Who were the Antideutsch? An obituary
Jan-Georg Gerber
Platypus Review 175 | April 2025
This article was originally published in Bahamas.[1] It is based on the afterword to Jan-Georg Gerber’s Das letzte Gefecht: Die Linke im Kalten Krieg,[2] as well as a talk he gave in January 2024 at the invitation of the Frankfurt pro-Zionist Left. It has been translated into English by Platypus Affiliated Society member Tamas Vilaghy.
THE ANTIDEUTSCH HAVE been pronounced dead many times already. Sometimes this was the expression of a wish, at other times a warning of a looming collapse meant to stave off further decline. What few could have denied already, given a lack of protest against the West’s retreat from Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine, and the self-mutilation deployed via social media during the Corona crisis, nevertheless became clear after the October 7, 2023 Palestinian terror attack against Israel: the movement that never wanted to be a movement no longer existed. Hence why only scorned civil society organizations and other NGOs organized demonstrations and solidarity rallies for Israel after October 7 and not, as had become customary in the 00s, Antideutsch groups. The few exceptions only proved the rule.
The Antideutsch commentaries and explanations of the worst antisemitic crime since the Holocaust proved equally weak. Analyses which remain convincing to this day appeared just three days after September 11, 2001,[3] and yet, although 10/7 is in no way less important in its meaning than 9/11, almost three weeks passed by without a peep before the first presentable explication of the largest antisemitic massacre since 1945 was published.[4] Even the Berlin Left-wing weekly Jungle World,[5] which was long derided by the Antideutch with the label “Antideutsch light,” acted more quickly.
Clearly, all this doesn’t stem from the failure of individuals. Although we’ve come to love tracing back failure and backlash to the unpreparedness, betrayal, or personal depravity of current or former comrades, the hesitation after 10/7 had very little to do with these. It was much more reminiscent of Wolfgang Pohrt’s description of the crack up of the German student movement in the 60s. He once wrote that during the highest phase of the protest movement, it took a few nights to read and understand books which would otherwise have taken months, if not years, to comprehend.[6] The same is true for the analyses. If the participants are to be believed, the treatment of topics such as the war in Vietnam, the Emergency Laws of 1968,[7] or post-fascism could be produced in a couple of days, sometimes in mere hours. The belief that one is feeling the winds of history behind one’s back (or, if one prefers Walter Benjamin’s critical view of progress, that one’s hand is resting on the emergency break of the historical process[8]) produces astonishing psychodynamic consequences. Once this kairos[9] — the old name for it — passes by, greater success eludes us, or the winds of history turn out to be a tempest in a teapot, and then comes dejection. The capacity for mobilization as well as individual enthusiasm inevitably subside, and the level of intellectual activity most often declines.
It’s been a long time now since every major German city had its own Antideutsch group. At just one Israel-solidarity networking event for Eastern German Antifa groupings in 2005, summoned to life under the bungled name of “Zahal Ost,”[10] more than a dozen groups were represented. There were even more that couldn’t participate due to time constraints. The names of these and other initiatives, alliances, and coalitions have been all but forgotten in the meantime. They were often French or English names with a pensive or well-read air, often martial-sounding and almost all unintentionally goofy: “Sur l’eau,”[11] “Liberté toujours,”[12] “T-34,”[13] “Gruppe Morgenthau,”[14] “No Tears for Krauts,” “Antideutsche Aktion Berlin,” “Association Pomme de Terre.”[15]
To paraphrase Brecht, many of them were concerned with simple things that are difficult to do: they strove for a synthesis, based on the Frankfurt brand of critical theory, of the three original guiding principles of the French Revolution — freedom, equality, security —, of utopian and social contract-based paths to modernity, or more broadly, materialism and idealism. One of the most important starting points was Max Horkheimer’s conviction that modern society could only be understood on the basis of antisemitism.[16]
Thus they (to avoid saying “we”) broke with many Left-wing assumptions, such as with the false collectivism and the contempt for the individual shared by large parts of the Left, and broke with the hostility to Israel and with anti-Americanism as well. The name “Antideutsch” was borrowed from an article by Jürgen Elsässer,[17] who has long since wandered from the far Left towards völkisch socialism. Sometimes one called oneself Antideutsch, sometimes the term was bestowed upon one. Since it was never the most wrong-headed thinkers who were described as Antideutsch in the past, resistance to the term was rare: Heinrich Heine, Kurt Tucholsky, Thomas Mann, and Theodor W. Adorno seemed like good company to be in.
