The Alternative for Germany, the far-right party that won a recent election in a small eastern state, plans a cultural overhaul that has drawn explicit comparisons to actions taken during the country’s Nazi past.

The arts community in the state, Saxony-Anhalt, is preparing to fight for its survival if the party, known as the AfD, is able to form a coalition government with rivals and take power. Artistic directors in institutions across the state, many of which depend on government funding, are mobilizing to defy the AfD’s plans for more “patriotic” arts programming.

Both sides agree the stakes transcend the local stage. The AfD has put the cultural overhaul at the center of its plans to transform Saxony-Anhalt and the rest of the country. The party’s election platform pledged to push artistic institutions to celebrate prewar German history, break from the influences of multiculturalism and end Germany’s “guilt complex” about the country’s Nazi past.

The AfD has also scorned the storied Bauhaus, a hugely influential design school in the state that was once shuttered by the Nazis, who saw the institution’s avant-garde style and international outlook as a threat to traditional German identity. The Nazis used the movement as a shorthand for foreign, Jewish and communist influence.

Barbara Steiner, director of the Bauhaus Foundation, which is based on the site of the shuttered school and preserves its legacy, said, “The AfD understands that through culture, they can get into people’s heads, into their mind-sets.”

AfD leaders say as much. “An AfD state government will trigger an overall cultural renewal,” Mr. Tillschneider said in an interview this spring. The party did not respond to a request for a further interview for this article or to questions about its cultural platform.

The Saxony-Anhalt chapter of the AfD has been classified as right-wing extremist by German federal intelligence, and the party’s lead candidate in the state has said he cannot “presume to judge” if the Holocaust was humanity’s worst crime. The AfD won 44 percent of this month’s statewide vote, riding a voter backlash against economic stagnation and a decade of high immigration.

The party’s attacks on the Bauhaus use “the same language that the National Socialists used in 1933,” said Elizabeth Otto, an art historian at the University at Buffalo. Throughout that year, the Nazis took aim at culture they considered “un-German,” burning thousands of books that offended their concept of German identity.

Wolfram Weimer, the national culture minister and a close ally of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, told a German newspaper this summer that “the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt is a direct continuation of the Nazis when it comes to the Bauhaus.” His ministry has since launched a petition of support for the school, with nearly 4,000 signatories.

AfD leaders reject comparisons with the Nazis, though they allude to them in the cultural section of the governing platform they published in the spring.

The AfD’s platform calls the party’s cultural plans a necessary corrective to a German culture that has been weakened by a “rainbow ideology” and a “masochism” of fixation on the country’s past atrocities.

The party’s cultural changes in Saxony-Anhalt should ultimately “heal” the nation’s identity crisis “through a new, patriotic cultural policy that restores German self-confidence,” the party’s platform states.

Leaders of artistic institutions say they fear the moves would stifle free expression.

Concern is especially acute at the Bauhaus, which derives half of its funding from the state and is perhaps the region’s most internationally prominent cultural institution.

Bauhaus teachers and students became some of the most important architects, designers and artists of the 20th century, and their innovations shaped architecture worldwide. When the Nazi party closed the school in 1932, many prominent architects and artists emigrated to the United States.

The concrete-steel-and-glass building where Mr. Gropius once taught in eastern Germany now serves as a state-owned museum.

The AfD has been attacking that site since 2024, when state officials decided to change the Saxony-Anhalt state motto to “Think Modern,” a reference to the school.

Mr. Tillschneider responded by denouncing the school’s legacy in a speech, citing the school’s “forced elimination of tradition” in architecture.

The AfD’s platform would change the state motto to “Think German.” The document suggests other changes that would threaten the Bauhaus, supporters say, including requirements that public buildings “adopt recognized traditional architecture.”

Ms. Steiner added that she anticipates the AfD might try to replace her with a more sympathetic director.

“I’m not going to give in,” she said. “As long as I can, I will stay.”

Other institutions express concern that an AfD government would use budgetary leverage to force them to shut down performances or exhibits that party officials don’t like.

In Germany, arts institutions enjoy public funding levels that dwarf many other wealthy countries. Many small cities and towns have municipal theaters funded by both the city and the state, as well as smaller arts organizations that rely on public grants. Saxony-Anhalt, which has about 2.1 million residents, has an annual culture budget of about $220 million — more than four times the budget for culture of New Mexico, which has roughly the same population.

The AfD has previously taken aim at the Magdeburg Puppet Theater, in the capital of Saxony-Anhalt, which receives nearly a quarter of its funding from the state. The party has accused the theater of overstepping the boundaries of “political neutrality,” including after it unfurled an anti-discrimination banner in 2024.

On a sold-out evening in July, the puppet theater staged the kind of production that has antagonized the AfD. The show was a rendition of a 1928 classic, “The Threepenny Opera,” by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, but with a modern twist: None of the characters were presented in traditional gender roles.

In response to the AfD’s cultural platform, a group of 27 cultural institutions released a statement entitled “Cultural institutions warn against nationalist-oriented cultural politics in Saxony-Anhalt.”

About 150 institutions have since joined a new network that provides access to confidential resources on how to deal with political attacks from the right, including legal tools. Members of the network say they are anxiously watching the AfD’s efforts to build a coalition in Saxony-Anhalt.

“We need to wait and see,” said Annegret Laabs, director of the Kunstmuseum Magdeburg, a contemporary art museum, “how and whether a government will form.”