"Weltbühne" | The new "Weltbühne": A German product

Pacifism is having a tough time these days. It would be welcome if there were a publication that could restore it to its status. In this respect, the revival of the "Weltbühne" would certainly be justified, for it was the very newspaper that, during its heyday, had become one of the central organs of German pacifism. And that's why it's also right that this new "Weltbühne" opens with one of Kurt Tucholsky's iconic phrases: "Soldiers are murderers."

And according to the editors, this should also be the program of the new newspaper: "In a present that once again ridicules pacifists, reclassifies armaments as investments, and denigrates diplomacy as appeasement, the new warmongers claim to be fighting for freedom with their craft. The world stage, both new and old, counters: It is fighting against war with freedom."

Strong words, you'd think, until you read the newspaper. One of the authors, co-editor Thomas Fasbender, quickly makes it clear in his essay in the magazine that all these slogans are nothing but empty words: When asked which manifesto he finds most interesting in recent history, he chooses "The Manifesto of Futurism" from 1909, that proto-fascist text by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, in which the central passage states: "We want to glorify war – this only hygiene in the world, militarism, patriotism, the anarchists' act of destruction, the beautiful ideas for which one dies, and the contempt for woman."

It has become a GDR newspaper in the sense that the message is meant to be read between the lines.

How does that fit together? Absolutely not. You can't celebrate Marinetti for his bloodlust and be a pacifist at the same time. Fasbender isn't concerned with any particular stance; he simply wants to distance himself from what he calls the "juste milieu" – the left-liberal bourgeoisie, Green Party voters; you know the tropes. He calls his text "Unequal to the Past," which is really what an article about this new "world stage" should be called.

This applies not only to the content, but above all to the style. The jingle is accompanied by whispering. The entire issue—and it's only 30 A5 pages for a whopping eleven euros—is full of ambiguities, vague hints, sentences that sprawl into vagueness. This has nothing to do with the sharpness and clarity that Tucholsky, among others, stood for. The star text of this first issue is paradigmatic of the method employed here: Deborah Feldman suggests that the editor-in-chief of the "Jüdische Allgemeine," Philipp Peyman Engel, might not even be Jewish. It's a well-known move of hers, plastering other people's family trees around; it's not true, of course. That's why she only whispers about it; she's not allowed to say it outright anyway; she's legally prohibited from doing so. But what the heck, a little character assassination is also exciting.

Overall, the problem with this entire piece of work is its lack of sincerity. Both the whispering and the twanging are intended to cover up a blatant lack of credibility – and only make it all the more apparent. The newspaper was financed by Holger Friedrich, who took over the "Berliner Zeitung" five years ago and transformed it into an Eastern newspaper – or at least into what he considers to be the East: Kremlin-friendly, conspiracy-mongering, a concept of freedom that tends to tip over into a self-righteous, authoritarian attitude.

Friedrich bought the trademark rights for "Weltbühne" in Switzerland, although there are three of them. Nicholas Jacobsohn, the grandson of "Weltbühne" founder Siegfried Jacobsohn, owns two in the USA, but he doesn't use them, partly due to a lack of financially strong partners. Friedrich would be one of them, but has now applied to have Jacobsohn's trademark rights deleted after no cooperation was reached. Jacobsohn expressed his annoyance about this in "Der Spiegel." It's complicated.

Michael Fasbender is also part of the journalistic Russia connection; he used to work for RT Germany; Michael Andrick, who considers fact-checking a threat to free society, is allowed to write at length about the term "freedom," and his conformism oozes from every line.

In this sense, the "Weltbühne" certainly follows a tradition that is also inherent in it: From 1945 onward, it was a party-line newspaper in the GDR and was only finally liquidated in 1993. Nevertheless, the current editors prefer to refer to Tucholsky rather than Peter Hacks, who celebrated Wolf Biermann's expulsion in the "Weltbühne," as if they could turn back the clock. Turn it back as far as they wish. As if they didn't have to revisit the problematic history, but could instead start directly with any sentence they liked in Tucholsky.

And that's the worst thing about this issue: It plays dumb. It does so in every respect: It calls itself pacifist, but doesn't talk about current wars. It calls for debate, but doesn't say what it means. It has become a GDR paper in the sense that the message is meant to be read between the lines. But that's not the left-wing legacy of Tucholsky or Carl von Ossietzky. Instead, the third editor, Behzad Karim Khani , isn't above writing a long-winded explanation of why he's now producing a pacifist magazine with someone like Fasbender, who glorifies war. Because: he's just an anarchist.

Yes, then in the end, this is the kind of magazine that emerges. What is urgently needed is a central organ of German pacifism; this would require a certain intellectual honesty. That isn't present here: the so verbosely proclaimed defense of pacifism plays no role in the paper. The entire magazine is a lie, which claims that others are lying too. Ironically, this makes it exactly what it doesn't want to be: a good member of society. The only tragedy is that yet again, someone pretended to be a pacifist, and in the end, they weren't. In that respect, the entire newspaper is a classic German product.