Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s I used to travel to Germany pretty frequently, struggling with concepts such as tea served in glasses, not being able to buy things on Saturday afternoons and unexpected ideas about the use of toilets. This coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall, a process in which my role is confined to the archives for another seventy years.

My assumption was that a reunified German working class would radically transform European politics. The citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) would free themselves from the shackles of Stalinism while retaining a spirit of collectivism revitalised by a chance to develop a new form of socialist democracy. This, combined with the much higher standard of living in West Germany, would create an entirely new situation in Europe. Stalinism would die unmourned and capitalism would have a major new challenge.

It wasn’t just me who thought so. Ernest Mandel argued that we were seeing a “combination of May ’68 in France and the Prague Spring, multiplied by two…It’s the beginning of a genuine revolution, a struggle to build a democratic, popular alternative to both communist oppression and free-market despotism.” A German friend thought both Ernest and I were utterly wrong.

Back then German neo-fascism was a very marginal thing in the west and was utterly suppressed in the east. Today almost 21%, more than ten million Germans, mostly in the former GDR, are voting for the neo-fascist AfD. While Die Linke have the support of 25% of younger voters the AfD isn’t too far behind on 21%. A generation ago that would have been inconceivable, as is the fact that it’s getting 38% of less well paid working class voters.

It is a commonplace that, as with Reform, the key to the AfD’s success is pinning the blame for everything connected to poverty, insecurity and underinvestment on migrants. What is less remarked on is just how massively unsuccessful the GDR’s surveillance, censorship, brainwashing and lying was in leaving a lasting socialist legacy.

From Putin’s Russia to the rise of the AfD, all the evidence is that Stalinism’s enduring legacy is racist, anti-democratic and reactionary. By suffocating the working class with repression and bureaucracy it opened the door to profound reaction. Still, if you can’t be optimistic when you’re young, when can you be?