A note from the editors: Locust #3 is going to the printers. Subscribers should begin receiving their full copies within a few weeks — featuring artwork, poetry, literature, essays, interviews and other gestures from Locust writers, artists, and contributors. Subscribe here. In the meantime we are posting here this essay from Locust #2.
FOR SOME reason, impenetrable to any German leftist, there seems to be the strange US-American liberal assumption that Germany is a lederhosen-wearing, beer-sipping liberal paradise, where we hug refugees all the day, care for mother nature, and organize a perfect ‘socialist’ (in the liberal use of the term, meaning social-democratic) society, and with the guidance of a dear and democratic government, we care for our people and the world. While it will forever be a mystery for me how anyone could believe this in the first place, I am going to debunk this assumption in this article. My wager is that, by observing the current situation in Germany, we might find tendencies and latencies that elide developments within capitalist realism that are elsewhere still not fully feasible.
My point of departure will be Gisela Elsner’s novel, Heilig Blut, first published in Russian in the USSR in 1987.
Elsner’s writing career is in itself symptomatic of the German predicament. Starting as a celebrated feminist novelist the literary scene ostracized her when she joined the Communist Party. Shunned by former friends and the haut-vole of academia and literary criticism, she was kicked out by her former publisher and died by suicide in relative poverty only two years after the Berlin Wall fell.
Being an engaged comrade, Elsner worked in her last texts (two novels and one long theoretical essay), all untranslated, on the obvious rise of fascism in Germany. Her central point was that this reappearance of fascism does not take place in the political discourse but in culture and in everyday life. Therefore, her writings investigated not so much the big political scene but the normal, petit-bourgeois German reality as the source of the untimely presence of fascism.
Heilig Blut narrates the story of a hunting trip with a tragic ending: Three World War II veterans, Lüßl, Glaubrecht and Hächler, accompany the son of their common friend Gösch on a hunting holiday in the Bavarian Forest, which ends for young Gösch when he dies in a shooting accident. Unsurprisingly, the main topic of a story about a hunting trip is masculinity. Elsner quite closely examines how ideas of hardness and masculinity coincide with a life-worldly fascism (or fascism as a lifeworld).
Lüßl, Glaubrecht, and Hächler are all former Nazis who stick to their ideology; they are constantly ranting against Lefties, bragging about killing Russians in the war, making anti-Semitic jokes, etc. Yet at the same time, the three of them are successful businessmen in West Germany, having made a fortune after the war. This trajectory in itself is not surprising, but describes in a nutshell the development of West Germany: Former low to middle ranking Nazis, without ever abdicating fascism as their ideology, became the backbone of West German capitalism. You would hardly find one in Germany’s elite who was not also a Nazi.
This said, Elsner goes deeper: For her, fascism in the German context no longer means a form of unified ideology, but a set of socio-economic and psycho-social structures, that are totally compatible with neoliberalism. She tries to prove this thesis with Heilig Blut as her experiment. We learn, following the plot of this novel that the structuring principle of the group and its inner dynamics is always competition; or rather, the quest for superiority. Being superior is what drives the racism of the group, what’s behind their exterminatory antisemitism, their ableism, etc., and what is presented by the old men as the essential quality of a “true man.” In consequence, they themselves do not act as we would expect a group of friends to act. They do not assist one another. They do not know solidarity. They only know the opposite. If at any moment one of the group shows weakness, the ohers will unity and bully him, preying on his supposed inferiority. Hence, the hunting group is in a primordial Hobbesian state of constant competition. Alliances emerge or recede as long as someone can be humiliated.
Leg’s Eye — artwork by Anupam Roy from Locust #2.
This structure presents, according to Elsner, the logical principle of the neo-German, neo-liberal, and neo-fascist lifeworld of German capitalism. There is no longer one central, unifying historical project or group to organize fascism, as with the NSDAP. What happens is that the quest for superiority enters the very DNA of society. Social life is turned into one all-encompassing competition. Within this competition it’s not only victory that counts. The typical neoliberal fantasy holds, as Jodi Dean observes, that competition is a means to realize one’s desires. But the German variant does not lay much effort in the fulfilling of the desire. Instead, the desire is contained within the competition itself. The goal is not to withdraw from the market and consume. The central German fantasy of fascist neoliberalism is experiencing oneself as superior within competition. Competition is thus not fantasized as means to achieve an end outside itself, but as an end in itself – a means to organize superiority.
This might sound farfetched, yet Elsner, writing in the 1980s as Reaganonomics took off in capitalist West Germany, anticipated the reality of the current predicament. We see this fascist-neoliberal fantasy at work everywhere. It is the subconscious structure of everyday life in Germany. A good example of this is the German discourse on the Greek economic crisis. For years, as long as the crisis was an un-resolved case for media, a narrative prevailed of lazy Greeks that needed to feel and learn the hardness of the market. Their crisis was described as a crisis of failed adherence to market norms, of being too weak, and therefore they had to be scrutinized. This humiliation took place in the right- and left-wing press. It was a staple talking point for politicians from all camps (save the radical left), and it was widely shared by the German population, making fun of the lazy, degenerate Greeks. “Why should I pay for the Greeks?” could be heard time and again in village pubs. What the people – by expressing this lack of solidarity – really meant was: “We are superior than the Greeks, we work harder, enter pension age later, are more successful in the market.” Those participating in this mainstream discourse of racist supremacy gained nothing from it but the feeling of superiority.
