On Fri, 25 Jul 2008, Doug Henwood wrote:
> So you Germans/Germanophiles here - what's the political leaning of
> JungleWorld? Their Doris Akrap interviewed me this afternoon for next week's
> paper. She seemed pretty cool to me.
I remember running into it in the 1990s. It was left and intellectual but also commercial and slick. But not prominent. It was hard to pigeonhole.
Here's a quick translation of the page describing it in the German Wikipedia:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_World
Jungle World, published in Berlin and available across Germany, is a weekly political newspaper. It presents itself as a pluralistic debate-paper[1] which is oriented towards the "undogmatic Left."[2]
1. History 2. Political Orientation 3. Weblinks 4. References
1. History
The paper started in 1997 when the majority of the editors of Jungen Welt (including, among others, Jürgen Elsässer, Klaus Behnken, Ralf Schröder, Heike Runge, Bernd Beier, Wolf-Dieter Vogel, Ivo Bozic, Martin Krauß, Beate Willms, Stefan Ripplinger, Jürgen Kiontke) revolted against the firing of Klaus Behnken, the editor in chief, by Dietmar Koschmieder, the chief executive. They occupied the editing rooms. Almost all the editors took part, and Jungle World grew out of the strike paper they produced.
Since then the perspective of the paper has changed a bit. After 9/11, Jungle World published texts that not only opposed but some which also supported the attack on Afghanistan and the Taliban. For this it was strongly condemned by many in the German Left. Time and again since then it's annoyed some part of its readership by stubbornly continuing to question certain left positions. For example, when the 2006 World Cup was held in Germany, editor Deniz Yücel called for calm and wrote about the social significance of waving German flags,[3] and was severely criticized for it by many readers.[4]
2. Political Orientation
Politically, Jungle World is located somewhere between radical left and unorthodox left, although some of the radical left, especially the anti-imperialist fraction, often view it with suspicion and disapproval. The paper calls itself an undogmatic left weekly. Jungle World considers much of the German anti-imperialist left to be unreflective and nationalistic. It also lost a lot of readers with its critique of the Antifa and Autonomen movements. Between 2001 and 2004, their circulation dropped from 17,000 to 12,000. On the other hand, it is also occasionally attacked from the extreme anti-German side of the political spectrum in the magazine Bahamas.[5] Today the circulation is around 15,000.
[BTW, "anti-German" is a term Germans sometimes use to refer to anti-nationalist/anti-fascists. Extremists of this ilk include Antifas, who love to get in rumbles with the far-right.]
The Bundesamt fuer Verfassungschutz [the domestic intelligence agency, roughly the equivalent of the FBI or MI5] for North Rhine-Westfallen and Brandenburg classifies the paper as extreme left and part of the anti-German spectrum.
Footnote and weblinks at: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_World