This article was originally published in Die Welt on November 28, 2025, and is translated here with permission of the author.

Librarian Regine Stein’s motto is: “The future of libraries is open.” This can be interpreted optimistically: ever-expanding horizons are opening up for information and education. Or fatalistically: no one knows what lies around the next corner.

Just over a year ago, Regine Stein became director of the central office of the Common Library Network (GBV) of the German states of Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia, and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. The network, which includes around twenty libraries in Berlin, is funded in part by the German Research Foundation.

One of the participating institutions is now slated to be excluded on December 31, 2025: the Library of Conservatism (BdK), located in Fasanenstraße in Berlin, near the Literature House and numerous galleries. The reasons for the decision, which was made in the summer, have not yet been disclosed and were not communicated to the library; our inquiry to Regine Stein went unanswered.

The rationale for the action was unlikely to have been unpaid membership dues. The library’s core collection consists of the extensive holdings of the publicist Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing (1927–2009) and the philosopher Günter Rohrmoser (1927–2008). The total number of books is in the mid-five-figure range. Schrenck-Notzing was primarily interested in American conservatism, while Rohrmoser, in his later years, focused more on Russian conservatism. Both attempted, after 1968, to broaden the political options available to the CDU and CSU parties toward the right.

The library has a spacious reading room. In addition, a series of events aimed at fostering intellectual exchange takes place at the Fasanenstraße location. Speakers who have presented their work for discussion in recent years have included the communication scientist Norbert Bolz, the art philosopher Bazon Brock, and the journalists Patrick Bahners (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), Jens Jessen (Die Zeit), Harald Martenstein (Welt and Die Zeit), and Gunnar Schupelius (B.Z.). (In the interest of transparency: I too once had the pleasure of presenting a book there.)

That is not exactly a lineup that could threaten the constitution! But that is precisely what is eliciting resentment. The argument is that the presence of non-extremists—like the invited guests—“normalizes” radicals. Library scientist Isabel Elsner goes even further, ignoring the evidence in the event calendar, by claiming that the “principle of neutrality for libraries” is “by no means taken into account at the Library of Conservatism events, since no protagonists from other political camps . . . have been invited so far.”

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Back in 2018, Member of Bundestag Anne Helm (from the Left Party) submitted a list of questions to the Berlin Senate regarding the library to underscore its potential for danger: “What knowledge does the Senate have about investigations that have or had a connection to number 4 Fasanenstraße?” The officials may have smiled when they presented the answer: between 2013 and 2018, so they reported, there were three incidents of property damage and one theft from a car at the location; all crimes were solved

It is quite possible that the discussion within the library network is based on Isabel Elsner’s bachelor’s thesis (“The Library of Conservatism: A Conservative to Extreme Right-Wing ‘Salon’ as a Special Academic Library and Member of the German Library Association,” Cologne, 2022). That thesis complained that the collected books represented “the entire canon of the German extreme right, from right-wing conservative to neo-Nazi.”

A spot check, however, does not confirm this claim: For the search term “National Socialism,” the first title displayed is a publication by the American conservative Paul Gottfried, followed by a publication from Wallstein Verlag, Armin Mohler and the Intellectual Right in the Bonn Republic. The third book, Right-Wing Historical Revisionism in Germany: Forms, Fields, Ideology, is also from Wallstein. However, Wallstein is not a right-wing publisher, but rather a left-liberal one, widely praised for its publications on the history of National Socialism, the culture of remembrance, and the extreme right in Germany.

Isabel Elsner views the collection critically with regard to the complex of gender and family issues. The holdings pose “questions of library ethics: Should a book that equates abortion with rape have a place in a library collection?” A comparison is worthwhile here. Another member of the library network is the Berlin-based “Institute for Critical Inquiry,” which is dedicated to queer issues, in fact at a high theoretical level. It sees itself as a catalyst for “radical reflection” and as a link between research and activism. The institute’s latest book publication addresses the topic of Becoming Trans*: Queer Temporalities and Transitions in Video Blogs. No one (thankfully) would likely consider excluding this research institution from the library network simply because its collection on the traditional family model is limited.

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In any case, it was in Ms. Elsner’s work that the membership of the Library of Conservatism (BdK) in a professional organization was first questioned. “As an association that sees itself, among other things, as a promoter of democracy,” she wrote at the time, “the German Library Association (DBV) should address the activities of the BdK in parallel with the development of its institutional ethics.” Experts should be consulted to initiate a “review of the BdK’s membership in the DBV.” There are likely few bachelor’s theses that have had such a resounding impact.

One encounters in it the term “democracy promotion,” which until recently was hardly known. For a long time, it was only a topic in development cooperation projects (Democracy Promotion in Tunisia is a typical book title of this era), but now it seems to primarily denote a domestic and internal political task; there are even professorships for democracy promotion. It is best to understand the term as referring to the activities of state-funded NGOs.

According to Regine Stein, the expulsion of the library from the Library Association will take effect on December 31, 2025. Since the Library of Conservatism is suing—its value and accessibility are threatened by the prospect of removal from the search system—even if it ultimately loses in court, the matter is likely to take longer.

However, a process that will predictably drag on agonizingly and embarrassingly can hardly be in the interest of the library network. If you’ve stepped into a mess by misjudging a situation, you don’t need to summon onlookers with a megaphone. Or do you? Perhaps some things should be clarified; perhaps one day there will be a landmark ruling that puts a stop to these excessive controls. “The future of libraries is open,” to quote the new head of the library network once more—the future of libraries remains open!

Lorenz Jäger is a German journalist and author who served as editor of the cultural section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His Adorno: A Political Biography is available in English. Translation of this article by Russell A. Berman, with comments here.

Authors’ note: This essay by the political group en arrêt! Berlin originally appeared in German, in slightly modified form, as “Die Parties sind vorbei: Über Hyperpolitik in Zeiten von Correctiv und dem Kampf gegen Rechts,” in Bahamas 94 (Spring 2024): 24–28. It has been translated by en arrêt! Berlin, except for the passages from Freud and Baudrillard, where the English text is quoted.

The article discusses the mass demonstrations that followed the media coverage of a meeting of right-wing politicians and activists in Potsdam in November 2023. The media coverage and the subsequent demonstrations started in January 2024 after an article by the NGO Correctiv was released, in which the meeting was labeled a “secret gathering” of politicians allegedly working on a plan to “deport” millions of foreigners. Correctiv, a fact-checking and self-described investigative journalism website, also drew parallels to the Wannsee conference of 1942, where Heydrich and Eichmann organized the Holocaust. Even though most of the report turned out to be false or highly exaggerated, Germany saw some of the largest demonstrations of the last twenty years following its release. The authors describe this as a form of “hyperpolitics” that goes along with the German NGO complex that has its roots in the Schröder years of the SPD–Green coalition government from 1998 to 2005.

The reason why the article is republished at this point is because of the recent events surrounding the 2025 federal election in Germany. Shortly before the election, the current ruling party, the CDU, had voted together with Alternative for Germany (AfD) in favor of a resolution that became known as the “five-point plan.” It called for “immediate, comprehensive measures to end illegal migration, secure Germany’s borders, and consistently deport persons who are required to leave the country, especially criminals and dangerous individuals.” This came in the wake of a wave of attacks and terrorist acts that had shaken the Federal Republic in the days and weeks before, almost all of which were committed by migrants.

The joint vote was interpreted as “cooperation with right-wing extremists” on the part of the CDU, which had allegedly violated the “Brandmauer” (firewall), an informal commitment not to cooperate with the AfD. This was followed by renewed widespread protests within supposed “civil society,” which also took place in front of the CDU party headquarters in Berlin and portrayed the CDU as a facilitator of fascism. The protests were organized by an alliance of NGOs and various associations, some of which are financed in part by the state via the program “Demokratie leben!” (Live Democracy!), which “facilitates projects all over Germany which develop and trial [sic] new ideas and innovative approaches in promoting democracy, shaping diversity and preventing extremism.”1 The attacks against a future governing party, as well as against the biggest opposition party, the AfD, from state-financed circles gave new relevance to the question of the workings and background of the NGO complex in Germany, which will continue to occupy the German debate. In fact, 182 million euros was allocated to the program “Demokratie leben!” in the 2023 fiscal year.2 An increase in funding to 200 million euros was approved by the federal parliament for 2024.3 Against this backdrop, an inquiry by a CDU-CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag in spring 2024 caused considerable discontent among the protagonists of the projects funded by the program and the surrounding milieu. The group sought detailed information about which NGOs receive state funding through this and similar programs, and how much they receive. Critics accused the CDU-CSU of using the inquiry to intimidate civil society actors for political reasons.

These developments might also be interesting for Telos Insights readers, as the United States is currently tackling problems with its own network of NGOs, some of which likewise receive federal and state grants and contracts. This network might at times even be considered to be an example of “artificial negativity,” as described by Telos founder Paul Piccone. In any case, the complex the authors describe is made up of an activist class that has the means and the will to try and shape public opinion in its favor, in Germany as well as in the United States.

—en arrêt! Berlin

The return of politics came as a shock. At least for those who had proclaimed the end of history and settled into the illusion of post-political times. In 2016, Brexit, Trump, and the rise of the AfD encountered a social class that found it difficult to come to terms with the breach of the supposed consensus of the liberal order. The “basket of deplorables” (Hillary Clinton) revolted, its grievances became vocal, and politics returned: “The eschatological rumor that politics was dead has been disproved. For now, however, it seems as if the patient has jumped out of a coma and landed directly in hyperkinesis without ever having dealt with the previous symptoms.”4 So we have arrived in the age of hyperpolitics: hyper-excited, hyper-fleeting, hyper-erratic. Anti-political revolt on the one side, panic-driven activism on the other. Are these the new class antagonisms?

The diagnosis that “the ‘secret meeting’ in Potsdam is a wake-up call that is rousing many from collective lethargy and passivity”5 roughly sums up what the Cologne-based Rheingold Institute, a market research firm with a psychological bent, found out about the motivation of participants in the anti-right-wing demonstrations in January 2024. The institute’s founder, Stephan Grünewald, is somewhat more precise: “Demonstrators describe how they . . . were shaken out of their lethargy and passive resignation, which they had felt in recent months in the face of multiple crises.” Mood, wake-up call, lethargy: while a market research institute may not be a psychoanalytical association, it has correctly identified a recurring motif in a hyper-political society, namely, the “exhausted self” (Ehrenberg) attempting to break out of its melancholy.

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The fact that such statements repeatedly refer to a “wake-up call” should strike not only readers who are attentive to such linguistic nuances. The metaphor of a sleeping majority that is finally being roused to a state of emergency and of politicians who must finally take action against the right wing is part of an inner monologue of self-talk. It is dog-whistling to the subconscious. When the left-wing daily newspaper TAZ in all seriousness expressed its delight over the demonstrators’ belated anti-fascism in the words “Deutschland erwacht” (Germany awakens), this not only revealed the intellectual void of its social media editors, but also clearly demonstrated the dual role of reporting and mobilization. “The only referent which still functions is that of the silent majority,”6 wrote Jean Baudrillard about politics in the late twentieth century. In 2024 Germany, it is not supposed to have a minute’s silence.

A (Not So) Secret Plan

The fabricated scandal surrounding a meeting of right-wing figures and the media campaign that followed is therefore by no means coincidental; rather, it was intended by everyone involved. It is a deliberate self-deception, driven by activism, political calculation, and that very “inner wake-up call.” Even avowed supporters of this campaign readily admit this when they emphasize the significance of the demonstrations in the big election year of 2024. This reveals a tactical understanding of the protests. But let’s start at the beginning.

The scandal is fabricated primarily because it is based on false claims and completely dishonest exaggerations in the media and political discourse. This can now be gleaned in many places, albeit no longer in headlines and hourly updates; it appears instead in marginal notes that are hardly noticed by the public. When the article “Secret Plan against Germany” appeared on January 10, 2024, there was widespread talk of “plans to deport millions of people from Germany” (Correctiv), a “deportation summit” (Der Spiegel), and “deportation fantasies” (Amadeu Antonio Foundation). A week later, the first stage adaptation of the investigation premiered, co-produced with the Berliner Ensemble. This meant that the Potsdam meeting was reenacted on a theater stage, with the decisive advantage for the authors that problematic (i.e., unproven) statements could later be excused as “artistic freedom.” The framing of the secret meeting, at which “AfD politicians, neo-Nazis, and wealthy entrepreneurs” allegedly came together, remained unchanged. The claim that the “deportation of millions of people” had been discussed—and even planned—was later quietly deleted and denied by Correctiv.7 What remains is little more than the AfD’s association with Martin Sellner, whose proposals for “remigration” are by no means secret but have even been published as a book that he himself authored. But by then, the genie was already out of the bottle. The first large demonstrations took place on the weekend after Correctiv’s investigation was published. The question of the truthfulness of Correctiv’s story quickly faded into the background. A recurring theme of the demonstrations was references to 1933 and the equation of the AfD with the Nazi Party. Two weeks later, there was already talk of ongoing mass demonstrations. “Almost everyone knows someone who was at the protests,”8 reported extremism researcher Julia Ebner on the German news program Tagesschau. These were the largest demonstrations in Germany in twenty years. The government, the opposition, and the population acted in solidarity, which must have pleased the increasingly unpopular government representatives above all.

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The fascination with the mass demonstrations was immense. As a collective experience, they became an integrative act, reinforced and prolonged by benevolent media coverage. The delusional projection of preventing a “new ’33” through participation illustrates its manic character. This includes the appropriation of the slogan “Never again is now,” which shortly before had served as a call for solidarity with Israel after October 7 and has now been reinterpreted as a “feel-good slogan”9 against the right. Jungle World author Svenna Triebler describes her manic rush in the face of the new sense of unity at the large demonstrations with the metaphor “as if someone had thrown open the windows in an unbearably stuffy room.” She was not the only one who had let the lack of oxygen get to her head. Even those who had previously remained silent on the subject of Israel suddenly found their voices when there was nothing at stake and political protest became risk-free.

Sigmund Freud describes the shift from melancholy to mania as a “liberation.”10 This liberation applies to the object of suffering, in this case the “collective lethargy . . . in the face of multiple crises.”11 “Moreover, the manic individual plainly demonstrates his liberation from the object which was the cause of his suffering, by seeking like a ravenously hungry man for new object-cathexes,”12 Freud continues. This new object, the “sense of unity” of the demonstrations and the attempt to transfer it to the abstract idea of democracy, cannot be permanent. For the next melancholic phase is always on the way. Melancholy and mania, in the Freudian sense, are two interconnected, opposing states that form two sides of the same coin and, in the worst case, repeatedly turn into one another. This “cyclical madness” forms the basis of the new mode of politics, driven by viral panic and a network of increasingly sophisticated apparatuses that fill the void left behind by the mass organizations of the twentieth century.

From Mass Politics to Post-Politics

The political cycle has changed. The end of the end of history is now being proclaimed.13 Anton Jäger, a historian in the service of the new socialist left, has introduced the term “hyperpolitics” to describe the current cycles of outrage that pass for political expression: it is intended to “enable us to understand a form of politics that followed the mass politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the post-politics of the ‘very long’ 1990s and the anti-politics of the 2010s.”14 Jäger distinguishes between four different phases of social politicization, which he links to the degree of institutionalization, i.e., the degree to which those involved in politics are bound to parties, associations, or unions. The starting point for such a genealogy is the age of mass politics, which Jäger dates to between 1848 and 1914. This forms the first phase: people were integrated into political structures, and their everyday lives were largely determined by places and situations of political negotiation and opinion-forming. Parties and trade unions were able to mobilize their members on a regular basis. How they did this can be read not only in diaries and other memoirs but also in contemporary prose. The novel Barrikaden am Wedding (Barricades at Wedding [Wedding is a neighborhood in Berlin.—ed.]), a mixture of communist feel-good literature and milieu study, describes the pub Zur Roten Nachtigall (The Red Nightingale), where local KPD members spent their evenings: “Various communist newspapers and magazines hung neatly on hangers on the walls. Above them were large boards decorated with photographs of the workers’ sports clubs that met here. At the side of the front room was a bar with a glass cabinet for sausages, and behind it a large, mirrored cabinet with beer glasses, schnapps bottles, etc.”15 Whether anyone would want to drink their beer at this place is beside the point. But the novel, which describes the events of the so-called “Blutmai” of 1929 from the perspective of organized communists, refers in this passage to the now-lost “third places” and their relevance for political life in the age of mass politics. In its colloquial rhetoric and revolutionary pathos, it illustrates a way of life in which politics was the starting point for social relationships and consistent ideologies provided the basis for personal action.

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Post-politics, on the other hand, indicates a retreat from these structures, along with their possibilities for association and collective action. Jäger links the economic basis for the break with the era of mass politics to the worsening crisis of capital growth that began in the 1970s: increasing surplus value could only be achieved through the intensified exploitation of labor, i.e., by reducing the wage share, which required breaking the power of the unions. In addition, the so-called “Volcker shock” between 1979 and 1981, when key interest rates in the United States were raised from 11 to 20 percent, triggered a massive recession that drove up unemployment and accelerated deindustrialization.16 The end of the organized working class also wrecked Fordism. The shift to a service- and financial market-oriented form of capitalism created the urgently needed avenues for new capital accumulation, which were accompanied by a dual movement of state action. Even though it is true that the welfare state was systematically dismantled, talk of a retreat of the state in the name of neoliberal deregulation is nothing more than a persistent left-wing fantasy that ignores the state’s imperative to take preventive action and its subsidization of civil society. Jäger conveniently ignores this simultaneity. Highly sophisticated NGOs have long been acting as extensions of the state, propagating precise codes of personal conduct in the name of anti-racism or climate change. This paved the way for Correctiv and similar ideological enterprises.

I Just Believe in Parties

This development has been noticeable in the United States since the 1970s and in Germany a little later. Instead of old membership organizations with local branches, organizations such as think tanks, foundations, and other NGOs have moved to the center of the clash of interests, with professionals taking over political work. The academic world has long been tailored to training their future recruits. These employees are drawn from an educational elite that is tied to a specific class and is haunting sociological debate under the term “professional-managerial class.” In the new organizational forms of political work, powerful donors in the United States or, in the case of Germany, the state itself are replacing the financial contributions of traditional organization members. Moreover, the implementation of political measures increasingly falls within the remits of politically active players that have never been elected by the people, such as central banks or the European Commission. The debate between different milieus, in which opinions are formed between antagonistic interest groups, has been increasingly relegated to the media sphere. The culture war blossoms in the logic of the internet.

In the age of post-politics, this class was able to go about its work relatively undisturbed. In the course of this, the “catch-all parties” known in Germany as Volksparteien (people’s parties) “finally transformed in the 1970s into ‘cartel parties,’ for whom access to the levers of state power was more important than competition with ideological opponents, from whom they were becoming less and less distinct and with whom they soon cooperated in various constellations in order, to put it bluntly, to at least keep their jobs in the ministries.”17

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The absence of politics in people’s everyday lives has rarely been celebrated as much as in the American TV series Sex and the City, which ran on HBO between 1998 and 2004. The series is about four successful women in New York who talk about their love lives, the hottest restaurants, and other crucial everyday matters. Samantha, who combines self-confident quick-wittedness with an uninhibited zest for pleasure, sums up the prevailing mood of those years when she proclaims: “I don’t believe in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. I just believe in parties.” The celebration of indulgence, pleasure, and permissiveness, which favors momentary excess over the restraints of abstract justice and the future, has long been viewed with suspicion. In the reboot of the series, titled And Just Like That…, Samantha has disappeared, and instead the protagonist Carrie has a podcast with a “queer, non-binary Mexican-Irish diva,” which programmatically stands in for the contemporary renovation of a series that is now considered “problematic.” Now it’s all about woke instead of Vogue: the post-political generation is entering a new era. The parties are over.

As classic organizations like unions and political parties have been weakened, they have been replaced by organizations that enforce state doctrine and prevailing morals in people’s private lives. After all, what do BLM, QAnon, and the mob that stormed the Capitol have in common? “They don’t keep membership lists, they’re not very permanent, and they have trouble imposing discipline on their followers.”18 In Germany, it should be noted that groups like the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, Campact, and Correctiv, while they do not keep membership lists, do keep payrolls and are designed to be indefinitely funded by the state. Their supporters adhere to the work ethic of true believers who feel they are working for a noble cause.

Jäger interprets this politicization of the liberal class as a reaction to the anti-political movements that celebrated their greatest triumphs in Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Hyperpolitics is therefore a class-specific term and appears more as an expression of a general mood than a “mode of viral panic typical of the accelerated internet age with its short hype and outrage cycles.”19 The “previously rather passive, post-politically socialized liberal center [reacted] with a kind of reactive shock politicization.”20 The barriers to entry for this shock-driven politics are low: it takes little effort, no membership fees are required, and one can quickly climb or descend the career ladder and exploit one’s activism for personal gain. Consequences exist only in the apocalyptic hallucinations of the hyperpoliticized, who nevertheless do not have to leave their oasis of inconsequentiality.

Volatile Opinions

Hyperpolitics is thus “first and foremost an eminently market-conforming variant of politics, both in form and content. Markets offer exit options and are inherently short-term in nature. Trading algorithms have no concept of the future.”21 Instead, a concept of information born from the logic of financialized capital is prevalent in public debate. As Joseph Vogl writes in his book Capital and Ressentiment, stock market information presents itself as an

indistinguishable conglomerate of genuine news, assumptions, conjectures, rumors, opinions, as well as opinions about opinions, provoking judgments not only about the value of news, but also about how others value news, and thus about how “a reliable judgment about the prevailing currents” of opinion can be formed. On the one hand, stock market trading is therefore no stranger to “science” in order “to arrive at the right conclusion in the face of important news.” . . . On the other hand, such knowledge is plagued by adversities that erase the difference between what is known and what is meant, and that run counter to the logical principles of sufficient reasons and mutually exclusive opposites: in a reversal of the scholastic cessante causa cessat effectus, the “cessation of the cause” does not necessarily mean the “cessation of the effect” on the stock market.22

Once the news is out there, no amount of corrections—such as those made repeatedly by Correctiv, which certainly lived up to its name—can stop it. For even if trading algorithms have no future, the internet has an unfathomable past that continues to haunt us. Thus, people are still talking about “planned mass deportations,” even though the story has long since been exposed as sensationalist scaremongering.

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This is because the starting point and the arena for political debate have shifted from the “third places” described by Neukrantz to the filter bubbles of digital communication. Here, every expression of opinion simultaneously produces information that is incorporated into the cycle of capitalist valorization. However, opinion itself is subject to immediate verification in the volatile business of such communication; feedback loops of mutual reinforcement or rejection kick in immediately, as is familiar to everyone who uses social networks. In every judgment, the expected reaction is thus at least partially already factored in: “Marketable opinion is formed according to what the average person thinks the average opinion might be, and the basis of judgments lies in the assumption that a majority of judgments converge in them. Or, to put it another way: what we are dealing with here is an endless game of mirrors with no fixed point of reference.”23

The internet is the antechamber to this form of political debate, in which the marketable concept of information has short-circuited with public debate. Capital has incorporated the act of speech into its process of valorization and thus forced it to comply with its structural laws. For “information is knowledge minus proof and justification, but knowledge itself is subject to the uncertain outcome of verification procedures. The end of justifications can only lie in the renunciation of further justifications. ‘The experts never get to the end of anything,’ as Robert Musil once said.”24 Activists, on the other hand, start from the ending and operate with information that can cause short-term swings in public opinion, which then take an uncertain course. If the mood is right, the German state will foot the bill.

Living and Rewarding Democracy

Since 2015, around 100 million euros in project-related funding has been spent yearly in Germany on NGOs through the “Demokratie leben!” (Live Democracy!) program alone. This is because “democracy thrives on people who get involved on a daily basis and stand up for democratic values. The Federal Ministry for Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth promotes this commitment with the federal program ‘Demokratie leben!’”25 And people who get involved in these organizations on a daily basis make a living off democracy.

The predecessor organizations of “Demokratie leben!” date back to 2001 and were founded in the wake of the “uprising of the decent.” At that time, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder urged non-governmental organizations and courageous citizens to mobilize civil society at the local level against the far right. There was then still a rudimentary form of political division of labor, as the 200,000 rebels at the height of the movement followed the call of a professional politician who politicized the masses in response to current events.

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The narrative published by Correctiv ignores this division of labor. Correctiv provided the facts and evidence, together with journalistic commentary and an appeal to the general public. This orchestrated new uprising illustrates the historical shift from post-politics to hyperpolitics, because where just under twenty-four years ago speeches were given and foundations were subsidized to mobilize people in post-political times, Correctiv knew that it could rely on a far-reaching network of numerous initiatives, foundations, projects, and a hyperpolitical population that is easily stirred up by the media and ready for immediate action. Unlike Schröder, Correctiv did not speak into the void of a depoliticized society hoping for a response, but into the dense political and media network of foundations, NGOs, opinion journals, and news formats of which it is itself also a part. When Schröder was still trying to address both his old social democratic base and the post-politically isolated, while having to reactivate or reestablish forms of organization that no longer existed in any meaningful form, he stood at the end of an irrevocably fading era.

But history, as we know, repeats itself as farce. The fact that within a few hours and days the so-called “Correctiv investigation” attained the status of an established truth, and the ensuing protest the status of an edict, would have been impossible without the broad structures of civil society. This highlights the weakness of the liberal concept of hyperpolitics, which distinguishes between good and bad mass mobilization and proclaims the perpetuation of protests as the solution. Jäger proposes mass mobilization as a way out of the predicament, calling for a return to personal engagement and institutional association.26

Clowns and Journalists

From the outset, Correctiv’s self-image has blurred the line between journalism and activism: “We conduct our research free from political and economic dependencies. Our reporters are guided by the common good.”27 The financial contributions to Correctiv show that political and economic independence is not a major priority: in 2023, over half a million euros came from public funds, with the rest (around €4.2 million) coming from private donors and foundations. These are journalists who have never felt particularly comfortable within the confines of mere research. Their understanding of the common good ultimately boils down to identifying “fake news,” for which they themselves determine the relevant criteria. And they draw the line between fake news and possible satire based on their own taste. Their activist stance precedes the first step of research, financed by clients such as Meta, which use automated “detection technologies” to short-circuit the research process in similar cases. The circle of activism and journalism is now complete. This can be seen in biographies like that of Jean Peters, who has been writing for Correctiv since 2022, previously wrote columns, then jokes for television satirist Jan Böhmermann, and once threw a cake in AfD politician Beatrix von Storch’s face while dressed as a clown. He summed it all up on his website as follows: “I used to combine art and journalism for performative actions.”

