The past of the German Left and the Social Democratic organization of Germany is 1 of the most instructive narratives of modern Europe, due to the fact that in its history, as in lens, the fundamental tensions of modernity are concentrated: between class and nation, between emancipation and power, between democracy and ideology.
The SPD is not only a political organization – it is simply a civilizational institution that took on different functions in different epochs: from the working class representative, through the state party, to the modern operator of the normative redevelopment of society.
Genesis: Marxism, Prussia, state as an enemy and object of desire
The SPD grew out of the 19th-century labour movement in the realities of the Prussian national state, which combined the authoritarian political structure with dynamic industrialization. Ferdinand Lassalle, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht were not revolutionaries in the Bolshevik sense; their Marxism was organizational and educational, not insurrectionary. At this stage, there is simply a fundamental feature of German social democracy: an ambivalent attitude towards the state. On the 1 hand, the Prussian State was a tool of repression (Sozialistengeseze Bismarcka), with the another – the object of future acquisition and transformation.
From the beginning, the SPD has built a parallel society: trade unions, press, clubs, self-help systems. This was not a task of demolition of the state, but a task of alternate social hegemony. Even then, the SPD functioned as a “state in the state” – a model that will return in a completely different cultural form after more than a 100 years.
Karl Kautsky, the main SPD theorist of the turn of the century, legitimized Marxism as a technological worldview, but simultaneously rejected revolution as a political path. This discrimination – Marxism as a framework Interpretationsnummer, not as an immediate action programme, will be crucial to the further destiny of the party.
Weimar Republic: the betrayal of revolution or the choice of state?
1918 was a minute of real trial. The SPD faced an alternative: a socialist revolution, or a national state in the form of a republic. Selection Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Noskego was clear: a state above class, order above utopia. The brutal suppression of the uprising of Spartacus and the conflict with the KPD to this day is interpreted by the extremist left as a "fail". From a conservative point of view, however, this was a constitutional moment: the SPD became a organization to the system, not a revolutionary movement. It was in Weimar that the ethos of the SPD was formed as the "last defender of the republic" – an ethos that would later become the foundation of its moral legitimacy. At the same time, however, the SPD could not make a affirmative national narrative. The Republic was defended by her by procedure, not identity. This deficit will return in the 21st century in the form of post-national liberalism.
Third Reich and Anti-Fascist Myth
The SPD was the only large organization to vote against power of lawyer for the Reichstag Adolf Hitler. This fact became the foundation of the moral story of the founding organization after 1945. nevertheless – he notes Ernst Nolte – the antifascism of the SPD was negative, not positive: the organization knew what it opposed, but could not propose an alternate imagination of the national community. This anti-fascist story will later be instrumentalized respective times.
The modern SPD not only derives its legitimacy from opposition to Nazism, but extends the concept of “fascism” to all right-wing criticism of liberal order. What was a real totalitarian threat in the 3rd Reich, in the 21st century becomes a category of moral delegitization.
After 1945: SPD vs. GDR and the paradox of anti-communism
In the RFN, the SPD was initially more skeptical of western integration than the CDU, but explicitly rejected the GDR model. Kurt Schumacher saw in SED “The worst form of Fascism” – which shows how far the SPD of the time was from communism. SPD anti-communism was real, state and national.
This fact is frequently silenced today, due to the fact that it storms the communicative of the alleged continuity of "left solidarity". In fact, the SPD was in the 1950s a organization of national opposition alternatively than progressive avant-garde.
Bad Godesberg: triumph or surrender?
The Bad Godesberg program was a historical compromise: SPD accepted capitalism, but wanted to civilize it. It was the highest of social democracy as a realistic project. nevertheless – he notes Götz Aly – it was besides the beginning of a long process of perfect disarmament in which the SPD abandoned its own social anthropology for liberal individualism.
Brandt and Schmidt: Realpolitik Before Moralism
Willy Brandt was Ostpolitik not out of love for communism, but out of the belief that the national state must act in a real way. Helmut Schmidt he was a state technocrat, skeptical of ideology and social movements. For Schmidt, moral issues were a private matter, not a policy matter.
