This article was originally published in Danish on March 29, 2024.
By Povl H. Riis-Knudsen
BOOK REVIEW, ETC.
Sahra Wagenknecht:
Die Selbstgerechten
Mein Gegenprogramm – für Gemeinsinn und Zusammenhalt
Frankfurt: Campus 2021
Sahra Wagenknecht is the new shining star in Germany’s darkened political sky. She began her political career in the party Die Linke, whose roots go directly back to the SED, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany), which was the ruling party in East Germany. She grew up in Jena in the GDR; her father was Iranian, but she never knew him. He was expelled from West Berlin when she was 3 years old and is now missing in Iran. Wagenknecht was labeled a “left-wing extremist” by the political police, which was an understatement. Sahra Wagenknecht was an orthodox communist and studied Marx and Hegel. Gradually, however, she fell out with her party and therefore founded her own Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht – Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit.
She studied literature and philosophy and later wrote her dissertation in economics. She has also authored several books, of which this is the most recent—and it has actually been translated into Danish, but as far as I can tell, it’s only available as an e-book. It is Sahra Wagenknecht’s “Mein Kampf”—without any comparison, by the way. It’s no little picture book—nearly 350 pages in a fairly small font, and there’s no unnecessary fluff. Wagenknecht gets straight to the point, and she covers virtually every aspect of society. The book is definitely best read in small doses, as it’s so rich in content that you should work your way through it slowly and thoughtfully. And let me say this right away: It’s a fantastic book! I don’t agree with everything Wagenknecht says, but that’s not necessary either. You don’t become any wiser if you only read books that don’t challenge your thinking.
Sahra Wagenknecht isn’t the only one who laments that the climate of debate in society has become so intolerant, hateful, and aggressive, but she is one of the few who tries to understand how it came to be this way. She does not exonerate the right wing for using loud and clear rhetoric, but she emphasizes that this is, after all, a natural reaction to the “left-liberals’” refusal to even discuss objections to their agenda. Any dissent is simply dismissed as right-wing or, at worst, “Nazi.” This pushes many people away and drives them right into the arms of the right wing. It doesn’t help to simply berate one’s political opponents—instead of trying to argue for one’s views and win them over to one’s side. She cites, among other things, Hillary Clinton’s disparagement of Trump’s voters as “a basket of deplorables” (a bunch of pathetic losers) as a good example of what not to do. It’s counterproductive! Being skeptical of immigration, COVID-19 policies, or climate hysteria doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a “Nazi”! And that’s true—many would add “unfortunately.”
She rightly accuses the “left-wing liberals” of being neither left-wing nor liberal. They cannot tolerate dissent, subject those with differing views to persecution—and they make life miserable for people at the lower rungs of society, They create a narrow corridor of opinion that you cannot step outside of if you still want to keep your job—or simply be able to have your say. According to Wagenknecht, “right-wingers” are generally understood to be people who support war, a smaller welfare state, and greater inequality. I wouldn’t necessarily endorse that definition outright, but she is certainly right when she claims that this is how many people think. And she is especially right when she goes on to state that these are precisely the views one encounters today among many Greens and left-liberal Social Democrats. On the other hand, she does not consider it right-wing extremism to speak of the exploitation of immigrants as wage-drivers, the impossibility of teaching a school class where half the students do not speak German, or to point out the problems with radical Islamism. If one were to label this as right-wing, one would simply be driving people toward the right-wing parties, because, as is well known, these are the very issues that concern a large portion of the population—and rightly so. By failing to address these issues, the left is letting down the ordinary people who have built this society.
