The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) will win the elections held this Sunday in Saxony-Anhalt, according to all polls and, depending on how many parties surpass the 5% threshold, it could even come close to an absolute majority. For the first time since World War II, the far right would have real chances of governing a German federal state.
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The traditional parties are looking for ways to prevent it, and the polls may force alliances previously unthinkable. But whether or not it reaches government, the AfD has long left its mark on this territory of the former GDR. Also in the way of discussing culture, art, history, and even what it means to be German.
One of the settings where this dispute has deep roots is in the Saaleck valley, in the south of the state, near the border with Thuringia. An apparently idyllic landscape where, over barely 10 kilometers, some of the deepest—and also darkest—layers of German history are condensed.
Among vineyards, castles, and small stone villages appears the medieval cathedral of Naumburg, with the famous Uta, one of the great female figures of medieval German sculpture. Very close is Schulpforta, the humanist school attended by Nietzsche, Fichte, and Klopstock, which the Nazis incorporated in 1935 into their network of Napolas, centers where the future elites of the regime were trained. Today it has returned to its origins as an elite boarding school for especially gifted students. There is also the Saaleck castle, where the assassins of Walther Rathenau (former Foreign Ministers of the Reich) sought refuge. And just a few kilometers further, the Saalecker Werkstätten, the house and workshop of architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg.
Those who passed through Saaleck
It is in Saaleck where the valley’s history fully enters the battle of ideas. In 1928, Schultze-Naumburg published Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race), a book in which he compared works by Picasso, Kandinsky, or Kirchner with photographs of people with disabilities to present them as expressions of the same biological “degeneration.” But Saaleck was not only the place from which he wrote. Hitler himself passed through his house, and there ended Richard Walther Darré, future Reich minister and one of the great ideologists of “blood and soil,” a theory embodied in the book New Nobility of Blood and Soil. In the very title, he thanked Schultze-Naumburg for the hospitality that allowed him to complete it.
Also from there, Schultze-Naumburg waged his war against modernity. A member of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) and party deputy, he played a decisive role in the closure of the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1932. Almost a century later, it is precisely the Bauhaus that has once again placed culture at the center of the political battle in Saxony-Anhalt.
“The Bauhaus represents uprooting,” says Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, AfD cultural policy spokesperson in the regional parliament. His party wants to replace the current state motto, “think modern,” with another: “think German”. “Our paradigm is different,” explains Tillschneider. “We want to think German, in relation to our identity, our culture, and our history.”
The choice of words is no minor matter. Tillschneider has also described the Bauhaus as “the straying of modernity,” an expression that directly refers to Schultze-Naumburg and his fight against modern architecture. The AfD leader rejects any ideological proximity to National Socialism. However, the historical echo is difficult to ignore.
The battle has long since left the Parliament. More than 60 museums, theaters, foundations, memorials, and associations in the state have mobilized against the cultural shift announced by the AfD. They warn that “the freedom of art, the openness of cultural institutions, and the democratic culture of memory” are at stake. A manifesto in defense of the Bauhaus has also gathered more than 2,500 organizations and individuals.
Annegret Laabs, director of the Kunstmuseum in Magdeburg, sums up the clash differently: “If it is said that art is what arises on German soil and is not political, nothing remains of the art of our country.”
In the former Werkstätten of Schultze-Naumburg, work is now being done in the opposite direction. When Arne Cornelius Wasmuth arrived in Saaleck in 2017, he found the house from which the architect had developed much of those ideas practically asleep in time. A specialist in the rehabilitation of historic buildings and heritage protection, he understood that it was not just about saving some buildings. It was necessary to decide what to do with their history.
His first call was to Egidio Marzona. The Italo-German collector and patron, who passed away this year in Berlin, had gathered one of the great European collections of conceptual and avant-garde art. “When I told him about my discovery of the Saalecker Werkstätten, he was immediately interested and wanted to come with me to see them,” Wasmuth recalls.
A few weeks later, they were together in Saaleck. Marzona saw the possibility of creating there “a unique cultural space” that consciously confronted that legacy and drew from it “the motivation for a contemporary and bold cultural transformation.”
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The Marzona Foundation acquired the Werkstätten in 2018 and began their rehabilitation. While the works progress, the dieDAS Design Akademie Saaleck already functions as an international design academy that brings together architects, designers, artists, and thinkers. Harvard joined the project; then came ETH Zurich, the Royal College of Art in London, and TU Delft. Where Schultze-Naumburg fought the avant-gardes, an international network has been established to discuss, study, and produce new ideas.
It is not an island alien to the valley. During the GDR, the Werkstätten were a nursing home, and for many locals, that, not Hitler or Schultze-Naumburg, is the closest memory of the place. “In collective memory, it is much more associated with that stage than with the dark chapter before 1945,” explains Wasmuth. Hence the open days, concerts, barbecues, and meetings with local residents. The challenge, he says, is to build a bridge between international research and design and “the population of the region and our direct neighbors.”
The future of the castle
Outside Saaleck, the AfD again contests the narrative of the past. Its electoral program states that Saxony-Anhalt has an “overabundance of great German history” and lists Henry I, Otto I, Luther, Bismarck, and Nietzsche, who studied a few kilometers further up, in Schulpforta. The AfD wants to bring that history to schools, create new concepts of “patriotic tourism,” recover the Friedrich Nietzsche prize, and turn Saxony-Anhalt, in Tillschneider’s words, into “a place of longing for all German patriots.”
The ambition goes beyond the state. The AfD promises to make Saxony-Anhalt a “model state of cultural policy” from which to then promote change in the rest of Germany. Tillschneider openly talks about a “180-degree turn” in cultural policy.
The tension has also reached the streets. In Allstedt, portraits of neighbors that were part of an art installation appeared covered with swastikas and far-right slogans, and several sculptures were destroyed. Other neighbors organized to protect the works.
But where the AfD project has more concrete consequences is in the distribution of public money. In June, the AfD proposed in the regional parliament that cultural institutions receiving subsidies must declare their commitment to “the state, democracy, and German culture.” Tillschneider announced that there would be no public money for what he calls “anti-German art.” “If German art no longer exists, neither does Germany.”
Saaleck depends precisely on that public money. About 22 million euros are available for the rehabilitation of the Werkstätten: seven million from the federal government and 15 million from the state of Saxony-Anhalt. The state also finances the work of the Marzona Foundation through annual subsidies.
That is why an AfD victory would not be an abstract matter for Wasmuth. “It would undoubtedly be a great challenge for us in Saaleck,” he admits. The aid “could be subject to conditions that we would not be willing to accept.”
And he makes clear where the limit is. The Marzona Foundation states that it consciously decided to make Saaleck “a center for an open, inclusive, and decolonial society,” among other reasons because the region “was and remains a stronghold of far-right forces.”
When the Werkstätten fully reopen in 2028, they will house the dieDAS Design Akademie Saaleck, a documentation center, and the Saaleck Study Center, in collaboration with the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The project will thus have transformed the house from which Schultze-Naumburg fought modernity into a place dedicated to discussing it.
As long as politics allows it. Wasmuth defines Saaleck as an “uncomfortable monument.” Uncomfortable because of what happened there. And because, almost a century later, the cultural battle forged within its walls has returned to the valley with the AfD.
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