New Right. Post-Left. Adorno in Neukölln: Finn Job’s Novel “Hinterher”
by Russell A. Berman
The German-language version of this essay appeared in Bahamas 95 (November 2024): 16–22.
1. The Trauma
The key episode in Finn Job’s 2022 novel Hinterher begins at Sophia’s drug-filled birthday party in a run-down apartment in the Berlin district Neukölln. A visiting Swedish woman declares in English that “the great thing about Berlin is that you can be whatever you want.”1 The unnamed first-person narrator and his gay lover, the Israeli Chaim, volunteer to go out to pick up more alcohol for the group. When the two step onto a side street off Sonnenallee, standing in public, the narrator confesses that “I was so happy and lost in myself, yes, I was so stupid that I gave Chaim a quick kiss on the cheek” (war ich so glücklich und selbstvergessen, ja, war ich so dumm, dass ich Chaim einen flüchtigen Kuss auf die Wange gab) (99).
Punishment follows happiness immediately. Young neighborhood men shout homophobic slurs at the couple: “Queers! [Schwuchteln!] Let’s go, they’re homos! . . . Allahu Akbar” (99). A gang starts to run after the couple—hinterher, the title of the novel, means “afterward” or “in pursuit”—but fortunately the two are fast enough to make their way back to the safety of the apartment. However instead of sympathy from their friends, they face condemnation. The same Swedish visitor who had just gushed over Berlin’s openness, where everyone can be whatever one wants, launched the opening salvo, again in English in the original: “Don’t you think it was a little bit insensitive to kiss each other? I mean this is Neukölln—their home. You probably hurt their feelings” (102). That mild scolding escalates quickly until their friends eventually denounce them as “Nazis” (103), “fascists” (18), and racists (147). For the identity-political progressives in Neukölln, Nazis are apparently people who kiss in public.
The scene stages the intersection of themes that define contemporary Germany. First, the denunciations that the couple face upon their return testify to the durability of an automatized anti-fascist discourse. Peter, in whose apartment this scene plays out, is a drug dealer and sports an “antifa” T-shirt, evidence that political affiliation has become a combination of virtue signaling and fashion statement (98). In part this disseminated anti-fascism is an understandable constant in German culture since 1945, but it has become particularly acute in response to the rise of the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Of course the inflationary use of the “fascist” epithet is familiar in the United States too: any politician we don’t like must be a “fascist,” regardless of the political contents at stake. Nor is the denunciation restricted to politicians: one can recall Seinfeld’s notorious “Soup Nazi.” In Germany this rhetorical inflation is particularly pronounced, but it became a side-show in the American presidential campaign with the escalation of name-calling.
Second, the political left claims to have a monopoly on anti-fascism, thereby marginalizing conservative or Catholic anti-fascist traditions, pushing aside Stauffenberg (the 1944 assassination attempt), the Scholls (the “White Rose” movement), or Konrad Adenauer (Catholic “anti-Prussian” politician and first chancellor of West Germany), while concealing collaborations between Communists and Nazis, especially during the period of the Hitler–Stalin pact of 1939–1941. Yet that same self-declaredly anti-fascist left has undergone its own transformation, thanks to a de facto alliance with Islamism. As traditional working-class groups either abandoned the left with its programmatic socialism or simply dwindled in numbers due to the global reorganization of labor, left activists and parties have begun to seek support and fish for votes among Muslim immigrants, despite the decidedly non-progressive cultural orientations: patriarchy, homophobia, and antisemitism. Such have been the electoral strategies of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France. Judith Butler has famously declared Hamas part of the global left that deserves support, meaning that the patriarchy, homophobia, and antisemitism are not dealbreakers, not incompatible with solidarity from contemporary progressives.
Third, identity politics—brilliantly parodied in the novel with the Swedish visitor’s hypocritical “you can be whatever you want to be”—has replaced class consciousness. Programs for social change have given way to identity curation; pronouns are more important than raises. Certainly the postmodern narcissism of “whatever you want to be” might seem to be incompatible with the embrace of Islamism with all its dogmatism: no, you cannot be gay in public in Neukölln, as Job demonstrates with the persecution the couple faces. Yet the inner direction of identity politics (obsession with the self) and the outer direction of the anti-imperialism of the Islamist turn (focus on the exotic other) share a common denominator: they both act as vehicles to avoid collective questions of class, labor, and social conflict.
In the following, I want to reflect on this particular cultural political moment as it is captured in Hinterher with regard to the transformations of anti-fascist discourse and the complexities of identity and integration in multicultural Germany. I begin however with a pulse-taking of the response by the intellectual German public to the challenge of right-wing populism.
