What were the Antideutsch?
Jan Kalk, Jan Sander, Justus Wertmüller, and Detlef zum Winkel
Platypus Review 175 | April 2025
On August 2, 2024, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion on the question “What were the Antideutsch?” at Humboldt University in Berlin. The speakers were Jan Kalk (Gesellschaft für kritische Bildung), Jan Sander (Platypus), Justus Wertmüller (editor of Bahamas[1]), and Detlef zum Winkel (author). The panel was moderated by Platypus member Marius. An edited transcript follows, which was translated by Platypus members Salim Askar, Tobias Rochlitz, Johannes Schön, Jack Verschoyle, Tamas Vilaghy, and Therri Wünsch.[2]
Introduction
After the so-called K-Groups[3] disintegrated in the 1980s and the Greens established themselves as a parliamentary party, the German Left — both in West and East Germany — was caught off guard by German reunification. This is the backdrop against which the collapse of the USSR and “really existing socialism” appeared in a particular light. The German Left focused on the potential danger of a “Fourth Reich” as a central theme and questioned how the meanings of concepts originating from the Old and New Left had shifted in the changed context: communism, capitalism, anti-fascism, and anti-imperialism. In retrospect, it seems that “solidarity with Israel” was the only unifying characteristic of the movement, which was largely confined to Germany and Austria. When the Platypus Affiliated Society published Joachim Bruhn’s “Communism and Israel,”[4] non-German readers asked, “What does this have to do with the Left?”
How did the Antideutsch relate to the rest of the Left? What were the important political turning points over the last 20 years that shaped and changed the concept of “Antideutsch”? What was the political situation in Germany and the rest of the world, as the Antideutsch understood it? What is the political legacy of the Antideutsch movement in the 2020s, both in Germany and internationally?
Opening remarks
Detlef zum Winkel: The Antideutsch were the only ones that openly opposed German reunification in 1989–90. Their opposition was not rooted in frustration over capitalism absorbing another more or less socialist country. Rather, it stemmed from the nationalist excesses that followed the reunification process, which intensified week by week as no one took action against them. Neither the government, the parliament, the president, the judiciary, nor the media did anything to stop it.
A concrete example of the events that opened our eyes can be found in the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig. In the beginning, they were manifestations of democracy. They advocated for freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, protection of privacy, and opposition to state despotism. This was not only welcome but long overdue for the GDR.[5] Something new and promising — a significant step forward. Disillusionment followed promptly, almost overnight. From one Monday to the next, the message of the demonstrations changed: “We are the people” became “We are one people.” This was accompanied by a sea of black-red-gold flags, which had been absent in the weeks prior. Such a surprising turn is not an entirely unique phenomenon in the world. In Kyiv, on the Maidan, the Right sector took control suddenly. In Cairo, during the Arab Spring, the Muslim Brotherhood seized the occupied Tahrir Square. Always without prior warning, always in the form of a sudden coup.
In Leipzig — and this shows its particularity — the coup wasn’t discussed, nor was it recognized as such. Nobody asked, “who were they? Where did all those flags come from? Have we been infiltrated?” The organizers and activists in Leipzig didn’t let such questions be raised. That’s the problem. “We are one people [Volk]” seemed like the logical continuation of what had come before, as if that’s what everyone had meant from the beginning: the people. One people. The main thing is people. Who’s going to split hairs about that?
But for us, it was an ethno-nationalist [völkisch] turn which unleashed a dynamic that continues to this day. When one offers a national solution to all the problems which were so oppressive in the GDR (and which also existed in the Federal Republic), one quickly realizes that they cannot be overcome in this way. The nationalist recognizes this as well, but he cannot admit his error. Quite the contrary: a guilty party must be found; an enemy is needed. And they find this enemy among those who do not belong to the Volk: migrants, multiculturalism, and ominous string-pullers from Wall Street who are organizing an Umvolkung.[6] This can be confirmed today in Björn Höcke,[7] Götz Kubitschek,[8] Jürgen Elsässer,[9] Martin Sellner,[10] or directly in Adolf Hitler.
Once again, the concept of the Volk revealed its susceptibility to Right-wing thought and unfortunately revealed the susceptibility of the Volk itself. At this point, the paths of the Left diverged. One part tried to ride the wave of peaceful revolution even though it had changed direction. The radical Left, on the other hand, rejected the euphoria around unity. They warned of a Fourth Reich. “The failure of socialism and the collapse of the Soviet Union fostered an imperialist megalomania,” as stated in a resolution adopted at the first congress of the radical Left. Those in power in Bonn would already act like the leaders of tomorrow. In retrospect, I find this to be accurate.
For the Right in East and West Germany, opponents of reunification could only be seen as opponents, and thus they were branded as “Antideutsch.” From the Right, mind you. I don’t know who first introduced this term, but it wasn’t us. Nevertheless, we accepted the label: fine, then we are Antideutsch. Everyone will understand what that means. Later, there were some attempts to give the term a more theoretical framework. Given its genesis, such efforts can only lead to misunderstanding.
The next influential milestone that would shape the Antideutsch was the Gulf War of 1990–91. Iraq invaded and occupied the small but wealthy neighboring country Kuwait. In response, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia initiated a Western military coalition. The then-president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, in classic antisemitic fashion, planned to punish Israel if Iraq were attacked. Some Palestinian organizations expressed their satisfaction with this, and aligned themselves with Iran in the meantime. Of course, Israel was not involved in the conflict at all. Konkret editor Hermann Gremliza commented, “In this case, the wrongdoer — the U.S. — did the right thing with dishonest intentions.” Other Leftists strongly disagreed and interpreted the war through anti-imperialist frameworks, arguing that it was primarily about global control of the oil trade.
This controversy caused the radical Left to fall apart before it had even found itself. However, the remaining Antideutsch learned to treat the state of Israel differently from how it had been done before, and to actively advocate for its right to exist rather than limiting themselves to occasional lip service. We have maintained this position to this day, and it has become even more important in a time when antisemitic sentiments are growing stronger within both the national and international Left. Since the Antideutsch hold a unique stance on the Left with their Israel-friendly attitude — others call it pro-Zionist — it may seem as if all that remains of their original approach is solidarity with Israel.
To evaluate this thesis, I want to refer to a remarkable article that was published in the New York Times in November 1992[11] and in German in Konkret in January 1993.[12] This should also answer the question of the Antideutsch’s legacy. In the face of racist rallies and acts of violence, the author Abraham Rosenthal observed a “rise of Nazism in Germany,” at the same time urging people to finally stop using terms like neo-nazis or Right-wing radicals: “They and we know exactly who they are. And the Germans applauding them know it as well. The attacks on foreigners, especially those with dark skin, are not sudden outbursts of violence. Just like the first attacks on Jews back then, they are part of the Nazis’ strategy.” Furthermore, Rosenthal wrote that this leads to similarly narcissistic movements in Central and Eastern Europe: “That is what it was like in the 30s and 40s, and it can also be seen today in Hungary, Romania, Russia, and the Balkan states.”[13]
Since 2022, Russia has clearly been at the top of this list, and an alarming number of other countries would have to be added: Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and France. When it comes to Ukraine, however, I am hesitant — this is more out of consideration than conviction.
Scathingly, Rosenthal stated: “Germany’s crisis is our crisis as well. That’s what we’ve learned from Hitler. But the West remains passive. The initiative is left entirely to the German government, and it has completely failed in defending against the danger.”[14] Let me repeat: it has completely failed! Perceptive observers were able to see this more than 30 years ago. Today, we are dealing with the consequences. Now, to the punchline of this text from today’s perspective: the description of social phenomena that Rosenthal so lucidly applied to Germany also applies to his own country[15] in the third decade of this century. He couldn’t have imagined it; none of us could have imagined it 30 years ago. On November 5, an election of historic significance will take place in the U.S. The result will either pour an enormous amount of fuel onto the nationalist fires burning across the world or perhaps grant us a moment to breathe. I am terrified of people who want to learn from the NSDAP[16] how to make America great again. The crisis of the U.S. is our crisis as well. Do I need to say more about the legacy or the relevance of the Antideutsch today? To me, being Antideutsch means consistent antifascism — one that does not yield to appeals to national unity or the nation itself. The same is true the other way around: as every antifascist initiative experiences as soon as it discovers a sore point within their own community — boom, suddenly they’re Antideutsch.
Jan Kalk: The question “What were the Antideutsch?,” which could perhaps more aptly be formulated as “Who were the Antideutsch?” (since they were never more than a “jumble of individuals,” to use Manfred Dahlmann’s phrase) repeats once again the premise of the death of the movement.[17] Jan-Georg Gerber suggested in his obituary “Die Antideutschen,” in the most recent issue of Bahamas,that this time might be the last time: “[it] became clear after the October 7, 2023 Palestinian terror attack against Israel: the movement that never wanted to be a movement no longer existed.”[18] Yet already in 2010, just before I became active in the scene at all, Lars Quadfasel presented an “Epitaph for the Antideutsch Movement”[19] at a “Conference on the State of Critique,” which was named “On a Scale of One to Ten, How Shitty is Germany?”[20] The announcement to the conference stated, 20 years after the Wall had fallen, that “Antideutsch” had become chic (for example, through Egotronic[21]), and that since buttons with the Israeli flag on them now defined the autonomous scene instead of Palestinian scarves, the “communist critique of Germany,” and with it, the question of “What is German” had receded into the background. Even if nothing could have been more desirable for Antideutsch critique, itself the continuation of critical theory, than its becoming superfluous, people were still concerned that the critique had lost its object.