She takes a particularly dim view of the group she refers to as the “Lifestyle Linke.” The left—at least in Sahra Wagenknecht’s view—was created to improve the living conditions of workers and other groups at the bottom of the social pyramid. Today, this mission is being neglected. Instead, the focus is on being “woke.” They are on the lookout for imagined racism, such as in the name Zigeunersauce, (Gypsy sauce) a Knorr classic that had to be renamed Paprikasauce Ungarische Art. At Knorr, they had rendered racism “harmless” and paid too little attention to diversity. At the same time, the foreign-owned Unilever had forced the remaining 550 employees at the Knorr factory in Heilbronn to accept a new collective bargaining agreement with lower wages and poorer working conditions. While the “Gypsy sauce” had made big headlines, the new agreement prompted no protests—not even from left-wing parties. They are preoccupied with transgender people, gender transition, the use of the correct pronouns and proper gender-neutral language, gender quotas, potentially offensive language, and a reckoning with colonial history and the entire European culture—which must be buried, since it was created solely by old white men. In short, the left today is concerned with imaginary problems that interest at most 1% of the population—and certainly not the people the left-wing parties are supposed to represent: the workers, the man on the factory floor, who, in today’s politician-created economic crisis, is struggling to make ends meet. The fact is that the left-wing parties have become know-it-all, out-of-touch academic parties—consisting mainly of entrenched, well-off groups in society, often with a university education. They look down on ordinary people; they look down on working people; indeed, they look down on the people as a whole.
They do not see their mission as improving the financial situation of the lowest-paid, but rather as getting the average Joe to understand the importance of their twisted ideas and distorted perception of reality. Joe, however, has other worries! He wants to know how he’s supposed to pay his electricity bill, which war-crazed climate idiots have driven up to unprecedented heights. When the head of a soup kitchen—euphemistically referred to in German as a “Tafel,” which in German simply means a set dining table—complains that young, able-bodied “immigrants” are driving pensioners, the unemployed, and single mothers away from the emergency relief program created for them, and which in itself is a stain on a modern state, he is labeled a “Nazi,” and his house is vandalized.
Instead of worrying about solving the obvious social problems—which are far greater in Germany than here—the “lifestyle left” is preoccupied with finding offensive passages in older literature, which is now being rewritten to fit modern idiocy; indeed, they’re even organizing book burnings of J.K. Rowling’s books because she’s so heretical as to claim that there are only two genders. People who hold views different from those of the “woke” crowd are lumped together and branded as “Nazis”; they can no longer rent spaces, they’re fired from their jobs, and so on. Just today I read that the Bertelsmann Group—a media conglomerate that, more than anyone, should champion freedom of speech and freedom of thought—is urging employees who are members of Alternative für Deutschland to leave the company because they quite obviously do not share its “values.” We have now reached a point where you can only have a job and be part of society if you share its very narrow “set of values,” which consists exclusively of anti-values. To share it, you have to have been lobotomized! Recently, a high school principal called the police because a 16-year-old girl had said that Germany is not just a place—it is “Heimat.” She was picked up by three uniformed officers and escorted to the police car like a criminal, and at the station subjected to what we would call here a “counseling session”—her views were deemed a threat to society. Her desire to continue her high school education is likely limited now, and that is precisely the point. “Nazis” are not supposed to receive an education; they are supposed to live at the very bottom of society—if they are to live at all. I must ask again: who are the “Nazis” here? This is not at all how I imagine democracy.
I must add, on my own behalf, that after World War II there were discussions about whether the Germans might have a particularly authoritarian gene—and perhaps should be exterminated. The answer to that seems obvious today. Of all Europe’s wretched peoples, the Germans surely hit rock bottom, even though there’s a lot of competition for that spot. I’d prefer a Central African tribal group to today’s Germans! But the Germans will surely solve that problem themselves—with the help of their elected politicians. German politicians—funny enough, especially the “Greens”—want a nuclear war. It would clean things up—but it wouldn’t be very “green”!
Sahra Wagenknecht believes that the majority’s opinions are now being suppressed. If the people believe that the government exists for the people’s sake, they’re “Nazis,” and if they believe that power shouldn’t be handed over to the EU’s army of unelected bureaucrats, they’re anti-European. And the press unanimously supports this.