As generally understood, the Antideutsch emerged from the Left-wing critical discussions which took place after the fall of the Eastern Bloc in 1989–90, the crisis of anti-imperialism, and the implosion of other Leftist certainties at the time.[18] The immediate focus in the early 90s, as expressed by Bahamas, still published in Hamburg at the time (later in Berlin), was the new formation of a “non-reformist, radical, anticapitalist, communist Left.”[19] Another Antideutsch newspaper offered the image of a hearse traveling through the towns during a plague, “loading up everything it could snatch from the dead and decomposing bodies[:] this or something like it is how we see our situation, we’re just not sure what we’ll come away with.”[20]
It was soon obvious that it wouldn’t be much. A large-scale boycott campaign against the first unified German parliamentary elections in 1990 failed spectacularly. The same thing happened with a campaign around Tag der Befreiung, the day of the liberation from National Socialism, on May 8, 1995.[21] That’s why, by the second half of the 90s, the Antideutsch were overwhelmingly composed of small ideology-critique newspapers and theory circles. Even if some insisted that the ivory tower had “embrasures,” those involved knew very well that this wasn’t about political mobilization as much as preparing for hibernation. The errors and mistakes of the Left had to be worked through.
This started to change in 2000 with the Al-Aqsa Intifada,[22] but above all after 9/11. To recall: over 20,000 terror attacks took place in Israel between 2000 and 2005, in which over 1,000 Israelis were killed. More than 7,000 were wounded. Almost 3,000 people were murdered and 6,000 wounded in a single day in the suicide attack in New York on September 11, 2001.
It was in this context that the ivory tower was abandoned; the loose affiliation of small “Antideutsch” or “ideology-critique” circles, groups, and individuals became a political movement; here began the high phase of the Antideutsch. Outrage over the German ambivalence to terror against Israel and the U.S. played not an insignificant part in this development. Protest against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq produced the largest anti-American marches in the history of the Bundesrepublik, and sympathetic appraisals of the suicide attacks in Israel and the attack on the World Trade Center crossed party lines. At the same time there developed a large united front against Israel and the United States, composed of the radical Left, neo-Nazis, social democrats, and Hamas supporters. Talk about a “German Way” [Deutscher Weg] became popular again. This helped the already battered Social Democratic Party of Germany[23] (SPD) to its second successive federal electoral victory in 2002.
This ahistorical transfiguration of peace was supposed by the Antideutsch side to be questioned through organized events, demonstrations, and campaigns. The distancing from the West was criticized. Max Horkheimer was a forerunner here as well. He, along with Adorno, formulated a categorical imperative in the 60s: “It is correct, and required of every thinker, to measure the so-called free world against its own ideals, to stay critical in regards to it, and nevertheless to stand by its ideas and defend it against fascism, whether of Hitlerian, Stalinian, or of any other variety.”[24] This so-called free world, despite its “disastrous potential, despite its internal and external injustice,” forms “an island in space and time whose loss in the ocean of tyranny would also be the loss of culture, to which critical theory belongs.”[25] All the major German newspapers were soon writing about this noteworthy Left which oriented itself to these words and raised the American and Israeli flags at its demonstrations, attacking not only Left traditionalism but also the German mainstream. Even the New York Times and Haaretz reported on it.