Theses about “German national[ist] frenzy,” or fear about the rise of a “new German imperialist colossus”[22] as expressed by the radical Left in 1990 had turned out not to be true — this despite the fact that Max Czollek now promotes the “Demo-Memo” with the well-known slogan, “Germany — Never Again!” to make it clear that reunification made the AfD “possible once again.”[23] The question of Germany’s Sonderweg[24] reappeared in the debates with the anti-nationalist Left, and the question accordingly came up: are we dealing with aspects of continuity with national socialism in post-Nazism, or with the general logic of the State, the Nation, and Capital, without any “German peculiarity”?
Sonja Witte, Clemens Nachtmann, and Joachim Bruhn fundamentally opposed this notion of a special path, which made it possible for them to distinguish between the “general insights of the critique of political economy,” which one could learn from a Das Kapital reading group, and the German essentials over and above these. The essential concept of post-Nazism, coined by Clemens Nachtmann, was intended to force West German society “to confront its barbaric business foundations” without ignoring its engineered transformation from Nazi Germany into the Federal Republic, and thereby making sure not to get involved in sectarianism or the normalization discussions which followed the debates around fascization [Faschisierung].[25]
The innovation of Antideutsch materialism, as formulated primarily by Joachim Bruhn, Clemens Nachtmann, and Uli Krug, lay precisely in its sharpening of, and almost orthodox relation to, Marxist critique and the critical theory which followed from it. In this way, it took seriously the question of “how a Marxist critique, carried out in the hope of a real possibility for emancipatory historical development, could even be possible in light of the turn to barbarism of the 20th century.”[26]
In the knowledge that “one doesn’t have a choice between operating in the philosophy of history or not, but only between a bad or a reflective variant of the same,” the Marxist concepts (the theory of history and of revolution) were confronted by the present with its post-Nazism conditions, and by the history which flowed from it.[27] In addition to the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer, we can thus refer to the writings of Wolfgang Pohrt, to whom this materialism owes everything. Pohrt was the one who recalled the Marxist formulation that the key to the anatomy of the ape was the anatomy of man, and consequently that “the origin and the course of history are always mediated by its results in the present.”[28]
While Marx could therefore still formulate his critique of political economy as the unity of social critique and revolutionary theory on the assumption of a proletariat he had synthesized, this critique has now disintegrated. It is retrospectively clear that the “abolition of the capitalist means of production within the capitalist means of production,”[29] which Marx hinted at, led to capital stock and trusts, and not as the harbinger of freedom but as a national socialist solution to the crisis for which Marx couldn’t have had a concept. National socialism, which promised a solution to a crisis without touching the foundations of society, established the national community as — how Marcuse put it in his text on liberalism — “classless society on the basis and within the bounds of existing class society.”[30]Or, as Bruhn formulated it, the mass annihilation of European Jews was “the collective and cross-class historical crime which definitively transformed the basic contradiction between capital and labor into the system-immanent motor of accumulation.”[31] Sealing off the revolutionary abolition of capital through a regressive crisis resolution that culminated in antisemitic murder also meant the passing of reason from history. Even if Antideutsch materialism was once brandished in the hope of liberation, it must be admitted that nothing in the circumstances has allowed for this. The cover of the Initiative Sozialistisches Forum’s The Concept of Materialism (2009), a red flag leaning in a corner, expresses just this.[32] Correspondingly, it is often coincidences which make radical critique possible in spite of hardened circumstances. Nachtmann formulated it thus: “[It is] he who is all too attached to the deceptive world of beautiful appearances who, insofar as he immerses himself yet in the immediate, inevitably encounters the wrong society, and finds himself tasked by an idiosyncratic injury, by an unjustifiable decision to take on society.”[33]
Critique thus becomes a defensive battle, an entryway into the precarious forms of bourgeois mediation being attacked by the ongoing anti-bourgeois struggle against liberalism, and advocacy for Israel. It thus aims essentially against the present forms of “subjective de-subjectification”[34] and the “self-destructive tendencies of post-bourgeois society,” which the concept of post-Nazism encompasses. The latter has nevertheless become universalized, as Nachtmann pointed out. The present post-Heideggerianism of the postmoderns, “the post-colonial counterrevolution against Israel,” and the self-sacrifice of the West make clear that the object of critique has become all but total.[35]
Justus Wertmüller: About 8,000 people attended a rally in Berlin on Saturday, July 27, 2024, initially in Neukölln, later in Kreuzberg, which — at least for Germany — was something new. Taking place after the alternative Christopher Street Day protests on the same day, this endeavor called itself the start of Internationalist Queer Pride Berlin and, under the banner of the watermelon, proclaimed the “anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist struggle for freedom” and reiterated, “No one is free until we are all free.”[36] In order for everyone to understand what this was about, their invitation poster presented, below watermelon seeds drawn in black — no, they were drawn in brown — a green watermelon seed in the shape of Israel.[37] This constitutes a criminal offense. The Palestinian keffiyeh was ubiquitous among the attendees; at least one out of four carried one; the rest stuck to the watermelon imagery.
Early that same evening, July 27, as these people in Kreuzberg and Neukölln were “chilling,” Hezbollah rockets hit a soccer field in Majdal Shams, an Israeli town inhabited by the Druze in the Golan Heights; 12 children and teenagers died. In summary, July 27, 2024 did not only witness the biggest openly antisemitic rally in Germany since 1945, but also, on that day the whole German Left — not only in Neukölln and Kreuzberg, but in toto — declared its solidarity with Hezbollah, and welcomed the Holocaust intended against Israeli citizens, partly with approval, partly with satisfaction. Palestinian supporters [Jubelpalästinser[38]] of Arabic or Turkish descent were not present at the rally, mind you. (It was gay and lesbian after all, wasn’t it?) Leftists from Western countries — over 8,000 of them — were all by themselves in Berlin.
The Californian campus has long been responsible for the contents and slogans of such parades. It’s anti-imperialist at its core and thus, if for no other reasons, necessarily inspired by antisemitism. Even if the numerous expats possibly constituted the majority of protestors last Saturday (there were a lot of English speakers), everyone, especially those who consider themselves on the Left, should have denounced as loudly as possible the eliminationist antisemitism that was exhibited there. But this and a lot of small incidents of the past 10 months are hushed up or — in the name of the main evil called “racism,” which supposedly needs to be combatted — belittled. Those affiliated with the queer scene have appropriated the bloodlust of the perpetrators of October 7, 2023 in all its prurience from the very beginning, turning mass murder into a sports event with paragliding and motocross. Above all, they just melt at the sight of the rapturous glow in the eyes of the mostly young perpetrators there and, vicariously, here, in the appropriate neighborhoods of those brothers gravely affected by racism — eroticism and mass murder. Queer pride is the coherent expression of what the Left has degenerated into: it wants the second Holocaust and sympathizes with October 7, even sensuously so. Look at them.
Wherever Left politics was practically implemented, killing fields emerged: in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cambodia, in North Korea. And wherever the people had supposedly liberated itself in the anti-colonial struggle, slaughters of liberation were on the agenda: in Algeria, Pakistan, Nigeria, Congo, Vietnam, etc. Anti-colonialism taught the Left to think in terms of race instead of class from this point onwards, as exemplified in Sartre’s bloodthirsty preface to Frantz Fanon’s bloodthirsty book The Wretched of the Earth (1961). People still read this stuff affirmatively today, and not as they would read Mein Kampf (1925). The excessive aspiration to represent the World Spirit and thus to be destined to execute the purpose of history never departed the radical revolutionary Left.
The trail of blood began with the denial that Lenin and his followers were, if for no other reason, a gang of criminals from the very beginning, from 1917 on, because they counted on the civil war to unleash the mortal hatred of a thousand years of servitude and eventually leave behind the most disciplined and most unscrupulous troops as victors in a devastated country. Since Red October, it was all about the seizure of power in the state, the centralization of power after victory, and the establishment of an educational dictatorship that wouldn’t allow any escape for its subordinates. A critique of the state, a warning that the state of capital could be the final nail in the coffin of capitalist socialization, doesn’t inspire radical Leftists, and never did. It has always been bare, primitive hostility towards the state, which, after the hope for a supposedly proletarian putsch was definitively shattered, resorted to playing with fire and keeping ideological guard to make sure no one steps out of line. The dirty work is done by the scumbags, for example in the French banlieues [suburbs]. The mostly college-educated Left ensures them a calm ideological hinterland and even calls them — these antisemitic murderers — victims in the end.
Except for the post-colonial figures, which queer pride represents, there is no Left anymore. The radical Left of earlier times is in power — a few twists in their biography were carried out easily — and actually not only in the current German government, but in all areas where it’s vital to downplay, to appease, and to frighten. They want to cover up their failure to establish an at least Keynesian world with embarrassing educational doctrines coupled with fear-mongering about climate change, the threat from the Right, and a racist consensus that must be combatted, whose existence is asserted for so long that some people eventually realize that it perhaps doesn’t exist.
