...and not just the usual Springer suspects, but also "respectable" mainstream rags like Der Spiegel.
Die Linke is having its first programmatic convention (it hasn't had an official program since its founding), appropriately enough, in Erfurt of all places. A nice bit of historical symmetry: the SPD's Erfurter Programm of 1891 was considered a return to "Marxism" for the party after the infamous "Gotha" program against which Marx famously directed his criticism. Kautsky's commentary on the Erfurt Programm would become one of the foundational texts of the Second International; the venerable Charles H. Kerr publishers in Chicago issued it in English under the title "The Class Struggle."
In any case, the German chattering class is outraged -- outraged! -- that this socialist party dares to be: a socialist party! Legalization of all drugs! Opposition to all foreign interventions by the Bundeswehr!
The funny thing is, the bourgeois press has been speculating with glee that the party would rip itself apart between it's right and left wings, particularly on the issue of foreign interventions. Now Der Spiegel is shocked that the party is "cementing its radical oppositional course": http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,793414,00.html
And I will venture a speculation here: OWS has had a salutory effect. The smarter heads in this party know that any future it has is tied to the success of what was exhibited last Saturday when 10,000 people took to the streets of Berlin. The pro-governing right-wing fraction grouped around the "Forum demokratischer Sozialismus" is an influential force in the eastern Länder, but I suspect that "cuddling up to the SPD and Greens" is not an advisable strategy at the time when an international extra-parliamentary opposition has raised the bar for the legitimacy of any self-proclaimed socialist party.