BORNHAGEN, Germany — No one in the village saw it coming, least of all Björn Höcke, a quiet and well-liked local father of four who also happens to be Germany’s most notorious far-right politician.
Last January, at a rally in Dresden, Mr. Höcke questioned the guiding precept of modern Germany — the country’s culpability in World War II and the Holocaust — calling on Germans to make a “180 degree” turn in the way they viewed their history.
Germans were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” he said, referring to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin.
And then, one recent Wednesday morning, Mr. Höcke woke up in his rural home to find the Holocaust memorial outside his bedroom window: 24 rectangular concrete slabs, one section of the original monument, rebuilt to scale on the property immediately neighboring his.
The only difference: The slabs had been rotated 180 degrees.
“We wanted to remind Mr. Höcke that he can turn German history however much he likes, it doesn’t change,” said Philipp Ruch, co-founder of a Berlin-based artist collective known as the Center for Political Beauty and, at least on paper, Mr. Höcke’s new neighbor.
The memorial has put an uncomfortable national spotlight on Bornhagen, a village of 309 inhabitants on the former border of East and West Germany in the fabled rolling hills of Thuringia, where the Brothers Grimm long ago collected fairy tales.
Mr. Höcke, a history teacher turned local chief of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has called the village his “refuge” and “locus of inspiration.” But behind its idyllic facade, Bornhagen reflects the new, confusing reality of a Germany where polite political consensus and demographic homogeneity are breaking down, and where the intimate and ideological live side by side.