The reeducation camp, as applied in communist state praxis, never completely faded from memory. The difference today is that it’s not the supporters of the defeated regimes they want to go after, but consistently those parts of the population that try to get by, outside of the public sector, and that refuse to join in wholeheartedly. These people, who tend to support the AfD and Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht[39] in significant numbers, are under general suspicion. They, who often vulgarly oppose the paternalism that is especially directed against them, experience crisis differently than the Leftist state bureaucrats — all Leftists are on the drip of the state, not only in the parliaments and in the Greens — who despise them so vigorously. While some (the Left), sensing that the meager payments they still reap with their coaching projects to strengthen democracy might soon be canceled, campaign for the unabated, debt-financed expansion of their employer (the state), others imagine themselves as radical opponents of the system. The allegedly Right-wing pseudo-rebels are correct in feeling themselves drawn into a vortex of doom, but they’re wrong when they pretend to long for a different state. In contrast to their enemies on the Left, they style themselves as friends of doom when they demand the state to sacrifice Ukraine to Russia. But quite like their enemies, and in spite of their partly existing sympathy with Israel — which exists among some of them, but for sure not among Leftists — they hand the Jewish state over to its hangmen when they insist — and they all do — that Germany shouldn’t allow itself to be dragged into the most recent conflict in the Middle East. But those agitated people are the only ones who, based on their own experience, address what is otherwise tabooed: society has already capitulated, at least partially, to the gang war for honor and spoils among the — needless to say — victims of racism.
The two hostile parts of this society don’t share anything in common with the concept of a self-conscious nation. The two largest European nations face economic and social collapse. JD Vance, the Germans’ favorite enemy since he was appointed as Trump’s running mate, recently said, “I was talking about what is the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon, and we were like, maybe it’s Iran, maybe Pakistan already kind of counts, and then we sort of finally decided maybe it’s actually the UK, since Labour just took over.”[40]
And he is right, with the exception that it would be disingenuous to blame the unrestrained Islamization of Great Britain on Labour only — they are all to blame for it.
On a practical level the focus should be on the nation, namely the concept of the nation that was once associated with Great Britain and France, and which today, however bizarrely, only remains in the U.S. What should be demanded is a society that tries self-consciously to master its destiny within clearly defined borders — borders! It should grant itself the framework of a state to protect itself and ensure outward security through the military and — and! — maintain a border regime in order to determine for itself who can enter and who can’t. This certainly includes, where necessary, a politics of punitive tariffs against the occupiers of the world market.
In view of the crisis, the nation has become as questionable as customs barriers, but it might prevent the worst during the threat of hostile take-over by Islamic minorities or subjugation to the dictates of totalitarian powers like Russia and China. This points to the counter-nation Israel which represents a constitutive people [Staatsvolk] that can’t be defined according to ethnic [völkisch] and religious criteria, but which is nonetheless Jewish; which had to emerge from the catastrophe of the revolutionary phase after 1917, if one was to survive as a Jew; a nation, lastly, which is an answer to the failure of the revolution as well as to the failure of the nation-state in its crisis. The nation of Israel is therefore a beacon for something that might once take hold elsewhere: a liberated nation.
Regarding the main question, the others will determine what is Antideutsch. As far as Bahamas is concerned, it should be noted that this magazine is perceived as an endeavor that doesn’t level nuanced criticism against “all forms of antisemitism and similar forms of group-focused enmity,” but which calls for unconditional solidarity — yes, unconditional solidarity — with Israel in a coercive tone. Bahamas is perceived as not recognizing a right to “Israel criticism,” founded not on a German, European, nor on a post-colonial basis. This is accurate. I have always been Antideutsch in that sense. I would like to take part in a struggle for Israel with as many other people as possible, instead of solely as a magazine. But only under the condition that the fellow travelers of the queer death squads who write, “against all forms of antisemitism and racism!” on their flyers stay out.
Jan Sander: A point of departure for the Antideutsch critique — similar to the founding of the Platypus Affiliated Society in 2006 — was the confrontation with the concept of imperialism. While the Left-wing opposition to U.S. imperialism in the 1960s and 70s could at least still have been meant as partisanship for supposedly progressive revolutionary forces in the Third World, or maybe even was, the Left later, from the 90s onwards, combined its criticism with more or less undisguised support for reactionary forces.
What continued to connect the Antideutsch with the Left was not the generally known — and now repeated — positive programmatic demands of that current (i.e., support for Israel, the fight against antisemitism, against Islamism, you name it) but the negative: the critique of this Left.
Through criticism, the Antideutsch indeed took up the essential, often forgotten characteristic of Marxism: Karl Marx’s dictum of the “ruthless critique of all that exists” did not apply, contrary to current interpretations, to any external object, nor to a subjectless systemic capitalism, but significantly to the Left and the workers’ movement as the subject and object of the social process.
The Antideutsch were among the few participants in the “post-political” Left of the 80s and 90s, as were the Millennial Left, who were at least partially aware of the regression of the Left. For this reason, the average Platypus member was probably more interested in them than, say, the Interventionistische Linke.
In the current issue of Bahamas, Jan-Georg Gerber recalls that the original aim of the Antideutsch was to come to terms with the mistakes and errors of the Left. The aim was the refoundation of a “non-reformist, radical, anti-capitalist, communist Left.” Even if we in Platypus would express ourselves differently for reasons that would take us off track here, the similarities between the Antideutsch and Platypus are unmistakable. So what makes us different?
In Gerber’s text, he characterizes the Antideutsch movement as a modernization movement against its will.[41] But the same could be said — viewed from the standpoint of the present — about the entire Left in history. Capitalism reproduces itself ideologically through dissatisfaction with and protest against it. Even the slogans of the New Left of the 1960s later became neoliberal ideology. Before that, the old Left of the 1920s and 30s, through its political failure and its ideological pandering to the labor ethos and national ethos, led to the German Labor Front and the Holocaust. The concrete form of this history may be specifically German in this case, but the underlying problem of repetition is specifically modern.
In his essay “A Short History of Nonbeing,” the American Hegelian Robert Pippin deals with this strange phenomenon.[42] Even though the text deals with philosophy and art, it can help to shed light on the impasse of the present as well as the topic of the Antideutsch. It is also much more succinct than Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966), on which it is essentially based.
From Pippin’s point of view, philosophy and art are at an impasse: phenomena such as the recurring diagnosis of the death of art, novels about bourgeois self-hatred, as already exemplified in the French novellas of the 19th century, and postmodernism in philosophy, which celebrates itself as a great rupture, yet halfway unconsciously repeats the crisis of philosophy at the time of the break-up of the Hegelians in the 1840s in a distorted and bombastic way — these all point to a certain pathology of the present. The questions and problems of the last 150 years remain essentially the same, while our ability to answer or even adequately recognize them is deteriorating. The new intellectual products do not offer a way out of the old calamities, but instead they continue to obscure access to the awareness of the core problem. Pippin writes about this: “Regardless of how all that might be worked out, there is also a historical cost for the neglect or underattention or lack of resolution of this core critical problem: repetition. Essentially, the cost is the rather mysterious repetition — now over several generations — of a number of the original moments of recoil, revulsion, and alienation among the founding formulations in modernism.”[43] According to Pippin, contemporary critical theory, which in name is the heir to the Frankfurt School, fails to recognize how far the historical conflicts that were first noticed in the 1840s reach into the present. Critical theory today is therefore “insufficiently critical.”
Although Pippin does not seem to be fully aware of this, it is precisely this problem that is the subject of what Theodor W. Adorno calls regression, at the center of which, for Adorno, is the Left. According to Adorno, the exhaustion and subliminal despair of today’s “Left” can be traced back to the fact that it has lost itself in a tangle of seemingly unsolvable problems that have accumulated since the time of Marx. None of the problems that have piled up in the history of previous generations of the Left since the First and Second Internationals have been successfully overcome. All of them continue to burden us.
Dismissing this history as “outdated” would mean that the problems would later return in an intensified form — on the so-called Left as well as in society as a whole. The regressive repetition of the death of the Left is not confined to the last 30 years. Neither the kids nor the Left were alright before the existence of the Antideutsch, the 90s, or the decades before that.
In the so-called “kitchen conversations,” Max Horkheimer formulated the following thoughts to Adorno: “I believe that Europe and America are probably the best civilizations that history has produced up to now as far as prosperity and justice are concerned. The key point now is to ensure the preservation of these gains. That can be achieved only if we remain ruthlessly critical of this civilization,” to which Adorno replies in agreement, “We cannot call for the defence of the Western world.” Horkheimer adds, “We cannot do so because that would destroy it.”[44]
Although Horkheimer and Adorno recognized the need to call for a new “socialist party” and to reformulate the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) “strictly on a Leninist basis,”[45] they also recognized that the necessary preconditions for such a practice had not been met. Even in their time, there was no Left capable of understanding the call. Any attempt to ignore this antinomy of the political after the failure of the Left would encourage a further regressive repetition. Adorno and Horkheimer therefore saw it as their task to maintain the critical tension. Their position should not be misunderstood as relativism.
Platypus attempts to take up this critical reflection — with a necessarily antinomic result: on the one hand, we find that the Left today has neither the “right nor the duty” to position itself in international or even national conflicts. A real Left that could assert its own demands through responsible action is lacking worldwide. On the other hand, non-political reflection is not possible either. In other words, the questions “What would a real Left have to do?,” “How would the Left have to change in order to change the world?,” “What should happen that would not happen anyway without a Left?,” and “What would have to be done to get closer to the goal of liberation?” — these questions must continue to be asked if the goal, originally also shared by the Antideutsch, of the refoundation of a Marxist Left is to succeed.
