More than four years have passed since Angela Merkel said goodbye to politics in December 2021 after 16 years leading Germany. A period in which, as she promised, she has stayed out of politics except for the book tour for her memoirs and a few public appearances. She vanished so completely from the political scene that her presence last February at the federal congress of her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) — the first time she had attended since leaving office — eclipsed the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, with whom she also does not have a good relationship.

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They are teenagers, or young adults barely over the age of 20, but above all, far-right radicals who dream of “Day X,” the day it all begins, the day they will massacre immigrants. Germans who go to school, attend training programs, or work — far removed from the neo-Nazi stereotype of skinheads in bomber jackets — and who then immerse themselves in far-right extremist movements that speak of a “pure people,” downplay the Holocaust, and hate migrants, but now also direct their anger at feminists and the LGBTQ+ community. German investigative journalist Angelique Geray, 33, decided to infiltrate these groups between 2024 and 2025 to understand how they become radicalized. “I wanted to find out why right-wing extremism is once again presenting itself as a kind of cult or youth trend,” she explained earlier this month in a cafe in southern Berlin after publishing her experience in a book titled Undercover unter Nazis (Undercover Among Nazis).

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