-german intelligence to re-nazify eastern germany

• even though by now many former gdr citizens were forced to go west due to losing their original jobs to shock therapy and are now forced to live amongst deeply anticommunist westerners, and the ones who remained having to deal with roaming (and sometimes armed) neonazi gangs made of people who were brainwashed by the post reunification propaganda (again, most afd voters were born after 1990), 57% of the population of the “new states” polled believes that life was better under socialist rule.

though you wouldnt hear any of this from west german political analysts. they instead claim that east germans simply have a pathological “democracy deficit” due to “growing up in a dictatorship”

It got hollowed out real bad with reunification, and having your state hollowed out is a decent predictor of reaction

Yeah, I’m pretty sure the elder there are pro- Deutsch Democratic Republic - but

when you have a generation that’s raised without DDR and socialism and is taught to hate it - without as much as social integration nor economic opportunity or social mobility in the current Eastern parts of Federal Republic of Deutschland,

and you have under the influence of fascist groups coming from FRD, post-Cold War

Those two ingredients tend to turn younger demographics fascist adjacent

The two other comments here are spot on, but there was also a lot of movement of even former dedicated communists from the East to the West after the wall came down as I once talked about through the lens of my German family in this post.

But it’s a combination of left defeat, lots of the former Eastern left dispersing across the more prosperous West of the country, and the fact the state spent many years enjoying putting the boot in to the East both politically and culturally (although the fash sometimes overstate that aspect as opportunism too).

Have you seen any post socialist block country? When communism is actively discredited, the only alternative to a liberal democracy becomes fascism.

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