Outrage was nevertheless not the only reason for the transformation of loosely related circles and journals into a movement; it was probably not even the most important. The rise of the Antideutsch coincided with the decline of another political current; we’re speaking here of the antifascist movement (Antifa), which was the largest gathering of the extra-parliamentary Left in the 90s.
The Antifa movement entered into crisis in the summer of 2000, shortly before the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. After an arson attack on a synagogue in Düsseldorf, chancellor Gerhard Schröder called for what he named a “Revolt of the Decent.” He urged his countrymen to no longer ignore the activities of neo-Nazis, as had become standard in the 90s — fighting neo-Nazis was now presented as a top priority. Hundreds of thousands of people found themselves at demonstrations and vigils, united against neo-Nazis. As it became clear shortly thereafter, that the Düsseldorf attack was perpetrated not by German neo-Nazis but by Arabic antisemites, nobody seemed to mind. The trivialization of antisemitism coming from Arabic, Islamic, or generally migrant backgrounds, as opposed to neo-Nazis, was built into state and civil-social activism from the beginning on. The federal government initiated an action program worth millions to sponsor civil-social initiatives against Right-wing extremism. The “Civitas” program[26] alone made more than €50 million available by 2006. Countless Antifa activists, either with or without a degree in education, could now pursue their activity in these organizations, with the added twist that what was previously free activity was now paid with state funds.
This meant that antifascism was suddenly no longer the “fight for the whole,” as one of the largest antifascist groups in the country had described it in a brochure just two years earlier: against state and capital, Germany, the “pigs,” or the “system,” as you like it.[27] Instead, it seemed to have become state-supporting. An Antideutsch circle from Halle soon wrote, “Antifascism is the entry application to enter decent German society.”[28]
Whoever didn’t go over to the Antifa out of some opposition to small Nazi cliques in the middle of nowhere but because of a desire to confront society, to confront the unclarified but hypothesized connection between relatives, teachers, parents, politics, and the economy — in short, to confront the horror of the everyday; whoever was not ready, in contrast to many others at the time, to seal himself off from reality, had to find a new field of play after the summer of 2000. It was against this background that the strategies of the antifascist movement spoke, and I quote, of “new political fields,” which would have to be tilled by Antifa. At a large Antifa congress in Göttingen in April 2001, in which around 700 people took part, not only was the liquidation of the Antifascist Action / Nationwide Organization (AA/BO) announced, but all this under the motto, “The year we make contact.”
The subject of contact was soon determined. It was the anti-globalization movement, which had been in the headlines since the late 90s because of its mass militancy. The protests against the 1999 economic summit in Cologne were barely noticed by the Antifascist groups at the time. By 2001, they were joining the large demonstrations in force. There were about a dozen charter buses to these demos leaving just from Berlin, ready for Antifascists-become-critics of globalization. They said they wanted to critically intervene in the movement; a large Antifascist magazine spoke euphorically of a “Summer of Resistance.”[29]
The summer was nevertheless followed by fall. It even began in June. The 2001 EU Summit in Göteborg saw almost civil war-like conditions; law enforcement fired live munitions at demonstrators. Some were wounded, one of them in critical condition. A few weeks after, at the G8 Meeting in Genoa, police shot 23-year old No Global activist Carlo Guiliani. The mass militancy against globalization had reached its limits. The movement was confronted by a massive wave of repression at the same time. A few people from my hometown got off easy: they were banned for about a decade from traveling to the Czech Republic after a particularly colorful protest against the IMF and the World Bank in Prague. A member of a large Berlin Antifa group who has joined the editorship of Jungle World in the meantime was not so lucky: he sat behind bars for two years in Sweden after he was caught up in riots against globalization in Göteborg.
