Wednesday, 26 November 2025, to 7 pm the historian Volker White his current book „The German Democratic Reich. How the extreme right is destroying history and democracy“ in the Audimax of Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences. Andreas Froese, Director of the Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial, will moderate the event.

In his recently published book, Weiß presents an in-depth analysis of the new right-wing scene and uses case studies to show that and how it rewrites and rewrites history for its own ends. He works out the overlaps between Russian historical politics and the extreme right in Germany in their sometimes contradictory attitudes towards the war in Ukraine. The AfD's repeated attempts to distort Nazi history and reinterpret National Socialism as a left-wing movement also come under scrutiny. Weiß also looks at how the new right-wing scene deals with GDR history and its strategy of appropriating partial narratives such as that of the GDR opposition and occupying the currently developing eastern identity on the right.

The event is a cooperation between the Thuringian State Centre for Political Education, the Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial and Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences. The Admission is free.

Volker Weiß, born in 1972, is a historian and journalist. He completed his doctorate with a study on Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, a protagonist of the „Conservative Revolution“ in the 1920s, who became one of the masterminds of the New Right. As an expert on the history and present of the extreme right, Weiß is a specialist author for various newspapers and magazines, currently the Süddeutsche Zeitung. He also regularly publishes books. His 2017 book „Die autoritäre Revolte. Die neue Rechte und der Untergang des Abendlandes“, published in 2017, is considered a standard work on the subject.