This is the last minute the SPD functioned as a state organization in a classical sense.
Schröder: Base demolition and openness to cultural liberalism
Agenda 2010 destroyed SPD's bond with the working class. "New measure" policy has emerged in place of social policy. That's erstwhile the SPD began to compensate for social losses from cultural radicalization.
Gerhard Schröder He was the last SPD Chancellor to think geopolitically (Russia!), but at the same time opened the way to the perfect distribution of the party.
SPD after 2010: LGBT, Antifa, BLM and Greens
The modern SPD is already a different formation. Its centre of gravity shifted from economy to normative engineering. Support for LGBT+ ideology, affirmation gender as a legal category, tolerance against Antifa, adaptation of BLM narratives – all this shows the transition from social democracy to cultural left.
Andreas Rödder He says we're dealing with "a fresh moral left"who rules not through business but through standards. Eckhard Jesse indicates asymmetry in the treatment of extremism. Herfried Münkler warns against the dissolution of the national state under postcolonial communicative pressure. The alliance with the Greens sealed the process. The SPD became the executive apparatus of the Green ideology: climate, migration, customs. The organization no longer represents a class or a nation, but a transformational project.
SPD, Russia and Geopolitics: From State Realism to Postnational Moralism
The SPD relation with Russia is 1 of the most consistent and at the same time the most distorted threads in the debate on the German left. In order to realize it, the publicist abbreviations of the "prorossiness" of the SPD must be completely rejected and go back to the foundations of German strategical culture. Ostpolitik was not an ideological task or left-wing internationalism; it was an expression of classical continental realism, rooted in the belief that the stableness of Central Europe requires Russia to be considered as a permanent geopolitical factor.
Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr They assumed that the division of Germany could not be abolished by force or moral condemnation of the USSR. expression ‘Wandel durch Annäherung’ was a strategy to minimize conflict, not legitimize communism. Brandt recognised the boundaries in Oder and Nysa not due to the fact that they were "fair" in a historical sense, but due to the fact that their non-recognition blocked the anticipation of any sovereignty of the West Germany in east politics. It was an act of symbolic resignation in exchange for space of political manoeuvre. Helmut Schmidt went even further in realism. He was skeptical of the moralizing of abroad policy, openly criticized pacifism and the peace movements of the 1980s, and treated the USSR as an opponent, with which a unchangeable conflict should be maintained, alternatively than an ideological crusade. Schmidt was 1 of the last SPD politicians to think in terms of balance of power alternatively than “values”.
This realism was eroded after 1990. The unification of Germany did not lead to the return of classical power policy, but to the moralisation of German global identity. The SPD – like the full German elite – began to see abroad policy as an extension of the policy of memory and ethics. Russia stopped being a geopolitical actor and became a moral projection. Gerhard Schröder is simply a transitional figure. On the 1 hand, he was the last SPD Chancellor to think of categories of national interest, energy and strategical sovereignty. Partnership with Russia, Nord Stream, opposition to the Iraq War – all of this was part of the classical tradition of continental realism. On the another hand, Schröder, through the breakdown of the SPD social base, opened the organization to a fresh hegemony: liberal-progressive, Atlantic and post-national.
After 2014, and especially after 2022, the SPD found itself in a state of geopolitical split. Brandt and Schmidt's tradition has been morally delegitimated as "naïve", "dependence" or even "wine". At the same time, the SPD was incapable to make its own realistic alternative. Instead, it took over the language of the Greens: abroad policy as a moral task in which war and sanctions become tools of "normative education".
Herfried Münkler points out that Germany conducts abroad policy after 2022 ‘without state theory’, based on emotions and symbols. SPD – formerly a organization of balance and mediation – became part of a moral block that does not separate interest, work and long-term effects. In this sense, breaking up with Russia was not a return to the West, but a resignation from strategical autonomy.
