Remi-what? – The AfD Reinvents Forgetting

It was a historic moment in the history of the German language. In a nondescript conference hotel near Berlin, somewhere between poorly decaffeinated coffee and the smell of minced meat rolls, a small miracle occurred: the AfD discovered forgetting. Not political forgetting, of course. They’ve always mastered that art – when it comes to Höcke, the Reichstag, or their own closeness to Russia. No, this time it was about a word. A single, cold, hard word: remigration. It was deleted. Not from the party's DNA, mind you, but from a parliamentary group paper. Just like that. Snap. As if it had never existed. Gone. Simply erased. Like a typo in history. And yet, they had worn it so proudly – the R-word, like a black-and-blue badge of the unyielding. They had chanted it, nurtured it, plastered it on campaign posters like others do with demands for freedom or beer price brakes. And now? Now they said: better not. Too harsh. Too loud. Too many associations with bus routes to Syria.

It was like a dialectical car crash. The party that usually fights every kind of language policing as if it were a wind turbine blade in Brandenburg suddenly played censor itself. Not out of insight – that would be bourgeois – but out of calculation. They want to appear “capable of governing,” they say. As if words were not about meaning, but camouflage. One had to ask: who told them to do this? A strategist in a tie borrowed from the Gerhard Schröder collection? A phone call from Viktor Orbán, who prefers to make “remigration” a matter for top-level leadership again? Or was it ChatGPT in an especially polite mood? Maybe somewhere, a marketing genius whispered: “Call it a homecoming bonus trip – sounds like Payback.” But the real kicker came on the back page of the paper: there it was again. Just not as loud. “Homecoming projects,” “repatriation offensives,” “departure incentives.” The garlands of words in a völkisch whisper. What was deleted lives on – like mold in the political framework. Just with better perfume.

And while Bernd Baumann publicly reaffirmed that they were of course sticking to the term, somewhere a party convention teleprompter scrolled through the old version. The text wasn’t “deleted, but transformed,” they said when asked. That sounds like Orwell, but smells more like Febreze for racism. Because of course, “remigration” remains what it always was: not a linguistic accident, but a strategy. The fantasy of purity condensed into a single word. The idea that they don’t just want to get rid of people, but also their history, their language, their very existence. Only now they call it something else. The AfD has perfected the principle of the modern far right: don’t change the content – just the packaging. Instead of steel helmets, it’s blazers now. Instead of deportation, it’s repatriation partnerships. Instead of neo-Nazis, it’s “concerned demographers.” And so they stand there now, the party of the remigration-forgetters, with empty paper and full mouths. They delete the word – but not the ideology. And when asked, they say: “What? We didn’t say anything.” And somewhere in Saxony, someone whispers: “But that’s what they meant.”