Nathan, Turned Upside Down

I. Three Hours in the Chair

In July 2026 Ulf Poschardt spent three hours in Ben Berndt’s podcast “ungeskriptet” (Unscripted). The conversation was released in August. Poschardt was editor-in-chief of the German daily “Die Welt” from 2016 to 2024 and then its publisher for a year and a half. Since July 2026 he has held no post there. He is writing a trilogy about the German middle class: “Shitbürgertum” appeared in 2025, “Bückbürgertum” (the bowing bourgeoisie) in 2026, and “Fightbürgertum” is announced.

The conversation revolves around this third volume: Islamism, antisemitism, the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Covid, tolerance and, as the extreme possibility, civil war. A few weeks earlier Björn Höcke, the far-right AfD politician, had sat in the same chair. The host therefore asks what actually distinguishes Poschardt from Höcke. It is the best question of the evening.

II. Where He Is Right

A fair critique begins with what is true. Poschardt tells of Jewish friends who no longer ask whether they will leave Germany, only when and where to. That is no exaggeration. In a survey by the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, more than half of the Jews questioned in Germany said as early as 2023 that they had considered emigrating in the past five years.

He is also right that there is a vicious antisemitism in Islamist milieus and that girls are pressured into headscarves and marriages. He explicitly distinguishes: Islamists are a minority, whoever wears a headscarf voluntarily should be allowed to, and he wants to attack only the structures that exert pressure. And he concedes that Christianity, too, has caused bloodbaths. That is more than one hears from many culture warriors.

Even his anger at Greta Thunberg has a kernel. At a protest against the arms maker Rheinmetall in Berlin in July 2026 she wore a T-shirt reading “Yalla Intifada”. That can be sharply criticised.

III. Resentment with Arguments

But how does he criticise? For him Thunberg is a “joke figure” who was “canonised” and “went mad afterwards”. A few minutes later he explains the difference between himself and Höcke: Höcke has resentment, he has arguments.

That is not a distinction but a self-certification. Whoever calls a young woman a joke figure and denies her sanity is not arguing. He is doing exactly what he accuses Höcke of. The T-shirt would have been an argument. The insult destroys it.

IV. The Certainty of the Freedom Fighter

He accuses Thunberg of taking the field with “certainty of salvation”. Then he turns to Covid. It would have been better to protect only the vulnerable and leave everyone else alone. That can be seriously debated. But Poschardt does not debate, he judges: the argument “we don’t want anyone to die” was “mendacious”, used so that “as many people as possible lose their freedom”.

He thereby imputes to those responsible that they wanted the loss of freedom. That is no longer analysis; it is the same certainty he mocks in Thunberg, only with the opposite sign. Whoever knows he is right no longer needs to examine the intentions of others. He already knows them.

V. Nathan, Turned Upside Down

Poschardt himself calls the strongest witness: “Nathan the Wise”. Whoever knows his tradition, he says, should reflect on his religious tolerance. What he means is: our tradition produced tolerance, so we must defend it, if need be militantly.

Lessing says the opposite. In the ring parable a father leaves three identical rings to three sons, and none can prove that he owns the genuine one. The judge advises each to show the genuineness of his ring through his conduct. That is no instruction to place one’s own tradition above the others. It is the sharpest rejection of every claim to absolute truth in German literature.

And Lessing wrote “Nathan” not as a spokesman for his tradition but against its guardians. After his dispute with the Hamburg chief pastor Goeze, the Duke of Brunswick forbade him in 1778 to write about religion without approval. So he wrote a play. Whoever invokes Lessing invokes a man whom his Christian authorities wanted to silence.

VI. The Tradition One Tells Oneself

For Poschardt the Enlightenment is a product of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and the separation of church and state is its very essence. Historically it was the other way round. Both were won against the churches.

As late as 1864 Pope Pius IX, in the “Syllabus of Errors”, expressly condemned as an error the proposition that the Church ought to be separated from the State. He likewise condemned the proposition that immigrants should be allowed the public exercise of their own worship. The Catholic Church recognised religious freedom only on 7 December 1965, at the Second Vatican Council. In between lie centuries in which it persecuted dissenters, as we described in the case of Giordano Bruno.

One may invoke the Enlightenment. But one cannot credit it to the institution that fought it the longest. Whoever does so is defending not a tradition but a legend.

VII. Who Is “We”?

Poschardt often says “we”. “We still allow them” to demonstrate “on our streets”. One must say: “This is where it ends, here our realm of freedom ends.” The host asks: who is “we”? The answer wavers. First it is the whole of civil society, of every religion and skin colour. Then it is those who come from the Judaeo-Christian tradition and therefore bear responsibility. The host points out that the German constitution says nothing about this tradition but guarantees religious freedom.

Here lies the real contradiction. On Covid Poschardt is a freedom maximalist. On demonstrations he wants to say “enough”. Militant democracy has its tools: bans on associations, the criminal offence of incitement to hatred, conditions imposed on assemblies. They apply to everyone and are applied by courts. A felt “we” that decides who may walk on “our” streets is not among them.

VIII. Civil War as a Pose

Poschardt does not expect civil war, he says. Yet he mentions it several times, refers to the film “Civil War” and to the dark Batman films, and asks what one is prepared to “go into a confrontation” for. The next book is called “Fightbürgertum”.

Whoever reaches so many people is not playing a thought game. He is stoking a mood in which each side arms itself rhetorically because the other does. Engineers call this positive feedback: a signal amplifies itself until the system oscillates. Cooling requires the opposite, negative feedback, that is, people who do not join the shouting.

Add to this imprecision where precision matters most. In Iran, Poschardt says, 17-year-olds are executed for making a TikTok dance video. We have found no such case. What is documented is that a young couple was sentenced in 2023 to more than ten years in prison for dancing in front of the Azadi Tower, and that dozens of protesters have been executed, some of them very young. The truth is bad enough. Whoever exaggerates it weakens precisely the strongest indictment.

IX. You Know More About That Than I Do

Poschardt fights against claims to absolute truth and has one himself. For him tolerance is something that “we” grant because “we” have the right tradition. Lessing’s tolerance is something else. It begins with the admission that nobody can prove the genuine ring, not even oneself.

In our Rhenish philosophy this means: nobody has the whole truth, but everyone has a place at the table. Including the Muslim woman in a headscarf, as long as she does not dispute anyone else’s place. Including Ulf Poschardt.

And when he then starts talking about civil war, the Rhinelander says: “Da wissen Sie mehr als ich!” – you know more about that than I do. And orders another Kölsch.