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Rise & Fall of the Federal Republic of Germany
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“The post-war period is finally history. […] The era of the Federal Republic has ended not with its dissolution, but through a progressive hollowing out of long-established norms that once formed the core of its memory politics. […] The nation’s pluralistic culture is being subordinated to a Staatsräson which is increasingly at odds with its post-fascist consensus and opening massive rifts in German society.”
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So goes the thesis underlying Der grosse Kanton: Rise & Fall of the Federal Republic of Germany, a symposium held in Zürich on the 5th and 6th of December this year. Organized by Anselm Franke, Philip Ursprung, and Emily Dische-Becker (a member of the Diasporist’s advisory board), as well as Medico International, the symposium brought together more than thirty scholars, writers, and intellectuals representing a wide variety of disciplines, to offer an assessment of the state of affairs in Germany.
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Since its conclusion, as the speakers might have foretold, the symposium has become the subject of a media frenzy. Many of the reports seemed to object to the conference’s concept altogether, without seriously confronting the analyses offered: willfully misconstruing speakers’ comments to paint a picture of a gathering of like-minded pro-Palestine activists, for example, who parroted left-wing conspiracies without meaningful dissent. These same papers suggested the symposium’s claims of the narrowing of free speech and the threats of cancellation in Germany were overblown, despite a long and well-documented record.
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In the coming weeks, the Diasporist will be publishing a selection of contributions shared at the conference. Some of these texts were delivered in response to the specific prompts of panels — taking stock of the state of the media’s insistent disavowal of reality, the unease emanating from Germany’s remembrance culture, the guardrails applied to academic discourse, and more — while others offered broader diagnoses of the Federal Republic’s past and future. We will also be releasing excerpted transcriptions of discussions that followed panelists’ contributions as well as new pieces building upon ideas laid out at the symposium. Although many of the contributors agree on the contours of the crisis, their frameworks, approaches, proposals, and explanations vary.
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If you enjoy this series, please consider giving an end-of-year gift to the Diasporist. Your contribution helps us continue to share critical ideas and to foster conversations like these.
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Diedrich Diederichsen
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Of course, it seems nearly paradisiacal that there was a time — let’s call it the 1970s — when a major German daily newspaper opened its feuilleton pages with a one-and-a-half-page review of a Bresson film, or a profile of Josef von Sternberg, although he hadn’t even made a new film. But the price of this beauty was the conspicuously territorial and ideologically-determined political line of the rest of the paper. The price was the fact that something daring could not be read in its own right but only as a supplement in the context of a publication that was otherwise oriented in one direction or another, and that it always had to be grateful for the generosity of the actual reporting on economics and government on which it depended.
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Stefanie Schüler-Springorum
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But a great deal happened in those first 40 years: many former victims of persecution died in poverty, from illness, suicide, or “heartbreak,” as one nephew wrote about his aunt. Or they lived quiet, unassuming lives, sometimes not daring to leave their homes for days because a neighbor had apparently found it amusing to park a delivery truck with the inscription “Mengele” in front of their door — the door, in this instance, belonging to a family of Auschwitz survivors.
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A. Dirk Moses
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However, rather than face the fact that German and Western publics express revulsion at the death and destruction in Gaza, their political classes have decided that the medium and not the message is the problem. Social media is to blame, we hear. It’s because China and Qatar control the algorithm of TikTok that teenagers are seeing “walls of dead children.” Their solution is to change the ownership of TikTok so that pro-Israel messages flood their phones instead.
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