2. Critical Theory—from NPD to AfD?
The growing popularity of the AfD has unsettled the German public sphere; it is hardly wrong for Germans to worry about the emergence of illiberal forces, whether on the right or the left. Anxiety about right-wing extremism has become acute against the backdrop of the AfD’s strong performance in the European elections in June 2024 and in the September elections in Brandenburg, Sachsen, and Thüringen. Fear of a resurgent extreme right has been further amplified by electoral outcomes elsewhere in Europe, particularly in France and Italy. It is not at all surprising that the AfD success touches nerves in Germany, in light of the Nazi past as well as the specifically anti-Nazi political traditions from the Federal Republic and the GDR—both anti-fascist, albeit in decidedly different ways.
In this context, it is not surprising to find renewed interest in the Critical Theory tradition of the Frankfurt School, especially the works of Theodor Adorno, whose contemporary influence has arguably surpassed, at least for the moment, the resonance of his primary competitors in the intellectual life of the older Federal Republic, Martin Heidegger and Niklas Luhmann. Adorno remains iconic. His thought integrates heterogeneous strands, including German idealism, especially via Georg Lukács’s neo-Hegelianism, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud, rounded out by background assumptions borrowed from Marxism. Yet his thought also responded to his own historical context: the collapse of Weimar democracy, the rise and devastation of the Nazi dictatorship, and the aftermath of anti-democratic—or, in his terms, “authoritarian”—tendencies in post-1945 Germany. It is this Adorno—not the Hegelian, not the music critic, not the aesthete, but the critic of right-wing radicalism—who has come to the fore in the context of the AfD’s electoral successes, and this defines Adorno’s contemporary reception.
Adorno delivered the address “Aspects of the New Right-Wing Radicalism” at the University of Vienna at the invitation of the Association of Socialist Students of Austria on April 6, 1967. He spoke freely from notes, and the definitive text of the lecture for a volume of his lectures is based on a tape recording. He may not have edited the transcript itself. That text, with an afterword by Volker Weiss, was first published in a small Suhrkamp volume in 2019. Remarkably this booklet has been repeatedly reissued, and in 2024 it reached its seventh edition: Adorno on right-wing radicalism is a topic in demand, indicative of both Adorno’s continued prominence and the endemic nervousness in the suddenly fragmenting political landscape of contemporary Germany.
My concern here is not the historical formation of Adorno’s thought in the face of the rise of Nazism nor his perception of Nazi Germany from the distance of his exile in California. Nor will I address the adequacy of Adorno’s 1967 characterization of the right-wing extremism of the Federal Republic, including the politics of the NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands) that emerged in 1964 or the rhetoric of Gerhard Frey’s Nationalzeitung, founded in 1951. All that belongs to an era of Cold War neo-Nazism. Instead my interest is the current revival of Adorno’s account in the context of contemporary developments.
To assume that Adorno’s more than fifty-year-old analysis of the NPD could directly apply to the AfD is obviously implausible, especially given the fact that the AfD stands in no significant organizational or personnel continuity with the NPD. Nonetheless the current dissemination of the Adorno text and its repeated reissuing implies the perception—or misperception—of a continuity on the far right, i.e., the assumption that what the sage said about neo-Nazis in 1967 must apply to right-wing extremism in the 2020s. What then does this surging reception of Adorno’s text on the NPD demonstrate about the contemporary left and its anachronistic understanding of the AfD? And—a separate matter—might Adorno’s text shed some light on the confrontations narrated in Hinterher, i.e., the two confrontations, one with the homophobic lynch mob running after the gay couple, and the other with the anti-fascist peers who denounce the gay couple as “Nazis”? What does it say about contemporary progressive rhetoric if epithets like “Nazi” and “fascist” can be used so expansively?
Adorno begins the 1967 address by taking us back yet another decade into the past by invoking his famous 1959 lecture on coming to terms with the past and its premise that a potential for right-wing extremism is a function of the continuity of social structures: “that the social preconditions for fascism continue to exist,” and these structures include above all “the ongoing predominant concentration tendencies of capital.”2 This immanent law of capitalist development, he argues, implies the prospect of the immiseration or Verelendung of social groups, in particular those who thought of themselves as middle class and who are subjectively hostile to the “transition to socialism” (10–11). Adorno then casts this allegedly threatened middle class as the likely source of support for a renewed fascism.
