Who Is the Volk? PEGIDA and the Contested Memory of 1989 on Social Media

Richardson-Little, Ned; Merrill, Samuel

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-32827-6_3

Cited by 12 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 24 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The past is a powerful tool of political mobilisation for right‐wing leaders and parties, which base much of their discourse on tropes of tradition, nostalgia, and (gone) national glory. At the same time, the far right is best placed to benefit from the ‘memory fluidity’ that has characterised European (and more generally Western) politics in recent years – whereby many of the established ideational signposts underpinning the post‐World War II, and later post‐Cold War order are increasingly questioned, reassessed, reformulated and at times straight out falsified (Couperus & Tortola, 2019; Jaskulowski & Majewski, 2022; Joly, 2022; Richardson‐Little & Merrill, 2020; Rueda, 2022). In particular, the (ab)use of the past seems to have an important two‐way role in the so‐called mainstreaming of the far right, whereby the latter both capitalises on and encourages, the contestation and revision of events and chapters of the ‘dark past’ – and in particular those linked to the experiences of fascism, war and colonialism (Couperus & Tortola, 2019; Pasieka, 2021; Pető, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political violence in far‐right memory: Fratelli d'Italia's remembrance of the Primavalle arson

Marchese,

Tortola

2024

Contemporary European Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The relationship between the (populist) far right and the past is the subject of increasing scholarly interest. The deployment, reassessment and at times manipulation of historical memory, in particular, is an important factor in the politics and mainstreaming of the European far right. The latter has a lot to gain from any shifts in collective memory placing nations' dark and shameful past in a more benevolent light. At the same time, far‐right actors play an active role in such shifts, by routinely (ab)using the memory of the past for electoral gain. This article contributes to the research agenda on the memory politics of the far right by examining how Fratelli d'Italia – Italy's foremost far‐right party – remembers and narrates the ‘years of lead’, a tumultuous and hotly contested chapter in the country's political history. More precisely, our analysis zooms in on the powerful trope of ‘secular martyrdom’ attached to the memory of that period, and looks at how this idea is mobilised by Fratelli d'Italia via the examination of a particularly tragic episode of the years of lead, namely, the 1973 Primavalle arson.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political violence in far‐right memory: Fratelli d'Italia's remembrance of the Primavalle arson

Marchese,

Tortola

2024

Contemporary European Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In the case of right-wing social movements, some even make use of symbolism and similarities. PEGIDA, for instance, adapted the Montagsdemos (Monday protests), popular prior to the fall of the GDR, even using the slogan 'we are the people' (wir sind das Volk), online and offline (Richardson-Little & Merrill, 2020). Polish groups such as Młodzież Wszechpolska (All-Polish Youth), Roty Marszu Niepodległości (Independence March) and their key figure Robert Bąkiewicz adapt symbolism around Polish resistance during World War II.…”

Section: Social Movement Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Right-Wing Perspective: Populist Frames and Agenda on Facebook in Central and Eastern Europe

Almodt

2023

cejc

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Political and public debates unfolding online provide various spaces for interaction between political actors, citizens and media outlets. This environment can be employed for diverse agendas, frames and biases, especially within populist narratives. This work examines the discourse of Central and Eastern European right-wing populists from Austria, Germany, Hungary and Poland (2015-2021). To identify discursive patterns within public Facebook posts (n=192,057) by 31 party, movement and partisan news media pages, created by API interrogation, right-wing discourse is analyzed through semi-automated quantitative content analysis based on text mining, in conjunction with qualitative content analysis of messages that generated the highest engagement-rates (n=80). Key findings indicate both national and international narrative patterns with a focus on political, social and ethnic opponents, by incorporating Engesser et al.’s (2017) core elements of right-wing populist discourse within Master Populist Frame building (Heinisch & Mazzoleni, 2017), thus marking the contemporary agenda of European right-wing discourse.

show abstract

“…Recent scholarship has addressed how German far-right and radical-right populist actors, including the AfD, have mobilized and revised memory of World War II and the Holocaust (see Audretsch and Gatzka, 2020;Bender, 2021;Deodhar, 2021;Schmalenberger, 2021). Researchers have also started to interrogate how such actors approach GDR memory (see Göpffarth, 2021;Richardson-Little and Merrill, 2020;Sabrow, 2019;Volk, 2020;Wüstenberg, 2019). Much of this research has stressed how different German far-right actors' instrumentalization of the past has led to mnemonic conflicts about 'the "correct" way to interpret the past' (Zerubavel, 1996: 295) that have fractured what was otherwise a generally unified public German 'memory regime' -even if the commemorative consensus surrounding World War II and the Holocaust is arguably stronger than that which surrounds GDR-related events (see Art, 2014;Kubik and Bernhard, 2014;Volk, 2020).…”

Section: German Far-right Political Memory and Social Media Commemora...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Far-right anniversary politics and social media: The Alternative for Germany’s contestation of the East German past on Twitter

2022

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines how the German radical-right populist party the Alternative for Germany ( Alternative für Deutschland) and its politicians have engaged with the public memory of the East German past via Twitter and how this has impacted the use of social media as a tool of political commemoration in Germany. The article analyses the mnemonic wars over ‘anniversary tweets’ related to four events: the East German Uprising (1953); the construction (1961) and fall (1989) of the Berlin Wall; and German reunification (1990). The article surveys when and how Twitter became a platform for these events’ political commemoration and the role of the Alternative für Deutschland therein. It also outlines the mnemonic discourses that the Alternative für Deutschland has deployed on Twitter around these events’ anniversaries and explores the sorts of digital contestation and transnationalization evident at these times.

show abstract

Who Is the Volk? PEGIDA and the Contested Memory of 1989 on Social Media

Cited by 12 publications

References 24 publications

Political violence in far‐right memory: Fratelli d'Italia's remembrance of the Primavalle arson

Political violence in far‐right memory: Fratelli d'Italia's remembrance of the Primavalle arson

The Right-Wing Perspective: Populist Frames and Agenda on Facebook in Central and Eastern Europe

Far-right anniversary politics and social media: The Alternative for Germany’s contestation of the East German past on Twitter

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About