Philipp Ruch, who has been active since 2009 in the name of “political beauty,” likewise prefaces his books with the following statement: “His works deliberately blur the boundaries between fiction and reality.” But while Ruch has never claimed to have rediscovered this boundary, Peters already speaks in the present perfect tense. Ruch aims to be “a reverse Claas Relotius case for art”28 by delivering reality instead of the fiction that is expected, but he still understands this reality as a “counter-reality” that is tied back to his concept of art. Peters, on the other hand, claims to be committed solely to reality. And yet his constant switching between art, journalism, and political action, which is a sign of stunted abilities in all three areas rather than their ingenious combination, has by no means come to an end with his activism. The research he provides is not simply written down and presented to politicians and society; it is immediately transformed into theatrical plays and educational lessons. Just eight days after Correctiv’s publication, it was staged at the Berliner Ensemble, live streamed and broadcast on RBB. There seems to have been no doubt in the fee-financed programming department whether an artistic adaptation of the article initiated by the authors themselves should be shown uncommented and in full on RBB’s evening program.

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In order to bring the thin plot to the theater stage, director Kay Voges resorted to meta-commentary on the events: “The actresses will partly slip into the role of the journalist and try to analyze what is happening. But they will also perform a kind of reenactment and recite texts as they were spoken at the Landhaus Adlon.”29 On the stage of the Berliner Ensemble, this is how it sounds from the mouth of actor Andreas Beck: “I am the stage character Gernot Mörig, and I welcome you once again. What I am about to say here is not what I said word for word, but some terms and expressions have been passed down through memory logs. This is important in order to convey the extent of my fascist language.” In this deliberate confusion of both spheres—journalism that is fictional enough to pass as art; art that is presented seriously enough to pass as journalism—the subsequent ignorance of the participants in the anti-AfD protests about what exactly they are outraged about and why they are on the streets is already present and conveyed. Is it just a meeting in Potsdam, is it a threat of revolution, is it the danger of fascism? The multiple self-corrections made by Correctiv, from “deportation” to “expulsion,” from “Germans with a migrant background” to “people,” etc., find their artistic counterpart in the evening at the Berliner Ensemble in Constanze Becker’s red alarm button, which she presses in the event of statements that are not covered by journalism. When even the “stage characters” are constrained by a further level of commentary, ultimately anything can be claimed. This does not correspond to the ideal of independent art, because the storylines should find their way back into reality. For an independent work of art, the ensemble performance is too clear; the audience is not looking for mysteries, but for the sermon of the day.

The Anti-AfD Complex

A survey conducted by the University of Konstanz30 confirmed what must have been clear to any observer of the demonstrations and the circumstances surrounding their emergence: the uprising was not that of a “silent majority,” but of the green-ideological milieu of those who had been in power and better off for years, both politically and culturally, and who masqueraded as civil society. Even taking the nature of the issue into account, 61 percent of demonstrators who last voted for the Greens and 65 percent who identify as center-left are considerable numbers that do not match their self-description as civil society. The demonstrations were held to preserve a cultural and ideological hegemony that is evident in the deliberate merger of state and society and is expressed not least in the upcoming Democracy Promotion Act, which will finally ensure that civil society agencies no longer function as front organizations of the state, but rather as an extension of the state into society. The very history of the draft law was marked by efforts to strengthen its supporters’ own milieu. Minister for Family Affairs Lisa Paus sees Germany as “primarily threatened and attacked by right-wing extremist groups,”31 but also includes threats “below the threshold of criminal liability,” i.e., everything “that just about falls under freedom of expression.”32 It would seem that there is enough to do above the threshold of criminality, yet Paus finds those who venture below it so annoying that financial subsidies for non-governmental organizations appear almost imperative. The fact that the state is using money to meddle in an area that does not fall within its remit hardly seems to bother the left-wing demonstrators. It is obvious that Paus does not see them as a political threat outside the realm of criminal law, but rather as potential voters.

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The Correctiv stunt finally achieved its stated purpose when it was used by the immigration authorities in Potsdam to impose a general ban on entry into Germany on the Austrian Identitarian brawler Martin Sellner. The argument presented was based on the Correctiv story, which was what made him famous in the first place. In the words of the Potsdam authorities in their decision against Sellner: “The so-called secret meeting is proof that your personal presence in the Federal Republic of Germany contributes significantly to introducing and spreading your ideologies in the public discourse.”33 As wrong as Sellner’s understanding of remigration may be, and as much as he may be aiming for a völkisch rather than a Western objective, there is little in the way of actual legal grounds against him. Even Die Zeit admits that “Sellner has not committed any crime.”34 And yet, here, in the aforementioned realm below the threshold of criminal liability, an entry ban and, in the event of noncompliance, deportation have been imposed. Both have since been suspended. The fact that Sellner is not just someone who is politically unwelcome, but that the state-civil society complex is pursuing a right-wing figure who, in a sense, is still pursuing extra-parliamentary politics in the classic sense, is more than just a side note. The message that those who operate outside the designated, state-approved institutions with the appropriate financial resources are finding their room for maneuver increasingly restricted is likely to have been understood. This was never about Sellner alone. The panic-driven activists’ definitions of their enemies are as vague as they are interchangeable. The fact that they are nevertheless becoming influential would be inconceivable without the backing of politicians and the media. It is only in this environment that organizations such as Correctiv can thrive. Germany offers the perfect breeding ground for such developments, and it is pursuing a unique, special path into hyperpolitics. In the words of former Federal Minister Franziska Giffey: “There is no other European country that has a program of this magnitude, with a budget in the hundreds of millions, dedicated to promoting democracy and preventing extremism.”35 Germany prides itself on state-funded efforts to silence unwelcome voices.

The following article is a slightly revised translation of an essay originally published in Italian as “La settimana che lascia un’Europa sconvolta,” in La Stampa on March 7, 2025. Translated by Gabriele Segre and Gabriel Noah Brahm.

This past March’s extraordinary meeting of the European Council concluded a week that may well go down in history as one of “diplomatic revolution.” Seven portentous days began symbolically the Friday before, with a live clash between Zelensky and Trump in the Oval Office, and continued with a whirlwind of events: from the positions taken by European and NATO partners during the London defense summit, to Washington’s decision to suspend military aid to Kyiv and the high-stakes meeting in Brussels. Each event underscores the rapid acceleration of an ongoing upheaval now reshaping the world as we knew it, auguring change on a scale matched only by the magnitude of Europe’s growing unease about it.

Setting emotions aside, the central question is how that pivotal week tangibly altered not only Ukraine’s fate but that of Europe as a whole. The answer is far from straightforward.

Rewriting decades of strategic and security arrangements on this side of the Atlantic will take far longer than the time it takes to sign an executive order in Washington. Especially when the plans of other global actors remain shrouded in uncertainty: no one knows how far Trump is willing to go or what Putin’s and Xi Jinping’s long-term goals truly are. Gambling on their intentions seems reckless, but the stakes are even higher for Europe: can it play a role on the stage of this unfolding global drama? And if it struggles to take center stage, will it at least secure a supporting role—or merely serve as the backdrop for others’ performances?

To assume any role at all, Europe must first decide what it wants. A tall order for a continent that, until now, has failed to articulate its objectives. No European nation desires to be embroiled in a war that has dragged on for over three years, accompanied by an energy crisis and soaring inflation. Yet beyond rhetorical commitments to a “just peace” and the supply of arms in America’s wake, the Union has offered no meaningful diplomatic initiative to end the conflict.

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This impotence reflects a deeper crisis: it is evidence that Europe has lost the ability to engage in politics in its highest sense—as a creative tool to envision solutions beyond the boundaries of conventional logic. For too long, Europe has relied on the reason of data and statistics, ignoring that, however precise, rational calculations cannot fully grasp the unpredictability of human nature. We have forgotten that politics is not an exact science; it shares the same essence as art. Like music or painting, its ultimate purpose is to combine elements of our collective imagination, giving them new meaning in the creation of an original work. Politics is not nourished by numbers and necessities alone but by emotions, aspirations, and desires. When it succeeds, the outcome transcends the sum of its parts.

Trump, for all his reckless and dangerous “creativity,” is nevertheless engaging in politics. Europe, by contrast, has historically been so preoccupied with avoiding conflict that it sought refuge in a rigid framework of law and rules. In exchange for reassuring predictability, it relinquished its capacity for imagination. While this approach has been effective in preserving what we are, it is ill-suited to confront forces that no longer recognize such a system. In response to the Ukrainian crisis, Europe has relied on the only method it knows: calculating troop deployments and financial investments to maintain its peaceful existence. A cost-benefit equation that it hoped would yield a zero-sum balance, but which is increasingly excluding it from the dynamics of a world in constant flux.

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To play a role in shaping the future, Europe must rediscover politics as the “art of imagination,” not merely the “science of control.” This shift may entail accepting the risk of conflict. War, of course, represents failure—the equivalent of discarding a canvas or tearing up a score. But the creative effort required remains preferable to the illusion of resolving an armed conflict through calculations and laws that no one is willing to abide by.

After all, art itself has never been immaculate or painless. Every great painter or musician knows that imagination demands the greatest effort—and risk. Yet they also know that such a process aims to leave a mark that endures beyond mere survival. In the same way, politics must take risks to build a lasting future.

There is no doubt that Trump is willing to take those risks. The question is, are we? How much imagination can Europe muster? And will we rise to the challenge, or remain content with a role as the stage upon which others play out their grand designs?

Topics: TPPI Translations • Reflections & Dialogues

Gabriele Segre is an expert in international relations, political culture, and leadership. Since 2018, he has served as the Director of the Vittorio Dan Segre Foundation, an international institution dedicated to fostering a culture of coexistence among diverse identities.

The following article is a slightly revised translation of an essay originally published in German as “Konversion zwecks Konservation: Eine Standortbestimmung des Christentums dies- und jenseits des Atlantik anlässlich Ayaan Hirsi Alis Bekehrung,” in casa|blanca 1/2024. Translated by the author.

In a nod to the Book of Revelation, “The Four Horsemen (of the Anti-Apocalypse)” was the playful moniker chosen for themselves by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens when they gathered for their first joint discussion around 2007. The quartet soon became known for its sharp polemics not only against religious fundamentalism but against religion in general. Strangely unconcerned with the wide range of theoretical as well as historical developments that have challenged the basic premises of Enlightenment rationalism over the past 250 years—from Adorno to the atomic bomb—they prided themselves on promoting a strictly scientific outlook on the world, be it against veritable religious fanaticism or ultimately any kind of speculative thought.

The Fifth Horsewoman

For many years, the Dutch-American politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali was considered a key figure in the movement known as New Atheism. Growing up in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, she received an orthodox Islamic education and, as a teenager, associated with the Muslim Brotherhood before eventually fleeing a forthcoming forced marriage by illegally entering the Netherlands in the early nineties. There, she became an apostate and began to engage in political activism. As an uncompromising critic of Islam, she not only faced accusations of Islamophobia but also a constant threat to her life, which peaked after Theo van Gogh, with whom she had made the short film Submission (Part I) about Islam’s degradation of women, was murdered by an Islamist in 2004. The attacker, a Moroccan-Dutch dual citizen born in Amsterdam, had pinned a note with a death threat to Hirsi Ali on the victim’s clothing. She was forced to go into hiding. The price she paid for openly confronting Islam, rather than resorting to nebulous generalizations that make all religions appear as mere shades of the same gray, distinguished Hirsi Ali from antitheists like the biologist Richard Dawkins. Nonetheless, there was a proximity to the “four horsemen.” They appeared on the same YouTube channels and participated together in conferences such as the Global Atheist Convention, where Dawkins gave Hirsi Ali the nickname “Fifth Horsewoman” in 2012.

It came as no surprise, then, that her fellow New Atheists were quite perplexed when the critic of Islam announced in November 2023 that she had converted to Christianity. In an essay titled “Why I Am Now a Christian,”1 echoing Bertrand Russell’s famous “Why I Am Not a Christian,” she explained the reasoning behind her decision: With the expansionist authoritarianism of Russia and China, along with the rise of global Islamism and woke ideology, liberal Western democracies face three interconnected, internal and external threats. Hirsi Ali attributes the West’s weaknesses on all these fronts, at least in part, to a disorientation regarding what fundamentally holds the West together: “The response that ‘God is dead!’ seems insufficient,” Hirsi Ali states. “So, too, does the attempt to find solace in ‘the rules-based liberal international order.’ The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” According to her, this legacy ought to be understood as an ensemble of “ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity—from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning.” Consequently, the process of secularization that made these modern institutions possible in the first place is presented not as a development in opposition to Christianity but as one that emerged within and through it: “Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage.” In stark contrast to the historical interpretation of her former neo-atheist allies, who conceive of modern freedoms as having been won in bloody battles against Christian orthodoxy, Hirsi Ali understands the church as a forerunner of liberalism.

An Atheist’s Belief in Christianity

In this context, Hirsi Ali implicitly ties into the work of a well-known predecessor, Benedetto Croce. In 1942, Croce, a Vico and Hegel scholar and a leading figure in the intellectual resistance against fascism in the liberal tradition of the Risorgimento, published an essay titled “Perché non possiamo non dirci ‘cristiani’” (“Why We Cannot Help Calling Ourselves ‘Christians’”).2 Deviating quite significantly from some of his earlier writings, Croce describes the rise of Christianity as the greatest revolution mankind has ever brought about. All other human innovations either fall short of it or, like the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the French Revolution, are dependent on it. To Croce, the spread of Christianity, first in Galilee and Judea and then throughout the Roman Empire, did not in fact result from a divine act of salvation, but constituted a profound change in human consciousness, laying the foundation for the idea of freedom that was to be realized through the centuries that followed.

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Croce’s cultural affirmation of Christianity, rather than of Christ, must be understood against the backdrop of his firm rejection of fascism and Nazi barbarism, both of course decidedly anti-Christian. The fact that Croce doesn’t even hint at this connection in his 1942 text and instead praises the civilizational blessings of Christianity in a curiously carefree manner indicates that his concept of history only includes events that contribute to the development of the principle of freedom. Thus, Croce places fascism and National Socialism as footnotes outside a continuous and teleological narrative leading from Jesus to the Risorgimento and finally to the First Republic of 1946. The question of why liberalism failed to prevail and whether some of the necessary preconditions of fascism were in fact immanent to it is not even considered.

This blind spot points to an inherent inconsistency of the liberal belief in Christianity: If the valuable contents of Christianity have entirely migrated into the secular sphere, or conversely, if secular liberalism constitutes the highest stage in a historical development that began with Jesus teaching a morality of freedom, this does not explain why a return to its Christian origins is necessary. It would be, at most, a matter of intellectual honesty to recall the religious roots of modern institutions, but this reminder would lack the urgency with which Hirsi Ali and, in a different way, Croce present it. If, however, as in the case of Hirsi Ali, the insistence on preserving a specifically Christian heritage of the West is motivated by the reference to a crisis in secular Western societies, and if this crisis is not simply to be passed over in favor of a linear conception of progress, one must consider the possibility that something essential was lost with the Enlightenment’s liberation from the religious yoke. Is modernity indeed the bearer of a torch inherited from the Christian Middle Ages, or does it owe itself to a break with tradition, the consequences of which have not been fully reflected upon to this day?3 Anyone who recalls the particular origins of Western universalism would have to confront this question of discontinuity in the process of secularization—even at the risk of jeopardizing cherished liberal certainties. Instead of facilitating the Western self-reassurance Hirsi Ali evidently aims for, this endeavor would then take on the character of self-reflection or even self-doubt.

Unlike Croce, who leaves no doubt that he understands himself as an atheistic advocate of a Christianity measured by human standards, Hirsi Ali, in her own words, experienced existence without any solace from above as unbearable and almost self-destructive, further stating that she has come to believe that the question of the meaning of life can only be answered by turning to God. However, this reference to the personal dimension of her conversion remains vague, and the most interesting aspect of it is what Hirsi Ali does not say: that she believes in the life, death, and resurrection of God’s begotten Son, Jesus Christ. This gap, which marks the text’s close proximity to Croce’s despite its declared intention, became the subject of a minor journalistic controversy in its aftermath. Paradoxically, it was mainly her former comrades from the New Atheism circle who accused Hirsi Ali of not having genuinely converted and of merely instrumentalizing Judeo-Christian “values” as a weapon in a political conflict.4 Meanwhile, Hirsi Ali’s Christian supporters—more humanistic in this regard than the self-proclaimed humanists on the other side—declared that conversion is not a matter of total, overnight transformation but often a process lasting years; they also criticized their secular opponents for their almost inquisitorial zeal to dissect souls.5

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In this dispute over the apparently instrumental character of Hirsi Ali’s conversion, the underlying assumption of her explanation has scarcely been questioned: namely, the assumption that Christianity today actually has the potential to serve as a weapon in the conflict with the mentioned internal and external enemies of the West. In short, is the trust in Christianity as a civilizational force defending the West even justified? The treatment of this question is complicated by the fact that Hirsi Ali remained silent about her newfound denominational affiliation. If a conversion at least to some degree owes itself to political considerations, one would think that the real political-theological condition of the institution one is joining would have to play a decisive role in these considerations. To put the question more succinctly: Which Christianity can today be invoked as a credible force defending the West against external and internal threats? In the following, this question shall be considered by focusing on Lutheran, Catholic, and Evangelical responses to Islamic and Islamist ideologies that operate globally and frequently materialize into concrete violence, the destructive force of which has (again) become painfully apparent following October 7.

Europe’s Churches in Decline?

Invoking the Protestant churches of Western Europe in this context would be delusional. While certainly assuming an avant-garde role, the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD) is not at all alone in diligently striving to align the interpretation of Holy Scripture as closely as possible with the statutes of government-affiliated NGOs. The ever-increasing similarity between the churches and a wide civil society promoting sustainability, social justice, and democratic values is not only politically harmful but also precludes the possibility of an institutionally framed religious reorientation. Of genuine spiritual interest would be precisely those elements of the Christian heritage that cannot easily be made to fit into activist discourses. By occupying and concealing this heritage with dull contemporary buzzwords, official Evangelical Christianity leaves little room in its ranks for a struggle with transcendence mediated through revelation.

This is not a new phenomenon but rather the radicalization of a long-standing tendency within Protestantism. Karl Barth had already succinctly criticized nineteenth-century Protestant theology for having lost sight of its own fundamental questions and problems in its effort to assert itself in the face of modernity. With all the energy put into communicating “through the open doors and windows to the outside,” he wrote, Protestant theology had “hardly any time, love, and desire left for the work to be done inside the house,” while “the air blowing in from outside” was, according to Barth, “not always fresh, but in many cases decidedly foul.”6 Today, the question arises whether the walls of the house are still standing; whether there is still a meaningful distinction to be made between an inner life of Protestant theology and its external environment. The erosion of the autonomy of theology—the same can be said for science and art—is both a result of and a contributor to the pre-totalitarian encroachment of an activist state apparatus on all areas of life. The constant encouragement in churches, as well as in schools and universities, to think freely without regard for authority produces subjects who, precisely because they have not been taught any law to rely on, readily comply with every new regulation.

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Thus, in the crisis of the West, Protestant theology not only is unsuitable as a remedy but is itself involved in the symptomatic processes. This is evident, for example, in the fact that Annette Kurschus, then-chairwoman of the EKD council, declared at the synod in November 2023 that Jews in Germany should “not have the slightest doubt that they can count on the churches,” while in the same breath insisting that we must “resist anti-Muslim resentment at all costs.” She continued: “I have received countless letters following my recent statements on migration, letters that essentially say: ‘You want to let in masses of people who incite against Jews here, shame on you!’ Thus, shameless hatred of Muslims disguises itself as friendship with Israel. In reality, it is pure racism, and our faith compels us to speak out strongly against it.”7

Her statements on migration, to which she refers here, were made at the end of October 2023 in an interview with the FAZ. Among other things, she had said: “Does the capacity for intake have limits? From the perspective of neighborly love, this limit lies where self-abandonment occurs. I believe we are far from reaching this limit.”8 A bit of semantic subtlety is needed to clarify the implications of this statement. Limits, if they are to prevent self-abandonment, must be set long before the point of self-abandonment is reached; however, Kurschus’s statement implies that the limit of intake capacity should coincide with the point of self-abandonment. And indeed, the signs of the times point in this direction: only a few months after Kurschus’s FAZ interview, a Mexican tourist was physically attacked in Munich by a group of six German, Eritrean, Syrian, and Yemeni nationals because he wore a kippah; a woman and a man conversing in Hebrew were spat on, attacked with a chair, and punched in the face by an Arabic-speaking man in a fast-food restaurant in Neukölln, a notorious Berlin district where Islam has long come to dominate everyday street life; Jewish student Lahav Shapira was brutally beaten up by a classmate with Arab origins for having opposed anti-Zionist activism at the Free University of Berlin; and in Zurich, an orthodox Jew was stabbed by a naturalized Tunisian youth who professed allegiance to ISIS in a video. These events likely will not change anything about Kurschus’s assessment, for it is her unwavering “faith” that compels her to see nothing but a racist delusion in the connection between Muslim immigration and the concrete threat to Jews in Western Europe.

When it comes to its stance on migration policy and Islam, the Catholic Church is generally guided by a similar sentiment. In hindsight, the legacy of Pope Benedict—who had warned of political Islam most notably, but not exclusively, in his famous “Regensburg Address”—now appears as a brief interlude in a trend that predates and outlasts him. As early as October 1965, the conciliar declaration Nostra Aetate set the Church’s course for a new attitude toward Islam. Initially planned as a declaration exclusively about the Church’s relationship with Judaism that intended to lay the foundation for overcoming Christian anti-Judaism, it was perceived in a paranoid manner by both Christians and Muslims in the Arab states as a commitment to the State of Israel and an act of favoritism toward the Jews. Vehement protests resulted in a lengthy struggle over the declaration, with the bishops’ conferences of the partly decolonized, partly decolonizing Global South opposing what they described as a one-sidedly Western stance of the Church. In the end, a draft was agreed upon that addressed Judaism within the framework of a broader discussion of the Church’s relations to non-Christian religions, Islam among them. The declaration exemplifies how the Church’s attempt to live up to its self-understanding as “all-encompassing” (kat holon) and its claim to the universality of reason turn into relativism and political recklessness. Most notably, the text states that the Church “rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions”—which, as it refers to all religions worldwide, cannot but be regarded as a papal endorsement of the postmodern “anything goes” mindset. In the section on Islam, then, the declared “esteem” for Muslims is combined with the call to “forget the past” and to strive for “social justice and moral welfare, peace and freedom” for all mankind, thereby indicating the Church’s recent tendency to concretize its emphatic concept of humanity in an ethic of defeatism.9 Pope Francis’s Easter call for a #CeasefireNow in Gaza further illustrates the point: when the Christian ideal of loving one’s enemies is made the standard not only in the moral and spiritual but also in the political sphere, the hope for universal salvation may lead to a reckless denial of reality.

A German View of the Christian Right

While there may be an indeterminate number of church members who regularly shake their heads at the actions of their spiritual leaders, Europe by and large has become accustomed to the Islam-friendly positions of the largest churches. Consequently, there is a significant sense of bewilderment regarding the situation across the Atlantic. Since at least the 2016 presidential election, Evangelicals, who made up a significant voting bloc for Trump, have in Germany become an ideal vehicle for projecting both anti-American and anti-Christian resentment. Little is known in Germany about their history, theological profile, and political influence, but the images of protests in front of abortion clinics are familiar, and there is a consensus that these people pose a threat to democracy in the United States.

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The success of journalist Annika Brockschmidt, who published a bestseller in 2021 with the sensationalist title America’s Holy Warriors: How the Christian Right Endangers Democracy (and followed up in January 2024 with The Arsonists: How Extremists Took Over the Republican Party), is based on this gut feeling widely shared among Germans.10 The tireless emphasis on the “diversity”—that is, the indeterminacy and indiscernibility—of the Christian Right allows the author to absolve herself of the responsibility of coming to terms with actual religious and political developments in the United States. Rather than adopting an analytical approach to issues like racism, misogyny, homophobia, and theocratic political ideas—all tendencies that undeniably exist within Neo-Evangelicalism and the religious right to some degree—Brockschmidt’s book comes across as a collage of unwelcome quotes. The incontestability of a left-liberal normative consensus on pandemic policy, climate, Islam, migration, and gender is silently assumed, and anyone who expresses differing views is portrayed as part of a diffuse yet all-encompassing “Christian nationalist” conspiracy. Whenever her protagonists fail to match the image of the fanatical white supremacist she tries to paint, she takes this not as a challenge to her claims but as evidence for the movement’s aspiration to present a friendly face to the outside world. She then diagnoses a “coded version” of Christian nationalism, supposedly recognizable by the emphasis on “Judeo-Christian values.” According to this logic, Ayaan Hirsi Ali would have already qualified as a “Christian nationalist” with her declaration of her conversion.

Among the accusations Brockschmidt makes against the Christian right, the charge of Islamophobia cannot be missing. Her substantiations, if one chooses to call them that, read, for instance, as follows: “Jerry Falwell called Mohammed a ‘terrorist’ on television in 2002—a statement that caused a diplomatic scandal and even led to riots in India in which five people died.”11 Implicitly suggesting that Falwell is somehow responsible for these deaths, while completely glossing over the bizarre hypersensitivity of the prophet-followers to which this story attests, is clearly absurd. Brockschmidt is not wrong, however, to point out that leading Evangelicals have repeatedly made critical as well as polemical remarks about Islam in recent decades. This should come as no surprise, for they also make up the most uncompromising supporters of the Israeli cause in America. Consider, for example, the unequivocal clarity of the statement of support published on October 11, 2023, and signed by numerous leading figures of American Evangelicalism: “Since the inception of the modern state of Israel in 1948, Israel has faced numerous attacks, incursions, and violations of its national sovereignty. The Jewish people have long endured genocidal attempts to eradicate them and to destroy the Jewish state. These antisemitic, deadly ideologies and terrorist actions must be opposed.”12

These lines merely express what had been more or less unchallenged American common sense for several decades. And yet they deserve special mention at a time when half of all 18- to 24-year-old Americans are in favor of “ending Israel and handing it over to Hamas,” and when support for Israel is declining even among young Republicans.13 In light of these findings, it is crucial to take a sober look at the history and present of Evangelicals as a political force when considering the potential role of Christianity in defending an increasingly fragile West.

