Faced with almost certain election defeat next year, Germany’s leftist Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has launched an unprecedented and lawless assault on the free press. She banned an inconvenient and socially provocative magazine by decree and sent masked police to carry out heavy-handed early morning raids on journalists’ homes, seizing financial values and carrying off assets, even office furniture. The ban is performative and cynical but the consequences for press freedom and property rights in central Europe are enduring and far-reaching.
Until recently, Compact magazine would reliably appear each month on German newsagent shelves. With its sensationalist headlines and gaudy graphic design, it looked like a high school dropout’s attempt to outdo the National Enquirer in tawdriness. In reality, it was stringently political and took itself extremely seriously.
This was probably unsurprising because the Founder, Juergen Elsasser, was once an arch-ideologue of the German extreme left. In the 1980s, Elsasser contributed to newspapers such as the Communist Association’s Workers’ Struggle (Arbeiterkampf). However, Elsasser reinvented himself in the last two decades. Now, he is seen by many as a thought leader of contemporary German ultra-nationalism. However, Compact’s strain of German nationalism was so virulently anti-Western that, at times, it perfectly mimicked the old slogans and narratives of Soviet propaganda.
Image: Jürgen Elsässer at a “Free Saxons” rally in 2022, by Dirk Bindmann. CC BY-SA 4.0.
This makes Compact sound like a communist publication, but Elsasser aligned it with the fascists (aka “the far right”). Both share hate individual liberty, so they hate America. The difference is that the German fascists want an ethnostate, and the communists want a totalitarian state, with or without ethno-fascism.
In 2015, the magazine produced an infamous “special edition” with the headline “Ami Go Home” Ami translates roughly as Yankee), once the name of a notorious propaganda song by Ernst Busch, a mouthpiece for Soviet-occupied Eastern Germany.
Compact’s special edition predictably insulted federal democratic Germany as a “military colony of the Pentagon.” In 1950, Jürgen Kuczynski, a deputy in the sham parliament of the East German communist occupation regime, had first proposed the idea that democratic West Germany was an American “colony,” so Compact’s smear seamlessly carried on the legacy of red propaganda.
Aside from this anti-American fare, Compact also sold a newly-minted silver “Druzbha medal” to “make a sign for Peace and German-Russian friendship.” This harked back to the infamous Stalinist slogan Druzhba Narodov, translated as “friendship of peoples,” a slogan that the Soviet Russians used to cover up their genocide of Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians, Meskhetians, Kalmyks, and many other peoples.
As Compact’s editor, Elsasser has sought to align the magazine with other anti-Western and undemocratic systems. In 2012, Elsasser traveled to Tehran, meeting personally with hardline Islamist dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He enthusiastically reported back, “Tehran is more modern than Berlin… Beggars, prostitutes, misery, and dirt are all things you will not find here... The country has power and perspective. The sanctions will not bring it to its knees but make it stronger.”
These days, Compact’s supporters on social media varyingly claim that it was a conservative, libertarian, or pro-Trump magazine. These claims hold water only with anglophone audiences who have never actually seen a print copy of the magazine on the newsstands.
Compact’s attention-seeking antics offended many in Germany, although it was neither the most extreme nor most influential publication of the wider German far-right. It was just the loudest.
The German government has not moved to ban much more extremist publications, such as the infamous N.S. Heute (National Socialism Today) magazine, which remains in print but does not seek to attract public attention with sensationalist covers. Thus, banning Compact isn’t about fighting the far-right but is, instead, about performatively making the problem invisible to angry voters instead of solving it. This is a testament to the shallowness of wokery.
Ultimately, the ban isn’t even about Compact at all. To ban Compact, the government used a novel legal mechanism that profoundly undermines the rule of law. It bypasses already-existing German laws regulating hate speech, circumventing even the meager due-process guarantees they offer.
The German Basic Law was written after WWII when it was imperative for Germany to prevent the rise of another fascist movement. It provides wide-ranging mechanisms to repress extremist speech but while restrictive, the laws come with strong due process protections.
While Article 18 authorizes the constitutional court to strip free speech rights from anyone who uses speech to “fight against the free democratic order,” this can occur only after a substantive hearing with legal representation. The German government did not use this mechanism against Compact magazine, even though it could easily have done so. Neither did Germany rely on its ordinary criminal, which has strict provisions against hate speech, incitement, and criminal libel. Those laws, too, give defendants a chance to test the allegations against them in open court before a verdict is reached.
What the German government opted for was an authoritarian quick fix, offering instant results without due process. To ban Compact, it used Germany’s Vereinsgesetz, which are vaguer laws against associations. These laws give the government the broad right to ban by decree any civic associations that are “directed against the constitutional order.” The Vereingesetz also allows the government to seize the assets of any association it bans and to conduct house searches to do so. Historically, the Vereinsgesetz has been used against extremist clubs, associations, and even biker gangs. But in recent years, successive German governments have sought to broaden the law’s scope, deeming it applicable to incorporated for-profit companies.
Technically, the Vereingesetz law, which was not intended to regulate the press, cannot ban a newspaper. However, the government understood that seizing the assets of the company that owns and produces a newspaper has the same effect. Without its copyrighted logo, physical newsroom, digital archive, and web domain, the paper is inoperable and effectively banned.
In early 2005, Germany’s then-interior minister Otto Shilly used the Vereinsgesetz law to suppress the company behind a small Kurdish-German newspaper, Ozgur Politika (Free Politics) by alleging that the publisher was part of the direct structure of the already banned Kurdish far-left PKK terror group.
As with Compact Magazine, police raided the outlet’s newsrooms and seized its equipment and data. Shilly did this two weeks before general elections when the government was desperate to show it was cracking down on extremism.
Shortly after the elections, the Federal Administrative Court overturned the ban, finding no public interest justification. In 2006, a newspaper called Yeni Ozgur Politika (New Free Politics) began publication in Germany and still exists today. Between 2005 and 20024, no government has dared to again use the Vereinsgesetz against a traditional media publisher. That changed with Compact...
Using the Vereinsgesetz law to ban publishers by decree is fundamentally authoritarian. It destroys both speech and property rights. All this is done based on vague, ad-hoc bureaucratic criteria rather than the exacting standards of German criminal or constitutional law.
Sure, the media outlets can later sue and perhaps overturn the ban but, by then, the damage is done. The state has identified confidential journalistic sources, unpublished stories have lost timeliness, and months of forced non-publication mean losing l advertisers, subscribers, and investors. Future whistleblowers will think twice before contacting any journalist, knowing the state can seize their communications at will.
In 2004, after the Ozgur Politika ban, prominent German civil society groups and trade unions still had the courage to speak out in harsh terms against this abuse of law. Today, there is only coy silence or weasel-worded both-sideism.
Compact Magazine made for an easy, unsympathetic target. No one wants to risk being seen as sympathizing with the magazine’s deeply unpleasant ideological causes. This time, lawless authoritarian overreach is going largely unchallenged. This will inspire the government to commit more legal abuses.
The woke German political establishment hates X, Rumble, and Truth Social because these platforms give breathing space to those who question the mainstream. Will they be prohibited next?
One prominent German Green party politician has already discussed a potential ban on X following the Compact case. Any other government claiming for itself the unrestrained power to ban news publishers by decree would rightly face sanctions and international diplomatic pushback. Isn’t it time Germany’s de-facto minister of censorship, Nancy Faeser, faces the same before it is too late?
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