This forum has shed light on vastly different but interrelated contexts of Palestine solidarity. The essays draw attention to the interplay of shifting solidarities with Palestine and the amorphous formation of “the (political) left” across geographical and temporal contexts. Germany, although not belonging to the postcolonial and neocolonial contexts as in the other essays, is one among many puzzle pieces interlocking with political realities elsewhere, and across worlds. Like other “post”- imperial regions, Palestine continues to be an uncomfortable question mark in the German national narrative of post-Nazi redemption. It is a question mark which has split the German radical left into two seemingly irreconcilable sects: a staunchly pro-Zionist, pro-American, and markedly bellicose faction—the Anti-Deutsche—and their equally convicted counterpart, the pro-Palestinian, anti-colonial, and supposedly antisemitic Anti-Imperialists. The German and international media cyclically regurgitates this dichotomy, with every escalation of violence in Palestine sparking German leftist networks to organize protests both in support and in opposition to Israel, at times clashing violently with one another. While inter-factional violence amongst leftists is certainly not unique to this context, the locking of arms between members of the Christian Conservative Party (CDU) with antifascist groups at pro-Israeli protests just might be.

German leftists who continue to stand with Palestine were not surprised by the intensification of governmental restriction and police violence targeting pro-Palestinian support. After all, the post-war political discourse in West Germany branded anti-Zionist and otherwise pro-Palestinian leftist voices and positions as antisemitic at least since the 1960s. By the 1990s this radical pro-Zionist stance manifested increasingly in many radical leftist circles across reunified Germany. Triggered by the geopolitical fall-out resulting from the presumed end of the Cold War, like the Yugoslavian wars and the invasions of Iraq, the Anti-Deutsche left emerged as a distinct political current in the country. In this essay, I aim to deliver a longue durée of the German debate around Palestine and Israel through the idiom of this idiosyncratic political formation, pointing at entanglements that continue to link the imperial-colonial to the present. Perhaps, this helps to explain why broad sections of the German left find it easy to look the other way at the face of the destruction of Gaza or the targeting of political dissent at their own doorstep.

In the wake of the Berlin Wall and informed by Nazi atrocities as well as their acceptance of a paradigm of collective guilt, a diverse group of authors and organizers saw the potential rise of a Fourth Reich on the horizon of a reunified Germany. The rise of right-wing extremist attacks in both Germanies seemed to confirm their prophecy of a resurgence of nationalism and authoritarianism reminiscent of the Nazi era and German imperialism. This fear motivated the formation of groups that explicitly identified as antinational and later Anti-Deutsch, emphasizing a critical stance toward German history and identity, opposing German national sentiments, symbols, and slogans. (Hagen 2004, Errlanger 2009)

While a sizable, heterogenous section of the Anti-Deutsche movement eventually continued down a theoretical path, which led them to disavow themselves from “communism” and even “leftism” altogether, in the beginning they very much saw themselves as communists. But from the start, they sharply diverged from the broader radical left by challenging the prevailing anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist consensus. The West German New Left had often aligned itself with anti-colonial national liberation movements and socialist governments in the Global South, while being critical of Israel, in particular since the 1967 War. The West German radical left stood in solidarity with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Palestinians. Similarly, in socialist East Germany, solidarity with the PLO and a critical stance towards Israel had been an element of the raison d’état (Staatsräson). Breaking with this leftist tradition, Anti-Deutsche took a militant stance of unconditional solidarity with Israel. This position was not only a political choice but framed as moral imperative grounded in their recognition of Israel as the refuge and homeland of Holocaust survivors.

Anti-Deutsche criticized the left for a tendency to relativize or downplay the Holocaust, and accused it of harboring latent antisemitism, lurking in its admittedly at times quite militant anti-Zionism. In consequence, the attitude toward the Palestinian question became a defining and divisive issue in activist circles. A further point of departure was the Anti-Deutsche’s stance on war and military interventions beyond Palestine, where they further broke with traditional leftist pacifism and anti-imperialism. This shift became particularly pronounced starting with the Gulf War in 1991, with a decisive split in the movement during the wars in Yugoslavia and continuing through the post-9/11 era. As I will show, the Anti-Deutsche ideology took shape not just in response to the German responsibility for the Holocaust, but also in reaction to violent conflicts which ensued with the global transition out of the Cold War’s stalemate, rather than out of a German exceptionalism. In fact, it is the Anti-Deutsche’s discursive linkage between these post-Cold War conflicts and the Holocaust, that have been a decisive factor in building the movement’s political identity and its relations with other formations on the left and beyond.

