Alternative für Deutschland’s success tells the tale of Germany’s forgotten East

Back in the early 1990s, a few years after the Berlin Wall came down, I went back to the house in Dresden where my father was born. The house was on the outskirts so my father and grandmother survived the bombing – they got the last train out of Dresden before the Red Army arrived. The family I found there had been there since 1945. They’d been expelled from Silesia when Stalin handed the region over to Poland, and had ended up in Dresden along with so many other displaced Germans. They’d been living there for half a century, three generations under the same roof. They didn’t own this house – like almost everything in East Germany, it had been owned by ‘the people’ (i.e. the government). They were excited by their new future in a reunited Germany, the ‘blooming landscapes’ Helmut Kohl had promised them. I wondered what would become of them.