Following the influx of migrants to the Spanish exclave of Ceuta at the end of July, a controversial debate opened across Germany as in Europe. It for the first time suggested that the ideas and references of the New Right had entered the mainstream media discourse amid discussions on immigration and the future of Europe. This breakthrough – which may ultimately prove more significant for Germany than the recent successes of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, or Berlin – can be understood by reading a recent text by a German New Right intellectual, Götz Kubitschek, a central figure for understanding the cultural battle underway. This former reserve officer, founder of Antaios publishing, has never been elected, and the AfD even refused him membership. He has lived for a quarter of a century in a Saxony-Anhalt manor at Schnellroda. From there, he gave the German radical right what it lacked: a framework, a vocabulary, a genealogy. In this brief and unusually frank piece, he explains how he went about it, borrowing his method from the left of 1968. We translate and comment on it line by line.
A hyperlink and its consequences
On August 11, journalist Harald Martenstein published an article about Ceuta, which had seen, days earlier, the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants from Morocco. Martenstein is one of Germany’s best-known columnists. He wrote for twenty-four years for Die Zeit, a center-left weekly, before launching in 2022 a new column titled “Neben der Spur” in the liberal-conservative daily Die Welt. Under the title “Migration conquering: it will destroy Europe, forever. It’s a pity,” Martenstein commented on the events in the Spanish enclave.
It was not, however, the column’s title that stirred emotion in the days that followed. In his text, Martenstein referred to the book Le Camp des Saints by French author Jean Raspail (1925–2020), which depicts the fictitious arrival of hundreds of thousands of Indians on the shores of the French Mediterranean and the ensuing collapse of European social order. Published in 1973, the work would, decades later, inspire Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015). The first German translation, not authorized by Raspail, was published in 1985. Thirty years later, in 2015 as well, a new translation, this time authorized, was published by the far-right publishing house Antaios. It was set against the backdrop of millions of refugees arriving in Europe and of Angela Merkel’s decision to open the borders.
Martenstein’s reference to Raspail would probably have drawn nothing more than a shrug from his longtime colleagues and Die Zeit readers if not for one detail. Indeed, the author had accompanied his reference to Le Camp des Saints with a hyperlink leading to Antaios’s site. This detail caught the attention of a colleague of Martenstein, Robin Alexander, now one of Germany’s best-known political journalists. Alexander was deputy editor-in-chief at Die Welt before going solo in 2026 with his colleague Dagmar Rosenfeld to launch their podcast Machtwechsel (Change of Power). Alexander’s analyses reach a vast audience; many policymakers listen to them week after week, and his opinion probably wields considerable influence in Berlin.
Alexander’s praise
On August 12, a day after Martenstein’s column appeared, Alexander thus addressed this link in his podcast. He himself wrote a best-seller on Merkel’s refugee welcome policy, Die Getriebenen, published in 2017, and had already read the new translation of Raspail in 2015. He explains how the book had been discovered at the time by the German general public. First by Matthias Matussek, a longtime Spiegel journalist whom Alexander describes as “somewhat left-leaning,” but who, in his view, had since drifted further to the right. Matussek is said to have written in 2015 a laudatory review of the translation of Raspail for Die Welt. But the newspaper reportedly did not want to publish it, and Matussek would eventually end up at Weltwoche, a conservative-right Swiss weekly led since 2006 by the controversial journalist Roger Köppel.
The year 2015 was Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das” (“We’ll manage it”); references marked by cultural pessimism were marginal and appeared in Weltwoche rather than in Die Welt. A decade later, in August 2026, the reference to Raspail’s book suddenly served as a lens through which to interpret the Ceuta events and as the opening move for Martenstein’s column, one of Germany’s most-read. Alexander traced this evolution in his podcast. He sees in the reference to Raspail and the link to Antaios’s site a victory for the founder of that publishing house, Götz Kubitschek, who has clearly shaped the German New Right from Schnellroda in Saxony-Anhalt for a long time. Alexander adds: “Kubitschek would say: that is the real success. It is much more important than my getting 40 or 40.5% in Saxony-Anhalt […]. That is the real victory of these ideas. And on this point, Kubitschek is right.”
Irony of history: by focusing on Martenstein’s reference to Antaios, Alexander gave it a powerful multiplier effect. One of Berlin’s best-known journalists turned his attention to Kubitschek and the New Right’s ideas and methods, even showing them a form of respect and thereby lending them a certain legitimacy.
A networker
On the same day, August 12, Kubitschek reacted to Alexander’s podcast. His text is remarkable in many respects. It provides a good introduction to thinking about the German New Right and its influence on the AfD, even for French readers.
