As members of Europa-Universität Flensburg, we publicly declare our solidarity with those affected by right-wing violence and with those who stand up against it. We endorse the following commitment to an antifascist Europa-Universität Flensburg.
Background
Over the Easter weekend (5–7 April 2026), the offices of the CDU, SPD, The Left Party, the Greens, and the SSW in Flensburg were attacked with incendiary devices. In addition to traces of arson, German flags had been spray-painted on the buildings and far-right stickers were found at the scenes. Other institutions in Flensburg, such as the community center Infoladen Subtilus and the queer center FLENSBUNT, are also regularly targeted by far-right attacks.
According to independent monitoring conducted by Zebra e.V., Schleswig-Holstein recorded an average of three right-wing, racist, and antisemitic attacks per week in 2025. At the beginning of this year, a large swastika was scratched into the frozen lake between the Audimax and the library on the Flensburg campus itself, while far-right stickers and graffiti have increasingly appeared in the surrounding area.
Researchers, too, are increasingly becoming targets—for example through parliamentary inquiries calling on universities to identify by name scholars working in fields such as gender studies, migration studies, sustainability research, or postcolonial studies.
Commitment to Antifascism
We, the members of Europa-Universität Flensburg, affirm our commitment to antifascism.
At a time when academic freedom is under attack around the world—and when, in countries such as the United States, these attacks are accompanied by attempts to criminalize resistance to them as terrorism—universities must not hide behind a misplaced or superficial notion of political neutrality.
We must call things by their proper name: the far-right ideology of racial war and the alleged threat of the “death of the nation” (Volkstod), which it claims can only be prevented through racist, anti-feminist, and anti-queer attacks on human rights, fundamentally challenges our peaceful coexistence in freedom and dignity. We are all under attack long before science itself becomes a direct target, and we must respond accordingly. Whether the victims are unhoused people, persons with disabilities, refugees, the unemployed, or religious minorities, the enemies of our freedom constantly seek and find scapegoats whom they claim are poisoning the blood of their “people.”
At this point, we commemorate Ingo Finnern, an unhoused Sinto man who was murdered by a far-right extremist in Flensburg Harbor on 19 March 1992 after opposing the perpetrator’s racist agitation, as well as the tens of thousands of people who lose their lives each year to the illusion of an “ethnically” homogeneous Europe.
We affirm our commitment to antifascism also in light of the historical legacy of Nazi terror in Germany. The final government of the Nazi regime was arrested in Mürwik in May 1945. Only one year later, the Flensburg College of Education—the institution that would become today’s Europa-Universität Flensburg—began operating at the same location. This circumstance alone spares us the shame of having to look back on denunciations of “non-Aryan” or politically undesirable fellow students and colleagues at our own university. As Schleswig-Holstein’s first democratically founded institution of higher education after the end of the Nazi dictatorship, we carry an explicit mandate to educate for responsible action within a free and democratic constitutional state. Antifascism is therefore not external to our university; it is embedded in its founding mission. We remain committed to that mission.
In the face of the global resurgence of anti-human politics and far-right hate crimes, including on our own campus, we will oppose these attacks. We stand in protection of those members of our university who are particularly targeted by this hatred. And to all those around the world who courageously confront it, we say:
You are not alone.
We are all antifascists.