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Condition of Germany

Interview with a prominent leader of the German left on the state of her country, currently the epicentre of converging crises—geopolitical, economic, environmental. With politics swerving right under an SPD-led government, flux and refoundation on the left.

Germany’s Counter-Cinemas

Is a new dissident cinema emergent in Germany? In defiance of the glut of ‘heritage’ productions and navigating a stultifying state-funding bureaucracy, an inter-generational set of filmmakers working out of the Berlin School tradition interrogates the regional hegemon’s past and present.

Plus Ça Change

The Merkel era in Germany—and Europe—brought to an end by the crushing defeat of her party. Prospects for country and continent under the enlarged ‘extreme centre’ of Scholz, Lindner and the Greens. Does the resurrection of the SPD conceal a shuffle to the right?

Germany Redivided

Wide-ranging perspective on the German political landscape under Merkel, and left debates on how best to counteract the ascent of the AfD, from one of Die Linke’s Bundestag members.

Working in Prenzlau

Despatches from the frontline of job-market restructuring in the former GDR Länder, as residual social-democratic structures ease the downward passage of redundant workers into a newly fractious class experience.

Germany’s Faltering Motor?

Joshua Rahtz on Marcel Fratzscher, Die Deutschland Illusion. Fallibilities of the German economy diagnosed by a leading adornment of its policy elite.

Projecting Empire

Esther Leslie on John Phillip Short, Magic Lantern Empire. What role did popular visions play in fin-de-siècle German colonialism?

What’s Become of the German Greens?

Once pillars of the peace movement, Die Grünen are now cheerleaders for Western military intervention. Joachim Jachnow’s cursus vitae of the movement—diverse origins, ideological rifts, shifting social bases—explains the transformation.

Dresden’s Clocks

Fredric Jameson on Uwe Tellkamp, Der Turm. Reunified Germany’s best-seller from the former DDR, and the way time was lived in it.

Marx and Montage

The author of Archaeologies of the Future unearths fragments from ‘ideological antiquity’ in Alexander Kluge’s recent film on Capital. Encounters with Eisenstein’s unrealized equivalent, seeking a cinematic transposition of the commodity fetish.

A New Germany?

What have been the outcomes of reunification in the Federal Republic? Perry Anderson charts contradictory cross-currents within its polity, economy, culture and society, gauging the impact of a contested neoliberal offensive on the ‘Modell Deutschland’ and its intellectual life.

Being Max Weber

Peter Thomas on Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: die Leidenschaft des Denkens. The first full biography for 80 years, with new details of the thinker’s life seen through Green spectacles.

Imperial doxa from the Berlin Republic

Benno Teschke on Herfried Münkler, Imperien. Can an ideal-type for empire be deduced from a historical sociology of Han, Persian, Roman, Ottoman and US models? Prescriptions from Berlin for a second-tier European Empire.

Overcoming Emancipation

Gopal Balakrishnan on Martin Beck Matuštík, Jürgen Habermas: a Philosophical-Political Profile. Bends in the thought of Germany’s leading philosopher, and its engagement with history, across half a century.

Auerbach’s Assistant

Darko Suvin on Peter Jehle, Werner Krauss und die Romanistik im NS-Staat. Germany’s most radical Romance scholar, who wrote on Corneille while awaiting execution in Nazi Berlin, and his contribution to a secular understanding of literature.

When the Party Commits Suicide

“Finally, in the deluge of the conservative-liberal ‘Black Books’ on Stalinist ‘totalitarianism’, a work which not only meets the highest standards of historical research, but also enables us to grasp the unique social dynamics that culminated in the great purges of the 1930s: J. Arch Getty’s and Oleg . . .” read more

From the Collective to the Collection: Curating Post-Communist Germany

“Who still has souvenirs of Autumn 1989 stored away in the cupboard? To mark the tenth year of post-communism, curator Bernd Roder of the Prenzlauer Berg Museum in Berlin recently put out such a call for donations. His planned exhibition, The Time Is High, sets out to punctuate . . .” read more

The Grand Hotel Abyss

“A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss. . . a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort. . . And the daily contemplation of the abyss, between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment . . .” read more

Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence

“On 12 January 1969, Herbert Marcuse wrote to Theodor Adorno announcing a June visit to Frankfurt. He wanted to give a lecture. He requested that the meeting be small and intimate, and solicited an official invitation, so that he could get leave from the University of California. This . . .” read more

Correspondence on the German Student Movement

“Prof. Dr. Theodor W. Adorno” read more

An Allegory from Atlantis

“Christa Wolf, Medea. A Novel in Voices, Virago Press, London 1998, HB £16.99.” read more

There are Alternatives

“For the first time in the history of the Federal Republic, a Chancellor has been voted out of office in a national election. Can we conclude that German democracy has gained in self-confidence?” read more

Trials and Triumphs of East German Publishing

“In his autobiography, Walter Janka, who died in 1995, records the following exchange during his interrogation by the infamous Erich Mielke (Minister of State Security in the gdr) after his arrest in 1956 on charges of endangering state security while head of the Aufbau Publishing house. ‘Mielke:“Don’t . . .” read more

Reflections on Nationalist Disasters

“Seventy-five years ago there occurred an event, obscure at the time, from whose terrible consequences the world of 2000 ad has not yet completely recovered. The place was Munich, capital of the historic Kingdom of Bavaria and now the second city of the recently formed all-German Reich . . .” read more

The Future of German Social Democracy

“[. . .] Over the past few years, we have not only achieved greater unity in the party, we have also refocused the image of the Social Democrats. In recent times, throughout the years of Kohl’s government, something has gone missing from our society—something which is essential for . . .” read more

Cinematic Ethnology: Siegfried Kracauer’s 'The White Collar Masses'

“In the Introduction to his last, posthumously published book History: The Last Things Before the Last (1969), Siegfried Kracauer formulates a summa of his intellectual existence. The discovery of the hidden connection between his interest in history and his interest in the photographic media reveals to him the . . .” read more

The Siege of German Social Market

“The paradox of post-war European politics is that the most democratic economy in Europe, the German Social Market Economy, has underpinned the stability of continental currencies. The rights available to German workers and citizens both individually and collectively have been, and remain, amongst the most extensive of any . . .” read more

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s 'Crazy' Thesis: A Critique of Hitler’s Willing Executioners

“In the opinion, not of bad men, but of the best men, no belief which is contrary to truth can be really useful. . .” read more

Marxists Before the Holocaust

“I shall begin here from an astonishing fact. In December 1938, in an appeal to American Jews, Leon Trotsky in a certain manner predicted the impending Jewish catastrophe. Here is what he wrote: ‘It is possible to imagine without difficulty what awaits the Jews at the mere outbreak . . .” read more

Habermas on National Unification in Germany and Korea

“Jürgen Habermas’s public lecture in Seoul on ‘National Unification and Popular Sovereignty’ came as a welcome intervention for those Koreans committed to a reunification process which would be both peaceful and democratic. Although little of what he said, even on German unity, was entirely new to many of . . .” read more

National Unification and Popular Sovereignty

“Since the collapse of the Soviet empire, new states have been emerging in fast-moving sequence—whether through the secession of formerly ‘autonomous’ territories, or through the reunification of national states that had fallen into dependence and partition. These would appear to be only the clearest symptoms that a phenomenon . . .” read more

Nationalism and the Left in Germany

“A new/old spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of nationalism. Everyone underestimated its force and potential before 1989, and in the post-Cold War world, almost everyone is struggling to come to terms with it. There is a long history of the Left, in Germany in particular, being accused of . . .” read more

Overcoming the Past

“I would like your very different biographies and your experiences with the European Left to encounter each other as it were in a discussion on Germany, on ‘overcoming the past’, on the legacy of socialism, on Europe and the lack of synchrony between Germany and Poland. The . . .” read more

The Second Life-Fiction of the Federal Republic: We Have Become 'Normal' Again

“Since the fiftieth anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938 a commemorative event has been held every 9th of November in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. This year Ignatz Bubis reported on some of his experiences during a visit to Rostock, and this provided the theme for the main . . .” read more

