Klingbeil and the Antifa: what he said and when

Lars Klingbeil, today vice-chancellor and federal finance minister, spoke in an ARD documentary in 2019 about his path into politics. Half a sentence from it has been quoted again and again ever since: that he had been “bei uns in der Antifa mit aktiv gewesen” – actively involved in the Antifa where he was from. This overview sets out that statement and everything he has said about it since, with date and source. Where one source merely reproduces another, that is stated.

The statements in chronological order

The later accounts in Jacobin (2021) and taz (2025) give no source of their own and recognisably go back to the same statement from 2019. They are not independent confirmation.

The background: Hetendorf

The “Heideheim” at Hetendorf no. 13 in the district of Celle, not far from Klingbeil’s home town of Munster, had been a far-right training and conference centre since the 1980s. From 1991 the “Hetendorf conference weeks” took place there annually; the Lower Saxony intelligence service described them as gatherings with racist content that denied the Holocaust and glorified National Socialism. The conference week in June 1996 was accompanied by counter-demonstrations, some of them violent.^[9]

In February 1998 Lower Saxony’s interior minister banned the two associations running it, and the property was seized.^[14][10] Klingbeil, born in 1978, was still at school at the time. By his own account he helped to organise the protest against the centre.^[8] None of the sources checked connects him with violence.

What the intelligence service understands by “Antifa”

According to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, “the Antifa” does not exist as a nationwide, clearly delimited organisation; there are many local groups which have to be considered separately. For some, anti-fascism is a basic democratic principle, for left-wing extremists a rallying cry; the term is not exclusively left-extremist. At the same time the office describes violence-oriented left-extremist groups that appear under the name Antifa, and warns that left-wing extremists seek to use the consensus against right-wing extremism in order to be accepted as partners by democrats.^[11]

What he has said about violence

Klingbeil has rejected political violence in general terms on several occasions. As SPD general secretary he called it a disgrace in February 2020 that FDP politicians had been attacked in Thuringia, and said: “Violence must never be a means of politics.”^[12] In a Bundestag debate in May 2024 on violence against volunteers, politicians and emergency services he demanded that anyone attacking democracy must be punished at once; he also named attacks on police officers.^[13]

In the sources checked we found no express distancing specifically from militant Antifa groups or groups prepared to use violence.

What is open

What remains open is the complete wording of the statement from 2019, because the programme is no longer available. Also open is which context Klingbeil meant by “bei uns”, “where we are”: a group, an alliance or the protests against Hetendorf. His later explanations speak of protests and of an attitude, not of membership.^[5][8]