Matthias Küntzel

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Matthias Küntzel (July 2012)

Matthias Küntzel (* 1955 in Osnabrück ) is a German political scientist , historian and journalist . He is a member of the Association of Historians in Germany , the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, and the German Society for Foreign Policy . Küntzel has been working part-time as a political teacher at a Hamburg trade school since 1992.

Life and positions

From 1984 to 1988 Küntzel was a research associate in the parliamentary group of the Greens, responsible for the areas of nuclear energy and nuclear proliferation . In 1991 he received his doctorate summa cum laude from the University of Hamburg with a thesis on the history of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and the German nuclear option.

Küntzel was a member of the Communist League (KB) and after its split in 1991 belonged to the “ anti-German ” editorial minority, which from then on called itself “Group K” and published the magazine Bahamas . Küntzel was the editors of 1991-1995 Member Bahamas from 1988 to 2001, he also wrote for the magazine concretely . Küntzel became known to a wider public as co-author of the book Goldhagen und die deutsche Linke or: Die Gegenwart des Holocaust . In 1999 he organized the conference "The Goldhagen Debate: Balance Sheet and Perspectives" with Daniel Goldhagen , Andrei S. Markovits and others on behalf of the Heinrich Böll Foundation .

Since 2001, his main areas of work have been the Middle East conflict , anti-Semitism , Islamism and its relationship to National Socialism, dealing with the Nazi past in Germany and the Islamic world, and German-Iranian relations. In 2002 Küntzel published his book “Djihad und Judenhass. On the New Anti-Jewish War ”, published in 2007 in English, 2008 in Hebrew, 2009 in French, 2016 in Greek and 2019 in Italian. The English-language publication was followed by extensive lecturing at American universities, including Stanford University (California), Yale University (Connecticut), Brown University (Rhode Island) and Columbia University (New York). Between 2004 and 2015 Küntzel was a research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2005 he publicized the existence of anti-Semitic writings on the Iran booths at the Frankfurt Book Fair and wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal . In the period that followed, the focus of his essays and lectures shifted to the role of Iran and German-Iranian relations.

From 2006 to 2011 Küntzel was a member of the international board of the scholars' association Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME). In 2007 he was a co-founder and until March 2013 a board member of the German section of this organization. According to its own statements, the SPME organization aims to "counteract anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism through persuasion". In this context, Küntzel calls for tough action against Iran's nuclear policy and criticizes the German government for maintaining its close political, economic and cultural contacts with Iran. Küntzel also analyzes contemporary Islamism . In dealing with Islamist movements such as Hezbollah and Hamas in the Middle East conflict, he calls for support for Israeli politics and sees pacifism as inappropriate.

In 2007, a planned public lecture by Küntzel entitled Hitler's Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East was canceled at short notice by the University of Leeds after Muslim students were outraged about the topic of the announced lecture. The reason for the rejection was officially given security concerns, while Küntzel and the German Institute of the University spoke of censorship and the sale of academic freedom.

In 2008 Küntzel was a speaker at the Global Forum For Combating Antisemitism at the Israeli Foreign Office and, at the invitation of the Center For Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, took part in a two-week summer research workshop on contemporary anti-Semitism. In December, his criticism of the Berlin Center for Research on Antisemitism sparked a controversy about equating hostility towards Jews and hostility towards Muslims.

In 2009 Küntzel published with Wolf Jobst Siedler jr. his book The Germans and Iran. Past and present of a fateful friendship and was the only German expert to take part in the London Conference on Combating Antisemitism organized by the British Foreign Office. In 2010 he was a speaker at the Ottawa Conference on Combating Antisemitism, organized by the Canadian government, and began his commitment to Deutschlandradio Kultur in the Politisches Feuilleton series. In 2011 the American Anti-Defamation League (ADL) awarded him the Paul Ehrlich-Günther K. Schwerin Human Rights Prize.