Thankfully Adorno does not dwell for long on this evidently orthodox Marxist framework that interprets social change in terms of putatively immanent laws of capitalism. Instead he turns to what we today might call discursive or rhetorical features of far-right politics. Yet the fact that he grounds his analysis of extremism in assumptions about the development of capitalism shows how historical or, more harshly, how dated and anachronistic his approach turns out to be, in at least two ways. First, contemporary criticism of the AfD and, in general, left-wing criticisms of right-wing radicalism in the twenty-first century no longer typically operate with this kind of orthodox Marxist paradigm. No one seriously still talks about the concentration tendencies of capitalism as the fundamental explanation of political developments, just as hardly anyone posits the inevitable transition to socialism. Adorno in 1967 was speaking in an intellectual environment in which Soviet-style Marxist analysis still held a plausibility it has long since lost. By contrast, when the AfD today is likened to the Nazis or even equated with them, the supposed similarity is not based on allegations of support from concentrated capital. Instead the connection between the Nazi past and the present is made only on the basis of symbolism or rhetoric, e.g., via AfD politician Björn Höcke’s use of the phrase “Everything for Germany” (“Alles für Deutschland”), which is denounced because it echoes a slogan of the SS. Similarly the editorial choice to preface the Thüringen party program of the AfD with a poem by Franz Langheinrich, an otherwise forgotten writer, is taken to prove the Nazi credentials of the AfD because that same poet turned into an adamant Nazi (even though the poem itself is conventional Naturlyrik without explicit politicization). By that logic, every seminar on Heidegger or any publication of poems by Ezra Pound should be viewed as proving fascist sympathies. These sorts of cultural connections have displaced arguments about monopoly capitalism on which Adorno was fundamentally relying. In general, it is fair to say that what calls itself left today has largely shifted away from arguing in terms of political economy and has moved instead into the field of cultural semiotics. It’s the symbol that counts, not the surplus value. Perhaps that’s all for the good: reciting land acknowledgments is a lot easier than land redistribution.
In addition, Adorno bases his argument on the surely accurate claim that the rise of historical National Socialism depended on support from leading industrialists, representing the “concentrated capital” to which he refers. Whether “heavy industry” in West Germany supported the rise of the NPD in the 1960s is an empirical historical question; I doubt it. It was probably more a matter of a “lunatic fringe” of ewig gestrigen, an explanation that Adorno rightly does invoke. In any case, there is no evidence that support from concentrated capital describes the electoral success of the AfD today. For all the very real challenges that the German economy faces in the context of competition with China and the disruptions of environmentalism (to mention only two points), there is no evidence that the heavy hitters—Volkswagen, Daimler, Siemens, or Allianz—cook the secret sauce behind the AfD’s successes. On the contrary, as in the United States, leading companies lean more toward the model of “woke capitalism,” supporting diversity, immigration, and political correctness, necessary corollaries to their export-oriented business models. Whatever is making the AfD tick, it is probably not the German stock market, nor is it whatever is left of heavy industry, as Germany’s manufacturing base continues to collapse thanks to misguided policies and global pressures: what is “made in China 2025” is not going to be made in Germany.
When Adorno moves beyond the terms of political economy to describe aspects of the right-wing radicalism of 1967, he explores the sphere of culture—effectively justifying the pejorative designation “cultural Marxism,” although not in the way Jordan Peterson may mean it—paying more attention to the formal features of the radical right’s speech and ideology rather than to class conflict. He does mention in passing the perception of economic threat among retail merchants, peasants, and some grape growers, “kleine Winzer in der Pfalz” (15), but the thrust of the argument points elsewhere, away from economy and toward terms consistent with the analysis that he and Max Horkheimer developed in their Dialectic of Enlightenment: mass-cultural manipulation and technique, the triumph of instrumental reason.
For example, Adorno claims that the NPD was able to achieve an “organizational mass appeal” (21), which distinguished it from earlier extremist competitors that could not shed a sectarian image. “In Germany what works . . . has to be strict and centralized”—remember, he is speaking to an Austrian audience with its own attitude toward Germany—“but anything that seems sectarian and appears to lack strong backing is automatically suspect and will lack mass appeal.” What he calls “the German ideology” has no room for loners or Einzelgänger (21). Whether that is a sufficient characterization of “German ideology” can be debated: there is plenty of romantic isolation—think of the images of Caspar David Friedrich—or Waldeseinsamkeit in “German ideology,” not just mass movements. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that this capacity to project organizational superiority, which Adorno attributes to the NPD, is not at all a distinguishing feature of the AfD. Party discipline and effectiveness, which Adorno rightly viewed in the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, he claims—dubiously—to rediscover in the 1960s in the NPD. In any case, it is surely not a prominent attribute of the AfD to date. On the contrary, it seems not to be able to take advantage of its own electoral successes, as seen in the confusion in the Thüringen state assembly.
