On March 13, 1953, a teacher named Julius Hlavaty appeared before the United States Senate’s Committee on Government Operations, chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Hlavaty led the mathematics department at New York City’s prestigious Bronx High School of Science, and was widely considered one of the best math teachers in America. He wore a gray chalk-striped suit, a polka-dot tie, and a textured white handkerchief in his breast pocket. He kept his white hair slicked back, and looked more like a continental industrialist than a high-school instructor.

He was there, ostensibly, to speak about Voice of America, the federally sponsored news service that McCarthy was investigating for supposedly pro-Communist leanings. Hlavaty, a Slovakian-speaking immigrant, had recorded a statement about coming to America that had been broadcast across Central Europe. But McCarthy had an ulterior motive for the hearing.

Hlavaty was a member of the left-wing American Labor Party, and may have been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s. Almost immediately, McCarthy lit into him. Was he a member of the Communist Party? Not now, Hlavaty said, though he refused to talk about his past. Had he registered as a member of the ALP? Hlavaty confirmed that he had, though he didn’t see why his private political opinions were McCarthy’s business.

This article has been adapted from Clay Risen’s forthcoming book, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America.

Hlavaty had no illusion about what was going on. “It seems to me that my name tomorrow is going to be spread over all the newspapers in the country, and what I said here, which would be the strongest defense that I would have, will not be in there,” he told the committee. “What is happening here today means, if not actually, potentially, the end of a career.”

Three weeks later, Hlavaty was fired by the New York City Board of Education for insubordination. The board had recently ruled that anyone refusing to cooperate with Congress—which meant not only answering interrogators’ questions, but also providing them with the names of other suspected Communists—would be summarily ousted. A week after that, Hlavaty’s wife, Fancille, a teacher in the New York suburbs, was also fired. On her last day, she told her students that she had “nothing to hide” but that “inquisitions into a person’s private beliefs, particularly of their distant past, are a danger.”

Many hundreds of teachers were hounded out of the profession in the late 1940s and early ’50s by school boards, congressional committees, and ad hoc citizens’ groups. Countless more were scared away from teaching “controversial” material.

Schools have always been contested ideological terrain in America, whether over who got to attend them or what would be taught there. Today we can hear echoes of the Red Scare campaign against teachers in the Trump administration’s orders to end diversity programs in education, which some worry could lead to interference in teaching about race and history. Several states, most notably Florida, have ordered schools and colleges to restrict or eliminate courses on gender, while groups such as Moms for Liberty have rallied parents to police curricula and ban books from school libraries. Ideological battles over education may be proxies for larger conflicts—Communism in the ’40s and ’50s; diversity, equity, and inclusion today. But such fights are particularly fierce because of how important schools are in shaping American values. To control the country’s education system is, in no uncertain terms, to control the country’s future.

“Propaganda for New Deal doctrines, socialism, and the ‘welfare state’ is being poured into American high school children in massive doses,” the Chicago Tribune claimed in 1951. Conservative critics had long charged that the very idea of free, publicly supported education was socialistic. Now, suddenly, in the form of teachers such as Julius and Fancille Hlavaty, they seemed to have found their proof.

Especially in big cities, teachers were indeed a progressive bunch, better educated and often more worldly than the average American. A few had become Communists in the 1930s and early ’40s; a handful still were. And for a while, they had been able to bring their ideas to their classrooms—not Communism itself, but ideas that Communists shared with the broader left, about civil rights, women’s rights, labor, and foreign affairs. When the culture turned against those ideas, teachers were among the biggest targets.

New York City was the epicenter of the Red Scare in education. From 1940 to 1942, two Republican state legislators, Assemblyman Herbert Rapp and Senator Frederic Coudert Jr., held closed-door hearings that, in their secrecy and low standards of evidence, presaged the McCarthy inquiries: Hostile witnesses were forced to name names, and informers were allowed to speak with anonymity. The Board of Education fired anyone who did not cooperate, as well as anyone identified as a subversive by two or more witnesses.

In 1949, New York State passed the so-called Feinberg Law, which made membership in any group labeled subversive by the U.S. attorney general grounds for a teacher’s dismissal. A year later, the New York City Board of Education began “trials” against teachers suspected of Communist sympathies.

One such teacher, Irving Adler, led a group of union members in a suit against the Board of Education, which reached the United States Supreme Court in 1952. But the Court, in a 6–3 decision, ruled that teaching was a privilege, not a right, and that the public’s interest in keeping Communist influence out of impressionable young minds outweighed Adler’s First Amendment rights.

In their scathing dissent, the Court’s two stalwart civil libertarians, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, wrote that teachers had no recourse under the law to explain why they had belonged to a subversive group, which might not be subversive to begin with. “Any organization committed to a liberal cause, any group organized to revolt against an hysterical trend, any committee launched to sponsor an unpopular program, becomes suspect,” the pair wrote. “In that manner, freedom of expression will be stifled.”

During the decade-long Red Scare, from roughly 1946 to 1957, not a single American teacher was found to have imparted Communist ideas on their students, let alone acted “subversively” against the government. But that did little to allay the truly paranoid, who insisted that Communist influence worked in more subtle and sinister ways. Anti-Communist watchdog groups emerged everywhere: some national in scope, others hyperlocal.

In September 1949, a Belgian-born, Yale-trained sculptor named Suzanne Stevenson founded the Minute Women of the U.S.A., a sort of 1950s precursor to today’s Moms for Liberty. Within three years, the group claimed to have 500,000 members. The Minute Women went after Communism in all its alleged forms, but their focus was education. Stevenson gave the mothers of young children a list of subversive books, then instructed them to hunt through their school libraries and haul any suspicious titles before their local school boards. What the Minute Women considered “Communist” broadened over time. Progressive education was a target. So was civil-rights talk—the Houston chapter protested a speech at the University of Houston by Rufus Clement, the president of Atlanta University, a historically Black institution, claiming that his ideas about racial equality made him politically suspect. They managed to bar a United Nations–sponsored writing contest from Houston’s public high schools, and in 1953 forced out the deputy superintendent, who had promoted the contest as too “controversial.”