Eschatological Zionism and Historical Experience

The roots of Evangelicalism lie in Pietism, Presbyterianism, and Puritanism, as well as the interdenominational Protestant revival movements in the New World since the 1730s, though most of its characteristic features likely emerged only from the late nineteenth century onward.14 At that time, postmillennialism was prevalent among American protestants of all denominations. Focused on Revelation 20, this teaching asserted that Jesus Christ would return only after a thousand years of divine reign on earth. Throughout this time span, the millennium, good would progressively triumph over evil, with the parousia being the ultimate endpoint of this positive development within the secular realm. Because of the optimism at its core, postmillennial eschatology is mostly compatible with Enlightenment liberalism’s progressive view of history.

By contrast, premillennialism, initially less popular, expected Christ’s return and the end times to come about before the establishment of his thousand-year reign, and potentially at any given moment in time. The doctrine originated in the early Church but was rejected by Augustine and lost significance in the Middle Ages before experiencing a revival among Puritans in the seventeenth century. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, dispensationalism, a specific form of premillennial eschatology popularized by the Irishman John Darby, spread increasingly in the United States. Followers of this movement fervently anticipate the moment when Jesus will return and instantly rapture devout Christians along with the dead into the clouds to join the Lord. Nonbelievers, left behind, will then witness the Antichrist’s seven-year reign on earth, culminating in the Battle of Armageddon, in which Christ shall defeat the Antichrist to finally establish his millennial kingdom.

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For many premillennialists, Israel plays a crucial role in this eschatological schema. Darby posited that the return of Jews to the Holy Land would signal the start of the end times, with the Battle of Armageddon eventually occurring on Israeli soil. Evangelical William E. Blackstone, author of the influential 1878 book Jesus Is Coming, significantly contributed to popularizing this doctrine. Learning about the rapid increase in pogroms against Jews in the Russian Empire and the nascent Zionist movement in the 1880s, he convened American Christian and Jewish leaders who in turn issued a resolution in solidarity with Eastern European Jews. In 1891, he addressed the Blackstone Memorial petition to President Harrison, urging the United States to support the return of Palestine to the Jews in response to Russian pogroms. Thus, it was with him that “Christian Zionism,” to which (Neo-)Evangelicals still adhere, became a political force in America for the first time.

The close connection between Evangelicals’ end-time beliefs and their support for Israel is an easy target for ridicule and, as such, often used by anti-Zionists as a tool to delegitimize Israel. The vivid retelling of unfulfilled eschatological predictions is guaranteed to provoke politically charged laughs and sneers. Yet it does not do the matter justice, for it omits important historical context. The rise of Evangelicalism in its current form is closely tied to the experiences of the two world wars. Dispensationalists have embedded their apocalyptic visions in a continuous and often meticulous inquiry into geopolitical developments since at least the 1910s. Their end-time message was grounded in a distinctly anti-German foreign policy stance and gained much of its traction precisely because it appeared increasingly plausible in light of the catastrophes of the twentieth century—while at the same time aiming to alleviate the horrors by integrating them into a divine salvation plan. The relative success of premillennial eschatology can therefore be regarded as indicating a collective unwillingness to confront the unspeakable negative that was the Holocaust. But a similar repressive reflex is also at work when left-leaning Germans abstract from this historical background and treat Evangelical end-time expectations as deranged Yankee delusions.

That being said, it is simplistic to reduce Evangelicals’ support for Israel to their end-time beliefs. Blackstone’s example shows that “Christian Zionism” has always involved other motives, such as moral outrage over the suffering of Russian Jewry. And anyone who has read the aforementioned “Statement of Support” must admit that Evangelicals are indeed capable of justifying their support for Israel in political terms. How else could it be, considering that they succeeded in establishing numerous pro-Israel lobby organizations with close ties to other Zionist groups in America and Israel after World War II? They built on an already existing network. The mainline churches had been advocating for the establishment and survival of the Jewish state since the 1920s. Similar to the New Left, they only began distancing themselves from the Zionist project in the 1960s and today sometimes express openly anti-Israel views.15 It could be argued that this change of heart is the real issue in need of explanation, while the Neo-Evangelicals, increasingly isolated in this stance, merely continue an originally interdenominational American Protestant tradition.

Fundamentalists without a Fundament

On a political level, despite occasional antisemitic remarks from within their ranks, Evangelicals can certainly be considered an objectively anti-antisemitic force. However, the theological substance of their teachings is fundamentally questionable. The self-designation as “fundamentalists,” which conservative Evangelicals adopted during and after World War I, is misleading: their doctrines are not the result of a return to the fundamentals of Christian faith, but rather a creatio ex manipulo—a creation not out of nothing, but from only a handful of connections within Christian tradition. Pivotal influences were Darby’s dispensationalism, with its unique interpretations of the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation, and a specific understanding of biblical infallibility. Guided by the philosophical empiricism of Francis Bacon, premillennialists applied his inductive method to biblical exegesis: the collection and sorting of “hard facts”—i.e., literally interpreted Bible verses—should come first, and only thereafter may a system of general statements be formulated. The fact that Christian fundamentalists would build on a sensualistic epistemology may seem bewildering to outsiders. However, given the fierce anti-Catholicism that characterized the Evangelical movement for many decades, it makes sense when understood as a demarcation from Aristotelianism, scholastic theology, and the dogmatic tradition of the old Church.

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After World War II, the movement’s leaders began to distance themselves from the banner of fundamentalism, under which they had maneuvered themselves into cultural isolation due to their aggressive anti-Darwinist agenda. Now calling themselves Evangelicals, they sought new ways of mobilization. Both a catalyst for and a result of this realignment was the rise of Billy Graham. In September 1949, two days after President Truman announced that the Soviets had built an atomic bomb, the young Baptist preacher gathered his followers in Los Angeles for the first of a series of revival meetings, subsequently touring the states for weeks as a celebrated star. By the mid-1950s, he was so well-known that he was flown to Paris, where Roland Barthes, among others, attended the spectacle. “If God is really speaking through Dr. Graham’s mouth, it must be acknowledged that God is quite stupid,” noted Barthes afterward. “In any case, assuredly, God is no longer a Thomist, He shrinks from logic.” Barthes’s point here is that Graham’s performance broke “with a whole tradition of the sermon, Catholic or Protestant, inherited from ancient culture,” and more specifically, with its “requirement to persuade” through rational discourse. Instead of the logocentric method of preaching, Graham employed “a method of magical transformation,” substituting “suggestion for persuasion: the pressure of the delivery, the systematic eviction of any rational content from the proposition, the grandiloquent designation of the Bible held at arm’s length like the universal can opener of a quack peddler, and above all the absence of warmth, the manifest contempt for others, all these operations belong to the classic material of the music hall hypnotists.”16

With some good will, a publication influential in Evangelical circles from the 1990s can be seen as a belated reply to Barthes. In 1991, theologian and pastor Douglas Wilson published Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning: An Approach to Distinctively Christian Education, significantly contributing to popularizing the idea of a classical Christian education and explicitly criticizing Christian anti-intellectualism.17 The movement, now known as “Classical Education” and supported by a substantial network of private schools and homeschooling parents, aims for a holistic education oriented toward “classics” of the Western canon, and more specifically toward classical antiquity. This is pursued both formally, through a tiered model progressing from grammar to logic to rhetoric, and substantively, engaging with works by Homer, Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, and Plotinus. The future of Classical Education, whose influence extends beyond Evangelical circles, hinges on whether it will genuinely address and try to overcome the specifically Evangelical as well as more broadly modern alienation from this tradition, or whether it will merely adorn itself with the aura of lofty historicity in the culture war against woke ideology and the public education sector.

To the West of Athens and Jerusalem

At first glance, the results of this brief political mapping of Christianity today might seem disheartening for those who share Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conservative impulse. When asked which denomination truly embodies the desire to uphold the “Judeo-Christian tradition” and can “equip us for civilizational war” (to echo Hirsi Ali’s somewhat dramatic phrasing), no positive answer can be given. While the decidedly pro-Israel and pro-Western Neo-Evangelicals cannot credibly be said to represent a tradition extending back to the intellectual roots of the West, Catholic and Protestant clergy of the Old Continent have over recent decades consistently aligned themselves with forces that threaten the further survival of what remains from this tradition.

However, claiming that they betray their own heritage is only half the truth. Christian Europe has, in its two-thousand-year history, been characterized by an unparalleled ability for self-questioning and self-relativization. An early model for this is Herodotus, who, in the fifth century BCE, was the first to aim at a prejudice-free depiction of some cultural practices of non-Greek peoples in his Histories. As noted by Allan Bloom, this proto-ethnological method presupposes the understanding that one’s own customs are not to be taken as an absolute standard. In this sense, the Western universalism of reason goes hand in hand with the willingness to consider the possibility that certain foreign ways of life might be superior to one’s own traditions. It therefore cannot be defended in the same identitarian fashion as a community that is inherently convinced of the superiority of its own particular makeup. For this reason, Western societies are vulnerable in a way that non-Western ones are not. The phenomena that today represent a tendency toward self-dissolution in the churches of Western Europe—excessive sensitivity to the concerns of other cultures, insistence on an abstractly understood human dignity used to justify open-border policies and the appeasement of political Islam, blindness to Europe’s civilizational achievements—are thus not so much a straying from the right path as they are manifestations (or in some instances parodies or perversions) of a problem as old as the West itself.18

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French philosopher Rémi Brague attributes this fundamental difference between Europe, on the one hand, and Islam or China, on the other, to a specifically Roman awareness of cultural “eccentricity.” The uniqueness of Rome—if we take the name not merely as a designation for a historical empire but as a symbol in the same way “Athens” and “Jerusalem” have become symbols—consists in its recognition that the sources of its cultural life lie outside itself. It knows itself to be dependent on origins that are foreign to it and therefore must be consciously and continually reappropriated: Hellenism and Judaism. Christianity, specifically the “Roman” Catholic Church, is defined by Brague as the paradigmatic embodiment of this attitude. Thus, it is not merely a content but the form of Western civilization, which becomes endangered together with it.

It should now be apparent why the response to such danger cannot be a mantra-like invocation of the Christian tradition. This tradition is not an object lying around somewhere and waiting to be taken up to serve a political purpose. It is not readily available and never has been. On the contrary, it is characterized by a specific mode of absence, for it owes itself to a movement of appropriation of foreign and contradictory origins—Greek on one side, Jewish on the other—that is driven by a painful sense of cultural lack: the sense that something is missing and must be searched for in a distant and ambivalent past.19

The various “renaissances” on European soil emerged from such a sense of lack and were characterized by their ability to wrest new perspectives from old texts, shifting or disrupting the existing horizons of meaning. In consequence, they did not immediately lend themselves as armor for “the West” against internal and external threats. Conversely, the politically motivated attempt to bring Greek philosophy, Roman law, scholastic theology, and modern Enlightenment together under a common slogan often obscures the understanding of each individual subject, thereby contributing to the freezing into clichés of the very tradition from which salvation is hoped. Contrary to the implications of Hirsi Ali’s essay, activities aimed at a political defense of the West can never be fully aligned with the rejuvenation of its intellectual substance. The two purposes are obviously intertwined, but they can never be reconciled. While pragmatism in forming alliances and the courage to define enemies are required politically, only the radically open and non-instrumental immersion into forgotten words will show the spiritual way forward. Though she does not fully recognize the complexities and contradictions that come with such an endeavor, Hirsi Ali’s turn to the Christian foundations of the West certainly points in the right direction.

Topics: TPPI Translations • Reflections & Dialogues • Israel Initiative

After completing a degree in philosophy and Judaic studies, with frequent excursions into classical philology, Anna Sutter is currently studying law in Berlin. She is a contributing editor at the magazine casa|blanca – Texte zur falschen Zeit and regularly publishes articles there. Her interests include political philosophy, ideology critique, and theology.

The following article was originally published in German as “Warum Diktaturvergleiche jetzt als verfassungsfeindlich gelten” in Die Welt on May 15, 2025, and it appears here in English translation by permission of the author. Translated by Julius Bielek.

Is it right-wing extremism to compare the Federal Republic of Germany with the GDR or the Nazi regime? That is what the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution [Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV] claims in its report on the AfD.

According to this absurd logic, prominent historians and philosophers would have to be treated as enemies of the constitution. Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s maxim, “We live in the best Germany that has ever existed,” seems to formulate a raison d’état in the view not only of the current government personnel but also of the BfV.

There is no other explanation for the fact that the BfV, in its assessment of the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organization, which has now been suspended but not withdrawn, cites statements as evidence that do not defame parliamentary democracy but rather warn against its transformation into a totalitarian state.

That’s what the BfV report states, as reported by Bild: the AfD “massively denigrates” the German state by “portraying the Federal Republic as a totalitarian system” and by “making comparisons with the GDR or the Nazi regime.” Furthermore, during the coronavirus pandemic, AfD members of parliament had described the Federal Republic as a “dictatorship” and “totalitarian,” with the aim of “undermining trust in the political system as a whole.” Three things are noteworthy about this assessment. First, the BfV seems unable to distinguish between the German state, its “political system,” and the federal government, whose members are temporary administrators of that state and not identical with it. Second, the BfV apparently does not know the difference between a comparison and an equation and misunderstands the diagnosis of totalitarian tendencies within a democracy as an expression of totalitarian sentiment, thus seeking to punish the messenger for being the bearer of bad news. Third, the assessment shows a memory loss that borders on historical revisionism. Because using “comparisons with the GDR or the Nazi regime” to criticize current conditions in Germany should come as no surprise to anyone who doesn’t confuse present-day Germany with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds,” as Steinmeier does.

The fact that the Federal Republic is the successor state to the Third Reich, and that reunified Germany has not simply annulled the history of the GDR in favor of a timeless model democracy but has incorporated it into itself, is not a denigration but rather a statement of fact, as embodied in Angela Merkel’s biography, among other things. It may thus be an exaggeration for people who used to live in the GDR to feel reminded of the East German secret police by Nancy Faeser’s “reporting centers.”‍‍1 But this is not a delegitimization of the Federal Republic of Germany that is legally significant to the BfV; rather, it is an expression of sensitivity to the totalitarian dangers inherent in the German state due to its history. And anyone who remembers from school that National Socialism was not a dictatorship hostile to its own citizens, but was instead supported by the majority of them and therefore described itself as “the true democracy,” is not an enemy of democracy but simply has a better memory than today’s model democrats.

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To call to mind that the Federal Republic of Germany stood in continuity with National Socialist Germany in terms of institutions, personnel, and mentality, and that it therefore regards coming to terms with that past as its historical duty—the whole pathos of learning from history, as is emblematically summarized in the final sentence of Bertolt Brecht’s drama The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (“The womb is still fertile from which this crept”), apparently can no longer be turned critically against the Federal Republic, but only against the AfD, according to the BfV. This party acts as a proxy scapegoat, as the incarnation of a Germany perpetually stuck in the Nazi past, the survival of which “our democracy” can never diagnose in itself but only in its internal enemies.

But the backward-looking2 have never been a force to be reckoned with. Even the neo-Nazis who murdered people in Hoyerswerda and Mölln in the early 1990s in order to bring back the Third Reich were not living in the past, but in the then-present. They embodied not the old but rather the future-oriented ruin, just as National Socialism in its era was a progress-oriented youth movement and not an alliance of old white reactionaries. That is why the most dangerous revenants of National Socialism today are neither D-Mark nostalgists nor “Reich Citizens,”3 but rather the leftist sympathizers of Islamist antisemitism. When the state agencies tasked with protecting the free democratic order today consider “Islamophobia” and persistent references to totalitarian tendencies within democracy to be signs of hostility toward the constitution, this can hardly be interpreted as anything other than an indication that those warning of a shift from democracy to totalitarianism are not, at the very least, entirely mistaken.

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For a long time, examining how and why democratic systems turn into totalitarian ones was one of the most distinguished tasks of political philosophy. From Max Horkheimer’s The Authoritarian State (1940) to Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State (1941) and Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1944) to Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the period during and after the existence of National Socialism was marked by numerous, mutually contradictory attempts to understand how democratically constituted states transform themselves into totalitarian orders.

In the decades of the Cold War and its aftermath, philosophers such as Zygmunt Bauman, André Glucksmann, and Alain Finkielkraut have drawn on this in their examination of the totalitarianisms of the modern age. In contrast, the report on the AfD by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, as well as the various orchestrated civil society mass marches “against the right,” suggests that the analysis of such transitions should be a thing of the past since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, in which there are only flawless democrats or anti-constitutional muckrakers. Such Manichaeism, however, has always been a characteristic of totalitarian thinking.

Topics: TPPI Translations • Reflections & Dialogues

Magnus Klaue is a literary scholar and cultural historian. From 2011 to 2015, he was an editor of the Berlin weekly newspaper Jungle World, and between 2015 and 2020 he was a research associate at the Simon-Dubnow-Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig. He writes regularly for Die Welt and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Since 2024, he is a co-editor of the biannual political magazine casa|blanca.

The following article originally appeared in German as “‘Be Kind’: Selbstbestimmung – ein Dekret für raue Zeiten” in casa|blanca 1/2024. Translated by David Appleson.

I

One of the cult books of the left-leaning, self-regarding academic elite—who are not the least bit interested in the world’s misery, but instead constantly seek to maintain a critical distance from circumstances—is The Will to Knowledge, the first volume of Michel Foucault’s seminal, unfinished work The History of Sexuality. Published in German translation in 1977, the philosopher’s reflections on the supposed influence of decentralized forms of power in Western societies took the humanities and social sciences by storm because they fulfilled the desire of a university-educated readership to feel radical, while actually encouraging them to maintain a know-it-all attitude that merely skirts the status quo.

In view of the transgender debates of recent years, it is worth revisiting this work. Foucault famously was interested in the proliferation of gender categories in the last third of the nineteenth century, when, in the wake of the considerable loss of importance of the church as a social regulatory authority and the simultaneous boom in the natural sciences and human medicine, the abnormal facets of the bourgeoisie [Bürgertum] and the lower classes attracted increased interest. This era saw, for example, the influential publications of Cesare Lombroso, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Havelock Ellis, as well as the early works of Magnus Hirschfeld and Sigmund Freud.

The weighty objection to Foucault is that while he was interested in “The Incitement to Discourse,”1 which he attributed to an invisible “power” pervading all areas of life, he was not interested in the practical aspects of the alleviation of suffering, which were central in some writings of that era—be they as a therapeutic measure or as a burgeoning political idea of emancipation. As is well known, psychoanalysis, whose scientific genesis also dates from this period, set out not to coerce or to subject socially disgraced individuals to state control, but to articulate what had been repressed and thus to find a language for a desire that would enable the individual to find the path from distressing symptoms to self-knowledge. Foucault was unable to see much more in such social reform efforts than a secular extension of pastoral interaction, which he tried to identify in contemporary literature.2

What Foucauldians have not yet grasped is that The Will to Knowledge, as a bizarrely overrated diagnosis of an aspect of the Western world—in particular, its changing understanding of sexuality3—is also an unintentional mirror of their own milieu, which continues to have an impact to this day. Understood descriptively, the “discursive ferment”4 around sex and desire that Foucault identified includes patterns used by its followers themselves, as their blindness consists in their inability to reflect on the social diversification measures from above, which they actively support. Although the talk of an enforced “multiplication of disparate sexualities” and of an “imperialism that compels everyone to transform their sexuality into a perpetual discourse”5 should make one sit up and take notice, Foucault’s writing is always interpreted as if what it describes only meant the workings of discursive powers that are actually remote from the subject, but never one’s own actions. “The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us”6—the formulation reads like a vivid summary of the trend cultivated in progressive circles to advertise one’s preferred pronouns on all possible professional and private occasions in order to pay attention to who is actually participating in the new social game called “he/him” or “she/her,” and who is not, and with this gesture pretending to show solidarity with transgendered people. The claim that “we” are witnessing a “visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities”7 is confirmed by any look at the cultural production of the last two decades, but even more so on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. In this context, one passage from The Will to Knowledge is well worth quoting, one that, despite its obvious relevance for the twenty-first century, is widely neglected:

More than the old taboos, this form of power demanded constant, attentive, and curious presences for its exercise; it presupposed proximities; it proceeded through examination and insistent observation; it required an exchange of discourses, through questions that extorted admissions, and confidences that went beyond the questions that were asked. . . . The medicalization of the sexually peculiar was both the effect and the instrument of this.8

This “medicalization of the sexually peculiar” that Foucault once identified is possibly even more potent today than it was back then, and it is manifested in the form of the hastily applied label “trans” to female adolescents who are obviously often lesbian and suffer from autism, whose number has increased dramatically over the past twenty years (a development that cannot be explained statistically), and who were initially met with the “affirmative approach.” The result was and is the administration of cross-sex hormones, which are seen as a path to sex-assignment surgeries, and puberty blockers, whose medical consequences can be disastrous for the rest of one’s life.9 It is precisely this circumstance that has led numerous Western states that wanted to set a progressive example to now make a radical turnaround regarding the chemical “treatment” of alleged transgender adolescents—including the United Kingdom, where the “affirmative approach” has long been practiced unhindered at the Tavistock Clinic in London.

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“Nineteenth-century ‘bourgeois’ society—and it is doubtless still with us—was a society of blatant and fragmented perversion,”10 wrote Foucault, and the majority of his disciples are unable to think beyond this point. For the post-bourgeois constitution of the present is one in which the most flourishing perversions are once again nurtured by science, which through offers of alleged medical support directly benefits financially, while academically marketed titles such as Queere Theorien zur Einführung [Queer Theories: An Introduction], by Mike Laufenberg, inform us with a rebellious gesture that societies produce “the knowledge and possibilities by which fundamental principles of their order—such as the assumption of a biologically anchored actual gender—can be plunged into a crisis.”11 What cannot be explained to Foucauldians—who from the very beginning have profited from the comfortable benefits of bourgeois society, which they believe they have profoundly penetrated and still want to plunge “into a crisis” that in reality has long been the status quo—is the current transition to a social order that is permeated not by finely honed “power techniques” but rather by the primitivism of the law of the strongest, whose return is heralded by the acts of violence against sexual and gender minorities.

II

One of the many bleak German-language documents that, without protective academic packaging, would hardly pass muster as an analytical foray into the “subject” today is Das Selbstbestimmungsgesetz [The Self-Determination Law], a treatise by Annette and Waldemar Vanagas published in 2023.12 The academic-activist duo, whose claims are unsurprisingly rooted in the usual ideological background of queer theory—the subtitle of the book is “On the Discourses of Transgender and Identity Politics”13—bases most of its argument on Foucault. Consequently, they are less interested in transgenderism as such—which is consistently and decidedly not understood as transsexuality—than in a supposedly meaningful and reality-shaping discursive power.

Alongside the slanderous fixation on disfavored unpopular migrant women authors who are not stupefied by identity politics, a degradation that is by now well known because of university departments that are supposedly sensitive to racism,14 as well as on Till Randolf Amelung, who is famous for his nuanced statements about trans issues and his sharp criticism of trans activism, the reference to the professional anti-Zionist Jasbir Puar vividly demonstrates how a scientific publication with a “diverse” agenda contributes to the normalization of antisemitism in Germany.

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So it is that we learn from Vanagas and Vanagas that the supposed phenomenon behind the term “homonationalism,” coined by this academically coddled apologist for terrorism,15 is “characterized by the construct of the uncivilized, intolerant-homophobic, Muslim-migrated Other, from which homosexual interests must be protected.”16 The rhetorical smokescreen typical of conspiracy theory circles, which hints at ominous “interests” without explaining them, is less surprising than the detail that Vanagas and Vanagas are already suspicious when homosexual people strive for security guaranteed by civil rights—but, strangely, not when transgender individuals claim the same as a political goal. There is a rather mundane reason for this: in the authors’ simplistic worldview, homosexuality, in the tradition of Judith Butler, is a “stabilizing moment” in the “heteronormative” order,17 ergo regression; “trans,” on the other hand, is transgression, with which the last remnants of the bourgeois world can be expelled.

The fact that this security will never exist where Sharia practices have been introduced is something that Vanagas and Vanagas cannot comprehend because they obviously do not know what they are. Nor do they understand that the homosexual emancipation story in the West, despite all legal achievements and social liberalizations, was never completed but was preliminary. This is evident first and foremost from those acts of violence that are never of concern to queer theory adherents. The most striking examples are the murder attempt in Dresden in October 2020, long since erased from public consciousness, in which an “uncivilized, intolerant, homophobic” Muslim, the alleged refugee Abdullah Al Haj Hasan, stabbed gay man Thomas L. and seriously injured his partner Oliver L., as well as the fatal punch at Münster Pride 2022, where Nuradi A., a Muslim who, according to what is yet known, is also an “uncivilized, intolerant, homophobic” man and an alleged refugee, first harassed lesbians and then punched twenty-six-year-old trans man Malte C. to the ground, with fatal consequences.18 In other police reports, one has to read between the lines, as in the case of the assault of a twenty-seven-year-old in Berlin in early 2024 by “eight men,”19 or when five “men,”20 or four “men,”21 attacked a gender-nonconforming individual, or when there is talk of “five teenagers and young men”22 who in a pack exhibited the same behavior. The fact that in their lack of empathy in this regard completely middling academics like Vanagas and Vanagas—whose “research” is not based on police documents but on Foucault—do not dwell on such issues is because they have no interest in pursuing the question of whether “power” is not always decentralized but instead, contrary to the founder’s articles of faith, is sometimes quite tangible. Despite all the now well-known cases of harassment and humiliation, smear campaigns and signature lists, with which thousands of agitators committed to “diversity” occasionally stir up others against individual dissenters, the authors unabashedly describe vulgar bullying as “intervention in racist, transphobic, Islamophobic, etc., interactions,” which “can be as valuable as it is nerve-racking as a social learning process”23—valuable, that is, for conformist perpetrators, whose socially accepted rage comes at the expense of the victims’ jobs and mental health.

