The German left, identity politics and political correctness

What is almost entirely lacking in these latest “battles of mutual excitement” and “moralistic storms of steel,” even in explicitly left-wing interventions in the debates on identiy and identity politics, is a memory of the old debates of the 1980s and 1990s. There is a striking lack of historical or theoretical background in the current political debates concerning identity politics, and hardly anything is truly new here - except the political-historical context of these discussions and that they are taking place on a much wider socio-political terrain and under far greater public scrutiny. The author surveys the recent German debate, illustrating not only the different approaches of various left-wing and right-wing currents of opinion but also that these positions are nowadays mostly a dispute between left-wing and right-wing liberalism. Identity politics is of itself neither inherently nor even primarily left-wing. As a historically specific political current of ideas identity politics is a product mainly of the last quarter of the 20th century, an integral part of neoliberal postmodernism.