Groups such as the Minute Women received significant support from national organizations with anodyne titles such as the National Council for American Education, founded by a far-right activist named Allen Zoll. During the 1930s, Zoll had founded an anti-Semitic, pro-fascist group called American Patriots, which was considered so extreme that the military refused Zoll’s application for civilian intelligence training during World War II. His new group positioned itself as a defender of patriotic education against subversives. He pumped out a steady stream of pamphlets: “How Red Are the Schools?,” “Progressive Education Increases Delinquency,” “They Want Your Child,” “Red-ucators at Harvard.” He created a blacklist of sorts, keeping track of ousted teachers and circulating the names to his subscribers around the country, to prevent educators from relocating to a new state. And he developed a running list of “subversive” books, insisting that school and public libraries get rid of them immediately. Hundreds followed his orders; one library, in Oklahoma, even burned its suspicious texts, out of expediency or stridency or both.

Parents and students were encouraged to act as informants, reporting their slightest suspicion about a teacher or principal. In California, the state education commissioner urged the American Legion to report “to me any evidence concerning subversive activity it may have respecting any person connected with the public schools.” School districts got help from Washington: Through its Responsibilities program, the FBI allowed administrators to request information on suspicious teachers or job applicants. According to the historian Beverly Gage, by 1955 the bureau had fulfilled 900 such requests.

All of this—the vigilantism, the censorship, the loyalty investigations—had an immense effect on teacher morale. Thousands left the profession in the early 1950s; many more surely thought better of joining in the first place. Most of those who remained kept their heads down and shied away from important if “controversial” subjects. A 1953 survey by the National Education Association found an overwhelming reluctance on the part of teachers to discuss civil rights, universal health care, capitalism, and sex. “Far more to be feared than any radicalism in our schools is the tyranny that would force education into a straightjacket of regimented conformity,” said Reverend Walter Tunks, the rector of St. Paul’s Church in Akron, Ohio, at the National Education Association’s 1953 convention in Miami Beach. “That is the real threat to our American way of life.”

Many of the same people who went after elementary and high-school teachers soon opened a second front against professors on college campuses. In 1948 in Washington State, the Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities—a mini-House Un-American Activities Committee—launched investigative hearings into University of Washington professors suspected of subversion. Using tactics borrowed directly from HUAC, the committee interrogated dozens of faculty members and administrators; three professors lost their jobs, and many others had their careers derailed.

By the 1950s, more than a dozen states had barred Communists from teaching at public colleges and universities, as had scores of private colleges. Almost every state instituted some form of loyalty oath. In 1950, under pressure from the California state legislature, the University of California adopted an additional oath, forswearing belief in subversive ideas and membership in any subversive organization; as usual, subversive was largely undefined.

In most cases, universities went along. In 1953, the Association of American Universities, a group representing 37 of the country’s top educational institutions, issued a statement declaring that no Communist should be allowed to teach in a college classroom, and demanding that any academic called to testify before a government committee should speak honestly and fully. Several university presidents, including James Conant of Harvard, issued blanket statements barring Communists from their faculties. “America’s colleges and universities,” the historian Ellen Schrecker wrote, “had given Joe McCarthy and the members of HUAC a say over selecting their faculties.”

It was perhaps inevitable that HUAC would single out Harvard: the best-known and most prestigious university in the country and the alma mater of so many of the liberals and progressives behind the New Deal. (Harvard was hardly a fortress of pro-Communist sentiment, however; in a 1949 poll of faculty taken by The Harvard Crimson, more than two-thirds agreed that “Communists should not be employed as teachers.”) In 1953, HUAC got several Harvard academics—including the literary scholar Granville Hicks and the historian Daniel Boorstin, both of whom had attended Harvard during the ’30s and dabbled in Communism—to name names. They testified to the existence of a Communist cell on Harvard’s campus in the ’30s, involving students and professors; though the cell was long gone, it had included one professor who remained on faculty, a physicist named Wendell Furry. Both HUAC and McCarthy called Furry to testify. At first he declined to speak, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Then, during televised hearings in 1954, he agreed to discuss his own past as a Communist, but he adamantly refused to name names. Congress voted him in contempt. He only barely managed to avoid prison time.

After being attacked by McCarthy in Washington and losing his job at Bronx Science, Julius Hlavaty suffered a further indignity. His sole book, a student primer called Review Digest on Solid Geometry, was added to a list of titles to be removed from government-sponsored overseas libraries. In an acid letter published in The New York Times, Hlavaty wrote that his book “consists exclusively of questions, problems, and solutions in solid geometry, logarithmic and trigonometric tables, and reprints of past examinations in solid geometry. Yet it has been thought important to notify all United States libraries abroad to ban this apparently ‘dangerous’ and ‘controversial’ work.” Other books on the list included the novels of Howard Fast and the poems of Langston Hughes, two authors who had likewise refused to discuss their political beliefs before Congress.

Libraries around the world removed copies of more than 300 titles by dozens of writers. A worldwide survey by the Times found that the policy was inconsistently carried out. Books were burned in Tokyo, but merely set aside in a locked room in Sydney. A book by the Times reporter Walter Duranty that was removed from the more than 40 Amerika Haus libraries across West Germany was left on the shelf in Vienna. An overzealous librarian in Buenos Aires removed not just prohibited titles such as The Maltese Falcon, by the pro-Communist novelist Dashiell Hammett, but Whittaker Chambers’s aggressively anti-Communist Witness as well.

Though much of this happened under Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, even he was taken aback by the federal government’s foray into censorship. In June 1953, he traveled to Hanover, New Hampshire, to deliver the commencement address at Dartmouth College. “Don’t join the book burners,” he told the gathered students and families. “How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it?” He continued: “They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t America.”

It was a lesson that America is, apparently, still struggling to learn.

This article was adapted from the forthcoming Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America.

