I largely agree with you and I think this entire discussion comes down to praxis. Let me please provide my thoughts below. Happy to see your thinking and keep the exchange going.

Anyone who doesn’t see Class as the primary contradiction is not a leftist.

That would currently be 95+% of Germany, including much of the “Die Linke” in Germany.

There are many small regional cultures in Germany but there is no unifying culture, apart from maybe Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

Again, fully agree here and we see how the Vergangenheitsbewältigung is being distorted by capitalists against Palestinians and anyone criticising Israel in general.

The tactics of marxism change but the strategy and goal never does. A cultural taboo can change in less than a generation, there is nothing permanent in culture. The culture of Germany will not shed capitalist ideas until generations after the revolution. You cant do things the other way around because the capitalist control the intellectual and cultural means of production

If the tactics of Marxism change, why not exploring the idea of applying Marxist praxis in the direction where we speak the language of the proletariat? If we can’t raise class consciousness (unless I’m mistaken here, but for Germany this is definitely not the case.), neither can we do it through culture, then how do we get people mobilised?

Germany is very far from proletarian revolution and it has a severe deficit of class consciousness like all western nations. You don’t counter that by choosing to foster false consciousness because that will end up with a false revolution like the 3rd reich.

A Devil’s Advocate would say what have been tried by communists in Germany, or the capitalist core, doesn’t work, either. Trying to raise class consciousness is apparently not working and if this was the solution, then you are going right with the “Die Linke” who advocates for educating the masses only and is becoming something like the Greens were 30 years ago. By those standards, we always lose against capital, cuz they dictate what people learn. Again, being the Devil’s Advocate, Lenin would still wait for the revolution if he wanted to raise class consciousness only.

We do need to reach out to workers but we don’t do it by indulging in nationalism or identity politics.

Of course, correct Theory, but how does that look like in praxis? Because currently, the right is wooing the proletariat into their arms, not the left. And using culture as a vehicle to educate and mobilise people can be a valid way, many socialist countries did and still do that.

Even the program of the KPD in 1918 talks of culture twice (https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/geschichte/deutsch/kpd/1918/programm.htm). One example being in their very first paragraph, as “cultural duty”: “On November 9th, workers and soldiers shattered the old regime in Germany. On the battlefields of France, the bloody delusion of Prussian saber-wielding world domination had crumbled. The criminal gang that had ignited the global conflagration and driven Germany into a sea of ​​blood had reached the end of its rope. The people, deceived for four years, who in the service of the Moloch had forgotten their cultural duty, their sense of honor, and their humanity, who had allowed themselves to be used for every atrocity, awoke from their four-year paralysis—before the abyss.”