In addition, Adorno attributes to the NPD a capacity to mount successful propaganda campaigns. Indeed he calls propaganda “the center . . . in a certain sense the real issue” (41). Yet it is, for Adorno, a propaganda with little content because, he claims, the ideology is too thin; at stake instead is merely the capacity to reach the masses: “Propaganda is primarily a mass psychology technology” (41). Adorno’s understanding of propaganda in 1967, which appears to build on his experiences in the 1930s and 1940s, does not translate easily into the very different media environment of 2024. He may have already been wrong in his projecting onto the NPD in 1967 the capacity for propagandistic breakthroughs the NSDAP had carried out in the 1930s, its mass public resonance. In any case, it is hard to associate that old-style “mass appeal” with the AfD, despite its electoral results. Its achievements in September probably have less to do with media acumen or its politicians’ rhetorical gifts than with the clumsiness of the governing coalition in Berlin. The AfD, in other words, is not an Adornian culture-industry problem, as little as it is a result of capital concentration. Indeed one can argue that the electoral outcome was much more a matter of what the center parties lost than what the extremist parties gained.
Adorno’s NPD analysis however does carry over convincingly into the current moment in two ways. One point that indisputably defines the contemporary mentalities is the sense of imminent catastrophes and “fantasies of the end of the world” (20). There have been plenty: predictions, from the left as much as from the right, of ecological disasters, never-ending pandemics, or prospects of war. Here Adorno is indeed a useful guide to aspects of contemporary radicalism. Job’s novel also ends with a sense of imminent catastrophe. We are all waiting for Armageddon tomorrow.
The second point where the older analysis retains actuality involves the centrality of antisemitism, but now displaced into the toxic alliance of immigrant Islamism and the anti-Zionist left. Islam, Islamism, and immigration make up one enormous topic, especially in Europe; so is the relationship of the left and Zionism, and both of these topics are too extensive to address here in necessary detail. More importantly, however, these two fields intersect in Germany, whose national history has mandated that the security of Israel belongs to its “reason of state,” as per Chancellor Angela Merkel, the same chancellor inescapably associated with the large-scale migration that amplified integration challenges, expanded parallel societies like Neukölln, and led to radical calls for establishing a caliphate in Germany. Under the pressure of these two competing conditions, something is shifting in German self-understanding, as public antisemitism reemerges.
Can the Federal Republic continue credibly to engage in Vergangenheitsbewältigung, addressing the legacy of the Nazi past and the Shoah, without scrutinizing the ideological baggage of immigrants from countries marked by high levels of antisemitism? Can Germany remain an open society with privacy protections but still engage in surveillance of Islamist organizations or end the wave of random knife attacks with Islamist motivations? Can it, as Deniz Yücel has challenged on X, respond to the Islamist attack in Solingen 2024 (an Islamist knife attack) without forgetting the far-right attack in Solingen in 1993 (an arson attack on a home for refugees)?3 And, for the topic foregrounded in Hinterher, we need to ask how the German left is rebalancing its self-declared anti-Nazism, its always at best only half-hearted opposition to antisemitism, with its eagerness to embrace Islamism, despite—as already discussed—the indisputably reactionary contents: patriarchy and homophobia, as well as antisemitism.
For nearly a decade, at least since 2015, a restructuring of the German public discussion has been underway, and all the more so after the September elections and, in their wake, the repeated invocation of a caesura, a break, a recalibration of the social contract. To be sure, the problem is not uniquely German, given the difficult post-election process in France. “If Chancellor Scholz were President Macron, he would call for new elections,” wrote Ulf Poschadt in Die Welt after the elections in Thuringia and Saxony and the defeats of the parties that make up the Berlin coalition, but new elections would likely only make evident the collapse of the SPD across the country.4 Indeed the outcome of new German elections could be worse than in France: where Macron has had to face down the challenge from Mélenchon’s far left, Scholz might end up with a victorious AfD far beyond the states in the German East.5
Germany faces a challenging constellation: a growing new right, a post-left trying to combine identity politics with post-colonialism, and a large immigrant population, and within it the Islamist minority. Against this fragmented background, competing solutions have emerged. The Israeli Arab German Ahmad Mansour argues tirelessly for integration strategies, social work to bring immigrant youth into a Germany of liberal values. In contrast, the German-Jewish author Max Czollek proposes “disintegration,” a call for German Jews to give up on the mendacity of the “memory theater” of reconciliation, although in the face of growing antisemitism, even a hollow memory theater could seem attractive and surely better than a caliphate. And not to be forgotten: the proposal by Chancellor Scholz to pursue deportation “in a grand style,” an aspiration that is hard to differentiate from the vision, imputed to the right, of “remigration,” mass repatriations. Traditional progressive positions are vanishing—such as Adorno’s capitalism criticism—while right-wing positions move to the center and ventriloquize the left. Whatever challenge the AfD’s electoral success may represent, more to the point may be the AfD-ization of the rest of the political spectrum, whether it be the chancellor’s enthusiasm (and after the recent Solingen knife attack, not only the chancellor’s) for deportations or the epigonic left’s internalization of Islamist cultural values. The commentator Sascha Lobo writes in Der Spiegel, “How do you get a German leftist to find right-wing slogans okay? Just translate them into Arabic.”6
And that brings us to Neukölln and the writing on the wall.
