Germany is invoked as a political and historical setting through which the book examines leftist violence and Nazi antisemitism. It is not described as a physical landscape: its significance lies in the ideological and political examples attached to it, which help distinguish direct violence from the structures of belief and social power that shape modern life.

Germany and Political Violence

In discussing the turn toward direct action after the emancipatory sequence of 1968 had exhausted its potential, the book identifies the Red Army Faction in Germany as one example of leftist political terrorism. It presents this terrorism alongside extreme sexual pursuits and a turn toward inner experience, including Eastern mysticism, as three forms of a mid-1970s drive toward immediate contact with the Real. Their shared direction, in the book’s analysis, is withdrawal from concrete sociopolitical engagement.

The Red Army Faction’s wager was that conventional ideology critique could no longer awaken people understood to be immersed in capitalist ideological sleep; direct violence was instead imagined as a shock capable of doing so. Germany thus appears not as the scene of a narrated action but as the national location of an organization within a wider argument about the political limits and risks of a push toward the Real.

Germany and Nazi Antisemitism

Germany also enters the argument through the Nazis’ antisemitism. The book distinguishes factual claims about Jews from the ideological function of antisemitism: even if claims made by Nazis were true, their truth would not explain why the figure of the Jew was necessary to sustain the Nazi ideological position. The relevant question is what that figure did for the ideology, not whether the accusations described Jews accurately.

This distinction makes Germany a reference point for the book’s account of psychoanalytic interpretation. Knowledge becomes significant at the level of truth when it reveals the structure supporting a subject’s ideological position; merely disputing or confirming the surface claims leaves that structure unexamined. The analysis therefore treats antisemitism as pathological not because of the evidentiary status of particular accusations, but because of the ideological need they served.

Place in the Argument About Modernity

These references situate Germany within the book’s broader account of modern social and political life. Its discussion of the mid-1970s places German leftist terrorism beside other responses to the perceived exhaustion of political emancipation, while its discussion of Nazism examines how ideology can organize knowledge around a constructed figure of the enemy. Together, the examples make Germany a historical and political point of reference for arguments about violence, belief, and the limits of direct action.