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ONCE UPON A TIME ANTI-FASCIST  
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Jan Ralske
August 9, 2026
The Left Berlin
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_ Nationwide parliamentary elections are scheduled for September
2026. The rise of the extreme right in Europe is especially alarming
in Germany, where the historical consequences of Fascism are brutally
clear. _

, photos: ©Jan Ralske

 

It is the mid-1980s. The Berlin Wall between the two Germanys is still
intact and visible in the background of these photos. It was defined
as the “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall” by the East German
authorities. This will soon change.

In these two images, the concept of the Berlin Wall being a protective
“anti-Fascist barrier” is valid, visually. The pictured site in
West Berlin was the former torture center of the Gestapo on
“Wilhelmstraße,” West Berlin. It was sealed off from East Berlin
by the Berlin Wall facing West Berlin. The Nazi torture center, a
symbol of evil that the East Germans thought they could keep out with
a wall.

The official German Democratic Republic (GDR) title of the border
barrier as the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall was met with ridicule in
the West, where they preferred the description “Wall-of-Shame.”
The playwright, Heiner Müller would later describe the GDR as a
“nursing home for Communists and Concentration Camp victims.”
Anti-Fascism was a State doctrine taken seriously by the GDR as many
of East Germany’s elite had been imprisoned or held in Concentration
Camps during the Nazi years. The Berlin Wall did have negative
ramifications, but it was necessary for the economic survival of the
GDR, and the claim that it prevented WW3 in the middle of the Cold War
is a valid argument.

The context of an Anti-Fascist Wall separating Berlin into an
“Anti-Fascist” East and a “Neo-Fascist” West would also seem
to be confirmed by the fact that this informative sign about the
historic Gestapo site was repeatedly attacked and damaged by Fascists
and ultra-Nationalists in West Berlin who did not want to be reminded
of the dark side of Nazi history and German Nationalism. In post-WWII
West Germany a Nazi past or Nazi sympathy were not barriers to a
successful career. Other people of that era who considered themselves
Anti-Fascists, like Bertolt Brecht or Anna Seghers, did not feel
welcomed in the West and returned from WWII exile to settle in the
GDR. Much later, the young West Germans who came to West Berlin to
avoid the German military draft were told to migrate to the East side
of the Wall if they were not satisfied with things in the West. This
was a typical reaction in West German media to critics of a government
largely run by former Nazis in the West.
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The first actual physical split of Berlin was not carried out by the
East German authorities and their wall: it was done by the police in
the West who blocked trams
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coming from East Berlin at the still-open sector border. Why? The GDR
gave women employment equality immediately with the founding of the
republic in 1949. Women were hired as drivers of the trams, an act
that the West Berlin authorities considered illegal. The trams were
stopped at the sector border, and a male driver from the West had to
replace the female GDR driver in order for the tram to be allowed by
the West to proceed through Berlin. It wasn’t until 1980 that West
Berlin gave women equal rights at work.

Back to the photo: directly adjacent to this Gestapo torture site
stands a building, “Deutschlandhaus,” where the offices of the
“Berlin Landesverband der Vertriebenen [[link removed]]”
(Organisation of the Exiled Germans, BdV) are located. It still exists
there as the organisation of Germans who left or were expelled as Nazi
sympathizers from regions that were claimed by Nazi Germany or
populated by Germans before national borders were changed after WWII.

This organisation, BdV, has the reputation of holding extreme
right-wing views and revisionist concepts of German history. Their
website writes of “massacres” committed by the Soviet Red Army and
partisans fighting Nazi Germany. It was and still is funded by the
current Federal German Government, 81 years after the end of WWII.

That large building in the background formally served as the
headquarters for the Nazi Wehrmacht under Hermann Göring. After
German re-unification in 1989, the Federal Economic Ministry moved
their offices there. The new West German ministry received an
unwelcome visitor in 2015: the Greek Economic Minister, Yanis
Varoufakis. He came to Berlin to negotiate the alleged debts owed by
Greece to Germany, or more accurately, to German banks.

Greece had been devastated by the Nazi Wehrmacht during WWII but never
received any reparations from Germany; a point of contention to this
day. Varoufakis came to Berlin to negotiate the 2015 debt crisis in
Greece, or more accurately, debt owed to German and French banks.
Varoufakis vividly describes the “toxic atmosphere” of the former
Wehrmacht headquarters in a discussion with Slavoj Žižek in this
video clip [[link removed]],
where he also explained that the “Euro” is actually the old
“German-Mark.” Varoufakis failed to get any compromise from
Germany and had to resign his post as Greek economic minister. Germany
now has more economic power over Europe than the Nazis could ever have
imagined.

