Germany

A backlash book. Or three books?

Bettina Rohl’s “The RAF (Red Army Fraction) Loves You – The German Federal Republic in the Intoxication of 68 – A Family at the Centre of the Movement” is several books for the price of one. Rohl’s mother, Ulrike Meinhof, was one of the leaders of the early 1970s urban-terrorist RAF, otherwise known as the Baader-Meinhof Group (which Rohl insists on calling the Baader-Meinhof Gang, to underline what she sees as its essentially apolitical and criminal character). One of the books within the book provides an insight into the relationship between Rohl and her mother. Clearly, there was no love...

Climate resistance must be built from below

In his new book Burning Up, A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption (Pluto Press), Simon Pirani notes that the world economy tripled in size between 1945 and 1973. And the world began to burn as much fossil fuel, every three years, as in the whole of the nineteenth century. That depended on cheap oil, which averaged at around $1.80 per barrel during the 1960s. In Simon Pirani’s view, this period of “transition to an oil- and electricity-dominated system... was not directed at providing electricity access or improving lives; if we can speak of an aim or direction, it was to do with capital...

“Rise Up” remains seated as Berlin marches against racism

Somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 people marched through Berlin on Saturday 14 October in a protest against “racism, social exclusion and the shift to the right (‘Rechtsruck’)”. The “#Indivisible” demonstration was backed by a range of individuals and organisations — around 4,500 of them — that Stand Up to Racism could only dream of. Official publicity for the demonstration declared: “We are for an open society of solidarity, in which human rights are indivisible and in which it is a matter of course that there are a multipicity of ways in which people can decide how to live their own...

The Daily Mail of the left

[The French daily] Le Monde recently published a long article on what they call the “anti-immigrant/anti-migrant” left”: a “left” in favour of national sovereignty and closing borders. The French daily cites the German Aufstehen movement of Sahra Wagenknecht, the “ambiguities” of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, and Danish Labour and ‘populist’ left forces. Lo and behold the Morning Star, Britain’s leading organ of the pro-Brexit left, has just published this (in the Saturday/Sunday print edition): Title: “Time to get tough with the EU and our own anti-democrats”. Blurb: “The benefits...

What does #StandUp, stand for?

#StandUp, the new “broad movement” initiated by Sahra Wagenknecht and Oskar Lafontaine (both leading members of the German Die Linke — The Left — party), will have its public launch on 4 September. To date, #StandUp has existed only as a webpage, a Facebook page, a Twitter account and an e-mail address list. But, boast Wagenknecht and Lafontaine, some 85,000 people have already signed up to the initiative. That’s greater than the total membership of Die Linke itself. But what people have signed up to remains as unclear as is the level of commitment expressed in clicking a box to receive a...

The dangers of Germany's new left populism

Sahra Wagenknecht, co-chair of the parliamentary fraction of the German left-wing Die Linke party, has announced the launch-date and name for a new extra-parliamentary “broad movement”. It will be launched on 4 September, and it will be called #StandUp. On one level #StandUp — targeted at members of Die Linke, the SPD (German Labour Party), the Greens and those not members of any party — is a response to last year’s general election results. The CDU (German Conservative Party) and the CSU (regional Conservative Party, in Bavaria) saw their vote fall by eight percent but still won the highest...

The dangers of Germany's new left populism

Sahra Wagenknecht, co-chair of the parliamentary fraction of the German left-wing Die Linke party, has announced the launch-date and name for a new extra-parliamentary “broad movement”. It will be launched on 4th September, and it will be called #StandUp. On one level #StandUp – targeted at members of Die Linke, the SPD (German Labour Party), the Greens and those not members of any party – is a response to last year’s general election results. The CDU (German Conservative Party) and the CSU (regional Conservative Party, in Bavaria) saw their vote fall by 8% but still won the highest percentage...

How the German state let Nazis get away with murder

A Munich court announced its verdicts last week at the end of the five-year long NSU (National-Socialist Underground) trial. Beate Zschäpe, the only surviving member of the Neo-Nazi “NSU trio”, was sentenced to life imprisonment for her role in the ten murders, three bombings and 15 armed robberies carried out by the NSU between 2000 and 2007. Zshäpe had claimed that she had known nothing of the activities carried out by Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, the two other members of the trio who had committed suicide after a botched robbery in 2011. A neo-Nazi all her adult life, Zschäpe claimed —...

Antisemitism in Germany

On 25 April thousands of atheists, Christians, and Muslims joined Jews on the streets of Berlin, Erfurt, Potsdam, Cologne and other German cities in “kippa day”. They demonstratively wore the skullcap (kippa) used by Orthodox Jewish men, in a protest against antisemitism. This was sparked by an incident on 18 April, when a young man was attacked on a posh Berlin street for wearing a kippa. He was an Israeli Arab who had put on the kippa to show a friend (so he thought) that antisemitism was slight and there would be no problem. The chief of Germany’s Jewish community followed up by advising...

German union wins over hours, but at what price?

Last month, the German metalworking and electronics industries waged their most intensive struggle for years. More than 1.5 million workers downed tools in three 24-hour stoppages. The 24-hour strikes allowed them to make a strong show of economic force. The strikes meant between 770 and 980 million Euros’ worth of lost production. Little wonder, then, that the Gesamtmetall employers’ association wanted to prevent open-ended strikes. Unions and employers have agreed to a wage increase of 4.3% over two years from April 2018, and a one-off payment of 100 Euros. From 2019, employees should...

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