Die Linke, SED and GDR Heritage: Postcommunism as a intellectual Structure
If the SPD represents the evolution of social democracy towards cultural liberalism, then Die Linke represents a completely different process: the transformation of communism into a post-communist normative left. Die Linke It is not a social movement, but an organization continuity, the beginning of which was the forced merger of the SPD and the KPD in 1946 in the russian business zone.
The SED was not a social democratic party, nor even a classical communist party. She was an apparatus of power, organized around control, planning and repression. The GDR was not "another way of upgrading", but a dependent task without sovereignty. Importantly, its legitimacy was based almost exclusively on anti-fascism – understood not as a historical reflection, but as a tool for the West's deposition. After 1990, there was no real intellectual decommunisation. SED was converted to PDS and then into Die Linke, keeping a crucial part of the frame, network and kind of thinking. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk emphasises that Die Linke is the only large organization in Western Europe that has not passed the time of the founding break with its authoritarian heritage.
Ideological Die Linke functions as an amalgam of the 3 currents: East German nostalgia, academic Marxism and the western identity left. This second component was absorbed after 2000, especially in the western lands. As a result, a organization was formed that combines extremist criticism of capitalism with extremist moral liberalism – a combination internally contradictory but politically mobilizing.
Die Linke She was never truly curious in taking over state work at national level. Its function is to keep ideological force on the SPD and the Greens, to shift the boundaries of the debate and to normalise the demands previously considered extreme. In this sense Die Linke performs a function which Ernst Nolte would describe as “A revolution without revolution”: permanent destabilisation of standards without taking responsibility.
Sahra Wagenknecht was an exception inside Die Linke as she attempted to reconstruct the economical and state rationality of the left. Her conflict with the organization camera revealed the actual nature Die Linke: a organization more curious in identity policy, migration and symbolism than the real surviving conditions of the working class. The division and emergence of the BSW are the logical consequence of this process.
GDR, Stasi and incalculable intellectual continuity
The problem of GDR in the analysis of the German Left is not simply the authoritarian nature of the SED state, but the deficiency of a real cultural and organization break after 1990. Stasi was not simply a safety service; it was a tool of full public penetration, based on the logic of suspicion, prevention and control of discourse. It was this logic – not circumstantial personnel structures – that proved to be the most durable.
Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk and Hubertus Knabe They repeatedly pointed out that after the union there was an asymmetrical mirror: the GDR elite mostly survived in the scientific, media and organization apparatus, while the public debate established communicative “Antifascist Innocence of the East”. Die Linke (previously PDS) became the depositary of this narrative, and the SPD – her tactical ally, especially at the land level.
The consequence is simply a blurring of the notion of authoritarianism: the repressiveness of the GDR can be relativized, and the "antifascism" is absolute. This semantic shift allowed later recognition of criticisms of migration, globalisation or ideology gender au “new forms of Fascism”.
Antifa: From story of opposition to a Street force Tool
Antifa in Germany is not a uniform organization, but an umbrella field of mobilization, whose legitimacy is based on a story of opposition to Nazism. In practice, it acts as a non-systemic arm of emphasis on public debate.
The SPD – especially at local and youth level (Jusos) – adopted an attitude of instrumental tolerance: a formal distance with actual acceptance. Politologist Eckhard Jesse points to structural asymmetry: while right-wing extremism is being pursued as a threat to constitutional order, left-wing force can be interpreted as "reactive". This double standard is not a coincidence; it is due to the moral hierarchy in which the "right side of history" receives interpretative immunity. The SPD, accepting this hierarchy, gave up state neutrality.
Migration and moral liberalism as a substitute for social policy
After the erosion of the SPD's working base, she began filling the vacuum with a symbolic identity policy. Migration was presented not as a structural challenge, but as a moral test. Moral Liberalism – LGBT+, gender, BLM – became a substitute language for a redistributive policy that the SPD was no longer able to lead after the 2010 Agenda.
