BERLIN’S annual Rosa Luxemburg Conference keeps growing. Upgrading this month to a new, larger venue to accommodate the ever larger number of visitors, and announcing midway through the day that 3,500 people had now passed through the Tempodrom’s doors, it is one of the most important left debating grounds in Germany.

It’s organised by the Morning Star’s German sister paper Junge Welt, and over the years our paper has become an expected presence, with a Morning Star stall, paper sales on the following day’s procession to the graves of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht at the Friedrichsfelde cemetery and media partner status advertised on publicity and the conference screens. 

If those links seemed closer than ever this year — with several conference speakers referring to the Morning Star in their addresses — it’s because we face so many issues in common.

A British left used to defeat might underrate the attention paid to our movement abroad, but from last year’s excitement at the strike wave to this year’s enthusiasm for the enormous peace demos for Gaza, German socialists do look to learn from us as we should from them and as often as not their source is the Morning Star.

Two questions dominated this year’s conference: peace and the rise of the far right. Germany’s peace movement is gaining strength: opposition to Die Linke’s descent into pro-Nato and pro-Establishment assumptions on foreign policy prompted the formation of the breakaway Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (the BSW, of which more in my next piece) — and preparations are under way now for protests at the Munich Security Conference on February 17, under the banner Warmongers Stay Out.

“We know from the Morning Star that we are not alone,” Heinz-Michael Vilsmeier of the Alliance Against the Nato Security Conference, the key protest organiser, told the hall. “There is anti-war organisation in Britain too… the peace movement is not national, but international.”

Speakers demanded that 2024 see a “renaissance of anti-militarism,” with February’s anti-Nato mobilisation in Munich due to be followed by the country’s traditional Easter marches for peace. 

German rearmament —expressed in a sharply rising military budget and a €100 billion “special fund” to rebuild its armed forces — has been accompanied by a rapid shift in the political Establishment’s approach to foreign conflicts since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with the main government and opposition parties approving arms exports and foreign troop deployments long seen as taboo given Germany’s Nazi past. 

At the same time the new militarism actively rehabilitates present-day nazis, a point made by BSW MP Zaklin Nastic. “For me as a migrant from Poland, hearing trade unionists shout ‘Slava Ukraini’ — the motto of the Bandera fascists [of the Nazi collaborator Ukrainian Insurgent Army, rehabilitated by Ukraine’s post-2014 government as anti-Soviet freedom fighters] who killed 100,000 Poles and Jews was appalling,” she said. 

Germany’s socialist left is acutely aware of the continuity of senior military and administrative personnel between the Nazi regime and the Federal Republic (West Germany), which swallowed up East Germany in 1989, and speakers drew attention to the foundation of the Munich Security Conference by ex-Nazi officers and arms industry chiefs: it dates back to 1963, when Adolf Heusinger, chief of the Wehrmacht’s general staff from 1938-44, was Nato secretary-general. 

Knowledge of this legacy is one reason the peace movement is strong: when Wagenknecht joined feminist Alice Schwarzer in publishing a petition for a Ukraine ceasefire and peace talks with Russia it drew hundreds of thousands of signatures and motivated a 50,000-strong rally in Berlin. 

At the same time, it has been almost entirely shut out of “official” politics, with even Die Linke abandoning its previous opposition to arms exports.

A youth panel on how to counter ruling-class propaganda and state repression with a mass movement for peace detailed some of the innovative methods used: the €100 Billion for Youth campaign, which publicises the links between raised military spending and cuts which have begun to bite in education, social services and healthcare, managed to organise an open-air festival in Hamburg and has become a common presence at left and trade union marches, distributing educational material.

Other campaigns are more unfamiliar: Ariane Alba Marquez of the Socialist Democratic Student Association said the impact of neoliberalism in education had turned students into a less progressive body than in the 1960s, but stressed the potential to campaign around maintaining or winning universities to “civil clauses,” a tradition begun in Japan in the 1950s but which later spread to Germany in which academic institutions make a commitment not to participate in research for military purposes. 

Clearly such campaigns have a leverage partly derived from Germany and Japan’s wartime past, but Britain’s imperial legacy is bloody enough that support for such clauses could be winnable here too.

Jan Hagelstein, a youth rep in the IG Metall union speaking in a personal capacity, focused on bringing discussions to union branches on alternative spending programmes and defence diversification, acknowledging that many German workers saw a commitment to spend €100bn on arms as a promise of job security in an increasingly weak economy.

Freya Pillardy of the Socialist German Workers’ Youth (SDAJ), the youth wing of the German Communist Party, outlined the arguments it takes into schools and colleges: that European militarisation is directly tied to the declining economic power of the US-led alliance, and its corresponding need to use force to maintain its global position, and the roots of conflicts like the Ukraine war in Nato expansion to Russia’s borders in defiance of repeated promises. 

She said the slogan “Peace with Russia and China — the Main Enemy is at Home” had proven popular on youth marches and that since the Israeli invasion of Gaza, backed to the hilt by the German government, the SDAJ was campaigning for free expression in schools and holding school meetings on the Palestinian question.

Pillardy said the communist task above all was to join the dots between issues from war abroad, repression of free speech at home and spending cuts to inform resistance to them all.

The BSW’s Nastic made a similar point on turning the anti-war struggle into a socialist one: “Capitalism has war in it like clouds have rain.”

The rise of the far right
 

THE last panel of the conference featured a debate moderated by Junge Welt editor Stefan Huth on the rise of the far right in Germany, with the fascist Alternative for Germany now second in the polls, ahead of all three government coalition parties.

Gerd Wiegel — head of the Democracy, Migration and Anti-Racism department of the German Confederation of Trade Unions (DGB) — warned against Establishment-led campaigns, saying the rise of the far right was directly tied to “the fundamental crisis of the liberal democratic system.”

In Germany trade union members had been shown to be more likely than the average citizen to vote AfD, and that saying ‘they are extremists, voting for them is racist’ had not had any effect.

Wiegel recommended training to take discussion of the AfD to the shop floor, and to focus it on social and economic questions which would show that the AfD had nothing to offer working-class people.

“Many of their policies actually strengthen neoliberalism, and that needs discussing on the shop floor,” he said. Unions were also the largest ethnic minority organisations in the country, and should promote the solidarity of all workers against the employers, he argued.

BSW MP Zaklin Nastic said the AfD had capitalised on the convergence of all Establishment parties behind almost identical social and foreign policies, and argued that the new alliance’s anti-war stance would be crucial in reducing its support.

She defended the decision by her and nine other MPs to quit Die Linke — “if my party tells me to give the government a blank cheque for war, such an abstention is neither left nor anti-capitalist,” she said to applause. “If I get shouted at by colleagues for attending a peace march, that is not my party any more.”

The German Communist Party’s Shabnam Shariatpanahi said the party’s Heating, Bread & Peace campaign took left-wing and anti-racist political discussion into social campaigning around issues hurting working-class communities, and that it had started holding community breakfasts. “Be visible, be on the streets,” she stressed. 

She took issue with some BSW campaigning, saying Wagenknecht had used similar language to the right on immigration and that the focus should be on addressing the causes of the refugee crisis in climate change and imperialist war. 

But Nastic rejected the idea the BSW’s position gave ground to the right, saying the new alliance also focused on the reasons people were made to flee their country but was getting flak for targeting most of its criticism at the government rather than the AfD.

“The AfD is anti-EU, but backs arms spending and Nato membership?” she asked sarcastically. “But to show up the AfD for what they are, we must show up our rulers for what they are too.”