At the same time, Antifa’s flirtation with the anti-globalization movement was challenged by 9/11. The attacks happened only seven weeks after the summit meeting in Genoa. A political group from Halle made it known nationally how difficult the critical intervention in the anti-globalization movement was shaping up to be in this context: shaken up by the suicide bombings in Israel, the attacks on the World Trade Center, and the Islamist rallying cries against “crusaders and Jews,” they held up a banner at the 2002 anti-EU summit in Copenhagen opposing antisemitism and anti-Zionism. This led to them being smeared by the anti-globalization protesters as Nazis, ending in physical confrontation and being shut off from the protest.[30] Even the critique of antisemitism counted as pro-Israel.
Whoever wanted neither to dismiss these failures as peripheral events nor at the same time to renounce political praxis as such was forced more or less automatically to the side of the ideology-critique circles who had left their ivory towers after 9/11. These, in turn, were strengthened by the experts of the Antifa movement who had become disoriented by the “Revolt of the Decent” and the crisis of the critique of globalization.
Even if a few luminaries of the movement had consistently spoken out against identity politics and superficial confessions, attending a peace demonstration with Israeli flags came to substitute for the jolt of learning through doing which the traditional Antifa demonstrations could no longer offer, as these had long since been welcomed and endorsed by the president, mayors, and social studies teachers. Even the need for unifying symbolism, which brought not a few people to Antifa, outlived its usefulness: besides Israeli and American flags — obviously correct — there soon came IDF trousers, ideological pins, vacations in Israel, Hebrew courses, Near East studies, and Jewish History and Culture.
The high point of the alliance between ideology critique and the newly directionless Antifa was nonetheless quickly receding in the rearview mirror. Out of about 30 groups who mobilized in Hamburg in 2004 for one of the largest Antideutsch demonstrations of the 00s, more than half didn’t exist by the end of the decade. (Now only three remain.) Around the same time, a desire was expressed in Bahamas to renounce the term “Antideutsch.” One should be ideology-critical “and nothing else.”[31] Even if they were never successful at freeing themselves from the term, this marked an early reaction to the looming crisis of the Antideutsch. Not only had the formula “Antideutsch” become, in many ways, a stand-in for an identity, but the already wide spectrum it designated became even more diffuse.
There were at least three reasons for the crisis. The end of the Iraq War in 2003 and of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2005 meant that (1) the immediate reasons for taking to the streets had disappeared. The war in Lebanon in 2006 offered one last short opportunity to mobilize. Following this, the activist part of the movement fell into a well-known ditch of campaigning, that phase after “over-politicization” (Oskar Negt) which brings frustration and lament. Some comrades retreated into private life as a response; others discovered new spheres of action for themselves. In the course of their innumerable changes of direction, they realized that it wasn’t just because of “the cause” that they took part in actions, but because of the action itself — at some point “the cause” fell by the wayside. Football and its fanatical, so-called “Ultra” fandom became attractive around this time; others got into martial arts. The Berlin Antifa anti-globalization activist who was sentenced to two years’ jail time in 2001 after his arrest in the Göteburg riots became East German champion in mixed martial arts and has fought professionally ever since.
The drying up of successful mobilization efforts meant furthermore that (2) the intellectual-historical contradictions of the movement became evident: freedom, equality, and security; social-contract theory and utopianism; materialism and idealism are hard to reconcile. Since enduring this tension requires intellectual effort, the easier way out became more attractive. Some activists became Western liberals, others conservative Atlanticists. Many found their way back to Leftist traditionalism.
Above all, (3) numerous ideas of the movement became generalized, even if in a botched way, which is to say, without the unifying idea of defending the principle of the West, measuring it by its own standard, and going beyond it on this basis.[32] The critique of anti-zionism shed light especially on the youth organizations of the Linkspartei,[33] the SPD, and the Greens. After the Second Lebanon War, an Israel solidarity working group, the BAK[34] Schalom was founded within the Linkspartei; shortly thereafter, three of the most prominent politicians of the Linkspartei at that time, Gregor Gysi, Katja Kipping, and Petra Pau, were speaking out against the traditional hostility to Israel in their own organization.[35] Franziska Drohsel, the chairwoman of the Jusos[36] between 2007 and 2010, publicly criticized Left anti-Zionism; there took place similar debates in the youth organization of the Greens.