Last week in Munich, Vice President J. D. Vance scolded European dignitaries for their failure to address popular discontent. They had ignored what Vance called the most “urgent” issue of our time: the relentless flow of non-Europeans into Europe. Without naming it, Vance was defending a far-right political party called Alternative for Germany (AfD), best-known for its commitment to deporting as many immigrants as the country’s airports can process. Vance said he “happen[s] to agree” with voters worried about “out-of-control migration.” But he was aghast at the idea that governments would try to silence their citizens, whatever their views. “There is no room for firewalls,” he said. “You either uphold the principle of democracy or you do not.”

Germany’s establishment leaders have long accepted a different binary: Either you put up a “firewall” (Brandmauer) against far-right extremists, or you risk losing your democracy to literal Nazis. Accordingly, when the AfD won a plurality in last year’s state-level elections in Thuringia, the other parties cried “Nazi” and stitched together a coalition to keep the AfD out of the government. But this arrangement—even when you win, you lose—has infuriated AfD supporters, and at the party meetings I attended recently, they were in a storm-the-Bastille mood, eager to take down an old regime that they, like Vance, believe is stealing democracy from them in the guise of saving it.  

This may be the year the firewall collapses. The AfD is now polling at about 22 percent nationally and seems destined for a strong showing in Sunday’s federal parliamentary election. No other party will deign to form a coalition with it. But if the AfD performs well enough, it will be impossible to exclude altogether from decision making.

Earlier this year, I donned a flame-retardant suit and pole-vaulted over the Brandmauer into Thuringia. Like other AfD strongholds, Thuringia was part of the old East Germany, and like much of the East, it remains economically depressed. It has lost more than a fifth of its population since unification. Historically, it is a German cultural center, the home of Goethe and Schiller and Bach—Land of poets and thinkers, the banner at the state’s largest railway station announced—and, in 1929, it was the first part of Germany to vote for the Nazis.

On January 28, I attended an AfD rally in Ichstedt, a town of about 600. I would describe the place for you, but the event began at 7 p.m., which, on a moonless German winter night, in an empty countryside, meant that I may as well have traveled from the train station blindfolded. No businesses were open, and the roads were almost without streetlights. My taxi driver told me that since car factories and copper and potash mines had closed in the area, jobs were few. He asked me whether anyone had ever told me I looked like Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the most enthusiastic AfD supporter outside Germany. (I said I was not Musk and hoped to convince him by leaving a miserly tip.)

I was the last to arrive. The rally took place in a humble, rectangular community center, of the sort one might find in a small and dwindling American town. The men and women in the hall also matched the Middle American phenotypes familiar to me from my childhood in Minnesota—the heavyset men in late middle age; the younger men in caps and grimy hoodies; the women with frizzy hair, matching the men beer for beer. I bought a lager, and they invited me to sit at one of the long tables. My coaster was AfD-branded, with a play on a German adage: “Whoever dishonors the farmer, doesn’t deserve the beer.” I searched the room for anyone who looked likely to have non-German ancestry, and only when I caught my own reflection in the bottom of my glass did I see one.

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A theme of the evening, rather than the need to vote for the AfD—the votes of all present were assured—was the need to proclaim one’s support proudly, so Germany knew that this movement could not be ignored or outlawed. “I became a member of the AfD in 2016,” Daniel Haseloff, a party candidate, told the crowd. “Then it was normal to vote for the AfD in secret—to come to the party meetings in the dark and say, I hope no one sees me.” Now, he said, it was time to “declare support at work, among family members, and say, Yes, I stand for the AfD; I stand for deportation, for Fortress Europe, for our great homeland, for our great culture, and for Björn Höcke.”

Höcke, the leader of the Thuringian branch, is a major figure in the AfD’s far-right wing, and one of the main reasons the party’s opponents suspect they’re dealing with real Nazis. In a 2017 speech, Höcke wondered aloud if Germany’s self-flagellation over the Holocaust might not have reached a point of negative returns. Germany, he said, “needed to make a 180-degree change in its commemoration policy.” Before entering politics, Höcke was a teacher of history, not of geometry, so the “180 degree” line left unclear whether he meant that Germany should stop agonizing over its fascist past, or come around to celebrating it. Members of the current government are already discussing banning the AfD, and the group’s supporters at the rally told me they view a strong showing in the election as the only means of survival, because the greater the following, the more awkward a ban will be to implement.

The AfD started in 2013 as an anti–European Union party, full of Germans cranky about having their hard-earned taxes go to bail out lazy Mediterranean countries. A decade on, at the Ichstedt meeting, AfD supporters were still furious that EU membership had added another encrustation of bureaucracy and taxation to an already massive state. But the issue that dominates the party’s platform is immigration, and the chant that animated the Ichstedt crowd most was “Abschieben, abschieben, abschieben”: “Deport, deport, deport!” Germany has seen net migration of more than 5 million people since 2014. More than 1 million of the new arrivals are Syrian and Afghan, and in 2023, the number of people seeking asylum jumped by 50 percent. The AfD has pledged “remigration”—deporting or encouraging the departure of as many of these newcomers as possible, as well as encouraging Germans who have left to come home.  

Party leaders say they wish to make Germany safe again; to end “climate madness” and attempts to rely on solar and wind energy, in their dark and not-always-windy country; and to keep welfare benefits out of the grabbing hands of foreigners and in the hands of Germans. They have also learned to be indignant, along with Vance, about the state of German free expression and democracy, and say that “direct democracy,” rather than democracy filtered through the establishment-party system, will remedy the AfD’s exclusion from power.

Supporters during the AfD general-election-campaign launch, in Halle,. Germany is holding a national election on Sunday. (Krisztian Bocsi / Bloomberg / Getty)​

Sometimes these concerns cross-pollinate with the old hostility toward the EU and its bureaucracy. A speaker at the rally compared the onerous paperwork that the German state demands from its citizens with the light burden it places on asylum seekers. Citizens are denied state services for checking the wrong box, he said, but asylum seekers can show up with no documents, and the state will provide someone to fill out the forms for them and cut them every break. If Germany had to be paperwork hell, then newcomers should be subjected to the same tortures.

