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Collage of Antideutsch stickers
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IN LATE AUGUST, 2019, a blue municipal trash can in Leipzig stopped me in my tracks. Or rather, a sticker on a blue municipal trash can stopped me in my tracks. Looking over my shoulder, I took out my phone, snapped a photo, and peeled it off, only to throw it into the same trash can and walk away. The sticker, emblazoned with words as threatening as they were odd, was a stark reminder of the way people in my adopted home related to the country I grew up in: “The Mossad is going to get you,” it said in German, next to a logo of the Israeli intelligence agency. “Against any and every antisemitism,” it continued. “Am Yisrael Chai!” The last phrase, transliterated Hebrew for “the people of Israel live” — traditionally meaning something like “long live the Jewish people” — is something of a catchphrase for Israeli nationalists.
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Logo of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, accompanied by the text “The Mossad will get you. Against every antisemitism. Am Yisrael Chai!”
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A few months prior, I had moved back to Germany after an intense six years in Tel Aviv, and on my return was added to a small Leipzig group chat of left-leaning Israelis. I sent the photo I had just taken and wrote something like, “folks around here are tripping hard.” My new friends were confused. Who is making threats in Germany in the name of Israeli intelligence? One friend wondered whether the sticker came from German Jews, drawing strength from the “Jewish state” in a hostile environment — or perhaps it came from neo-Nazis trying to scare Germans about scheming Jews.
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While one can hardly know for sure with a sticker, it is safe to assume that the sticker’s origin was altogether different: It almost certainly came from young Germans with no Jewish background and was intended as a threat against Nazis, not propaganda for their cause. It has all the hallmarks of German left sectarian philosemitism — what is colloquially known as antideutsch.
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Antideutsch — “anti-German” — is what a strain of the German radical left titled itself in the 1990s, morphing through the so-called Global War on Terror in the early 2000s into a political formation virtually unheard of outside Central Europe: anti-capitalist revolutionary leftists who champion the state of Israel and cheer on American interventions in the Middle East. In recent years, as fewer and fewer German leftists actively identify as antideutsch (bafflingly, they now prefer “ideologiekritisch” — “ideology-critical” —suggesting they are more inquisitive and less credulous of belief systems than others), opponents of this tendency continue using the term to refer to all those who seem to espouse leftist politics but vocally defend the state of Israel, or even to German supporters of Israel more broadly.
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This is the movement from which the Mossad-inspired sticker I encountered in 2019 likely descends, deploying Israeli symbols not to meaningfully engage with Israel-Palestine but to carry out intra-German political struggles. The threatening, bombastic, yet somewhat whimsical style of the sticker exemplifies the strange aesthetic of the dwindling latter-day antideutsch youth scene, which has continued its rebellion long after Merkel declared Israeli power a foundational interest of the German state.
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Indeed, despite any cognitive dissonance in the age of Staatsräson, this is a lasting feature of in the many stickers that I have encountered over the years, first in Leipzig and then Berlin (the former a traditional antideutsch stronghold). On many of these stickers, figures representing violence and power, real or imagined, often military and usually masculine, always derived from outside Germany (especially from Israel) are used to threaten antisemites (and “antisemites”) and to imagine forceful opposition to the German status quo and the afterlives of National Socialism:
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“Shut your scheiß antisemite mouth, you miserable wretch, or I’ll park a Merkava in your dirty fool face.” The Merkava (literally: chariot) is the Israeli military’s main battle tank.
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