Every act of terrorism or war continues to be misused as an opportunity to defame the more hated Right and to promote one’s own pseudo-political position. But even criticism of antisemites, however accurate it may be, does not transcend moral judgment. It is essential, however, to adhere to Hegel’s insight that the moral standpoint does not reach the course of the world and must necessarily benefit foreign ends that operate at the level of politics — because the Left does not. By slipping into moralizing and tendentially Manichean thinking, the Antideutsch, perhaps intentionally, avoided from the start the risk of politics as the art of the possible. In doing so, however — if they have any effect at all — they provide backing for what would happen even without them and without a Left: regressive repetition.
Responses
DzW: It’s not easy for me to find an appropriate response to Justus’s tour de force. At times, it seemed somewhat incoherent to me. A debate about a relatively small, minority faction within the Left immediately turned into a discussion about the Left, socialism, and communism as a whole. It was about the emergence and development of socialist regimes in China, Cambodia, Russia, Vietnam, Mozambique, Angola, and so on. I’m sorry, but I wasn’t part of those governments and can’t analyze them in such a short amount of time. Nor am I willing to simply sign on to this sweeping funeral dirge. The problem with this approach is that in a discussion meant to focus on Germany, we lose sight of specifically German issues.
[The panel is interrupted for several minutes as a pro-Palestinian rally passes by.]If we shift the discussion — intended to focus on the conditions in Germany, how they have developed in recent years, and the tendencies they reveal — to talk about China, Cambodia, Russia, Vietnam, etc., we are making the classic mistake of projection. And that is exactly what I don’t want to take part in. Justus, I appreciate that you are thinking about what a state should look like, how one might still extract something positive from the concept of “the nation,” and how borders should be properly controlled. But — I’m sorry — that’s exactly what I read every day in Franfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Der Spiegel, Frankfurter Rundschau, and elsewhere. I don’t see what is particularly new about your supposedly wise proposals.
I want to stay on the topic of Germany and pick up on a few key points raised by my fellow panelists, particularly the issue of imperialism. Within the Antideutsch Left, we have thought about this in more or less classical categories: a German Sonderweg threatens to lead to a Fourth Reich, as a unified Germany would gain power and establish special networks in Eastern, Central, and Southeastern Europe. However, the Kohl government put a stop to this in the 1990s by pursuing European integration, particularly through a common currency. The prevailing opinion at the time was that a German Sonderweg was no longer a threat and that the danger of Germany becoming an imperialist colossus had been averted. That was a mistake, because the opposite is true: it was precisely through this step that Germany succeeded in taking command of Europe. In the early 1990s, this would not have been possible, because back then, unlike today, Germany was still balanced by the influence of both Britain and France in shaping the EU’s direction. In this sense, the thesis of a Fourth Reich and German imperialism remains relevant.
However, it makes no sense to cling to old templates in our discussions. We must, of course, acknowledge that Russia, China, and to some extent Iran are pursuing imperialist policies that shape global events more strongly than the imperialist ambitions of France or Britain. The reasons for this, however, do not lie in the capitalist development described by Marx and others, but rather in the loss of influence and significance of these societies — except for China — and the resulting social problems, which they are aggressively resisting. This, in turn, is a parallel to German Nazism, but I don’t want to go further into that.
So let’s stay on the topic of Germany. A reckoning with the Left? Fine, that’s a discussion worth having — but not here and now.
JK: We can stay on the topic of Germany. We have to make these detours, since the radical Left wanted to deal with global imperialism before it dealt with German imperialism. The Communist League of West Germany[46] actually visited Cambodia, which ended fatally. They saw the promise of a cure for many problems there. The fundamental problem seemed to be that the Left has a universal, revolutionary demand. You can do politics of reform, but you won’t grasp the various individual problems because they’re related to the big picture, which is either imperialism or the Israeli state, usually both.
At some point the Antideutsch’s initial hostility to imperialism provoked a crisis. You said that we have these completely Right-wing movements now, but these would have to be looked at individually. They’re a consequence of German imperialism, and the discussion around normalization or fascism, which I tried to trace in my remarks, speaks volumes: reunification, which appeared the way you described it, is not synonymous with a Fourth Reich, and we can’t draw a connection to the International or to Russia, the way you just did.
We should instead be talking about a critique of the Left and the question of why the Left had to preoccupy itself with these countries and with Mao the whole time, when it was all the way over in West Germany? It’s not that there are accumulated problems, but rather that we can’t endure the negativity we find ourselves in; it’s that the Marxist critique of political economy promises a solution to the problem that is receding into the distance, but for which, at the same time, we can’t be satisfied with reformism. That’s where all the projections come from that get expressed in a delusional way in post-colonial theory today.
But demanding protective tariffs from the nation-state is a phenomenon of crisis that needs to be analyzed, and points to the problem of a lack of liberalism. If there are no more liberal parties in France, and Jews are forced to leave the country because of this, you have to ask yourself where the liberal forces are. The liberal nation-state is totally absent today, and maybe it’s the task of the present Left to defend liberalism.
JW: Detlef, the objective of this event is to say something about the Antideutsch, indeed asking the question of what this means for the Left. This is what I did, I talked about a streak of blood that stretches from Lenin to here.
The Russian Civil War is a crime committed by the Bolsheviks; they unleashed it. Lenin justified it shortly before in the “June Theses.” It’s a tremendous crime to count on a civil war among a people that is rotting in enslavement and seething with hatred, instead of creating something beyond Czarism together with the Mensheviks, which would have been possible: that’s a gigantic crime which cost more than 3 million peoples’ lives long before Stalinism. Anyone who utters Lenin’s name — such bastards should reflect on that sort of adventurism. I don’t want to play the anti-communist, I promise! But I expect that this wooden, dusty, dogmatic stuff is for once truly appreciated — read it, it’s unbearable: violence lurks behind it.
Concerning the Antideutsch, apparently, no one on this panel cares about the eliminationist antisemitism that just passed by down here — what was that great music all about? There they are, the Holocaust-friends, the watermelons, the Palestinian flag. Years ago, I wrote an article titled “It’s Israel that matters,” in Bahamas[47] — I don’t publish anywhere else anymore for good reasons. I had hoped that the speakers on this panel might see things similarly after October 7 — but no one here gives a fuck, not at all. What the hell are you all talking about?
And then I’m told that I’m doing bad politics here. I’m told that all of this can be read in Spiegel and wherever, while I’m talking about things that might be of interest at some point for how people could join forces — explicitly apart from the Left, explicitly apart from anti-racism, apart from post-colonial studies, apart from anti-imperialism. This is not a question of finding a different word; there is a need for something else that can bring together people who are up to something better for themselves and the world — please leave out the Left.
JS: Are you serious about Lenin?
JW: Absolutely.
JS: Alright. I’m confused because the White Army that faced Lenin was the most vile, antisemitic bunch that ever existed. The alternative to the dictatorship of the proletariat — which then failed and actually led to terrible crimes in a counter-revolution — would have been Lavr Kornilov’s fascist putsch as early as 1917. The Bolsheviks enforced the militant protection of Jewish settlements with one of the very first decrees. There were also cases of Red Army battalions taking part in pogroms during the Civil War — including in Jewish settlements — for which there were severe disciplinary measures.
What about Kronstadt?[48]
JS: The Kronstadt manifesto is hardcore antisemitic. It identified both capitalism and the Bolsheviks with the Jews. I am therefore very surprised by this statement. Anti-imperialism is a priority that stems from a strategy that was adopted in the 1920s and 30s based on a questionable decision within the Comintern. The principled orientation that a Left must be directed against imperialism — at the time, incidentally, intended as a temporary tactical maneuver, not as a principle — is questionable. No political force exists — whether it is on the Left or should be called something else, as Justus said — that would be able to play at the level of this world arena. Israel does not need us here to defend it. Israel defends itself, has the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), you name it. These are things that happen anyway.
You just want to watch passively, really?
JS: I have no other choice. All those who try to argue with moral blackmail here are playing the same game as the anti-imperialist Left, who try to force people to go to the next demo with similarly questionable moralistic arguments. It doesn’t make any sense to pretend that we are a player that could play along at the world level in this way. The Left does not exist.
I would like to say one more thing about Trump: it’s important not to fall for what major capitalist parties throw at each other. The task of the Left should be to look realistically at the differences, which are of course grossly exaggerated by these parties. In America — to quote Gore Vidal — there is one party with two right wings; that is the party of property. Trump is by no means a fascist or someone who resembles national socialism. Trump himself was a supporter of the Democratic Party in the late 1980s and early 90s. The political positions are on a similar level. This is just another sign of how much the Left has been sucked into mainstream politics. Justus has already said something about this too.
Q&A
Detlef, you said that the Iraq War was the turning point that caused the Antideutsch movement to make Israel’s right to exist the main concern. It isn’t clear to me what this is supposed to mean. Especially given the background that, as you put it yourself, at the moment they emerged, the Antideutsch were one of the last historically conscious responses to the regression of the Left. How did we get to the point that we suddenly only talk about Israel’s right to exist?
DzW: I’ve outlined the whole thing briefly. First, there was the classic antisemitic reflex from Saddam Hussein, who naturally assumed that if you get into a conflict with Saudi Arabia and the U.S., you have to attack Israel. Second, Iraq had weapons of mass destruction at the time, especially chemical weapons, which it actually used, e.g., against rebelling Kurds, resulting in 5,000 civilian deaths. Those chemical weapons were produced with the help of German engineers and German companies. Hussein threatened to use this poison gas against Israel — this could not simply be shrugged off as an everyday affair. Gas masks were handed out in Israel, ironically often produced in Germany as well. That drove many Israelis to the brink of madness: they felt threatened by German gas and had to protect themselves with German masks. Against that background, the Left debate unfolded.