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Ichstedt is so sedate that I had trouble imagining any crime there at all. The urban disorder of nearby cities, however, was vivid in the speakers’ and attendees’ minds. It seemed to have inspired equally vivid reverie of how migrants might be rounded up and sent home. Haseloff pledged that the airport in Thuringia’s main city of Erfurt, which has steadily lost passenger business over the past 20 years, would be revitalized through the construction of “deportation prisons” in the surrounding industrial zone. “Under an AfD government in Thuringia, several planes a day will take off to the home of immigrants. By doing so, we will set an example for the whole of Germany. We will make Thuringia an undesirable destination for social migrants.”

Once the Ichstedt rally ended, everyone got up to go home, and a few were already at the door when someone onstage suggested that they close with a few verses of the German national anthem. Everyone stood and sang, solemnly. Germany has had the same anthem since the Weimar Republic, and many decades ago, it was shorn of Nazi-redolent verses such as “Deutschland über alles.” But after two hours’ worth of talk of “the great German homeland” and Kultur, how could one not hear those ominous excised lines echoing distantly?

That echo was unfair to those present. Although the rally attendees definitely wanted to get rid of foreigners, they used no slurs; they did not vilify Islam; they did not use overtly racist language or tropes of extermination; and they seemed sincerely wounded by the accusations that they were fascists. Nevertheless, some rhetoric, when uttered in German, unavoidably sounds odious. The German language is a prison, and anyone who speaks it is trapped by associations that other languages have escaped. “God bless America and the American people” is boilerplate, but “Gott mit uns” (“God is with us”) is a Nazi slogan, and when I hear a German talking about “das Deutsche Volk” (“the German people”), I wonder if he is reaching for his Luger.

One has to ask: If I were running a far-right party plagued with accusations of sympathy for the Third Reich, would I adopt slogans that encouraged that impression, or that discouraged it? The AfD does the former. Its leader is Alice Weidel, and at rallies one often hears chants of “Alice für Deutschland”—which literally means “Alice for Germany” but sounds just like “Alles für Deutschland,” a Nazi-storm-trooper motto. Some of the party’s other leaders, such as Höcke, keep stumbling into statements that sound at best neutral about the legacy of Nazism. Höcke has warned that if Germans are not appeased, their native “Teutonic fervor” will erupt violently; he once wrote that his country will have to “lose” the part of its population that is “too weak or unwilling to resist the advancing Africanization, Orientalization and Islamization” of German society. (He later said that he meant only that those who denigrate Germany, call it a “shit” or “mongrel” country, or wish for it to be firebombed would have to go.) In the state Parliament in Erfurt last month, Mario Voigt, the leader of the current government in Thuringia, which has shut out the AfD, stared down Höcke and called his party a “Führer cult.” Höcke reacted to this speech by raising his hands in mock alarm.

On numerous occasions, the party has embraced vicious and personal campaign tactics. This year, the AfD leafleted immigrant-heavy communities in Karlsruhe with fake one-way economy-class tickets dated for election day. The passenger name was “illegal immigrant”; the destination: “safe country of origin.” “It’s nice at home too,” the tickets said, with assurances that “citizens will not be deported,” though the wording implied that all who could be legally deported should be. One after another, individuals welcomed by the party have been found to have nasty episodes in their past—harassment of Jews, minimizing statements about Hitler.

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Complicating matters is the fact that Weidel, the actual Führer (or Führerin) of the AfD, is hardly Third Reich–compliant. She can speak in fiery tones about immigration: “On the first day in government, we will seal off the German borders,” she promised a crowd earlier this month, adding, “No one will be able to come in.” But she is also curious about the world outside Germany for reasons unrelated to conquering it; she speaks Chinese and lived in China for six years. And although she has Aryan skin and hair, she is married to a woman of Sri Lankan origin, with whom she is raising two sons. In her speeches, she stresses that Germany must comply fully with refugee law—but she adds that “asylum is temporary and ends when the reason for fleeing no longer applies.” Her opponents accuse her party of an unseemly interest in concepts like “the German people” (with all that phrase’s Nazi baggage). But Weidel herself seems most passionate when defending the elimination of carbon taxes and the return of the internal combustion engine.

Even the party’s detractors acknowledge that most AfD supporters are not personally racist, and that many have been drawn to the AfD because of their displeasure with botched or bizarre economic policies. Weidel is adept at drawing conversations toward policies that many Germans, whatever they think about immigration, can agree were foolish, and should have been recognized as such at the time. The establishment parties, after all, were in charge when Germany shifted away from nuclear power, toward wind energy and natural gas piped in from Russia—essentially volunteering itself as a hostage in case Russia ever became an enemy of Europe. (The AfD, like the Trump administration, is very friendly toward Russia, and wishes to reopen pipelines from there to diversify energy supply and lower prices.)

Weidel can dwell on these boneheaded policies in part because almost every German keen on mass deportation is already planning to vote for her, and those in the center are up for grabs. That said, the AfD knows that crime and immigration are winning issues. When I interviewed Stefan Möller, an AfD politician and a deputy to Höcke, he was filled with sensible commentary about the failed economic policies of previous governments. But his eyes really lit up when I turned to immigration, because the AfD has simply dominated all public discussion of its downsides. “Almost every day, we’re seeing reports of knife attacks, of children being hunted down in schools,” Möller told me. “We are expected to prevent things like the knife attack in Aschaffenburg, or the attack in Magdeburg, or the rampant crime. These are not acceptable. And the answer, for society and for our voters, is a consistent policy.”

By now it is impossible to ignore the crime rates of recent immigrants to Germany. In 2023, about 41 percent of crimes were thought to have been committed by foreigners. The anecdotes match the data: Several high-profile cases of bizarre public violence, such as the stabbing of random children, have involved foreigners. At a rally I attended in the town of Sonneberg, a politician named Oliver Kirchner referred to Germany as “the world’s mental hospital,” for its willingness to accept criminally insane foreigners.