Furthermore, the condemnation of social protests as nationalistic, which have since become common practice in the Left-liberal public sphere, had already been tried out by a portion of the Antideutsch in the 90s. This was framed as a critique of a general tendency on the Left to idealize the lower classes. Nationalist riots were regularly refashioned as protests around social grievances in the years after German reunification. At the very latest, this pattern has been reversed since the adoption of the so called Agenda 2010, the dissolution of the welfare state in the Federal Republic of Germany: racism and nationalism are now rarely glossed over in public — on the contrary. Making reference to the nationalist undertones which social protests sometimes carry often serves merely to denounce any criticism of the dismantling of the welfare state.
The Antideutsch were obviously not responsible for this development. Even if a part of their positions reached the Left-of-Center parties, as well as both conservative and liberal media, they had no power to change society. Without wanting such a thing, they instead became the eccentric offshoots — the lunatic fringe, in Theodore Roosevelt’s words[37] — of a longer-term process which aimed at modernizing Germany. This process was directly related to the replacement of the old middle class with a new one, and the concomitant creation of a new service proletariat.
As the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz once expressed, the old middle class is rather down-to-earth, tied to crafts and industrial labor, with relatively constrained mobility.[38] It’s geared towards “maintaining its status [Statusinteresse] and self-discipline”: “it’s about a concrete standard of living, rather than the immaterial quality of life which is so important to the new middle class.”[39] It’s different from the new middle class whose formation was closely bound with the formation of that “capitalisme post-moderne” which has been discussed in France for the last 30 years; more academic, hedonistic, mobile, and cosmopolitan. “The cosmopolitans,” according to Reckwitz, “are for openness in many regards: of identity, of markets, against too strong rules or regulations. Liberalization in the widest sense of the word, in fact.”[40]
Most activists of the movement came from this new middle class; others aimed to join it. The Antideutsch paeans to individualism, cosmopolitanism, pleasure, and consciousness of historical responsibility also expressed, unbeknownst to them, the social and cultural rationale of their original or intended milieus: “Bourgeois and Bohème at once,” as Reckwitz puts it — as if he had read the Antideutsch leaflets of the 00s.[41] The same is true of the Antideutsch critiques of collectivism, their attacks on provincialism, and occasional arrogance towards the abandoned members of the new lower class, who were actually the cultural antithesis to this new middle class.
In other words, it’s likely that the Antideutsch slogans and ideas were temporarily picked up by a disoriented Antifa public in such an enthusiastic manner because they offered two possibilities at once: one could orient oneself unconsciously to the socio-economic Zeitgeist while at the same time preparing oneself to fight against it. This also corresponded in a distorted way to the imperatives of work and life that came with the rise of the new middle class — the “key demographic of this late-modern society,” according to Reckwitz: it was about an alliance between forced participation and permanent distinction, between striving for uniqueness and uniformity.
As the modernizing process which was tied to the replacement of the old middle class with a new one could barely be ignored, a portion of those who stayed in the Antideutsch milieu timidly began to realize what they had come to support. In this context, the disputes which took place around Corona and the war in Ukraine were not the causes of the decline of the Antideutsch. These make up rather the sad coda that accelerated the disintegration of the remaining milieu. If one believes Marx, the official reasons for a movement and the actual functions of a movement often diverge significantly.[42]
The conditions in which things developed and were perpetuated obviously do not falsify the Antideutsch critique of false collectivism, nor solidarity with Israel, nor the synthesis of utopia and contractual thinking, or of materialism and idealism: perhaps the genesis and the validity of an idea are not so easily distinguishable from each other as is often portrayed in Intro-to-philosophy courses; at the same time they cannot be collapsed into one. Especially given the present threat to Israel and ongoing anti-zionist rollbacks, a collective critical voice which would defend the West in Max Horkheimer’s sense, even against itself, is urgently needed.