To fully understand this development, let’s retract again to the global sixties and the New Left. Like many other locales, the post-war generation of the left in West Germany emerged from universities and had—also in response to the Stalinist interventions in a range of popular uprisings—began to align itself with China rather than the Soviet Union. Further exacerbated by the atrocities committed in Vietnam, this anti-imperialism, which some have called Third-Worldism, became staunchly anti-American, with American foreign policy often branded as fascist. The German New Left had begun the decade trying to break their parents’ deafening silence. They acknowledged the bloodsheds of the World Wars and the genocidal Nazi apparatus, while pointing at influential members of society with previous allegiance to the Nazi Party—judges, politicians, generals, professors, etc. Reframed onto Palestine, this translated to an understanding of Israel as colonial enterprise backed by the American empire and its Western allies, with the 1967 War crystalizing this position further, thereby shaping the German New Left as “the natural home of camaraderie with Palestine,” as Roy puts it in the forum’s introduction. The unfolding dialectical radicalization of the West German state and the New Left had eventually even produced a brief active alignment between some militant elements of the German left and some militant elements within the PLO, namely the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Jean Améry (1912–1978), author and Holocaust survivor, was among the earliest to denounce leftist anti-Zionism as disguised antisemitism. Published from the mid-1960s onwards, his essays stressed Germany’s obligation to support Israel as a refuge for Holocaust survivors. He condemned the New Left’s equation of West German state repression with Nazi crimes as a gross relativization. In 1974, Hermann L. Gremliza became editor-in-chief of the West German leftist monthly Konkret (published since 1957 – except for a short break in the 1970s). While Konkret at the time still published opinions of the pro-Palestinian Red Army Faction, Gremliza would incorporate Améry’s critique and become a key figure among the early Anti-Deutsche. Despite this, he was still able to sufficiently locate a sympathy for the Palestinian cause to make statements unthinkable from German intellectuals today. For instance, he said in 1985: “Why, instead of the poor Arabs, shouldn’t the legal successors of the perpetrators [of the Holocaust] provide the Jews with a state territory, for example, Bavaria […].” Around this time, other authors like Eike Geisel and Wolfgang Pohrt appeared in Konkret, highlighting again the persistence of antisemitism and criticizing the left’s loose commitment to the PLO. Moishe Postone, a key figure for Wertkritik, reinterpreted Marx to show antisemitism as a distorted critique of capitalism. His ideas influenced later Anti-Deutsche groups and publications like Krisis, EXIT!, and Austria’s SINet. By incorporating psychoanalytic insights to critique ideology and nationalism, Ideologiekritik (critique of ideology) became central to certain strands of Anti-Deutsche theory. (Erlanger 2009: 100) While the (re-)discovery of and/or engagement with critical theory, particularly the Frankfurt School, had a long tradition within the German New Left, it gained a centrality in Anti-Deutsche theory, which eventually led to some eliminating Marxism and communism from their ideology.

A key catalyst in the emergence of the Anti-Deutsche, came in response to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Many West German leftist, from anarchists to formerly Maoist members of the Green Party, opposed reunification, fearing a “Fourth Reich” would emerge out of a newly reunified Germany. The Gulf War of 1991 was another pivotal moment in the definition of Anti-Deutsche. While attacks on the German peace movement for its alleged anti-Israeli and anti-American positions had been present before unification, this first invasion of Iraq radicalized some of the antinational left further, which immediately split the movement. Gremliza and others supported the war—a position that was unprecedented for the general anti-war ethos of the radical left. Their argument framed the war as a necessary defense of Israel from Iraqi chemical weapons and, by extension, a stand against a new form of fascism and antisemitism. Although this pro-war position did not gain majority support within the antinational movement at the time, it nonetheless established an analytical framework for the Anti-Deutsche, which involved drawing analogies between contemporary conflicts in the postcolonies, framing the United States and its allies as antifascist forces opposing new forms of fascism and antisemitism beyond the Global North.

