Eine Krise regionaler Identität und ihr Gebrauchswert für rechtsgerichtete politische Gruppen – ein Beispiel aus Vorpommern

Abstract

For the first time since the reunification of Germany, right-wing activists and politicians have attempted to take over a university city, i.e. a place where the highly educated, creative, cosmopolitan, innovation-oriented groups should be more likely to question irrational populism than elsewhere. An internal organizational problem – in this case: the renaming of the University of Greifswald – which normally should be solved with on-board resources, was shifted to a regional political level as a dispute over Ernst Moritz Arndt. Arndt was one of the most aggressive nationalists in German history, whose name was given to the university under fascist rule in 1933. The dispute was emotionalized by demonstrations and letters to the editor of the regional newspaper, taken up by groups and parties predominantly from the right-wing spectrum. It was brought into a populist form, and pushed with high journalistic effort into the regional public sphere as a Pomeranian identity crisis. In spite of the enormous pressure from outside and the numerous attempts at intimidation, it is admirable that the University Senate members decided to discard the name of Arndt – 63 years after the end of World War II. Although the result of the renaming was noted nationwide, its dramatic circumstances and background were not presented. However, this would have been necessary in order to show how strong right-wing radicalism already is in some regions, by which coalitions it is further enhanced, how strongly it is favoured by the spatial over-centralisation of state institutions, and what a university has to afford in order to assert itself successfully in such an environment.