This strain of the German “left” emerged after reunification, convinced that German national character is irredeemably poisoned by the Holocaust and that the sole path to redemption lies in unconditional, uncritical, near-fetishistic support for the state of Israel.

They are the canary in the coal mine of the European left. They represent what happens when historical guilt curdles into reactionary fetishism, when class analysis is abandoned for moral posturing, and when the memory of one genocide is weaponized to justify another.

More than that it is indicative of a deeper pathology at the heart of Germany and its culture of “guilt pride”, where they now express their supremacy over others through how well they can perfomatively self-flagellate, how uniquely introspective over their own history they portray themselves as.

Meanwhile in practice demonstrating that they have learned less than nothing, as they once again support fascism, racialized supremacism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and German tanks and German missiles being used to wage a war in the East and murder Slavs cast as “Untermenschen” (“Orcs”).