The Kosovo War (March 24 to June 9, 1999) served as another point of departure, profoundly impacting the Anti-Deutsche’s ideological development and their relationship with the broader German left. This conflict, which saw NATO intervention to decisively shift the tide in favor of Kosovo Albanians, culminating in the withdrawal of the Serbian army and the establishment of an international protectorate over Kosovo, marked Germany’s first active military involvement since 1945. In his speech at the Green Party’s special conference on May 13 of that year, the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer notoriously defended the NATO assault on Yugoslavia by stating: “Auschwitz is incomparable. But I stand on two principles: never again war, never again Auschwitz, never again genocide, never again fascism. Both belong together for me.”

This implicit Auschwitz comparison and the humanitarian justification for military action ignited an intense debate within both the Green Party and the left in Germany and Austria. In a highly idiosyncratic and anachronistic interpretation, some Anti-Deutsche viewed the Kosovo conflict primarily as a German war against Serbian nationalism, asserting that Germany was leading the intervention with the Americans in a subordinate role. Conversely, the Anti-Deutsche themselves supported Serbia and vehemently opposed NATO intervention, seeing it as a direct continuation of German nationalism and imperialism, replicating the alliance between the Croatian fascists of the Ustaše regime and the Nazis. The remainder of the antinational left on the other hand, tended towards an abstract rejection of both Serbian nationalism and the NATO intervention, condemning all parties involved.

The next external impetus for controversial Anti-Deutsche stances followed soon thereafter in shape of the attacks on New York City and Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001. This confirmed their monochrome assessment of (militant) resistance to Western modernity as inherently antisemitic, in turn radicalizing their position on Palestine and beyond. The Anti-Deutsche then endorsed military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq as essential for the defense of Israel and Western civilization. We can see here, as with the cases of the Gulf War and the Kosovo War, how the German image of the postcolonial (particularly Muslim) world has been closely intertwined with the responsibilities resulting from the Holocaust and a narrative of a benevolently superior West. This militant pro-war and pro-Israel stance considerably deepened divisions within the German left and, notably, even within the Anti-Deutsche’s own ranks. While a minority retained some critical perspectives on US foreign policy, a significant faction fully embraced a pro-American, pro-Israel position and the broader Global War on Terror. In their evolving analysis, political and even cultural Islam was increasingly viewed as a new fascism, analogous to fascism in the German tradition. Their uncompromising rhetoric led to their exclusion from various left-wing anti-fascist demonstrations and a general alienation from anti-fascist circles, but, at the same time, they won support from the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, even attracting some party-members to participate in protests they had organized.

The Anti-Deutsche strongly oppose the traditional left-wing sympathy for Palestine. The Second Intifada and subsequent uprisings were almost exclusively framed as inherently antisemitic attacks on Israel, and Anti-Deutsche discourse consistently emphasizes Israel’s role as a crucial bulwark against global antisemitism and Islamist extremism. Anti-Deutsche critique categorically rejects any concessions to Palestinian movements, indiscriminately devaluating perspectives as diverse as the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, leftist intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, often drawing parallels to Nazi antisemitism.

Over time, the Anti-Deutsche movement became increasingly isolated from other leftist groups. Some members began publishing in conservative media outlets, further blurring the boundaries between left and right, and provoking criticism from both sides. Despite this, the Anti-Deutsche remain a unique phenomenon in German political culture.