Most Leftists at the time said that Iraq was a small country defending its resources. They also didn’t care that Iraq had annexed Kuwait, as long as Iraq was against the U.S.
— the superpower that controlled the entire oil trade and dictated the prices. Hence, many on the Left were on the side of Iraq. Sadly, this position can still be found in today’s peace movement and is often wrongly applied to Iran, because if things carry on, Iran will soon become a nuclear power.
JK: If the Left has a raison d’être, it would be as an authority committed to reason. This reason would morally lead to the defense of Israel. If the Left does not do that, it gives up any claim to universalism and is no longer any kind of Left — if that concept can still be used after what Justus has just reported.
JW: The outstanding mistakes or terrific things that the Comintern or the devil-knows-who achieved at some point aren’t important regarding the topic of anti-imperialism. Anti-imperialism is a genuine product of the New Left that emerged after World War II and counted on cooperation with struggling peoples — whether in a Maoist or whatever other way. Anti-imperialism departed severely from Leninist and other kinds of dubious phenomena.
As to not give the wrong impression that anything about the Bolsheviks was redeemable, first of all, history is written by the victors. The Bolsheviks were excellent at spreading their narrative — including through judicial murders from the early 1920s onwards. There were significant Left-liberal and social democratic forces in Russia before 1914 who didn’t always foam at the mouth but who were educated. It was the Bolsheviks that prevented a relatively better outcome of the 1905 Revolution through their insane radicalization. Whoever looks at the Civil War and systematically sides with Maxim Gorki over Anton Chekhov, to put it in literary terms — Chekhov was a Left-liberal reformist, and he was right; he hated the radicals — whoever counts on the Bolsheviks instead of the Mensheviks and justifies this in hindsight, certainly won’t comprehend that the main objective of the Bolsheviks was to instigate a civil war, in which every conceivable disgrace of a thousand years of servitude was expressed in every corner in the country. To get rid of those — the Left-liberals, the social democrats, a lot of Jews among them — who would have been better qualified? This is the Bolsheviks’ preparation for the disaster they brought about. Please look that up!
JS: My critique doesn’t refer to universalism, but with the fact that moral categories — and this is an insight which Marx and Hegel took as basic — do not grasp the procession of world events. The complexity and contradictoriness of circumstances do not allow the world to be divided into good and evil, into progressive and non-ethnic states that should be supported, and those that should not. It is a worldwide system in which different versions of the political Right compete with each other; there’s really no Left. So, I think that it’s wrong to interpret this conflict within the Right in terms of moral norms; to continue leading with this standpoint thinking and to take sides. This starts with the interplay between Islamism and U.S. imperialism as far as the rise of Hamas is concerned. It’s not easy to see that this whole time the Israeli side has only been committed to the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. It’s well known that since the 1970s the Israeli government has supported Hamas in their struggle within Palestine against Fatah and have thus promoted their rise. This isn’t to say that there’s been some kind of conspiracy, but the situation simply does not allow the Left to clumsily side with any government —
JW: Not even with the Israeli side — yes, no?
JS: No.
JW: Okay, “yallah intifada.”[49] I’m leaving.
[Justus Wertmüller leaves the table.]JS: Like I said, the Left doesn’t need to take any position.
JW: [From the auditorium] I don’t talk to people who say they can’t align themselves with any side, not even with the Israeli one — over and done! I’m not a Leninist after all!
Moderator: Justus, we would like you to stay.
JW: [From the auditorium] One can’t discuss with people who don’t defend Israel.
[Justus Wertmüller leaves the auditorium.]Jan Sander, you say that we as Leftists shouldn’t take sides immediately, but that we should at first analytically check how all of this is related to us, for example, to regression, to capitalism. I agree with you, but how would you respond to the objection that Marx indeed took sides in his day — such as in France’s war against Prussia or in the Mexican-American War? Marx took sides all the time and at the same time explained to people how this is related to social conditions. Could you elaborate on this general abstention: just because Israel or Ukraine aren’t perfect communist world republics, we can’t take sides there. Why is it adequate to not do that?
JS: The difference is that there was a Left back then, and conflicts like these played a role in its revolutionary strategy. Today, there is no Left, and as a result there appears to be no way in which these international conflicts contribute to the building of some kind of Left. This is an apolitical position which attempts — like Marcuse said at the end of the 40s — to preserve the potential of actually taking a political position at one point.
Jan Kalk, you said that you feel committed to an orthodox Marxist politics and critique, but that you also believe that liberalism is to be defended. Marx’s point was that the project of a self-conscious nation that realizes the wealth of nations through trade is in crisis. According to Marx, the liberal ideals are undermined by capitalism, which is why they can only be realized through socialist revolution. Do you think that something has changed in that regard, that liberalism can be defended differently now, without becoming inconsistent?
JK: Of course, Marx’s critique of political economy deals with liberal ideas by means of Smith and Ricardo. For Marx, it was clear that their political economy and also the ideas of German Idealism could only be realized through a social revolution. This is still not wrong. The problem, however, is that the social revolution was not within reach historically, and it is not within reach today either — especially not in the case of the Bolsheviks. I also ask myself about the vision of a Left that is silent on Israel and supports Left-wing governments that don’t exist — do you want to support Pol Pot? Do you want to support China's attack on Pol Pot?
JS: Who was talking about Left-wing governments?
JK: You said that these governments are Right-wing and that’s why you don't want to support them. Do you want to support any Left-wing governments in Israel?
JS: They don't exist there either.
DzW: Of course they exist!
JK: So you watch people being slaughtered because they are not Leftists? Back to the question: liberalism is only worth protecting on the condition that we are aware that we are dealing with residues. That’s a difficult defensive struggle, but at the same time, there’s nothing else, especially not after the experience of National Socialism.
DzW: I don’t quite agree with Marx’s famous line, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”[50] It is just as important to interpret the world in order to understand it. But it’s not as if there are no longer any possibilities for action. You can’t get anywhere with those kinds of buzzwords, provocations and polemics that miss the point and produce scandals. In the light of the large protests against the AfD, you can see that there is an enormous willingness to get involved against negative societal developments and to have an influence on them. It is nonsense to simply slander these protesters and to accuse them of antisemitism or prejudices against Israel — such accusations can only come from someone who has not taken part in such protests. They are waiting for people to work productively with them, be it with Grannies against the Right[51] or by proposing actions and providing support. Our task now is to participate in such movements, not just to practice ideology critique and produce ideologies ourselves. We have to get involved where possible and achieve something.
There is, of course, a strong Left-wing and democratic opposition in Israel, which is protesting on a massive scale. If you extrapolate it and compare it with the size of the population, these are massive protests with enormous resilience. For me, this is a point of orientation, and I also support these protests financially.
JS: I ask myself what kind of view of socialism we get if we take sides with the opposition parties or even the government in Israel. As has already been mentioned, the Left was not born yesterday. It’s actually left a long trail behind it. It repeats itself in the forms of protest and action without getting closer to solving the problems it takes up. At this point, there must be people who put their finger in the wound and raise this question. I won’t allow myself to be blackmailed, true to the motto of carrying the banner for someone.
Just now the objection was raised against taking sides on the grounds that the IDF is already doing the job and we aren’t needed. In this very building of Humboldt University, antisemitic graffiti appeared a few months ago. The office of someone who was outed as Antideutsch was smeared with Hamas’s blood triangle. The IDF doesn’t solve this kind of problem. Wertmüller has a point when he alludes to the 8,000 “Palestinians by profession” that marched through this city last week. There is no considerable protest against these kinds of rallies organized by the emancipatory Left — the IDF can’t help with that either. In this sense, I can relate to Wertmüller’s outrage and his exit, even though it is a bit embarrassing, because it rather serves to ease his conscience. It would have made more sense to engage with this head-on, in the midst of debate [im Handgemenge[52]]. It’s not about looking for a Left movement to be built somewhere. What kind of foolish question is this? You said yourself 20 times that a Left movement doesn’t exist. There is no one we can reference. The question is simple: under which conditions — as servile and miserable as they might be — can I imagine living a somewhat dignified and self-determined life? The fact that we can meet for a free discussion tonight and that we’re not getting locked up in Siberia or Xinjiang the moment we express these positions publicly — this is an important difference. We shouldn’t let this be taken away from us by retracting to equidistance.[53] Taking the side of communism is of course a moral matter. It’s nonsensical to claim the opposite. The revolution shall be, and the conditions, as they are, shall not be. This is a moral, normative judgment — simple as that.
JS: You’re comparing apples and oranges. One of the questions was about whether I would call for the defense of the Israeli government. The Israeli government can do that very well itself; it has the IDF for that. Concerning whether I stand in solidarity when people are attacked or have their offices smeared is another question. That is within my reach, and my behavior — or that of my group — can perhaps make a difference. Such an intervention would require a completely different discussion than the abstract one of whether one is for or against Israel. The same goes for a demonstration, although it’s not clear to me how you want to proceed with your opposition to these demonstrations. You’re right that there’s a difference between being in a Siberian prison and being free. But the task of the Left remains the same. In both situations, it should be about the Left helping to build a socialist party and trying to get closer to its goal.
