The German radical left party Die Linke (“The Left”) was founded in 2007, bringing together the Party for Democratic Socialism (the successor organisation to the former governing party in East Germany) and The Electoral Alternative—Work and Social Justice (Wahlalternative Arbeit… Continue Reading
A review of Oliver Nachtwey, Germany’s Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe (Verso, 2018), £16.99 Oliver Nachtwey’s book sets out to examine the truth of the central ideological myths of the German economy. First, that Germany is… Continue Reading
We live in troubling times. Across Europe, the far right is advancing and growing in confidence. In France, the Front National candidate Marine Le Pen entered the run-off for the French presidency in 2017 for only the second time in… Continue Reading
Paragraph 219a criminalises doctors who wish to provide information about abortion. Its history goes back a long way and points to the scandal that even today there is no right to abortion in Germany.1 The Kristina Hänel “case” has pushed… Continue Reading
Antonio Gramsci famously wrote in 1930: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.1 He was writing about an era… Continue Reading
John Rose and Sebastian Zehetmair1 are quite right to welcome the publication of David Fernbach’s collection of Paul Levi’s writings.2 There is still much to be learnt from the early years of the Communist International. For far too long the… Continue Reading
Eighty years ago, on 30 January 1933, President of Germany Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler to the position of Chancellor of the Reich.1 In the years preceding Hitler’s appointment the Nazis and their paramilitary units, the SA and SS,… Continue Reading
A review of David Fernbach (ed), In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings by Paul Levi (Brill, 2011), €99 Introduction by John Rose David Fernbach’s selection of the writings of Paul Levi allows us not only to reassess the… Continue Reading
Just one month after Angela Merkel’s new conservative-liberal government took office in Germany it faces its first difficulties. Franz Josef Jung of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) resigned from the government amid allegations of a cover-up relating to the Kunduz… Continue Reading
Readers of this journal are unlikely to be participating in the twentieth anniversary celebrations of the “transition to capitalism” in Central and Eastern Europe and it’s easy to see why.1 The expansion of Nato shows that its supposedly defensive purpose—to… Continue Reading