The recent rise of far-right movements in Europe and beyond has drawn the attention of numerous scholars who, seeking to better understand their persistent successes, have studied different dimensions of their broadening appeal. Research in this burgeoning field has examined how processes of dispossession and shifting labor structures have transformed political allegiances (Kalb and Halmai Reference Kalb and Halmai2011), the significance of music and fashion to processes of recruitment and group formation (Teitelbaum Reference Teitelbaum2017; Miller-Idriss Reference Miller-Idriss2017), the rearticulation of traditional and newly fashioned gender relations (Geva Reference Geva2020; Simpson Reference Simpson2020), the rise and normalization of Islamophobic discourses (Bangstad Reference Bangstad2014; Bunzl Reference Bunzl2007; Lewicki and Shooman Reference Lewicki and Shooman2020; Kalmar Reference Kalmar2018), and the specificities of racist and authoritarian currents in the post-socialist context (Kalmar and Shoshan Reference Kalmar and Shoshan2020; Hentschel Reference Hentschel, Bystrom, Harris and Webber2018). An important debate has revolved around the historical links between Europe’s fascist past and today’s emergent far-right political formations, some of which have referenced historical precedents explicitly while others have done so less openly so or not at all. Authors have identified a shared common ground between the ideological frameworks that characterize today’s neofascist movements and those of earlier periods (Holmes Reference Holmes2000), highlighted the critical place that fascist charisma, as incarnated both in historical and in contemporary leaders, has occupied in enabling their political ascent (Gingrich and Banks Reference Gingrich and Banks2006), and analyzed how today’s New Right has drawn on earlier intellectual traditions of European nationalism (Göpffarth Reference Göpffarth2020).
In this article, my aim is to deepen our insights into the role that Europe’s fascist past has continued to play in the present by exploring how values embodied in, or retrospectively read into, the fascist leader have informed contemporary moral discourses. To analyze the moral significance of values associated with Hitler and National Socialism in today’s Germany, I draw on Caroline Humphrey’s formulation of moral exemplarity.Footnote 1 While cults of personality dedicated to deceased charismatic fascist leaders have continued to exist in various countries, the notion of moral exemplarity, as we shall see, goes beyond their mere adoration and fetishization. Here, I ask whether and how, given the extraordinary constraints on invocations of the memory of National Socialism in Germany, moral discourses nevertheless reference this past and are shaped by it. I identify several ways in which the figure of Hitler and National Socialism operate as meaningful moral exemplars for distinct German publics. For broad sectors of German society, I argue, Hitler and National Socialism surface as central coordinates for orienting moral discourse, albeit as negative exemplars, while for far-right sympathizers they signal positive moral qualities, though often indirectly through operations of syntagmatic substitution by less strongly tabooed fascist figures as well as of metonymic extension to “ordinary” historical types. To fruitfully illuminate the lingering salience of the fascist past, I conclude, we must revise the concept of moral exemplarity to allow its extension beyond the figure of the fascist leader and to acknowledge its complex intertwinements with other genres of moral discourse, for example those that appeal to rules.
I begin with a brief discussion of the different sources on which I draw for my argument: ethnographic fieldwork in two different periods and materials from the German public sphere. I then introduce the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Humphrey within the field of the anthropology of morality. Next, I discuss the challenges of thinking about the moral exemplarity of National Socialist leaders in contemporary Germany, owing to the exceptionally strict constraints that govern discourses about the Third Reich. In the following three sections I outline how, these difficulties notwithstanding, the memory of National Socialism operates as moral exemplarity in the German context. I propose three registers in which moral discourses in Germany summon the memory of National Socialism and its leaders: first, as negative exemplarity in mainstream public discourses, a figuration of moral depravity and failure that serves to condemn contemporary conduct and to inspire upright behavior; second, through substitutions that, instead of the irredeemable figure of Hitler, summon its equivalents from within the cast of Nazi leaders and endow them with admirable moral values; and, finally, by extension to the domain of the ordinary, where the common, low-rank German soldiers of the Wehrmacht become the object of moral veneration. I conclude the paper by illustrating certain resonances between these registers of moral exemplarity and the values that I have found to compel young right-wing extremists in my research.
Sources and Fieldwork
In order to develop my argument about National Socialist exemplarity in Germany, I draw on three distinct sets of sources. First, and most extensively, I present evidence from ethnographic research conducted in 2004–2005 with groups of young right-wing extremists in the district of Treptow-Köpenick in Berlin. During this period, I accompanied a team of street social workers who served the groups I wanted to study and who facilitated my access to them. Gradually, I developed a degree of trust and familiarity with their members that allowed me to spend time with them independently at their apartments, outdoors hangouts, local soccer matches, or favorite pubs. Gender-mixed and mostly in their late teens to mid-twenties, they were by and large (though far from homogeneously) socially marginalized descendants of working-class East German families with low educational records and, in many cases, criminal records for various offenses and misdemeanors. Recorded interviews as well as countless informal conversations over a span of sixteen months offered a wealth of insights into their positions on the National Socialist past and contemporary German politics. Elsewhere I have detailed the methodological strategy I employed and the challenges that it presented.Footnote 2 I should note, though, that I conducted this fieldwork under a pseudonym, so that the young right-wing extremists in Treptow, while fully informed that I was an anthropologist studying them, were unaware that I was a Jewish Israeli.
The second set of materials were collected during fieldwork in 2019–2020 as part of an ongoing research project on the political significance of the concept of heimat Footnote 3 in today’s Germany. Ethnographically, this project has focused on villages and small towns in Brandenburg, where I conducted fieldwork in local heimat museums, participated in the activities of cultural associations, interviewed engaged residents, accompanied farmers to their fields, and volunteered at a small, organic farm. My primary objective has not been to target right wing nationalists. Instead, I have sought to understand how more general currents shared by broad publics have rendered far-right discourses compelling for many in the East German countryside, where the Alternative for Germany party (AfD) has been particularly successful in recent years. Accordingly, most of my interlocutors were not sympathizers of far-right politics, and indeed many considered themselves committed anti-fascists. A majority were well-educated and ranged from middle-aged to retirees. Here, I draw especially on my experiences on the organic farm and my conversations with its owner, an AfD sympathizer.
Finally, I look at materials from the German public sphere to illustrate the moral significance that the National Socialist past has for broader sectors of Germany’s population beyond the young extremists or older citizens of the East German countryside. I examine two popular and controversial films that both feature Hitler as their protagonist and think through what their rendering of the Führer might tell us about the moral valence of his figure in Germany. I also draw on a press archive of over three thousand items that I have collected from a variety of German media over the past fifteen years, with a focus on nationalism, the far right, and National Socialism.
