Gaining Sympathy and Shifting to the Right: The Literary Politics of the German-Speaking New Right

ABSTRACT No other political movement in Germany has engaged with literature as intensively in the twenty-first century as the New Right. Its protagonists publish and review fiction texts in various publishing houses, magazines, and blogs; devote supplements, podcasts, and videos to literature; and organize their own literature fairs and present themselves as a whole as a “reading movement.” The article presents the literary politics of the German New Right in four steps: It first (1) focuses on the concept of metapolitics, then (2) analyzes the most important literary political strategies—with (3) a closer look at the New Right’s reception of Ernst von Salomon’s novel Der Fragebogen (The Questionnaire, 1951)—and finally (4) demonstrates how literary and party politics are increasingly merging between the New Right and the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which was founded in 2013.