“Specifically” in distress: “Whatever is gone is lost forever.”

“Specifically” there is a crisis: production and distribution costs have risen, and the number of copies sold has fallen. As you can read on your magazine’s website, the latter also has the “Antinationnalmust do in national times” from “Konkret”. To what extent does “Konkret” oppose the zeitgeist?

The magazine “Konkret” has fundamentally never changed its stance. The new “Konkret” celebrated its tenth anniversary in 1984 with the words: “10 years of argument, fight, rebelliousness, criticism, contradiction. 10 years of being miserable and knowing better.« There is nothing more a magazine can do than write against the omnipresent counter-enlightenment and political regression. And that doesn’t get any easier in times when the subscription service reports that the only publication that is currently growing is “Tichy’s Insight” and the Press Council informs our publisher about complaints from the right because we have accused AfD politicians of stupidity and a police officer , who shot a man “with a migrant background,” racism. A few days ago, a mentally ill reader called the editorial office and said he was afraid that if the fascists got their way, he would be one of the first to be targeted.

Interview

Fritzi Busch

Friederike Gremliza has been the editor of “Konkret” since 2020.

Do you think this fear is justified?

In any case. The underlying future expectation is not just a possible one, but the most probable one. Nevertheless, at a time when the right is on the march, also because the left cannot offer it any significant resistance due to a lack of its own strength, at least the journalistic places where contradictions can be expressed must be defended. Also because what is once gone is lost in the long term: no one who has the will to do so currently has the means to build a new paper of the size and reach of “Konkret”.

The magazine represents a political stance that is unique in the German-speaking world: critical of the West and its institutions, but showing solidarity with Israel and being sensitive to antisemitismus on the left. How do these two positions reconcile, as bringing them together also involves some contradictions?

Let me ask you back: What kind of left would it be that would reconcile with the West and NATO or come to terms with the persecution of Jews, and that would not make it its mission to protect the one place where Jews live in safety? can defend? If “Konkret” is actually the only paper that fights both NATO and anti-Semitism, then it is probably the only left-wing paper in this republic.

In June 2022 there are 29 Authors who have written varying amounts for “Konkret” declared in an open letter that they wanted to stop working for the magazine. The reason was the “editorial course on the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine”. The accusation against “Konkret” was that the magazine took the position that “Russia, pushed onto the defensive by NATO’s eastward expansion and CIA-sponsored coups, simply had no choice but to attack.” Would you agree with this assessment?

The accusation you made against “Konkret” shows the problem with the dispute: it is based on a lie. There is not a single text in “Konkret” that would support this accusation; No author of “Konkret” has justified the Russian attack on Ukraine. It is not without reason that the authors of the letter either omitted evidence or made some up for themselves. On the day the war began, “Konkret” published a statement on its homepage that said, among other things:

Neither has any “concrete” understanding of Moscow’s power-political ambitions and the Russian move to destroy “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Ukraine” (Vladimir Putin), nor is this magazine a commitment to the liberal demokraofWe can expect the West’s world order, which always discovers its great love for peace when it has not started a war of aggression.

A lot of discontent was sparked by the title of the “Konkret” issue, which appeared ten days before the start of the war. The headline read: “Go East! NATO aggression against Russia.

The title, which discussed NATO’s eastward expansion, was based on a misjudgment of Russian foreign policy – but that was by no means exclusive to us. Until the beginning of this war, this policy was generally considered to be entirely rational and predictable – at least as far as the foreign policy of an internally authoritarian imperialist state can be rational. The question that then had to be answered after the Russian invasion was what had caused its change and whether the systematic expansion of NATO to the east was a reason, possibly the main reason, for this change. How did Vladimir Putin, who sought rapprochement with the West, become a chauvinistic warlord?

How did you try to answer this question?

