“Weltbühne” – the new “world stage”: a German product

Pacificism has a hard time. So it would be to be welcomed if there was a publication that has again helped him rightly. In this respect, the revival of the »Weltbühne« would have its justification, because it was just the newspaper that had become one of the central organs of German Pacificism at her weddings. And that’s why it is right that this new “world stage” with one of the iconographic sentences Kurt Tucholsky is open: soldiers are murderers.

And that should also be the program of the new newspaper in accordance with the publisher: »In a present that laughs at Pacific, armaments to be re -clarified and diplomacy as an appeasement, the new warmongers claim to fight with their craft for freedom. The world stage, the new like the old man, holds against it: it fights with freedom against war. «

Strong words, you would like to think until you read the newspaper. One of the authors, co -editors Thomas Fasbender, quickly makes it clear in his text in the booklet that all these slogans are nothing but mucker: The question of the most interesting manifesto in recent history is, he opts for “The Manifesto of Futurism” from 1909, that is, that protofascist text Filippo Tommaso Marinettis, in which it says: » glorify – this only hygiene in the world, militarism, patriotism, the annihilation of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas for which one dies, and the contempt of the women. «

It has become a GDR sheet in that the message between the lines is to be read out.

How does that go together? Not at all. You can’t celebrate Marinetti for your thirst for blood and be a pacifist at the same time. Fasbender is not about any attitude at all, he only wants to differentiate himself from what he calls “Juste Milieu” – left -liberal bourgeoisie, green voters; You know the tropics. He calls his text “not up to the past”, so an article about this new “world stage” should actually be called.

This not only applies to the content, this also applies to style. The whine is jaun. The whole booklet-and these are only 30 A5 pages for a whopping eleven euros-is full of ambiguities, vague hints, and in the approximate ranking sentences. This has nothing to do with the sharpness and clarity for which Tucholsky stood, among other things. The star text of this first edition is paradigmatic for the method that is used here: Deborah Feldman indicates that the editor-in-chief of the “Jewish general”, Philipp Peyman Engel, is perhaps not a Jew. This is a well -known move with her to mate others in the family tree; Of course it is not true. That’s why she just whispers around it; She shouldn’t say it correctly anyway, that is also prohibited for her. But what the hell, a little call murder is also exciting.

Overall, the problem of this entire Elaborate is the lack of sincerity. Both – the whine and also the fusher – should cover a blatant lack of credibility – and only makes it even more recognizable. The newspaper Holger Friedrich, who took over the “Berliner Zeitung” five years ago, financed it-or at least to what it thinks for the East: Kremlin proximity, vigor, a concept of freedom that likes to tip into a self-right-author attitude.

Friedrich bought the trademark rights for the »Weltbühne« in Switzerland, but there are three of them, two of them have Nicholas Jacobsohn in the USA, the grandson of the »Weltbühne« founder Siegfried Jacobsohn, who, however, does not use it, even due to the lack of financially strong partners. Friedrich would be one of this, but has now applied for the deletion of Jacobsohn’s trademark rights, after which no cooperation came about. Jacobsohn has been annoyed in the “Spiegel”. It is complicated.

Michael Fasbender is also part of the journalistic Russia concept, he used to be at RT Germany; Michael Andrick, who considers fact checks to be a threat to free society, may write elongated about the term “freedom”, and his conformism drips from every line.

In this sense, the »Weltbühne« is definitely in a tradition that also attaches it to her: from 1945 it was a loyalty sheet in the GDR and was only finally liquidated in 1993. Nevertheless, the current editors prefer to refer to Tucholsky than to Peter Hacks, who celebrated Wolf Biermann’s expatriation in the “Weltbühne”, as if they could turn the time back. As far as you would like. As if they would not have to deal with the problematic history, but could start directly on any sentence that they liked at Tucholsky.

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And that’s the worst thing about this edition: it stands stupid. She does this in every respect: it is called Pacific, but does not speak of current wars. She calls for debates, but does not say what she means. It has become a GDR sheet in that the message between the lines is to be read out. But that is not the left heritage of Tucholsky or Carl from Ossietzky. Instead, the third editor, Behzad Karim Khani, is not too stupid to write down why he is now making a pacifist issue with someone like fascinating. Because: It is just anarchist.

Yes, then a booklet comes out at the end. A central organ of a German pacifism urgently would need; A certain intellectual sincerity would be a prerequisite for this. There is no such thing here: the defense of pacifism that is so verbally announced in this way does not matter in the tide. The whole magazine is a lie who speaks out that others lie too. Ironically, she does exactly what she does not want to be: a good member of society. The only tragic thing is that someone has already pretended that he was a pacifist, and in the end it wasn’t. In this respect, the whole newspaper is a classic German product.