By Valerio Castellini
October 13th, 2025
NUREMBERG—Visiting the Nazi Party Rally Grounds and Courtroom 600 back-to-back felt like transitioning through two disparate sides of the same story: the pursuit of power, and the effort to judge it. Even if incomplete, the Rally Grounds feel immense, hollow. They make you feel subdued, each individual rendered invisible, absorbed into the spectacle of unity. The courtroom, on the other hand, is sober and grave. It conveys both the weight of justice and the difficulty of defining it in the face of crimes that had only recently been codified and never been tested.
The Nuremberg Trials offered a fragile sense of justice after unthinkable atrocities, establishing that crimes against humanity were more than wartime excesses—and deserved to be publicly judged as moral ruptures.
For years afterwards, the subject haunted Germany. The sense of collective guilt was so strong that it simply remained unspoken. Yet, over decades, Germans turned remembrance of their darkest period into a shared civic duty, and responsibility became woven into public life. No politician in Germany over the past half century would have ever made apologies for Nazism, and there has been a common consensus around its condemnation.
It was not the same in Italy, where I grew up. After Mussolini’s fall, there was no equivalent reckoning, no public trial to lay out and process the crimes committed by the regime, and, most importantly, to separate guilt from complicity. Fascism faded, but it was never fully denounced. Instead, it was absorbed into the grey zones of nostalgia and political convenience. Many of the same institutions, and even some of the people, survived the transition to democracy. What remained quickly became normal again. Today, the word “fascist” is treated as a partisan insult rather than a moral line. Without a moment of public condemnation, the past hovers unresolved, and its lessons become negotiable and contextual.
Precisely because of Germany’s painful honesty, the rise of the far-right Alternative Für Deutschland (AfD) feels especially unsettling. The party draws support from legitimate (if often sensationalized) fears—uncontrolled immigration, high inflation, rising energy costs—but translates them into resentment and exclusion, not viable solutions. Then-AfD leader Alexander Gauland has famously referred to Nazism as “just bird shit on the 1000 years old, successful German history.” The language trivialises the very crimes Nuremberg sought to define.
It is not surprising that the party’s strongest results come from regions of former East Germany, where cultural resentment feeds on economic stagnation and the sentiment of being left behind after national reunification. In those areas, the long project of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—coming to terms with the past—has failed at becoming a shared national story. The moral narrative from the West side is perceived as something imposed, not chosen. That distance now gives the AfD space to claim authenticity against the “moral hypocrisy” from Berlin.
There is something unique about this revival of the past. It is not direct; instead, it erodes the moral vigilance that used to keep that past at bay. The AfD does not seek to rewrite history as much as to empty it of its consequence. The revival is not a return to nazism, but to indifference.