All of this—to be found in an academic publication with supposedly gender-sensitive concerns and marketed as a contribution to a fairer society, in which everyone should somehow live “self-determined”—is by no means an exception. Anyone who wants to read more such nonsense should take a look at any issue of the academic journal Transgender Quarterly, published by Duke University Press. Likewise, there is the book Females, published in German translation by Merve in 2021, a volume adorned with the absurd but earnest subtitle Alle sind weiblich [Everyone Is Female]. New York-based author Andrea Long Chu, who candidly reveals that it was so-called “sissy porn” that made her transition from male to female, captures the transactivist state of affairs: “Pornography is what it feels like when you think you have an object, but really the object has you. It is therefore a quintessential expression of femaleness.”24

III

The debate about the German Self-Determination Act [which came into effect on November 1, 2024—ed.25] is incomprehensible without appreciating this logic, which has taken hold of the entire West. The achievements of the second women’s movement are supposed to be denigrated, which is why it’s not surprising that it is feminists who have said everything there is to know about this change in the law, and it was detransitioners—young women who have been told by everyone that they were actually men because of their nonconforming behavior—who, at enormous psychological and physical cost, have helped to correct the myth that the new “self” that is to be created here can never be a fallacy or deception.26 Judith Butler’s subversively intoned speech about how gender attributes and associated stereotypes—“men are like that” or “women are like that”—could be parodied with a few gestures, and thus the whole gender construct could be overturned, is no longer believed today. “Genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived,” she states toward the end of Gender Trouble. “As credible bearers of those attributes, however, genders can also be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible.”‍27 Butler’s ongoing popularity merely proves the inconsistency of such theories, especially since the clerical staff behind them are now fighting for the opposite. The aim is to give legal credibility to something everyone knows is a fiction, but which is to be declared universally valid, with incredible state intrusiveness, in a bureaucratic act that pretends to be a gesture of debureaucratization in the service of dignity and humanity. Because: “Whoever says culture also says administration, whether they want to or not.”28 For precisely this reason, the talk of the cultural—a.k.a. social—gender and its “subversion” did in fact not lead to a social revolution but to the state administration that is today called diversity and, in the name of the best of intentions, carries out the identitarian and anti-bourgeois parceling out of society.

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That the Self-Determination Act is not simply a mere legal reform but a political disruption, whose practical and theoretical consequences extend far beyond the legislative arena, is already evident in Ferda Ataman’s response to the familiar feminist objections that gender self-definition is an invitation for men of sinister motive to make themselves at home wherever they are not concerned: “We have mostly unisex saunas in Germany. No man has to change his gender entry to see a naked woman in Germany”—thus the Federal Commissioner for Anti-Discrimination, in an apparently hapless statement.29 Federal Family Minister Lisa Paus claimed to have recognized, from the “vehemence of the debate,”

how difficult it still is for some in our society to accept that there are people who locate themselves outside the binary gender order. Trans, intersex, and non-binary people have existed for millennia. It was just a big taboo, usually with criminal consequences, if people wanted to express that in their lives.30

Likewise, a commentary for Die Zeit declared: “The horror scenario that trans women would threaten women’s shelters has been used for decades.”31 Too bad that the cases of abuse of such opportunities, not by trans women but by men who, without any signs of transition, present themselves as members of the female sex for their own advantage, have meanwhile been thoroughly documented. International headlines were made in 2024 when around a dozen Spanish soldiers legally declared themselves to be women to enjoy the professional and monetary benefits of legal gender change. One of them was quoted as saying: “On the outside I feel like a heterosexual man, but on the inside I am a lesbian. And it is the latter that counts.”32

IV

It was the trans-activist trick of disguising one’s own political-activist engagement as the last civil rights struggle that helped it to its social success by instrumentalizing the actual suffering of a quantitatively tiny social group and staging it as a struggle against the evil looming on the political horizon. Self-determination—the idea of living in an emancipated way, which presupposes the freedom of everyone else, at least in theory—no longer echoes in the term “self-determination law” as the will to eliminate social constraints, but is regarded as a state matter, which grotesquely counteracts the proclaimed concern. The legal modification can’t hide the fact that the “self” in “self-determination” can also mean imagining something and having the conceit confirmed by the state—being “recognized.” In the best case, this means overdetermining the longing for a different gender; in the more likely case, it opens the floodgates to all kinds of aberrations and abuse.

The contrast to the 1970s, when the New Left, in its confrontation with the second women’s movement, realized that breaking out of social roles also meant thinking beyond the gender status quo, could not be greater. Even the errors of that era look harmless in comparison with the present, a time when “gender identity” is suddenly said to be innate. The dull glow of the utopian that emanated, for example, from a 1979 issue of Ästhetik und Kommunikation in which such ideas of gender emancipation were at least discussed in terms of competing ideas—something that would be completely unthinkable in the journals of today’s university subjects ending in “studies”—was also due to a notion rejected by many people even then: a matriarchy whose traces were said to have been historically blurred by the triumph of the fathers, or a concept of androgyny as the driving force behind cultural utopia.33 It is even considered an achievement that in the twenty-first century, hardly anyone is described in these terms: no one calls themselves androgynous because this term assumes two genders, the respective presentation of which is deliberately blurred, and also, conversely, out of false and premature respect for all the new “gender identities” to come. In queer theory circles, the sociopolitical eradication of reflection on bisexuality is considered a huge step forward because, as the supposedly brilliant objection goes, there aren’t two sexes, and thus no theory of bisexuality34 can exist. Sexual dualism is a projection; many genders are the reality, especially those generated linguistically—and those who say otherwise are inhumane.

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Meanwhile, the proliferation of supposedly “diverse” gender categories actually recreates what it claims to reject. They all somehow mean something similar, namely, the stated deviation from a norm that attempts to shape and restrict every life plan, but whose real effects are never empirically shown and which, needless to say, is criticized in blatant ignorance of tangible violent acts aimed toward Islamist goals.

Ultimately, however, the ideas of identity politics amount to no more than the distinction between “cis” and “trans”—and, thus, to precisely the binary logic that they so fiercely oppose. Aaron Lahl has pointed out that this is a revival under a different guise of the authoritarian idea of a rigid order: “Those who desire queerly desire well.”35

In Julia Kristeva’s 1983 essay Tales of Love, published in France and, six years later, in German translation, some thoughts can be found that today, in sexually “diverse” times, would never pass the trend-conscious editing of an academic series.36 The psychoanalyst, linguist, and former editor of Tel Quel, who grew up in Stalinist Bulgaria in the 1950s and 1960s—and whose atheistic defense of Christianity and extremely sharp comments on the mischief of Islam stand in stark contrast to everything that traditional German academics have produced based on simplistic notions of the Enemy and racist headscarf propaganda37—is devoted to the treatment of people with narcissistic disorders who seek attention through exaggerated self-presentation, but who at the same time mystically overstate this staged undermining of the gender order:

No matter how endless the analysis, it always comes to an end—it is possible to bring it to an end—when the analysand chooses one sex for himself. The androgyne, a fixated hystero-paranoid, senses it and remains on his guard. Unless he meets a Jungian analyst, with whom he can trade stories of archetypes, the androgyne fears the speech that differentiates, cuts off, identifies. His love chatter is a panicky flight away from the joys and discontents of sexualized love. Neither tragical nor comical, the androgyne is outside of time; hence he is timeless, the vanishing point of our distracted anxieties, our incompleteness, needs, desires for an other. . . . Absorption of the feminine by man, veiling the feminine in woman, androgyneity settles its accounts with femininity—the androgyne is a phallus disguised as a woman; not knowing the difference, he is the slightest masquerade of a liquidation of femininity.38

In Kristeva’s writings, what Butler later termed “parody” with a revolutionary impetus has long been understood as a symptom of a misogynistic urge, which has now reached a preliminary climax in the discourse of the fluid human being with endlessly circulating desire, leaving no area of society untouched. In fact, the objectifying talk of “gender categories,” which has found its way from university seminars into politics, shows similarities with Jung’s thinking. And not only that: Kristeva’s side blow at “archetypes,” in which she rightly recognized the mythologization of the social, contains a core that points far beyond the 1980s and is validated in the present, in which even the most banal thought is used for market-oriented identitarian self-aggrandizement. These include, for example, the type of man who doubts his masculinity, for whom the distinction between so-called “alpha,” “beta,” “delta,” and “sigma” men is the most important thing of all—not least because, in addition to supposed clarity about one’s own role, it promises a remnant of masculinity that reacts to the brutalization on the local streets and thus promotes the parceling out of society. The fact that this reflects the genderized, emotion-driven corporate culture of left-leaning companies, where, as in the well-known case of Facebook, more than fifty “gender identities” are offered, indicates the extent of narcissistic gratification drawn from this thinking and acting.

“Narcissism is the curse of the bourgeois world,” Elisabeth Lenk once remarked. “Not only is every individual drilled here to become their own object, to control themselves; the whole of society is narcissistic.”39 The hyper-narcissism of the post-bourgeois society is the legacy of this curse. Without social media, the popularity of even the craziest “gender identities” among adolescents would be inexplicable. In Vanagas and Vanagas, a particularly revealing remark can be found in this regard, because communication channels used by millions and millions of people worldwide now stream out an insulting refusal to serve an opinion monopoly: if “cis-feminist actors have recently begun to dominate Twitter and other social networks, this suggests a takeover of previously queer-feminist strategies.”40

V

In the matter of diversity, participation is a matter of honor. “Be kind” is the associated motto, which has the philosophical caliber of a hideous vinyl wall decal, a “wall tattoo,” but has in reality become a physical branding of the self. Above all, however, it has become an imperative that suggests to the main victims of this trend, women, in a progressive way, what centuries of conditioning in family and society had instilled in them: complaisance and obedience. As is so often the case with “diverse” concerns, this formulation, which comes across as a gentle reminder, is also imbued with aggressive pathos. Being obtrusively nice in an era when social life is becoming increasingly brutalized—and when the refusal to comply with the virtue-signaling culture of “diversity” immediately results in sanctions—is equivalent to capitulating to the current conditions. It means greeting not only the grossest mistakes and transgressions, but even the most shameless misogynists, with a smile.

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This is followed by another repulsive dimension of the twisting of the word “self-determination,” because the “m/f/d” [male/female/diverse] abbreviation, which appears in an increasing number of public announcements and promotions, will never bother those for whom some social interaction with gender and sexual minorities would actually be beneficial. It is directed exclusively against those who have still experienced remnants of bourgeois socialization, and they are called upon to bow to the new demands in order to institutionalize a further level of control that exposes everyone to each other. The whole diversity hype arose from the knowledge that the public social conflict zones—which, as an evening walk through any German city center and almost every use of the regional train reveals, are permanent—do not behave in opposition, but in complement, to the talk of “diversity.” It is therefore worth looking up what “self-determination” also means elsewhere, albeit still under the aegis of diversity. In the report Muslimfeindlichkeit – Eine deutsche Bilanz [Muslimophobia: A German Balance Sheet], published in 2023 by the “Independent Expert Group on Muslimophobia” and issued by the Federal Ministry of the Interior and for Homeland Affairs, the term appears as follows: “It should be noted that the general ban on the hijab restricts the right to self-determination and freedom of religion of its wearers and therefore appears disproportionate.”41

To understand what is behind the push for intrusive requests to be nice, it is again worth looking back to the 1970s. In 1975, a dozen female authors published the anthology Mädchenbuch auch für Jungen [Girls’ Book, for Boys Too], which was aimed at young female readers. It contained an article by Elfriede Jelinek entitled “A Call to Unfriendliness,” which formulated the exact opposite of the “be kind” drivel of today. The writer called on boys to protect not the “seemingly helpless” girls but rather the “strong and independent,” in order not only to appreciate their self-fulfillment but also to actively support them as “people among other people.”42 However, in sexually “diverse” times, the strong and independent girl runs the risk of being mistaken for a boy by those around her.

Thus, “self-determination” means neither autonomy and emancipation nor protection from violence, but a decree that overrides the obvious to prepare for rough times that are likely to become only more uncertain and brutal. For what is the talk of “Gayropa,” which is popular in Russia, supposed to be if not the post-Soviet counterpart to the anti-Western tirades behind crazy postulates like “homonationalism” by Jasbir Puar? The “Querfront” [“cross-front,” the Weimar-era alliance between the far right and far left—ed.], which, among others, Vanagas and Vanagas defamatorily ascribe to dissidents,43 has long been lived within their own milieu, subsidized by the state, and sold to the general public as science. The goal is well known: the West is to die, and with it the “binary gender order” that is considered its essence. The adepts of Foucault and Butler know what they are working on. What they don’t know is that they, too, will have to pay the price when their work one day is done.

Vojin Saša Vukadinović is a historian. He has, among other books, edited several anthologies on the past and present of antisemitism, racism, and migration, and has published scholarly articles on political violence, the New Social Movements of the 1970s, identity politics, and theoretical matters.

Topics: TPPI Translations • Reflections & Dialogues

Hubertus Knabe is a German historian who has written extensively about Communist East Germany (GDR) and the character of its dictatorship. In addition to his books and articles, he contributes online commentary in his E-Letter. This text is a translation of his E-Letter 160.

The short essay provides a critical evaluation of the current German discussion around the status of May 8, the date of Germany’s formal surrender in 1945, what became known in the United States as Victory in Europe Day (V-E Day). How should this momentous date be commemorated? How has its status changed over time? These are questions about memory but also about important political questions of the present, and not only in Germany.

Knabe traces the divergent interpretations of May 8 in East and West Germany. In the Communist East, the date was quickly assimilated into a partisan ideological narrative, according to which the Soviet Red Army “liberated” Germany—liberated rather than defeated. That claim of liberation served to celebrate the dominant role of Russia in the countries that would end up trapped behind the Iron Curtain. It also supported the fiction that Communist East Germany represented an authentic expression of an indigenous “anti-fascist” movement. As Knabe points out, all that was false: as it fought its way across Europe, the Soviet military leadership never talked about freeing Germany—its expressed goal was to crush its army and to destroy the Nazi regime. Nor did most Germans alive at the end of the war experience May 8 as a liberation: the Allies’ victory was an unambiguous defeat for the German state, to which most Germans remained loyal until the end. The exceptions for whom May 8 genuinely brought liberation were groups like Jews and others who had survived the camps or in hiding or foreign workers who had been enslaved by the Nazis.

Knabe also traces the transformation of May 8 initially in West Germany and, after 1989, into the self-understanding of unified Germany. While the ethos of the early decades in the West had none of the “liberation” rhetoric typical of the East, it gained ground in the discussions in 2025, the eightieth anniversary. To explain this shift—from May 8 as defeat to May 8 as liberation—one might point to the fading of any immediate historical memory of the end of the war, which had not been understood as liberation by most of those who lived through it. Alternatively, one might attribute this shift in interpretation of the date to the influence of politicians or activists from the former East, now shaping the cultural hegemony in the Berlin republic. That hypothesis of a GDR or post-GDR factor driving culture in unified German is an ongoing topic for Knabe. In any case, one could anticipate a competition between two alternative explanations of the cultural shift from a narrative of defeat to a narrative of liberation: it can be viewed as an endogenous development within (West) German culture or alternatively as the result of exogenous influence from the former East. Historians of Germany can work that through.

All of this is important for students of German history. Yet Knabe’s E-Letter also has several resonances of wider import, beyond Germany, with regard to the character of cultural developments across the developed world. Germany is of course a particular case with its distinctive history and experience of modernization, its “Sonderweg.” Yet Germany is also a modern Western democracy, where cultural and political developments can shed light on what is transpiring elsewhere in Europe or the United States. What has been happening in Germany in terms of cultural tendencies is not only German.

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First and perhaps most evidently, Knabe’s E-Letter points to the importance of looking with skepticism at the phenomenon of those protest movements, including in the United States, that call themselves “antifa.” What is the meaning of that appellation? Of course, the several fascist dictatorships—and in this context, that includes the Nazi regime as well as Mussolini’s Italy and others—faced politically heterogeneous opposition in the pre-war period from anarchists, socialists, and democrats, and not at all only from Communists. In fact, some Communists found themselves compelled to repress their own antifascism during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939–41 (Communists are not reliably antifascist). Today those historical fascist dictatorships are long gone, but they continue to deserve retrospective condemnation and criticism. In that sense, antifascism is an unquestionably appropriate stance.

Yet the validity of antifascist critique has been tarnished because the discourse of “antifascism” became the hegemonic ideology in the Soviet-dominated Communist movements, especially but not only in East Germany. The heterogeneous antifascism of the pre-war era faced extensive repression by Communists during and after the war. In other words, “antifascism” is not only an abstract name for opposition to Hitler and Mussolini; it also became the specific legitimating ideology of Communist dictatorships. Soviet Russian imperialism in Central Europe masqueraded as an antifascism that claimed to have offered “liberation,” but in fact crushed popular revolts: 1953 in East Germany, 1956 in Hungary, 1968 in Czechoslovakia. Dissidents were imprisoned or executed in the name of “antifascism.” In the same vein, the Berlin Wall was labeled the “antifascist protective wall.” The rhetoric of “antifascism” historically was used repeatedly to justify oppression.

To what extent do contemporary “antifa” movements embrace that repressive legacy? Are they historically and politically aware of the implications of the rhetoric of “antifascism” in dictatorships, or are they simply ignorant of the past? To answer that question would require extensive empirical research, as well as an evaluation of the shifting semantics around the term. In general, however, in much of the Western left there has not yet been a sincere reckoning with the experience of Communism in Central Europe. In Germany, the Left Party and its twin, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, act to maintain positive memories of East German socialism.

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Part of the complications around May 8 and antifascism has to do with the historical abandonment of the anti-totalitarian consensus of the Cold War, which once condemned both Nazis and Communists: both extremes on right and left used to be deemed dangerous. In the meantime, a new stance has developed, especially in intellectual and academic circles, which is hostile to Nazis and fascists but increasingly tolerant toward Communists, past and present. For them Nazism represents, understandably enough, absolute evil, but Communism is valued as a good idea that was perhaps just poorly implemented. Why not try it again?

This transformed political perspective, with its opening to the radical left, becomes even murkier when antisemitism is factored in. “Antifa” draws its aura of heroism from its animosity to Nazis, the perpetrators of the Shoah. But the Communism, of which many—but not all—of today’s antifa adherents are fond, pursued its own Jew-hatred in the form of Soviet anti-Zionism. Moreover, when antifa demonstrates for the destruction of Israel, it operates in a direct continuity with Nazi hostility to Jews, including Jews who had settled in the British Mandate. The Nazi source of anti-Zionism is embodied in the person of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin el-Husseini, the founder of Palestinian anti-Zionism who consorted with Hitler and spent World War II broadcasting antisemitic propaganda from Berlin. Antifa claims, in other words, to be anti-Nazi even as it advocates Nazi policy. The ideological tangle here is sufficiently confusing to warrant caution toward the hopelessly tainted lexicon of “antifascism.”

To regret the abandonment of the anti-totalitarian consensus that condemned both Nazism and Stalinism does not at all mean that they were identical or equivalent. Both forms of totalitarian rule committed massive crimes, but the two regimes displayed empirical differences. Exterminationist antisemitism was central to Nazism, leading to the Shoah. The deaths in gulags and the Ukrainian famine, the Holodomor, were immense. It is obscene to enter any discourse in order to minimize either catastrophe. Suffering cannot be justified with a claim that someone else suffered more. Yet one can observe just such efforts from opposite ends of the political spectrum to diminish the Holocaust. Ernst Nolte famously treated the Holocaust as a response to the Bolshevik terror two decades earlier; it had, so he suggests, no significance of its own, it was merely a secondary effect. More recently, postcolonial rhetoric finds a perverse pleasure in declaring the deaths in the Shoah trivial compared to the violence of colonialism. It remains to be seen whether postcolonialism really cares about the victims of colonialism or whether it is fundamentally nothing more than the current metamorphosis of antisemitism. Neither the Noltean right nor this postcolonial left treats the genocide of European Jewry as anything except a topic to denigrate through a competition in victimhood.

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Second, among the wider implications of Knabe’s text is precisely that victimhood has an appeal. The narrative around May 8 as a moment of liberation requires that Germany be viewed as having been the first victim of the Nazis. In other words, Germany must be understood as a victim in order to claim to have experienced “liberation” when the Nazis surrendered. If Germany had not been a victim, then the liberation claim makes no sense. This claim that Germany was Hitler’s first victim (and not largely a willing participant) is itself an obvious plagiarism of the founding myth of the Austrian Second Republic, according to which the annexation of Austria, the 1938 Anschluss, was Hitler’s first conquest and therefore the first act of victimization. The interesting point here is not the competition over priority—who was first, Germany or Austria—but rather the bizarre phenomenon that there is a cultural advantage declaring oneself a victim. In the German—and Austrian—contexts, inventing oneself retroactively as a victim serves the purpose of exculpation: if one was a victim, then one was never really guilty. However, the pursuit of victim identity is not just a German or Austrian monopoly; it has a wider appeal that goes well beyond Knabe’s analysis. Why is it profitable to be a victim? Why do people want to be losers?

Especially in the course of the final third of the twentieth century, a cultural shift took place across the West in which successful claims of victim status began to yield definite benefits. Such benefits could be material, in the form of positive discrimination or affirmative action. Alternatively, victimhood could bring a sort of cultural capital: we have entered a world in which it is better to be a victim than a perpetrator, better to be oppressed than an oppressor, and ultimately better to fail than to succeed, since all success is suspect and heroism consequently shunned.

Hypothetically this shift toward a victim cult might be attributed to a logic of egalitarianism that treats any inequality as evidence of exploitation rather than as a consequence of differential accomplishments or even just random luck. Defining oneself as unfairly disadvantaged maximizes the credibility of one’s claims for compensation. Victim-claiming is for grifters. For Germany as victim, the result is an evasion of guilt, but that may be a unique constellation. More broadly in advanced societies, the long-term impact of prioritizing victimhood will have other consequences, including a general suppression of merit, a reduced capacity for innovation, and failed problem-solving. A society in which merit is shunned will not be able to generate success. It will be hostile to signs of distinction, quality, and accomplishment. Decline becomes inevitable for society, even if for the individual the victim status brings advantages. Losers have their own will to power.

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There is a third implication of the German embrace of “liberation” as the definition of May 8, one that is somewhat contradictory to the victimization strategy just discussed. As advantageous as it may be to claim to be a victim, there is simultaneously an indisputable appeal to reach a happy end in any narrative. That appeal is all the stronger if one can imagine oneself on the side of the victors. One way or another, a will to self-preservation seeks out opportunities for success and positive self-perception. To be sure, such a positive self-perception might in some cases just be delusional, but more generally it is part of a legitimate instinct of survival. For an individual, this survival is a matter of maturity and autonomy; for a nation, it points toward sovereignty and self-determination.

From this political point of view, the German discourse of antifascism and liberation turns out to have been particularly false. In the GDR, the narrative of liberation only served to justify the Russian occupation, and so much so that it was only with the Gorbachev reforms, decisions taken in Moscow and not in Berlin, that East Germans could begin to announce their own popular sovereignty: “wir sind das Volk.” For four decades, from 1949 to 1989, liberation in East Germany meant the lack of freedom, both for individuals and for the state.

Meanwhile the discourse of liberation in West Germany ironically only gained ground—as Knabe shows—after real sovereignty shifted away from the Allied forces to the European Union. This liberation too was ideological, if not so blatantly as during the GDR. Popular sovereignty as expressed in the Bundestag is limited by bureaucratic preferences in Brussels. That is arguably the latest chapter in the specific German history of a fraught relationship to national identity.

Yet on this matter, too, the problem is not only German, especially at this moment in world history. At stake more generally is the changing status of sovereignty. The post–World War II arrangement in which most nations, certainly in Europe, were subordinated to respective blocs, West and East, gave way to the post-1989 triumph of globalization, with extensive integration into a world market and the priority of international organizations, most prominently the United Nations. National identity and sovereignty were shunned, and especially so through the primacy of the European Union. Suddenly however the ground has shifted. That era of globalization and a “rules-based international order” appears to be coming to an end through processes of deglobalization, the erosion of international organizations, and the restructuring of international trade. A politics of transactions is replacing the primacy of deontological values. One result is the revitalization of the concepts of nation, national interest, and sovereignty, no longer disdained as “nationalistic” in an exclusively pejorative sense. Trumpism is one driver of this shift, but so are great power competition and the rise of right-wing parties in many parts of Europe. It remains an open question if a sovereigntist agenda in the countries of Europe, and not only in Germany, can successfully renegotiate the nature of the transatlantic alliance in the face of the Trump administration. Knabe’s essay is specifically about a history of political illusions in Germany—East, West, and unified. However, the questions it raises for the future concerning liberation and national sovereignty have much wider significance for the future of the West.

Topics: TPPI Translations • Reflections & Dialogues

Russell A. Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he directs the Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World. He previously served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State and as a Commissioner on the Commission on Unalienable Rights. He is currently a member of the National Humanities Council. He is the Editor Emeritus of Telos and President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.

These days, the Federal Republic of Germany is commemorating the end of the war eighty years ago. Politicians and the media are giving the impression that Germany too was one of the victims of National Socialism. This turns history on its head.

“The longer the Third Reich is dead, the stronger the resistance against Hitler and his ilk becomes.” This quote from journalist Johannes Gross comes to mind when one sees how Germany is commemorating the end of World War II eighty years ago. Following a series of commemorative events, the Bundestag also convened for a ceremony on May 8. Berlin even approved an additional public holiday, and a week of events with over one hundred activities took place around “Liberation Day.” One might think that Hitler’s first victim was Germany.

The exuberant commemoration stands in stark contrast to historical reality. None of the Allies had any intention of liberating the Germans in 1945. Their sole aim was to defeat them—completely—so that they would surrender unconditionally. “Now we stand before the cave from which the fascist aggressors attacked us,” Soviet Marshal Chernyakhovsky ordered his soldiers on January 12, 1945, before marching into Germany. “We will not stop until we have liquidated them. There will be no mercy—for anyone.” And on May 10, 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman instructed his general staff: “Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation, but as a defeated enemy state.”

The Germans were also far from rushing out to cheer the Allied forces. This was due not only to the unimaginable atrocities committed by the Red Army during its invasion of the eastern territories of Germany, which drove millions of people to flee, but also to the fact that the majority of the population remained loyal to Adolf Hitler until the very end. Unlike in other countries, there were no partisan units or uprisings in Germany.

Instead, the Wehrmacht put up fierce resistance, especially on the Eastern Front. The fighting continued even after Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. When Berlin finally surrendered on May 2, another 170,000 soldiers had lost their lives in the battle for the German capital. For historians, there is therefore no question that it was not Germany that was liberated eighty years ago, but rather Europe from the Germans.