Möller told me he lives on the outskirts of Erfurt, and is therefore spared having to deal daily with the crime-ridden area around the train station and main square. He told me a story about children from his suburb who went downtown for ice cream. “They made a mistake on the way home,” he said. “Instead of walking along the tramway, where it’s busy, they went on Tromsdorf Street.” There, he said, they were beset and mugged by a gang of teenage immigrants. Then he invited me to become prey myself. “Go there, and you will see what I mean,” he said. “That is where they find their victims.”

Möller must have underestimated how cheaply The Atlantic houses its reporters when on assignment, because I needed no invitation: I had already booked a hotel near the train station, at the end of Tromsdorf Street. Like almost all railway hubs in Germany nowadays, this one had Syrians and other immigrants standing idly at all hours, talking in Arabic and Afghan languages. Because I was jet-lagged, I would walk Tromsdorf Street late at night, always returning to my room unstabbed. The area seemed not so much crime-ridden as eerily vacant, my footsteps echoing in the shadows like Joseph Cotten’s in Vienna in The Third Man. The shops—many of them Middle Eastern markets—closed after dark. Once or twice I fell into step with a few young guys and wondered if I had hit the jackpot and found a gang. But I am a grown man, not a woman or a tween with an ice-cream cone, so even if they were evaluating me for a mugging, they probably thought better of it. Once, two of them got closer, and I heard them talking in Arabic about going into a pool hall.

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Standing idly is not a crime; neither is speaking a foreign language. By American urban standards, the street was extremely safe. But Möller’s anxiety stems from a predictable form of culture shock, when a very old country changes very fast. Anyone who thought ordinary Germans could cope with this shock, and even welcome it, was deluded. Those streets had been emptying out for some time as the region’s economy flagged and its population declined, and for years they had been even more silent than they are today. No one predicted that when the silence was broken, the voices to break it would be Syrian.

This surprise, unthinkable just a decade ago, has led to grotesque calumnies against vulnerable people, as well as policy proposals that are both clumsy and inhumane. But even Möller, who works directly with one of the AfD’s most incendiary politicians, would when pressed acknowledge that the ideal German future would not look like the distant, romanticized German past, of lederhosen and beer and Wagner.

I asked Möller when he thought Germany went wrong—what year he would go back to, in his Flux Capacitor–equipped Audi, to reboot his country and avert the problems he wanted to solve. He said that he disapproved of Germany’s immigration policy going back as far as he could remember—but 2000, roughly, when Germany’s borders disintegrated and its currency vanished, was when everything started falling apart. I told him that I had started coming to Germany around that time, and even then it had seemed that immigrants were integrating into German society. And it hadn’t seemed so bad to have foreigners there, doing jobs that Germans were losing interest in.

Möller mostly agreed, and noted that the AfD itself had changed its maximalist position on immigration—deport them all—to a more targeted agenda of removing welfare-claiming layabouts, unskilled laborers, and criminals. “Today even our own voters expect us to differentiate,” Möller told me, between violent criminals and “migrants who integrated very well, who are now German citizens, who do not cause any problems.” He said that “no AfD voter expects the AfD—not even in Thuringia—to deport doctors, engineers, or some mailman from Ghana.”

Bjӧrn Hӧcke, the leader of the Thuringian AfD branch, raises his hands at a campaign event in Thuringia. (Michael Reichel / picture-alliance / dpa / AP)

The true collapse happened in 2015, Möller believes, when Syrian and Afghan refugees began arriving in huge numbers. He said any cardiologists or engineers among the legal newcomers should be welcome to stay. But the suggestion that such migrants might come, he told me, is for now “awfully theoretical.” The 2015 wave of migration, he said, had flooded the country with “social migrants,” those who came to enjoy free money from a welfare state, including Syrians and Afghans poorly equipped to integrate into an economy no longer dependent on labor performed by illiterate peasants. “The people we need for [skilled] jobs are not coming,” he told me. “The Indian engineer is not coming, because the Indian engineer will go to a place where he earns more money, where he pays less taxes, where his children are taught in decent schools, and where it is safe to go into town in the evening. He won’t stay in Erfurt.”

This was a persistent theme among AfD supporters and politicians: that Germany had become a shithole country, not fit for an engineer from Delhi, and it needed to become worse for newcomers to be livable for anyone. Donald Trump’s first inaugural speech was about “American carnage,” and now the AfD described an equally awful Germany. It is a weird sensation to go to Germany—the center of what Donald Rumsfeld called “Old Europe,” where I once stayed near a corner bakery old enough to have served Martin Luther—and find that it feels like America’s political younger sibling.

[From the March 1932 issue: Hitler and Hitlerism: a man of destiny]

But the longer history of the AfD is distinctively German, and the result of 50 years of politics perhaps too sedate for its own good. Germany, having been responsible for an eventful half century, decided to forswear eventfulness for the next half century. It was instead governed by a familiar species of cautious, credentialed bureaucrat: never younger than late middle age; usually addressed as Herr Doktor or Frau Doktor; always white, of course. Except for Angela Merkel, one would be forgiven for failing to match faces to names—and to some extent that interchangeability was a relief, considering the last time a German leader was immediately identifiable by face and mustache. The watchful conservatism was exemplified by the campaign slogan of Konrad Adenauer, leader of Germany’s center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU): “Keine Experimente!” The center-left party, the Social Democratic Party, was similarly conservative: no experiments, no funny business.

This status quo, bland as a Bavarian dumpling, faced challengers from the extreme left and right. The radical left produced violent factions—Baader Meinhof, Red Army—whose members ended up hunted and imprisoned. The radical right in Germany posed a more complicated problem. West Germany was plagued with accusations of having incompletely de-Nazified. Many politicians and business leaders had fought in the war, and a don’t-mention-the-war attitude prevailed among those of social grace—if the war was mentioned, the mention should sound disgusted, and anyone who spoke of it in any other way, including in neutral terms, faced shunning and worse. Neo-Nazi parties in Germany felt the full force of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (the Verfassungsschutz, the German equivalent of the FBI), and were shut down.

