I 8 attempts to examine what images of history are created, what narratives are (re-)produced and to what extent these match up with radical right-wing ideals and how they are being harnessed by corresponding actors, organisations and movements. All the articles thus address the role that the Pagan past plays as a foil for populist to extreme right-wing identity projects and their exploitation for political ends. They demonstrate how reenactment events, black metal concerts and Neopagan discourse produce notions of a pre-Christian past and images of Pagan societies that are grounded in a biologistic and ancestral understanding of “people”. It is this essentially völkisch, or – to use a more internationally compatible term – ethnicist thinking, that seems to lie at the core of their approach to the past, and that enables exclusionary practices of identity and prejudice. Moreover, by conjuring up a supposedly more natural and original way of life than the one we live in today, pre-Christian societies are staged and idealised as heroic ancestors, they thus not only serve as the starting point for the idea of an unbroken ethnic continuum stretching to the present but are also evoked as the antithesis of (post-)modernity. Although this kind of understanding history draws on the nationalist-romanticist and essentialist ideas of the 19th and early 20th centuries, they are often adapted and updated to meet personal convictions and the challenges of the present day. Accordingly, the considered fields of popular engagement with early history display an ambivalent and selective relationship to latest discourses and findings from academic archaeological and historical research. As the individual articles show, the practices of history that are analysed here can and do fulfil political roles by conveying notions of “belonging” and “non-belonging”, by marking conservative ideas of society out as being “original” and “natural” or romanticising violent behaviour and masculine warrior elites. However, the political force that such images of history can build up cannot always be recognised in the form of traditional political activism. Whereas sections of the described milieus openly maintained links with extreme right circles around the turn of the new millennium, they have since shed many of their more obvious political trappings. Whether this is linked to the overarching shift in strategy by the far right, to shun overt racist views and white supremacist fantasies and instead cloak them in concepts of cultural inequality such as ethnopluralism, is one of the questions addressed in this volume. Notions of supposedly natural societies whose culture and way of life were adulterated firstly by Christianity – all too often regarded as a phenomenon with Jewish roots that was introduced “from outside” – and later by society’s ideas of equality and diversity are created in order to lend legitimacy to anti-modern and anti-democratic concepts of life in the present day. In the guise of popular cultural approaches to history, such references to a long national historical tradition and ideals of a ‘natural’ way of life and culture combined with attempts to biologise cultural differences between human societies can be transported right into the midst of society. This is another reason why it is not sufficient to merely look at tangible links, activities or statements with extreme right-wing overtones. The way in which history is staged through public performance and popular media appears innocuous at first and sometimes even playful, so that it often escapes critical reflection due to its pop-cultural nature. However, it is these vivid images that can contribute to easily and unconsciously conveying an understanding of history that reinforces anti-democratic ideologies. The terms “extreme right-wing”, “far-right”, “altright”, etc. that are used in this volume cannot always be separated clearly from one another when zooming in on individual cases. “Far-right” generally refers to political beliefs that lie beyond the conservative right wing, although the boundaries are very blurred. The terms “extreme right” or “extreme right-wing” (in German rechtsextrem) are used in German criminal law as well as in many other contexts (including academic ones) where there are signs of a rejection of democratic principles and a willingness to employ or accept the use of violence to achieve political goals. All too often, however, it is impossible to make a clear assessment. This is because, even when corresponding attitudes are not voiced or explicitly demonstrated by other means, they can still appear as the ultimate consequence of adopting certain ideals. The “alt-right” (in German Neue Rechte, literally “New Right”) generally refers to groupings or movements that set themselves apart from the “old” right, i.e. the traditional fascism of the 20th century in terms of their look and political practices but that preserve precisely its ideas of ethnic and racist exclusion and of radically heteronormative, hierarchical and autocratic models of society that the “old” right espoused. Many societal undertakings that are regarded as traditionally “left-wing”, such as anti-globalisation, ecology
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