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When the Germans were finally defeated, the Allies had no intention of granting them freedom. Instead, the victorious troops occupied the entire German territory and assumed sole authority, right down to the local municipalities. “All German authorities and the German people must unconditionally comply with the demands of the Allied representatives and obey all proclamations, orders, directives, and instructions without limitation,” declared the four supreme commanders on June 5, 1945. Any political activity, even by opponents of Hitler, had to be approved by them.

For millions of Germans, the end of the war meant the exact opposite of liberation. Despite the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht, the Allies continued to take German soldiers prisoner on a large scale. Over three million were deported to the Soviet Union for forced labor, where a third of them died. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were also arrested, and almost 280,000 were sent to Soviet labor camps. In the end, the USSR annexed a quarter of the German Reich and installed a new dictatorship between the Oder and Elbe rivers.

The Allied victory meant liberation only for a minority. Around 200,000 to 300,000 people had survived imprisonment in German concentration camps and were now free. The same was true for the eight million foreign prisoners of war and forced laborers—although Stalin immediately reimprisoned those who had been abducted from the Soviet Union and sent those who were fit for work to labor camps as “traitors to the fatherland.” Deserters and opponents of the regime were also able to breathe a sigh of relief after May 8, and those who had been persecuted on racial grounds were able to leave their hiding places. The vast majority of Germans, though, were on the other side of the barricade in 1945.

Public Holiday in the GDR

However, the desire to shed the role of the perpetrator became apparent in Germany early on. At first, it was the Communists who transferred themselves from the losing side to the winning side. The founding proclamation of the KPD on June 11, 1945, written under Stalin’s watchful eye in Moscow, stated that the Red Army and its allies had brought the German people “liberation from the chains of Hitler’s slavery.” There was no mention of the fact that the KPD itself had contributed to the downfall of the Weimar Republic through its years of agitation against it.

Shortly after the founding of the GDR [the German Democratic Republic, i.e., East Germany—trans.], the SED [the Socialist Unity Party, i.e., the Communist Party that dominated the GDR—trans.] declared May 8 a public holiday. From then on, the party and state leadership gathered every year for a pompous ceremony on the “Day of the Liberation of the German People from Hitler Fascism.” Flags and banners decorated shops and office buildings, and tens of thousands marched to Soviet military cemeteries and war memorials to thank the Red Army for the liberation. On the tenth anniversary, a mass rally was even held in Berlin. The fact that a significant part of East Germany had been conquered by British and American troops went unmentioned.

The claim that the Red Army had liberated Germany soon became the most important basis for legitimizing the SED state. No one can doubt that the Soviet Union played a decisive role in defeating Hitler. Without it, the Nazi murders would have continued for a long time. On top of that, it ensured that Communists persecuted by the Nazi regime took power in East Germany. So, according to this line of reasoning, the occupiers were liberators.

In reality, the National Socialist dictatorship was merely replaced by a Communist one. The Red Army installed a vassal regime and kept it in power for decades with 500,000 soldiers. When the East Germans rose up against it on June 17, 1953, the revolt was crushed with tanks and infantry. “Liberation?” murmured people in the GDR to each other, with a view to the Soviet looting. “Yes—of watches and bicycles!”

But the term “liberation” also offered exoneration. If Germany had been liberated in 1945, then the Germans were Hitler’s victims too. And since the SED state was in a “brotherly alliance” with the Soviet Union, the East Germans were basically on the winning side. Because the GDR declared itself an “anti-fascist state” and claimed that Nazis only existed in the West, there was no longer any need to confront guilt and involvement.

Soon, the celebrations on May 8 served only to invoke the “unbreakable” friendship with the Soviet Union. Instead of thanking the liberators, the SED now sent “brotherly greetings” to Moscow, which were reciprocated in equally “brotherly” terms. The horrors of the war were only mentioned in empty phrases. To compensate for the introduction of the five-day week, the public holiday was eventually abolished in 1968.

Celebrations now had to take place without working people or in the evening. On the 30th anniversary of the end of the war, 40,000 young Communists from the GDR and the Soviet Union gathered in the dark at the Soviet memorial in Berlin’s Treptower Park to cheer on socialism with lighted torches. Later on, the SED used the date primarily to give itself a good report card. “Under the leadership of the party, the historic opportunity of May 8 was seized in the GDR,” wrote the SED central organ Neues Deutschland about the ceremony to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of the war. But then things became increasingly quiet around the German–Soviet friendship—because Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev was introducing reforms that many GDR citizens wanted for their country too.

Paradigm Shift in West Germany

In the Federal Republic, developments took a somewhat opposite course. Although the victorious Western powers had already allowed free elections in their zones in 1946, leading politicians saw no reason to celebrate on May 8. If the date was even acknowledged, it was to emphasize the ambivalence of the day. “Basically, May 8, 1945, remains the most tragic and questionable paradox in history for all of us,” Theodor Heuss [the first President of West Germany—trans.] declared in the Parliamentary Council on May 8, 1949. “Why? Because we were redeemed and destroyed in one fell swoop.”

As long as many people could still personally remember the end of the war, this attitude changed little. On the 20th anniversary, Chancellor Ludwig Erhard emphasized in a radio address above all the “grace” that the Western Allies had helped the Federal Republic rebuild and welcomed it back into the family of nations. At the same time, he pointed out that the inhabitants of the GDR had not been granted such a new beginning. “Yes—if the defeat of Hitler’s Germany had wiped injustice and tyranny from the face of the earth, then the whole of humanity would have good reason to celebrate May 8 as a day of liberation. We all know how far reality is from that.”

At this time, when students were beginning to take to the streets for communism and the Federal Republic was embarking on a new Ostpolitik, a striking paradigm shift began. After the dogmatic left, it initially affected only the SPD and FDP, but later it also spread to leading CDU politicians. Now, even in the Federal Republic, it was increasingly claimed that the Germans had been liberated in 1945. In Frankfurt am Main in 1975, Bernt Engelmann, the future chairman of the German Writers’ Association, declared to 25,000 demonstrators that “the fact that the 30th anniversary of liberation is not a public holiday in this country” was proof that “fascism is once again a latent danger.” Paradoxically, the fathers and grandfathers were simultaneously accused of remaining silent about Nazi crimes or of participating in them.

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The desire to count oneself among Hitler’s victims was also reflected in the speeches of the federal presidents. In 1970, Gustav Heinemann declared in the Bundestag: “We had to endure countless dark hours before the criminal tyranny of the National Socialists was taken from us.” Five years later, his successor, Walter Scheel, used the word “liberation” for the first time when he spoke about the end of the war: “We were freed from a terrible yoke, from war, murder, servitude, and barbarism.” In 1985, Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker finally declared authoritatively: “May 8 was a day of liberation. It liberated us all from the inhuman system of National Socialist tyranny.”

Only a few people were aware that von Weizsäcker also had a personal interest in this interpretation. His father had been sentenced to seven years in prison by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal for crimes against humanity because, as a member of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s state secretary, he had signed deportation orders for French Jews to Auschwitz. As a young lawyer, von Weizsäcker had defended his father and remained convinced of his innocence. Most people had also forgotten that the CDU politician had emphasized in 1970 at a memorial service in the Bundestag that May 8 was “not a holiday for us.” Although the “aberrations and heinous crimes of National Socialism” had come to an end, “a new regime of coercion had found its way onto German soil.”

Germany as Victim

The new West German view of history increasingly ignored that the Soviet Union had done anything but liberate East Germany. Some even considered this a deserved punishment for Hitler’s crimes. It came as a surprise to the political elite when the East German population suddenly liberated itself in 1990. Because there was now a pan-German Bundestag in which East Germans were only a minority, the West German view was also transferred to Germany as a whole. This suited the deposed SED cadres just fine, as the West now also counted the Soviet Union among its liberators.

During this period, Germany underwent another role change. In 1995, Federal President Roman Herzog invited the former Allies to Berlin for the first time for a state ceremony. Together with the French president, the British prime minister, the U.S. vice president, and the Russian prime minister, they celebrated the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. The Federal Republic, like the GDR before it, had now joined the circle of victors.

In 2020, on the 75th anniversary, this type of commemoration was to be repeated on an even larger scale. German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier invited 1,600 guests from Germany and abroad to a state ceremony in front of the Reichstag, where Soviet soldiers had once hoisted the red flag. Although the event had to be canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, politicians from the Green Party, the Free Democratic Party, and the Left Party called for May 8 to be declared a national holiday.

Again this year, Germany will not be able to show itself alongside the victorious powers. Putin’s brutal war against Ukraine would make a joint appearance appear downright cynical. And hardly anyone in Germany wants to celebrate the victory over Hitler with Trump. But some people’s regret is plain to see. “It hurts me deeply that we cannot welcome any Russians here,” said the chairman of a residents’ association in Berlin-Tempelhof, where the German capital surrendered to the Soviets on May 2, 1945, and where Berlin’s mayor, Kai Wegner, therefore laid a wreath. The municipality of Seelow and the city of Torgau also sent invitations to the Russian embassy to attend their commemorative ceremonies.

So now the Germans had to celebrate their liberation alone. Events were held in numerous cities, and an oratorio entitled “Liberation” was performed at the Berlin Academy of Arts. The media almost without exception served this narrative. On the initiative of the Left Party, May 8 is now an official memorial day in Bremen, and in almost all eastern German states. In Saxony, the CDU, for the first time, recently cast its vote in favor of a corresponding motion put forward by the Left Party. The Left Party would like to see it introduced nationwide.

What really happened in Germany on May 8, 1945, is only of interest to a few people today. What is also ignored is that the Allies still celebrate their victory over Germany on this day—not its liberation. There are hardly any people left who experienced the end of the war personally and could correct this simplistic view of history. This makes it all the easier for those born later to declare themselves liberated and thus victims of Hitler. Perhaps they should take a look at Ludwig Ehrhard’s speech, who sixty years ago recalled May 8, 1945, as follows: “It was a day as gray and bleak as so many before and after it, and so, when we heard the news of total surrender, it meant little more to us in the numbness of that time than a sigh of relief that the killing of human beings would finally come to an end.”

Dr. Hubertus Knabe is a German historian based in Berlin. He is an expert on East Germany and the legacy of communist Regimes in Europe. From 2000 to 2018 he was the Director of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, the former central prison of the Ministry of State Security (Stasi). For more information about the author and his work, visit his website at hubertus-knabe.de.

Topics: TPPI Translations • Reflections & Dialogues

This essay originally appeared in German as “Ressentimentgeladene Nostalgie gegen den Westen,” in Bahamas 95 (November 2024): 10–15. Translated by Jakob Blumtritt.

Editor’s note: When this text first appeared in Bahamas magazine, the newly founded left-wing populist party Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht – Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit (BSW) (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance – Reason and Justice) had performed well in state elections. Since then, however, in the federal election in February, it missed the five-percent electoral cutoff by a few thousand votes. After recently failing to legally challenge the election results, the party will not acquire a seat in parliament in this legislative period.

The BSW’s persistence, and the fact that they are represented in the governing coalitions of the states of Thuringia and Brandenburg, shows that this party isn’t going anywhere, and neither is left-wing populism in Germany in general. It shouldn’t be overlooked that another left-wing populist party, Die Linke, made a surprising comeback in this election cycle, garnering 8.8 percent of the vote.

While these two parties have strong disagreements on some key issues, especially when it comes to immigration, they share a common resentment toward the United States and Israel. Counting the votes of the BSW and the Left Party together, left-populist parties received 13.7 percent of the vote—more than the 11.6 percent received by the Greens and not far behind the SPD’s 16.4 percent.

It might also be of interest for Telos Insights readers that Wolfgang Streeck, a sympathizer of the BSW and widely regarded as a key source of its ideas, spoke on one of the panels at the recent TPPI-sponsored conference on postliberalism. Between the lines of his presentation, attentive listeners may have noticed anti-Western sentiments very similar to those that underpin much of BSW’s political worldview.

With all this in mind, it becomes clear that there are still plenty of reasons to examine the ills of that party, as does this text from a magazine that is known for its unsparing criticism of the antics of the left, staying true to its roots in first-generation Frankfurt School Critical Theory.1

—Julius Bielek, ed.

On October 23, 2023, the media-star front woman of the Left Party, Sahra Wagenknecht, and nine other members of the German parliament announced their resignation, including the former parliamentary leader Amira Mohamed Ali. At the same time, they announced at the Federal Press Conference that they wanted to found a new party. According to Wagenknecht, such a party is sorely needed because the majority of the population no longer feels represented by any party.

In fact, a study previously published in the Politische Vierteljahresschrift, a quarterly journal of political science, concluded that a party under her leadership could be attractive to those who no longer hide their dissatisfaction with the real existing political establishment. In addition, Wagenknecht could achieve the feat of winning over “economically left-wing and culturally right-wing voters.”2

The founding meeting of the party finally took place behind closed doors in a Berlin hotel on January 8, 2024. Since then, the new alliance, which, in its own words, has been joined by police officers, theologians, trade unionists, entrepreneurs, nurses, city dwellers, and villagers,3 has been operating under the name “Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht – Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit” (BSW) [Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance – Reason and Justice], led by a dual leadership consisting of Wagenknecht and Mohamed Ali. Its goals are ambitious: it wants to establish itself as a people’s party in the coming years and “represent the center of society.”4

A Pioneering Spirit

The first party assembly took place on January 27, 2024, in the former East Berlin cinema Kosmos and was dominated by the vote on personnel and program. In addition to these formalities, the staging of the founder’s political swan song also played an important role: “When Sahra Wagenknecht and Oskar Lafontaine entered the room at 10:01 a.m., it was clear that two people were celebrating the completion of their life’s work. Both have left their old parties behind in anger. Wagenknecht recently left the Left Party, Lafontaine left the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) in 2005 and then also the Left Party in 2022.”5

This appearance made it clear that “the new political project is a family affair”6 whose undisputed foundation is “the political program of the couple”:7 “Critical of NATO and the United States, against green moralism, for a higher minimum wage and higher pensions, against unlimited migration, and for a return to the peace and foreign policy of the 1960s.”8

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The reference to times long past was also reflected in the auditorium. The “impression of a strange backwardness” was evident “not only from the almost complete absence of young people” but also from the fact that the majority were “people in their so-called prime, who visibly had little desire for internal strife.” They had joined the party “mainly because of Sahra and came to Berlin for the founding party conference.”9

Whether the leadership and entourage had agreed on a dress code is unknown. But the role model effect of Sahra Wagenknecht, who, as a “political businesswoman,”10 is always elegantly dressed, while exuding the charm of a well-heeled grandmother in a Rosa Luxemburg mode—as well as the repeatedly expressed view of those present that they were witnesses and, at the same time, participants in a historic event—may have influenced the choice of wardrobe. Many members “had thrown on suits or skirts. . . . [C]olorful hair or worn jeans jackets like at party conventions of the left . . . are not to be found—the BSW presents itself visually through a serious, rather conservative image.”11

In terms of political positions, however, Oskar’s and Sahra’s speeches were less restrained. Lafontaine explained that there is no party represented in the Bundestag that “consistently advocates good wages, good pensions, good social services” and at the same time votes against “war and militarization.” They want to fill this “gap in the party system.”12

Sahra Wagenknecht really got the crowd going: “We have to talk again about social inequality,” which finds expression in the “expropriation of the hardworking.”13 Furthermore, she criticized the “spoiled young politicians” of the so-called Ampelkoalition (traffic light coalition), which she called “the stupidest government in Europe,” and which was responsible for the “irresponsible arms exports”14 to Ukraine, “so that Zelensky will soon be able to attack even Moscow with German weapons.”15

She added that it was unacceptable that the AfD, of all parties, was perceived as a peace party. On the contrary, she said, this party must be fought. But abstract fulminations against the right would not contribute to its weakening. Instead, one should demonstrate concretely for “14 euros minimum wage, higher pensions, and affordable energy”16 to break the blue wave (blue is the color of the AfD).

After this sweeping blow, which once again emphasized that the BSW would not be a Left Party 2.0, “the hall [was] united in rhythmic clapping for minutes” and “the feeling of departure [was] tangible.”17

Defiant Communist

Even if Wagenknecht always emphasizes that the BSW wants to be a “party of togetherness”18 based on tolerance and respect, not even the party members would contradict the obvious perception that it is a “one-woman show.”19 Despite being seen as aloof, and as someone who creates a certain distance from others by displaying her cleverness, she also enjoys a high level of popularity outside of her immediate fan base and is able to fill entire halls and win over the audience.20

The acclaim she receives is by no means self-evident given her biography. In the DDR, Wagenknecht was refused admission to study philosophy and was offered a job as a secretary instead. Yet her world collapsed with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her biographer, Christian Schneider, reports that the young Sahra did not visit the West after the fall of the Wall, almost out of defiance, because for her it embodied “evil, the bad.” In her own words: “Capitalism is a society where everyone sees their material advantage and mercilessly indulges in selfishness. I wanted a society in which money is not the measure of all things, in which not everything revolves around making more money out of money.”

In the days of the fall of communism, Wagenknecht was convinced that the collapse of the workers’ and peasants’ state was not yet sealed. She joined the Socialist Unity Party (SED) “because now the opportunists are leaving. I had hoped that the DDR could be reformed, that democracy would work. And in such a way that [it] is there for the people and not for those with economic power.”

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From then on, the young comrade received increased attention from the party, in which it was an advantage that she did not have the old cadre’s aroma but also did not look like a typical alternative Western leftist. Wagenknecht qualified for membership in the Communist Platform, an association within the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS)—the Federal Republic of Germany’s successor party to the SED—with statements such as “I would rather have the DDR with a wall than the social conditions we have today,” and she became a figurehead of this extremely active sect. It was the “traditional cabinet of the DDR,” and it appealed to people who were concerned with the defense of the DDR up to and including Stalinism.

In her early text “Marxism and Opportunism,”21 which appeared in the Weißenseer Blätter in 1992, Wagenknecht argued that real existing socialism had not perished because it had been too Stalinist but rather because it had opened up to the West too opportunistically. In doing so, she openly opposed people like Gregor Gysi, another prominent, long-standing figure of the Left Party, who saw a future for socialism only if it freed itself from its Stalinist history.

With her positions, Wagenknecht took on the role of an outsider, which she enjoyed and used to her advantage. She found her support in a cohort of older comrades who were formative for the membership structure of the PDS at the time. Stefan Liebich, a member of the Bundestag for the Left Party from 2017 to 2021, noted in retrospect, “The 60/70-plus generation, they loved Sahra Wagenknecht. They were her troops, they stood behind her.”

The strategists in the party acknowledged that she enjoyed considerable support within the party, but they had concerns about whether this would also pay off at the ballot box.

Dietmar Bartsch, the last co-chairman of the Left Party faction in the Bundestag, described the situation before the 1998 federal election. At that time, he noted, “Sahra Wagenknecht would not have had a chance in the East. No constituency in the East would have put her forward,” so she was advised to stand in a West German constituency, of all places.

Regardless, she consolidated her position within the PDS in relation to the so-called reformers and made it clear that if “we enter into a coalition, we have to take responsibility for a policy framed by the constraints of capitalist society as apparent decision-makers. Then we are integrated into the power structures of this system.”

A Break with the Left

After the 2002 federal election, the existential question for the party was whether its failure to re-enter the Bundestag had sealed its fate as an East German regional party. Therefore, it was discussed whether a joint election platform could be formed with the Electoral Alternative for Labor and Social Justice (WASG), which was founded by disappointed SPD members and trade unionists, in order to gain a foothold in western Germany as well. After all, with Oskar Lafontaine, the WASG had a popular figure in its ranks in the old federal states.

Sahra Wagenknecht was extremely skeptical of such ideas: “I see myself as an anti-capitalist. I don’t see Oskar Lafontaine . . . representing socialist perspectives.”

In 2007, the PDS and WASG finally merged to form the Left Party. From then on, Wagenknecht recognized in Lafontaine a “father figure” (Bodo Ramelow) who was crucial in her rethinking, which promoted “Sahra Wagenknecht’s rise to become what she is today” (Dietmar Bartsch).

The publicist Albrecht von Lucke speaks of a “win-win situation” for both sides. “In a sense, it was the new dream team of the left.”

The result was that Wagenknecht “began quoting not Stalin and Lenin, but Ludwig Erhard and the ordoliberal classics of the social market economy,” so that she became an uncompromising advocate of the “classical social-democratic welfare state model,” as historian Thorsten Holzhauser added.

Under the influence of Oskar Lafontaine, her criticism of the Left Party intensified. That she no longer represented the party line on crucial issues became apparent at the 2018 party conference in Leipzig, when Wagenknecht sought open confrontation on the issues of migration and open borders.

However, this did not (yet) entail a break with the political left.

Rather, in the same year she played a leading role in founding the collective movement Aufstehen (Stand Up), which was modeled on Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France insoumise and Jeremy Corbyn’s (Labor) Momentum Campaign. In the founding call, whose demands largely correspond to what can be read in the programmatic statements of the BSW today, the initiators write that there are “majorities in the population for a new policy: for disarmament and peace, for higher wages, better pensions, fairer taxes, and more security. For higher public investment in education and infrastructure. But there is no party coalition capable of winning a majority that stands for such policies.”22 The aim was to reach as “many different supporters as possible . . . because the movement should be broadly based. We want to appeal to members of the SPD and the Greens as well as to nonpartisans and people who turned their backs on politics years ago.”23

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At the time, Wagenknecht’s intention was to create the basis for a “social power option.”24 After Wagenknecht turned her back on Aufstehen, the association almost completely disappeared from the scene. It “failed” mainly “because I had the illusion that movements organize themselves,” she said in the ARD documentary Trotz und Treue—Das Phänomen Sahra Wagenknecht. “You can’t just become a member [of the BSW], you have to apply. The party should grow slowly, each new admission is scrutinized.”25 The BSW also does not see itself as part of the Left, as Wagenknecht made clear during the federal press conference on the occasion of the party’s founding, because the label “left” is associated with gender issues and lifestyle topics, whose advocates she criticized not entirely without reason in her bestseller The Self-Righteous (Die Selbstgerechten).26

Extension of the Zone of Conflict

Despite this distancing from the left-wing political spectrum, the BSW’s political agenda and associated rhetoric is largely based on Chantal Mouffe’s 2018 book For a Left Populism. In this work, the author starts from her diagnosis of the times, made with Ernesto Laclau in 1985, according to which the socialist and social democratic parties were becoming less and less attractive to the traditional electorate. At that time, the social democratic-Keynesian welfare state model of the postwar order, which was also characterized by a compromise between capital and labor due to systemic competition with the Eastern Bloc, had reached its peak.

In order to overcome the crisis of Fordism, the political powers implemented a paradigm shift and henceforth relied on the neoliberal accumulation regime. Deregulation, privatization, deindustrialization, and the promotion of technological change were now regarded as suitable measures for generating new growth potential. In the course of globalization, the differences between the winners and losers of this process became more pronounced.

Under these circumstances, it initially seems absurd that Mouffe accused the parties of the parliamentary left of focusing too much on the contradiction between capital and labor. This was evidence of an “inadequate understanding of politics,” which she called “class essentialism.”27 The end of Fordism had not only led to a partial dissolution of the classical industrial proletariat; it had also enabled Margaret Thatcher, through her neoliberal crisis management, to win over parts of this milieu to her policies. Moreover, “new forms of subordination . . . emerged that [lay] outside the production process” (6).

Against this background, an “anti-essentialist approach” (2) could be used to extend “the field of social conflict” (3). Mouffe therefore argued for the “formation of a ‘chain of equivalence’ that gives expression not only to the demands of the working class but also to those of the new movements” (2), i.e., feminism, the gay and lesbian movement, anti-racism, ecology.

Fifteen years later, Mouffe had to realize that the modernization of the parliamentary left she had called for had taken place, but in a different way than she had imagined. The majority of the relevant parties had abandoned their former orientation in favor of the label “center-left party” (4) and now operated as New Labour or Third Way—as a “social democratic version of neoliberalism” (Stuart Hall)

The talk of the left-wing party spectrum that began at the same time meant that the “confrontational debate between parties,” which was still recognizable to some extent, was replaced by “a technocratic variety of politics,” which saw itself merely as the “neutral management of public affairs” (4).

In this “post-political situation,” “a real choice that citizens could have made between different political projects . . . no longer had a place,” which was the “cause of the process of increasing alienation from democratic institutions” (5). In this seemingly hopeless constellation, however, the author also recognizes an opportunity and, following Lenin’s remarks on a revolutionary situation, refers to a “populist moment,” which is characterized by the fact that the“prevailing hegemony is destabilized under the pressure of political and socio-economic upheavals,” and the “existing institutions no longer [succeed] in . . . defending the existing order” and “securing the loyalty of the people” (21). Right-wing populism recognized this dissatisfaction early on and used it to its advantage. It is therefore the order of the day for the classic left-wing parties to “bring the confrontational nature back to the fore” (15).

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Mouffe thus anticipated the BSW’s strategy of creating “a serious address” for those “who vote AfD out of anger without being right-wing.”28 Their “feeling of being left behind and their longing for democratic recognition, which they previously expressed in xenophobic language,” could be “formulated with a different vocabulary and directed against a new competitor” (23). A strategy that “builds a political front line by dividing society into two camps and calls for the mobilization of the ‘disadvantaged’ against ‘those in power’” is promising (11f.). However, one would have to “bid farewell to the myth of communism as a transparent and reconciled society” (13).

Yet if the “discursive construction” (80) of the people against those in power is not based on the rational recognition of objective structural laws of capitalist society, the “affects . . . play a crucial role” (76). After all, “no collective will can be constructed without common affects crystallizing in some form” (76).

