ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sociol.
Sec. Race and Ethnicity
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1680879
'Us' and 'others': collective identity-building of far-right movements in Chemnitz and 'Querdenken'
Provisionally accepted
- Philipps-Universitat Marburg, Marburg, Germany
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Far-right actors successfully mobilized supporters for protests in the city of Chemnitz, Germany, in the summer of 2018, triggered by the fatal stabbing of a German national and the subsequent arrest of two asylum seekers. At first glance, they applied familiar enemy constructions in their online communication on the event. However, a more detailed analysis showed that these ‘enemies’ were not targeted randomly. In this paper, I address the question of how the collective far-right actors in two German case studies – Chemnitz and ‘Querdenken’ – framed their online communication on Facebook to foster the process of the respective social movement’s collective identity-building. In particular, I focus on the role that the construction of out-groups, or ‘enemies’ plays for their collective identity-construction. I apply frame analysis (Benford and Snow 2000). The findings show that diagnostic master frames of ‘enemy’ outgroups and ‘crisis’ prove essential components; besides, diagnostic frames are more or less the only frame dimension identified. As master frames they hint to a collectively shared knowledge across the two discursive events.
Keywords: frame analysis1, online communication2, social movement3, antisemitism4, Germany5
Received: 06 Aug 2025; Accepted: 15 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Schmidt-Kleinert. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Anja Schmidt-Kleinert, anja.schmidt-kleinert@uni-marburg.de
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