The Nazi Meme Going Viral in Germany — and What It Really Means

The pop song “L'amour toujours” has been repurposed as a call for ethnic cleansing. What explains its popularity?

A neo-Nazi meme using the Eurodance hit L’amour toujours has spread rapidly across Germany in recent weeks, appearing at parties, festivals and on social media. What looks at first like ironic provocation is, in fact, part of a broader far-right online culture — one that normalises extremist language by wrapping it in humour and nostalgia.

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Sylt. Photo by Michael Kleinjohann on Unsplash

Wherever you look in Germany these days, fashionable young people are calling for ethnic cleansing.

On social media, the catchy hook of a dance song has been repurposed as a demand for a racially pure Germany.

For months now, Italian DJ Gigi D'Agostino’s song “L'amour toujours” has been trending on social media. When the hook arrives, those in the know chant: “Germany for the Germans, foreigners out.”

Occasionally, video popped up of drunk youths in rural Saxony chanting the words in the early hours in a beer tent. Largely though, this was happening at a level that was imperceptible to anyone over the age of 30.

Then, something happened that made it clear that this meme was way more popular than anyone realised. 

On the luxury island of Sylt on the Whitsum holiday weekend, a smartly-dressed young woman shot a video of her and her friends bellowing out the lyrics in the middle of a packed beer garden.

This was as far from a poor east German village as you could get. 

The bar charges a €150 entrance fee. The crème de la crème of German society were swaying away to a neo-Nazi slogan and no one around them seemed to care. At the end of the video, a man with a polo short draped over his shoulders even gave a Hitler salute.

The backlash was vicious. The tabloid press named and shamed the ‘Sylt snobs’, who were soon fired by their employers.

Asked for his reaction, Olaf Scholz described the chants as “disgusting and unacceptable” and said: “we need to focus on ensuring that this behaviour doesn’t spread.”

But spread it has.

Since the Sylt video went viral, the racist version of “L'amour toujours” has bubbled up all over the place.

One of the country’s most expensive private schools is investigating reports that pupils sang it at a school party. It has been heard at beer festivals and nightclubs; most recently it was sung by security guards at a refugee centre.

While this call for ethnic cleansing is spreading across the country’s dance floors, a very different atmosphere surrounds another call for mass deportations.

Why Germany’s youth are drawn to radical answers