konkret goes Digital

konkret is an independent monthly left wing magazine that in its various incarnations has been one of the most important magazines on the (radical) Left in the Federal Republic. Since 1974 it has appeared in a monthly print edition. In this whole period it was available from larger newsagents nationwide as well as by subscription. After the death of its editor Hermann L. Gremliza in 2019, his daughter Friederike Gremliza took over the publication. After sinking sales and rising paper, printing and shipping prices over the last years, they took the decision to stop the print edition. In December 2025 the last print edition came out. They are now publishing a monthly digital edition in pdf format, available from their website.

Pre-History from the 50s

The history of konkret starts in 1955, when Klaus Hübotter and Klaus Rainer Röhl founded the paper Studentenkurier in Hamburg. Hübotter was a member of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) and a functionary of its youth organisation FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend, Free German Youth). He got into legal trouble after the FDJ was banned in West Germany in 1951.

Hübotter used his good contacts to East Germany and obtained financial backing from the East German state via the main FDJ organisation. In 1957, by which time Röhl had become the official publisher, the Studentenkurier was renamed konkret.

konkret became a success story of left wing publishing in the Federal Republic. It attracted many well known writers. A modern layout and critical tone made it attractive to its young academic audience. The money flow from the GDR was successfully obscured even to some of the closest collaborators.

Gradually the critical tone was also annoying the East German paymasters who wanted to exert more influence. But Röhl and his wife Ulrike Meinhof, who by now was editor in chief, didn’t want to give up their editorial independence. The money dried up and new strategies had to be found to finance the operation.

Sex Sells

Since then the covers often featured the word “SEX” and later on – from 1969-1973 – the magazine even featured pin up girls and “confessions” next to political articles. It worked. The print run rose to around 200’000, at one point the publication frequency was increased from monthly to bi-weekly, for a while even weekly.

But this “sex sells” strategy was also controversial. Ulrike Meinhof, star columnist of konkret for many years, left the paper – and her husband – and became one of the most vocal critics. She and her new comrades smashed up the villa she and Röhl had inhabited. Her path lead her from writing and publishing to the formation of the urban guerilla group Red Army Faction.

In 1973, Meinhof was already in prison by then, an internal coup deposed of Röhl and tried to steer the paper back into a more purely political direction. But the realignment and re-design wasn’t successful and the old konkret went out of business.

Röhl started his own new publishing project which continued the sex & politics line of the early 1970s konkret under the name das da and dasda/avanti. He managed to take several of the old konkret authors with him and for a while it looked like West Germany would have two independent left wing monthlies, after the successful relaunch of konkret without him.

However Röhl and his das da empire eventually went bankrupt. He gradually moved to the political right, bitterly denouncing his communist past and blaming interference from the East German secret state in the undoing of his publishing project.

Launch of the Gremliza konkret in 1974

Re-enter Klaus Hübotter who had become a successful architect and real estate developer in the 1960s. He intervened by purchasing the title rights and intellectual property from the insolvency estate. This allowed the magazine to be relaunched with the same name, effectively insulating the new publication from the debts of its predecessor in 1974.

Thus the new konkret was born. Hermann L. Gremliza, a former journalist at Der Spiegel who had joined the old konkret in spring 1972, became the editor from the new beginning in 1974, a position he held until his death in 2019. While it became less of a mass market magazine, he managed to steer it through the troubled developments of the German left in the 70s and 80s, managing to bridge the gaps between orthodox Marxists, the left wing of Social Democracy and various products of the New Left.

So it was Gremliza’s new konkret that became one of the few leading media voices of the independent left in the 1980s and beyond.

German Unification

Despite being a self-described communist, it took Gremliza until 1989 to give up his membership in the (centre left) SPD, reportedly when, after the wall came down, the Social democratic members of parliament sang the German national anthem alongside the MPs all the other parties.

While konkret was still pandering to the mainstream anti-Reagan, somewhat anti-American “mainstream left wing” sentiments in the 80s, the focus started changing with the reunification and the first Gulf War.

The seismic shifts caused by the demise of the Eastern Bloc propelled the fear of a Fourth Reich to the fore for many on the radical left. The danger of a new German imperialism that would make yet another attempt at world domination seemed real in the face of awakening nationalism in the mainstream and a wave of neo-Nazi violence.

A faction in the Communist League (Kommunistischer Bund, KB) was soon defining itself as “anti-deutsch” (anti-German). An initiative called “Radikale Linke” (Radical Left) tried to unite different forces in this direction. Besides Arbeiterkampf (the paper of the KB) and later Bahamas, konkret became an important mouthpiece of this “Nie Wieder Deutschland!” movement.

Wolfgang Pohrt, the left wing publicist who had already in the early 80s denounced anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in the so called peace movement – so to speak – dropped the atom bomb in konkret in March 1991 in the context of the Gulf War, when he suggested that if attacked by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with poison gas, Israel should retaliate with nuclear weapons.

This didn’t go down too well with the more traditional anti-imperialist clientele and konkret lost thousands of subscribers. Nevertheless, and despite being a feared polemicist himself, Gremliza managed to continuously bridge gaps in the radical left – or at least keep konkret so relevant that everybody had to read it.

The 1993 Kongress – Looking for a position for the 90s

konkret regularly came under fire from various sections of the left, whether “anti-deutsch” or anti-imperialist. But the early 90s were a different time than today and konkret organised an important congress in 1993 in which very different factions of the radical left shared the same stage: Hermann L. Gremliza himself, Wolfgang Pohrt, but also Karl Held (from GegenStandpunkt), Georg Fülberth (DKP), Robert Kurz (Krisis), Karl Heinz Roth (a historian with an autonomist background), Joachim Bruhn (ISF) and many others – all of who were contributors to the magazine. Sarah Wagenknecht (now head of a left nationalist group named after herself) and Jürgen Elsässer (who later migrated to the radical right and became the editor of Compact) also make an appearance.