Any demonstration by Antifa, the “Alphabet People,” climate idiots, or grandmothers against the right wing—that is, the usual semi-communist rabble—is praised as an expression of joy, modernity, and diversity, while the Yellow Vests’ demonstrations in France were unanimously condemned. They were an expression of the people’s dissatisfaction with those in power. We see the same thing today with the farmers’ protests. Denmark, incidentally, was one of the very few countries where there were no farmers’ protests. It was shameful, but then again, there aren’t any farmers left anyway.
Where Sahra Wagenknecht scores the lowest with me is on the issue of immigration, where—contrary to her usual style—she speaks rather vaguely. She views the immigration problem as primarily a social issue—even though she quite rightly points out elsewhere that society is more than just a collective welfare office. A society requires a sense of community, and a community consists of people who share values, language, culture, habits, customs, etc. She glosses over the ethnic aspect—what the rest of us, out of old habit, still call the racial aspect. However, these things are interconnected—even though she herself is an example of how one can very well be German even while carrying some foreign genes. Iranian genes, however, are certainly not the worst!
She believes that, above all, we must not discriminate against foreigners. I certainly don’t think we should discriminate against them either—because they shouldn’t be here at all. They need to get out! At the same time, however, she is not blind to the fact that minorities today are, across the board, actually privileged and granted special rights. We know this all too well: women and people of color are preferred, and if you can find a transgender person, that’s the absolute best. Beauty has become something negative. Whereas one used to assume that models were pretty, tall, white girls, today they are of indeterminate race, short, fat, and ugly. Hideous transgender people are routinely chosen as “Miss Something-or-Other” in beauty pageants. After all, beauty is discriminatory!
As an old communist, Wagenknecht views the world through an economic lens. She believes that identity politics—which defines people’s identities based on ancestry, skin color, gender, or sexual orientation—divides society on entirely the wrong grounds. The gay truck driver and the gay student from a wealthy family really have nothing in common. The former rails against the EU, which threatens his job, while the latter may have just convinced his parents to finance a study abroad program within the EU system. She sees the world as a class struggle. In my world, men and women are not just economic pawns—they are part of an organic whole, a people in which men and women fundamentally have different roles. There is no class struggle and, of course, no people of color. The other artificial “minorities” do not exist in the public sphere!
She is not wrong, however, in pointing out that immigration—both of the so-called “citizens with a migration background,” as they are now called in politically correct German—and of migrants from less prosperous EU countries—seems to be driving down wages. The foreigners themselves are also being pushed into what the Germans call “bullshit jobs” or meager social assistance (Hartz IV)—and they’re dragging German workers down with them, especially the women. But countless gender equality consultants have been hired and new, meaningless job titles introduced—something we’re familiar with here as well. A “Putzfrau” has become a “Raumpflegerin” (just as a Danish building superintendent has become a property inspector and a garbage collector—for heaven’s sake—a “renovator”). It all seems so terribly familiar. Below the poverty line, however, poverty is spreading for everyone, no matter what you call people or how many consultants and case workers are hired!
While ordinary people are getting poorer and poorer, the rich are getting richer and richer. Wagenknecht doesn’t like rich people, but I must point out that wealth is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. But when wealth is detached from social responsibility toward the people and the society that is the very foundation of that wealth, it’s not so good—and that is precisely what is happening today. The rich have become globalists; wealth is no longer created within the framework of a given society; it has become anonymous, and it belongs only to them—not something that ultimately belongs to society, for they no longer feel that they themselves belong to the people and society—they are citizens of the world. The workers in the rich man’s many companies are merely insignificant and interchangeable pawns in a game. The only goal is to obtain their labor as cheaply as possible.
