Surprisingly, considering she is a journalist, Susann Witt-Stahl
apparently does not understand that for meaningful communication to take
place, words and concepts have to have reasonably fixed, specific
referents. To take an example, when apologists for the state of Israel
make inflationary use of the word ‘anti-Semite’ and apply it to any and
all critics of Israel, the term itself loses all meaning, so that it
basically becomes an empty signifier devoid of any content.
Witt-Stahl does something similar with the term, ‘anti-German’ (Letters,
December 20). I now understand why she thinks the ‘anti-German’
phenomenon is still a relevant tendency within the German left: quite
simply, she applies the label to pretty much any phenomena exhibiting an
apologetic stance toward Israel, or other unsavoury positions she
disagrees with, so that anybody, from the neo-conservatives to the
Springer Press, to rightwing, pro-Zionist Social Democrats, are all
subsumed under the label, ‘anti-German’.
But ‘anti-German’, at least as understood by radical leftists, for whom
signifiers still refer to relatively well-defined and limited concepts,
has a much more specific meaning. It usually refers to a diverse but
well-defined spectrum of radical leftists emerging out of the ashes of
the network, Radikale Linke, and its ‘Nie wieder Deutschland’ campaigns
during the period of German reunification, as well as the minority
tendency in the Kommunistischer Bund during the same period. It survived
throughout the 1990s in the editorial boards of journals like the
now-defunct 17 Grad (with an orientation toward post-structuralism and
cultural studies) and Bahamas (more dogmatically oriented toward the
Frankfurt school). During the post-second Intifada and Iraq war period,
the milieu around Bahamas and its various pupils on the margins of the
antifa movement briefly achieved notoriety with freak-show displays of
American and Israeli flags on demonstrations.
As I have already noted, the hard-core milieu around Bahamas drifted
into an explicitly non-communist neo-conservatism, while the notoriously
fashion-prone antifa milieu has already moved on to other theoretical
trends. What so fascinates incorrigibly middle-brow pseudo-intellectual
leftists like the Platypus Society was precisely this brief period of
self-declared ‘communists’ embracing openly reactionary positions. But
that period is now over; the reactionary positions remained, but any
pretence to ‘communism’ has been dropped. In that sense, the
‘anti-Germans’ are indeed gone.
What Witt-Stahl means by ‘anti-German’, however, is simply any sector of
society (not just the left, apparently, since she names the notoriously
anti-leftist Springer hack, Henryk Broder!) that engages in apologetics
for Israel. So the BAK Shalom tendency, who are basically bog-standard
rightwing Social Democrats, are also ‘anti-German’ in Witt-Stahl’s eyes.
But there’s nothing theoretically novel about a Zionist, pro-war
tendency in social democracy. One just has to take a quick glance at
tendencies in the United States around Max Shachtman and Albert Shanker
to see how common and influential such positions were in the labour
bureaucracy in the United States. Indeed, the milieu around the ‘Social
Democrats USA’ (SDUSA) that emerged from the split in the American
Socialist Party in the 1960s would eventually become quite influential
during the Reagan administration, giving birth to the ‘neo-conservative’
phenomenon, as we now know it. The existence of similar tendencies in
Germany is really not anything special.
Susann Witt-Stahl also gets her chronology wrong by implying that
squeamishness about Israel in the German left is a legacy of the
‘anti-Germans’. In fact, one finds pro-Zionist sentiment as far back as
the writings of Ulrike Meinhof in her pre-guerrilla period. Indeed, the
German New Left as a whole was relatively pro-Zionist in the pre-1967
period. In the late 1980s, organisations such as the Revolutionary Cells
and the autonome LUPUS Gruppe published documents attempting to wrestle
with the legacy of perceived anti-Semitism in the radical left, and
explicitly attacking anti-Zionism as a variety of anti-Semitism. Whether
one agrees with this assessment is another topic entirely. I’m simply
trying to point out that these kinds of discussions predate the
anti-Germans as a defined tendency, and have also outlasted the death of
the anti-Germans as a defined tendency.
Interested readers looking for a good, scholarly account of the rise and
fall of the whole phenomenon of the anti-Germans would be well-served by
Bernhard Schmid’s essay, ‘Deutschlandreise auf die Bahamas: Vom Produkt
der Linken zur neo-autoritären Sekte’, collected in the book Sie warn
die Anti-deutschesten der deutschen Linken. Or, if somebody wants to
make a reasonable offer to pay me for a translation, drop me a line.
Otherwise, I’m finished arguing over the relevance of a marginal sect
that has achieved a sort of sinister legendary status among Anglophone
leftists far beyond its actual shelf-life.
Angelus Novus
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