The announcement has caused a stir in Germany and abroad. The logo of Poggenburg’s new party, Aufbruch der Deutschen Patrioten (Awakening of German Patriots), will feature a blue cornflower, which Austrian Nazis used as a secret symbol to recognize each other when their party was banned in the country in 1933. As historian Bernhard Weidinger told the BBC, “the cornflower is a complicated symbol” in more ways than one. It is also known as “the kaiser’s flower” because it was once a favorite of German Kaiser Wilhelm I, the first German emperor. CNN notes that the cornflower has continued to be associated with nationalism and the far-right in recent history; Austria’s far-right Freedom Party adopted it as a symbol, eventually ditching it in 2017. [...]
But Poggenburg is far from an aberration within a German far-right that often flirts with Nazi symbolism or language. In 2016 Frauke Petry, the former chair of AfD, gave an interview in which she argued in favor of de-stigmatizing völkisch, a word used by German Nazis to allude to a person’s race. And in January 2017 Björn Höcke, an AfD politician, “attacked Germany’s national Holocaust memorial and the country’s devotion to teaching its citizens about Nazi genocide,” according to German broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW).
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