“Here, in particular, it is striking how closely the narrative of left-liberalism resembles that of neoliberalism. While for neoliberals there are only individuals and their families—who are connected to one another by nothing but the market—for left-liberals there are only individuals and identity-politically defined minorities, who likewise have nothing in common with one another, indeed, who can no longer make themselves rationally understood by one another and who lack any empathy for people outside their own group. Their entire identity, on the other hand, thrives precisely on being different, on their distinction from the majority.”1
The current capitalist society is a society in disarray, an atomized society lacking social cohesion and thus also characterized by ever-diminishing social security. For the left, this is “the project of progress aimed at overcoming nationalism and prosperity chauvinism”2. In this context, it must be said that the dwindling social security, which is also evident here, is far more pronounced in Germany. I’ll gladly admit that I’m opposed to any form of welfare state, but as long as we live in a state that supposedly taxes its citizens to ensure so-called welfare, then of course there must also be the necessary social security. It’s not a gift. It’s something we’ve paid for ourselves!
Today’s society is creating an ever-growing underclass consisting not only of workers but also of academics—people who never land a permanent position but drift from one temporary, meaningless job to the next.
As mentioned, all of this is exacerbated by globalization, which completely severs the bond between society and the individual. The large, anonymous hedge funds are not interested in individual companies or their products. They look only at stock prices, because their sole purpose is to make money. They close factories in Europe to move production to low-cost countries, and they sell off the most profitable divisions of a large company while liquidating the parts of the company that do not promise significant short-term profits. Naturally, this particularly affects forward-looking research and development. In the 1930s, there was a group of people known as “farm butchers.” They bought farms for a song, sold everything of value, and either put the rest up for forced auction or set it on fire. Modern private equity funds have taken this system to new heights.
The masterminds behind these private equity funds are to be found in the same circles that are behind “woke” culture, immigration, and all the other social ills that threaten the survival of our culture. Sahra Wagenknecht does not identify them, but I would imagine she knows full well who they are. She’s certainly not stupid! However, one cannot say that out loud, because those same circles also control the mass media and thus the entire political and cultural landscape.
On the one hand, Wagenknecht believes that more social housing should be built for immigrants so they can mix with the population, and that schoolchildren should be mixed in the American style through busing. In short, German children should be transported by bus to schools in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods and vice versa to promote “integration.” This is a crime, but when one is “race-blind,” one comes up with such deranged ideas. She does, however, admit that German families lose their quality of life when their neighborhoods suddenly change character and they are displaced from their own traditional environment. Wagenknecht overlooks the fact that immigrants do not come to be integrated into our problem-ridden and value-free world, but to take it over and make it their own world with their own values—and this takeover does not happen over coffee and conversation; it is brutal.
She concedes that “increasing migration […] leads neither globally nor in host countries to less inequality and greater social cohesion, but to the exact opposite”. She further believes that it is the poor countries of origin that lose the most—they lose talent and labor. We know the truth about this beautiful illusion. It is not brain surgeons and nuclear physicists who are coming here, and the old wisdom that it is the best and most enterprising who have the means to move when conditions at home become too poor no longer really applies. It has become too easy to travel. Whereas 150 years ago, emigration was something daunting, expensive, and arduous—something that cut people off from family and friends—today one simply borrows the money for a plane ticket from a human trafficker, and a cell phone ensures that one still lives mentally in Africa. In more ways than one, these foreigners are bringing Africa to Europe. They are transforming a cultured land into a jungle. Wagenknecht doesn’t say this outright, but she points out that the losers in this immigration are precisely the people at the bottom of society—including the children and grandchildren of the original “guest workers” who forgot to return home. That is absolutely correct, and it is, of course, no coincidence that it is precisely among the descendants of the earliest immigrants that there is growing resistance to the continued admission of foreigners. Wagenknecht, for all her good will, cannot see that all of this could be a left-wing project—and she is certainly right about that. But the well-off leftists live in their own ghettos without any immigrant problems—far removed from reality and the everyday lives of ordinary people
