Left-wing journalism – For everyone who isn’t finished yet

More rearmament, more state coercion, more Germany – that’s what the federal election campaign is saying. What can leftists and anyone who is still bothered by something like this do? Read Hermann L. Gremliza, for now.

Why? Firstly, the editor of the Hamburg magazine “Konkret”, who died in 2019, wrote a lifelong campaign against such evils. He understood them – completely correctly – not as unpleasant side effects of an inherently beneficial thing, but as the very poison that flows out of the wrong overall organization of social work. Secondly, in describing this disaster, Gremliza has set standards that few before or since can measure up to. The fact that Karl Kraus, who was born in 1940, chose himself as one of his role models was not a presumption. Thirdly, the first two of a total of 18 volumes of the “Collected Writings” are now available, edited by his daughter and current “Konkret” editor Friederike Gremliza and the long-standing “Konkret” editor Wolfgang Schneider. The two volumes cover the early years of Gremliza’s publishing, 1963 to 1978.

nd.Kompakt – our daily newsletter

Our daily newsletter nd.Compact brings order to the news madness. Every day you will receive an overview of the most exciting stories from the world Editorial team. Get your free subscription here.

When Gremliza was introduced to “Konkret” in 1972 as a new employee and “‘Spiegel’ left-wing deviant,” the magazine was fighting on the “sex front” under Klaus Rainer Röhl, with a lot of bare skin and keyhole reports. Gremliza had previously ended up at “Spiegel” after completing his studies in political science at the FU in West Berlin in 1966, where he wrote in “FU-Spiegel” under a pseudonym. In Tübingen he had already worked as an editor for the student newspaper “Notizen”. Gremliza explained to the young academics what was in other newspapers, in the liberal “Zeit” or – “as brown in the back as it was tight in the front” – in the “Deutsche National-Zeitung”.

You can already guess what Gremliza’s “Express” will later become: the biting commentary on the German media mischief. With his famous text “The Brown University,” Gremliza also lifted the Tübingen gowns and showed the mustiness of a thousand years. The reaction was immediate: the author was being paid by the East, it was said: “The ‘Notes’ have poured buckets of manure over the university!”

What Gremliza did in the “Spiegel” called the “assault gun of democracy” – after all during the time of old Nazi Kurt Georg Kiesinger as Chancellor and new Nazis from the NPD – unfortunately only appears in the footnotes in the “Collected Writings”. There was a row with editor Rudolf Augstein about co-determination, and in 1971 Gremliza dropped out. Because his texts at the time were not signed by name and Gremliza himself did not keep an archive, there are some “gaps” in the “Collected Writings,” as Schneider writes in the editorial introduction.

For the “Konkret” period, Gremliza’s texts are easier to assign; they include the political columns, the “Internal” and the media show “Express”, as well as occasional literary reviews under a pseudonym or a report from the GDR. There is soon a row with “Konkret” editor Röhl, whom Gremliza accuses of running the newspaper according to “the maxims of a herb shop.” Now it’s the editor who gives up and founds a new magazine called “Das Da” as a playground. Röhl clears the field for Gremliza.

In 1974, a new era began at “Konkret”. Gremliza, who runs the magazine as publisher, editor, editor-in-chief and initially the only editor, writes: “Everyone talks about the lack of an independent left-wing newspaper – we’re creating one.” Us? This is a series of authors and freelancers that Gremliza invites to collaborate, from Rudi Dutschke to Heinrich Böll to Günter Wallraff. Almost four years later, when the legendary publisher’s widow Inge Feltrinelli briefly joined the consolidation as a partner, Gremliza notes that it was able to establish itself as the “only serious organ on the democratic left outside of the established parties.” You are just a “party paper”. I’m sorry, what? »And that of the other party: for the DKP an SPD paper, for the SPD a fourth party paper, for the KB a DKP paper, for the union felt an RGO paper, for the KBW a Bonzen paper and so on.« True to the line beyond the respective lines. Gremliza knows how to bring different attitudes into a meaningful discussion. He doesn’t need labels such as “left-wing pluralist” for this.

