AfD lawmaker attacks Germany’s ‘cult of guilt’ ahead of Saxony-Anhalt vote

Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a 48-year-old AfD lawmaker in Saxony-Anhalt, is campaigning ahead of the Sept. 6 state election on a platform of de-emphasizing Germany's Nazi past in schools and culture, according to Politico's reporting. He describes the country's postwar remembrance culture as a zombie-like 'cult of guilt' and says AfD wants to 'spread the joy of being German.'

Tillschneider, the AfD's cultural and education spokesman in the state parliament and a likely candidate to run a future ministry over school curricula, wrote the party's governing program for the state. That platform proposes cutting funding for what it calls 'anti-German art,' developing 'patriotic tourism,' and reshaping history lessons, though the phrase 'more Bismarck, less Hitler' was dropped from the final document.

He says lessons on the Third Reich would stay in schools, just delivered as 'good history lessons' that create 'a sense of a different past.' Tillschneider was also one of three Saxony-Anhalt lawmakers who attended a Putin birthday celebration at the Russian Embassy in Berlin last October.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.