The article therefore builds on and juxtaposes three different types of sources that contrast with each other in various respects: the populations for which they are significant (lower-class urban right-wing extremist youths, older farmers and engaged citizens of the East German countryside, or national-scale publicity); their time-frames (respectively 2004–2005, 2019–2020, and 2004 to the present); as well as my mode of accessing them (ethnographic fieldwork under a pseudonym or my real name, the consumption and archiving of public media). While my objective is to identify and describe some of the ways in which the figure of Hitler and National Socialism more broadly operate as moral exemplars in Germany, I claim neither nationally generalizable validity nor an exhaustive catalogue of possibilities. Instead, through the heterogeneity of my sources, I aim to facilitate a more refined and less reductive analysis, one attentive to the diverse modes in which National Socialist exemplarity manifests itself and to their overlaps and dissonances.
The Concept of Moral Exemplarity
When considering the significance of fascist exemplarity today as it operates in the case of the memory of Hitler and National Socialism in contemporary Germany one confronts several unique difficulties. In order to first determine their nature and subsequently not so much resolve them as elaborate alternative ways of conceiving the role of National Socialist exemplarity, a few preliminary words on my understanding of the notion of exemplarity are in order. The concept has enjoyed certain traction in a number of disciplines, including anthropology, literary studies, history, law, education, and philosophy (Ferrara Reference Ferrara2018; Langlands Reference Langlands2018; McNay Reference McNay2019; Noyes Reference Noyes2016; Owen Reference Owen2017; Toracca Reference Toracca2018; Eriksen Reference Eriksen2017; Kristjánsson Reference Kristjánsson2017; Sibau Reference Sibau2011; and Lowrie and Lüdemann Reference Lowrie and Lüdemann2017). In each case, it has taken on particular meanings as well as specific references. In law, for example, it has been used to describe the special standing of landmark statutory transformations, such as the ratification of a new constitution or important constitutional amendments, or certain constitutional court rulings (Ferrara Reference Ferrara2018). In education, the concept has been used to explore the emulation and elevation of role-models (Kristjánsson Reference Kristjánsson2017). Exemplarity has also been employed by political philosophers, for example to extend and develop the notion of biopolitics (Castro Reference Castro2012).
In what follows, I draw on some of the insights that emerge from these discussions, but I am informed primarily by Caroline Humphrey’s (Reference Humphrey and Signe1997) exposition and development of the concept within the field of the anthropology of morality. Humphrey builds on her experience in Mongolia, where she was interested in the ways that her interlocutors mobilized the words and actions of exceptional figures as exemplary moral narratives that allowed them to justify their own behavior. She outlines a sharp contrast between two kinds of moral discourses. The first, she says, orients itself toward moral rules and characterizes modern European societies. Rule-based moral systems seek to formulate and conform to objective, universal, and coherent principles. According to Humphrey, such systems share three fundamental characteristics (ibid.: 34): First, they are identically applicable to everyone, and hence “suppose the sameness of the subject, that is human equality, or they are designed to promote such equality.” Second, they are consistent and coherent, “such that if you obey one rule you do not thereby disobey some other rule in the code.” Finally, they strive to be clear and unequivocal, so that “the subject knows immediately what is a right action and what is wrong.”
The second kind of moral discourse, which Humphrey says is dominant in Mongolia, emphasizes instead the importance of moral exemplars. Here, behavior is articulated and assessed in reference to precedents set in the biographies of exemplary political, historical, religious, or mythological figures and personalities. Such moral discourses allow for far greater creativity and open-endedness because situated moral judgments can invoke any of an entire universe of characters and anecdotes and interpret them in different ways. Rather than constraining the moral conduct of individuals, exemplars open up a discursive space for elaborating and justifying moral decisions in a continuous process of individual self-improvement. They therefore contrast with all three characteristics of rule-based moral discourses: first, they assume individual difference and inequality, “a culturally specific concept of the person”; second, they cultivate diversity or “a variety of different ‘ways of life,’” and hence acknowledge social conflict; and, finally, they demand of the individual a great deal of interpretative effort and are therefore “open-ended and unfinished.” She illustrates this by describing an example of a Mongolian who justified his marriage to a Chinese—a moral dilemma—by citing the precedent of the Emperor Chinggis Khan who married princesses of different nationalities in order to promote his “Mongolian greatness” (ibid.: 26).
In the cases that Humphrey discusses from Mongolia, exemplars appear as the discourses and actions not of one supreme entity but rather of a variety of venerated historical figures. The publicly narrated and widely known biographies of these figures, furthermore, each includes various anecdotes on which individuals may draw and which they may interpret in different ways according to their circumstances. Humphrey emphasizes “the extraordinary variety of these teachers, ancestors and gods that stand in a teacher-like relation to the subject,” and adds that Mongolians are not “limited to having just one exemplar in their life” (ibid.: 35). In a similar fashion, Rebecca Langlands shows that the exempla in Ancient Rome were a particular genre of concise moral stories that invited imitation from listeners and inspired their admiration (Reference Langlands2018). Roman exempla were numerous, and their variety and contrasts helped maintain a space of individual moral agency within the community. The diversity of moral exemplars in both cases appears important for allowing a degree of individual autonomy in the elaboration of moral selves through situated deployments that respond to particular social circumstances. Unlike Humphrey, who contrasts Mongolian exemplarity with Western rule-based moral discourse, Langlands highlights the importance of exemplarity within Western moral philosophy and especially its centrality to the Aristotelian tradition of moral thought. Both authors, however, oppose moral exemplarity to the sorts of universalist and immutable claims associated with moral discourses of rules—often attributed paradigmatically to Kant’s moral philosophy—that presume a generalized validity across both individuals and contexts.
Such a rendering of exemplarity as a kind of moral discourse that sharply contrasts with rule-based moral systems also implies a relatively strong individualist perspective, which Humphrey and other authors indeed emphasize in their studies. As against the imposition of community norms and expectations, exemplarity in this view offers the sort of situated incoherence and indeterminacy that permits individuals a significant degree of moral autonomy. The selection of exemplars from a variety of available possibilities, their interpretation, and their deployment become a practice of the self through which individuals continuously and pragmatically elaborate their moral persona. As they do so, they use the possibilities offered to them within a given repertoire creatively to craft this persona, rather than simply internalize and obey the community enforcement of normative standards. And yet, as I will suggest, to the extent that National Socialism can be held to operate as a moral exemplar in Germany today (and, more generally, in the adoration of previous fascist leaders elsewhere), it remains questionable whether any strict separation between individual and collective moral discourse applies in how it does so. Instead, what we witness, for example, as young right-wing extremists cite National Socialist examples to make sense of and legitimize their conduct and to distinguish themselves from their peers, may be better conceptualized as the discursive generation of recursive distinctions within a given moral universe.Footnote 4
The Non-Exemplarity of Hitler
At first glance, the German specificities of the collective memory of National Socialism in general, and of Hitler in particular, seem to sit uneasily with the notion of moral exemplarity. To begin with, in Germany there are relatively severe legal restrictions on the discursive handling of this memory in all its aspects. The criminal code and several other legal mechanisms place restrictions on public speech and other forms of expression about the National Socialist period.Footnote 5 Such restrictions regularly emerge as topics of political and legal debates concerned with circumscribing the licit forms of talking about National Socialism. Criminal law, for example, has long prohibited the public approval, denial, or downplaying of National Socialist crimes, with the memory of the Holocaust looming large here. In the early 2000s, in response to massive right-wing extremist marches in memory of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, the law was revised and extended to include a subsection banning the violation of the dignity of the victims of National Socialism by the approval, glorification, or justification of its crimes.Footnote 6 More recently, public pronouncements by leaders of the far-right AfD party have widely been seen to be historically revisionist and they have been accused of relativizing National Socialist atrocities. This has brought the question of the legal limits on the freedom of expression back into the public eye.Footnote 7 While in fact numerous publications describe diverse aspects of the National Socialist period in positive light without suffering censure, from a legal standpoint the possibilities for articulating the memory of the Third Reich in terms of moral exemplarity come under heavy restrictions in Germany.
