Antisemitism Across Borders: German and American Neo-Nazis, 1970s-1990s
This talk investigates the transatlantic connections between German and American neo-Nazis from the 1970s through the rise of the Internet era in the 1990s. In tracing neo-Nazism beyond German borders, the project unearths an underacknowledged reality, which reshapes our understanding of the global far right today: the strengthening of German neo-Nazism was not only the homegrown or inevitable successor to the Third Reich, but rather also owed to mutual American influence. In the decades after Hitler, when the East and West German governments struggled to suppress Nazism, American neo-Nazis exploited the U.S. right to free speech and the increasing ease of global communications to circumvent German censorship laws, ship propaganda across the Atlantic Ocean, and galvanize a younger generation of German neo-Nazis who turned their hatred not only against Jews but also against immigrants, asylum seekers, Black Germans, and other “foreigners.” By uncovering the surprising mutual influence of the U.S. on the resurgence of German neo-Nazism, this research reconsiders the triumphalist Cold War narrative of America’s democratizing influence on post-fascist Germany, exposes the past difficulties of policing hate speech, and provides deeper context for the global resurgence of the far right today.
Michelle Lynn Kahn is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of Richmond. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from Stanford University, with a Ph.D. minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research situates post-Holocaust Germany and Europe in global and transnational context, focusing on far-right extremism, racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, Holocaust memory, migration, gender, and sexuality.
Her book project, Neo-Nazis in Germany and the U.S.: An Entangled History of Hate, 1945–1990s, investigates the transatlantic connections between East and West German and American neo-Nazis from the fall of the Third Reich through the reunification of divided Germany and the rise of the Internet Era.