3. Antifa and Islamism
Neukölln is the space where the post-left subculture meets immigration from Muslim-majority countries. It is also the geographical setting of the fictional trauma in Hinterher. Some evidence of Neukölln writing may help illustrate the cultural and political tensions that are at stake—as evidenced by a small set of graffiti from the summer of 2024. These texts obviously postdate the writing of Hinterher, which appeared in 2022, but they are nonetheless indicative of some persistent cultural tendencies. The intratextual references in the graffiti demonstrate that they are recent and postdate the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, another kind of caesura, particularly in its reverberations in Germany. They are all from a side street of Sonnenallee, which is where the novel places the consequential kiss. I assume two different authors, one native German, the other immigrant (perhaps Yemenite), but one person may have spray-painted them all.
The first example protests the Israeli campaign in Gaza, but it insinuates a connection between Germany (for which “Berlin” obviously stands) and the war. My concern here is not an evaluation of German–Israeli bilateral relations, where the question of “German reason of state” would be posed, but rather the nature of the threat articulated in the graffiti, phrased as an elliptical conditional, an “if-then” phrase: if Gaza burns, i.e., if it is attacked, we will burn Berlin. An underlying if implausible assumption in the statement might be that the German government has the capacity to restrain the Israeli government. What is of interest in our context, however, is the apodictic prioritization of Gaza over Berlin, i.e., foreign policy over domestic policy, or, more polemically, the slogan’s privileging of anti-imperialism over social change. The slogan is not “If our rents rise, we will burn Berlin” or “If wages decline, we will burn Berlin.” To be sure, such programmatic slogans might be found elsewhere, but they are not evident here inside this text. This is consistent with the familiar pattern of a reified anti-imperialism that infinitely defers discussions of repressive social conditions, that the Syrian philosopher Sadik al-Azm long ago argued with regard to the Arab nationalism of 1967 and Edward Said’s Orientalism.7 The anti-imperialist “struggle” takes precedence over all other issues, such as gender equality or traditional working-class movements’ concerns with employment conditions. So the identity-political left rallies for Gaza while German manufacturing jobs are being cut.
The second example shows a neighboring inscription, presumably from a different author (different color, different language). From the top right: “Gaza above the world” (غزة فوق العالم), which is effectively an Arabic repetition of the formulation from the German national anthem: instead of Deutschland über alles, we have a version of Gaza über alles. Indeed the phrasing is barely distinguishable from Höcke’s version discussed above, but now we have Alles für Gaza, everything for Gaza. Whatever the intertextual genealogy, the assertion is clearly a statement of absolute commitment to a national cause that is substantially congruent with German national discourse (the anthem) or far-right phrasing (Höcke). However, as Lobo put it, the maximalization of national obligation is now translated into Arabic and therefore appealing to the anti-imperialist left. Beneath this assertion of unqualified allegiance, the author writes, “Long live the resistance” (تحيا المقاومة), a reference to the Iranian terminology of an axis of resistance that includes the Islamic Republic itself and its various proxy forces across the Middle East and evidently in Neukölln as well.
To the left, on the roll-down shade, the same author has written “God is great” (الله اكب—the widely used phrase “Allahu akbar”). At times it might have the colloquial standing of “Thank God” in everyday English, or it can be used as a statement of exuberance, such as when shouted to celebrate a goal in a soccer match. The phrase does however have a primary core religious meaning that ought not to be overlooked, particularly in light of the third example:
This nearby inscription might be by the same author—the same color, similar letter formations, but here the religious register is undeniable: “Yemen, Allah, for the sake of Ali send help” (اليمن الله يا علي مدد). The Yemen reference and the invocation of Ali suggest a Yemenite author, perhaps Houthi identified. The second part of the inscription, the phrase “ya Ali Madad,” derives from legends around the Battle of Uhud of 625 AD, when the Muslim forces, led by Muhammad, fought the heathens of the Qurayshi tribe, and Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, arrived to provide support. The phrase is common among Shia and Ismaili Muslims. There are theological complexities associated with the phrase, especially regarding the mortality of Ali, but for our purposes it is useful as evidence of the religious content in the protest against the Gaza War. The goal of Hamas is not secular national self-determination or even national liberation, but rather a version of Islamic or Islamist expansionism.