The fact that “the affective bond to a charismatic leader . . . [would] play an important role in this process” (70) was also recognized by the creators of BSW, and this principle was deliberately taken to extremes. They are counting on the party leader to act as a “resentment machine” due to “her reach and her intensification,” which “tracks down and intensifies social inflammation and translates it into political antagonisms,” as Oliver Nachtwey noted in the FAZ.29

Unlike Chantal Mouffe, however, Wagenknecht is not interested in an “anti-essentialist approach,” which she made clear already when she was still trying to save the left with Aufstehen. It is true that “minority protection . . . is important. But the decisive issue is the fight against economic inequality,” Wagenknecht states. “It is our task to stand up for the losers of capitalist globalization and not to defame them.”30

New Power Factor in the East

Commentators initially disputed whether the strategy of entrusting a charismatic leadership figure with the establishment of a political front line, which had now been elevated to a program, would be successful, although it was stated that “the BSW . . . could open up a previously free space in the political offering.”31 According to a study by the Economic and Social Science Institute of the Hans Böckler Foundation (WSI), the BSW’s chances of being elected are “significantly above average,” particularly among respondents from eastern Germany, people without a high school diploma, workers, and people with a migration background. The study concluded that “a low income, a lack of financial reserves, high levels of stress and economic worries, as well as a low level of trust in institutions—especially in the public legal media and the federal government—[are] associated with an increased tendency to vote for the BSW.” Accordingly, it cannot be ruled out “that the BSW could compete with the AfD, especially in its strongholds in eastern Germany.”32 The last European elections represented an initial success in which the new party, starting from nothing, achieved a result of 6.2 percent. As expected, the share of votes in eastern Germany was more than double the national average. After the last state elections in Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg, the forecast that Wagenknecht and Co. could become “a power factor in the east”33 was also confirmed.

However, the BSW was not only voted for by those in precarious circumstances, as the electorate was made up of all ages and occupational groups, with a slightly above-average preference for pensioners. If there was one commonality, it was that the party was particularly successful in constituencies away from the major cities.34 The BSW benefited from the widespread perception that, as a hard-working and rule-abiding inhabitant of “the zone” (that is, the East), it was being taken advantage of by the West German state. This was once again confirmed by the surveys conducted during the state elections: the overwhelming majority of East German voters still consider themselves to be second-class citizens and dominated by the West, regardless of their party preference.35

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The Left Party, which for a long time fueled the East German ideology based on hatred of the West, has long since ceased to benefit from this mood. The outgoing co-chair of the Left Party, Martin Schirdewan, reacted “emphatically calmly” to the founding of his ex-comrade’s party, as it was “not a new left-wing formation”36 that could pose a threat to his party. The figures speak a different language. Although the Wagenknecht team was the only party to win voters from the AfD, the pull effect that many had hoped for failed to materialize.

Instead, the BSW caused a considerable loss of votes for the Left Party, which means that its insignificance in the East can no longer be halted. [But it now looks like the BSW is losing votes again, while the left is gaining votes.] The Karl Liebknecht House is also likely to have noticed that the Left Party has fallen victim to its own ideology, as both the BSW and the AfD are benefiting from its groundwork. The PDS/Left Party is partly responsible for the fact that “an unbelievable potential for anger” has been able to establish itself in the East, which is now a “cross-class phenomenon,” where “it makes no difference whether someone is socially left behind or blithely racing through the countryside in their expensive SUV,”37 as the historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk aptly put it. Wagenknecht and Höcke, an East German AfD politician on the right fringe of the party, therefore no longer need to go to great lengths to position those who are actually or supposedly disadvantaged against “those in power.”

The Old Federal Republic

In the introductory passage of the party program, the claim is formulated that BSW wants to be a representative for the many people who “rightly [have] the impression that they no longer live in the country that the Federal Republic [of Germany, BRD] once was.”38 This nostalgic reference to the old model of the BRD forms the content-related bracket of all BSW positions.

The reference to the Bonn Republic—where supposedly people weren’t blathering about cosmopolitanism, which critics within the new party consider particularly reprehensible—is unmistakable when it comes to migration. The BSW program states that the claim to asylum is not questioned, “but that immigration and the coexistence of different cultures” are only “an enrichment” as long as “the influx remains limited to a level that does not overburden our country and its infrastructure, and as long as integration is actively promoted and successful.”39

It is true that Wagenknecht also does not seem to recognize individuals, but only collective subjects that are irrevocably part of a culture. Nevertheless, it is significant that even questioning how individual asylum seekers can be cared for, or suggesting that only successful integration enables social participation, elicits accusations of being right-wing by the friends of open borders, especially as the party rejects right-wing extremist and racist ideologies. The left-wing coordinate system has been completely disrupted by people with a migration background who sympathize with the BSW because of its migration policy statements, according to the study by the WSI mentioned earlier.

For example, Jessica Tatti, formerly of the Left Party and now a BSW member of parliament from Baden-Württemberg, whose parents come from Sardinia: “As far as the refugee numbers are concerned, migrants simply see it the same way as many others: The numbers are too high, they overburden local authorities and make it difficult to integrate those who are genuinely seeking protection from political persecution.” These migrant groups have invested a great deal for themselves and their children, with great difficulty, in order to integrate, learn the language, and gain a foothold in the labor market, and they “expect [the same] from others who come to Germany after them,” said Tatti.40

Honest Work

Especially when it comes to economic and social policy, the BSW strikes a chord with East Germans, for whom the old Federal Republic has always been a place of longing. With reunification, DDR citizens had hoped to become part of the economic and social order they thought they knew from West German television. In reality, however, they had to realize that the golden years of the prosperous postwar period, in which, for example, “production workers . . . could afford a certain amount of advancement with effort,”41 had long been a thing of the past by the time they joined the scope of the Basic Law.

The BSW’s demands are so well received in the former DDR because they resonate with “a specifically East German milieu that believes in values such as performance, property, rules, and social justice, but sees itself cheated or bullied by the state.”42

Wagenknecht’s success in the East is also due to the fact that she has renounced the socialist perspectives that were still being used against Oskar Lafontaine years ago. Instead, the BSW’s economic and socio-political positions are aimed at reviving Rhineland capitalism in view of the entirely correct diagnosis that the promise of upward mobility of the old Federal Republic no longer works. No one in the Wagenknecht party would deny that their program, true to the original, ultimately boils down to “a system of corporatist structures aimed at consensus, which are constituted within a democratic constitutional state that protects the free-market order and is aimed at allowing broad sections of the population to participate in overall economic value creation via an expanded welfare state.”43

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The problem is not that the BSW wants to relieve people of their most urgent financial hardships and enable them to participate in society. When it is stated with regard to wages that an expansion of collective bargaining coverage could be beneficial for the positive development of salaries, empirical evidence already supports such a demand.

It also corresponds to reality that the diagnosed “privatization and commercialization of existential services, for example in the areas of healthcare and housing,”44 come at the expense of citizens. Therefore, the appeal to (re)transfer areas of existential care to the public sector is entirely plausible.

Yet with the plea for a “society in which the common good is more important than selfish interests, and in which it is not tricksters and gamblers who win but those who make an effort and do good, honest, and solid work,”45 it becomes clear that the social issue is ultimately to be solved on the basis of resentment. By mobilizing affective envy, a deeply antisocial social character is served, which is directed against the unproductive wealthy and the corrupt state, which wastes taxes on “billions in subsidies [to] corporations from overseas”46 and deprives the little man of the equivalent he is entitled to because, according to Wagenknecht, it “attracts new refugees with high benefits for asylum seekers” instead of “using these funds for higher pensions and better healthcare for its own population.”47

Ultimately, the Wagenknecht team pits Rhenish capitalism, based on productive work, against the “unleashed capitalism that destroys traditions and ties,”48 i.e., financial capital and its profiteers in the person of the “yield hunters,”49 and is thus in the tradition of German ideology.

Self-Confident Europe

Against this backdrop, it comes as no surprise that the BSW explicitly refers to “Europe in the postwar period,” in which the “once strong European welfare states” were the guarantors of “decades of upswing and peace.”50 Accordingly, they argue for a “reindustrialization of Europe that brings back jobs and prosperity,”51 which goes hand in hand with the demand that the EU must limit the “power of Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Finance, and other multinational corporations”52 in favor of small and medium-sized enterprises, and ensure that “collective agreements and local wages are defended against cheap competition.”53

In addition, the party pursues “an integration-critical orientation in European policy” and wants to strengthen nation-states:54 “Our goal is a self-confident Europe of sovereign democracies, which does not come together through the centralization of power at the EU Commission, but through equal cooperation, joint economic projects, a single internal market with fair rules, and cultural exchange.”55 Even if the BSW avoids the AfD slogan “Europe of fatherlands,”56 its objective corresponds almost literally to the AfD position of a “European community of sovereign, democratic states that cooperate for the benefit of their citizens in all those tasks that can be better accomplished together.”57

Both formulations sound initially like a consistent interpretation of the principle of subsidiarity, to which there is no fundamental objection. But the BSW’s suggestion that the EU must in the future guarantee the member states “budgetary, social, and economic sovereignty”58 isn’t the end of the story. Rather, the talk of a self-confident Europe has an anti-American and therefore anti-Western thrust, which the publicist Daniela Dahn, who appeared as a guest speaker at the BSW party conference, summed up with her formulation that the EU is currently acting as a “transatlantic branch of the United States and NATO.”59

The aim is therefore to ensure “that the European Union focuses on its political, economic, and security policy independence, and thus primarily represents the interests of the citizens of the member states of the Union. Europe must become an independent player on the world stage instead of being a pawn in the conflict between the major powers and subordinating itself to the interests of the United States.”60

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The AfD also wants nothing to do with ties to the West and notes that the “geopolitical and economic interests of the United States . . . increasingly differ from those of Germany and other European states.” For this reason, “Germany . . . should not allow itself to be drawn into conflicts as a result of decisions by the United States to make way for other powers. The foreign and security policy of the United States forces Germany to formulate its interests independently.”61 This applies in particular to relations with Russia, which “has been a reliable supplier and guarantor of an affordable energy supply for decades, which is the Achilles’ heel of the German economy due to our energy-intensive industry. The restoration of undisturbed trade with Russia includes the immediate lifting of economic sanctions against Russia and the repair of the Nord Stream pipelines.”62

The BSW would probably not disagree with these statements, and it is almost superfluous to point out that it is a matter close to the hearts of both associations to “orient themselves toward Germany’s real political interests in their relationship with China.”63 The BSW warns urgently against tying oneself too closely to the United States, because then “there is a risk of losing the most important trading partner in China. The People’s Republic is not only an indispensable supplier of raw materials and primary products, it is also one of the largest sales markets.”64

This is why Michael Lüders, a publicist and long-standing president of the German-Arab Society, who was elected to the BSW’s extended party board and has so far been “extremely empathetic toward the Islamic world,”65 argued that China should not be the only trading partner, and that Germany and the EU should adopt a “middle position” in order to act as an honest broker between China and the United States, as “American subservience” had only led to the energy crisis becoming the “mother of all the problems facing the local economy.”66

Peace Madness

As both the AfD and the BSW want to “close ranks with the Kremlin and abandon Germany’s ties to the West,”67 the ex-leftists never tire of trying to prove that they are the authentic, i.e., most anti-Western, peace party. In doing so, they refer to Willy Brandt and Mikhail Gorbachev, “who opposed thinking and acting in the logic of the Cold War with a policy of détente, reconciliation of interests, and international cooperation.”68

In contrast to this, “what the West, what NATO has done since the end of the Cold War . . . can be summarized as change through confrontation, exclusion, and demarcation. A change that could lead the world to the brink of a third world war.”69 They manage to interpret Russia’s attack on Ukraine as a preventative action motivated by security policy concerns against a state that is inferior in all respects and that confidently turned to the West and NATO, invoking its sovereignty. However, according to the great Chairman Wagenknecht, “its leading power,” America, has “invaded five countries in the past few years in violation of international law and killed more than 1 million people in these wars,” which has triggered “feelings of threat and defensive reactions”70 among the Russians.

This completely insane reasoning is reminiscent of a passage from “Elements of Anti-Semitism” in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment: “The blindly murderous have always seen in the victim the persecutor from whom they were desperately driven to self-defense, and the most powerful empires have perceived the weakest neighbor as an unbearable threat before they fell upon him.”71 According to Wagenknecht, the Soviet Union, in contrast to the bellicose West, geared its policy entirely altruistically toward the preservation of world peace: a gross distortion that she now simply transfers to Russia. Wagenknecht cannot understand that, in addition to Ukraine, the former Soviet republics of the Baltic states and neighboring Poland in particular feel threatened by Russia based on historical experience and that their rational defensive reaction is to move closer to the West. The “peace negotiations”72 called for by the BSW would only make sense if Ukraine were on an equal footing, i.e., if it could present a credible military defense plan to rule out future attacks.

This is not an argument for Wagenknecht. Her longing for peace culminates in the abstruse demand that the West should motivate the aggressor to enter into peace talks by initiating an “immediate stop to all arms exports” and blocking “further support and the payment of aid money”73 until the Ukrainians finally give in. Instead, there are “still . . . no serious efforts by the West” to end the war “through negotiations.” To prove this, she has been peddling the half-truth for years that the possibilities of a negotiated solution, “which did exist,” were “thrown to the wind”74 by the West.

This is true insofar as the offer made by the BSW to the Ukrainian state would have been tantamount to an act of submission, as it would have had to renounce international security guarantees to protect it from further attacks and “cede more than a fifth of its territory to Russia,”75 which Wagenknecht regarded as a comprehensible condition on the part of the Russians.

German Ideology after Auschwitz

Wagenknecht’s statements on Israel show that she has her difficulties with defensive wars, which can sometimes also be of a preventative nature. She, who described the Gaza Strip as an “open-air prison,” misses “the clear criticism . . . of the Netanyahu government and its barbaric war”76 from the Central Council of Jews—which she apparently sees as a branch of the State of Israel—a war that has long since ceased to be a defensive war, but a campaign of extermination against the Palestinian population, as Wagenknecht announced both in Die Welt and during her election campaign appearances.77

Wagenknecht is not alone at BSW in this interpretation. Michael Lüders, a well-known enemy of Israel and the West, is a trendsetting figure who achieved the best result of all the candidates standing for election to the party executive.78 In an interview for Südwestrundfunk radio just three days after the massacre by Hamas and its ilk, Lüders railed that he considered Israel’s retaliatory measures to be wrong and described them as war crimes.79 His diagnosis that the West was ultimately responsible for the Hamas attack, as it had ignored the situation of the Palestinians, is also likely to be a consensus within the party.

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Last but not least, Oskar Lafontaine stands for the anti-Israeli path, fulminating about the “right to life of the Palestinians,”80 which must be protected, although no one has ever questioned that. This path is supposedly required by German culpability, i.e., “from the murder of six million Jews,” which “led not least to the expulsion of the Palestinians, to the founding of the State of Israel. And that is why we also have an obligation to these people.”81 The “First Husband” of the BSW also revealed in his speech at the party conference what his main problem with the AfD is. He said that the AfD “stands by Israel like no other party, even now in this war against Gaza. There is not a critical word about the Israeli army. I consider this position to be completely untenable. For me, what is happening in Gaza is a war crime that we must denounce, without any qualification.”82

Even if the BSW leader has thrown her socialist perspectives overboard, she has remained true to herself in one respect, and that is her obsessive hatred of the West. Her profession of faith in peace is based on this. When she seriously poses the question of whether “a war has ever been ended by the supply of weapons” and with conviction answers “no,”83 one could even agree with her at first glance, as the weapons supplied must also be used.

But apart from this quibble, any halfway historically aware contemporary would think of the Holocaust, and “that it was by no means German pacifists who ended the peaceful murder of German non-military authorities in the extermination camps,” but rather the armies of the Allies, “who were supported by the violent, bloody resistance of the partisans in Yugoslavia, Greece, and France.” Wagenknecht deliberately ignores the fact that Germany “in practice demonstrated and empirically proved that there can be worse things than war—that horrors are possible that only a strong army can relieve.”84

Topics: Israel Initiative • TPPI Translations

Mario Möller studied sociology, political science, and economics at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. The title of his final thesis was “The Tradition of Social Relations in the Labour Market in East Germany.” He writes regularly for Bahamas magazine.

More than ever, leftists, political Islam, and postcolonial intellectuals have joined forces in an unholy alliance. Lacking an understanding of the history of Islamic expansionism, Arab colonialism, and Islamic antisemitism, parts of the Western left have come to regard any countermovement to the West as a fight against American imperialism. Therefore, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Islamist movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah are understood to be part of an anti-imperialist bloc. These tendencies were already observed in connection with the rise of the “Islamic State” (IS). When its terrorists attacked the Kurdish city of Kobanê, Kurdish militias fought IS in cooperation with U.S. forces. Some leftists in Germany, Britain, and the United States demanded that the United States stop its bombings.

What was the point of their demand? The United States carried out air strikes to support Kurdish ground troops in order to defeat Islamic terrorism. Failure to bomb IS positions would have resulted in IS conquering Kurdish areas in order to enslave or kill women and children. In the end, as in the case of the Yazidis, genocide could have been the outcome. The anti-Zionist cultural historian Hamid Dabashi compares the Kurds to the Jews and sees a prospective establishment of an independent Kurdistan as the “second settler-colonial Israel.”1

The fixation of large parts of the left on the United States while simultaneously remaining indifferent to Russian, Chinese, Iranian, or Turkish imperialism has led to serious political misjudgments. This includes the idea that every form of Western thought, art, or literature is part of a colonial project. The works of progressive philosophers such as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Sartre, and even Frantz Fanon are now viewed as contributing to the reproduction of European white hegemony and are consequently rejected.

This may have helped to foster a variety of conservative, backward, and fanatical ideologies, ranging from Islamist movements to dictatorial rulers hostile to the West, especially in the case of Iran. Due to this perspective, large sections of the left have become unable to understand the nature of these Islamic and conservative forces, as they insist on the untenable principle that the enemy of the enemy is a friend. Instead of supporting progressive, secular, liberal, and left-wing movements in the Middle East, the left is turning to political Islam.

Islamofascism and Islamic Anti-Judaism

In 2017, I arrived in Germany for political reasons from the autonomous region of Kurdistan in Iraq. I expected to live in Berlin, in a city full of left-wing and liberal people, and to be able to express my political and philosophical beliefs in a free environment. After almost three years, I came to the conclusion that the local left was not what I had imagined.

If I wanted to openly express my views on fascist elements in Islam and antisemitism, not only was I not listened to by many, but I was also portrayed as someone who either did not belong to the left (it was not uncommon for the implication to be that I was considered a right-wing extremist) or understood little about Islam. It was obviously inopportune to discuss Islamofascism. But it is now high time to speak openly and unambiguously about this matter.

The appeal of fascism for Islamic radicalism is not a new phenomenon. As early as 1935, Hasan al-Banna, the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote approvingly of Mussolini’s policies. And conversely the appeal of political Islam for fascism can also be traced back a long way. A famous example is the important fascist thinker and founder of “primitive fascism,” Julius Evola.2 His numerous works on the topics of tradition and modernity are still considered a point of reference by neo-fascists of various currents today. However Evola was also fascinated by Islam. He praised its traditional morality and clearly defined social roles as early as the 1930s. After the Arab–Israeli War of 1967, he was confident about a revival of Islam: “The Arabs are undoubtedly an important people. At present they are in a desolate state. Arab socialism does not suit them. The global advance of Islam has not yet been stopped. When the time comes—and I am sure it will soon—they can restore the caliphate.”3 In the Islamic Republic of Iran, intellectuals regard Evola as an important philosopher. Hezbollah terrorist Fouad Ali Saleh, who was responsible for a series of attacks in France in the mid-1980s, also quoted passages from Evola’s work Revolt Against the Modern World in his trial.4

In recent times, scientists and authors have increasingly addressed fascist elements in Islam or analyzed political Islam as a modern form of fascism. Middle East scholar Manfred Halpern was one of the first to describe politicized Islam as a fascist movement; in his groundbreaking 1963 study The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa, he spoke of “neo-Islamic totalitarianism.”5 French Marxist Maxime Rodinson described Islamic movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood as “a kind of archaic fascism” whose goal is the establishment of a “totalitarian state” in which the “political police” brutally enforces the moral and social order.6

In 2014, Egyptian-German political scientist Hamed Abdel-Samad traced the ideological roots of the Muslim Brotherhood in fascist ideology in his book Islamic Fascism.7 He points out that some Arab-Islamic extremists use the Koran to demean and look down on non-Arabs, claiming that superiority of the Arabs is proven by the fact that the final revelation of God was made in their language.

Given this background, current phenomena such as IS definitely deserve to be understood as fascist. Flags of Taliban and IS terrorists were also seen at the supposedly pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Essen and Hamburg in late 2023. Secular, liberal, and left-wing migrants in particular have long been warning German society about the dangers of a rise of Islamism but have been ignored. When I pointed out this problem to my German left-wing friends, I was quickly labeled “Islamophobic” and in some cases branded “racist” against Muslims.

Left-Wing Reality Denial

Large parts of the left deny or relativize Islamic fascism and antisemitism in Islam. They see it as an exclusively European problem. The fact that Islamic forces were allied with Hitler in various ways is ignored or denied.8

The reports of antisemitic slogans at “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations in Europe are not surprising for two reasons: first, because of the stigmatization of Jews in the Koran, which has been passed down for 1,400 years, and second, because of the influence of modern ideologies on Islamic thinkers and the Islamic world.

The Koran states that Jews were punished for turning away from the revelations of Allah, among other things because they practiced usury. As in Christianity, Jews are also accused of murdering the prophet. At the time of the Prophet Muhammad, they had to pay the poll tax (jizya), de facto protection money, in a humiliating ritual. The most important anti-Jewish Islamist is generally considered to be the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), the author of an influential essay in the 1950s entitled “Our Struggle with the Jews.”9 Qutb is considered a kind of chief ideologist of the Muslim Brotherhood; Sunni jihadist movements in particular refer to him. He distilled a specifically Islamic antisemitism from religious tradition and Western conspiracy theories.

Qutb wrote that the Jews had been hostile to Islam since its founding in Medina by Muhammad. He further claimed that Islam had suffered continuous “tests” in a “war of 14 centuries” and was now the victim of “tribulations” and “machinations” caused by the Jews.10 Qutb blamed them for the assassination of the third Caliph in 656 and the resulting schism in Islam. He also attributed Jewish influence to the British occupation of Egypt from 1882 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. In addition, Qutb viewed the Jews as the creators of modernity, including Marx, Freud, and other “Jews” who intended to destroy Islam.

The Jews, Qutb said, recruit “lackeys,” that is, Western-educated and Westernized Muslims or “Jewish-influenced Muslims,” to undermine Islam and the fighting spirit of the Muslims. Therefore, he urged Muslims to always remember the Koran’s teaching that “the worst enemies of Muslims are the Jews” and that “God has cursed them.” Over the centuries, God had sent “his servants” to punish the Jews, and so he “made Hitler rule over them.” Qutb believed that their plan to start a “crusader-Zionist war” would result in Allah punishing them again by destroying Israel.11

The appeal to Muhammad’s tirades against the Jews of Medina and to verses in the Koran, says Ronald Nettler, the editor and translator of Qutb’s essay, lends an “Islamic conviction” to these negative views in the Middle East and beyond, as they appear to be based on history and tradition.12 From Qutb’s perspective, the ruling class in the Islamic world has been corrupted by Jewish and Western thought. Jews are also alleged to have directly established rulers and regimes in the Islamic world in order to advance the conspiracy against the community of believers.

Solidarity or Antisemitic?

When I joined the political left in Germany, it became clear to me after a while that the left, despite its assurances of solidarity with the oppressed, is selective in its support. As a Kurd, I experienced this very personally early on. I was often told that one could only support the Kurds on the condition that they did not form alliances with the United States, the EU, or Israel. When it came to Palestine, however, leftists argued for unconditional support for the Palestinian movement, including Hamas and all Islamist groups.

Why does the European left unconditionally support the Palestinian Islamist movement, but much less the Kurds, even though the Kurdish movement is secular, left-wing, liberal, feminist, and social democratic, and shows the least influence of Islamism? It took me a while to understand the answer: the left’s selectivity and antisemitism are inextricably linked.

The anti-Western rhetoric is also represented by some leftists from the Middle East. This supposedly left-wing attitude is particularly evident in the Middle East context, where writers and scholars such as Edward W. Said, Tariq Ali, and the Iranian-born Hamid Dabashi have sided with the Palestinians in the fight against the United States and Israel, but have rarely addressed the political concerns of the large Kurdish population in the Middle East, which repeatedly experiences ethnic discrimination, language oppression, and forced cultural assimilation.

Dabashi, for example, compares the Kurds to the Jews and sees the establishment of an independent Kurdistan as a “second settler-colonial Israel.” He argues that “the creation of an independent Kurdistan would be catastrophic for all peoples of the region, including the Kurds themselves,” and that this process would mean an “Israelization of the Arab and Muslim world” by Kurdistan.13 Antisemitism and chauvinism are thus found not only in the political right but in parts of the political left.

The attitude of the Iranian, Turkish, and Arab left toward the Kurds is certainly shaped by nationalism and their respective imperial ideas. Both the Iranian and Turkish nationalist left have been influenced by the European left. Paradoxically, Dabashi, who sees the establishment of an independent Kurdistan as a catastrophe for the Middle East, sees the establishment of a Palestinian state and the dissolution of Israel as the path to peace. A fundamental insight follows from this: the antisemitism that was once represented by the political right in Europe is now finding a home in parts of the political left. The Jews, according to the Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb, are recruiting Westernized Muslims or “Jewish-influenced Muslims” to undermine Islam and the fighting spirit of the Muslims.14

Since the 1960s, anti-Zionism and antisemitism have been embedded in a broader ideological framework that includes anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, and a strong distrust of U.S. policy. In the eyes of many people in the developing world, Jews became a symbol of the West and thus a target of hatred. One’s position on the “Jewish question,” while not of paramount importance in itself, became an indicator of affiliation with a larger political movement, political beliefs, and general cultural choices.

In the past, Jews were blamed by European antisemites for the emergence of capitalism and the destruction of the supposedly organic societies of the feudal era. Later, antisemitic Europeans accused Jews of acting as anti-capitalists and undermining bourgeois civilization. Sometimes they were blamed for wars, sometimes for peace, since as “money people” they needed peace to run their economies.

Today it is not the least leftists who blame Jews for every disaster in the Middle East. They demonize Jews as white colonizers and denigrate all those who recognize Israel’s right to exist. None of them dare to denounce Hamas’s terrorist attacks on civilians, the kidnapping of people, or the rape of women. They claim that all the problems in the Middle East only began in 1948, and they propose eliminating the State of Israel as the solution. Antisemitism is currently, even if this is not immutable, nearly a core part of the left-wing worldview or at least an accompanying feature of left-wing political movements.

