Unfortunately yes. It used to be known as Karl Marx City in the DDR (which is why Karl is the mascot of their team) and they’ve still got this balling statue of him as well, but after the wall fell, reactionaries that had been suppressed for decades started crawling out of the woodwork as everywhere in eastern Europe. And the west German government that had just annexed the DDR didn’t give the tiniest fuck about stopping them, or the western nazis deliberately moving to the east to agitate and organize, or to do anything about the campaign of violence that soon followed. Racism against “contract workers” (migrants from socialist countries in the global south like Vietnam or Angola) was already a bit of a problem in the DDR - many rural areas in the east have been very reactionary since the days of the Prussian kingdom with its lust for militarism and discipline and these places had a strong nazi presence before WW2. When you look at voting results from the last 100 years you can actually see that the AfD is strong everywhere where the NSDAP was most successful as well (in the west, similar things apply to Hessen and Bavaria, but the nazis are a bit more mask-on there). This shit just gets passed down over the years, lots of today’s nazis come from families that have been fascist for four generations now, and they’re raising their kids the same way. Even the DDR couldn’t root that out, it could only suppress it and without the communists holding them back, this just escalated completely. When we’re talking about the DDR, we need to keep in mind that they didn’t start a revolution to become socialist, socialism had to be brought by Stalin.

I’m not saying this to bash east Germany. Western libs love to do that, view them as an uneducated “basket of deplorables” that lacks “democratic values”. They’re not (the education system in the east actually benefits from the DDR until this day, i know a maths teacher who still lifts stuff from DDR textbooks because they were just that good didactically). I’ve met tons of amazing people who grew up in the DDR, they’ve still got more socialists than the west as well, and when you talk to people who grew up there or in other post-socialist countries, you can still notice a legacy of materialism and of being less affected by the false and performative mindset fostered by capitalism. But there’s a sizeable minority (about 20% or so) of downright reactionary dynasties that was very deliberately organized into the backbone of German neofascism after the fall of the DDR, and they’re out in the streets terrorizing people.