Secret meeting in Potsdam

Founder of the magazine Telos and sponsor of the Telos Paul Piccone Institute: Paul Piccone

Since October 7, 2023, when the Hamas massacre was promptly followed by the anti-Zionist mobilization at universities, mutual translations have occasionally appeared on the Substack of the US Telos Paul Piccone Institute (TPPI) and in the Bahamas magazine. There is now a small branch of the institute in Berlin. In order to deepen this newer transatlantic exchange of ideas, the Berlin branch, led by Julius Bielek, together with the German-Israeli Society of Berlin and Brandenburg, organized a conference in Potsdam from July 30th to 31st. Under the title “The Specter of Sovereignty: Populism, Antisemitism, and the New Class,” various people from the USA and Germany came together in the Audimax of the University of Potsdam for lectures and discussions.

Given the long and widely described end of the anti-Germans and their self-historicization that has been evident for some time, the sudden interest from the United States may come as a surprise. Conversely, the (anti)-German engagement with the magazine Telos had until then been limited to a few statements in Robert Zwarg's book on "Critical Theory in America" from 2017.

Paul Piccone's older texts conceptualized a wealth of developments – the crisis of liberalism and democracy, populism, the decline of the left – before they became ubiquitous.

The now quarterly magazine Telos - Critical Theory of the Contemporary was founded in 1968 at the State University in Buffalo, New York. Paul Piccone, who came from Abruzzo and was doing his doctorate there at the time, was responsible and wanted to create an organ for the theoretical self-understanding of the New Left. The controversial editor with a penchant for polemics was strongly influenced by the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Italian Marxism and remained the defining theoretical force behind the magazine until his death in 2004.

Telos has always brought together an extremely plural mix of often heterodox theoretical and political views. In addition to the American regular authors such as Russell Jacoby, Russell Berman and Gary Ulmen, there was great interest in the European theoretical tradition. As early as 1974, for example, texts by Hans-Jürgen Krahl were translated there, and those by Moishe Postone, Helmut Dahmer, Jürgen Habermas as well as Cornelius Castoriadis, Agnes Heller and other authors of the so-called Budapest School of Marxism soon also appeared.

Over the course of the 1980s, New Right theorists also arrived. The discussion began with Carl Schmitt, translated him and contributed significantly to his American reception. In the 1990s, Nouvelle Droite pioneer Alain de Benoist also repeatedly wrote articles. Representatives of the paleoconservative American right such as Paul Gottfried and Samuel Francis made occasional appearances, as did the Greek-German theorist Panajotis Kondylis, who has recently become increasingly popular in this country. Most recently, it was important representatives from the camp of post-liberalism such as Adrian Pabst and John Milbank who shaped the debate in the issue.

The elective affinity between Telos and, in the broadest sense, anti-German publications such as Bahamas and Sans Phrase, which is surprisingly little discussed in this country, was highlighted by Benjamin Marshall in Potsdam at the beginning of the conference. He identified some commonalities: In addition to habitual and stylistic similarities, they share a connection to critical theory, a criticism of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and a declared opposition to the existing left and the "administered world." However, where in this country the average consumer and the working class were viewed as discredited because of their complicity and failure in the face of National Socialism and instead the urban hedonistic individualism of left-wing students was cultivated, at Telos one saw in the particularism of local communities, traditional culture and US populism an "organic negativity" against the totalizing "administered world".

The head of the TPPI's Israel Initiative, Gabriel Noah Brahm, then looked at Israeli sovereignty and the "deep shtetl", a kind of Israeli "deep state" consisting of the media, judiciary and NGOs, which are critical of the judicial reform initiated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with reference to Carl Schmitt and Jacob Taubes.

In keeping with the Prussian backdrop, Michael Kochin then continued with a lecture on the crisis of the university in the USA and its forgotten responsibility for US ideas and the nation. The privileges of academic institutions would therefore have to be linked again to the condition of putting research at the service of the nation. The serious anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism at universities is also due to the fact that the George W. Bush administration failed to bring the mobilization in the wake of the war on terror into the universities.

Verena Buser addressed the debate about the genocide accusation against Israel and the so-called Second Historians' Controversy in Germany and illuminated the anti-Zionist thrust of the ongoing academic attack on Holocaust memory.

Unfortunately, there was no significant exchange about the theory of the New Class - as the educated support layer of virulent anti-Zionism in universities and civil society

Unfortunately, there was no significant exchange about the theory of the New Class - as the educated support layer of virulent anti-Zionism in universities and civil society. Apart from Casablanca editor Ada di Luca's mainly psychological comments on the topic, only Russell Berman spoke theoretically about the New Class in the narrower sense. The former Telos editor-in-chief discussed the strange appeal of Islamism for them. In this way, Islamism could serve the interests of the New Class in many ways: as an object of social state and socio-educational containment, it provides legitimacy for the expansion of the administration and at the same time, in its legalistic form, can be won as a partner in civil society. There and on the academic left, Islam is also a vital metaphysical offering that fits smoothly with anti-imperialism and hatred of Israel.

A highlight on the second day was another lecture by Russell Berman about the largely unknown Catholic poet Konrad Weiß and his work “The Christian Epimetheus” from 1933. In it, Weiß hinted at a negative political theology that was directed against both the naive humanism of the Weimar liberals and National Socialism.

Joseph W. Bendersky and Sabine Beppler-Spahl then again brought the nation into focus in their contributions about Kurt Schumacher's understanding of the nation-state and Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde's speech about "relative homogeneity" as a prerequisite for the free, secular constitutional state. The last panel was dedicated to the international perspective: Among other things, Eric Hendriks, head of the TPPI's China Initiative, reported on the Asian reception of the German anti-Western concept of culture.

A continuation of this German-US exchange would certainly be just as desirable as further reception of Telos and especially Piccone's older texts in this country. It is precisely these who theoretically conceptualized a wealth of today's developments - the crisis of liberalism and democracy, populism, the decline of the left - long before they became ubiquitous. However, despite all the justified criticism of transnationalism and legal containment of national sovereignty, the free-floating enthusiasm for the nation remains strange. People still think with the “Brexit” slogan “Take Back Control” and cling to the nation like leftists cling to the revolutionary subject in order to somehow bring the social conditions that have become independent in crisis under control.

Instead of focusing on the economic conditions of national sovereignty that have become anachronistic, people simply practice nostalgia. It remains to be seen whether some former anti-Germans will at some point join in the unbiased praise for local community, tradition and particularism presented by the US side and ignore emphatic individualism and criticism of the nation.