In 2012, at the invitation of the Henry Jackson Society , he gave a lecture in the British House of Commons on the 70th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference and, at the invitation of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Brussels, on the significance of Auschwitz Memorial Day for the present. In 2012 the Cologne-based Forough Verlag published the Persian edition of Die Deutschen und der Iran , translated by Michael Mobasheri, and in 2014 the English translation of this book appeared. The LIT-Verlag published its collection of essays Germany, Iran and the bomb. A reply - also to Günter Grass .

reception

Supportive reviews

Küntzel, here with Eva-Maria Schulz-Jander , Catholic President of the German Coordination Council of Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation ;
2015 in Hanover during the study conference "For God's sake - Religion in a secular society"

Küntzel publishes frequently in the USA and there u. a. in The Wall Street Journal , The Weekly Standard , The New Republic , Policy Review, and Telos. In Germany, Küntzel publishes primarily in the media Die Welt , Welt am Sonntag , Der Tagesspiegel , Spiegel Online , Internationale Politik , Jungle World and The Axis of the Good . His texts have been received and praised by scholars and authors such as Henryk M. Broder , Jeffrey Herf , Robert S. Wistrich , Walter Laqueur , Bassam Tibi and Pierre-André Taguieff . The book Jihad and Jew-Hatred received positive reviews in The Washington Times, founded by Sun Myung Moon . In The New York Times , Jeffrey Goldberg praised the English edition of the book as “stimulating and alarming.” J. Peter Pham describes it in American Foreign Policy Interest as a “healing reminder,” while Amnon Lord describes the book Jihad and Jew-Hatred in the Jewish Policy Studies Review as "perhaps the most important work written in the aftermath of September 11th." In Germany radio Ralph Gerstenberg Küntzel book called The Germans and Iran. Past and present of a fateful friendship as “worth reading and illuminating”. Its abundance of facts will “not only impress, but also worry any interested reader”, emphasizes the Handelsblatt , while Wolfgang G. Schwanitz praises the book in the Süddeutsche Zeitung as “exciting” and “disturbing”.

Negative reviews

Alexander Flores (University of Bremen) sees reality "grotesquely distorted" in Küntzel's book Jihad and Jew hatred . In the newspaper analyse & kritik, Bernhard Schmid criticizes Küntzel's analysis of Islamism, saying that it consists “above all of reading features of German National Socialism into Islamism. He does not even go to the trouble of analyzing Islamism and its social context ”. René Wildangel counted Küntzel among the authors who assumed “the Arabs had collective sympathy for the Nazis” and would only take a one-sided position due to a lack of knowledge of the Arabic language without regional sources. Katajun Amirpur ruled on Deutschlandradio that Küntzel was demonstrably so wrong in some cases that it was difficult for the reader to believe him where he could be right. Küntzel's reply was followed by a response from Amirpur to NEFAIS (Network of Specialist Journalists Islamic World) and Küntzel's reply. Fahimeh Farsaie in Friday speaks even more clearly of a “distortion of the facts”, the author wants to recognize “the face of the Nazis” in Islamism. The German Islamic scholar Michael Kiefer criticizes a so-called "alarmist tone", "terminological mistakes" as well as allegedly false Nazi comparisons and exaggerations that Küntzel suggests.

Awards

In December 2007 Küntzel won the Grand Prize of the London Book Festival organized by JM Northern Media LLC for his recently published book "Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11". In May 2008, Jihad and Jew-Hatred received the gold medal for best book in the field of religion from the American Independent Publisher Book Award . In February 2011 Küntzel was awarded the "Paul Ehrlich-Günther Schwerin Human Rights Prize" of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). He had "been committed to anti-Semitism for a long time and in a special way and warned his readers in his country of origin, Germany and elsewhere, of the dangers of this centuries-old virus for which there is no known remedy," said Abraham H. Foxman, Director of ADL, on the occasion of the award ceremony.

Publications

  • Atomic bombs - made in Germany? Secret routes to the nuclear weapon state. Kölner Volksblatt, Cologne 1986, ISBN 3-923243-18-9 .
  • Bonn and the bomb - German nuclear weapons policy from Adenauer to Brandt. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-593-34654-0 .
    • Bonn & the Bomb. German Politics and the Nuclear Option . Pluto Press, London 1995, ISBN 0-7453-0910-0 .
  • Goldhagen and the German Left or The Presence of the Holocaust. Elefanten Press, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-88520-639-0 .
  • The way to war - Germany, NATO and Kosovo. Elefanten Press, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-88520-771-0 .
  • Jihad and hatred of Jews - About the new anti-Jewish war. Ça ira, Freiburg im Breisgau 2002, ISBN 3-924627-06-1 .
    • Jihad and Jew-Hatred - Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11. Telos Press, New York 2007, ISBN 0-914386-36-0 .
    • Jihad et Haine des Juifs. Le lieu troublant entre Islamism et nazisme à la racine des terrorisme international. Éditions du Toucan, Paris 2015, ISBN 978-2-8100-0657-1 .
    • Il Jihad E L'Odio Contro Gli Ebrei. L'Islamismo, Il Nazismo E Le Radici Dell'11 Settembre , Salomone Belforte & C., Livorno 2019, ISBN 978-88-7467-148-9 .
  • Secret consent? Islamic anti-Semitism and German politics. LIT, Berlin 2007, ISBN 3-8258-0805-X .
  • The Germans and Iran. Past and present of a fateful friendship. WJS, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-937989-52-5 .
  • The Germans and Iran. (Persian translation). Forough Publishing, Cologne 2012, ISBN 978-3-943147-18-6 .
  • Germany, Iran and the bomb. A reply - also to Günter Grass . LIT, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-643-11703-8 .
  • Nazis and the Middle East. How Islamic anti-Semitism came about. Hentrich & Hentrich, Leipzig 2019, ISBN 978-3-95565-347-7 .