Those on the far right who wriggled out of being banned confronted instead a disciplined, broad, organized political punishment: the “firewall” that Vance finds so objectionable. Their parties, up to now, have been treated as unhygienic, so that even if the far right and the center agree on something, the center refuses to court the far right’s vote and instead treats it as untouchable. The task of tending the firewall’s flame was judged so important that the parties of the center increased their cooperation with the Green Party and the old East German Left. On immigration, the CDU quietly adopted the view of the left, that Germany’s future would be as a land of immigrants and that anyone who suggested that this vision was undesirable was probably a racist. During Merkel’s long tenure as chancellor, from 2005 to 2021, her party—while nominally center-right—came to embrace certain elements of the far left. This included, fatefully, the welcoming of millions of undocumented immigrants from Syria, Afghanistan, and other countries beset by war or poverty. Merkel’s line, in the face of this extraordinary situation, was “Wir schaffen das”: “We’ll manage it.”

AfD supporters gather for an election-campaign meeting in eastern Germany on August 14, 2024. (Michaela Stache / AFP / Getty)

Hans-Georg Maassen, who was Merkel’s head of domestic intelligence during this period and who was responsible for immigration law before that, has since been ejected from the CDU and started his own party, the Values Union, in part over his criticism of Merkel’s de facto open-borders policy. “For her, immigration policy was ideological,” he told me. “To let in millions of new people, without discussion: This is against the law.” The CDU, by taking this step, had become indistinguishable from the parties to its left, such as the Greens, who openly favored transforming Germany into an internationalist-left society. “People noticed,” Maassen told me. “If you vote for the Greens, you get a Green immigration policy. If you vote for the [Social Democratic Party], you get a Green immigration policy. And for the CDU, that gets you a Green immigration policy too.” That left an opening for the AfD. And as soon as Germans decided that immigration was the issue, the AfD was ready to win big for having consistently opposed it.

This history explains why the AfD directs its most bitter invective not at the immigrants, not at the leftists, but at the center-right. AfD leaders say the CDU caved to the left instead of turning back as many “social migrants” as the law allows. The process of telling refugees apart from non-refugees is extremely difficult, with dire consequences for those refugees wrongly flagged as non-refugees. Faced with that problem, Germany tried—I wrote about it for this magazine in 2018—but not, according to the AfD, hard enough.

In Ichstedt, Daniel Haseloff cautioned against being satisfied with anything but dismantling the CDU. “The CDU is our main opponent—not just here but in all of Germany,” he said. He did not even bother mentioning the left. “We will only be fully successful when the CDU in its current form no longer exists,” he told the crowd. “Trump has shown us how it’s done.” Only after the establishment Republicans were demolished, he said, was there “room for Trump, for Elon Musk.” (Some people looked my way.)

The man most likely to win this week’s election and become the new chancellor is Friedrich Merz, of the CDU. He has tried to court AfD voters and push through immigration legislation that the left viewed as too friendly to the AfD. This, Haseloff said, was a trick. The CDU just wants to peel off AfD votes—and when it does, it will do what governments have done before, and shut the party down. “Merz wants to see the party banned after the federal election,” Haseloff said. “That means he doesn’t see us as partners tomorrow; he sees us as opponents.”

It’s funny, then, that the biggest demonstrations in Germany that week were against the CDU—not by AfD supporters, but by their enemies on the left, who thought Merz had extinguished the firewall and given in to Nazis. I attended a protest outside CDU headquarters in Berlin the day after I left Thuringia, and felt as if I had traveled through time, from a small town decades ago, with its farmers and factory workers, to a gathering of modern university students in a cosmopolitan city. Demonstrators had spiky hair and sustained themselves with takeaway containers of kebabs, rather than beer and sausage. The youth of the protesters was salted and peppered with middle-aged and older people, the sorts of folks one sees at cultural events in the Bay Area or Vermont.

[Read: How Hitler’s enablers undid democracy in Germany]

They told me that by treating AfD voters and politicians as potential friends, rather than as pariahs, the CDU had welcomed racists back into the Reichstag. “We stand together against all right-wing extremism, regardless of whether it comes from the AfD or from the CDU,” a young woman with a bullhorn told the crowd. She said the CDU had never been a friend of immigrants, and now, by reaching out to the AfD, it had shown how false its friendship had always been. No one should trust them again, and demonstrators—the people—were the only ones standing between Germany and a return to racism. She led a chant: “Wir sind die Brandmauer”: “We are the firewall.”

Most noteworthy, at this protest outside the CDU, was that none of these people were members of the center-right, objecting to their party’s change in policy. They were all members of the left fringe of a broad coalition, hectoring members of the coalition’s center-right into maintaining an immigrant-friendly policy that the left flank had insisted on, and that the rest of the coalition had accepted with reservations. At the AfD meeting I had attended the night before, the message was: Don’t trust the CDU, even when it does what you want. Tonight the message was, Don’t trust the CDU, even though it did what you wanted for almost 10 years.

To some extent, this bind is just what happens in coalition politics: Being in the center means getting pinched by parties from both sides, but also having the chance to work with those parties and steal their voters with both hands. For much of Germany’s postwar history, however, coalition politics have not played out in the manner of most parliamentary democracies, because the center and left parties have conspired to treat the far right as radioactive. Here again one would expect Germans, of all people, to understand the dynamics of walls: that if you build them up, the pressure mounts on one side, and when the wall crashes down, the equilibration can be dramatic. Even as sensible a rule as Don’t be nice to Nazis cannot repeal this dynamic of hydrostatic pressure. The far right can be suppressed only so long, but that just means a reckoning postponed rather than avoided.

By sequestering the AfD on the right, the CDU kept itself free from the contagion of the party’s most odious members. It also lost its only chance to lure the non-odious AfD members to its side, and to explain how a Germany with a generous—but not infinitely generous—policy toward beleaguered foreigners could remain prosperous, safe, and German. I found Stefan Möller much more reasonable when I could press him, and get him to exempt his Ghanaian postman from deportation. In this way he is like most people: pricklier when left alone, and more reasonable when reasoned with.