It’s a pity that the recipient has already left, but I prepared two short, fairly bloody quotes: “What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”[54] And, by the same person: “My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.”[55] The bloodthirsty bastard who wrote this is Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the polity that Justus Wertmüller affirmatively refers to, namely the American Republic. All of his hysteria about piles of corpses — the whole history of civilization — even falls back behind those people who fought a bloody war of liberation. — Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — it was worth it for that. The myth that a liberal development would have been possible was conclusively refuted already in the 1960s by historian Leopold Haimson in his paper “Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1917.”[56] No historian takes the fantasy seriously that constitutionalism could have been created out of the Czarist empire.
Jan Sander, you repeatedly had to assert that you don’t allow yourself to be used by moralism. I nonetheless can’t escape the feeling that — even though I’m against a moral approach — you create an equidistance that omits the specific character of a German Left and its past. Almost all of us in this room are the grandchildren of Nazis. The Left is still insufficiently concerned with antisemitism and the historic responsibility we bear as German Leftists. It’s painful for me to see this topic discussed here in terms of “somehow in the past” and “a tiny rupture of civilization.”[57] This is what resonates with me when this is overlooked and when you say that you don’t allow yourself to be used by moralism. We have a specific responsibility. I can’t speak from a perspective that neglects the past of my grandparents and the “rupture of civilization” that was carried out then, and which creates an equidistance to what the pro-Palestinian side is attempting now. It would be appropriate to show more sensibility regarding this.
JS: Again, these are different things. One is a specific Left strategy which, as was said, comes from the 20s and 30s, which is about identifying differences between various national regimes to serve the political strategy that is supposed to lead to socialism. These disputes have given rise to anti-fascist and anti-imperialist orientations. In the course of history, there have always been regroupings based on the vicissitudes within which capitalism has produced these regimes. The current from which Justus comes was at first critical of Israel, and then reorientated itself. The basic schema behind it — the division of different countries and different regimes based on whether they should be combatted or supported — affirms, on a deeper level, the global system of national states which shores up capitalism. I’m against that.
It is far-fetched to draw the conclusion from the history of the German Left and the German past that it is necessary to intervene in these conflicts. You can read Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Elements of Anti-Semitism” without giving in to such conclusions.[58] We could draw other conclusions from your argument. From my perspective, the Antideutsch use — precisely like their anti-imperialist counterpart — every act of terror, every war going on around the world, in order to show themselves consistently to be the fighters against antisemitism or, on the other side, against colonial or imperial domination. In this way they seek to generate support for their position, which I find abusive.
In preparation for this panel, I listened to a lot of historical panels of the past 30 years and thought the whole time: I can’t believe “What were the Antideutsch?” is the title of this event. In your opening remarks, all three of you said that something went wrong. If I understood you correctly, Jan Kalk, the question of whether the Antideutsch are outdated was already in the air when you were politicized by the Antideutsch 10 years ago. Now here we are, but I don’t feel that anything has changed in the Antideutsch’s self-conception. Considering the past 30 years, could you reflect on what you have and haven’t achieved?
DzW: The fact that German reunification has happened can give the impression that we have achieved nothing at all. It was obvious to us that it would happen, and that was no reason for us to withdraw our concerns; we continued to defend them. Then came the Gulf War. We learned new things, even though we have seen that we cannot change history or the constitution of the Left. Things went the way they did — we have seen several vivid examples of this tonight. It has also not worked out to establish a different milieu with the help of Antideutsch factions: a milieu that at least treats people differently and discusses on a qualitatively higher level than the K-Groups, the Trotskyists, and others used to. Nevertheless, in the last 10 to 15 years — I can't explain why exactly — the ideas of the Antideutsch have seeped into society. The Antideutsch were never interested in becoming a 2–3% party and electing a secretary, but rather in placing certain ideas.
The examples Justus gave are not exactly wrong. Also, there are people we barely know who suddenly call themselves Antideutsch because they consider it chic. That shows that the whole thing hasn't been entirely ineffective.
Today, you are sitting here as a new generation of Leftists with questions and expectations that I cannot fulfill. Yet you also have certain opportunities: you don’t have the baggage of a strong Stalinist Left, nor the burden of the errors that occurred in the K-Groups (whereby Justus took the liberty of mixing it all up: the Communist League of West Germany with its visit to Cambodia is practically the same as the anti-fascist efforts of the Communist League Nord — all one streak of blood. This is an ideological dispute that doesn’t lead us anywhere). The question of whether there is a Left or not is in your hands. You don’t have to reinvent everything, but you can do things differently and better in the existing organizations, for example in the trade unions. Of course, this is a Sisyphean task, but I have survived it. There is also “Die Linke,” which Sahra Wagenknecht has recently left and is now looking for a new direction. That isn’t completely uninteresting. Plus, there are plenty of Leftist approaches and initiatives at the state and regional level that are waiting for you to join them.
JK: Drawing a balance sheet is, therefore, a strange thing to do because the object of critique still exists. At the same time, it shows real hubris to think that an Antideutsche or materialist critique of society could change much. The one success is perhaps in that a few thoughts have been conveyed to people in these circumstances about not allowing oneself to be completely destroyed by the present and not falling into any delusions that one could retain some distance from everything else by founding a party.
I would like to ask the panel to still address some 8,000 “Palestinians by profession” in the context of the protest that was partly perceived as ethno-nationalist [Völkisch] and that styled itself as reactionaries in Left guise. It feels like the Left ducks away and wants to keep its hands clean when it comes to that topic.
JS: What’s to be gained if I say something about that? What do you have in mind?
The topic is related to October 7, 2023, and the Left takes an antisemitic position on it. The topic is brushed aside, even after a rally passed by.
JS: Jan Kalk has already raised this topic. The underlying question is whether the Left is an object of critique at all. Of course you can accuse people of antisemitism — that’s probably true. I’ve experienced it myself. But what do you imagine all this is going to lead to? The Antideutsch has been on the German Left for 30 years. My opening statement was, first of all, a eulogy for the Antideutsch: the whole project has failed miserably. I’m confronted with the question: do we want to continuously live one death of the Left after another? What do we have to do to create a project that would go beyond this eternal regressive repetition? In this respect I turn the question back to you.
DzW: I believe that this — as I have read — feminist protest of such scale requires a firm response. One cannot just sit back and say, “That's none of my business.” There were hardly 8,000 antisemites. Rather there were some people who think they are on the side of the Palestinians for humanitarian reasons. A distinct counter-position must be formulated on this matter: we need to get together — within the Students’ Council or other networks — and try to bring at least a large proportion of the protesters to their senses.
JK: The Left should be the first to oppose such a gathering — overall, what is a Left supposed to do if it’s not able to oppose that? To talk of building a party and socializing the means of production in the face of these conditions is a strange hobby.
My question is related to the confusion among the youth. It’s not clear whether we find ourselves in a repetition of the 30s or of the 90s or of a combination of both. According to my understanding, the Antideutsch in the 90s tried to make sense of the Left’s history and follow in this tradition by critically scrutinizing the 30s. At the same time they lead the way forward by acknowledging that the 90s were different from the 30s. What is the origin of the youth’s confusion around the question whether the new NSDAP or the neo-nazism of the 90s is the great threat? To what extent was the Antideutsch project helpful to clarifying the 20th century for the generation sitting in front of you? How should we move on from here?
DzW: This isn’t a simple question and I don't want to give a simple answer. In the 90s we attempted to make a Leftist or communist contribution to the culture of remembrance [Erinnerungskultur] — something that gets easily overlooked when one speaks of the streak of blood — the remembrance of the failures of the Communist International, of the Hitler-Stalin pact, and ultimately also of the murder of Trotsky. At the time, that culture of remembrance was practically non-existent on the German Left. The question of the nation, the criticism of what until then had been called proletarian internationalism, and the need to develop this further into anti-nationalism, brought to light a number of weak points in not only the German but also international communist history. This impetus has not been completely in vain.
Were the Antideutsch helpful in clarifying this moment right now?
DzW: There's no need to sell ourselves short. The Antideutsch movement was helpful because it enabled us to anticipate the developments a little. That is why we have a certain authority when we talk about today’s fascization, pointing at Trump and indicating that many of the American Right-wing radicals use texts — The Turner Diaries (1978), for example — that explicitly refer to Nazism. Somebody has to say it, and we have the legitimacy to do so without being accused of anti-Americanism — although Justus would accuse us of anti-Americanism, that’s certain.
JS: I would accuse you of hostility towards the American Revolution when you lump Trump together with some German National Socialists. The Democrats have taken this stance for a long time. Since Eisenhower, every Republican presidential candidate has been called a fascist, and every Democrat presidential candidate has been called a socialist. These are both exaggerations and lies. In order to understand the behavior, one has to do a little more than read the New York Times and watch the Clinton News Network.
It’s great that someone stands for the cause of the Antideutsch, after all. I have a positive attitude towards the Antideutsch Left. I always thought the line of Wertmüller / Elsässer to be the deviation. I’d advise the organizers to invite Elsässer the next time. He would’ve stayed. Right-wing ideologues shouldn’t be invited; that is exactly the crap the Antideutsch have always fought against. We, as the Antideutsch, in our autonomist group, primarily opposed German militarism and German nationalism — not only fascism but nationalism more generally. For us, that also meant opposing Lafontaine already back then.[59] Of course we have to say, “against all forms of antisemitism.” This means to not associate oneself with some counter-revolutionaries from Russia who agitated against the “Judas Commune.” That used to be a characteristic topos of the antisemites which was presented in new guise by a former Antideutsch. It was clear to us from the very beginning: thinking Germany means thinking Auschwitz. This new militarism, the so-called turning point in history [Zeitenwende] hasn’t just existed since Putin — quite the contrary; we criticized the peace movement for having German nationalist credentials. But now it’s time to take action against the contemporary German EU militarism, explicitly not with the German peace movement that is being revived, but rather with groups like Rheinmetall Entwaffnen[60] which have recognized that war starts here. The group protests in front of German corporations instead of pursuing any kind of geopolitics. This is also a continuation of the Antideutsch struggle.