Assessing the Anti-Deutsche’s s impact on German society, particularly the left, is challenging, primarily because it was never bound to a monolithic rhetoric. Beyond unwavering support for Israel and a tendency to back US – led invasions, their positions were at times unpredictable and spontaneous responses to current events. Recurring popular declarations of the Anti-Deutsche left’s demise and irrelevance, or its public stripping of “leftist” status, further complicate impact assessment. As early as 2006, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (a major German think tank affiliated with the leftist party Die Linke) published an article implying that the Anti-Deutsche did not fit traditional leftist ideals of optimism, anti-capitalism, and nuanced critique (Erdem 2006). Yet, the Anti-Deutsche’s voice persists in the German public arena, the academy, the media, and in the parliament. Partially, this is explicable by the careers of some Anti-Deutsche, particularly later generations, who might not identify as such anymore but could be bringing their Anti-Palestinian stance along the way up the career ladder.

The Anti-Deutsche were and are an amorphous group, producing sometimes valid and necessary critique of ideological narratives, sometimes cultural agitprop like danceable tunes, and occasional high-meta theory of society under capitalism. To the reunifying German left, they were also the source of countless headaches, accusations, rifts, and breakups, some culminating in symbolic and even physical violence between potential comrades. Alienating their contemporaries, the early Anti-Deutsche have made a lasting impact on future generations, who often diluted the former’s hardcore positions, but simultaneously spread their ideology in academia, the press, and leftist institutions. In Germany, the secret service in charge of surveilling and defining political extremism, has recently re-discovered the Anti-Deutsche left, after deeming its divisive potential exhausted back in 2007. The reports of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz have in response to the developments on and following October 7 included a new section, titled Auswirkungen des Nahostkonflikts und Antisemitismus (Consequences of the Conflict in the Middle East and Antisemitism), in which they acknowledge the continued existence of radical leftist groups with a militant pro-Zionist stance. Yet, the German state’s tradition of ontologically separating Palestinian secular anti-imperialists in Germany from their “native” German counterparts on the other hand, continues in an unbroken chain reaching across several decades of annual reports. Consequently, the Palestinian organization Samidoun, which the German state considers a frontal organization of the PFLP, is lumped in with militant Islamists, Kurdish and Punjabi separatists, and Turkish right-wing extremists, in a separate chapter titled Auslandsbezogener Extremismus (Foreign-related Extremism). This revealing manifestation of Staatsräson might also explain the mainstream acceptance of the criminalization of this organization in 2023.

Taking stock of the larger German scene, Chancellor Friedrich Merz earlier this year welcomed the US-Israeli attack on Iran as a justified strike against an immoral “terror regime” at war with the West’s liberal values. Merz and his government’s views are driven by two core beliefs, both entangled with the legacy of Germany’s post-war leftist schisms: (1) that the post-Cold War transatlantic order, driven by liberal markets and values, is the best path to a democratic and equitable society, and (2) that Islam and Palestinian nationalism are incompatible with this order. These beliefs are increasingly prevalent across the German political spectrum, often as a frantic catching-up to the alt-right’s political gains. Paradoxically, these views often overlap substantially with positions developed from an extreme left that feared the remilitarization of Germany overseen by Merz and his predecessor. As Omid Mehrgan puts it in this forum, Palestine here is a “mode of relating to the politics of material conditions of life that touches all forms of politicization in the globalized ecologies of war and of remnants of life today.” It is also a mode of explication, for those among the readers who may have been stupefied as to why Germany’s repression of pro-Palestine demonstrations on the streets of Berlin and elsewhere have been so over-the-top violent. These demonstrations, in spite of everything, challenge the very trajectory of politics in Germany, especially leftist politics, since the Nazi event.

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Nico Putz researches Afro-Asian entanglements during the Cold War at Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, and is on the editorial board of MIDA Archival Reflexicon. 

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References

Erdem, Isabel. (2006). Anti-deutsche Linke oder anti-linke Deutsche? UTOPIE kreativ (192), 926–39.

Erlanger, Simon. (2009). “The Anti-Germans – The Pro-Israel German Left. Jewish Political Studies Review 21, (1–2), 95-99.

Hagen, Patrick. (2004). Die Antideutschen und die Debatte der Linken über Israel. MA thesis, University of Cologne, 2004, 2-7, 58.

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Cite as: Putz, Nico 2025. “On Anti-Deutsche and Neo-Imperial War” Focaalblog September 27. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/09/27/nico-putz-on-anti-deutsche-and-neo-imperial-war/