Pop-Up Populism: The Failure of Left-Wing Nationalism in Germany

In 2016, a dramaturge, a career politician, and a retired sociologist met at the Paris-Moskau Restaurant in Berlin to hatch a plan to distrupt the German left. The dramaturge was the fifty-something Bernd Stegemann, a large man in wire-framed glasses with with slumped mien of an eternal graduate student. He worked a five-minute cab ride away at Berliner Ensemble, a theater company founded by Bertolt Brecht in same year as socialist East Germany.