Most of the preconditions of Antideutsch activism have nonetheless disappeared. Antifa is no longer in a crisis, but rather long since integrated into the ideological state apparatus. A quarter century’s worth of state-funded Antifascist projects betrays the rebellious gesture which one occasionally adopts as hardly a challenge to the content of the state. Wherever the tentative recognition of one’s own conformism could begin to materialize despite it all, collective defense mechanisms [kollektive Abwehrmuster] are deployed, measures which could be well rehearsed in the almost 25 years since the proclamation of the “Revolt of the Decent.”
But above all, the modernizing process which the Antideutsch accompanied is already far advanced. The old middle class which dominated the Bundesrepublik in the Schmidt and Kohl eras[43] has lost its former meaning; the rise of a new middle strata is long since complete. This signifies the disappearance of not only the movement’s sociological conditions, but also the basic socio-economic conditions for the rise of the Antideutsch. Each movement has its time — even if it never wanted to be a movement. |P
[1] Jan-Georg Gerber, “Die Antideutschen: Ein Nachruf,” Bahamas 94 (Spring 2024), <https://redaktion-bahamas.org/hefte/94/-zusammenland-Eine-Islamisierung-findet-nicht-statt.html>.
[2] Jan-Georg Gerber, “Nachwort zur Neuauflage,” in Das letzte Gefecht: Die Linke im Kalten Krieg [The Last Fight: The Left in the Cold War], republished in an expanded edition (Berlin: XS Verlag, 2022), 205–14.
[3] See, for instance, Bahamas editorial staff, “Hinter dem Ruf nach Frieden verschanzen sich die Mörder: Stellungnahme der BAHAMAS-Redaktion zum islamistischen Massaker in den USA”[“The Murderers Hide Behind the Call for Peace: Statement of Bahamas on the islamistic massacre in the USA”] (September 14, 2001), CEE IEH 81 (October 2001), <https://conne-island.de/nf/81/20.html>.
[4] 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/>.
[5] Founded by editors who left the daily newspaper Junge Welt.
[6] Wolfgang Pohrt, Theorie des Gebrauchswerts. Über die Vergänglichkeit der historischen Voraussetzungen, unter denen allein das Kapital Gebrauchswert setzt [Theory of Use-Value] (Berlin: Edition Tiamat, 1995).
[7] Notstandsgesetze.
[8] See Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’” (1940), in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland, et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott, et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2006), 402.
[9] [Ancient Greek] The right time, the proper time, the exact time, the critical time, etc.
[10] IDF East. Zahal is the Hebrew acronym for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Ost is German for East.
[11] [French] Afloat; literally, on the water. These words are used as a title by Guy de Maupassant for a short story (1876) as well as a travel book (1888), and by Theodor Adorno for an aphorism in Minima Moralia (1951).
[12] [French] Liberty forever.
[13] A tank manufactured by the USSR in WWII.
[14] After the Morgenthau Plan, which was a proposal made by U.S. Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. in 1944, the goal of which was to weaken Germany, following WWII, by removing its arms industry and other key industries.
[15] [French] Potato Association, an allusion to the German preference for potato dishes.
[16] See Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).
[17] Jürgen Elsässer, “Weshalb die Linke anti-deutsch sein muss” [“Why the Left must be Antideutsch”], analyse & kritik – Zeitung für linke Debatte & Praxis 315 (1990).
[18] See Jan Gerber, Nie wieder Deutschland? Die Linke im Zusammenbruch des “realen Sozialismus” [Germany never again?: The Left in the collapse of “real socialism”] (Freiburg: ça ira, 2010).
[19] Quoted in the editorial in Bahamas 18 (Winter 1995), <https://redaktion-bahamas.org/hefte/18/Der-Fall-Deutschland.html>.
[20] “Lasst alle Hoffnungen fahren” [“Abandon all Hope”], 17 Grad Celsius 1 (1991).
[21] Gerber, Nie wieder Deutschland.