4. Toward the Repressive Left: What Hinterher Shows Us in Three Points
As noted, for Lobo the left internalizes right-wing positions (authoritarian and repressive) if they are translated “into Arabic.” What that means is surely not just a linguistic question but rather the consequences of the anti-imperialist post-left subordinating itself to Islamist positions, the movement from “be whatever you want to be” to denunciations of a loving kiss as fascist. Instead of free love, Sharia law. The identity-political left is “okay” with reactionary contents if they come via Islamist migrants. Examining this process closer is the real topic of Hinterher, to which we now turn, considering three points: What subjectivity is susceptible to this transformation? What is the face of repression? And is there an emancipatory alternative?
Subjectivity: While Adorno’s analysis of right-wing radicalism from the 1960s has only limited value today, the aesthetic-theoretical side of his legacy recommends our asking about the standpoint of the narrator. Who is telling the story? Hinterher opens with the first-person narrator quitting his job in a Berlin nightclub with “the frenetic hammering, the chemical haze of the half-naked bodies, and the green flickering light, the ecstasy in the empty faces” (9). The atmosphere elicits a feeling of hatred as he leaves his job for the last time. Although he feels no relief, at least he is able to repress the general sense of catastrophe, “for a moment repressing the threat hanging over everything.” At that moment his counterpart Francesco greets him: “I just saw you at the bar, Boy, but you really looked stressed out, really fucked up. Like it was better not to talk to you.” The direct address is the foundational interpellation of the narrator; Francesco, with his own beautifully Italianate name (we later learn both his parents are German, so this name choice is an indication of pretentiousness), dubs the narrator “Boy,” an infantilizing designation that sticks with him throughout the narrative. He has no other name, except for when Sophie calls him “fascist.” Francesco recruits Boy, now unemployed, to join him on a trip to Normandy, a journey that forms the frame for this road novel. Along the way Boy recalls, in nonlinear fashion, the trauma of the assault in Neukölln, just as he recollects the pieces of his past love affair with Chaim.
The joint trip is not a matter of equals. Francesco, who has the money, is in charge; Boy is his dependent and inferior. The duo therefore enact a master-servant relationship, which explains the name “Boy,” a term painfully borrowed from the language of imperialism, hierarchy, and servitude. Boy is the subaltern speaking, who begins with admiration for the master, only later to discover his fatal flaw. Early on Boy explains his appreciation of Francesco: “It was his distance to himself, to the role that he played, such an open approach to his role, the bold but, for his counterpart, clearly arranged view of himself that made him so bearable for me” (39–40). It is this dialectical complexity of character that Boy admires in Francesco, an ironic distance and playfulness about his own identity that preserves a multidimensionality, and which Boy goes on to describe as a rare and endangered capacity. “And this was especially an ability that was dying out everywhere, whose witnesses themselves were dying out, because we had to be one with ourselves and also had to avoid those who reminded us that perhaps we weren’t.” With that phrasing, Job has his narrator provide a programmatic attack on the obligatory one-dimensionality of identity politics that suppresses internal difference and rejects anything that elicits divergent thoughts. Hinterher is offering here more than character analysis, only of relevance inside the plot, but rather also a social theory of fascism with broader significance, even today: “It is dangerous to maintain contact with people like Francesco, too high a risk—yesterday in Germany and tomorrow in the whole world [gestern schon in Deutschland und heute in der ganzen Welt].” The unmistakable reference here is to a Nazi marching song with the refrain “Wir werden weiter marschieren / Wenn alles in Scherben fällt, / Denn heute da hört uns Deutschland / Und morgen die ganze Welt.”8 For Boy, then, Francesco represents a sort of emancipated individuality, an individuality capable of irony and playfulness, features that however are receding before the spread of an alternative, a degraded personality type, flat, unreflected, without differentiation. There are echoes here of Adorno’s account of the authoritarian personality and Marcuse’s “one-dimensional man,” and behind them the prospect of Nietzsche’s “last man.”
But the master-slave dialectic classically entails the instability of hierarchy and an ultimate inversion. In a final confrontation, Boy rebels against Francesco and denounces him as a “Richkid” (179) and “Junkie” (180). In a novel that has been full of drugs from the outset, Francesco has to have Sophia—Boy’s adversary, the one who accuses him of being a fascist—bring him cocaine from Berlin to Normandy. Confronted by Boy, he breaks down and confesses: “I need the cocaine, god. I need the fucking cocaine. I’m her coke whore!” and then later, “Fuck, I’m her shitty coke whore” (180). The master ends up as the slave, destabilizing the previous hierarchy, but Boy never really escapes his endemic weakness.