More poignantly, and beyond strictly legal constraints, discursive taboos on positive valuations of the National Socialist period and its leading figures further limit the space for possible enunciations about the Third Reich. Here, the possibility of moral decency turning into evil—of ordinary German citizens becoming supporters of Nazism or passively complicit in its atrocities—presents a threatening horizon, one which has for that very reason generated a wealth of philosophical reflection and historical research into the nature of this metamorphosis so as to better prevent its return. Yet, as Slavoj Zizek suggested, the truly menacing possibility is exactly the opposite, namely, that “an obsessive, fanatical attachment to Evil may in itself acquire the status of an ethical position” (Reference Žižek1989: 27), or, put differently, that what we usually conceive of as pure evil could in fact reveal itself to answer to a moral order. Because National Socialism in Germany stands as a sign for this kind of pure evil, any deliberation of its possible moral values troubles the boundaries of tolerable speech.
Admittedly, in the past two decades historians have increasingly attended to the long-forsaken question of Nazi morality. Claudia Koonz, for example, has argued compellingly that National Socialism succeeded in elaborating and propagating an ethical order that could justify its atrocities and win the active participation or silent complicity of the general population (Reference Koonz2003). It did so, she maintains, less by fomenting hate against its enemies and more by offering a set of moral virtues organized around a fundamentalist concept of the Volk. Wolfgang Bialas has similarly proposed that National Socialism developed its own moral universe while heavily drawing on dominant ethical discourses and adapting them to an exclusionary ethnic morality (Reference Bialas, Fritze and Bialas2014). While the crimes of the Third Reich, and particularly the Holocaust, have stood for pure evil, Bialas insists that Nazism must also be understood historically through the ethical system that it created and the moral values that stood behind it. However, in stark contrast with extensive scholarship on other dimensions of National Socialism, research on its morality, Bialas concedes, is “still in its infancy,” a testament to how “accepting any autonomous Nazi morality [is] controversial” (ibid.: 15–16).
As scholars have noted, the taboo on positive remembrances of the National Socialist past has spawned multiple ways of eliding both discursive and legal prohibitions. Fashion labels, for example, have integrated into their repertoire scantily camouflaged allusions to National Socialism and its symbolic vocabulary, such as through extensive use of coding and mythological elements, always skirting the frontier of the illicit (Miller-Idriss Reference Miller-Idriss2017; Shoshan Reference Shoshan2016). Since as early as the turn of the millennium, German neo-Nazis have adopted the aesthetic style of their opponents, the Antifa, in their public performances of nationalism (Zuev and Virchow Reference Zuev and Virchow2014). Given the centrality of a biological concept of race under National Socialism, contemporary far-right nationalists have sought to distance themselves from this past and legitimate their political discourse by repackaging racism in the form of essentialized cultural categories, articulating for example concepts of the Volk putatively grounded in Heideggerian notions of shared history (Göpffarth Reference Göpffarth2020) or attributing incommensurable cultural difference to Muslims (Lewicki and Shooman Reference Lewicki and Shooman2020).
The memory of the National Socialist past in Germany presents revealing resonances as well as contrasts with how the GDR past is remembered today. Particularly in the West, the disproportional support for far-right parties and neo-Nazi movements in the East is often attributed to the legacy of the GDR, to its inadequate working through of the National Socialist period (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) or to its authoritarian political culture (Shoshan Reference Shoshan2016). Contemporary far-right currents in the East are therefore deployed discursively to construct equivalences between the two dictatorships, using the first to delegitimize positive references to the second. Meanwhile, far-right activists and intellectuals have effectively mobilized the memory of the resistance under the GDR state to cast themselves as defiant fighters against the dominant political system and to delegitimize their leftist adversaries (Lewicki and Shooman Reference Lewicki and Shooman2020; Göpffarth Reference Göpffarth2021). At the same time, while often frowned upon especially by West Germans, positive recollections of the GDR period and of the values attributed to socialist society nevertheless circulate widely and publicly in ways that remain unavailable for similar valuations of the Third Reich period (Bach Reference Bach2002; Boyer Reference Boyer2006). Recently, during the thirtieth anniversary celebrations of the fall of the Wall in autumn 2019, I visited several local museums in small towns in Brandenburg that curated special exhibitions and staged events not only to commemorate the collapse of communism but equally to honor life under its rule. In one such venue, for instance, the director of the local association that organized the exhibit described it to me as celebrating the seventieth (rather than thirtieth) anniversary, referring thereby to the foundation, rather than the downfall, of the GDR.
Beyond the different ways in which the far right evades both legal restrictions on and dominant discursive norms about the remembrance of National Socialism, direct, unapologetic nostalgia for the Third Reich is of course far from absent among German nationalists. More than a few of the young right-wing extremists I worked with displayed Hitler busts on their bedroom shelves, possessed illegally-bought copies of Mein Kampf, decorated their apartments with National Socialist-themed posters such as the Reichskriegsfahne (the Reich’s war flag), sported jewelry pieces that featured symbols associated with the NSDAP, the SS, or the Wehrmacht, and celebrated the Führer’s birthday with their peers.Footnote 8 Such forms of veneration of National Socialism are, to be sure, quite common among German neo-Nazis and many on the extreme right elsewhere. Still, they seem to me to fall short of the sort of moral deliberation and self-fashioning that the notion of exemplarity is meant to suggest. More adoration combined with the excitement of the forbidden than contemplation, they pay little heed to the actions or words of Hitler or other prominent Nazis. Instead, they appear to perform a fetishistic relation to objects, images, and dates, often present in the form of personality cults and illicit commodities.
It is notable that, beyond the widespread nostalgia embodied in the fetishization of National Socialist objects and symbols, I cannot recall any instances among the right-wing extremists with whom I worked in 2004–2005 in which they summoned Hitler as a moral yardstick against which to measure themselves. While one might expect the figure of Hitler to take on positive significations and become a personal role-model for German neo-Nazis, this was not my experience. Instead, most all the comments I heard about Hitler were highly negative and critical, expressing reservations if not outright disapproval rather than enthusiasm about his role as an example to be followed or imitated.
