100 years of Johannes Agnoli – looking for the revolution

They were the “children of the Nazis”: that is a common description of the “68” generation, also from the right. What is right in many cases is therefore by no means suitable for determining the global wave of politicization, which also caught Europe and the Federal Republic in the course of the 1960s. In fact, the new left, as the academic part of the extra -parliamentary opposition (APO) was soon called, was diverse. Roughly a distinction can be made between those “68s” that were born during or even before the Second World War and the younger ones, whose year of birth was after 1948. Something very important becomes clear here: the political position on the circumstances is not mainly formally determined, but determined in terms of content; one positioning even. An excellent evidence of this fact is the life and work of Johannes Agnoli, Marxist political scientist and public intellectual, German-Italian, born in 1925.

On the occasion of Agnolis 100th year of birth, the booklet “Johannes Agnoli, or: Subversion as science” appeared at Dietz-Verlag; It gathers an introductory essay by the editor Michael Hewener and a selection of short texts by the political scientist. In the course of the presentation of life and work, the specific way becomes clear, in which both are mutually due in the case of Agnoli.

A German-Italian history

The most scandalous first: Johannes Agnoli was once a fascist. Although born in Italy, he joined the German Wehrmacht in 1943. While, unlike many other Germans, he never made a secret of his perpetrators, “Agnoli never spoke of being involved in direct war crimes or who has experienced them immediately,” as Hewener writes. He belonged to a mountain hunter regiment in the vicinity of Trieste, which was demonstrably used for partisan control. Also in the Trieste area, the SS also built the Riskiera di San Sabba concentration camp in October 1943-a rather little-known concentration camp, which is also the scene of the “Heldenfriedhof” novel by Thomas Harlan, the son of Veit Harlan, Nazi propagandist and director of the Anti -Semitic propaganda films “Jud Süß” (1940). Johannes Agnoli and Thomas Harlan are almost the same age, born in 1925 and 1929, both spend their childhood and adolescence in fascism, both of them finally come into public as communist intellectuals – and yet are fundamentally different. But that’s a different story.

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In any case, Agnoli goes to Baden-Württemberg after the Second World War-at the time as “enthusiastic about Germany” as already as a youthful member of the fascist Gioventù Italiana del Littorio (Gil). After a few years in captivity in British, where, despite his right -wing attitude, he is used to study, the now German citizen began studying philosophy in Tübingen in the middle of 1950s. The most important teachers are initially “the philosopher and educator Eduard Spranger, a former steel helmet activist, and political scientist Theodor Eschenburg, of which it was only known years later that he was said to have been involved as a lawyer for arisations”. How does someone like Agnoli come about, after all, “his whole life,” as Hewener writes, to devote criticism of state and parliamentarism? And when and how does this new life begin?

The answer makes Agnoli appear directly as a typical “68er”: in the university company of the late 1950s and early 1960s. After his right beginnings, he apparently quickly comes into contact with social democrats in Tübingen, the KPD and Marxist literature. “A first public proof of his real political turn to communist,” says Hewener, can be found in the “FAZ” article “Faust-Hitler-and dear Gretchen”, which is also printed in the second part of the Dietz booklet. Agnoli’s concrete form of dealing with his biography calls Hewener “his own coping with the past”: he did not put his own guilt at the center, but theoretically worked out on the ideologies that “seem to be attractive to fascism” and also shaped him as a young fascist.

Is Agnolis non-conflict with personal involvement? Especially since from the perspective of today’s left, in which moralism is often instead of a discussion of the content, Hewener’s assessment seems understandable: “In his public past, he was not concerned with personal forgiveness, but about clarifying the recess of fascism.” And his work clears In fact, all doubts about that one could have to deal with right ideas; It is completely prescribed by the critical penetration of bourgeois society – its most drastic form of rule, fascism. In other words, Johannes Agnoli, whose work and life is up for debate, was an anti -fascist.

Analysis instead of school declaration

And with that we come back to the biographical. In the middle of 1950s and early 1960s, Agnoli established himself as a critical political scientist, in 1962 a professorship at the Otto-Suhr Institute (OSI), the “Red Cadad’s Schmiede” at the Free University of Berlin appeared. From the mid-1960s, he turned to the criticism of the state and parliamentarism and, together with the APO-related- and in 1977 by serious repression- professor Peter Brückner, one of his main works, the “transformation of democracy”, which among other things critically examines the mainstream politology.

