Later this month, on February 23, Germany goes to the polls. Already it seems as if the wall that mainstream German parties had erected between their more sober, responsible politics and the provocations of the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) has crumbled. Thousands of Germans protested in cities across the country against the apparent willingness of the center-right Christian Democratic Union – the party most expect will win the election and provide the next German chancellor – to accept AfD backing for its bid to block undocumented migrants at the border.
AfD has become a serious threat to Germany’s political establishment, with its leader Alice Weidel even leading the race in one recent poll to become the country’s next chancellor. Weidel, a once obscure figure, enjoys the very loud and prominent support of Elon Musk, who interviewed her for over an hour on X last month and appeared at an AfD rally via video link last week to tell the crowd that there was “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt. “ He exhorted AfD supporters to “be proud of German culture and German values and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”
Many AfD members have in the past called for an end to Germany’s “cult of guilt” over the Holocaust. And Weidel herself, while endorsing that phrase, has said German politics should not be about its past but about “confidence and responsibility for the future.”

When Musk told thousands of Germans they need to “move beyond” Nazi guilt, I reached out to Erica Hellerstein, a brilliant reporter who has spent months investigating Germany’s complex relationship with historical memory. In 2023, her story for Coda dived into the little-understood opposition to Holocaust remembrance inside Germany.
“What’s interesting to me is seeing that view migrate from the fringe of German society to one of the most powerful shadow politicians in the US,” Erica told me.
“Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents,” Musk declared to cheering AfD supporters, just hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Musk’s own grandfather was reportedly a pro-apartheid, antisemitic conspiracy theorist in South Africa – another country that, like Germany, has been celebrated for its post-conflict reconciliation efforts.
To understand today’s shifting power dynamics, you have to understand how leaders manipulate our view of the past. The battle over historical memory has become one of the most potent weapons of modern authoritarianism, though it often goes unnoticed in daily headlines. Whether in school textbooks, political speeches, or family stories, the rewriting of history isn’t really about the past at all. It’s about who gets to control the future.
No one understands this better than Vladimir Putin, who has written the playbook that authoritarians around the world are now following: Close the archives. Rewrite textbooks. Silence historians. Transform perpetrators into heroes.
What makes this tactic so effective is how stealthily it works at first. The rewriting of history begins in intimate spaces – in family silences, in selective remembrance, in subtle shifts of narrative.
We sent Erica to Germany in the wake of America’s racial justice protests because we wanted to understand what Europe’s model for historical reconciliation could teach a nation grappling with its own buried past. What Erica uncovered was revealing: even as Germans publicly embraced their culture of remembrance, many maintained a studied silence about their own family histories during the Nazi era – much like the buried stories of racial violence she found reporting across the American South. It was in these intimate gaps between public commemoration and private amnesia that she found the seeds of today’s shift.

“Silence distorts memory…” wrote Erica Hellerstein in Coda nearly three years ago. She had traveled to Germany to report on its lauded culture of remembrance. Now with Elon Musk telling Germans to move on from their guilt, Erica’s prescient piece reminds us why we must interrogate the horrors of history so as not to repeat them in the future. READ THE FULL STORY HERE.
“I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that someone with Musk’s particular brand of grievance politics would gravitate to the AfD’s brand of grievance politics,” Erica told me, “but it does make me wonder if it will give license to other authoritarian movements to more vocally reject movements to reconcile with the past.”
It’s already happening: Argentina’s new president Javier Milei is actively whitewashing the country’s brutal period of dictatorship in the late-1970s and early-1980s. And in Hungary, historical revisionism has been essential to Viktor Orbán maintaining his grip on power. While, in the United States, conservative politicians continue to rail against the 1619 Project and any attempt to teach accurate history in schools.
In Russia, where 70% approve of Stalin’s role in Russian history, nearly half of young people say they’ve never heard of the Great Terror. Years before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine we saw how the Putin regime began to implement its meticulous, systematic erasure of Soviet crimes: “cleansing” history books, culture, music, film, media. By rewriting the past, Putin’s regime cleared the way for future atrocities. When he finally declared Ukraine’s statehood a historical fiction in 2022, the groundwork had been laid over decades of perpetuating carefully constructed historical myths.
Now, as Musk amplifies a view that was once barely whispered in German living rooms, we’re seeing the results of the same erosion of historical memory burst into the mainstream. It’s evident in the support for extreme right wing groups across Europe,
What makes this moment particularly dangerous is how it weaponizes a very human impulse – the desire to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths about our past. As one Gulag survivor told us, of wrestling with this challenge in Russia: “How do you hold people accountable when there are millions of interrogators, millions of informants, millions of prison guards… These millions were also our people.”
This selective amnesia creates exactly the kind of buried tension and grievance that authoritarians exploit. From Moscow to Buenos Aires, from Mississippi to Munich, we see how silence about the past can pave the way for power grabs in the present. When Musk aligns himself with Germany’s far right, he’s not just making an inflammatory speech – he’s giving global legitimacy to a movement that understands what Putin has long known: controlling society’s memory is the key to controlling society.
Today, as we witness what Erica calls “the global ripple effect of this kind of embrace of a once-taboo interpretation of history,” I’m struck by how the grand sweep of politics often begins in the quiet spaces of our homes.
The stories we tell our children, the silences we maintain at family gatherings, the questions we dare or don’t dare to ask about our ancestors – these intimate choices extend outward, shaping not just our personal narratives but our collective future.
As Erica put it: “I think it’s so important to start with our family stories – because over time, memory gaps can mutate into memory wars.” And so, perhaps our most important task begins at our dinner tables: facing up to the stories we’ve been afraid to tell.