Such reservations about Hitler generally took one of two distinct forms, depending on whether my interlocutors considered that he went too far or not far enough, or in other words, whether the atrocities committed by National Socialism were unwarranted and unjustifiable excesses or, alternatively, whether the Führer was ultimately a failed leader who fell short of fulfilling his promises. Some among the young right-wing extremists I worked with viewed, and struggled to present themselves as moderate patriotic nationalists, a position that few in Germany would grant them. For example, in their eyes, their opposition to what they described as the overpopulation (Übersiedlung, a term with strong National Socialist connotations) of the Federal Republic by foreigners was in no way xenophobic. They prided themselves on occasionally eating foreign foods such as kebab. They did not mind migrants living in their country or in their neighborhood, they claimed. What they could not accept, they said, was that too many migrants were coming in, particularly from Muslim countries. Such persons, performing what they viewed as a moderate political posture and prefiguring today’s mainstreaming of the far right by the AfD, would condemn Hitler for “what he did to the Jews.” Even if the Jews, according to them, were not entirely innocent either, seeking to exterminate them all was terrible.
More recently, I heard similar pronouncements from an interlocutor who explained in this way her reluctance to give her vote to the AfD party. A farmer in her early sixties in Brandenburg, she lives about an hour’s train ride east of Berlin, where she tends to her modest-sized organic farm. During the time I spent working with her on the farm, I used our coffee and lunch breaks to chat with her, since engaging in extended conversations while working the fields was often impractical. On one cold October afternoon, sitting across from me in her cluttered kitchen, my voice recorder on the dining table between us, she said the AfD stood closest to her own opinions, but all the same she would not vote for it because of everything that happened in the 1930s. “What do you mean?” I asked her. “I don’t like Jews either,” she explained, “but that’s not a reason to kill them.” Such views contrast with those on the farthest extremes who deny the Holocaust altogether, denouncing it as a Jewish plot against the German people, or those who, alternatively, lament that the final solution ultimately fell short of eliminating the “Jewish problem.” By contrast, among my young, right-wing, extremist interlocutors, many did not question that the Holocaust took place, or that Hitler bore responsibility for it, or that it should be condemned. Yet, in their eyes, while it blemished the legacy of the Third Reich, it did not entirely overshadow what they considered to have been its positive dimensions, such as national pride or social welfare.
Others among my young informants in Treptow were less concerned with performing a moderate, reasonable persona. They would openly voice their demands that all migrants—a category they clearly invested with racialized significations—leave the country. For them, unlike some of their peers, it was not so much that the final solution offered a positive exemplar that they aspired to emulate or was a crime to be denounced and rejected. Instead, the Holocaust as such simply did not figure much in their reflections on National Socialism or Hitler. They were far more concerned with assessing the Führer’s qualities as supreme leader and particularly with the result of the war. They understood Germany’s defeat at the hands of the Allies as a direct consequence of his decision, against the advice of many of his generals, to open a second front in the east. Hitler’s bad judgment in military matters rendered him, in their eyes, unqualified to rule Germany and, in terms of the present discussion, unappealing as an exemplar. His failure as a military leader reflected on his entire character and biography. His promises to deliver Germany from defeat and humiliation to the fulfillment of its triumphant destiny rang hollow and his confrontational bravado seemed to them inauthentic. It was because of his shortcomings, after all, that the German nation lost territory and was occupied and divided. It should not surprise us that the militaristic dimension of Hitler’s personality seemed so important to them. After all, it appears as a central pillar of the personality cults of other fascist leaders as well, including Franco (“El generalísimo”) and Mussolini, both of whom virtually always appear in military garb. Military skill and success here carry a strongly gendered valence, as signs of masculinity, virility, and male leadership. By contrast, Hitler’s deplorable performance as a war strategist and the Reich’s unconditional capitulation emasculate his entire persona.
It is remarkable to what extent the memory of Hitler as a villain or, alternatively, a failure, has taken strong root even among German right-wing extremists who profess explicitly racist views and who may express nostalgia for various dimensions of National Socialism. It stands far apart from other contexts, such as Italy and Spain, where the politics of memory and the discursive regimes that govern what one can say about the fascist past operate quite differently. As Francisco Ferrándiz shows (this CSSH issue), many in Spain continue to celebrate the legacy of Franco openly and unapologetically and resist efforts to critically rewrite the history of his period in power. The deceased former dictator thus still commands admiration as the savior of Spain from communism and anarchy. For his admirers, he stands for such virtues as honor, patriotic commitment to Spain’s national unity and imperial legacy, and moral conservatism. Franco’s memory, of course, unlike that of other fascist leaders, benefits from his triumphant record, which may partly explain his lingering appeal and the contrast with the memory of the defeated Hitler among German nationalists. Yet in Italy, too, as Paolo Heywood describes (this issue), thousands pay respect to the memory of Mussolini at his natal town and ever more unabashedly express their admiration for him. They ascribe to his figure revered qualities such as military prowess, masculine virility, and “ordinariness.”
The case of the German memory of Hitler is therefore in this sense an exception rather than the rule. The different constraints on public expressions of admiration for deceased fascist leaders, inscribed both in juridical frameworks that delimit licit speech and discursive norms that set the terms in which they can be openly commemorated, define distinct possibilities for evoking their legacy in the present. Such limits seem to have left their traces even upon far-right nationalists. Might greater acceptance of lingering support for the deceased leader somehow enable a broader invocation of his figure as a moral compass in public life as well as in personal life (as it seems to do in Spain)? While on the one hand highly personal, exemplarity is at the same time a public performance of a moral normative force in at least two ways: First, as an act, its very enunciation constitutes a publicly communicated summoning of and claim on the words and deeds of the exemplar. The articulated personal investment in a moral role model is in this sense a presentation of self, which, as Goffman pointed out (Reference Goffman1959), always also entails a commitment to others that its author is in fact as they present themselves to be. Additionally, the efficacy of the exemplary narrative as verbal form—in Austin’s terms, the felicity of the exemplary speech act (Reference Austin1975)—depends on both its capacity to constitute publics and the dynamics of its reception (see also Warner Reference Warner2002). A publicly transacted piece of discourse, it therefore answers as well to the discursive politics of the mediatized representations and to the forms of circulation of the memory of exemplary figures. In both of these ways the exemplary narrative remains contextually situated, meta-pragmatically indexing the specific discursive parameters within which it circulates (Silverstein Reference Silverstein and Sawyer1997). In Germany such conditions appear exceptionally circumscribed.
Negativity
Despite all these caveats, Hitler and National Socialism more generally can be thought of as moral exemplars in Germany today. I will show how, as such, they intervene in moral discourses in at least three important ways: as moral negativity, or the figuration of morality’s other; through syntagmatic substitution, or the replacement of the fascist leader by other prominent icons; and by metonymic extension, the affective projection of the relation of exemplarity to the realm of the ordinary. My argument will require a revision of the concept of moral exemplarity to widen its scope and allow for a more flexible, open-ended usage than some classical formulations would seem to permit.
