Klingbeil active in the Antifa? Mr Klingbeil, who were you active with?

In December 2019 Lars Klingbeil described in an ARD documentary how he came to politics. He had campaigned against the far right and had been “bei uns in der Antifa mit aktiv gewesen”, actively involved in the Antifa where he was from.^[1] He has explained the sentence several times since. In 2022 he said he had never been “organised”; every good democrat should be an anti-fascist.^[2] In 2025 he told ZEIT that he did not want to “deny it at all”, that “every sensible democrat should be an anti-fascist”; he had not been part of the organised Antifa, he had said that “casually”.^[3]

Those are explanations, not an answer. What context he meant in 2019 by “bei uns”, “where we are”, he has not said to this day. A vice-chancellor and federal finance minister owes the public clarity on this point. The complete chronology of his statements with all the sources is in the background piece Klingbeil und die Antifa: Was er wann gesagt hat.

Three questions

First: who were you active with? In which group or in what context were you “bei uns in der Antifa mit aktiv”, over what period and in what role? If it was the protests against the neo-Nazi centre at Hetendorf that you helped to organise, then say exactly that.

Second: do you expressly distance yourself from militant Antifa groups and those prepared to use violence, in particular from those the domestic intelligence service classifies as left-extremist? You have rejected political violence in general terms: “Violence must never be a means of politics”, you said in 2020.^[4] We found no express distancing from these groups.

Third: do you today maintain connections to groups that call themselves “Antifa”? A clear no would be enough.

An attitude and a scene are two different things

When asked, Klingbeil answers with the same sentence: every democrat should be an anti-fascist. I agree with that. The CDU, CSU, FDP, Greens, SPD and the overwhelming majority of citizens are against fascism. But the sentence answers a different question from the one that was asked. None of the many anti-fascists in this country says, on that account, that they were “active in the Antifa”. Anyone who says they were “active with the Greens” means an organisation, not their love of nature.

The term is ambiguous, and that is precisely why it deserves a precise answer. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution draws an express distinction: for some, anti-fascism is a basic democratic principle, for left-wing extremists a rallying cry. There is no single organisation called “Antifa”, but there are violence-oriented groups that appear under that name, and left-wing extremists who seek to use the consensus against right-wing extremism in order to count as partners of democrats.^[5] Anyone who was “actively involved in the Antifa” ought to be able to say on which side of that distinction they stood.

If “Antifa” were merely another word for democrat, then Friedrich Merz and Markus Söder would be “in the Antifa” too. Nobody claims that, Klingbeil included.

What also belongs here

Anyone demanding clarity has to work cleanly themselves. In circulation is a supposed Klingbeil quotation in which he is said to have defended the Antifa as “protecting democracy”. A dpa fact check has shown that this is false: at the press conference in question he did not use the word.^[2] Such quotations damage the legitimate question rather than help it.

What I expressly do not claim

I do not claim that Lars Klingbeil himself used or supported violence. There is no evidence of that; none of the sources checked connects him with it. That is precisely why the answer ought to come easily to him. This is not about prejudging anyone, but about transparency from one of the most important office holders in the Federal Republic.

Andreas W. HerbCEO MBG Group, Paderborn