Today the periode is called "Basballschlägerjahre". The early 1990s in Eastern Germany were marked by right-wing extremist violence. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, leading neo-Nazis from West Germany met with great interest with their ideas for a brown revolution in Eastern Germany. The reasons for this lay in the concealment of a neo-Nazi scene that had already grown stronger in the 1980s and was officially not allowed to exist in the anti-fascist GDR. The failure to deal with the National Socialist past and the Holocaust in schools and in society over the past 40 years were further reasons. There was hardly any understanding of democracy. The effects: nowhere else in Germany have right-wing extremist parties like the NPD and AfD achieved such great success in the new millennium. The documentary tries to show connections between the GDR past, reunification and the current situation in Eastern Germany.

Rechts und Radikal - Warum gerade im Osten?

Ingo Zamperoni has been known as one of the anchormen of the popular German late-night news journal Tagesthemen since 2016. The German-Italian knows the USA like only a few people because he studied there and later he reported from there as an US correspondent. He is also married to an American. That is why he has many relatives in the United States. But the rift that runs through American society also runs right through his in-laws living there. While father-in-law Paul is a supporter of the Republicans under Donald Trump, his wife Jiff and mother-in-law Lynn are supporters of the Democrats and concerned for their country. As an African American, the second husband of his mother-in-law brings his own insights into the increased racism in the country. Zamperoni embarks on a family-political search for the causes in order to understand why the whole country and its family are so torn.