At the broadest level of mainstream national publicity, Hitler’s figure operates in German moral discourses in a way similar to what Humphrey described as “negative exemplarity.” Among the people she worked with in Mongolia, exemplarity as a discursive practice often busied itself with the elaboration of moral role models and the calibration of one’s words and actions in order to imitate and approximate them. In contrast with this “positive exemplarity,” Humphrey said that her informants frequently invoked “negative exemplars” as well. In such moral tales, the exemplars represented a failure to acquire fundamental moral values and carry out socially acceptable conduct. They were neither invocations of venerated historical figures nor representations of ordinary persons who have erred, but rather tales about people who remained external to Mongolian society insofar as they lacked certain indispensable qualities. By implication, it is these absent qualities upon which such stories invite listeners and narrators to reflect. They therefore also entail a moment of positivity: “the negative exemplar,” she writes, “is not a story that simply says ‘You should not behave like this,’ but rather it requires the listener actively to fill in mentally the social virtues that the mad one never acquired” (Reference Humphrey and Signe1997: 39).
In Germany, the memory of National Socialism appears to operate as a negative exemplar in three interrelated fashions. First, the figure of the Führer himself sets the highest bar of moral depravity, of the absence of what should constitute basic human qualities such as empathy or reason. When I asked the young right-wing extremists who I knew during my research about the historical education they received at their schools regarding National Socialism and World War II, they described the curriculum in these fields as almost entirely focused on the figure of Hitler, his rise to power, and his rule before and during the war. In their eyes, and based on their school history classes, Hitler incarnated the single protagonist of and the person responsible for pretty much all National Socialist crimes and excesses. To the extent that their education had shaped their understanding of the Third Reich, it taught them to consider Hitler alone as its villain. Beyond school history class curricula, we find similar representations in such public media as the highly successful 2004 film Der Untergang (Downfall), which focuses on Hitler’s last few days, as he and his closest associates close themselves off in his bunker while the Red Army battles the last remaining German troops over Berlin (Hirschbiegel Reference Hirschbiegel2004).Footnote 9 While it has been criticized for humanizing and relativizing several of the Führer’s most intimate comrades, Der Untergang, in a cinematic representation of Hitler as protagonist that was at the time unusual for German films, depicts him clearly in terms of negative exemplarity—as demented, crazy, and hardly human, a being of both lack and excess.
Beyond the moral force of Hitler as monstrous, National Socialist rule at large serves in various contexts as a sort of negative exemplar to which contemporary political forms must answer. Here, exemplarity must be understood less as an individual moral decision and more along the lines in which it has been employed in legal studies, namely as embodied in critical juridical precedent or as exemplary statutory legislation. And indeed, German legal codes and juridical practice effectively institutionalize the Unrechtsstaat of the Third Reich as negative exemplarity by invoking it as a paradigmatic instance of the absence of fundamental ingredients of liberal-democratic justice, such as equality under the law or the guarantee of individual and collective freedoms. They reflexively describe themselves as concerned with upholding the norms that National Socialism dismissed and legitimize themselves as protecting the values that it so thoroughly lacked.Footnote 10 The conjuring of National Socialist atrocities as reasoning for contemporary political conduct finds expression as well in the situated discourse of voters. This is the case of the farmer I described earlier who said she would withhold her vote from the AfD because of the Holocaust.
Yet a third form in which National Socialism features as negative exemplarity in today’s Germany concerns not the personified figure of Hitler nor the broader memory of National Socialist crimes but instead the conduct of ordinary Germans, who are held to have largely remained complicit with these two other exemplars rather than standing up to them, as righteous morality demanded. For many today, the citizens of the Third Reich revealed themselves as lacking in important values such as courage, empathy, and solidarity. The question of what one would do if one were alive at the time is an important hypothetical for articulating moral discourse in our times, and one about which I have heard many Germans reflect. The contemporary imperative to show Zivilcourage (civil courage, to stand up to) in the face of racism and nationalism, which appears time and again in political discourse and the media, implies a condemnation of previous generations as having failed in this regard.Footnote 11 The question of whether Germans today would behave differently is therefore both a personal interrogative voiced by individuals reflecting on their own moral worthiness and a collective one that ponders the moral state of society at large. The 2015 satirical film Er ist wieder da (Wnendt Reference Wnendt2015), based on Timur Vermes’ homonymous novel (Reference Vermes2012), similarly addresses itself to ordinary Germans by resurrecting Hitler in a contemporary setting and using his character to indict and condemn German society at large.Footnote 12 Here, today’s descendants of the citizens of the Third Reich reveal themselves as similarly flawed, and as morally unfit, easy prey for the cunning Führer, who comfortably identifies and exploits their weaknesses. If not portrayed as latent National Socialist supporters, Germans appear as not yet quite emancipated from the mentality of their forefathers that allowed Hitler to rise to power.
For many, then, and for many reasons, Hitler and National Socialism stand for everything that one should stand against. As such, they maintain a lingering and active afterlife in the moral discourses of German society as figurations of lack, of that which correct moral conduct must seek to fill in, as well as of excess, the untamed and unhindered eruption of evil. But their negative exemplarity, and particularly that of the Führer, appears ambivalent. On one hand, his figure marks a limit. It signals the end of morality, its utter collapse, and with it, too, the end of that which is human. The image of Hitler as pure evil, as unadulterated moral depravity in the personal realm, finds its corollary in the image of the Third Reich as the absolute other of the Federal Republic in the political realm. Hitler therefore serves as a warning, as an urgent call for all to stand up to injustice and racism, as the threat of looming catastrophe that only moral commitment can hold at bay. His memory addresses itself to wide publics and interpellates many into action against racism and nationalism. On the other hand, as the negative exemplar par excellence in German public life, the memory of Hitler cannot but set a high bar for moral failure—it is impossible to match his standard. Thus, his exemplarity arguably contributes to the legitimation of certain nationalist discourses as “not-quite-Hitler,” not yet beyond the pale of minimally acceptable conduct, and hence as tolerable. Put another way, contemporary far-right actors in Germany, such as AfD party leaders, can deploy the National Socialist past as a backdrop against which to distinguish themselves as expressing political positions that might seem relatively reasonable, often by disguising racism in the language of cultural difference. AfD leaders have similarly sought to associate themselves with the resistance to the Nazis as a strategy for gaining legitimacy and casting their opponents in the role of the absolute villain (Lewicki and Shooman Reference Lewicki and Shooman2020).Footnote 13 In this way, the memory of National Socialism, and especially of the Holocaust, as pure evil has at times forestalled rather than advanced a critical confrontation with racism in the present (Partridge Reference Partridge2010).
