"Who remembers all the German victims?": competitive victimhood identities and Jewish exclusion in the AfD’s Facebook community

This paper sheds light on the community of Facebook users who interact with posts by the populist far right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and how they respond to the AfD’s contradictory narratives regarding Jews and antisemitism. The AfD uses its online space to construct an everyday reality of victimhood for its political community, which conditionally includes Jews. Jewish victimhood and inclusion is emphasised by the AfD when it fits their political aims, such as focusing on Muslim-Arab antisemitism to underline an anti-immigration stance, but these are minimised when Jewish victimhood is perceived to threaten non-Jewish German victimhood, as it is seen to do in the context of the Second World War and the Holocaust. This paper compares comments threads from these two thematic streams and finds that, regardless of the difference in victimhood framing by the AfD, users in both streams reacted with similar narratives of defensive, competitive victimhood and a reluctance to include Jews in their ingroup of victims, even when the AfD overtly included them. This was for two main reasons: 1) users perceived Jewish victimhood as drawing attention away from their own, allegedly overlooked claims; and 2) users felt that, in a mutually exclusive division of roles, Jewish victimhood consistently and unfairly forced them into the category of perpetrator. This paper demonstrates that, with the stigmatisation of overt antisemitism, exclusion can be expressed in terms of whose victimhood is considered legitimate and worthy of recognition.