I once thought that I could speak openly in left-wing spaces, imagining them to be the most democratic and free. For the first three years in Berlin, I had no idea, since I could not yet communicate in German and could not understand the reactions to my ideas. It took me a while to realize what was going on. Whenever I wanted to talk about philosophy, society, or literature, I felt like I was not being taken seriously. Some friends were less reserved: I should say what they wanted to hear, not what I wanted to say. I still believe that left-wing spaces need to be saved because they are important. But above all, they need to be democratized.

This post is part of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel Initiative. For more information about this initiative, please visit the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website.

Peshraw Mohammed, born in southern Kurdistan (Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq), based in Berlin, is a freelance author and translator specializing in German philosophy, antisemitism, and the cultural history of National Socialism. Since October 7, he has been writing regularly for German platforms and delivering speeches on antisemitism across various political spectra, including the right, the left, and Islamism. He is currently working on his forthcoming book, Genealogy of Demonization: The Interconnectedness of Antisemitism and Antikurdism (in English).

Topics: Israel Initiative • TPPI Translations

The following essay originally appeared in German in Bahamas 94 (Spring 2024). Translated by Xuxu Song.

For decades now, everything has been known about Rudolf Höss and his ostensible double life as both an enforcer of the Holocaust and a loving family man. Robert Merle’s 1953 roman à clef Death Is My Trade was based in part on publicly accessible notes that Höss had composed while in prison for war crimes. Pictures of the affable Mr. Höss with his wife and colleagues appeared in Alain Resnais’s 1956 film Night and Fog. The testimony of prison psychologist Gustav M. Gilbert, who had spoken with Höss at length in Nuremberg, came up in 1961 during the Eichmann trial. Höss’s autobiographical notes were published by DTV in 1963 under the title Commandant of Auschwitz. Things got especially German in 1977 when the film Death Is My Trade—the German title translates as Excerpts from a German Life—by Theodor Kotulla, based on Robert Merle’s novel and starring the prominent actor Götz George, the son of two celebrated German thespians, was released in German cinemas. A review from the Catholic magazine Filmdienst in December 1977, and quoted on Wikipedia, revealingly states:

The interchangeability of collective thinking and The Enemy becomes frighteningly clear in Kotulla’s emotionless psychohistorical analysis….In Kotulla’s film, political and moral superficiality and the volatile idea of “peace, order and above all cleanliness,” irrationally propagated as the highest value in itself—under this pretext, up to 9,000 people were sent into the “shower room” every day in Auschwitz—rightly appears as the main cause of the totalitarian abuse of power, which is why it can continue to function openly or covertly worldwide in various forms and ideological guises. In this respect, this fact-oriented fiction is a lesson that every teacher, especially every history teacher, should discuss with young people.

Even back then, the pedagogical lesson lay in the notion that Auschwitz merely provided the backdrop for vague musings about man’s responsibility for his actions in times of unfreedom.

A few months before the German New Wave band Ideal hit the charts in 1982 with “Keine Heimat, wer schützt mich vor Amerika?” (“No Homeland, Who Will Protect Me from America?”), German politician Oskar Lafontaine articulated the analytic function of the Höss case that is still in use today. Referring to the debate about the NATO Double-Track Decision, he declared: “Helmut Schmidt continues to speak of a sense of duty, predictability, feasibility, steadfastness….These are secondary virtues. To put it very precisely: one can also run a concentration camp with them.” There would have been much to criticize about a German chancellor (Schmidt) who served as a first lieutenant in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front and who, in Saudi Arabia in 1981, “spoke in relation to Auschwitz about ‘all the moral and historical baggage’ that characterizes German foreign policy in Europe, whereas the Arab peoples are pretty much the only ones who have not had any negative experiences with the Germans” (Jüdische Allgemeine, July 9, 2013). But Lafontaine, the left-winger of the SPD and an avowed anti-Zionist to this day, had taken no offense. After all, concentration camps, as we have learned, are facilities run by the Americans, like Abu Ghraib, or by their proxies—one of whom, Israel, has been running the world’s largest concentration camp for decades. “Let’s look at the conditions in the Gaza Strip: It increasingly resembles a large concentration camp,” stated Cardinal Renato Martino, member of the College of Cardinals, in an interview fifteen years ago (Spiegel, January 9, 2009). We have learned that we all become accomplices if we do not ask ourselves the question: “How can we offer resistance?”

And so, when Auschwitz becomes the subject of postmodern art, it is all about warning against “totalitarian abuse of power,” which “can continue to function openly or covertly worldwide in various forms and ideological guises.” Whoabuses power is clear from the outset, and the probing question of whether we have not all long since become accomplices in crimes comparable to Auschwitz and whether, in the end, there is even a little Rudolf Höss in us, must be ever present.

The Oscar as an Appeal for Shoah Relativization

On March 11, 2024, Jonathan Glazer was awarded an Oscar for best international film for The Zone of Interest—a film that does not want to be a film about the Holocaust, but instead transposes the Holocaust into the present and makes the violent deaths of millions of Jews interchangeable with all kinds of major and minor crimes. In The Zone of Interest, “crime” is indeed no longer bound to any objective criteria but is rather given over to the audience’s free association. The Oscar is not a recognition of an artistic achievement but is instead a recommendation to equate the nearly achieved extermination of European Jews with supposedly equal crimes committed by Jews against the Palestinians.

In his acceptance speech, director Glazer began by saying for himself and his team what needs to be said when artists talk about Auschwitz today: “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say: look what they did then, rather, look what we do now. Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present.”

Dehumanization is the key word and, tellingly, it seems used more as a rebuke of the perpetrators than those who were first stripped of their existence as citizens, then of their pitifully few remnants of human dignity, and finally, after the shaving, tattooing, grotesque uniforms, and starvation, of their last semblance of humanity before being driven into the gas chambers. This meticulous, European-wide process of capturing, stigmatizing, selecting, “concentrating,” and murdering six million people was carried out according to criteria that the perpetrators devised specifically not to murder all communists, intellectuals, or gays, but rather to exterminate the Jews, regardless of their relation to Judaism. This makes the Holocaust unique and distinguishes it above all from the murder of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915–1916 by the Ottoman Turks and also from the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda in 1994, because there was no escape in the Holocaust.

But Glazer had even more to say. To thunderous applause, he warned, as a Jew, against a Jewish Auschwitz: “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?” (Der Standard, March 13, 2024).

The Zone of Interest—Not a Film about the Shoah

People with a Jewish problem always imploringly warn not to lump a work together with the potentially “problematic” ideological statements of its creator. Yet Glazer’s statements correspond precisely to the conception and execution of the work itself. The Zone of Interest is an antisemitic propaganda film for the educated classes.

The freely adapted plot is based on the book of the same name by British author Martin Amis, whose title is intended as a risqué double entendre. Published in 2014, this provocative and often obscenely erotic novel, which is obviously set in Auschwitz but does not mention it, describes a fictional love story between an SS soldier and the camp commandant’s wife. In the English original, Amis often uses (sometimes misspelled) German words to describe their zones of interest, so it is hardly surprising that German publishers were not very enthusiastic. A central character in the book is the Jewish prisoner Szmul, who is described as the “saddest man in the camp.” Amis is no longer able to give an opinion on the adaptation of his book for a film in which no Jews appear; he died on the day of the film’s world premiere.

The film tells the story of the Höss family, whose head, Rudolf, was the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp from 1940 to 1943, in the conventional style of realist narrative cinema. The leading roles are played by the well-known German actors Christian Friedel, as Rudolf Höss, and Sandra Hüller, as his wife Hedwig. The international co-production between the United Kingdom, Poland, and the United States premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival in May 2023. At the 2024 Academy Awards, the film won an Oscar for best international film and for best sound, which was created by sound designer Johnnie Burn and mixer Tarn Willers. Sound indeed plays a leading role in the film, alongside the actors, as it replaces the visual absence of the victims of the Auschwitz killing machine with background sound effects. Gunshots, dogs barking, the roar of the guards, and the screams of pain from the concentration camp inmates can be heard day and night.

The soundtrack by musician and composer Mica Levi is only heard in exceptional cases. It is based on Hanns Eisler’s grand score for the documentary Night and Fog about Nazi concentration and extermination camps, though it does not come close to matching it. It is only in the closing credits that Levi is allowed an angelic song with a techno beat for six nerve-deadening minutes—which, like the occasional fade-ins of short sequences during the film (in bright red, later in black, or at the very beginning in impenetrable gray), are meant to contribute significantly to the film’s supposed emotionality, praised by critics and audiences alike.

Scenes are shown from the life of the Höss couple and their five children, who live in a villa with a garden directly behind the camp wall. The wall is never absent from the fabric of the film itself (which reaches feature length courtesy only of its protracted, tacked-on credits). It separates the world of the perpetrators or profiteers of injustice from the walled-in district of the unspeakable and also of the unnamed—onto which everyone is supposed to project whatever is currently on their mind. The only curious part is that almost everyone makes exactly the same spontaneous association.

The house and the garden are large and well-kept; there is a greenhouse, a garden pavilion, and a swimming pool. The “paradise garden,” which Hedwig Höss lovingly tends, is repeatedly blown with ashes from the concentration camp’s crematoria. Yet life remains peaceful. The message is that the residents manage to ignore the suffering next door, and for which Rudolf Höss is largely responsible, although evidence of the horror keeps intruding on the bourgeois idyll. During a Sunday boat trip in the nearby river, Papa Höss finds a not completely burnt human jawbone in the water. He immediately runs home, where the children are thoroughly washed. Hedwig delights in the contents of the suitcases of dispossessed Jewish women, turns in front of the mirror in a plundered fur coat, and uses the lipstick of women who are gassed on the other side of her garden. Höss loves his horse and his children and discovers that Zyklon B is the perfect means of cleanly exterminating human beings. A happy family in Nazi-era Auschwitz, seemingly able to successfully suppress everything.

The question of whether they may not have suppressed anything at all, but instead agreed to the extermination of the Jews behind the wall out of conviction, and simply did not want to be bothered with “details,” is cast aside. The film repeats what has already been said or laid out in the well-known Höss saga since the 1950s—but it is not true. The three oldest Höss children were ten, eight, and seven years old when they moved into the villa in Auschwitz; they lived there for three years. Children observe and ask questions. The wives of the SS soldiers from the settlement knew about it because the stench from the crematoria must have been a nuisance and so a topic of conversation. They could have quickly applied to get away—that was possible—but they stayed. They were all held together by a consensus that can be easily deduced from Höss’s statements and notes. Of his subordinates, he writes in Commandant of Auschwitz:

Most of those involved often approached me during the inspection rounds through the extermination sites to vent their depression and impressions, just to seek reassurance from me. From their confidential conversations I heard the question again and again: Is what we have to do there necessary? Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands of women and children have to be exterminated? And I, who had asked myself this question countless times deep down, had to fob them off with the Führer’s order, to put them off with it. I had to tell them that this annihilation of Jewry was necessary to free Germany, to free our descendants for all time from the most tenacious adversaries.

What went for the subordinates also must have been true for the women and older children. The reference to the Führer’s order is secondary and only played a role afterward: in the self-defense of the perpetrators and in the pathetic retrospective babble about necessity to obey orders, right of resistance, corruptibility, and so on, which began with the trial of Adolf Eichmann. What remains central is that the Führer’s order was not questioned by the historical personnel because the message that Jewry had to be annihilated to free Germany from its most tenacious adversary was shared by everyone. Hard, dirty work, but vital for the survival of all Germans, and it was not easy to remain personally decent, as Höss and Himmler emphasized. This conviction was widely shared, not simply by the residents of the SS settlement—yet it is not mentioned for the entirety of a film about Auschwitz.

Glazer was born in London in 1965 and is of Jewish descent. The former director of commercials made his feature-length film directorial debut in 2000 with Sexy Beast, a thriller, followed by two more feature films, Birth in 2004, a mystery drama, and Under the Skin in 2013—a science fiction thriller, which prior to The Zone of Interest was Glazer’s most successful, most talked about, and first work dedicated to a decidedly political subject.

A few days after the theatrical release of The Zone of Interest, voices on social media called for Glazer’s film to be sent to Gaza. The Swiss newspaper Blick (February 29, 2024) likewise reported on how Gaza comparisons caused a stir at the Berlinale: “It is extremely interesting to observe how Glazer’s film is being received in Germany in the wake of the antisemitism discussion at the Berlinale. There, an Instagram account of the festival posted a picture of the destroyed Gaza—and captioned it The Zone of Interest.” Glazer did not comment on these directly, but at the Oscars he made positive reference to such comparisons, which perfectly serve antisemitic thinking. At the Berlinale, as at the Oscars, there was cheap, convenient applause for such statements.

The cynicism with which Glazer emphasized in his acceptance speech that his film should stimulate thought about the present is obvious. After all, he made as little mention of the uniqueness of the victims of the Shoah in his speech as he did in his film. In an interview with the Guardian, Glazer also admitted that he wanted to connect the past with the present: “For me, it is not a film about the past. It is trying to talk about the present, about us and our resemblance with the perpetrators, rather than our resemblance to the victims.” Was that the reason why there is no violence and no victims to be seen in The Zone of Interest? Glazer obviously hid the victims of the Shoah behind the wall to make them fungible—interchangeable.

A “zone of interest,” in German “Interessensgebiet,” was the name given to the remote area in occupied Poland between the Sola and Vistula rivers near the town of Auschwitz, where the largest extermination camp was built. From 1941 until the end of the war, around 1.3 million people were murdered there in an area of around 40 square kilometers. One million Jews, that is one-sixth of the victims of the Shoah, as well as a large number of Roma, Sinti, prisoners of war, and others whose lives were deemed unworthy by Hitler and his henchmen, lost their lives here in the cruelest manner between 1941 and 1945.

Ideological and Primitive Universalization

Since then, historical awareness and a confrontation with the German past have been demanded in a variety of ways. Films, contemporary witness accounts, books, documentation, museums, and school textbooks attempt to describe this period and call on people to “never forget.” Over the years, the call for a different, less narrow, even global approach to the German past has become louder in German-speaking countries, not only from the AfD (Alternative for Germany) end of the political spectrum, but also from the milieu of the far more influential postcolonial left. New groups of perpetrators and other previously neglected genocides have been discovered, and people no longer want to be permanently tied down to the extermination of the European Jews.

National Socialism, like the Holocaust, is history, and history is something old. People should look to the future and finally take adequate account of the many mass crimes committed since the colonial era—so say voices from very different walks of life. Germany views itself as a superior country that has learned from the atrocities of the past and is therefore all the more determined to uphold moral principles. The narratives of Auschwitz serve as a reminder from the past, but no one wants anything to do with the idea of collective guilt. The claim that Germans have been stigmatized with collective guilt is part of the rhetoric of the right, which has always resisted the claim that the Germans are a nation of perpetrators. Martin Hohmann, a former CDU politician who later switched to the AfD, even went so far as to project the term “perpetrator people” onto Jews in a speech on German Unity Day in 2003, thus becoming a trendsetter for a completely different, left-wing scene.

With his universalization of the Holocaust, Glazer follows the Hohmann thesis in a postcolonial fashion. It seems that every resident of a Western country is a perpetrator. But now that the Germans have been spared this collective accusation, there remains but one perpetrator nation.

The possibilities of making the Shoah the subject of a traditional feature film have been exhausted, for the very reason that series such as the 1978 American miniseries Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss or films like Schindler’s List were unable to grasp the dimension of the crime and seemed to trivialize it against their own intentions. Glazer sensed his opportunity and pretended to create a completely unique work of art of his own out of Auschwitz, the Nazis’ zone of interest. He was well aware that he would have to approach the concentration camp story differently in order to be successful. The idea was not to make a “normal” film about the greatest crime in the history of mankind, but a different, newly conceived, and skillfully executed Holocaust film.

Such a plan requires a successful recipe based on the “less is more” principle. Be gone, Schindler kitsch and Spielberg melodrama, but also away with the facts, away with the presentation of victims, and above all: away with the Jews. Bring on the now, into which everything can be projected and which gives audiences room for their own interpretations based on current events. Of course, Glazer doesn’t want to be associated with right-wing fulminations against collective guilt, as the selection and staging of his actors shows. With skillful makeup and costume design, they correspond perfectly to the traditional images of Aryan women, men, and children. He accords rather with the milieu of the postcolonial left, because Glazer discovers evil in a German bourgeoisie that is believed to be capable of anything, submissive to its masters while simultaneously orchestrating its own, naturally tasteless happiness in the corner. The further away the specific victims are removed, the less talk there is of Jews and antisemitism in general, the clearer it becomes that behind the guilt-ridden bit players, the merciless but impersonal essence of capitalism is at work, which will not shrink from anything.

The soundscape of the film noted above can be applied to many places where people are tortured and murdered. To ensure that this interchangeability is maintained, those in front of the wall do not name who the victims behind the wall are. Only one scene in the film doesn’t quite follow this pattern. It is one in which Hedwig Höss laughingly tells her mother, who has come to visit, that her Rudolf calls her the “queen of Auschwitz,” and her mother ponders whether the Jewish woman whose house she cleaned before the war is “perhaps now on the other side of the wall.” At the same time, she is annoyed that she did not manage to acquire this woman’s beautiful curtains after her deportation. The distribution of the loot from the “Jewish apartments,” uncovered especially by historian Götz Aly, as well as the allocation of these apartments to the increasing number of “bombed-out” people among neighbors and other profiteers, here serves the sole purpose of shedding light on the shabbiness of the petite bourgeoisie and accomplices. In doing so, it conceals the fact that the Third Reich, its days of military triumph numbered, had long since been warning of Jewish vengeance and retribution as a further necessity for the Final Solution. It actively turned as many people as possible into accomplices, for instance by appropriating the household goods of deportees, so that there could be no turning back.

Research shows that Hedwig Höss came from a very wealthy family. Why does Glazer turn Rudolf Höss’s mother-in-law into a former cleaning lady in a Jewish household? Perhaps because the longer this cleaning lady is there, the more agitated she becomes by what happens in the concentration camp, so that one day she leaves the house secretly without saying goodbye. In his film, Glazer deals with only one Jewish victim, whom he describes as a rich woman whose former subordinate is a German accomplice but who has sufficient heart to at least flee the scene of extermination. Using a rich Jewish woman and an exploited German worker as stereotypes for the victims and perpetrators not only feeds into antisemitic prejudices. Recognizing human potential in someone because they were underprivileged in a precarious employment relationship echoes the bleak attempts to save the German working class by the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) and SED (East German Communist Party), who insisted that Jews should not be granted any “special” victim status. It is hard to imagine a more ideological and primitive universalization of the difference between “rich and poor” than in this key scene in the film.

And What Does All This Have to Do with Hannah Arendt?

The Zone of Interest is often praised in the German-language press with reference to Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” Arendt had belittled Eichmann and many other so-called desk murderers (Schreibtischtäter) as willing followers of orders, who in their ordinariness would not have been capable of evil at all—as if this required diabolical personality traits. Eichmann seems to her a mere functionary whose sole interest was the organization of the Holocaust, the purpose of which was of no concern to him.

Yet Adolf Eichmann was such a fanatical antisemite that even when it was important to remain inconspicuous, he inculcated his children with such blatant hatred of Jews that the “knowledge about the Jews” and the necessity of their extermination spread among their friends and classmates, arousing the suspicion of attentive mothers and fathers in the German colony of Buenos Aires, including Jews, and he was eventually exposed. What is already laid out in Arendt’s work is taken to extremes by Glazer and the German press in the case of Höss. Can the evil that is often located in the Auschwitz system, with its functionaries and, moreover, in a German population that at least willingly goes along with it, or at any rate that is completely indifferent, exist at all? Can an atrocity that is impossible without the suspension of any inhibition to kill and without that of the repression of the obvious, which manifested itself, among other things, in the fact that people shrugged at the fact that small children, the disabled, and the elderly were allegedly sent to work in the East, be called anything else other than a manifestation of evil?

Glazer, who depicts Rudolf Höss—who proverbially had his hand on the gas tap—as a lovable family man who was simply doing his duty, deliberately fails to recognize that he and his wife were perpetrators who acted out of conviction. As it happens, Höss was also an extremely brutal killer. In 1923, along with two colleagues, he got Walter Kadow, who had been expelled from the Roßbach unit of the paramilitary Freikorps as a traitor and thief, drunk in a pub in Parchim. They then dragged him into a wooded area at night, where they cut the young man’s throat as he lay on the ground before shooting him in the head. Höss had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1923 and was closely associated with Martin Bormann. In 1928 he and his wife joined the National Socialist, environmentalist, and, of course, antisemitic Artaman League, which probably awakened his and his wife’s preference for German settlement in the “East.” Someone who had been an avowed antisemite since at the latest 1922 by no means became an exterminator of Jews simply for career reasons.

It may be true that Höss himself did not mistreat or mock any Jews, but this is immaterial in relation to his will to exterminate the European Jews. Himmler did not quarter just any squeamish Germans or desk murderers from next door in a villa next to the camp, but hard-boiled Nazis from the very start, fanatical Jew-haters and sadists. The Polish inhabitants of the area where the camp was built were forced by the Nazis to leave their homes and villages because no one who was not involved in the genocide was supposed to live there. They wanted to avoid witnesses to the horror. Glazer does not look beyond the camp wall either, but instead turns it into one of the many walls of contemporary history behind which people are imprisoned.

“Inevitably” One Felt Reminded of Gaza

In The Zone of Interest, the suffering and murder of millions of people is reduced to a sound installation, which is celebrated as an artifice just as much as the use of surveillance cameras, which turn the Höss villa into a kind of Big Brother house in which the audience is supposed to feel just as caught as the actors in the film. The background sound functions as a substitute for what happens and sounds just as monotonous and threatening as it does in hundreds of films when it comes to making fear and horror “tangible.”

Canadian political activist and critic of globalization Naomi Klein believes that, given the emotional impact of the film’s images, it is impossible to avoid an updated reading of the historical material. “Everyone I know who has seen the film,” she wrote in the Guardian, “felt inevitably reminded of Gaza” (Berliner Zeitung, March 18, 2024). There is no declared one-to-one equation in the film, but the almost complete concealment of the identity of the victims is the trick to creating an interchangeability between the victims being Jewish, or, according to racial definitions of the murderers, having to be Jewish. When the extermination of the Jews is discussed, but they are not allowed to appear at all, whether in the picture or in the conversations of the perpetrators, the rumor about the Jews inevitably persists. This is the second trick that makes it possible for millions of moviegoers to be “inevitably” reminded of Gaza. Glazer, who comes from the same postcolonial milieu as Klein, knew very well what people who remember everything except the Holocaust jump at. He knew that that the unremarked depiction of Auschwitz’s camp wall alone was sufficient to come to the same realization as a Catholic cardinal in 2009: “Let’s look at the conditions in Gaza: It looks more and more like a large concentration camp.”

The Zone of Interest is intended to offer a unique and provocative perspective on the events in the concentration camps, and the audience is challenged to think about good and evil, where the lines can become blurred. Where does this lead? The key scene in this film that does not want to be a film about the Shoah is the one in which Hedwig Höss, who is drawn like a caricature of the German Woman of 1940—blond, healthy, fertile, and hardworking—shows her mother the lovingly tended garden of her new home and says something to the effect of: “Three years ago there was nothing here when we came here, and I planted it all so beautifully.”

This statement clearly alludes to Israel and to the Jewish immigrants who have been reclaiming the desert there since the beginning of the twentieth century, and even more so after the Second World War, following the words of the prophet Isaiah:

For waters break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; in the haunt of jackals, where they lie down, the grass shall become reeds and rushes….And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

(Isaiah 35:3–10, quoted in German from the 2017 Luther translation of the Bible; English translation from the English Standard Version)

This pragmatic and biblical promise for the survivors has been the target of scorn and hatred from the anti-Zionist left since the 1960s. The fact that Jonathan Glazer himself is Jewish lends additional relevance and credibility to such “criticism” of the age-old Jewish dream of returning to the Promised Land, where they would be so free to live as Jews without persecution. After all, it never hurts to protect your own resentment against possible objections with references such as “I know a Jew who also thinks that…”

The tedium of the film, which, committed to narrative cinema, has nothing to tell, is intended to reveal the murderers’ and accomplices’ boring evening after work—which, somehow, intensifies the horror. The visual language and the technically elaborate color scheme, which is reminiscent of faded, colorized black-and-white pictures from family albums, turns out instead to be a vain, elaborate, and nonsensical artifice that seems like an homage to the old days. The color scheme of The Zone of Interest’s footage ironically calls to mind the symbolism of the red dress in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, which became a strong visual symbol for injustice, cruelty, and for the life and dignity of every single human being. Glazer never achieves such symbolism at any point in his film. The exploited victims who work in the Höss villa, the nameless non-Jewish servants, who were filmed by the Big Brother cameras in such a way that their identities are unrecognizable, are likely meant to be the sort of typical staff of any capitalist society based on the exploitation of subordinates. Even the female rebel roaming around at night, filmed with a thermal imaging camera while she hides apples and leftover bread for the concentration camp inmates in the bushes, remains faceless and nameless.

The Holocaust Shrinks to a Backdrop

With little dialogue and no plot, the film wants to hit the mark yet instead falls into an abyss of triviality, as demonstrated by the sequence in which Höss acts out his sexual lust. We know that Rudolf Höss raped a political prisoner in the camp several times; the woman became pregnant and had to pay for it with harsh punishment and an abortion. Glazer stages this story by constructing a scene that is intended to look like a completely “normal” visit by a prostitute to a completely “normal” German man. A young woman takes a seat in Höss’s study, undoes her thick braid of auburn hair, which is over a meter long, and takes off her shoes to submit to Höss. We learn that there was a sexual encounter after the next cut, when we see the Sturmbannführer cleaning his genital area extensively from behind.

Glazer tells the story of a mass murderer who lives in a beautiful catalogue home, sexually exploited the women in his captivity, and loves his own children. So far so bad. This leads away from the reality of Auschwitz, which was not a prison camp in an authoritarian state where the Kapos also helped themselves sexually. Sexual relations with Jews were taboo for the German camp occupants. In Glazer’s film, the simple-minded Höss family does not stand in contrast to the extermination process, but simply exists alongside it. In the case of The Zone of Interest, the correct insight that evil cannot simply be shown by depicting extreme cruelty has led instead to the depiction of the banal everyday life of brutes, who appear as interchangeable—in a way that the Holocaust, which has been shrunk to a backdrop, is not.