Still more insidiously than providing an alibi for thinly veiled racisms to pass as innocuous, the negative valence of National Socialism has also been employed to legitimize Islamophobia by constructing equivalences between today’s Muslims and former Nazi Germans (Özyürek Reference Özyürek2019). In this narrative, it is Muslim immigrants, not white nationalists, who in today’s Germany represent the continuation of National Socialist currents, from anti-liberal and anti-democratic worldviews to patriarchal authoritarianism and sexual repression. Racism is thereby projected onto an Other, absolving white Germans as having already transcended their racist, authoritarian, and patriarchal past (Lewicki and Shooman Reference Lewicki and Shooman2020).Footnote 14
Substitution
All of this is not to deny that some fringe neo-Nazi groups in Germany appeal to the figure of Hitler as a very positive exemplar. For the broad majority of Germans, though, including young right-wing extremists like those with whom I conducted research, this is clearly not the case. But what if we search for the moral significance of National Socialism in today’s Germany not by directly considering the place of the figure of the fascist leader himself but by looking obliquely, as it were, near and past that figure, toward other forms in which this moral significance emerges? To take a first step in this direction, I need to discuss the notion of equivalence. In linguistics, the principle of equivalence refers to the substitutability of different terms or elements, rather than to their complete identity. Equivalence designates a set of potential terms that, given the (phonetic, morphological, syntactic, etc.) rules of a linguistic system, could legitimately take the place of a term that appears in an actual linguistic expression.Footnote 15 They may do so not because they are the same, but rather because they share certain features which, as far as the linguistic system is concerned, are essential for determining which elements can occupy a given location within a linguistic expression.
As I argued earlier, the figure of Hitler as the protagonist of Germany’s National Socialist history allows for no equivalents, transcending as he does the rest of the Third Reich villains. But, as Humphrey and others suggest, a moral discourse of exemplarity makes available, not just a single role-model, as the personality cults of fascist leaders might lead one to believe, but a diverse palette of options from which to choose. In linguistic terms, exemplarity offers a set of equivalents, which, while not identical, can serve similar purposes and be substituted for each other. Looking at such substitutions, I argue, can help us bring into focus other forms of moral exemplarity that, without naming Hitler as their reference, summon National Socialism. Such equivalences seem to occupy a place in Germany similar to that of Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy.
Though the figure of Hitler nearly always features as a negative exemplarity in public performances of moral commitments in today’s Germany, other icons of National Socialism enjoy broad veneration among German nationalists. For example, several of the youths I worked with in East Berlin mentioned their admiration for the National Socialist paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) leader Horst Wessel, the author of what later became the official hymn of the NSDAP, who was killed by communists and made into a martyr around whose memory Nazi propaganda erected a massive personality cult. Tellingly, they expressed similar reverence for General Erwin Rommel, whom they considered a model soldier and a military hero despite, or perhaps because of, his ambivalent relationship to National Socialism.Footnote 16 Other minor figures from the pantheon of National Socialist celebrities similarly popped up occasionally in conversations as illustrations of certain virtues. Towering far above all of them was the figure of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, who has found a particularly warm reception among German far-right nationalists.Footnote 17
In recent decades, no other person in the National Socialist hagiography has mobilized crowds anywhere near as large as Hess has. Thousands of far-right activists have gathered for annual rallies on the anniversary of his death. For years, massive marches plagued his ancestral hometown and burial place of Wunsiedel, in northern Bavaria. In consideration of exasperated residents, the local evangelical church terminated the lease on his grave when it came up for renewal in 2011, whereupon his family removed and cremated his remains. Hess came up again and again among my interlocutors, who viewed him as the good Nazi who, while seeking to rectify the injustice that his nation suffered at Versailles, nevertheless remained peace-loving. The appeal of his story rested on his famous parachuting into England in 1941 with the aim of negotiating an end to the war, his capture and wasting away until death in jail, first in England and later in Berlin, and finally his suicide in 1987. For these people, Hess was a hero who sacrificed himself for his principles and his fatherland, courageously undertaking a mission against all odds and despite the evident personal risks that it entailed. They disputed the official story of his death and instead believed, like many on the far right, that he had been assassinated by the British secret service, paying the ultimate price for steadfastly keeping to his values.Footnote 18 The narrative of Hess’s life that circulates among German right-wing extremists therefore opens up a wide space for articulating a range of moral values that they hold dear: from the pursuit of justice or the patriotic commitment to the nation to the love of peace, the willingness for self-sacrifice for the greater good, the courage necessary to face unfathomable risks, and the martyrdom of a tortured, saintly hero.
Ordinariness
Despite his fall from grace following his secret mission to England, in the eyes of German nationalists Hess belongs to the Pantheon of the Nazi Party, a leader whose physical appearance approximated the Nazi propaganda imagery of the Arian race. His persona lends itself well, therefore, to the sort of moral discourse that entails a mimetic orientation toward the actions and discourses of singular, exceptional figures. Yet, while this notion of exemplarity, with which we have so far been concerned here, appears common in Humphrey’s case, other forms are also possible. Sometimes, it can also designate the pull of the ordinary, the charm exercised by an established order and the icons that emerge as paradigmatic of it. Such figures need not be personified in concrete individuals. They could just as well be anonymous tokens of general types, for example of “common people” or “ordinary Americans.” During the 2008 federal elections in the United States, forty-five-year-old Ohioan Samuel Wurzelbacher surged from anonymity to national fame after he questioned presidential candidate Barack Obama’s small-business tax plans. Dubbed “Joe the Plumber” by John McCain’s campaign, he quickly became a personified metaphor for the hard-working American and a paradigmatic icon of ordinariness. In the United States, such exemplarity sometimes also appears in the nostalgic admiration for the so-called “Greatest Generation”—the cohort that served as soldiers in the Second World War—and the moral values that it encapsulated. In Dutch far-right discourse, Bert and Marja at times served as icons of national ordinariness, as paradigmatic placeholders for honest, simple, modest, working-class people legitimately concerned about the safety of their neighborhoods and the abuse of their welfare system by immigrants (Mepschen Reference Mepschen2016; Koning and Vollebergh Reference Koning and Vollebergh2019). They differ from extraordinary icons:
Ordinary iconic figures are rarely produced through the iconization of individual people—even if they can attach themselves to named individuals at certain moments—but are rather constructed as generic types … they remain tied to categories of ‘ordinary’ residents, whom they are taken to represent. It is their ordinariness and their generic character that gives our type of iconic figures a distinct role in public discourses and public and political imaginaries. They are imagined as hyperreal figures, yet can also stand in for entire categories
(Koning and Vollebergh Reference Koning and Vollebergh2019: 393).Here, the exemplarity of the ordinary, as incarnated in such figures as Joe the Plumber in the United States or Bert and Marja in the Netherlands, encounters its correlate in the ordinariness of the exemplar. As Paolo Heywood argues in this issue in relation to Mussolini, claims to the ordinariness of the exceptional exemplar, for instance to the fascist leader as coming from a simple background and being in a sense of the common people, are part and parcel of fascist charisma. If, in the case of Mussolini, ordinariness serves to highlight the virtues of the exceptional, in our case it is the exemplary instance which illustrates the virtues of the ordinary. In the first case exemplarity is personified, concretized in singular acts and words, and bound with an individual biography. In the second, it refers instead to generalized conduct, to the sanctioned acting out of moral values, to a dominant kind of moral being-in-the-world.
