The Revenge of the Uncool

The once national-conservative Springer Verlag has become a player in the international New Right. Ulf Poschardt’s pamphlet against the »Shitbürgertum« is exemplary of the cultural struggle against the long-time left-liberal dominated education and culture elite. At the same time, precisely those principles on which Springer once based its self-understanding are eroding: liberal democracy, social market economy, transatlantic ties, and a special responsibility towards Israel and the Jews, whose temporary low point is the honoring of the despiser of democracy Peter Thiel. Springer’s late revenge against 68 is thus much more than just a cultural struggle: it marks the transition of part of the bourgeois establishment from defending liberal democracy to dismantling it.

In 1967/68, Springer was not just an opponent of the student movement; it was its founding enemy. »Enteignet Springer«, the blockades of Bild deliveries after the attempt on Rudi Dutschke's life, the justified accusation that the paper had contributed to the climate of violence: the publisher became the epitome of the backward-looking. Cultural hegemony migrated to the left in pop culture, art, the university and the feuilleton, and remained there for half a century. Springer remained powerful but uncool. In the high-rise building on today’s Rudi-Dutschke-Straße, this humiliation has never been forgotten.

With the rise of MAGA and a worldwide right-wing populist movement, today offers the opportunity for revenge. Of course, the new right is also about a rollback of social liberalizations since the 1960s, while at the same time pursuing economic »Anything Goes«. But the moment of revenge is unmistakable: it is directed against the cultural elites, their language, their morality, and their way of life. Poschardt’s »Shitbürgertum« exemplifies this. The term refers to the green-academic milieu that, in this reading, determines the codes of respectability. What is attacked is less a politics than a social class and its cultural self-assurance. Textbook revanchism.

Ulf Poschardt is an insightful figure in this regard. He began as a knowledgeable author with well-researched books on DJ Culture and Coolness. Today, he relies on loud provocation, declares that distancing oneself from right-wing incitement is a power strategy of the Left, and declares himself a punk. One could read this as a break; what is more interesting is the continuity. For Poschardt, Coolness was always more of a technique of distinction than that »cool knowledge« which, for Spex, was rooted in progressive politics. It is directed against the mainstream, the square, the conformist. If the square is left-green in one’s own worldview, the same gesture points to the right. The logic of the demarcation remains; only the opponent changes. The Coolness once coded as politically progressive is thereby reduced to arbitrariness, in which the rocker costume itself becomes the only argument.

At the beginning of the millennium, Springer had still nestled up to the changed cultural landscape. Under Döpfner and Kai Diekmann, the house was poppy and lifestyle-oriented, from »We Are Pope« to the music and youth formats in its portfolio. But that was more of a latency phase. By 2010 at the latest, the other direction was evident: Bild was stirring up sentiment against the »bankrupt Greeks«, and Springer amplified Thilo Sarrazin's racist theses with all its publishing might.

There is, however, a crucial difference from 1968. Axel Springer was nationally conservative, Christian and paternalistic, but not neoliberal. Bild spoke to the »little man,« not the libertarian entrepreneur type. Market-radical ideas had long existed, in the Mont-Pèlerin Society as well as in Ordoliberalism, but they were embedded in the West German post-war consensus. They only became dominant gradually, starting with Thatcher and Reagan.

With the awarding of the Axel Springer Award to Peter Thiel on September 24, 2026, Springer has finally abandoned the democratic post-war consensus. In 2009, Thiel wrote that he no longer believed in the compatibility of freedom and democracy. From this, he developed, accompanied by crackpot ramblings about the Antichrist, a libertarian vision whose goal is to escape the constraints of democratic politics, from Seasteading to private, autonomous communities led by CEO-kings, as propagated by the reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, whom Thiel supports. It should be noted that the idea of the Antichrist is one of the oldest anti-Jewish-charged motifs in Christianity. At the same time, Thiel is a co-founder of Palantir, the company whose importance for the »resilience of democracies« Springer promotes in the award justification. In short: A publisher that invokes the defense of Western democracy honors a man whose political vision aims to eliminate it.

Conservative transatlantism once meant allegiance to the West, to liberal democracy, the social market economy, and anti-communism. Today, it has degenerated into allegiance to the Trump camp.

The same applies to a second pillar of the house. After the Shoah, Axel Springer wrote the reconciliation with the Jews into his publishing principles. This was also a counterpoint to a right-wing press of Hugenberg's kind, which in the Weimar Republic had prepared the ground for Nazi incitement, and it is one of the great achievements of the house.

Today, the former firewall against the far right has degenerated into a caricature. It is not intended to protect against the AfD with its long list of anti-Semitic offenses, but to defend the Israeli government, in which right-wing extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich hold key positions. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant against their leader Benjamin Netanyahu, on charges of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including intentional attacks on the civilian population as a method of warfare. The distinction between Israel’s right to exist and the war crimes alleged against its government, on which any serious solidarity rests, is thereby obscured – while Muslim people are placed under general suspicion.

Anyone who defends democratic values must equally name and combat anti-Semitism, Islamism, and all forms of political violence. But not at the expense of turning contempt into a discursive strategy. Springer is willingly paying this price: Outrage, polarization, and the humiliation of the opponent work better on digital platforms than any nuanced argument. Here, Springer’s creator strategy comes into play: Declining circulation is replaced by personalities like Poschardt, who mobilize their radicalized following across all digital channels. The house’s actual product is, once again, the dehumanization of the political opponent – as can be observed currently after the Left’s victory in Berlin.

But that’s not the end of the story. Orbán has been voted out, Trump’s seat is shaky, in the UK there are majorities for returning to the EU. And Friedrich Merz, thanks to his antisocial policies and rhetoric, is more unpopular than any chancellor before him. There are first signs of the collapse of the neo-right project. Even Springer will turn away from its new friends once the wind starts to change. The only open question is how deep the neo-right – yes: shit-bourgeoisie – will drag us into the shit this time before it recognizes its reactionary revolt for what it is: a moral and intellectual declaration of bankruptcy. Time is on our side.