But, like quite a few critical professors of the time, Agnoli is also politically active in the context of the APO in the 1960s. When the workers failed in the “Republican Club” he founded, he tries to support Italian guest workers in Wolfsburg in the class struggle, but without any significant success. (This is also a typical German “68” experience, of which today’s left can still sing a song.) The remaining seventies spends Agnoli with research stays in Italy and Germany, writes for the Italian magazine »Critica del Diritto« (“Criticism of law”) and build contacts with the left -wing communist movement of operaism. In Italy, he finally witnessed a strong, militant worker movement, as it was inconceivable in Germany at the time – but it is no longer in current Italy.

Yawning empty space in Agnolis Otherwise solid materialistic work: the patriarchy.

Also based on the comparative look of Italy-Germany, Agnoli wrote its most important book, “The State of Capital”, which appears in 1975. Here he determines the pacification of the class struggles as one of the most important tasks of the bourgeois state – the one in which he has real political autonomy, while he can ultimately manage capitalist economy and its crises. In its function, he determines the state as an ideal overall capitalist and, in this context, also makes it clear that this is “not a neutral instrument” “that can be used depending on the prevailing balance of power”, as Hewener writes. With this important rejection also the possibility of a socialist, “good” state, Agnoli takes a special position within the new left. Agnoli’s end of career fell on the collapse of the socialist states; The last sentences of his farewell lecture criticize the ideology of the “end of history”, in 1990 he in the magazine concretely published his essay “Destruction as a determination of the scholar in a poor time”, a consequent “rejection of constructive participation in the conditions”. This essay is also completely printed in the Dietz ribbon.

Yawning empty space in Agnolis Otherwise solid materialistic work: the patriarchy. Unfortunately, he is no exception here, despite the “sexual liberation”, the new left also existed many times for men’s associations. This also involuntarily depresses himself in Hewener’s essay, in the form of a total male dominance with regard to the theorists mentioned. His patriarch -critical information is correspondingly positive: for example, that the young Agnoli had “affairs with some women” and acquired “a corresponding reputation” borrowed money for an abortion in a professor. Finally, he began a relationship with the 13 -year -old student Barbara Görres, whom he later married. In the first and only naming of a female author, Görres is quoted in the following words: »In her marriage, you would have kept very classic arguments in her marriage, said Agnoli’s wife Barbara in her biography about her husband: whether she should work or not; Anyone who could go out to political appointments and who at home had to take care of the first child, the daughter Babette, born in 1965. Reproductive work has mostly got stuck with her. ”The view of the register of passenger is almost shocking: among the 87 people are sage and write four women. Like Agnoli’s refusal to theoretically deal with sexism and also racism, his work harms his work – some productive can certainly be written down.

LEST Agnoli!

The last section of his essay overtit Hewener with “What remains?” – And writes, Agnoli’s work “raises many questions and does not offer any simple answers”. I would like to contradict that. The objects of his studies are complex, but Agnoli processes them with clarity and above all with clear positioning: for example the relationship between state and economy, fascism and capitalism; The question of violence and pacifism; The role of journalism, public education; Imperialism and war; The anti -fascism and its bourgeois impossibility.

And of course what should not be missing from these basic societal issues: the eternal question about the relationship of the left to parliamentarianism. Agnoli has also dealt with this, and he was now cited again for this. In 1969 he found the following in the text “Journalism in the APO”: The “participation in parliamentarianism requires a certain social behavioral and political way of action. The parliament party does not want to disintegrate, but do legislative work. It is not in your interest in improving your functionality to actively radicalize masses by awareness of your situation. Rather, she has to try passive radicalization; This means that she will turn it into a passive election consumer mass that opts for radical candidates. Her whole organization will take the character of the apparatus in which she wants to integrate. ”This is the truth, and even if our present actually seems to demand a progressive force in parliament: the left is doing well to get behind these words to write the ears. She hasn’t done it too often.

Michael Hewener (ed.): Johannes Agnoli, or: Subversion as science. Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin 2025, 175 pages, Br., 14 €.