Andreas Rödder accurately describes this process as a transition from ‘interest policy’ au "standard policies". In this logic, opposition to multiculturalism is not a political error, but a moral defect. The SPD, entering a permanent alliance with the Greens, accepted this paradigm in its entirety, accepting the function of admin of progressive transformation.
BSW – Sahra Wagenknecht and revolt against cultural left
Insurrection Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) is the most crucial thought event on the German left since Bad Godesberg – not due to the scale of the electorate, but due to a real paradigmic break. BSW is the first left-wing task in Germany to openly reject cultural liberalism as the dominant ideology of the left.
Wagenknecht assumes that the modern left has betrayed its social base, replacing the conflict with capital-work with symbolic conflict. Her criticism of mass migration, sanctions against Russia, deindustrialisation and climate policy is not nationalistic but state-social. In this sense, BSW is closer to Schmidt's tradition than Brandt's, and even more so – the Greens. It is crucial that the BSW does not mention to the nostalgia of the GDR or to post-communist symbolism. On the contrary: Wagenknecht criticizes Die Linke For moralism, eliteism, and separation from real surviving conditions. This conflict exposes the actual division of the German left: not between improvement and revolution, but between social realism and progressive cultural engineering.
From a conservative perspective, BSW is an ambivalent phenomenon. On the 1 hand, it rejects many elements of "moral rot", on the another hand, it remains rooted in the stature and anti-liberal criticism of the market. This is not a return to classical social democracy, but a left without cultural liberalism, which makes it possibly attractive to the labour and post-industrial electorate.
Migration: from the social issue to the instrument of normative hegemony
Migration policy has become the main field in Germany where the transformation of the German left from a social task into a normative task has taken place. For classical social democracy migration was a problem of the labour market, integration and state solidarity. For the modern SPD, as for the Greens, it became a moral test in which opposition is delegated as an ethical deficit.
The decisive minute came in 2015–2016. SPD was not a policy initiator ‘Willkommenskultur’But she became her organization guarantor. alternatively of demanding control, selection and integration, the organization adopted a "humanitarian language" which excluded the debate from the area of rational policy. Migration was ripped out of the state context and entered into a post-national communicative in which sovereignty is treated as a relic of the past. The consequence was the SPD electorate rupture. conventional working environments – especially in the east and in the deindustrialised regions – saw mass migration as a origin of wage pressure, competition for housing and public order distribution. The SPD responded to these concerns, not politics, but morality. Thus, the social problem has been transformed into a cultural conflict.
Die Linke went further, treating migration as an component of global justice and ‘anti-racist duty’. As he notes Wolfgang Merkel, we are dealing with a paradox: parties that historically represented the working class present ignore the empirical effects of migration on this class, focusing on symbolic moral capital.
The BSW is the only left-wing task to reconstruct the state and social dimension of migration. The criticism of Wagenknecht is not cultural but structural: mass migration without integration weakens solidarity and solidarity is simply a prerequisite for redistribution. This position brings the BSW closer to conservative criticism of liberalism, though without its national metaphysics.
Ukraine and War: Moralization of Conflict and the End of German Realism
The war in Ukraine became a minute of definitive break-up of the SPD with its own geopolitical tradition. Ostpolitik Brandt and Schmidt were based on the presumption that Central Europe is simply a region of conflict of interest, and the function of Germany is mediation and stabilisation. After 2022, the SPD abandoned this logic for the moral binary division of the world.
In the fresh narrative, conflict is no longer a geopolitical dispute but a clash "democracy with authoritarianism". specified language eliminates the anticipation of negotiation and compromise, and abroad policy reduces to symbolic gestures. SPD – formerly a organization of state work – accepted the function junior partner Atlantic morality, giving up strategical autonomy.
Herfried Münkler stresses that Germany was in a situation "war without strategy": they decide on historical consequences without clear political objectives. The SPD, alternatively of performing a stabilizing function, became part of a coalition of emotions and media pressure. Die Linke in this regard, it has revealed its interior contradictions. Part of the organization remained with pacifist anti-Americanism, another—especially the city wing—received a liberal-intervention narrative. The deficiency of consistency confirmed that Die Linke is incapable of reasoning in terms of state and security.