Maassen, the former Merkel colleague, had been a CDU candidate in Thuringia before he started his own party. He told me how his attempts to stand for election on the CDU line eventually became untenable, because voters came to think of the CDU as a party of scolds, and of thought-police in a new guise. He noted that people there knew, because they had lived through one-party rule in the East, what a stifled politics felt like. “In East Germany, if they were an opponent of the regime, they had to look to the left, to the right, if they were in a restaurant and talking politics, in case somebody had big ears. Nowadays they have the same feeling if they are members of the AfD.” But if you complained about this stiflement in East Germany, your punishment could be severe. Now the problems are lesser, although still real: losing your job, your freedom to associate with other far rightists. The deeper issue, he said, was the AfD members’ sense of betrayal by a system that they had been told was open. “The AfD supporters say, This is not democratic.”

Dale Carnegie, the self-made titan of self-help, swore by the social power of names. Saying someone’s name, he wrote in How to Win Friends and Influence People, was like a magic spell, the key to closing deals, amassing political favors, and generally being likable. According to Carnegie, Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency partly because his campaign manager addressed voters by their names. The Steel King, Andrew Carnegie (no relation), reportedly secured business deals by naming companies after at least one competitor and a would-be buyer, and maintained employee morale by calling his factory workers by their first name. “If you don’t do this,” Dale Carnegie warned his readers, “you are headed for trouble.”

By Carnegie’s measure, plenty of people are in serious jeopardy. It’s not that they don’t remember what their friends and acquaintances are called; rather, saying names makes them feel anxious, nauseated, or simply awkward. In 2023, a group of psychologists dubbed this phenomenon alexinomia. People who feel it most severely might avoid addressing anyone by their name under any circumstance. For others, alexinomia is strongest around those they are closest to. For example, I don’t have trouble with most names, but when my sister and I are alone together, saying her name can feel odd and embarrassing, as if I’m spilling a secret, even though I’ve been saying her name for nearly 25 years. Some people can’t bring themselves to say the name of their wife or boyfriend or best friend—it can feel too vulnerable, too formal, or too plain awkward. Dale Carnegie was onto something: Names have a kind of power. How we use or avoid them can be a surprising window into the nature of our relationships and how we try to shape them.

The social function of names in Western society is, in many ways, an outlier. In many cultures, saying someone else’s given name is disrespectful, especially if they have higher status than you. Even your siblings, parents, and spouse might never utter your name to you. Opting for relationship terms (auntie) or unrelated nicknames (little cabbage) is the default. Meanwhile, American salespeople are trained to say customers’ names over and over again. It’s also a common tactic for building rapport in business pitches, during telemarketing calls, and on first dates.

Western norms can make sidestepping names a source of distress. For years, Thomas Ditye, a psychologist at Sigmund Freud Private University, in Vienna, and his colleague Lisa Welleschik listened as their clients described their struggles to say others’ names. In the 2023 study that coined the term alexinomia, Ditye and his colleagues interviewed 13 German-speaking women who found the phenomenon relatable. One woman told him that she couldn’t say her classmates’ names when she was younger, and after she met her husband, the issue became more pronounced. “Even to this day, it’s still difficult for me to address him by name; I always say ‘you’ or ‘hey,’ things like that,” she said. In a study published last year, Ditye and his colleagues searched online English-language discussion forums and found hundreds of posts in which men and women from around the world described how saying names made them feel weird. The team has also created an alexinomia questionnaire, with prompts that include “Saying the name of someone I like makes me feel exposed” and “I prefer using nicknames with my friends and family in order to avoid using names.”

[From the April 2023 issue: An ode to nicknames]

Names are a special feature of conversation in part because they’re almost always optional. When an element of a conversation isn’t grammatically necessary, its use is likely socially meaningful, Steven Clayman, a sociology professor at UCLA, told me. Clayman has studied broadcast-news journalists’ use of names in interviews, and found that saying someone’s name could signal—without saying so directly—that you’re speaking from the heart. But the implications of name-saying can shift depending on what’s happening at the moment someone says a name and who’s saying it; we all know that if your mom uses your name, it usually means you’re in trouble. Even changing where in the sentence the name falls can emphasize disagreement or make a statement more adversarial. “Shayla, you need to take a look at this” can sound much friendlier than “You need to take a look at this, Shayla.” And, of course, when someone says your name excessively, they sound like an alien pretending to be a human. “It may be that folks with alexinomia have this gut intuition, which is correct, that to use a name is to take a stand, to do something—and maybe something you didn’t intend,” Clayman said. Another person could misinterpret you saying their name as a sign of closeness or hostility. Why not just avoid the issue?

In his case studies and review of internet forums, Ditye noticed that many people mentioned tripping up on the names of those they were most intimate with—like me, with my sister. This might sound counterintuitive, but saying the names of people already close to us can feel “too personal, too emotional, to a degree that it’s unpleasant,” Ditye told me, even more so than saying the name of a stranger. Perhaps the stakes are higher with those we love, or the intimacy is exaggerated. People on the forums agreed that avoiding loved ones’ names was a way to manage closeness, but sometimes in the opposite way. “I think this is pretty common among close couples,” one person wrote. “It’s a good thing.” Using a name with your nearest and dearest can feel impersonal, like you’re a used car salesman trying to close a deal. If I say my boyfriend’s name, it does seem both too formal and too revealing. But if I use his nickname—Squint—I feel less awkward.

[Read: Why we speak more weirdly at home]

Alexinomia is a mostly harmless quirk of the human experience. (It can cause problems in rare cases, Ditye told me, if, say, you can’t call out a loved one’s name when they’re walking into traffic.) Still, if you avoid saying the names of those closest to you, it can skew their perception of how you feel about them. One of Ditye’s study participants shared that her husband was upset by her inability to say his name. It made him feel unloved.

As Dale Carnegie wrote, “a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Pushing through the discomfort and simply saying their name every now and then can remind your loved ones that you care. By saying someone else’s name, even when it’s awkward, you’ll be offering a bit of yourself at the same time.

The new year has begun, bringing with it the socially sanctioned push to make resolutions. Readers, or those who want to devote more time to reading, tend to set some quantifiable intentions for the year to come. A popular one is finishing an arbitrary number of books; another approach is to establish specific parameters—reading only titles by women for a year, meeting a quota for books in translation, or trying one work from every country. Some readers opt for one or two giant books that are notoriously demanding.