It has been said that this wide spectrum of the German Left never reappeared under one umbrella since then. This might be the case on some level, but the conference also showcased that the differences were deeper than the will for unity.

In the meantime konkret was trying to find its own position in the changed global context, which was closely linked to Gremliza’s ideas and opinions. While the editorial line of konkret was critical of the wars on the Balkans in the 1990s, and of the German involvements in them in particular, its position regarding the 2003 Iraq war was more ambivalent. In the context of the first Gulf War he said:

“In a situation determined by the threat to Israel from German poison gas missiles and the ‘pacifist’ stance of German politics towards their client Saddam, I hoped that the right thing would be done for the wrong reasons, namely that Saddam would be disarmed by the US Army.”

So Gremliza saw Israel as a specific case that should be defended. At the same time George W. Bush was portrayed as a “barbarian in civil clothing”. In other words: konkret tried to be “anti-deutsch” and “anti-imperialist” at the same time.

Into the 21^st century

Authors from various factions of the German radical left came and went. Former authors often turned into vocal critics of the direction the magazine was taking. But at least as long as Gremliza was alive, he was able to steer the paper on a course where it never completely lost its relevance and several times regained its position as an important place for discussions and direction.

Gremliza also added his “handwriting” to every single issue for decades by writing an editorial at the start of every issue and providing a collection of press clippings with ideology-critical notes and comments on the last page. This framework guaranteed a continuity, regardless of the meanderings of the wider German left.

By this time the magazine still sold close to 40’000 copies on average every month. However this number was dwindling under the new editorship to about half by late 2023.

It would be unfair to point to the change in editorship as the sole reason. Obviously other factors play a role too: Print media is getting less important in the way we consume news and analysis. Political trends also play a role in an increasingly splintered left. konkret’s aspiration to be an outlet for the broad left at the same time as being a polemical voice within it has become more difficult to maintain.

So economic and political issues contributed to a worsening crisis of the magazine. In 2022 konkret lost a fairly large number of important contributors after the blunder of publishing a cover story “Nato aggression against Russia” which went to print before, but on sale after the Russian aggression against Ukraine started.

Other left wing publications going (more) digital

Germany had until recently several left wing daily papers appearing in print: Die Tageszeitung (taz), Neues Deutschland (nd) and Junge Welt. These three have quite distinct histories (which I won’t go into in detail here). The taz comes out of the undogmatic left of the 1970s and appeared as a daily newspaper since 1979. Over the last years a slow transformation was initiated which included the launch of a new weekly printed edition (wochentaz) and a daily digital edition on the web and a dedicated app. The last printed edition of the daily came out in October 2025.

Neues Deutschland was the former official daily newspaper of the East German ruling Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei, SED) and became an independent left wing daily after the collapse of the GDR. Recently renamed nd, the paper more or less followed the course of the taz – and is now publishing a weekly print edition and a daily digital one.

This ironically leaves only the smallest of the three, the orthodox communist/anti-imperialist (and former organ of the Stalinist youth organisation of the GDR, the FDJ) Junge Welt as the only “left wing” paper that still appears in print every day.

Perspectives for a digital konkret

It is perhaps unavoidable that daily print editions become obsolete and get replaced with a more voluminous weekly one, while the flow of information continues online in real time. The decision of the monthly konkret to go digital seems a dangerous one however, especially as it was not prepared with a broader digital strategy in mind. konkret barely has any relevant social media channels, half-assed attempts to launch a YouTube channel and a podcast went nowhere years ago.

Sadly this is in stark contrast to the model developed by former konkret author Jürgen Elsässer’s Compact magazine. Elsässer gradually moved to the far right to become an important media figure and agitator of the spectrum of the right wing/to the right of the AfD. Compact has successfully built up fairly massive social presences on X and especially YouTube with daily videos, all the while still publishing their monthly print edition. Online their brand of “patriotic” agitation, conspiracy narratives, xenophobia and historical revisionism, mixed with anti-EU, anti-Israel, and after a recent u-turn on Trump, anti-American, propaganda, seems to at least lead to clicks – always connected to relentless fundraising efforts.

It seems the political (far) right is (far) ahead of the left in these matters, but even within the left, konkret seems particularly badly prepared for a digital-only future. Digital publishing can’t just mean to replace the printed magazine with a pdf-version, hoping the subscribers will remain faithful. Perhaps the magazine waited too long until the crisis forced this step, but they will have to expand their activities in the digital realm and beyond if they want to stay relevant.

The question is if the will and vision for this is actually there. A sign that it may be is the launch of a new podcast which, the first of which was released on April 16, compiling three half-hour interview-presentations of articles published in the April issue, all concerned with the current Iran war. The first, with author Detlef zum Winkel is very detailed and informative about the development and current state of the Iranian nuclear program and – if you understand German – definitely worth listening to. The second and third part not so much.

Whether konkret will slowly go under or, perhaps even worse, collapse into a monthly, formally “anti-anti-Semitic” junge Welt – or manage to stand its ground and grow from there is unclear at this point.

Christoph Fringeli

• Other articles and reviews by Christoph Fringeli on datacide-magazine.com

Statement of the writers who left after the “NATO vs Russia” disaster:

Why we don’t write for konkret anymore (German):

Warum wir nicht mehr für Konkret schreiben

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