A near impossible literacy test Louisiana used to suppress the black vote

Because, yes Germany has always been fair, democratic and non discriminating.

Also because residents of Germany have a duty to always maintain an accurate registration of their current address with the county. So the German state actually knows where its voters live, making voter registration superfluous.

In case that was sarcasm, then I have to disagree. The current German state has an excellent track record when it comes to voter enfranchisement. Its shortcomings with the democratic process lay elsewhere. The last really questionable action relating to elections was the questionable ban of the communist party - in 1956.

> The current German state has an excellent track record

"Current state" is a convenient wording to exclude 1933-1990

I wish my home country could be as brutally honest with itself about its past and work as hard to make things right as Germany has been the last several decades.

The disturbing party coming up on the Right feels like Germany has blamed itself for too long. That “self-blame” is a lot of what has enabled modern Germany to be a much better place than it was before the war.

(I’m an American living in greater Nuremberg, and get to see monuments to Germany’s failures on a regular basis)

Germany is self-blaming only to some extent or for some definitions of this notion.

Yes, they are well aware of what happened in 1930s and that there was Hitler, etc.

And still they conveniently fail to see any connection with today times. It is some unclearly defined Nazis who took over the control of Germany and did all the killings and destroyed a few countries around. But not anyone's grandfather was involved. And supposedly the companies which built their wealth on slave work and death of thousands continue to prosper.

Not sure someone suggested that. Not sure what the argument is. The "Because" looks like it should be an argument. Also the sarcasm seems to make it an argument somehow.

Was it just an expressed opinion of "Germany was most of the time undemocratic, unfair and discriminating"? Yes, it wasn't democratic in the Kaiserreich from 1871 until 1918, it had huge democracy deficits in the Weimar republic from 1918 to 1933, it was a murderous, facist dictatorship from 1933 to 1945, and a Russian puppet state with fake elections from 1945 to 1989 in the East. So I would agree with that expressed opinion.

"And still they conveniently fail to see any connection with today times."

Who is they? The people who brought far right leaders to court because those were shouting SA slogans? Surely not those. And I would argue, that the new right indeed does see the connection, they want to have that connection to today times (see shouting SA slogans).

"It is some unclearly defined Nazis who took over the control of Germany and did all the killings and destroyed a few countries around."

Not sure what that sentence means.

"But not anyone's grandfather was involved."

You seem to have missed the 1960/70s where the topic exactly was that "The fathers did this and didn't talk about it" (In the West, East Germany just declared themselves victims of the Nazis) - which directly lead into the red terror (Red Army Faction RAF) of the 1970s as a reaction to "old nazis".

And you seem to have missed the large Wehrmacht discussion in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmacht_exhibition (late, I know)

"And supposedly the companies which built their wealth on slave work and death of thousands continue to prosper."

Many companies have paid [0] (late, not enough IMHO) for using slave labor - at least that discussion led to every company pay a historian to write down that part of their history most ignored before. The biggest problem is not the companies but some rich people in Germany like the Quandts who are one of the richest families in Germany and own a large chunk of BMW - they got their money by slave labor, selling to the Prussian army and the Wehrmacht and by stealing from jews.

Compared to that, my (German) grandparents lost their large farms (not complaining, or accusing, but as a comparison) and everything else except their clothing and the clothing they could carry in two suitcases. They were not on the right side of "War Is a Racket".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_Remembrance,_Respon...

German honesty regarding its past is a modern phenomenon, if not outright propaganda. During the Cold War they were a lot less honest; the Nazi regime was often used as propaganda against the other side. e.g. West Germany would downplay Germany's capitalist class's role in Hitler's rise to power and emphasize the racial nature of the Holocaust. East Germany[0] would do the opposite, emphasizing capitalism and de-emphasizing antisemitism[1]. These different spins on the same events were intended to downplay their side's role in the Nazi regime, shifting all the blame to the other.

This is especially true in the West. Large swaths of the German capitalist class actively backed Hitler and the Nazi party, and got away with it. How they got away with it is particularly appalling. One of the most common defenses at Nuremburg was "I was just following orders", an excuse that was usually rejected. But there was one very specific kind of order that would reliably keep Nazis (Hugo Boss, IG Farben, etc) out of the noose: shareholder duties. In the name of anticommunism, there was an active campaign in the First World[2] to downplay the war crimes of German capitalists after WWII.

The AfD is not a result of Germany being tired of remembering. They're a result of Germany's denazification being incomplete - and politically influenced by the exact same economic forces[3] that put Hitler in the chancellor's seat in the first place. States create liberal democracies with free markets, businesses figure out how to exploit those markets, they get unfathomably rich before someone can stop them, they coopt or overthrow democracy, and then replace liberalism with tyranny.

Overthrow is possible because society has vulnerabilities that can be exploited through propaganda and outrage porn. You socially engineer the public into abolishing their own liberty to hurt the other that they hate. In America, that vulnerability was African Americans. In Nazi Germany's case, it was deeply rooted antisemitism. In today's Germany, it's immigration[4].

[0] The Stazi wants to know about your dancing skill and computer memory speed

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Uni...

[2] As in, "aligned with American capitalism" world

[3] America's business elite were not that far behind Germany's in terms of planning to overthrow democracy. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_collaboration_with_Na...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

[4] German immigration policy - and, to a larger extent, most EU external immigration policy - is built entirely for rich, self-motivated knowledge workers who can navigate bureaucracy and do all the integration work themselves. As a result, it has lots of poorly integrated immigrant populations with lots of scary right-wingers that the German right can use to scare German liberals into, themselves, becoming scary right-wingers. Fnord fnord fnord.

Why would I exclude 1949-1990?

Minor thing, its "Stasi" for "Staatssicherheit" (or "Ministerium für Staatssicherheit") not Stazi. But I know it should be Stazi - it sounds more like something Colonel Klink would say.

In general as a reply, I'm not sure where you grew up in Germany (or if, because of Stazi). I grew up in West Germany in the 1970 and 1980 and there was not one week where there wasn't a story about German war crimes, genocide etc. in one of the large magazines. It was also a large topic in school. But it seems where you grew up things were different.

"In Nazi Germany's case, it was deeply rooted antisemitism. In today's Germany, it's immigration"

No it's the same. Racism together with the special case of antisemitism. People don't change.

"The AfD is not a result of Germany being tired of remembering. They're a result of Germany's denazification being incomplete"

Interesting view point. I would assume it is wrong (though I do think denazification in the East was incomplete), it doesn't have anything to do with being tired of remembering or incomplete denazification. Its just that people don't change, and they are nationalists, socialists and racists (just like the Nazi party - (National Socialists)) and with the rise of the populist right in the US and all over Europe, they thought they should band together again. The internet removed all gate keepers. Before that all other far-right parties in the West like "Die Republikaner" didn't get lots of traction but faded away fast.

The current German state was made in the 90's.

Personally don't think the German Democratic Republic had an excellent track with enfranchisement.

I will take any day Germany self-blaming itself over Germany's Hegel and Nietzsche Kultur that killed tens of thousands of Belgian and French civilians in the first world war and millions of Jew, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, etc... civilians in the second world war.