Something about the Leftists
Adnan in the Schlüterstraße is famous for its lamb chops (17 euros) and its truffled pasta so it was a bit of a surprise that Gregor Gysi did not turn up at the party for journalist Jan Fleischauer. Perhaps it was to do with the title of his new book, “Unter Linken – Von einem, der aus Versehen konservativ wurde”. Or perhaps he simply wasn’t very hungry. Still the place was full of conservatives – Matthias Döpfner, Minister zu Guttenberg, Wolfgang Bosbach, my God, a whole cruise ship full of Missfelders and Röttgens and Barings – in celebratory mood as if they had just won an election and were dancing on the graves of the Left. And you see their point. For some mysterious reason the Left across Europe (except in tiny Iceland) is in retreat. We have the biggest crisis of capitalism in human memory and what is the hard left doing? Hiding under the bedcovers. This should be their hour. Did not Oskar predict all this in his anti-globalisation books? Lafontaine was never shy before about telling us that he was right, even when he manifestly was not. It was Die Linke who first identified bankers as gangsters (Ganoven), who called for nationalisation and taxes on the rich. And yet there they are in this week’s Stern-Forsa survey at a stubbornly unchanging ten per cent, just a nose ahead of the almost invisible Greens. The SPD meanwhile is surging ahead thanks partly to Steinbrück’s bullying of Ouagadogu and other shanty-towns like Zürich (one thing I have noticed over the years: Germans hate bullies in everyday life but love them in politics. Strauß, for example). Steinbrück has understood something about the Zeitgeist. The electorate wants to castrate bankers but at the same time wants politicians with testosterone, a kind of egg-transplant. And this is the season when voters get what they want. Jawohl!
But what about the Linken? I worry about them. There was obviously a structural defect, an engineering problem as soon as the WASG united with the PDS. As Carl Wechselberg said last week, the point of the merger was to soak up large numbers of unhappy west SPD voters who admired Lafontaine, but it never happened. Instead, the West-Linken are largely crazies and the kind of obsessive bean-counters that so scarred poor Jan Fleischauer’s childhood. The East-Linken meanwhile have turned themselves from Bolsheviks into Mensheviks and from Mensheviks into Gutmenschen; they are the party that actually listens to their constituents and empties their bed-pans. How were these two bits ever going to merge? They are like two rats in a sack. And so as Wechselberg has realised (albeit after a long delay), the only way the Linken can survive is by constant radicalisation to disguise the cracks. Their programme shows that they have given up the idea of national government: a 100 Milliarden Zukunftsfond, another 100 Milliarden every year for education, Klimaschutz and health, the scrapping of NATO.
The fundamental problem, of course, is that the Germans like their left winger to be kuschelig, cuddly. The Left leaders were never as successful nationally as when Oskar preferred Sekt to Sektieren; a fat, loving father who liked to eat well. The same went for party-Gysi, dancing with women who were at least a metre taller than him. It was as if they were saying, yes, let’s have a revolution – but one in which every citizen, however poor, has the right to eat oysters washed down with a good dry white wine. That, I discovered this week in a new biography written by Tristram Hunt, is what Friedrich Engels wanted. “Engels believed in cascading the pleasures of life – food, sex, drink, culture, travel – down to all classes,” rites Hunt. “Socialism was not a never-ending committee meeting, but a life of satiated enjoyment.” Every Sunday, Engels would open up his house in London’s Primrose Hill and throw a party. August Bebel remembers leaving at two in the morning after a night of Pilsner, claret and Maitrank. “If I had an income of 5,000 francs I would do nothing but work and amuse myself with women until I went to pieces,” he wrote to Marx in the 1840s. “If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn’t be worth living.”
Now that is a Leftist political thinker who would get my vote. If Engels had been in charge, Fleischauer would not have had to write his reckoning with the Left. And Gysi could have come along to Adnan and had a lamb chop with a good conscience.
