Confessing mistakes, admitting lies, admitting failure – that is now part of political rhetoric up to the level of the Federal President.

But who was right in the face of history, who was ahead of their time, who saw things coming?

And without being pinned down to classifications of left and right?

Carl Amery, who was born a hundred years ago today, can be measured by this claim, and not just in terms of prioritizing nature conservation.

Christian Geyer Hindemith

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Remembered as a writer and early environmental activist, Amery (an anagram of his surname Mayer) was a founding member of the Green Party in 1980 and a pioneer of ecology as a cross-cutting issue that emerged in the early 1970s against what was said to be the profit filth of capitalism .

This in a kind of cultural counter-offensive that ranged from Hans Magnus Enzensberger (course book 33 on “Ecology and Politics”, 1973) to EF Schumacher (“Small is beautiful”, 1973) or Herbert Gruhl (“A planet is plundered”, 1975). .

Why so irritated, Mr. Enzensberger?

The early friends of the earth meticulously carried out their dispute over methods.

While Enzensberger still suspected the new ecological critique of ideology of being a methodologically unclean, pure superstructure phenomenon of the capitalist mode of production (critique of ideology as ideology, as he scoffed), Amery insisted on the opportunity character of the ecological approach, precisely because of its crossing of the boundaries between man and nature: “My colleague Hans Magnus Enzensberger is one of the most insightful Marxist treaters of the ecological problem;

but that is precisely why the irritated tone he strikes (in his landmark book 33) against the claim of human ecology, political ecology, makes one sit up and take notice,” Amery wrote in 1976 in “Nature as Politics”, a book that turned out to be a classic of the future proved.

Terrible how right Amery was when he said in the same book that there was “not a single minority problem, not a single nationality problem in the Soviet sphere of influence” that “would not have been or would not be solved either by genocide or by ethnocide”.

The originally left-wing prophet attached the expectation to this finding: “The proper humane Marxist would hardly act any differently than his capitalist ancestor did in America, or as his Cossack great-grandfather did in Siberia;

At least not in principle.” When it comes to slaughtering people, it’s only about the differences between “slaughter with or without stunning”;

the slaughterhouses remained standing under the sign of the Soviet.

Amery saw it coming.