As a novel of substance abuse and degradation, Hinterher can be compared with works by Bret Easton Ellis and William S. Burroughs, and with regard to politics and drugs in Germany, to Bernward Vesper’s The Trip or Ernst Jünger’s Approaches. In Hinterher, however, there is no romanticization of narcotic effects. The novel describes a society engaged in self-destructive behavior through the consumption of massive amounts of cocaine, ketamine, GBL, or LSD as forms of escapism from a hated existence. Behind the surface-level political rhetoric of fascism and anti-fascism there is a deeper nihilism, where the superficial politics lose most of their importance. On this point, Adorno was right: “Whoever has no prospects and does not pursue social change . . . wants to escape his situation through collapse, but not just the collapse of his own group but, if possible, the collapse of everything” (20). Or as another graffiti artist in Neukölln put it succinctly: “pure hate.”
Repression: Hinterher is a road trip novel about Boy and Francesco’s sometimes surreal adventure from Neukölln to Normandy, where, in a subplot, they house with Gédéon, the eccentric heir to a decaying villa, while Francesco works on an art installation in a church. So it is also a Künstlerroman, or at least a novel about art. At the same time, it is foremost a novel of recollection—references abound to Proust and Remembrance of Things Past. Yet the content of that recollection is the trauma of the events on the Sonnenallee and in Peter’s apartment, the inversion of the moment of innocent happiness into persecution.
The traumatic memory emerges fragmentarily in several discrete passages during the journey, but the core narration of the event is placed nearly exactly midway through the novel. Two significant steps preface it. Gédéon has just engaged Francesco and Boy in construction work, demolishing a wall, and this architectural breakthrough effectively announces the breakthrough of memory. In addition, immediately preceding the narration of the trauma, Boy has an elaborate dream: Kurfürstendamm, Frank Sinatra soundtrack, and the gourmet section of the famous KDW department store, where he opens a door to a hidden room and “Sophia sits at one of the tables with al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. They giggle and whisper with each other. . . . Sometimes the mufti pinches Sophia’s cheek, and then she has to laugh and shake her indefinable hair” (96). Sophia: she is Boy’s former friend, with whom he moved from Westphalia to Berlin, perhaps a former lover who however now participates sadistically in the denunciation of him as a fascist. Al-Husseini was a historical leader of Palestinian nationalism during the thirties and forties who collaborated with the Nazis, given their shared antisemitism, and who spent the war years broadcasting propaganda to the Arab world from a station in Zeesen near Berlin. The representation of Sophia and al-Husseini together stages the uncomfortable alliance of the left with Islamism.9
For German critics of Israel, al-Husseini is a particular irritation because he is proof of the proximity of anti-Zionism to the Third Reich. This provocation is exactly part of the truth content, Adorno’s Wahrheitsgehalt, of Hinterher, exposing the slide of the post-left (Sophia) toward a legacy, the Nazi past, that it knows it ought to denounce, but to which it is drawn. At stake ultimately is a values ambiguity inherent in the traditional left and right distinction.
That dream of a fraternization of the post-left and reactionary Islamism, Sophia and al-Husseini, is subsequently made real in the treatment of Chaim. Arriving at Peter’s apartment wearing a kippah, he encounters abuse both on the street and inside the apartment: “He went to the apartment twice more and walked through Neukölln wearing a kippah. He was only beaten up once because the second time he already had his Taser—but twice he was able to hear from Peter that he shouldn’t be surprised, why did he have to provoke. . . . Yes, Sophia wouldn't be entirely wrong, basically he’s a racist” (147). The narrator can only affirm Chaim’s decision to leave: “Chaim was right to go back to Tel Aviv. In his place, I would have gone too” (147). What Hinterher records then is the erosion of the possibility of Jewish life in Germany, not, or not only, because of imported antisemitism but because of the lack of solidarity precisely in the community that understands itself as progressive. The Swedish visitor was wrong: Chaim’s trajectory shows that you cannot be whatever you want to be in Berlin.
Boy however is fundamentally different. He displays an ingrained resistance to repression. It was he after all who planted the kiss on Chaim’s cheek without thinking, which is consistent with what we know about his oppositional personality: his flight from the provinces to Berlin and his quitting his hated job at the outset of the narrative. In contrast to Sophia, who thrives in the politically correct atmosphere of the university, Boy—despite his intellectuality and bookishness—abandons his academic studies precisely because of the reigning orthodoxies. “Where she cried out for more censorship, I was bothered by the existing speech bans, and where she said we had to be considerate—considerate of God knows who—I thought we were just starting to criticize” (47–48). Answering Francesco’s query as to why he dropped out, he replies, “There is a climate of fear in the universities,” and an extended criticism of contemporary literary theories leads him to the provocation, “If necessary, everything can be buried in gender theory, even unpopular thoughts. All these hidden Heidegger-Nazis, these wretched— . . . . What should I do with these idiots, who do not try to hide their inabilities and present it all as progressive sensitivity?” (48).