There’s nothing wrong with these aspirations, but personally, I’m a bit allergic to this kind of goal setting. I don’t like hemming myself in with strict rules—and I don’t want to let my inner perfectionist force me to continue a challenge long after I’ve stopped enjoying it. More important, strict directives prioritize box-checking over holistic growth. There are many ways to advance your skill and capacity as a reader: Some of us are naturally drawn to detailed nonfiction, and others must learn to love it; some may have a taste for meandering, multigenerational epics, while their friends must train to build up the attention span they need. Depending on your particular strengths and desires for change, a single book may offer a better workout than a dozen others combined. Each of the five books below exercises a different kind of reading muscle, so that you can choose the one that will push you most.

Dawn, by Octavia Butler

Butler’s best-known book is probably 1993’s Parable of the Sower, which takes place in an imagined 2024 uncannily like our own. But in 2025, consider picking up the science-fiction matriarch’s Xenogenesis series instead, starting with Dawn. The novel revolves around Lilith lyapo, a woman still mourning the death of her husband and child in a car accident when the world collapses during a nuclear war. At the book’s start, she wakes up and finds herself alone in a locked cell. Where is she, and who are her captors? The shocking truth: 250 years have passed since the war, which left Earth uninhabitable—and she’s one of the few humans left in the universe. She’s been preserved by the Oankali, an alien species so different from us in their senses, family systems, and even genders that she has a hard time making herself look at them at first. Like Lilith, readers are thrust into a foreign environment in which technology is as alive as fungi. In her uniquely straightforward style, Butler asks you to abandon preconceived ideas of what sentient life looks like and what survival really means. Once that perspective shift occurs, though, Butler’s universe—and the questions she’s raising—free you to imagine whole new ways of being.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa

García Márquez’s 1967 novel is a beautiful, surreal saga following the Buendía family and the town they founded, Macondo, over the course of a century. During those years, Macondo—which begins as a solitary retreat in the middle of nowhere—is invaded more and more by the concerns of the outside world: technology, warfare, colonialism. The novel’s huge cast of characters typically remain in their community, but all have distinct trajectories, many of which lead to their own versions of loneliness, tragic or ecstatic. One Hundred Years of Solitude can be a difficult read: Character names are repeated across generations; magic blurs into reality. Then there is García Márquez’s style, packed with pages-long paragraphs and lengthy sentences whose cadences take you on surprising journeys. Perhaps its most distinguishing quirk is its paucity of dialogue or of scenes as we recognize them; the adage “Show, don’t tell” is upended. Yet the long sections summarizing various events or expounding on capitalism, naive idealism, and violence turn out to be as engaging as any page-turner for the reader with the persistence to soldier on.

[Read: Why some people become lifelong readers]

The Piano Teacher, by Elfriede Jelinek, translated by Joachim Neugroschel

The Austrian Nobel Laureate Jelinek’s 1983 novel, her sixth—yet the first to be translated into English—is a deeply uncomfortable read. Immediately, it confronts readers with a strange style that telescopes chronology and memory, moving among its main character’s thoughts and associations without fanfare. This takes some getting used to, but once you’ve fallen into its rhythm, events move swiftly and even pleasurably (which is not to say pleasantly, given the subject matter). Erika, the titular piano teacher, is an unmarried woman in her late 30s who lives in Vienna with her abusive and overbearing mother; violent altercations between the two aren’t rare. Her outlook is bleak: Erika is in many ways shut down, imprisoned by her mother’s expectations and trapped in a static nation that had yet to face its role in World War II. When one of Erika’s students begins making romantic overtures, she rebuffs him, but he keeps at it. By the time she finally agrees to become involved with him, he is unprepared for the depth and depravity of her desires, honed over years of voyeurism in porn theaters and peep shows. The Piano Teacher asks you (and teaches you) to stick with disturbing moments and unpleasant characters. In return, it offers a journey through oddly beautiful prose and a powerful examination of shame.

Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was the first adult classic I tried to read. At 12, I loved its righteous protagonist, but the context of 19th-century Britain, powered by plunder from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, went over my head. Later, I learned to see the role that empire plays in the narrative: The madwoman haunting Jane and her beloved, Mr. Rochester, his Creole first wife, Bertha Mason, is shut up in the attic and compared to an animal. Cast aside in the original novel, she animates Rhys’s 1966 response: In Wide Sargasso Sea, Bertha is imagined as a girl originally named Antoinette, raised in Jamaica on a fallow sugar plantation after the abolition of British slavery. Rhys was British but born and raised in colonial Dominica, and she used her knowledge of the Caribbean and its dynamics to fill in the details of her main character’s life, defined by tensions between the planter class to which Antoinette belongs and their formerly enslaved neighbors. The prose jumps among narrators and flows dreamily from one moment to another, detailing how Mr. Rochester uses Antoinette’s Creole heritage and her family history of mental illness against her. Rhys’s project deals with Jane Eyre specifically, but her intervention asks us to consider other great literature in its historical and political context as well.

[Read: The adults who treat reading like homework]

The Vegetarian, by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith

On the surface, The Vegetarian is a work of realism with a simple premise. Yet something in the book is profoundly destabilizing, turning it into a wonderfully vertiginous read. When it opens, we meet Mr. Cheong, whose wife, Yeong-hye, has always been absolutely normal—rather quiet, a good cook, competent at her part-time graphic-design job, and deferential enough to her husband. But one night, a dream sparks dramatic change: She stops eating meat and using animal products, refusing to even keep them in the home. This seemingly small, personal decision triggers absolute indignation in her husband, parents, and siblings. There is much pain in The Vegetarian—the weight of guilt, the desire to self-destruct, the longing to change everything about yourself, the presence of despicable characters—and the plot’s unpredictable trajectory can make for a challenging read. That discomfort is precisely what Han is digging into in this marvelous and worthy book. But there is beauty, too, sitting right alongside the ugliness, waiting to reward the reader who can handle its leaps.