The New Right scene is complicated, fragmented and riddled with ditches, they always say. The old, value-conservative and, in a broader sense, bourgeois networks shy away from the new alliances with the extremes, who in turn maintain friendly connections with the fighting neo-fascist rank and file. Occasionally, however, it seems that there is great unity among the gentlemen – with the exception of one prominent exception, there is always such a thing. An obituary notice published in the FAZ for the publicist Günter Maschke, who died in February, sheds light on the darkness and provides an amazing insight into the charisma of the New Right, which extends far into the bourgeois spectrum.
Maschke, who recently died at the age of 79, was one of those for whom the military word monster “Querfrontler” was first invented, formerly an active sixty-eight man, admirer of Adorno and Ernst Bloch, then, in the 1970s after a conservative turn under the editor Joachim Fest, author the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Cooperation with the newspaper was discontinued due to content-related conflicts, which were particularly sparked by Maschke’s obituary for Carl Schmitt. After a further intellectual, a reactionary turn, Maschke then wrote for new right papers like that young freedom and was journalistically active on many fronts and a legal-intellectual source of inspiration for many generations.
Mosebach and Jäger stand here next to Kubitschek and Lichtmesz
Maschke’s march through the left to the conservative to the new right institutions and media finds an echo in the signers of his obituary notice, minus the voices that are still left. Götz Kubitschek, publisher of the Antaios publishing house and lord of the new-right cadre school, who gets their intellectual fodder in the magazine secession and found her place of pilgrimage in the Schnellroda estate can be found there, as can his wife Ellen Kositza.
In addition, Alain de Benoist, the chief ideologue of the French new right, or Martin Lichtmesz, 30 years his junior, central figure of the Identitarian movement and permanent editor in Kubitschek’s periodical secession. The Frankfurt writer Martin Mosebach and the long-time FAZ editor Lorenz Jäger apparently have no worries about appearing in uniform with these paragon figures of right-wing extremist thinking.
Conservative media are once again attracting writers from radical left newspapers
Not only Kubitschek, but also Hans-Ulrich Kopp shows how closely these networks of conservative-right fraternization reach into the publishing landscape. The Stuttgart entrepreneur with an important role in the right-wing fraternity milieu founded the Lepanto-Verlag in 2007, a publisher of theological literature belonging to the Catholic Media Association.
The temptation is great to claim the surprising composition of this series of names for a historical moment that has long since passed. There used to be a lot of figures like Maschke, left-wing renegades who crossed over to the right bank in the “old” Federal Republic of Germany. In the new generation, such a change of attitude is unlikely to occur. The résumés of the new right have been hard right from the start. But the generations meet in the current enemy image. As Heinrich Mann Prize winner Danilo Scholz nonchalantly commented, it’s all a question of the occasion: “United in mourning: old and new networks”.