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Since the beginning of 2018, non-sexist language has been one of the main controversies in the German public opinion. In addition to linguistic arguments, this controversy involves frequent allusions to anti-feminist and "anti-gender" discourses. It thus appears that the debates on non-sexist language are much more closely related than it seems to current debates on gender equality policies. Our analysis of a selection of the main arguments against non-sexist language, published mainly in the liberal and conservative press, highlights the need to further explore the links between these discourses and contemporary antifeminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of Pegida and success of the Alternative for Germany has raised the question of how Germany should respond to the New Right. This article argues that reading in archives has emerged as a sociopolitical act of resistance against far-right movements, and that archival reading across time, borders, and media has turned into a strategy to defend democratic ideals. As the New Right's rise also originates in an archival investment to control public opinion and policy, the practice of archivally reading today's far right shows that contemporary Germany is in the midst of renegotiating its cultural archive, memory, and democratic principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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One of the main goals of contemporary media, along with the experts and professionals, who speak in them, has been to explain complex issues and provide the audience with clear descriptions of social reality. This is mostly achieved by the production of ideologically useful interpretative schemes that facilitate understanding of the issues present on the media agenda. An important strategy of shaping the public opinion in the way in which public affairs and the activity of social life participants is framed. Analyses of such practices have been conducted for over thirty years within various research approaches collectively referred to as framing analysis. This research provides several arguments helping one to develop a more critical perspective on the representations of social phenomena dominant in the media and discourses of symbolic elites (e.g. opinion writers, academics, experts, journalists, politicians), along with the analyses of the origin of such phenomena, moral judgements and preferred "corrective policies". One of the phenomena defined by the media in Europe as the most important one for the past several years, is the so-called "New Right". The aim of the paper is to analyse the interpretative schemes used by the journalists of four Polish opinion-forming weeklies and to describe the activity of its German manifestation – the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident (Pegida) social movement and the Alternative for Germany party (AfD). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Germany, like in other European countries, one can observe the recent rise of right wing movements, referred to by some authors as the New Right (Bruns, Glösel and Strobel 2016). During the last years those tendencies were able to create and establish closed pictures of national identities, and promote these quite successfully through populist discourses (Speit 2016, 314). Since the so called 'Refugee-crisis,' they gained even more approval throughout German society and established the 'Muslim' as contrary to German habitus. On the contrary there are also civic movements that show explicit solidarity with refugees and offer their help to the newcomers, which was labelled as 'welcome-culture.' Since this polarisation of attitudes towards refugees is so obvious, the question that is addressed in this article concerns the motives and structural circumstances of this division of orientations throughout German society, and hints at questions of identity and habitus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains the failure of Pegida Austria as a social movement organization by testing three prominent theories of social movement theory: political opportunity structures, ideology, and resource mobilization. The failure of Pegida to play a role in Austrian politics is ascribed to the dominant role the Freedom Party (FPÖ) already plays in the Austrian parliament, the FPÖ's issue dominance on anti-immigration and Islamophobia in public discourse, and the relative scarcity of individuals capable of mass mobilization outside the spectrum of political parties. The analysis is based on a crucial-case study that does a comparative content analysis of the FPÖ and Pegida platforms to assess the ideology argument. The political opportunity and human resource arguments are analyzed with process tracing. The findings reveal that all three theories jointly help to explain the failure of Pegida Austria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Right-wing extremism in Germany has recently undergone considerable changes with a new right-wing party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) successfully entering several local state parliaments as well as the European Parliament, "Pegida" demonstrations representing a new type of public action in terms of social movements, and the emergence of institutions like the Library of Conservatism and magazine projects like Sezession. This article considers whether such developments could be seen as a renaissance of the "New Right", representing a long-term success in its strategies. Since the 1970s, the strategy of the New Right has been based on promoting a culturally conservative metapolitics in the pursuit of "cultural hegemony", meaning to influence public opinion in the Federal Republic of Germany and shift it to the right-- which at first glance might seem to have succeeded in light of recent events. The developments seen in German far-right extremism, however, have been neither monocausal nor monolithic. Therefore, this article will take a closer look at various aspects of the idea that recent changes in Germany's rightwing extremism might represent a successful implementation of this New Right strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The starting point of this article is the concept of political extremism characterized by the rejection of fundamental values of the democratic constitutional state. Following a definition of the structural traits of right-wing extremism, the author sharply distinguishes it from the related concept of right-wing radicalism. Furthermore, the concept of so-called New Right is analyzed, as well as the presence thereof in France, Italy, Great Britain and Germany. This is a fitting concept for description of intellectual currents striving towards an ideological-strategic renewal of right-wing extremism. Namely, an application of extremist traits to the activities of the New Right, and, in particular, an analysis of ethnopluralism as its essential line of thought, leads to the conclusion that it stretches into the sphere of right-wing extremism. At the same time, emphasis is laid on its function as ideological basis and means of connection with the social environment which, precisely due to its "political mimicry" tactics, represents a danger to democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walter Benjamin's reception of Ernst Jünger and the new nationalists grouped around him during the years of the Weimar Republic is notable for establishing a link between their aestheticization of the war experience and Germany's military defeat. Benjamin's interpretation can also be extended to the new nationalist politics in the 1920s: the failed attempt to work out a programme which would reconcile the forces of nationalism and socialism gives way to a view of politics as style, hierarchy, and leadership. A parallel process is at work in Germany today among intellectuals of the New Right: through its project of intellectualization, the New Right seeks to distance itself from National Socialism and present itself as heir to the supposedly alternative tradition of the Conservative Revolution. The project fails, and the New Right moves towards the aestheticization of politics mapped out by the new nationalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of 2018, non-sexist language has been one of the main controversies in the German public opinion. In addition to linguistic arguments, this controversy involves frequent allusions to anti-feminist and "anti-gender" discourses. It thus appears that the debates on non-sexist language are much more closely related than it seems to current debates on gender equality policies. Our analysis of a selection of the main arguments against non-sexist language, published mainly in the liberal and conservative press, highlights the need to further explore the links between these discourses and contemporary antifeminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]