[22] Also known as the Second Intifada (2000–05).
[23] Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands.
[24] Max Horkheimer, new foreword to Traditionelle und kritische Theorie. Vier Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1968), 10.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Initiative founded in 2001 against Right-wing extremism in the former East Germany, since expanded to German-speaking Europe and modified to deal with issues of urban mobility.
[27] Antifaschistische Aktion Berlin, Das Konzept Antifa. Grundsatztexte und Konkretes [The Concept of Antifa: Principles and Details] (Berlin: Eigenverlag, 1998).
[28] Arbeitsgruppe No Tears for Krauts, “Ladenschluss versus Ausverkauf” [“Closing time vs. clearance sale”], (October 3, 2007), leaflet for the Leipzig anti-unity demonstration, <http://nokrauts.org/texte/2007-10-03_Ladenschluss.pdf>.
[29] Phase 2, “Summer of Resistance,” Phase 2 2 (Fall 2001), <https://www.phase-zwei.org/hefte/artikel/summer-of-resistance-1693>.
[30] See Gipfelstürmer Halle, “Antisemitische Ausfälle in Kopenhagen” (2002), in Gegen die deutsche Normalität. Interventionen hallescher Antifa-Gruppen (2000–2014), ed. Arbeitsgruppe Antifa (Halle: 2014), 67ff.
[31] Justus Wertmüller, “Ideologiekritisch und sonst nichts: Drei notwendige Vorankündigungen zur Konferenz” [“Ideology-critical and nothing else: Three necessary advance notices for the conference”], Bahamas 57 (2009), <https://redaktion-bahamas.org/hefte/57/Ideologiekritisch-und-sonst-nichts.html>.
[32] In a certain way, this process resembles the development once laid out by Oskar Negt for the Sozialistische Büro (Socialist Bureau), one of the overflow tanks for the “undogmatic” part of the collapsing protest movement of 1968. As he wrote, the organization found itself since the late 70s in a decline which could only be inadequately described as failure: “The foundational ideas of this project have become in many respects so generalized that one barely finds people on the Left anymore who don’t speak about basic interests, experience, and needs.” Oskar Negt, “Politik als Produktionsprozess” [“Politics as a production process”], in Tradition heißt nicht, Asche aufzuheben, sondern die Flamme am Brennen erhalten, ed. Komitee für Grundrechte und Demokratie (Sensbachtal, 1985), 53.
[33] The Left Party.
[34] A BAK, or Bundesarbeitskreis [Federal Working Group] is a group or committee organized at the federal level for political / governmental or professional / academic ends. BAK Schalom describes itself as “a platform against anti-semitism, anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism, regressive anticapitalism, and Islam-apologetics.”
[35] Philipp Gessler and Veit Medick, “Israel spaltet die Linke,” Taz (May 13, 2008), <https://taz.de/Streit-ueber-Antizionismus/!5182229/>; Gregor Gysi, “Die Haltung der deutschen Linken zum Staat Israel,” presented at a conference on “60 Years of Israel” (2008), hosted by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, <https://www.hagalil.com/archiv/2008/04/gysi.htm>; Katja Kipping, “Jenseits der Konfrontationslogik,” Taz (December 12, 2006), <https://taz.de/!342145/>.
[36] Junge Sozialisten/innen, youth organization of the SPD.
[37] Theodore Roosevelt, “An Art Exhibition,” in History as Literature and Other Essays (New York, 1913), 305
[38] See Andreas Reckwitz, The Society of Singularities, trans. Valentine A. Pakis (London: Polity, 2020).
[39] Andreas Reckwitz, “Der Unterschied liegt in der Kultur” [“The difference lies in the culture”], Taz (August 2, 2018), <https://taz.de/Soziologe-ueber-die-neue-Mittelklasse/!5523416/>.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid.
[42] See Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).
[43] Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of West Germany (1974–82). Helmut Kohl, chancellor of West Germany (1982–90) and chancellor of Germany (1990–98).
