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Published on: 04/24/2026 - 11:02

In the 1990s, when the Wall had just fallen, the former GDR experienced an explosion of racist and political violence without equivalent since the end of the Second World War. These are the “baseball bat years.” Behind this name, a dark period from which the country is still struggling to get rid of.

In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the former GDR of the 1990s, skinheads in bombers and combat boots reign supreme in the streets. The East German police have lost their legitimacy, the institutions of reunified Germany are not yet able to take over.

Part of the youth, radicalized to the far right, attacks migrants, homosexuals, left-wing activists... Accommodation centers for asylum seekers burn and dozens of people are murdered.

Thirty years have passed and yet the specter of these “baseball bat years” has not disappeared. Recently, racist attacks have started to rise again and the courts are judging a new generation from the neo-Nazi movement.

We went to Magdeburg, capital of Saxony-Anhalt, in the heart of the former GDR. In the 1990s, this ordinary town became the scene of violence that reunified Germany believed to be impossible.

Today, a few months before the parliamentary elections in September, the rise of the far-right AfD party is reviving the memory of these dark years.

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