The BSW, on the another hand, consistently defends the negotiating position, causing accusations of "prorossiness". In fact, it is simply a return to continental reality, which in the German tradition of the left was the norm, not the exception.
SPD — Die Linke – KPD – BSW: continuity and breakups
The SPD is simply a post-social organization today. Its ideological core is no longer in class conflict or redistribution, but in the management of the normative transformation: climate, identity, migration. It is not neo-communism in a structural sense, but soft cultural post-marksism, without economical design.
Die Linke is the intellectual continuity of communism, though without its revolutionary energy. It is simply a organization of the normative protest that combines anti-capitalism with moral liberalism, reproducing the paradox of the modern left: symbolic radicalism in the absence of state responsibility.
The KPD (historical) was a revolutionary party, rooted in internationalism and the submission of Moscow. Its importance present is not about organizational continuity, but about conceptual inheritance: anti-fascism as a tool for delegitization, primacy of ideology over the state, hostility towards pluralism.
The BSW is simply a heterodoxic project: a left-wing economic, socially conservative in a functional, realistic geopolitical sense. It is neither social democracy in the classical sense nor neo-communism. It is an effort to reconstruct the state left after the era of liberal progressiveism.
A Conservative Perspective
Andreas Rödder describes SPD as a organization she abandoned ‘Republic centre of gravity’ to "moral identity policy". Eckhard Jesse points to structural asymmetry in the treatment of extremism, which undermines state neutrality. Herfried Münkler warns against the failure of strategical reasoning and return "Conscience policies" Instead of a business policy. Götz Aly stresses that the German Left historically had a tendency to moral absolutism, which in various epochs led to political disasters.
Conservative authors (VerteUnion, Neue Rechte) stress that the SPD has ceased to be a working class organization and has become part of the post-national management elite, separated from real social conflicts. Even the "extreme right" (NPD in ideological analyses) aptly – although ideologically distorting – diagnosed the disintegration of the social base of the left, which, however, was utilized destructively and anti-systemic.
Socialism or Neocommunism?
With respect to the modern SPD, we are not dealing with classical social democracy or neo-communism in the historical sense. This is simply a post-social task in which class categories have been replaced by normative categories. In this sense, the SPD is not a organization of the social left, but a liberal left.
Die Linke represents soft cultural post-communism, devoid of state ambition. The KPD remains a historical mention point as a informing against ideological absolutism.
The BSW opens a fresh opportunity: a left without cultural liberalism, but besides without revolutionary communism.
From a conservative perspective, the key conclusion is one: the German social democracy has not been "failed" – it has abandoned its object itself. In place of society, she introduced the norm, in place of the state – moral narrative, in place of realism – ideology.
Eurasianism of Alexander Dugin and the German Left: Structural Imcompatibility
The reception of Alexander Dugin's thoughts and wider Eurasianism in Germany is an asymmetrical and highly polarized phenomenon.
German Left – both SPD and Die Linke – shows to this doctrine almost full receptional inability, while its interest appears selectively on the right side of the spectrum, especially in the circles of the fresh Right, the AfD part and marginally in the post-national environments of the erstwhile NPD.
The reason for this asymmetry is not ad hoc, but structural. Eurasianism Dugin is an anti-liberal doctrine in the ontological sense: he rejects liberalism not only as a political system, but as an anthropology, based on individuals, individual rights and universalism.
Meanwhile, the modern German left – even erstwhile criticizing economical neoliberalism – remains fundamentally liberal culturally. Its axioms include emancipation of the individual, pluralism of identity, cultural constructivism and normative universalism. Eurasianism, on the another hand, is based on concepts of completely alien to this formation: civilization as an organic being, the originality of the community before the individual, the sacral dimension of politics, hierarchy, tradition, geopolitics as fate. Therefore, for SPD and Die Linke Dugin's thought is not only "controversial", but not translated into their conceptual language. There is no common ground of discourse here.