This notion surfaces regularly and in various groups in German society. France is striking to keep the pension age at the current 62? German media ridicules French workers, suggesting that German workers, whose legal pension age is 67, are stronger. Immigrants get help to learn the language? The Russian-German community cries out, claiming that immigrants of today should not get a better treatment than what they received arriving in Germany in the 1990s. People on social help who get a slight improvement for their dire living situations? Immediately, white and blue collar worker will speak out, terming this as unfair, as they, the hardworking salt of the earth, get no benefits, but the ‘parasites’ do.
The logic of competition and superiority as value in and of itself thus atomizes the social sphere. It is hard to organize people around the idea of solidarity when the opposite of solidarity is introduced within the lifeworld. This view is shared by most – if not all – of the socialist left. In fact, many democratic socialists talk about the development of the “Standort Deutschland” – a central phrase also in union discourse. It means that the main goal of politics should be the improvement of Germany’s national performance in an international scale. In other words: The left (communist and autonomous groups excepted) largely accepts the discourse of superiority and competition, while arguing that Keynesian economics and social welfare is preferable to that end, rather than a ruthless barbaric neoliberalism. This goes so far that radical democratic socialists like Sarah Wagenknecht ask for the closure of the border and speak out against immigration, as she perceives it as a danger to the German working class and hence to German competitiveness. Thus, the very notion of international class solidarity is exchanged for the discourse of superiority and competition.
On the other hand, people internalize this discourse themselves, reproducing it daily. Capitalist realism thus appears not so much as a world-encompassing, dystopic depression, but seems more like a mania. The popular masses know the system is shitty but they accept it, not because they see no alternative, but because they internalize the ideology of superiority. I vividly remember one scene. We were agitating among young workers in front of a local factory in Bavaria. Their work shift just had ended, and a crowd of maybe 30 young colleagues enjoyed a smoke with us. Whatever we said, they agreed, but nonetheless they saw no reason in communism. As one colleague said: “As long as I can play along here, I have a chance at least to get a fast car and enjoy two-weeks vacation in Mallorca. In communism, this will mean nothing any longer, every lazy idiot from the streets will be able to do this. Why should I want this?” In other terms, nothing speaks against equality itself but equality. The notion that there are those beneath me, that barely deserve to exist, and that the lower castes are inferior by nature, is not only accepted, it is an ontological horizon, before which the very idea of equality seems like an idiocy.
We could (and should!) now discuss if and how this predicament appears in other forms elsewhere in our neoliberal, global capital-sphere. I would never ever reserve what is happening here to Germany, or read it as specificity as a kind of metaphysical German nation being. Indeed, the Marxist philosopher Christoph Menke recently proposed to assume that a subtractive logic, that organizes superiority by excluding others, is a driving psychic factor for all subjects of late capitalism and fascism. Yet, it is true that this logic is hegemonic and radical in Germany. And therefore, I suggest, we should study the German situation more closely (this article itself does not claim to present a theory, it is but a phenomenological description of something), because such an analysis would allow us to better understand the intersections of fascism, religious ideologies, and neoliberalism. The German cult of superiority lends itself, of course, to fascist formations. The AfD, a populist-right-wing big tent party, is so successful, not because it would transgress the discourse, but because it speaks within the discourse. It even expresses the discourse better than other parties can. Where they speak of competition (and mean superiority) they clearly and explicitly talk about supremacy, of the strong ruling the weak, of the inferiority of the others (non-whites, gays, lefties, …). On the other hand, the assumption that there is a naturalized order of superiority and inferiority lends itself to (neo-)religious cults (esoteric belief systems) that are multiplying in Germany at the moment: The reason for this is, of course, that superiority is in itself irrational – I simply am by nature superior to others, because I am chosen. People living within this ideology find it easy to turn to neo-liberal-age-sects that preach individualist salvation through the improvement of oneself, through spiritual guidance, etc.
These two tendencies are everywhere in our world – fascism and a return to individualist death cult like religions, preaching superiority, appearing everywhere, oftentimes hand in hand. Thus, studying the German situation will allow the sad remainders of the internationalist left to better understand and assess these phenomena – to see eyes wide shut the nightmare we are in.
In Germany itself nothing of what is going on now is unheard of. The appearance of brown esoteric cults that believe in the “individual,” as well as an atmosphere of stern and cold competition, marked the short years before Nazism – as ideology and mass movement – emerged in the early 1920s. To think of this is, of course, no consolation. Instead it is to think of another, even darker nightmare.
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