Joachim Bruhn’s Left-Wing Critique of Anti-Zionism and the Capitalist State in the 1990s: An Intellectual History of the Antideutsche

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In one of the greatest alliances of the German extraparliamentary Left since 1968, rival factions from more than one hundred organizations came together in 1990 to express their opposition to German reunification, sparking the Antideutsche (Anti-German) current within the German Left. The theoretically sophisticated but little-studied Antideutsche group, the Initiative Sozialistisches Forum (Socialist Forum Initiative), led by Joachim Bruhn, used the occasion of unification skepticism and increased anti-immigrant violence in the 1990s to develop a unique Kapitalismuskritik, before the Antideutsche movement liquidated its critical edge around the turn of the century. Bruhn drew on German leftist national self-hatred from the nineteenth century to the 1970s New Left, Moishe Postone’s theory of structural anti-Semitism from the 1970s, and the Frankfurt School’s critique of “state capitalism” from the 1930s and 1940s to develop a threefold critique of a “German” predilection for reactionary-conservative anti-capitalism, left-wing anti-Zionism as concealed Stalinism, and de facto nationalist and statist ideology, respectively. While Bruhn brought to the surface several repressed ideological concessions of the German Left, his fixation on historical national guilt and the purely negative aspects of the capitalist state prohibited a genuinely dialectical critique revealing opportunities from within the apparent impasse.