Moreover, Eurasianism itself undermines the nucleus of the postwar identity of the German left: anti-fascism as a universal moral paradigm. Dugin rejects antifascism as a liberal myth, treating the 20th century not in moral terms, but in civilization. specified a possible is unacceptable to the German left, due to the fact that anti-fascism acts as a metapolitical immunity in it – it protects it from criticism and allows it to be delegated to the opponent without substantive dispute.
Why Eurasian Interest in the German Right (New Right, AfD, NPD)
The interest in Eurasianism on the right side of the German political scene is selective and instrumental alternatively than doctrinal. It besides involves not simply taking over Dugin, but utilizing any common criticism points toward the liberal order of the West.
The fresh Right (in an intellectual sense, not party) is curious in Eurasianism primarily as an antithesis of Atlanism and liberal universalism. Dugin offers a language that allows you to talk about the planet in terms of multipolarity, civilization and conflict of values – which resonates with criticism of liberal cultural hegemony, the European Union as a post-national task and American normative dominance.
In AfD, this interest is heterogeneous. The liberal-conservative wing remains skeptical towards Dugin, treating him as an ideologist of Russian imperialism. On the another hand, the national-swinging wing sees Eurasianism as a critical tool to challenge the liberal consensus without referring to classical German nationalism, which remains historically charged.
In utmost environments (the erstwhile NPD) eurasianism was interpreted in a simplified way, frequently contrary to its actual content, as an ideological justification for anti-Western sentiment. It was not an intellectual reception, but a symbolic reception.
It is crucial, however, that the right is curious in Eurasianism, not as a Russian project, but as a negation of liberalism. This is simply a fundamental difference with the left, which liberalism criticises selectively but never ontologically. Modern German left does not reject Eurasianism due to the fact that it is "authoritarian", "Russian" or "reactive". She rejects him due to the fact that he exposes her own ontological void. Eurasianism – whether declared wrong, dangerous or utopian – asks questions about meaning, civilization, boundaries, destiny and community. The German left is no longer able to answer specified questions.
SPD, Die Linke and their intellectual facilities function in a planet where politics has been reduced to the management of standards and the state to enforce moral correctness. This is simply a planet without tragedy, without a conflict of civilization, without past understood as fate. In specified a planet there is no place for Dugin – not due to the fact that he is dangerous, but due to the fact that he reminds that politics is not therapy. The paradox is that the German Left, obsessingly fighting “fascism”, itself created an anti-political order in which any ontological alternate must be excluded as immoral. This is no longer pluralism – this is hegemony.
From this point of view, the interest in Eurasianism on the right is not an expression of the "defect of the West", but a symptom of the intellectual vacuum left by the left after abandoning its own social and state roots. erstwhile 1 page stops asking questions about meaning, the another – even wandering – starts asking questions about meaning.
At the end of the word Oswald Spenglerwhich, in the context of this analysis as a whole, sounds like a warning, not a sentence: "Ideologies do not conquer, but life forms. And erstwhile the form is exhausted, no morality will save civilization”.
This conviction remains the key to knowing both the crisis of German social democracy and the left's tense reaction to all civilization alternatives.
Matthäus Golla
German Bibliography (Election)
– Andreas Rödder, Der false LiberalismusMünchen 2020;
- Eckhard Jesse, Forgen des Extremismus, Baden-Baden 2018;
– Herfried Münkler, Die neue Spaltung der Gesellschaft, Berlin 2023;
– Karl-Rudolf Korte, Wahlen in der Erlebnigellschaft, Frankfurt a.M. 2019;
– Werner Patzelt, Populismus und DemokratieWiesbaden 2017;
– Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Die Übernahme. Knows Ostdeutschland Teil der Bundesrepublik wurdeMünchen 2019;
– Götz Aly, Unser Kampf, Frankfurt a.M. 2017.
