EU Watchdog Reveals Kremlin Media’s Attempt to Rewrite German Unification History

On 15 Novem­ber 2024, EUvs­Dis­in­fo report­ed that Russ­ian state media RT Deutsch is attempt­ing to manip­u­late his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tives about Ger­man reuni­fi­ca­tion to serve cur­rent polit­i­cal agen­das. The arti­cle begins:

Infor­ma­tion manip­u­la­tion tends to have spe­cif­ic aims in the here and now: to shift a pol­i­cy, to con­fuse vot­ers, to cre­ate insta­bil­i­ty in a soci­ety seen as hos­tile. But some­times, these aims are best achieved by pro­ject­ing manip­u­la­tion into the past. The sym­bol­ic dates of 3 Octo­ber and 9 Novem­ber are good recent exam­ples. 3 Octo­ber, a pub­lic hol­i­day in Ger­many, marks the day in 1990 when the Fed­er­al Repub­lic of Ger­many and the Ger­man Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic were reunit­ed in a sin­gle state. Ger­man uni­fi­ca­tion had been made pos­si­ble by the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 Novem­ber 1989. But 9 Novem­ber also marks anoth­er occa­sion, as the pro-Krem­lin dis­in­for­ma­tion out­let RT Deutsch glee­ful­ly point­ed out last year – the first large-scale anti-Jew­ish pogrom in Nazi Ger­many in 1938, known as Reich­s­pogrom­nacht or Kristall­nacht (the Night of Bro­ken Glass). Mem­o­ry cul­ture RT claimed that the ‘red-green mem­o­ry of the Fed­er­al Repub­lic’ had pushed aside com­mem­o­ra­tion of the end of World War I or Hitler’s beer­hall putsch in 1923…

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Key Points:

1. RT Deutsch uses manip­u­la­tive lan­guage like ‘annex­a­tion’ instead of ‘reuni­fi­ca­tion’ to draw par­al­lels with Nazi-era ter­ri­to­r­i­al expansions.
2. Russ­ian state media attempts to dis­cred­it Ger­man uni­fi­ca­tion by por­tray­ing it as a tool for main­tain­ing Amer­i­can dominance.
3. RT’s cov­er­age ques­tions Ger­many’s com­mem­o­ra­tive prac­tices and crit­i­cizes cur­rent polit­i­cal lead­ers’ state­ments about uni­ty and diversity.
4. The analy­sis iden­ti­fies a pat­tern of his­tor­i­cal manip­u­la­tion aimed at influ­enc­ing con­tem­po­rary Ger­man polit­i­cal discourse.