In the issues that followed the much-discussed March issue, authors from various political camps tried, as is the rule in “Konkret,” to put this war, like other political events, in its historical context to understand; We published around 20 articles about it by autumn. It is hardly due to any particular proximity to “Konkret” that the research and documentation center for the analysis of political and religious extremism in Lower Saxony at the Georg-August University of Göttingen published one in the December issue of the magazine “Democracy Dialogue” that it publishes published an investigation entitled “The Empire Strikes Back. “About left-wing orientation difficulties during the Ukrainian war” presents the most important left-wing positions and points of contention on this topic exclusively based on texts published in “Konkret”.

In the months after the Russian attack on Ukraine, Konkret tried in divergent articles to find out whether or how the left should position itself in an intra-imperialist conflict, a conflict in which the wrong competes against the wrong. Unfortunately, in the course of the debate, the faction for which Karl Liebknecht’s statement “The main enemy is in our own country” suddenly no longer had any meaning left the debate.

Do you think that the public distancing of these authors has contributed to the decline in the number of copies of »Konkret« sold?

The magazine loses readers in every crisis, in every event that dramatically changes the political agenda, in the course of which vulnerable parts of the left change sides. I mentioned a few examples in our appeal for donations: the Prague Spring, German reunification, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Yugoslavia wars, the anti-corona measures, Hamas’ war against Israel. This was also the case in the case of the Ukraine war. However, most readers say goodbye either because things are getting tight for them financially or because they simply don’t feel like reading a left-wing paper anymore.

What would the German-speaking left lose if “Konkret” no longer existed?

The only paper that rejects both social democracy and the emotional left, the resentment of the “little man” as well as the elitism of a misunderstood critical theory. A partisan, but not a party, paper, a left-wing paper without a defined target group, with an editorial team that can work without having to curry favor with readers.

A few weeks ago it was announced that the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, founded and financed by Jan Philipp Reemtsma, will close in 2028 because Reemtsma does not want to hand over the management to someone else. Reemtsma was also the author of “Konkret”, the “Konkret” publishing house is based in Hamburg. How do you assess the closure of the institute?

First of all: Jan Philipp Reemtsma’s last contribution to »Konkret« was 30 years ago. To your question: The closure of this institute comes at a time when the end of the so-called New Left is looming. Founded in the mid-1980s as a decidedly left-wing institution – its advisory board included the Trotskyists Helmut Dahmer, Ernest Mandel and Jakob Moneta, among others – it then showed something of a programmatic capitulation at the end of the 1990s in the withdrawal of the first version of the “Wehrmacht Exhibition”. . The now announced dissolution of the institution is the consequence of the breaking away of the social and historical connections that led to its founding. After all, it is this breaking away that is causing problems for the few remaining left-wing publications in this country.

The “Konkret” congress of 1993 is famous with contributions from Sahra Wagenknecht, Wolfgang Pohrt, Karl Held and many others. Would it be time again for an explosive “Concrete” congress? And who would you invite from the German-speaking left?

The “Concrete” Congress did not take place in a vacuum. It was an attempt to bring together the fragmented and divided remaining left and – in view of Germany’s claims to be a great power after reunification and the numerous assassination attempts on foreigners – to work out any common ground. This congress is now seen as the event at which the divided German left – from the eco-socialists to the anti-imperialists – came together for the last time, only to then realize that there were more things that divided them than things they had in common. And today? Those you mentioned are either dead (Wolfgang Pohrt, Karl Held) or have drifted to the right (Sahra Wagenknecht). The remaining German left, where it is not domesticated in parliament, has purred into a handful of groups and factions between which fruitful exchange is hardly possible and joint organized action is impossible. And this at a time when a new fascism is dawning not only in Germany, but throughout the EU.

So there will be no new edition of the “Konkret” congress?

No, there is a lack of both personnel and political and programmatic similarities. And we also have time and nerves – we have other things to worry about right now.

The appeal for donations from “Konkret” can be found at www.konkret-magazin.de/rettet-konkret

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