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\u2019ve always mastered that art \u2013 when it comes to H\u00f6cke, 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u2013 that would be bourgeois \u2013 but out of calculation. They want to appear \u201ccapable of governing,\u201d 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 Schr\u00f6der collection? A phone call from Viktor Orb\u00e1n, who prefers to make \u201cremigration\u201d a matter for top-level leadership again? Or was it ChatGPT in an especially polite mood? Maybe somewhere, a marketing genius whispered: \u201cCall it a homecoming bonus trip \u2013 sounds like Payback.\u201d But the real kicker came on the back page of the paper: there it was again. Just not as loud. \u201cHomecoming projects,\u201d \u201crepatriation offensives,\u201d \u201cdeparture incentives.\u201d The garlands of words in a v\u00f6lkisch whisper. What was deleted lives on \u2013 like mold in the political framework. Just with better perfume.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t \u201cdeleted, but transformed,\u201d they said when asked. That sounds like Orwell, but smells more like Febreze for racism. Because of course, \u201cremigration\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019t change the content \u2013 just the packaging. Instead of steel helmets, it\u2019s blazers now. Instead of deportation, it\u2019s repatriation partnerships. Instead of neo-Nazis, it\u2019s \u201cconcerned demographers.\u201d And so they stand there now, the party of the remigration-forgetters, with empty paper and full mouths. They delete the word \u2013 but not the ideology. And when asked, they say: \u201cWhat? We didn\u2019t say anything.\u201d And somewhere in Saxony, someone whispers: \u201cBut that\u2019s what they meant.\u201d<\/p>\n
Es war ein historischer Moment der deutschen Sprachgeschichte. In einem unscheinbaren Tagungshotel bei Berlin, zwischen schlecht entkoffeiniertem Kaffee und dem Geruch von Mettbr\u00f6tchen, vollzog sich ein kleines Wunder: Die AfD entdeckte das Vergessen. Nicht etwa das politische. Das hat sie stets virtuos beherrscht \u2013 etwa beim Thema H\u00f6cke, beim Reichstag oder bei der eigenen Russlandn\u00e4he. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7986,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"iawp_total_views":1,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[33,5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-afd-no-thanks","category-news","category-topstory"],"yoast_head":"\n