Between Alarmism and Denial: A Personal Retrospective on Robert Hepp, the New Right, and Political Drift
Robert Hepp, a German sociologist who gained public visibility in the late 1980s and 1990s through television appearances and political debate, was known for provocative theses on migration, national identity, and historical continuity. Long before the rise of today’s right-wing protest parties, he positioned himself as a radical critic of postwar German consensus culture. I first encountered him in the 1990s through the talk show Talk im Turm, where his arguments struck me as unsettling, excessive, and deliberately transgressive. Looking back, I still regard him as a right-wing extremist and a historical revisionist. That assessment has not changed. What has changed is my ability to separate ideological intent from empirical observation. One of Hepp’s most prominent claims was that Germany would face a form of “Balkanization” through migration. Even then, the term was clearly chosen to provoke fear and suggest an inevitable descent into ethnic conflict. In retrospect, that prediction ...