Let us have the decency to be alarmed. The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, has issued a report that reads like a dispatch from the twilight of the Weimar Republic. Sixty thousand far-right extremists, they say, represent a clear and present danger to European security. Sixty thousand. That is not a fringe. That is a movement. That is the sound of history repeating itself, first as tragedy, then as a very expensive intelligence report.
Consider the numbers. The report claims that of these 60,000, roughly one third are considered “violence-oriented.” That is 20,000 people who are not merely angry about immigration or nostalgic for the Third Reich. They are trained, motivated, and waiting. They are the sort of people who stockpile weapons, who trade conspiracy theories in encrypted chat rooms, who believe that the Federal Republic is an illegitimate occupier state. This is not your grandfather’s skinhead movement. This is a networked insurgency of the disaffected.
And what is the response from the political class? A collective shrug. The usual platitudes about “standing up to hate” and “defending our democratic values.” Meanwhile, the AfD polls at nearly 20 percent nationwide, and in the eastern states, it is the dominant political force. The firewall against the far right is crumbling. The parties of the centre, paralysed by proceduralism and fear of offending the electorate, have allowed the Overton window to slide so far to the right that the old “extremists” are now merely “controversial.”
The irony is almost too rich to stomach. Germany, the nation that spent seventy years building a meticulous system of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the working through of the past, is now confronted with the very spectre it thought it had exorcised. The memory of the Reich is not merely a scar. It is a ghost that refuses to stay buried. And why should it? When the economic conditions that gave rise to the original fascism are re-emerging: inflation, energy shocks, a sense of national humiliation, a refugee crisis, and a political elite that seems more concerned with bureaucratic minutiae than with the lived realities of its citizens.
But let us not be sentimental. The far right is not a monolith. It is a coalition of the nostalgic, the paranoid, the economically dispossessed, and the merely angry. Some want a restoration of the Kaiserreich. Others dream of a racially pure Volksgemeinschaft. Still others are just thrill-seekers who enjoy beating up foreigners. The glue that holds them together is a shared loathing for the liberal order. And that loathing is increasingly mainstream.
What can be done? The intelligence report recommends more surveillance, more policing, more bans on extremist organisations. This is the standard response of a state that has run out of ideas. But you cannot arrest your way out of a cultural crisis. The rot is not in the streets; it is in the hearts and minds of millions who feel abandoned by the very system they are supposed to revere. The moral panic about extremists masks a deeper truth: the legitimacy of the post-war consensus is exhausted.
We are living through a slow-motion collapse of the liberal democratic project. The extremists are merely the symptom. The disease is a civilisation that has lost faith in itself. And 60,000 is just the number of people who have already picked up arms. The real number of those who sympathise, who vote for them, who nod along to their rhetoric in private, is an order of magnitude larger. That is the true security risk. That is the shadow of the eagle, stretching across a continent that has forgotten why it built cages in the first place.