Boy rejects structures of repression—in Sonnenallee, in Peter’s apartment, and at the university. Because of this resistance, Sophia declares him a fascist, and she intends to enforce her verdict with violence: “Back then, earlier, Sophia used to sleep a lot with antifa toughs from Thuringia” (27), and she still has one of these brutes hanging around to carry out her political sadism. So when this “Thuringian colossus” (31) asks, “OK, so where is this Nazi now,” Boy knows that he has to flee. Francesco takes him to France.
Liberation: Hinterher traces a road trip, but not simply from Germany to France. Rather, we move from the specific oppressiveness of Neukölln, where you in fact cannot be whatever you want to be, to Normandy—so not just to anywhere in France, but precisely to that region in France still associated with the liberation of le débarquement. Arriving in Caen, Boy notes: “[E]verywhere American flags were flying, and that alone made the city beautiful. The D-Day festivities had been over for a while—were these flags up all year long? Evidently people were more thankful here” (150). By invoking the Normandy landing, the text points to a real anti-fascism, in contrast to the threat of the Thuringian colossus or the gangs in the streets of Neukölln, or for that matter the cosplaying anti-fascists on campuses. No wonder then that Boy and Chaim, on a previous trip, had visited the grave of Klaus Mann, not in Normandy but nonetheless in France, in the south. The invocation of Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann, pulls together the various strands of the novel: he was gay, anti-fascist, the émigré who went into exile in the United States but who returned with the American occupation troops. Mann was also a notorious drug user, which further connects to the themes of Hinterher. (The visit to Klaus Mann’s grave in Hinterher echoes the visit to his father’s grave in Christian Kracht’s 1995 Faserland.)
The entwinement of France and liberation even reappears in the religious experience in the Cathedral of Amiens. “I was shaking and kneeled. Shaking I held on to the arm rest. . . . It seemed like my body was commanding that I pray. And I would have dearly liked to have been able to” (54). After an interlude he reports, “Not until I reached a side chapel and saw the flags of the Allies was I able to smile” (55). The Amiens visit here, specifically in the Sacred Heart Chapel with its display of Allied flags, deserves a comparison with the visit to the Marian shrine at Rocamadour in Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission (2015), a novel that has so many other points of contact with this one. Yet the idealization of France in Hinterher eventually wanes in the shadow of the memory of the 2016 Islamist attack in Nice on the Promenade des Anglais, which took 86 lives on Bastille Day, just two days after Boy and Chaim had visited there. The French utopia is shattered.
The title of Job’s novel names retrospectivity and subsequentiality. It points to a formal literary hinterher of recollection, evidenced in the novel’s Proustian ambience, recalling the past love with Chaim. But there is also the aftermath to the trauma in the Sonnenallee, as well as the hinterher to the Shoah that engages the narrator independently of his connection to Chaim. And there is our own hinterher of reception: we are reading this 2022 novel in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, after the calls for a caliphate in the streets of Germany, after the Solingen murders, and after the September 2024 elections. Perhaps most vividly there is the hinterher of pursuit and persecution, when the homophobic mob was running after the couple, a hunt filled with frenzy and bloodlust, in German, Hetzjagd. Job’s novel describes a condition—social, political, perhaps existential—of persecution, as an objective potential in the not-only German present.
Topics: Israel Initiative
Russell A. Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he co-directs the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. 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.
Finn Job, Hinterher (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2022). Subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text. Translations are my own.
Theodor W. Adorno, Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2024), p. 9. Subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text. Translations are my own.
Deniz Yücel (@Besser_Deniz), X, August 25, 2024, 4:57am, https://x.com/Besser_Deniz/status/1827631498683379832.
Ulf Poschardt, “Eine beispiellose Bestrafung der Ampel-Politik,” Die Welt, September 3, 2024, https://www.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/plus253304524/Wahlen-in-Sachsen-und-Thueringen-Eine-beispiellose-Bestrafung-der-Ampel-Politik.html?cachebuster=true.
This text was written before the collapse of the governing coalition in Berlin in November 2024. New elections are certain to take place soon.
Sascha Lobo, “Diesmal könnte sich tatsächlich etwas ändern,” Der Spiegel, August 28, 2024, https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/mordanschlag-in-solingen-diesmal-koennte-sich-tatsaechlich-etwas-aendern-kolumne-a-7a954bd2-b496-4fe4-8900-f2755743c3d3.
Sadik al-Azm, Self-Criticism after the Defeat (Beirut: Saqi Books, 1968), pp. 90–91.
Hans Baumann, “Heute hört uns Deutschland,” Musica International, https://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/Lieder/eszitter.html.
See Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2009); Matthias Küntzel, Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East (London and New York: Routledge, 2004); Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina (Frankfurt am Main: Primus Verlag, 2006).