Now we know how the parties feel about “Konkret”. But how does Gremliza feel about the parties? After all, the man was a member of the SPD until 1989. The “Collected Writings” provide information: Gremliza accuses the social democrats of being on the path “from Marxism to marketing, from enlightenment to stickers.” The SPD claims with great fuss that it is saying goodbye to ideologies in order to throw itself at one of the biggest ideologies: the “centre”. In order to pay homage to the middle, comrades who fight against rearmament, nuclear weapons or emergency legislation are punished. Because: “Class struggle and the middle are mutually exclusive.” And Gremliza wants the former.

When Willy Brand was re-elected in the early federal elections in 1972, Gremliza soberly stated: “Marx has not won and Hitler has not yet lost.” And calls for a fight against the SPD establishment. In 1976, when Helmut Schmidt ran against Helmut Kohl and Franz Josef Strauss, Gremliza warned urgently against confusing mathematics with questions of faith under the line “Vote for Schmidt?”: “A voting booth is not a confessional.” And warned against Schmidt, under which the Left threatened to suffocate.

How does it all fit together? What do you call an SPD member who, after years of SPD government, writes that “at the end of the Erhard government, the Federal Republic was a more liberal state than it is today – without emergency laws, without professional bans”? He is considered a “splitter” because he allows dissenting SPD members to have their say in his paper, but attests to comrades who have migrated to the DKP that they “can no longer hold the party book because of sheer vanity and insults”? Who defends the DKP against Henryk M. Broder, but calls a report about the Soviet Union from the DKP board “lyrical dirt”? He demands that the RAF be deprived of solidarity, which it has never exercised itself, but even after the murder of Federal Prosecutor General Siegfried Buback, does not want to offer itself to the persecuting state security agencies? Who calls for the “implementation of democracy” but at the same time the end of the “stultifying slogan about the ‘commonality of democrats’”? So what do you call someone like that? A dialectician. This is someone who doesn’t shout slogans. When contradictions arise, he doesn’t throw away his thinking out of fright, but instead begins.

An example: Gremliza calls for people to join the Bundeswehr in order to abolish it. »We want disarmament, we want an internal and external order that makes the profession of legitimized killing superfluous. But only a democratic army can be dismantled. “Everyone else is conducting a coup.”

Another example: When there is another argument with Dutschke, who is complaining against the Eastern Bloc, Gremliza replies matter-of-factly that one must “keep asking the question of power. And – see Chile – this cannot be decided positively in the foreseeable future without the involvement of the world power, the USSR.” In any case: “We will not achieve more human rights in Eastern Europe with Jimmy Carter and NATO.”

Last example: “Israel’s fight is not just for colonial expansion, the Arabs’ fight is not just for the liberation of oppressed and exploited compatriots. There’s a lot of folkloric terror at play, and not everyone who wraps a dirty towel around their head is a revolutionary.”

Shouldn’t this all be part of the ABC of left-wing thinking? However, you can learn to spell again and ultimately even speak sensibly. A good thousand pages of Gremliza are incredibly helpful in their cleverness, and they are also enjoyable. The fact that you no longer know some of the names in the texts – especially in the colorful “Express” mix – is not at all a problem. What Gremliza mainly had to communicate was not information, but attitudes towards other attitudes. And this continues to be communicated to this day – regardless of whether the SPD, which briefly flashed to the left during the election campaign, or the Federal Republic, which has been in a stable turning point since Corona, are just as terrible or worse than back then.

Gremliza’s “Collected Writings” can confidently be called required reading – for everyone who has not yet come to terms with the prevailing conditions. And the best thing is: there are 16 more volumes to come.

Hermann L. Gremliza. Collected writings in 18 volumes. Konkret-Verlag. Vol. 1: 1963–1975, 545 pp. Vol. 2: 1975–1978, 485 pp., €30 each in the subscription edition.