The anti-German self-understanding, therefore, has taken a direction that sees itself more critical of ideology [ideologiekritisch] than critical of capitalism. However, Robert Kurz (2003) is quite right when he tries to define the ideological basis of the anti-German movement. While the national essentialism of the Israel solidarity politics could be dismissed as strategic, Kurz points us to the theoretical alignment of anti-German thought to the very analysis that it tries to overcome. Kurz, one of sharpest critics of what he terms “the anti-German ideology”, has argued that its argumentation remains an inadequate response to what he calls “labor movement Marxism” [Arbeiterbewegungsmarxismus]. Kurz depicts class struggle as system-immanent, and instead focuses on an analysis of the fetish form of capital and its crisis. While the anti-Germans share this rejection of labor as revolutionary subject (based on their reading of Frankfurt School theory), Kurz argues, they counter-posit not capitalist crisis but an ontological understanding of reason and civilization. In the place of revolution, anti-German “communism” succumbs to a mere defense of “bourgeois civilization” (Kurz 2003, 63). Kurz is also critical of the traditional Left and its inability, as he says, to understand the relationship between National Socialism and capitalism. The anti-German movement exploits this lack of clarity, as much as it exploits Auschwitz to defend the “bourgeois subject” and to decouple the Holocaust from the historical development of modernity. For Kurz, the origins of anti-German ideology are found in “bourgeois discourses” (Kurz 2003, 11). In particular, he maintains, the dichotomous logic of “barbarism” vs. “Enlightenment” that characterizes much anti-German criticism is structurally not dissimilar from the anti-imperialism that it tries to distance itself from. Instead anti-Germanism perpetuates the binary conception of anti-modernity vs. modernity and projects it back onto the level of states and nations (e.g. Palestine vs. Israel, Europe vs. America).