Kubitschek, born in 1970, is a central figure of the New Right in Germany. He began his political career within the Deutsche Gildenschaft, a nationalist German student association with sometimes “völkisch” overtones, of which he was spokesperson for several years. Until 1999, he studied German language and literature, geography, and philosophy as part of a teacher-training program. With historian and journalist Karlheinz Weißmann, another central figure of the New Right, he founded in 2000 in Schnellroda, Saxony-Anhalt, the Institut für Staatspolitik (IfS). In the following years, the IfS became the hub of the New Right network in Germany, thanks to Antaios, the bimonthly Sezession journal, and educational events.
Starting in 2019, the Saxony-Anhalt Regional Office for the Protection of the Constitution (LfV) classified the IfS as a “verifiable far-right movement.” In 2024, this assessment led the IfS leadership to dissolve it voluntarily. The editorial activity of Kubitschek and his close associates continues nonetheless with Antaios and the Sezession journal. Events such as the annual summer festival or the winter academy in Schnellroda remain central to the milieu close to the AfD.
The growing influence of the “Höcke network”
German media attribute to Kubitschek a significant influence on Björn Höcke and on what is called the “Flügel” (the Wing), which from 2015 within the AfD embodied a radical, nationalist, and ethnocentric current. Höcke is the central figure of the Flügel. He is currently the head of the AfD’s parliamentary group in the Thuringian state parliament and president of the party’s regional federation. The Flügel itself was also classified as far-right extremist by the BfV in 2020, before it dissolved.
Höcke’s influence (and likely that of Kubitschek as well) has continued to grow in recent years. After the latest federal party congress, held in Erfurt in July 2026, many AfD observers noted that several Höcke-associated figures had joined the party’s federal leadership, its command center.
From an outsider’s perspective, it is difficult to gauge the extent of Kubitschek’s influence on Höcke and other AfD members and elected officials within the party and the Bundestag’s parliamentary group. It is nonetheless certain that Schnellroda’s New Right circles had a significant influence on the 2015 Erfurt Resolution, generally regarded as the founding document of the Flügel. The authors there described the AfD as a “resistance movement.” Kubitschek and Höcke share the same worldview on key issues, beginning with the “völkisch” conception of the people, which defines Germans not primarily by citizenship but by cultural or ethnic criteria. Both revive the New Right’s critique of liberalism, which they argue became hegemonic after the cultural revolution of 1968. Höcke has previously praised Kubitschek’s contribution, saying he draws from Schnellroda a “spiritual sustenance.”
One last point is decisive for understanding the translation of the text that follows: Kubitschek and Höcke believe in the power of “metapolitics” – a politics that does not measure its power by electoral results and parliamentary mandates, but by its influence on what is socially acceptable, on the spirit of the times. From the New Right’s perspective, the AfD must remain a “party-movement,” in other words a party tightly linked to an intellectual, media, and activist network that feeds the parliamentary group and its elected representatives with concepts and ideas.
Power Change
Last weekend, journalist Harald Martenstein quoted and recommended, in Welt am Sonntag, Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints as a reference for the forcible entry of migrants into Ceuta. Antaios, the publisher of the work, was referenced via a hyperlink. Since then, more than 500 copies of the book have been sold.
These are numbers that could still be reached twenty-five years ago thanks to a well-written review in the FAZ, and all this without any hyperlink. But at that time, it would have been possible only if the publisher had been listed with one of the three major wholesalers (Libri, KNV, Umbreit), i.e., if it had appeared in their catalogs and databases, and thus could be found by all booksellers.
Antaios is no longer listed with any of these three wholesalers; the terminations occurred several years ago, with no explanation. The Camp of the Saints can thus no longer be ordered easily through bookstores – next-day delivery has been completely ruled out since Antaios’s catalog ceased.
The competitive disadvantage in the battle for readers and visibility (not something I complain about, but I note once again here) is a serious matter for a publishing house with metapolitical ambitions. In publishing work, it is not only about making a living, but also about exerting ideological influence.
Our own mail-order service, built up professionally over the years, and the reliability of our distributors do not fully compensate for this disadvantage. This lack of visibility is therefore no small matter for a publishing house, and the hyperlink constitutes a small door opened in a firewall.
The former Welt journalist Robin Alexander noticed this small door. He discusses it with his colleague Dagmar Rosenfeld in the podcast “Machtwechsel,” which they have hosted together since 2021. Alexander gives more importance to Martenstein’s recommendation to read “The Camp of the Saints” than to two percentage points extra won by the AfD in a regional election.