Web links

Commons : Matthias Küntzel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ see the author's homepage http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/ueber-den-autor
  2. ↑ Steffen, Michael: Stories from the Truffle Pig. Politics and Organization of the Communist Federation 1971 to 1991 , Berlin / Hamburg / Göttingen 2002, p. 338 f., According to Patrick Hagen: Die Antideutschen and the debate of the left over Israel , diploma thesis 2004 in trend online newspaper , footnote 68
  3. ^ Goldhagen and the German Left or The Presence of the Holocaust. Elefanten Press, Berlin 1997
  4. ↑ SPME Section Germany , press release from December 1, 2007
  5. ^ Press release from December 1, 2007
  6. ↑ Official press release from the University of Leeds ( Memento from May 5, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ^ Article on the Leeds lecture
  8. ↑ http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/das-zentrum-fuer-antisemitismusforschung-auf-abwegen
  9. ^ Matthias Küntzel , alarm call against globalized anti-Semitism
  10. ^ Matthias Küntzel , Ottawa Conference on Combating Antisemitism
  11. ↑ Deutschlandradio Kultur, Politisches Feuilleton, August 12, 2010 , Tugendterror and city partnership
  12. ^ Hagalil, March 3, 2011 , ADL Human Rights Award 2011
  13. ↑ http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/the-wannsee-legacy-lessons-for-genocide-prevention
  14. ↑ آلمانی‍‍ها و ایران- تاریخ گذشته و معاصر یک دوستی بدفرجام http://www.foroughbook.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=352%3A1391-03-21-14-53-29&Aid=&Item3 69 & long = fa
  15. ↑ http://www.lit-verlag.de/isbn/3-643-11703-8
  16. ↑ Guest contributions by Matthias Küntzel at the Axis of the Good .
  17. ↑ Summary and criticism of Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 www.telospress.com (English)
  18. ↑ http://www.telospress.com/store/#!/~/product/category=4186633&id=17898064
  19. ↑ Deutschlandfunk, Andruck, The Magazine for Political Literature (broadcast on October 26, 2009)
  20. ^ "For 30 years on the special route", Handelsblatt (9 January 2010)
  21. ↑ Wolfgang Schwanitz, Süddeutsche Zeitung (from December 21, 2009) and Tagesspiegel (from January 4, 2010)
  22. ↑ http://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/16048.html
  23. ^ Analysis & criticism, 459, February 22, 2002
  24. ↑ Wildangel, René: Between axis and mandate power. Palestine and National Socialism . Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2007, pp. 21, 45
  25. ↑ Deutschlandradio Kultur, broadcast on January 10, 2010
  26. ↑ Matthias Küntzel: For example Katajun Amirpur or: When fear of the truth guides the pen . Matthias Küntzel's website, January 17, 2010. Accessed January 22, 2011.
  27. ↑ NEFAIS.net of January 21, 2010 ( Memento of April 6, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  28. ↑ Katajun Amirpur and the "Islamic World Trade Journalists Network", March 7, 2010
  29. ^ The Children of Tehran , freitag.de, February 1, 2010
  30. ↑ Michael Kiefer, review in TAZ, March 15, 2008 (accessed on May 17, 2010)
  31. ↑ London Book Festival Winners announced  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.associatedcontent.com
  32. ↑ ADL Human Rights Award 2011
  33. ↑ see also Philipp Henning: Review . In: H-Soz-Kult , April 3, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Küntzel, Matthias
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German political scientist and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Osnabrück