German Court Urges Constitutional Review of Far-Right AfD Party
How the Seven-Member Panel Came Together Remains Shrouded in Mystery
At best, the minimal introduction of the lay judges at Friday's opening session offered only vague hints that the production team had cast them as supposed representatives of a cross-section of society.
On Sunday, a spokesperson for the jury finally revealed that five of its members had, on balance, voted in favor of having Germany's Constitutional Court examine a potential ban on the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). However, they also called for the party's state funding to be immediately cut off.
The event was never without controversy. A number of witnesses had withdrawn after the production team invited an unusually high number of far-right figures to take the stage at Hamburg's Thalia Theater—far more than the trial format would have required.
Criticism of the Spectacle
It remains utterly baffling why Frauke Petry, the former leader of a fringe right-wing party, was allowed to appear as a kind of intermission clown on Sunday—after the evidence had been presented but before the verdict was delivered. While she may spout nonsense, she is neither amusing nor interesting, let alone darkly fascinating.
Without outright rejecting the performance, historian Volker Weiß made his skepticism clear. On Saturday, he took the stand to outline the AfD's approach to historical policy. But first, he questioned his own role: "We're all amateur actors in a dubious spectacle."
His criticism is understandable. Documentary theater is, of course, an established medium for bringing current, socially relevant events to life in an accessible way. Yet unlike The Trial Against Germany—a production that preempts a ban procedure that will likely never materialize—this performance focused more on past events.
Emerging during the French Revolution—when theater was the only mass medium accessible to the public—documentary theater experienced its first golden age in Germany during the Weimar Republic, a time when democracy was still finding its footing. Director Erwin Piscator initially staged reenactments of key Reichstag sessions and party conference debates in working-class pubs.
The Trial Against Germany was a risky endeavor: it had to avoid downplaying the threat posed by a broad far-right movement while also steering clear of being dismissed as a show trial.
After World War II, documentary theater played a crucial role in helping society grapple with the crimes of the Nazi era—and in conveying the importance of their legal reckoning. In The Investigation, Peter Weiss transformed the transcript of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials into an oratorio, premiering it in the final year of the proceedings.
In doing so, he made the landmark legal battle—fought for by prosecutor Fritz Bauer against fierce resistance—accessible to the public. He also exposed the evasive rhetoric used by concentration camp personnel during the trial, such as: "If I had a stick, I didn't need to use my hand."
A Strange Inquisitorial Tone
It is notable, then, that in Hamburg's Trial Against Germany, Liane Bednarz, acting as the AfD's defense, emphatically pointed out that Identitarian Movement leader Martin Sellner's references to ghetto laws in his book were actually about Denmark. This distinction clearly mattered to her.
Conversely, things took on an oddly inquisitorial tone when prosecutor Andreas Speit—a long-time contributor to our website—questioned conservative historian Andreas Rödder, introduced as a CDU intellectual, about his assessment of far-right ideologues Benedikt Kaiser and Götz Kubitschek.
Rödder had previously described them as "explicit theorists of the New Right"—a term that should be clear enough. According to Germany's Federal Agency for Civic Education, the "New Right" refers to an "intellectual current" aimed at "renewing far-right extremism." Yet Speit seemed to find Rödder's wording too lenient.
Stumbles and Missed Opportunities
A Misstep—Unfortunately
In doing so, he goes down the wrong path. After all, Rödder had previously stated that a ban on the AfD would be inevitable if it could be proven that the party actively opposes the constitution. "Then it must be banned," the professor declared. Unlike the Communist Party ban of the past, however, Rödder warned that such a move today would risk civil war-like conditions: "It would lead to unrest—I'm certain of that." Pursuing this line of inquiry further could have been highly revealing.
Yet these stumbles and missed opportunities are politically telling, marking moments of tension. The artificial setting of witness examinations allows for a more direct, blunt—though often more productive—form of communication. That is the strength of such a project. Unfortunately, poor staging on both the opening night and Saturday afternoon repeatedly pushed it to the brink of failure.
On Friday, the newly invented quasi-legal trial format, garnished with empty rhetoric from left and right, dominated the proceedings, smothering everything in stifling boredom.
Pseudo-Knowledge and Ignorance
On Saturday, the discussion turned to a proposed age restriction—banning social media for users under 16. In itself, this would have been a compelling topic for debate. But in the context of an AfD ban, it was utterly off-track.
No real expertise was brought to bear. The situation even reached the point where dramaturg Robert Misik—also a columnist for our website—took the stand, charmingly spreading his mix of half-baked opinions and outright ignorance on the subject. Apparently, he's even written a book about it. One can safely skip that.
"I think we learned relatively little about social media this afternoon," Herta Däubler-Gmelin, the composed presiding judge, summed up after two and a half hours of proceedings that evening.
The Real Threat Posed by the AfD Laid Bare
"Even if what we're doing here is theater," lawyer Gabriele Heinecke, representing the prosecution, told the jury in her closing argument, "this is not about art." The real issue, she said, was "the danger posed by a broad, far-right movement."
The Trial Against Germany was a gamble because it could neither downplay this threat nor risk being dismissed as a show trial. Over the three days, it exposed the very real dangers the AfD poses—to human dignity, to democracy, and to the lives of many. At the same time, the witness testimonies crystallized the hopes, fears, and very real anxieties that a potential ban would unleash.
In that sense, this theatrical simulation remains a model—flawed, perhaps, but not without value, precisely because the verdict, for all its formal language, preserves the complexity of the question.
Transparency note: In the subtitle, we incorrectly stated that the jury had voted to ban the AfD. The correct version, as stated in the text, is that the jury calls for an AfD ban "to be examined by the Constitutional Court."**
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