Wagenknecht does believe that it is a civilizational achievement that we have formed our current societies on the basis of a number of factors that bind us together, but she argues that these are based on territory and not on ethnic or religious identities. She might have been right about this to some extent—but only to some extent—until the Romantic era around 1800 gave rise to a heightened sense of national consciousness that was based precisely on ethnic principles and no longer on territorial ones. In the past, the nation was defined by the monarch, who could rule over a diverse array of peoples who spoke different languages and had different cultures. The Holy Roman Empire was not ethnically based. Neither was the Danish Kingdom, yet the Danes have always felt themselves to be specifically Danish. The fact that the king also ruled over Germans, Frisians, Jews, etc., does not change the fact that Denmark itself was ethnically defined. Regardless of the reason, however, she is absolutely right when she writes:
”For people who define themselves in relation to communities, their family is not just any family, their hometown is not just any region, and their country is something other than other countries!”3
Wagenknecht also addresses food production, since prices at the grocery store are, after all, of crucial importance to the poorest segment of the population. The well-off academics in government offices—who themselves rake in salaries in the millions—want to raise meat prices in the name of animal welfare, which they claim would improve if consumers paid more for the final product. Wagenknecht—quite rightly—sees the problem elsewhere, namely in the processing and distribution stages. In 1972, the farmer received 4.80 DM when meat was purchased for 10 DM. Today, the farmer gets 2.20 euros out of 10 euros. If you buy bread for 10 euros, the farmer gets 40 cents!! That’s simply not enough to cover production costs—and certainly not enough to improve animal welfare. The money disappears along the way from the barn and the field to the supermarket—and it’s not wages that are straining the budget. Jobs in the meat industry are among the lowest-paying “bullshit jobs” out there, and the animals are often sent to an even cheaper country to be slaughtered and to another to be cut up. On top of that, the four largest German supermarket chains control 70% of the food market, which means that, in practice, they can dictate producers’ prices. Similarly, the entire processing industry is controlled by a single company.
Sahra Wagenknecht also addresses environmental hysteria, “flight shame,” electric cars, and so on. Today, we can add climate idiocy to the list, which she doesn’t go into in detail—probably because she knows it’s a load of nonsense. The very same people who want to limit our use of cars and airplanes are exactly the same people who have promoted globalized trade, in which goods that could just as easily be produced locally are now transported from one side of the globe to the other by a fleet of airplanes and myriads of polluting trucks, requiring the construction of ever more highways. The solution to environmental and resource problems lies in promoting local production—and, indeed, local distribution through small, local shops, as we used to have them. It’s also about using less plastic for increasingly bulky packaging. At the same time, regulations should be implemented regarding the durability of consumer goods and the ability to repair items—without it costing a fortune.
These are just a few samples of Wagenknecht’s platform. It’s definitely worth reading the entire book—even if you find yourself shaking your head at some of her ideas. She writes in excellent prose—perhaps with a few too many English words, but fewer than you usually see. And above all, she doesn’t cripple the language with * and other politically correct nonsense.
The big question is whether she’ll succeed in making a political breakthrough. She’ll certainly win a fair share of votes in the former GDR, where people are generally more level-headed than in the former West Germany. Among other reasons, this is because she opposes supporting the war in Ukraine. People in East Germany generally have a much greater understanding of Russia, partly because they learned Russian and thus had the opportunity to develop a completely different perspective on the country. You have to take it with a huge grain of salt when you hear about how the Russians oppressed the GDR’s population. The latest opinion polls I’ve seen gave Wagenknecht 8% and 10% of the vote across Germany, respectively, and even though some of those votes came from the AfD, it was far fewer than I had feared. Meanwhile, another player has entered the scene: Die WerteUnion, founded by the former head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans Georg Maaßen, who comes from the CDU. If Wagenknecht, the AfD, and Maaßen want to have any hope of gaining decisive political influence, they’ll have to join forces. Judging by everything she has said, Wagenknecht seems ready to cooperate with the AfD. Both sides will have to swallow some camels, but I can assure them that camel meat tastes quite delicious. And Sahra Wagenknecht has yet another advantage in democratic politics: She’s pretty—as in really, really pretty! That quality should not be underestimated!
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Notes