Petra Kelly and Willy Brandt

“The deaths of Willy Brandt and Petra Kelly in a way mark the end of two successive generations of mass leaders, two eras of the West European Left, spanning more than fifty years. Willy Brandt, a man of very modest beginnings, identified from his earliest youth with the . . .” read more

Autographs and Images: Snapshots of Berlin and Prague

“The changing visual environment of formerly Communist countries, in flux under the pressures of capitalist enterprise and economic chaos, is so provisional, its elements apparently so unwarranted, that it raises many questions in the mind of any visitor from the West. This essay is about some of those . . .” read more

Political Generations in the Federal Republic

“We are not free—we have only been freed.” read more

The Rise and Fall of the West German Left

“Left politics in West Germany in the period 1945–90 were marked first by the rise of the spd, leading to its participation in government in the years 1966–82, and then by a sequence of election defeats, each more serious than the last. The strength of spd . . .” read more

Germany—A Binary Poison

“A brilliant invention. Two containers holding two chemical substances. Each in itself almost harmless. Only when the shell strikes do they react with one another and together turn into a deadly chemical weapon.” read more

Enzensberger’s Europe

“Martin Chalmers: We would like to begin with Europe, Europe. Although there are any number of paths which lead out of this work, we were interested first of all in how the book came about.” read more

The Nazi State: An Exceptional State?

“Any discussion of the character of an ‘exceptional’ state must presumably begin with a notion of what categorizes a state as ‘normal’. My own starting assumption is to accept Max Weber’s concept of the state: ‘an administrative and legal order subject to change by legislation . . . . . .” read more

Poetry and Politics: A Conversation with Stuart Hood

“Erich Fried was not only a distinguished and prolific poet—he said once in a characteristic phrase that he wrote poems the way rabbits have babies—but a novelist, essayist and translator of Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas and Eliot. These achievements have been recognized throughout Europe but are only now . . .” read more

Mothers in the Fatherland

“In spring 1987, a political document caused a stir in the Federal Republic of Germany: the Mothers’ Manifesto produced by a section of women in the Green Party. Some passed on to the business of the day with a feeling of kindly satisfaction—there was no longer much to . . .” read more

After the West German Elections

“The political earthquake once widely predicted for the West German federal elections failed to take place on 25 January 1987. Six months earlier, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, the centre–right coalition had barely managed to scrape home in the Lower Saxony elections, just thirty thousand votes ahead of . . .” read more

The Women’s Movement in West Germany

“Today the women’s movement in the Federal Republic of Germany is everywhere and nowhere. This ubiquitous non-existence has perhaps long been a feature of the new women’s movement, but the recent shifts may be best understood in the contradictory terms of a successful defeat. The State, initially under . . .” read more

The Greens at the Crossroads

“The West German political scene of the 1980s has been transformed by the emergence—for the first time since the foundation of the Federal Republic—of a socially radical force with a significant electoral following in the society at large. The Greens have changed the map of the traditional party . . .” read more

The Myth of Germany’s Missing Revolution

“It is now over half a century since Hitler came to power in Germany, inaugurating twelve years of bloodshed and destruction without parallel in human history. Throughout this period the Nazi phenomenon has posed a major challenge to human understanding. Why should fascism, in such an extreme, racist . . .” read more

East Germany’s Frozen Revolution

“Ever since 1917 the creation of a workers state in Germany had been the dream of the international communist movement. A socialist revolution in the largest industrial country of Europe, the birthplace of Marxism and home of the most numerous and best-organized proletariat of the world, would finally . . .” read more

The SPD and the Peace Movement

“In our dialogue with the spd do their members accept that such phenomena as the arms race, the dire impoverishment of half mankind and the global ecological crisis, all of which are linked by a multiplicity of factors that may well have their roots in a common . . .” read more

Beyond Actually Existing Socialism

“‘Communism is not only necessary, it is also possible.’ The quiet words carry a major historical irony. For what has now to be proved, before an informed and sceptical audience, is indeed possibility. And this not only in the reckoning of strategic or tactical chances, which in these . . .” read more