One wonders for which audience this film was made and what its message is. The Zone of Interest is not a film about the Holocaust; you have to already know history to understand the film. But it is not a film about the perpetrators and their perspective either; the bland character study of a single family is too shallow for that. Does it even provide a view of the Shoah that has never been seen before in cinematic form?

The Zone of Interest is the work of an ambitious filmmaker who wants to stand out with his supposedly extraordinary way of telling the events of World War II; for this purpose, he appropriates the genocide of the Jews and assumes the audience’s knowledge of the subject. But even for this, the much-praised sound of the horror is too quiet and the smoking chimney in the background too hackneyed. The work is obviously meant to be translated into today. Glazer uses Hitler’s planned and almost completely realized extermination of the Jews as a synonym for the capitalist West, which sits as a generalized evil perpetrator in blooming allotments in front of walls, behind which the Global South is exploited and starving. Israel, before and after October 7, lies of course at the forefront. Glazer uses the Holocaust as a mere prop, distorting the true tragedy and inflaming what is most dangerous for Jewish life today. Glazer’s “today” are the Europeans and Americans who live in prosperity and ignore the fate of their neighbors. The “de-Judaization” that Glazer undertakes in his film thereby delights the so-called “anti-Zionists” and the passionate antisemites from the Arab world to America.

Glazer Is Celebrated for His Perpetrator-Victim Reversal

The filmmaker stretches this far-fetched parallel to infinity. Yet when it comes to Jews and the genocide against them, the infinity of comparisons ends in Israel, because the world, since year one, but especially since October 7, has sensed there the opportunity to turn history on its head. They want to move the Jews into the gardens in front of the walls and fences behind which the new zone of interest they themselves have built is located: Gaza. This is Glazer’s perfidious idea of coming to terms with the past. He does not want to talk about the past and show what happened in Auschwitz, but to dock into the present. This is clear enough in the film, but especially in his speech accepting the film industry’s biggest award: “Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization…, how do we resist?” This is surely what moves postcolonially trained intellectuals so much about the film, and what it so expertly underpins for the anti-Zionist movement. And it’s exactly what Glazer wanted—as the Friday Times, published in Pakistan, enthusiastically suspects, writing on February 27, 2023, under the title “Watching Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest as Israel Massacres People in Gaza”:

The film's contemporary nature is revealed in at least one more aspect: it appeared on screens less than a week after the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians flared up, and this is also worth noting. Although this allusion is unintentional, what is immediately striking is the situation of the peaceful, carefree life of Zionist settlers and the suffering and dying Palestinians on the other side of the wall. The narrative around Operation Al-Aqsa Flood promoted by liberal media and commentators around the world revolved around Hamas’s attack on the music festival on October 7. The festival, where young people had carefree fun, took place just two kilometers from the walls of Gaza. On the one hand, the settlers’ carefree fun, and on the other, the tragedy of the Palestinians.

Social media is likewise overflowing with joy at Glazer’s Holocaust relativization. A Syrian Facebook user happily notes what the message is: “Not to say, ‘look what they did then,’ but ‘look what we do today,’ Glazer said, quickly dispelling the notion that comparing today’s horrors to the Nazis’ crimes is inherently trivializing or relativizing. He left no doubt that it was his expressed intention to show continuities between the monstrous past and our monstrous present.” Quite apart from the numerous expressions of gratitude to Glazer, which often end with the tag “#FreePalestine” on social media, it is easy to find countless anti-Israel statements sparked by Glazer’s film on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. The only difference between the cineastes’ praise and the usual antisemitic hate comments that can be found beneath almost all social media posts by Jewish institutions or even by Jewish private individuals since October 7 is that the relevant community first thanks Glazer for The Zone of Interest and only then writes antisemitic comments.

Glazer used the Jews as witnesses against themselves in a film about Auschwitz, instigating a rhetorical perpetrator-victim reversal, thereby contributing to the incitement of antisemitic mobs, such as those at American universities. The Oscar-winning film equates the Nazi Shoah with Israel in Gaza, and it does so with such ingenuity that a notion of colonialism in which Jews are perpetrators can be explained to schoolchildren on the basis of European Jewish history—which simultaneously gives every old, right-wing, dusty Nazi and every young, woke, left-wing antisemite great pleasure.

With his Rudolf Höss, Glazer puts himself on a par with Arendt and her Adolf Eichmann. He makes evil so small and trivial that even the worst relativizer of history can go along with it. We have long known what humans are capable of. Jonathan Glazer does not have to explain this to us, especially not on the back of the Jews and their fate.

Topics: Israel Initiative • TPPI Translations

In France for several years now, the universities, including the top ranking ones [grandes écoles], have been subjected to increasing pressure by active minorities, who can be characterized as “woke” or Islamo-leftist and who are able to exert, here and there, a genuine ideological dictatorship. On a number of questions, starting with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict or the Islamist menace, freedom of expression and freedom of debate are de facto forbidden. A pluralism of opinion has been replaced by the imposition of the ideological convictions of a politicized minority who share the same hatred of Israel and same admiration for “armed resistance” as an Islamist organization like Hamas. This is the case of Sciences Po Paris, which under the cover of virtuous calls for diversity and inclusion has fallen into a culture of suspicion, intolerance, denunciation, and sidelining of “those who don’t toe the line.” As at other institutions of higher learning, small sectarian far-left groups, in the name of the defense of “minorities” and of “victims”—those whom they value—impose their law, in the face of administrative authorities whose main concern is not to “make waves” and who, as a consequence, are willing to accept everything, to tolerate everything, closing their eyes as much as possible to the actions of the activists, who show off and impose the reign of their intellectual terrorism. This is the spectacle produced by the policy of tolerance toward the intolerant.

In order to measure the degree to which wokeism has taken over Sciences Po Paris, it is best to take a look at the jargon-filled, involuntarily comical announcement presented on March 4, 2024, by the “Head of Engagement,” establishing March 2024 as “the month of Diversity and Inclusion at Sciences Po.” One finds in it a stark illustration of the politico-cultural Americanization in the woke style of this famous Parisian establishment, proving that the ridiculous no longer kills, even in France:

In March, several important international days are celebrated and have as their common goal fighting discrimination and advocating for a more inclusive and egalitarian society. For the very first time, Sciences Po’s Head of Engagement has decided to organize Diversity and Inclusion Month. On this occasion, Sciences Po has mobilized to offer conferences, workshops, meetings, exhibitions, screenings, plays. . . . This month aims to promote equality, diversity, and inclusion, to facilitate the understanding of the mechanisms and issues related to different forms of discrimination, and finally to mobilize and encourage action. A rich program that reflects the diversity of our institution, its commitments, and its values. . . .

Events Reserved for Employees

• March 5: Queer Coffee & Friends, a meet-up every first Tuesday of the month from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. to discuss LGBTQIA+ topics in a safe way. The first meeting will take place at the Maison des Sciences Po (campus 1 Saint-Thomas)

• March 19: Anti-discrimination awareness workshop for managers. . . .

In student circles as well as in faculty circles, the silent majority lets things go, it lets the sectarians and the fanatics, without forgetting the idiots, impose their certainties and shout their slogans. Manichaeanism reigns, barring the road for necessary debates, replaced by the competition between victims. The de-ideologization of the majority compounds the resignation and conformist cowardice of the now woke administrative authorities, leaving the field open for the tyrannical minorities. What I have called Islamo-Palestinianism seems now to have become the dominant ideology of a number of university establishments, where one famously teaches the nebulous “gender theory” from the perspective of intersectional neo-feminism or decolonialism, and where one denounces “liberticidinal” and “Islamophobic” laïcité (state secularism) and “republican fundamentalism,” all while idealizing the multicultural society being erected as the path to salvation.

On March 12, 2024, at Sciences Po Paris, the occupation of the Émile-Boutmy amphitheater, rebaptized “Gaza” by pro-Hamas activists, demonstrated this worrying sectarian drift. “Don’t let her in, she is a Zionist”: this is how a student, a member of the UEJF (Union des étudiants juifs de France/Union of Jewish Students of France), was forbidden access to the room in which students were supposed to debate. This Jewish student specified that the pro-Palestinian activists told her, after having identified her, “You there, you’re not getting in! . . . We know who you are.” This is an example of discrimination against a person because of her diverging opinion. Any departure from the anti-Israeli consensus and more broadly anti-Zionism is considered to be intolerable. The denunciation of the “genocide of Palestinians” constitutes the main theme of accusation in anti-Zionist discourse since October 7, 2023. It aims to make everyone forget the massacres and the rapes committed by the Islamo-terrorists of Hamas.

Since March 12, the candidate for the movement La France Insoumise/France Unbowed (LFI) for the European Parliament, Rima Hassan, the Franco-Palestinian face of Islamo-leftist movements, posted on X her “support for all of the students and for all of the faculty who are mobilizing against the genocide taking place” (adding: “at your service—your rebellion is sound and beautiful”), followed the next day by LFI MP Aymeric Caron, who sent out, also on X, a “bravo to the Sciences Po students who are mobilizing against the genocide underway in Gaza.” Known for its slogan-like appeals “against ethnic cleansing and the Israeli genocidal project,” the radical left-wing collective “Urgence Palestine/Emergency Palestine,” which called for a demonstration in support of pro-Palestinian students in front of the Sciences Po premises on March 14, posted this message on X: “Denouncing genocide is not a crime.” The victim inversion is illustrated here perfectly: victims of a jihadist mega-pogrom on October 7, the Israelis are accused of “genocide,” presented as a “project” being carried out in Gaza.

Islamo-Leftism, Pseudo Anti-Racism, and Anti-Zionism

What is Islamo-leftism? It is a grouping of strategic alliances and ideological convergences between far-left groups and diverse Islamist movements. What is an Islamo-leftist? It is either a far-left activist who allies himself with Islamist groups in the name of certain supposedly revolutionary causes (anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, etc.) or an Islamist who draws close to the far left for tactical/strategic reasons by adopting some if its mobilizing themes.

In both cases, anti-racism is invoked. Every Islamo-leftist claims to be fighting racism. But the “racism” that he is combatting is first and foremost “systemic racism,” which is supposed to structure Western societies, said to be still “white.” It follows that the anti-racism of the Islamo-leftists can be reduced to the project of destroying Western societies accused of being intrinsically racist. The designated enemy is therefore the West and Westernized societies. The “struggle against racism” is transformed into the struggle against “systemic racism” or against all forms of so-called “systemic” discrimination (of race, of gender, of religion, etc.).

Like decolonial ideologues, contemporary Islamo-leftists have taken up this anti-racist vision of the world, in which “systemic racism” is supposed to manifest itself in a societal racism and an “institutional racism” characterizing Western societies. But they don’t stop there. Their fundamental thesis is that “institutional racism” is first and foremost “institutional Islamophobia.” Therefore, the fight against racism tends to be reduced to the fight against Islamophobia. That is where there is an alignment with Islamist propaganda.

They add to this what I call the thesis of substitution, which claims that in Western societies, antisemitism has now been replaced with Islamophobia. The fight against Islamophobia must therefore replace the fight against antisemitism. They can therefore denounce the fight against antisemitism as a strategy of occultation and diversion that allows for attention to be deflected from the real threat, Islamophobia, and the real racism that they see as “Zionism,” a fantasized and demonized Zionism. This is how Islamo-leftism places itself in the field of anti-Zionist propaganda.

Historical Variants

Islamo-leftism, which designates a revolutionary tradition on the left, constitutes a general category comprising a number of historical variants: Islamo-communism, Islamo-Third-Worldism, Islamo-alter-globalization, Islamo-decolonialism, Islamo-wokeism. Islamo-leftism has a prehistory, which starts in 1920 with the Islamo-Bolshevik collusion, and a history, which starts in 1978–1979 with the Islamo-communist alliance in Iran.

In the prehistory of Islamo-leftism, one has to go back to the first “Congress of the People of the East,” organized on September 1, 1920, in Baku by the Communist International, which had just been created. It is there that Lenin defined Islam as the religion of “oppressed nations,” that is to say, as an oppressed religion. It was therefore necessary not to offend the religious sentiments of the poor Muslim peasants. Comrade Zinoviev declared that it was necessary “to call for a genuine holy war [jihad] against the English and French capitalists.” This was one of the first appearances of the Islamo-communist convergence in the name of anti-imperialism. But the romance rapidly soured. In 1923, Stalin had the Tatar leader Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, a partisan of a national Muslim communism, arrested.

It was also under the banner of anti-imperialism that the Bandung Conference (April 18–24, 1955) was held, the first Afro-Asian conference, which can be considered the founding event of Third-Worldism and which would develop on the basis of the rejection of colonialism, imperialism, and racism, and would provide an ideological basis for the radical anti-Zionism and anti-Western sentiment that will be found later in decolonialism.

Next one must emphasize the importance of the Khomeinist revolution, when in 1978–1979 the Iranian Communist Party (Tudeh), like all of the groups of the left-wing opposition to the Shah, supported the Shiite Islamists in their conquest of power, to the applause of some of the Western intellectual elites (among them Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir), who saw in these developments a new model of revolution, supposedly endowed with a “spiritual” dimension. The Iranian communists, like other left-wing groups, believed they could play the card of an alliance with the Iranian Islamists. But after four years of collaboration with the Islamist government, Tudeh was brutally destroyed on Khomeini’s orders.

Finally, it is necessary to point out the connections between Islamists and Marxist revolutionaries in the 1990s in favor of the alter-globalization movement, in which Trotskyist organizations such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Great Britain took part. In the fall of 1994, Chris Harman, who was one of the leaders of this revolutionary party, published a long article entitled “The Prophet and the Proletariat.” In this text, Harman theorizes a strategic, but conditional, conjunctural alliance between revolutionary socialists and Islamists, particularly on the fronts of anti-imperialism and anti-racism.

Sometimes communists also convert to Islam: this was the case with the Marxist-Leninist terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as Carlos. The itinerary of comrade Carlos is emblematic: this communist activist of Venezuelan origin, Third-Worldist, and international terrorist converted to militant Islam after having embraced the Palestinian cause. He then found a place for himself in the jihadist terrorism of al-Qaeda, declaring on November 1, 2001, that he experienced “a profound relief when seeing the heroic acts of sacrifice of September 11, 2001,” and thus paying homage to the charismatic leader of the jihadist group: “Sheikh Osama bin Laden is the model of the mujahid. He is a living martyr, a pure one.” Anti-imperialism constitutes his primary motivation, which justifies what he himself calls ideological “convergence”: “All those who fight against the enemies of humanity, that is to say, American imperialism, the Zionists, their allies, and their agents, are my comrades.”

Radical Anti-Zionism at the Heart of Islamo-Leftism

In the discourse of Islamo-leftist propaganda, one can find a strategic balance between the compassionate presentation of the Muslim victim (colonialism, racism, etc.) and the heroic celebration of the Muslim rebel, the mujahid, the fighter for the faith. On the one hand, the victim figure of the colonized, discriminated against, and “racialized,” and, on the other hand, that of the vigilante-warrior, the jihadist, transformed into “resister.” The Islamo-terrorists of Hamas can thus be celebrated as “resisters.”

There one can also find anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist themes, but the primary enemy is the capitalist, colonialist, and “racist” West, racism being an attribute of “whites” alone (“Zionists” included) and “systemic racism” a unique characteristic of “white societies.” This is the fundamental dogma of decolonial and identity politics ideologues, who claim “political anti-racism,” a one-sided racism that masks an undeclared anti-white racism, and a radical anti-Zionism, aiming at the destruction of Israel, accused of being a “racist” or “apartheid” state. Most of the countries of the “Global South” have rallied around the Palestinian cause, and since the Israeli military response to the massacres of October 7, they accuse Israel not only of “ethnic cleansing” but also and primarily of “genocide” against the Palestinians.

I coined the phrase “Islamo-leftism” in the early 2000s to designate a militant alliance in place between Islamist groups and groups on the far left (which I designated as leftist to simplify) in the name of the Palestinian cause, erected as the new great revolutionary cause. It is therefore a descriptive term, referring to an observable ideological-political phenomenon, namely, in the form of “anti-Zionist” protests bringing together representatives of Islamist groups (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah) and far-left militants, primarily Trotskyists but also “alter-globalists.”

As I observed and analyzed in 2000–2002, this strategic alliance against a common enemy, Israel or “Zionism,” was based on the image of the Palestinian as victim, which in far-left groups then started to be transferred onto the Muslim, basing itself on the axiom that Islam was the religion of the poor, the oppressed, and the victims of colonialism and imperialism as well as racism. Therefore, the great sin is Islamophobia. To be pro-Palestinian, from the leftist perspective, is to be at once anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist, and Islamophile.

With this combination there is a very important break with tradition. Despite the fact that in the political culture of the far left, religion was “the opium of the people” that had to be denounced, the new Islamo-leftist alliance breaks with this militant atheism, but only to the benefit of political Islam, perceived as a revolutionary force, that is, as the only new revolutionary force. The first moment of the Islamo-leftist alliance is contemporary to the Second Intifada and the rise of the alter-globalization movement: the anti-Zionists and the alter-globalization activists saw in Islamist groups possible, even necessary, allies.

An Islamo-alter-globalist configuration was created in the 1990s and early 2000s. Since the late 1990s, the honorable Muslim Brother Tariq Ramadan, who would be invited to all the European Social Forums, understood that he could exploit the anti-capitalism supposedly shared by Islamists and Marxist-inspired alter-globalists, against a background of anti-Westernism (or “hesperophobia”), centered on a radical anti-Americanism.

The international context was first marked by the catastrophic World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, held in Durban from September 2 to 9, 2001, which was a festival of anti-Jewish hatred centered on the demonization of “Zionism” by certain pro-Palestinian NGOs, then by the attacks of 9/11 committed by a jihadist organization, al-Qaeda, whose declared objective was to combat the “Jewish–Crusader alliance” or the “Zionist–Crusader” alliance. The famous founding declaration, published on February 23, 1998, of the “Global Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders” marked the beginning of a new phase for radical Islamism, characterized notably by the designation of the Jews as incarnating the absolute enemy.

The enemy was the same for the Islamists and for the New Leftists, but it did not have the same name: the former designated it as “the Jews,” the latter as the “Zionists.” All of them declared themselves to be anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. This hybrid movement then found its raison d’être in the ideological convergence and strategic alliances around what I have called “radical” or “absolute” anti-Zionism, whose objective is the destruction of Israel. During these protests, the “Allahu Akbar” that sounded did not bother the leftist militants present in the least, no more so than the consensual calls for the destruction of Israel to the tone of “Zionists = Nazis” or “Zionism = racism.” The cry “death to the Jews” came to enhance these Islamo-leftist spectacles that were the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, starting in October 2000.

The anti-Jewish dimension of these demonstrations was striking, as was the importance given to the Nazification of the “Zionists” and more widely of the Jews, intended to convey this message summarizing the ongoing inversion of victimhood: the Zionist Jews are the new Nazis, while the Palestinians are the new Jews. The instrumentalization and misappropriation of anti-racism consisted then in giving it the face of anti-Zionism, based on the image of the Palestinian victim of a fantasized “Zionism.” These themes of Palestinian propaganda were internalized by the entire far left and part of the left at large.

Transformation of Islamo-Leftism

In the history of Islamo-leftism, I distinguish three periods: the first marked by the confluence of alter-globalization, anti-Zionism, and Islamism (2000–2005); the second marked by a growing decolonial hold on far-left movements, for the most part converted to the Islamophile victimhood cult and calling for “political anti-racism”; the third by the integration of radical anti-Zionism in the political religion that is woke ideology, and which has become a globalized intellectual fashion. During the years from 2005 to 2015, the figure of the victim will progressively be occupied by the Muslim, on the basis of a slogan: Islam is supposedly a “dominated” religion, it is supposedly the religion of an oppressed minority, the religion of the “dominated,” the excluded, the “racialized.” And the populations coming out of Muslim immigration are supposedly the heirs of colonized peoples, therefore “oppressed,” “discriminated against,” “racialized.” A pro-Palestinian victimization is thus enlarged into a pro-Islamic victimization. It is here that there is the second moment of Islamo-leftism, centered on the image of the Muslim victim of racism, which will be illustrated by calls to “fight Islamophobia,” which will multiply beginning in the mid-2000s.

The denunciation of “systemic racism” and “institutional racism,” both perfectly imaginary, have been borrowed from decolonial discourse and translated into a denunciation of “institutional Islamophobia,” something no less imaginary. Since then, in published platforms as well as during protests “against Islamophobia,” far-left activists have mobilized with Islamist activists, whether Muslim Brotherhood or Salafi. Islamo-leftism has taken the shape of an Islamo-decolonialism. The Islamo-leftism of the years from 1990 to 2005 was first and foremost anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, in the Third-Worldist tradition; Islamo-decolonialism is first and foremost anti-Western and anti-white, and its supposed “anti-racism” is reduced to anti-white racism.

The meaning of the term “Islamo-leftist” has been transformed with the evolution of the far left, which, after having turned away from the proletariat and the plebs, has progressively shifted to decolonialism, intersectionality, a radical misandric feminism (that is to say, the “second sexism” that, nourished by so-called “gender theory,” incites hatred toward the “white hetero male”), and, to top it all off, “critical race theory,” which I have analyzed as being a form of pseudo anti-racist militant racialization, or more precisely, of neo-anti-racism masking an anti-white racism. This turn of “anti-racism” into a new form of racism against Westerners of European origin is at the same time the most significant, true “sign of the times,” and the most worrying.

In France, it is the Parti des Indigènes de la République/Party of the Indigenous of the Republic (PIR) that is the clearest expression of this racializing pseudo anti-racism. But one also finds echoes in the heart of the NPA (New Anticapitalist Party) and, later, in the leadership of the La France insoumise/France Unbowed (LFI), namely, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Éric Coquerel, Clémentine Autain, and Danièle Obono (close to de Houria Bouteldja, who was the longtime muse of the Indigènes de la République). One ought therefore to speak today of an Islamo-decolonialism and an Islamo-radicalization.

The March against Islamophobia on November 10, 2019, in Paris, took place according to this model precisely, bringing together on the side of “progressive” activism the CGT (General Confederation of Labor), the UNEF (National Union of Students of France), the PCF (French Communist Party), the UCL (Libertarian Communist Union), the EELV (The Ecologists), Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), Jean-Luc Mélenchon (and other leaders of LFI), Benoît Hamon and the NPA (New Anticapitalist Party), and Islamist associations (with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood) as well as indigenists.

It is within this new ideological configuration that today, in France as well as Great Britain, based on the model of the United States and Canada, “woke” activism (implying being permanently “awake” in the face of “offensive words”) and “cancel culture” (the culture of cancellation or banishment aimed at personalities or works judged politically incorrect) are developing. These activists who define themselves as “progressive” trivialize a hyper-moralism and a pseudo anti-racist puritanism that works toward the destruction of our history and our high culture, as well as the disappearance of our academic freedoms and the freedom of expression in certain universities, and more broadly in the intellectual field.

With a few exceptions, far-leftist movements, but also a part of the left in general, have moved, in relation to political Islam, from indulgence to complacency; and from the latter to connivance, even complicity, through diverse alliances. After the launching of the Second Intifada (at the end of September 2000) and 9/11, the rupture between the anti-Islamist republican left and the radical anti-Zionist (and anti-system) left manifested itself in a number of ways in the political field. During the 2010s, things turned toward confrontation after jihadi attacks on French soil, illustrated by the deadly attacks of the anti-Jewish jihadist Mohammed Merah in March 2012 in Toulouse and in Montauban, as well as the terrorist attack perpetrated in January 2015 in Paris against the editor of the weekly Charlie Hebdo by two jihadi brothers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi.

Useful Idiots of the Islamists

The witch hunt launched against the supposed “Islamophobes” at Sciences Po Grenoble, between November 2020 and March 2021, reminded us that Islamo-leftism is doing damage, particularly in higher education. It testifies to the fact that some students and professors, active on the left, have rallied around the rhetorical strategy of Islamists, successfully instrumentalizing the Palestinian cause as a mobilizing victimhood cause. The Palestinian cause has been transformed into an Islamo-Palestinianist cause, the new supreme cause, whereas Israel and the “Zionists” incarnate diabolical causality. This is the primary effect of the great Islamo-leftist indoctrination on social media. The Islamist strategies have thus succeeded, thanks to their far-left allies, in banalizing the “hunt against Zionists” in France as in other Western nations. However, as we have seen since the mega-pogrom of October 7, 2023, the “witch hunt against Zionists” has often taken the form of a “hunt against Jews,” in street protests as well in university spaces.

The more Islamism kills, the more Islamophobia is denounced. This is the apparent paradox that gives pause. Because it is the rule of thumb of the Islamist ideological strategists and propagandists, followed by their Islamo-leftist allies. Since the assassination by young Islamists of the professors Samuel Paty (in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine on October 16, 2020) and Dominique Bernard (in Arras on October 13, 2023), we can see that the calls to “fight Islamophobia” have multiplied, as if the true danger were not Islamism but Islamophobia. In these instances we find a good example of the ideological inversion of reality.

Islamo-leftists are the auxiliaries, for the most part not conscious of being so, of the Islamists in the political and cultural space. While one must show no weakness in the face of the Islamo-leftist offensive, one must also be careful not to fall into the trap set by the Islamists, by confusing the fight against Islamism with a fight against Islam and Muslims. That would push all Muslims to join forces with the Islamists.

There are many French citizens, on the right and on the left, who consider Islamism, in any case, to constitute a serious threat to national cohesion and the exercise of their freedoms. Can they be declared “Islamophobes”? This is clearly an abuse of language and a confusion strategically maintained by the Islamists themselves, followed by the leftists who have taken their side. These concerned and vigilant citizens are, in reality, “Islamism-phobes.” And they have excellent reasons for being so, in view of the massacres committed by the jihadists, the separatism advocated by the Salafists, and the strategies of conquest of the Muslim Brotherhood! But they have nothing against Islam as a religion, open to being criticized, like any religion.

Topics: Israel Initiative • TPPI Translations

Pierre-André Taguieff is a philosopher, political scientist, and historian of ideas. His books in French on this topic include: L’imposture décoloniale: Science imaginaire et pseudo-antiracisme (Paris: Éditions de l’Observatoire/Humensis, 2020); Liaisons dangereuses: Islamo-nazisme, islamo-gauchisme (Paris: Hermann, 2021); and Le Nouvel Opium des progressistes: Antisionisme radical et islamo-palestinisme(Paris: Gallimard, coll. “Tracts,” 2023).

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. For a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. English translation © 2024 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.