When Justus left, an Adorno quote came to mind: “Whoever thinks is not enraged.”[61] I don’t mean to engage in malicious gossip. I just want to express what I’d say about the title “What were the Antideutsch?”: the Antideutsch failed. Thomas Ebermann, one of your comrades, says things like, “If I had known that all of this wouldn’t work out, I wouldn’t have read financial reports all these years but I would have indulged in hedonism.” Jan Gerber, who was quoted by Kalk and Sander, says that “we wanted to reconstitute the Left, namely a communist Left.” I’m afraid that I recognize a late rationalization with a lot of older Antideutsch, similar to older New Leftists: “We just wanted more freedom, living in flat shares, women’s rights etc.” But that is not true; they were communists and they presented a critique. Gerber’s point is also that the Antideutsch were part of neoliberal modernization. A quote by Helmut Kohl came to mind: “The Germans have to learn to be more modest.” This is also something the Antideutsch conveys, unfortunately. This is why I’d like to ask you — without false modesty, taking seriously your initial goals — to try again to explain the failure. Is it due to too much Leninism considering the continuity of the K-Groups, as Jan Sander pointed out? Is it due to too much anti-Leninism, due to the fear of the party and the masses, as with Wertmüller? Were the Antideutsch doomed to fail from the get-go? The last question is especially directed at Jan Kalk. Your task as successor of the Antideutsch would have to be a radical self-critique instead of a simple reproduction. What mistakes were made?
JK: I took up this point in my opening statement. The radical intensification of materialism is confronted with the desire for emancipated society, but, because of certain conditions, it’s unable to achieve it. People who want more often have problems with this point. The idea that there are problems on the Left which have accumulated, and which we must learn from, is very strange. To me, it seems to say that all we had to do was be more consequential, or that someone shouldn’t have started a family but rather should have written another article, or people should have been nicer to each other, and then everything would have been fine. We live in a society of the endless end of capitalism. “150 years of the Communist Manifesto” was a text of the Antideutsch movement.[62] If, today, we keep asking ourselves, “why did it not work out with communism?,” we’ll be doing something wrong again.
Why would we then be doing something wrong?
DzW: It’s a truism that history develops dialectically. After the first years of German reunification under Chancellor Kohl, which were bad enough, came the red-green coalition government. Other issues seemed to be the order of the day, and whoever started talking about the danger of nationalism was quickly isolated or could only spread their theses in some Leftist niche. At the same time, the red-green government initiated the Heuschreckendebatte[63] and, according to the polls, antisemitism grew enormously. It took on the guise of portraying Israel as a threat to world peace — a catchphrase coined by Günter Grass. As a result, the debate has shifted. We were always an incredibly long way from realizing a major Leftist project or even merely the unity of the Left — not to mention a new program or a new mass movement. As Jan Kalk has said, you can’t expect to have two or three good ideas and then hit the jackpot — if that’s what you want, you're in the wrong Left. Instead, you have to try to confront your own convictions about reality with reality, make the necessary corrections, and be ready again at the right moment. Without false modesty, I would say that the Antideutsch have not been a complete washout. They were a contributing factor in forming the necessary line of defense against the global Right-wing tendencies while making new friends along the way.
JS: The Antideutsch were, on the one hand, too much the dependent on what they understood as Leninism, and proceeded with the praxis of the 1970s with different contents, i.e., they continued to place their banner on the map and differentiate between supposedly progressive forces — because they were Western — and reactionary forces — because they were Islamic. By taking these lines they attempted to maintain their polemic. On the other hand, they were not Leninist enough because — to put it in a schematic way — they, like the whole New Left, lost sight of the goal: building a socialist party.
In their opening remarks, both Jans addressed that the Antideutsch stepped up to reconstitute a new Left. Detlef said that it’s nice to have an anti-fascist movement now and to see so many people on the streets against the AfD. Wertmüller said that the whole Left is on the drip of the state. Over here, we heard that there is no opposition or no Left that could intervene in the queer antisemitic mob. Where is this Left after 35 years of the Antideutsch? And why is it a problem to ask the question why, after a generation of Left activism, nothing ever came of communism?
JS: I’ve tried to give an answer to this question. What Justus means is that a large portion of the Antideutsch from back then are now integrated into the state, and they obviously take a completely different tone with Palestinian demonstrations. You can pat yourself on the back and say that the police today are a bit tougher than they used to be. I don’t know whether that’s an achievement, but that’s indeed the result. Gerber is completely right in his article: the Antideutsch are a movement of modernization. They’ve partially achieved this with their cultural attitudes, of course with a different emphasis than previous generations of the Left, which were much stronger. We are witnessing a gradual decline of the integration of generations of Leftists into ideological state apparatuses.
DzW: You said that a Leftist project was planned that did not happen. What was the reason? This puts me in the position of having to make achievements up so that I don’t end up completely empty-handed. I’d rather do without that. There are a couple of journals and authors who argue along Antideutsch lines, and keep advancing their positions. This also applies to Austria, which is important, as there’s a broadcaster there that wants to push for another annexation of Austria by Germany. Apparently there’s also a Left-wing faction within the UK Labour Party that, in the debate over Corbyn, actually took up the cause of solidarity with Israel and argues in a similar way as we do. I consider that a success, tiny as it is.
JK: Why hasn’t the revolution worked out? Why is the Left failing? This question is the founding moment of the kind of materialism that I have constructed here, as has been rightly said, because I think it’s correct. The collapse of revolutionary theory simply split it up into the big parts of the Left, and the collapse was understood as the result of individual failings. In this kind of materialism, theory’s ability to take seriously the significance of the failure of the revolution is sublated. We have to do this instead of locating structures of failure in history. Precisely this materialism gives rise to solidarity with Israel and the moral imperative to stand up for Jewish life today.
It was painful for me to see Justus Wertmüller leave. I thought to myself, he’s tried to change the Left for 30 years, and he can’t bear to see the result that we all are; he doesn’t want to take responsibility for that. Detlef, you stayed and you manage to bear with us somehow. You’ve passed us a Sisyphean task. Jan Kalk, you said in your opening remarks that the AfD was made possible through reunification. The Antideutsch tried to intervene in the reunification. Shouldn’t the Antideutsch have prevented the AfD? It’s not clear to me yet whether you would still consider yourself Antideutsch. Why would you motivate people today to be Antideutsch? Jan Sander, you gave a lot of people here a headache by trying to open up a horizon: “The Left used to be something else and politics as the art of the possible seems to be only possible in the form of Israel today.” Back then Bruhn said, “Israel and communism.” As far as I understood you, you don’t want to prompt people to be Antideutsch today. Do you still want people to be communists?
JK: The term Antideutsch always tended to be a label that people external to the Antideutsch called it. Perhaps it wasn’t rejected because it wasn’t the worst thing to be called. Nevertheless, as a communist today you are forced to make precisely this criticism. You can hold on to communism as a creed, but standing up for Israel is precisely the communist activity par excellence. However, I reject the idea that the AfD is a direct result of reunification. The phenomena of 1992–94 are not identical to the phenomenon of the AfD.
DzW: I have not been working day and night on Antideutsch politics for the last 30 years. I also don’t recommend that to anyone, since it wouldn’t be very Antideutsch.
JS: It’s a shame that Justus left. It must have been in part due to a statement I made that was a bit too harsh. Although, I was surprised at how sensitively he reacted. I don’t want to encourage anyone in a direct way to be a communist. But I want to raise a few related questions, because it is a phenomenon and more generations are now dealing with it. |P
[1] Bahamas is one of the leading Antideutsch magazines, founded in 1992.
[2] The original German transcript was published in Die Platypus Review 34 (November / December 2024), <https://platypus1917.org/2024/11/03/was_waren_die_antideutschen/>. Audio of the event is available at <https://youtu.be/sPbT71IExIw>.
[3] K-Gruppen, i.e., Kommunistische Gruppen (communist groups).
[4] Initiative Sozialistisches Forum, “Communism and Israel,” Platypus Review 28 (October 2010), <https://platypus1917.org/2010/10/08/communism-and-israel/>.
[5] German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik).
[6] [German] An inversion or replacement of the people. It is a neologism that echoes Umpolung (polarity inversion). The term was invented by Albert Brackmann, a leader of the Ostforschung, to describe a process of erasing German tradition and people.
[7] Höcke is the leader of the Der Flügel faction within the party Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) (AfD), which was founded in 2013.
[8] Kubitschek is a German publisher, journalist, and political activist. He was on the staff of the newspaper Junge Freiheit, and is one of the founders of the Neue Rechte (New Right) think tank Institut für Staatspolitik (Institute for State Policy).
[9] Coming out of the Maoist-oriented K-Group milieu, Elsässer was one of the leading figures of the early Antideutsch in the 1990s, being a critic of German reunification. He was an editor of Junge Welt and konkret, which had been founded in 1974. He turned back to a more traditional “anti-imperialist” Leftism in the 2000s, eventually becoming a Right-wing activist by the late 00s. In 2010, he was one of the co-founders of Compact magazine and has been its editor-in-chief since.