Forty years after this photo was made, it is 2026. The Berlin Wall at
this site is still intact. But the GDR—the State that called itself
the “New Germany”—is now gone. In 1992 the former GDR leader,
Erich Honecker, was arrested and imprisoned in the exact same cell in
West Berlin in which he was held as a Communist during Nazi times. He
is now dead.

West Germany did not “develop” this centrally located property in
the photo after 1989, when most public properties were privatized.
Financial corruption had ripped a hole in the Berlin government budget
in the late 1990s, which accelerated the sale of public property to
Capitalists speculating on real estate prices. The government decided
to use the historic significance of this property for their
“remembrance culture,” re-naming the site “Topography of
Terror.” They constructed a museum about the Nazi era right where
that lonely, battered sign formerly stood. Unlike other properties on
the former border, the West German authorities did not tear down the
Berlin Wall at this location. Now, next to the new museum, the Wall
serves as a useful symbol to emphasize the West German narrative
associating Hitler’s Germany and the East German Democratic Republic
as being the “two dictatorships” of German history. The
Anti-Fascist Wall suddenly metamorphosed into a symbol equating it and
the East German State with Nazi Fascism. The happy-end of the Cold-War
was declared.

A history written by the “victors.” The “dictatorship of private
property” now rules over re-united Berlin, and the terror persists
in other forms. Ask Greece, racked by austerity/privatisation where
over 60% of the population cannot meet the cost-of-living,
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or ask anyone trying to secure a rental roof over their head in Berlin
today, where real estate speculation has exploded the housing crisis
and ruined neighbourhoods. Ask Palestine, which has been decimated
thanks to German weaponry provided to Israel for its genocide. For the
first time since WWII, a weapons factory is being constructed in
Berlin by Rheinmetall, a corporation which funded the militias that
murdered the leftists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, and used
slave-labour
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to produce Third Reich armaments. Rheinmetall’s profits have soared
over the last 3 years during unprecedented militarization in Europe,
pushed largely by Germany and the German head of the EU, Ursula von
der Leyen.

East Germany may no longer exist, but it is happily resurrected by
German media to shoulder the blame for numerous problems currently
facing Germany. One of them is the rise of the extreme-right party,
Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Deutschland, AfD), which
is polling at record highs in former East Germany. The West Germans
claim this was more proof of the failings of the former socialist
system which never taught their citizens to respect “democratic
values.” But the fact is that the GDR ceased to exist 37 years ago,
meaning over 1/3 of the current voters in the East grew up under the
current system, not in the GDR. Secondly, when you include voters in
the West, the shocking result in the polls show that the AfD is the
strongest party
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in Germany as a whole, even ahead of the current conservative
Christian Democrats of Chancellor Merz.

The AfD is a party whose leader, Alexander Gauland,
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dismissed critical attention on Germany’s Fascist history, calling
the Nazi era “just a piece of pigeon-poop” in relation to “1000
years of successful German history.” 1000 years of successful
history? Does that sound familiar to anyone?

Nationwide parliamentary elections are scheduled for September 2026.
The rise of the extreme right in Europe is especially alarming in
Germany, where the historical consequences of Fascism are brutally
clear. That inspired Ali Abunimah, editor of “Electronic
Intifada,” to renew the call for a 2-State solution
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for Germany, and the right-to-exist for the GDR.

The Berlin Wall was born on August 13th and lasted a mere 28 years.
The generation that grew up under GDR socialism is dying out.
Ideologies do not necessarily depend on the physical world for their
existence; yet when they feel threatened, things can quickly “get
physical.” For the past three years, Berlin has banned all symbols
of the Soviet Union at the famous memorial site to the triumph of the
Red Army over Nazism on Victory-Day. “Victory Day”: a day of
liberation from Fascism or a day-of-defeat for Berlin? That may still
be an unanswered question.

Berlin and Germany remain a mine-field of dangerous memories.

 

_Jan Ralske is a filmmaker/artist/author originially from Texas who
has spent more than half his life in Berlin. After some success in the
film world, he now enjoys working more for others as an
editior/technician rather than trying to turn his own anger into
something useful._
 
_The Left Berlin is a community of international progressives in
Berlin. We run an online journalism project hosting a range of
left-wing perspectives in English, as well as collaborating on
progressive campaigns and events in the city. The site is run by a
team of volunteer editors, writers and translators._

 

* German history
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* Afd
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* Berlin Wall
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* Fascism
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* Anti-Fascism
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* German Democratic Republic
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