Debatte

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    • Tag: Federal Republic of Germany

    • The Politics of Shame and Oppression

      Cordula Reimann: Schamabwehr als Politik Gaza als Spiegel deutscher Verdrängung [Shame Defense as Politics: Gaza as a Mirror of German Repression], Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, https://www.rosalux.de/news/id/55133/schamabwehr-als-politik

      Since Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, and Süddeutsche Zeitung published digitized NSDAP membership records from the US National Archives in April 2026, millions of Germans have searched online to find out if their relatives belonged to the NSDAP, SA, or SS. However, a public debate about the collective and political implications of this newfound private knowledge is missing; the research remains an individual quest for enlightenment conducted on one’s home computer. This text interprets the absence of this debate as a continuation of a familiar pattern: an unresolved collective German sense of shame that is politically intertwined with state interests. This sense of shame was reignited by the situation in Gaza and manifests itself in humiliation and authoritarian repression, ultimately benefiting the political right. Millions have learned that their grandfather or grandmother was a party member. Yet, this private revelation has not sparked a public discussion about political responsibility today, particularly regarding Gaza. Official policy, which prefers to tie responsibility to the concept of “reason of state” rather than engage in an honest examination of the present, benefits from this privatized, unspoken shame. Without political engagement with this substantial new body of knowledge, the wave of research risks dissipating into individual consternation without consequence behind phrases such as “Never again is now.”

      ↗ https://www.rosalux.de/news/id/55133/schamabwehr-als-politik

    • The imperial Federal Republic of Germany

      Kai Koddenbrock and Carolin Fiete Norina Voß, “Walking a fine line: Germany and the question of imperialism”, New Political Economy, November 2025, pp. 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2025.2581605.

      Imperialism is all around us again. Russia in Ukraine and the United States in Venezuela have shown everyone that we need to rethink global politics as a violent and expansionist affair. Western support for the genocide in Gaza has shaken the ability to look away. Liberal heads of state like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney now even acknowledge that the elites and ruling classes in the West have actively peddled the lie that we have ever lived in a liberal world order.

      In light of this new-found honesty and confronted with the steadfast loyalty to the genocidal and fascist Israeli government, how can we theoretically and empirically understand a militarizing Germany without falling into the trap of viewing violence, war, and the exploitation of the South as something that is merely committed elsewhere?

      This is the guiding question Carolin Fiete Norina Voß and I have been working on for more than two years. The article is open access and invites readers to take a historical and self-critical look at our era of violence and the shifting relations of capitalist accumulation.

      We argue that theories of imperialism can help us to make sense of Germany. These theories were actively forgotten in large parts of the academic world of the Global North, while scholars in the Global South never stopped theorizing and experiencing the actually existing imperialism. We suggest a conceptual focus on war and military violence, domestic state-capital relations, and the extraction of value from the Global South. Empirically, we investigate recent shifts in German security and economic policy, Germany’s corporate giants Volkswagen and BASF, as well as the quest for critical minerals from the Global South.

      Our paper concludes that imperialism as an analytical term allows to tackle the geopolitics and geoeconomics of the present in a more holistic way and is generative and productive in dealing with a world engulfed in war and crisis.

      ↗ https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2025.2581605