In invocations of National Socialism that presume to appreciate its “positive” aspects, the valuation of the ordinary in moral discourse allows a safe distance from the infamous leading Nazis. It often emerges in one of two forms: First, in the intimate sphere of affective family relations, former Wehrmacht soldiers appeared in some of my interlocutors’ stories as kind and wise grandfathers whom they greatly respected. These were role-models for them who guided them morally through stories of heroism, patriotism, sacrifice, discipline, suffering, camaraderie, and military masculinity. Gino, one of my key young right-wing extremist interlocutors, admired his grandfather and kept a picture of him in Waffen-SS uniforms on his bedroom cabinet. The time spent with his grandfather during vacations was a precious memory to him. He recalled listening to his stories about the war and learning to shoot a gun. Gino grew up in the 1990s. Today, of course, far fewer World War II soldiers are alive. While modes of transmission no doubt have shifted, there is no reason to assume that either the affective relation to now deceased family ancestors or their active summoning as role-models have weakened because of their passing. “Our grandparents were not criminals” is as beloved a slogan on the German far right today as it was while those grandparents were alive.
A second form of the exemplarity of the ordinary appears in the often-mediatized elaboration of ordinary icons, of putatively typical (rather than exceptional) characters. Unlike the highly personalized—if broadly shared—bonds of ancestry, this discursive register celebrates anonymous generalities, such as the figure of the landser, or Wehrmacht infantry soldier, as an icon in itself. Right-wing extremists celebrate the landser as an anonymous national hero, and the iconic image of the landser is one of the most popular among them. It is tattooed, printed on garments, decorates demonstration banners, hung on bedroom walls, and features on the covers of neo-Nazi rock albums. The now-banned neo-Nazi band named Landser used the image and no doubt contributed to its popularity among young nationalists. We might think of this image as the collective totem for the clan of German Wehrmacht soldiers to which grandparents and other family ancestors belonged.
Much like the cult of Hess as the “good Nazi,” the cult of the ordinary soldier has elaborated its celebrations and rituals. In the early 2000s, the Waldfriedhof war cemetery near Halbe in Brandenburg, one of Germany’s largest, attracted thousands of nationalists from across the country for annual “heroes’ commemoration” (Heldengedenken) marches. Delegations of local Kameradschaften (fraternities), parties, associations, and political groupings laid wreaths at the site, where almost thirty thousand German soldiers, executed deserters, and Nazi prisoners who died in Soviet camps after the war are buried. In 2006, in response to several massive neo-Nazi demonstrations at historically significant sites, the Bundestag (Federal Parliament) tightened the freedom of assembly. Side by side with new restrictions on the content of public commemorations of the National Socialist period, the new laws allowed local governments to designate relevant sites within their jurisdiction that would be protected from nationalist marchers. Brandenburg and other states used the legislation to ban massive gatherings like those that had taken place at key locations of nationalist pilgrimage, including at the Waldfriedhof cemetery. Still, despite the ban on reaching the cemetery, annual marches continued to proceed through the nearby small town of Halbe.
Although the dead buried at Waldfriedhof are politically and nationally diverse, their anonymous mass corresponds to the anonymity of the simple Wehrmacht soldier, the unsung hero to whose memory the nationalists dedicate their ceremonies of collective mourning. This is a particular form of anonymity, specific to the memory of World War II. The military casualties of World War I who ended up in mass graves of unknown soldiers received individual, posthumous honors on memorial plaques in their parishes, schools, or town halls. Small German towns often feature a memorial to the Great War as well as to the wars of German unification (1864–1871), which gives the names of the deceased, and frequently the year and place of their death. With few exceptions that I am aware of, there are no such local memorials for the dead of the Second World War.
The figure of the landser as an icon for the ordinary soldier stands for a range of nationalist values much like those transmitted by loving grandfathers: discipline, loyalty, selflessness, perseverance, and so forth. Beyond mass gatherings and emotional speeches at military cemeteries, the ordinary soldier and the moral values he exemplifies are a common topic of adoration in far-right music. The neo-Nazi rock band Landser featured the familiar iconic representation on its first album, Das Reich kommt wieder (The Reich returns), though the lyrics of its songs—with titles such as “Naziskinheads,” “The race war,” “The refugee shelter burns,” and “Better dead than red”—are concerned less with the reverence for the ordinary, anonymous, unsung hero and more with the celebration of racist violence. One of my young right-wing extremist informants, a fan of Landser, introduced me to another of his favorites, the German folk singer-songwriter Frank Rennicke. At his apartment he would play to me Rennicke’s nostalgic, tragic, acoustic war ballads while providing commentary on the lyrics. With titles such as “The girl with the flag,” “My comrade,” “He fell for Germany’s freedom,” “Heroes’ commemoration,” and “The best soldiers in the world,” Rennicke’s songs contrast sharply with Landser’s explicit calls for violence against immigrants and political antagonists. Rennicke’s lyrics celebrate the honor, loyalty, camaraderie, and sacrifice of the common ranks and ordinary people, particularly by lauding their anonymous and selfless dedication. They mourn the “German” victims of the war, wax nostalgic about the homeland and old times, and bemoan the sad fate of the German nation.
Various historians have compellingly criticized the myth of the innocence of the Wehrmacht and its soldiers. In a study of the German army’s fierce fighting on the Eastern Front, for example, Omer Bartov argued that the powerful solidarity that buttressed its early successes and its tenacious resistance in the face of subsequent defeats owed largely to its soldiers’ fanatical devotion to the Führer and to National Socialist ideology rather than the spirit of camaraderie that often characterizes small military units (Reference Bartov1991). More recently, Ben Shepherd has convincingly challenged the narrative of the Wehrmacht’s moral righteousness and military virtue (Reference Shepherd2017). Propagated by generals in the immediate postwar period eager to displace all responsibility for the defeat and the massive crimes committed to Hitler and the SS, this narrative has long obfuscated the military’s glaring failures on the battlefield, its willing subservience to Nazi ideology, and its massive violations of ethical principles. More famously for the non-academic public is the polemic incited by Daniel Goldhagen, who wrote against the myth of the innocent ordinary Germans (Reference Goldhagen1996). He argued that a particularly virulent form of anti-Semitism was central to German nationalism and that “ordinary” recruits to the Wehrmacht were zealously committed to and willingly complicit in National Socialism’s genocidal project. Lastly, and perhaps most notable in their public impact in Germany, two traveling exhibits about the Wehrmacht’s war crimes in the late 1990s and early 2000s detonated both a heated scholarly dispute among historians about questions of accuracy and authenticity as well as a bitter public controversy about the memory of German World War II soldiers.Footnote 19 The young extremists I worked with did not read scholarly or popular historical literature or avidly visit exhibits. Nonetheless, their reiteration of the mantra, “Our grandfathers were not criminals,” no doubt reflected a sense, mediated by more literate activists and leaders in the German far right, that the memory of their forefathers as innocent heroes has come under assault.
