Hundreds of thousands demonstrated in the 1980s against the stationing of American medium-range missiles in the Federal Republic. They saw themselves as representatives of a purified Germany, united under the motto: “Never again fascism, never again war!” For Wolfgang Pohrt, on the other hand, a “German national awakening movement” manifested itself in the mass protests and sit-ins, whose anti-Americanism came from the murky sources that she thought she had filled up. The social scientist and publicist who died three years ago sensed what he saw embodied in every garden gnome as a “German being” and a Nazi disposition, also and particularly fondly behind the motives of the social movements, which he did not consider further developments,but were perceived as the decay products of the sixty-eight revolt.
The evil-eyed social critic, who did his doctorate on Marx's theory of use value and broke off an academic career, achieved his greatest public impact in the 1980s and early 1990s. His polemical essays and glosses on the radio, in the magazine Konkret and the newspapers taz or Die Zeit, which were sharpened to the point of explosion, were not only aimed at the peace movement. Pohrt also accused the anti-nuclear and environmental initiatives of a nationalist sentiment; he mocked the squatter scene as a “rebellion of the brownies”, castigated left anti-imperialism as anti-Semitic and during the Second Gulf War gave Israel the right to respond to Iraqi poison gas attacks with a nuclear strike. The shitstorms on letters to the editor and in lectures,which Pohrt triggered, confirmed him in his role as the unmasking provocateur of the left-green Justemilieu that took shape in those years.
At times Pohrt found a lot of resonance with the “anti-Germans”, a movement which on the one hand demands unconditional solidarity with Israel and on the other hand, since it is supported by Germans, has self-hatred as a logical prerequisite for existence. But Pohrt also duped their representatives when he denied the aging German society's potential for nationalist aggression at the beginning of the noughties and instead noted the lack of integration of migrants. The dangers of anti-Semitism and xenophobia, so Pohrt's conspiracy-theoretical punch line, were exaggerated by politics and the media in order to distract attention from Agenda 2010. Towards the end of his career as a social critic, the Marxist proclaimed that there was no alternative to capitalism,who himself makes the criticism of his system a function of this system.
Vicious and brilliant
Pohrt's wandering oeuvre still has charisma. This was made clear by an event entitled “The End of Ideology Criticism? Explorations following Wolfgang Pohrt ”took place at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. The explorers were Klaus Bittermann, editor of Pohrt's works, Dietmar Dath, editor of this newspaper, and Jan Philipp Reemtsma, managing director of the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture. On their behalf, Pohrt carried out studies on “mass consciousness” in Germany in the 1990s, which were based on Adorno's theory of the authoritarian personality. Pohrt himself admitted the methodological shortcomings of his surveys, which did not prevent him from condensing the results into dark genre images of the German mentality.When it comes to researching political attitudes in the population, there is no shortage of studies that provide ideological criticism in empirical guise, even today. But even the Hartkern variant of the ideological criticism in the style of early Pohrt is not yet a thing of the past, as one could observe in Hamburg: Many participants in the well-attended event were not yet born at Pohrt's heyday. The Frankfurt School is a link between Pohrt and young intellectuals.Many of the participants in the well-attended event were not yet born at Pohrt's heyday. The Frankfurt School is a link between Pohrt and young intellectuals.Many of the participants in the well-attended event were not yet born at Pohrt's heyday. The Frankfurt School is a link between Pohrt and young intellectuals.
Jan Philipp Reemtsma described Pohrt as the modern embodiment of the ancient Cynic who wants to be right against everyone else and therefore has to offend those who applaud him. The constant gesture of radical criticism, negation as an attitude to life and provocation as a business model occasionally allowed Pohrt to slide into pure malevolence. He expressed understanding that tourists had complained about the presence of disabled guests in the dining room of a hotel for “aesthetic” reasons, and interpreted the outrage as a typical German preference for ugliness. Behind the attempt by the then Minister for Women, Angela Merkel, to prevent the commercial pairing of Thai women with German men, he suspected fear of “racial disgrace” and the envy of German women.The operating temperature of constant anger can explain the misanthropy of such statements, but not excuse it.
Pohrt's work can be read as a vivisection and at the same time a symptom of the decline of a left in which the reasoning has taken the place of the working class.
His reading offers flashes of knowledge and the experience of an often polished, sometimes brutal style - no less, but no more either.
"Seriously, monomaniacs cannot help, however brilliant they are," wrote Golo Mann, referring to Karl Kraus.
It also applies to Wolfgang Pohrt.