To justify this, Alexander goes far back in time and describes Martenstein’s recommendation as the result of a strategic action that my publishing house had begun very early. He distinguishes three phases:
1. Until the AfD’s creation, Antaios offered etiquette training for village Nazis.
2. With the AfD’s creation, one would have launched a genuine capture and, with force and without scruples, would have torn the AfD from the hands of euro-skeptic professors who had founded it to make it a true project of the New Right.
3. Since then, Antaios would, with unwavering patience, pierce hole after hole in the firewall that exists in the culture pages of the press, leaving things there where there had been none before.
All of this is true. Only the casual description of phase 1 requires a correction: the approach to New Right training did not address village Nazis, but rather the educated fringe of those age groups who, in high school and university, had not encountered a right-wing current of thought and had sought one. Over the last 25 years, a few thousand have been trained, and a few hundred now work in publishing houses, press groups, or within the AfD. Around sixty hold elected mandates.
I am convinced that many publishing houses and many journalists (including those of the caliber of Robin Alexander) would pay dearly to be able, too, to talk for hours about such a renewal as Antaios has managed to carry out. Almost everything was new, unprecedented, unique, and it has become consolidated year after year; this consolidation was both a quest and an expectation.
For what could push the New Right – then a niche – out of its frame had to come from the center, and that is what happened.
Some observers of this milieu still today believe that it was not legitimate to take control of the AfD in 2015. Yet why would that not have been permissible? It worked, because thousands of AfD members quickly realized that Bernd Lucke’s offering was too narrow and that much more would be needed.
To realize this, one did not need to have read Gramsci (hardly anyone had), but rather more recent texts drawn from the recent history of the FRG, from the heyday of the New Left. Three models, three objects of study: when we acted, it was to analyze things with precision and, after reading, to internalize the processes:
There was, on the one hand, the takeover of large scouting associations and youth movements, conservative by nature and attached to the homeland, by groups on the left and socialist. It was natural to be interested in them: we ourselves were part of these movements. The literature on the subject was sparse; interviews with witnesses of the era proved far more enriching – this took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Even more striking was the takeover of the early Greens by “K” groups orbiting around Fischer, Trittin, Ströbele and others.
Green impulses from the CDU/CSU had always been linked to heritage protection, landscape preservation, regional anchoring, and anti-globalization. In the face of these naive activists, the cadres trained in communism had no trouble imposing themselves. The literature on the topic was abundant, and interviews with Rabehl, Maschke, Springmann, and Gruhl proved very fruitful.
Finally, the study of the infiltration of universities and teachers’ associations by pedagogical approaches and principles of the radical left proved crucial. Three lectures by Wolfgang Klafki, a few by Micha Brumlik and his pedagogical assistant Sabine Andresen (now a professor in Frankfurt), as well as Christa Meves’s apparent impotence – all of this was worth a half-meter of shelf space of analyses.
We remained astonished by the naive networking of conservative professors, by their suicidal generosity when it came to helping decidedly left-wing candidates obtain positions.
So what then? Should we, when the moment finally arrived in 2014 and 2015, have watched, with the same conservative and noble scruples, the liberal-conservative movement maintained as it was, which could have been on the right? It mattered little that, in Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt, or Brandenburg, the AfD achieved such success despite or thanks to this clear rightward orientation, to the point of having far outpaced all its national rivals. It is there, it is on the right, it seeks power, and millions of voters want nothing else than a change of power, that is: this very change of power.
No one knows what will ultimately remain of these fundamental ideological principles after a certain time in power. In any case, the initially liberal-conservative orientation would have had only imperceptible effects.
What is already perceptible today is what will ultimately be described, in retrospect, as the maximum achievable: in Germany a vast alternative ideological milieu is forming, previously nonexistent, which within a decade and a half will encompass a party, publishing houses, projects, institutions, media, establishments, university chairs, associations, foundations, federations of entrepreneurs and workers, as well as segments of a rebuilt faith. This milieu will produce architects, artists, teachers, musicians, politicians, ministers, journalists, police officers, mayors; it will be visible and influential.
On this path, we will witness clashes between right-wing fundamentalists and right-wing realists, but all will be on the right. The FRG’s political system will have been completed. Harald Martenstein will have continued to sympathize on many occasions; Robin Alexander will have continued to explain, in dozens of episodes of his podcast, how we got here. Yet he knows well: this is how power changes manifest themselves, or more exactly, probably, power-sharing. Nothing is more normal for this Germany that has sunk into the abnormal.