Nationalist Values and Exemplary Figures
In songs, massive marches, intimate settings, or other forms, the figures of the good Nazi leader, the loving war veteran elderly relative, and the anonymous, ordinary, low-rank Wehrmacht soldier have come to incarnate a set of meaningful moral discourses for German nationalists. Elsewhere, I have explored some of the moral values held dear by the young right-wing extremists I came to know.Footnote 20 Among the moral principles that they outlined for me in various conversations, two sets of values stand out as particularly pertinent for my argument in this article. First, they placed great emphasis on the spirit of camaraderie and its attendant values such as courage, loyalty, or honor. In informal conversations, they talked about sacrifices that their peers had made, for example by taking the blame for crimes they themselves had committed and suffering the legal consequences. They told me how, when they faced financial hardship and could not get by, their friends would show up at their apartments with basic supplies. They described occasions when, finding themselves threatened with violence by other groups, they could send their comrades a message and count on them to show up within minutes to fight on their side. With these stories they sought to highlight the significance they granted to solidarity, sacrifice, and camaraderie, which they believed distinguished them from leftist groups.
Second, they outlined what I have called a “moral economy of violence.” Their discourse legitimated the use of violence, to be sure, but only when it is necessary, such as for self-defense or fun sparring between friends. Even when legitimate, they asserted, violence should remain measured and proportional to the circumstances and avoid sliding into excesses. Revealing the highly gendered form of this moral economy, they claimed they would never hit a woman. Drawing a contrast with their professed objection to the senseless or disproportional infliction of physical harm, they condemned their leftist antagonists, the Antifa, as irrationally and excessively violent.
I should emphasize that we cannot take at face value my young right-wing extremist interlocutors’ verbal elaborations of their moral selves as bound by ethical principles of self-defense, opposed to violence against women, or committed to the spirit of camaraderie, solidarity, and sacrifice. These constituted moral claims, not descriptions of their behavior. In fact, unwarranted brutality, gender violence, and mutual betrayals were far from uncommon among them. Yet, in these and similar ways, their moral discourse resonated with the qualities that they identified in some of the figures they evoked from the National Socialist era. Such exemplars offered them coordinates for moral valuations of themselves qua right-wing nationalists. In other words, the moral horizons that Hess or the landser stand for correspond not to some general, universal values but instead precisely to those that differentiate members of the far right who seek to emulate them from others who do not. Like the vice-Führer—so they claimed—they too are ready for war but are lovers of peace, and like him, they would go unhesitatingly into battle when provoked and pushed into a corner but would seek to end the violence once the wrongs were made right. Like the landser, they are ready to make the sort of selfless sacrifice that their struggle demands. And they are committed to the spirit of solidarity with their comrades, like their grandparents were in stories they have heard.
Other values that people on the far right of German politics find important sit less comfortably within the framework of moral exemplarity, particularly as the concept has been developed by Humphrey to designate a moral discourse that contrasts sharply with moral systems dominated by universal, impersonal rules. In fact, many of my young interlocutors in Treptow placed great emphasis on the importance of maintaining order and enforcing the law. They differentiated themselves in this manner from punks, anarchists, and immigrants, whom they viewed as chaotic, lawless, and dirty. For example, one of them proudly narrated an incident that took place late at night on a previous weekend, in which, with a group of friends, they strolled down the street on the way back from an outing. They then noticed a young person spraying graffiti on a wall and dressed in garments that clearly identified him as associated with radical leftist groups. Without hesitation they apprehend the sprayer, called the police, and turned him in. I identified a similar preoccupation with the maintenance of public order and lawfulness in online nationalist websites in response to many appearances of the Star of David in graffiti on buildings, monuments, and tombstones of prominent people in Berlin cemeteries.Footnote 21 While a handful of commentors on far-right websites celebrated the unknown sprayers, most either refused to acknowledge that nationalists would commit such acts of vandalism and concluded that the perpetrators must be radical leftists, or alternatively, condemned the spraying and desecrations as unbefitting of German nationalists.
Many among my young informants, then, took pride in keeping things in order, obeying the rules, and being lawful citizens. Indeed, the very obedience to rules appears here as a moral value in and of itself. To the extent that exemplarity as a form of elaborating moral selves is significantly operative among these people, it is impossible to distinguish clearly from their allegiance to normative, rule-based moral commitments, with which it appears to articulate in diverse manners. Perhaps particularly in Germany (though arguably also in other post-fascist contexts) where the performance of order stood as a central pillar of the Third Reich’s ideological project, National Socialist exemplarity appears almost indistinguishable from the allegiance to rules. We see, then, that the distinction between moral discourses that invoke impersonal rules that appear as universal principles and those that construct their claims through the citation of presumably personal, often personified exemplars cannot be maintained as clearly as Humphrey seems to suggest. Rather than thinking about these two ways of articulating and forging moral selves as a zero-sum game between distinct and incompatible moral regimes, we would be better advised to consider the ways in which they may enter into dialogue and reinforce, challenge, or otherwise inflect each other.
Conclusion
The question of whether and how the collective memory of Hitler and National Socialism in Germany shapes moral discourses today by offering exemplary horizons for elaborating personal commitments, as I have shown, depends to a great extent on our understanding of the notion of exemplarity. In its positive form, and strictly within the framework developed, for example, by Humphrey, the idea of a moral discourse based on the principle of National Socialist-personified exemplarity is difficult to sustain within the contemporary, postwar German context. This is especially so for the figure of Hitler, which seems to exercise little appeal as a role-model even for far-right nationalists, not to mention the broader publics of German citizens (though there is a certain fetishistic cult around his image among neo-Nazis). This generalized negative relation to the figure of the Führer is due in part to legal restrictions governing enunciations about National Socialism, but more important are the politics of memory that define appropriate ways of speaking about the period. Even far-right-wing German nationalists, we have seen, often hold a disparaging view of Hitler.
If, however, we consider a more flexible and open-ended notion of exemplarity, as I have done in this paper, we find that National Socialism can play a significant role in providing certain orientations by way of exemplars. I have proposed three ways in which we might productively do this: First, through the idea of negative exemplarity, consisting of the invocation of the immoral exemplar as a screen against which to evaluate oneself and others. In Germany, Hitler in particular and National Socialism more generally evidently serve as paradigmatic negative exemplars for broad sectors of the population. Second, I presented the notion of substitution or equivalency as a way for thinking about the attachments that far-right nationalists elaborate regarding certain National Socialist figures whom they consider role-models for the moral qualities that they read into their biographies, such as Rudolph Hess. Such figures allow the redemption of nationalism by bypassing the tabooed figure of Hitler, which they, too, tend to view with disapproval. Finally, the exemplary moral qualities of the ordinary, incarnated in the intimacy of affect-laden kinship relations with ancestors or in the generalized anonymity of the figure of the simple German Wehrmacht soldier, offer another route by which the national past can be represented as worthy of aspiration and celebration.
My argument here and the materials that I have brought forward to support it suggest that, despite the reservations about its adequacy, a revised and expanded notion of exemplarity can capture the significance that National Socialism has continued to exercise in the moral discourses of many Germans, whether positively for sympathizers of far-right nationalism or negatively for broader sections of the population who oppose them. Such discourses, in turn, must be understood to articulate with, reinforce, and enter into various dialogical relationships with other registers of moral discourse, such as those that grant priority to lawfulness and the authority of general rules, rather than as merely contradicting or excluding them.