[10] Sellner is the leader of the Identitäre Bewegung Österreich (Identitarian Movement of Austria), which he co-founded in 2012.
[11] A. M. Rosenthal, “Our German Crisis,” New York Times, November, 24, 1992, <https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/24/opinion/on-my-mind-our-german-crisis.html>. See also A. M. Rosenthal, “The German Question Remains Open,” New York Times, April 26, 1990.
[12] Abraham M. Rosenthal, “Für eine internationale Offensive gegen den Nazismus,” Konkret (January 1993).
[13] Ibid., 24.
[14] Ibid.
[15] While Rosenthal was born in Canada, he lived in the U.S. and worked at the New York Times.
[16] Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, i.e., the Nazi Party).
[17] Manfred Dahlmann, “Vorwort zur Neuauflage: Was heißt antideutsch?,” in Joachim Bruhn, Was Deutsch ist. Zur kritischen Theorie der Nation (Freiburg: ça ira, 2019), 10.
[18] Jan-Georg Gerber, “Die Antideutschen. Ein Nachruf,” Bahamas 94 (Spring 2024): 72. Translated into English by Tamas Vilaghy in this issue of the Platypus Review.
[19] Lars Quadfasel, “Epitaph auf die antideutsch Bewegung” (November 6, 2010), <https://youtu.be/6BUTuZ31OuU>.
[20] Joachim Bruhn, Clemens Nachtmann, Lars Quadfasel, and Sonja Witte, “Auf einer Skala von eins bis zehn: Wie Scheisse ist Deutschland? Konferenz zum Stand der Kritik” (November 6, 2010), hosted by the Antinationale Gruppe Bremen, <https://audioarchiv.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/wie-scheisse-ist-deutschland/>, <https://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/ang/Konferenz2010.html>.
[21] A German band from Berlin that formed in 2000. The band participates in the initiative I Can’t Relax in Deutschland.
[22] Die radikale Linke. Reader zum Kongress vom 1. – 3. Juni 1990 in Köln, ed. Kongressvorbereitungsgruppe (Hamburg: Konkret-Literatur-Verlag, 1990), 193.
[23] See iz3w Freiburg and Max Czollek, “‘Nie, nie . . . nie wieder Deutschland’” (July 31, 2024), <https://www.instagram.com/p/C-FY9yLKTFu/>.
[24] [German] Special path. The term was first used in the 19th century to speak of the German-speaking people having taken a unique path from feudalism to modern democracy. Sonderweg took on new meaning during and after WWII: some argued that the special path necessarily led to Nazi Germany.
[25] Clemens Nachtmann, “Die demokratisierte Volksgemeinschaft als Karneval der Kulturen. Von der Verallgemeinerung des Postnazismus und dem Altern der antideutschen Kritik,” in Postnazismus revisited. Das Nachleben des Nationalsozialismus im 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Stephan Grigat (Freiburg: ça ira, 2012), 57.
[26] Matthias Spekker, “‘ihrem Wesen nach kritisch und revolutionär’. Wahrheit in Marx wissenschaftlicher Gesellschaftskritik,” in Wahrheit und Revolution. Studien zur Grundproblematik der Marx’schen Gesellschaftskritik, eds. Matthias Bohlender, et al. (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2020), 32, <https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783839450673/html>.
[27] Clemens Nachtmann, “Wenn der Weltgeist dreimal klingelt. Zur Geschichtsmetaphysik der ‘Krisis’-Gruppe,” Bahamas 21 (Fall 1996): 25, <https://redaktion-bahamas.org/hefte/21/Wenn-der-Weltgeist-dreimal-klingelt.html>.
[28] Wolfgang Pohrt, “Vernunft und Geschichte bei Marx,” in Theorie des Gebrauchswerts. Über die Vergänglichkeit der historischen Voraussetzungen unter denen allein das Kapital Gebrauchswert setzt (Berlin: Editions Tiamat, 2001), 270, <https://archive.org/details/vernunft-und-geschichte-bei-marx/>.
[29] Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, vol. 3, in Marx-Engels-Werke, vol. 25 (Berlin: Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED, 1964), 454.
[30] Herbert Marcuse, “Der Kampf gegen den Liberalismus in der totalitären Staatsauffassung,” in Kultur und Gesellschaft I (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Suhrkamp, 1965), 35.
[31] Bruhn, Was Deutsch ist, 170.
[32] (Freiburg: ça ira, 2009), <https://www.ca-ira.net/verlag/buecher/isf-konzept-materialismus/>.
[33] Clemens Nachtmann, “Krisenbewältigung ohne Ende. Über die negative Aufhebung des Kapitals,” in Postnazismus revisited, 156.
[34] See Rainer Rotermundt, Verkehrte Utopien. Nationalsozialismus, Neonazismus, neue Barbarei (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1980), 102.
[35] See the theme of Bahamas 93 (Winter 2024): “Für Israel gegen die postkoloniale Konterrevolution” [“For Israel against the postcolonial counterrevolution”], <https://www.redaktion-bahamas.org/hefte/93/F%C3%BCr-Israel-gegen-die-postkoloniale-Konterrevolution.html>.
[36] See the organization’s site <https://iqpberlin.org/>.
[37] See <https://t1p.de/8jjna>.
[38] A reference to Jubelperser, Iranian nationalists who shouted pro-Shah slogans, and attacked protesters at Reza Shah’s visit to West Berlin in 1967.
[39] Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht, a German party founded in January 2024 by Sahra Wagenknecht and (mostly) other former politicians of the Linkspartei.
[40] Andrew McDonald, “Trump’s VP pick J.D. Vance called U.K. ‘Islamist country,’” Politico (July 16, 2024), <https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-pick-jd-vance-vice-president-republican-party-uk-islamist-country/>.
[41] Gerber, “Die Antideutschen,” 72–75.
[42] Robert B. Pippin, “Critical Inquiry and Critical Theory: A Short History of Nonbeing,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 427–28.
[43] Ibid.
[44] Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Verso Books, 2019), 41; “Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis,” in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 13, Nachgelassene Schriften 1949–1972 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlage, 1988), 46.
[45] Ibid.
[46] Kommunistischer Bund.
[47] Justus Wertmüller, “Es geht um Israel,” Bahamas 20 (Summer 1996), <https://redaktion-bahamas.org/hefte/20/Elemente-des-Antisemitismus.html>. See also Justus Wertmüller, “Es geht um Israel,” Bahamas 93 (Winter 2024), <https://redaktion-bahamas.org/hefte/93/Es-geht-um-Israel.html>.
[48] Regarding the 1921 rebellion of sailors in the Russian port city of Kronstadt against the Bolshevik-led government.
[49] [Arabic] Let there be an uprising, etc. In the context of the Israel–Palestine conflict, it is an uprising against Israeli occupation or Israel.
[50] Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845), in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, second ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 145.
[51] Omas gegen Rechts Deutschland e.V., founded in 2019, <https://www.omas-gegen-rechts.org/>.
[52] An allusion to Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” (1843), in Marx-Engels Reader, 56: “The criticism which deals with this subject-matter is criticism in a hand-to-hand fight; and in such a fight it is of no interest to know whether the adversary is of the same rank, is noble or interesting—all that matters is to strike him. It is a question of denying the Germans an instant of illusion or resignation.” The speaker means this figuratively, i.e., a critique from within an unfolding event; in Marx’s case, it is “the German philosophy of the state and of right.”
[53] The concept (and accusation) of Äquidistanz comes up among the Antideutsch, e.g., Thunder in Paradise, “Perfidie des Allzumenschlichen. Äquidistanz heißt Kollaboration mit dem Judenhass” [“Perfidy of the All-too-human: Equidistance means Collaboration with Jew Hatred”], Thunder in Paradise (October 29, 2023), <https://thunderinparadise.org/2023/10/29/perfidie-des-allzumenschlichen/>.
[54] Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith (November 13, 1787), <https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-12-02-0348>.
[55] Thomas Jefferson to William Short (January 3, 1793), <https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-25-02-0016>.
[56] Leopold Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1917 (Part One),” Slavic Review 23, no. 4 (December 1964): 619–42.
[57] Probably referring to Sander’s quoting Pippin on postmodernism, “which celebrates itself as a great rupture.”
[58] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 137–72.
[59] Oskar Lafontaine is a retired German politician, currently member of the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, which split from the Linkspartei. Having been a member of the SPD since the 1960s, he held several high government offices. He resigned as finance minister of the first red-green government in 1999 over discontents with neoliberal reforms. He left the SPD in 2005 and was one of the co-founders of the Linkspartei in 2007.
[60] Disarm Rheinmetall, which is a German arms manufacturer.
[61] Theodor W. Adorno, “Resignation” (1969), in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University, 2005), 293: “Whoever thinks is not enraged in all his critique: thinking has sublimated the rage.”
[62] Initiative Sozialistisches Forum, “Die Vernunft in der Geschichte. 150 Jahre Kommunistisches Manifest,” in Flugschriften. Gegen Deutschland und andere Scheußlichkeiten (Freiburg: ça ira, 2001), 117–26, <https://www.ca-ira.net/verein/jourfixe/jf-1998-1_vernunft-geschichte/>.
[63] Heuschrecke is German for locust or grasshopper. DzW is referring to a political debate in Germany in 2005: the SPD chairman Franz Müntefering compared the economic activities of some investors to a locust plague.
