A Faustian Moment for the German Left

A Faustian Moment for the German Left

When Sahra Wagenknecht graduated from an East German high school in 1988, she could recite Goethe’s play Faust by heart, and it was Thomas Mann’s novel based on the same legend that later convinced her to go into politics. The parliamentary leader of Die Linke (The Left) — the far-left party that, by electoral accident, leads the opposition to Angela Merkel in the Bundestag — seems to have struck a Faustian bargain of her own, riding a populist wave of discontent with mainstream political parties into territory where Europe’s far-left and far-right meet.

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