Staatsräson Eats the Mind
Translated by Julia Bosson
Editor’s note: The following text was originally presented at “Der grosse Kanton: Rise & Fall of the BRD,” which was held in Zurich on 5-6 December. It was prepared for a panel titled ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL OR: DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE, STATE DISCOURSE AND DISAVOWAL OF REALITY.
I AM TRYING TO UNDERSTAND how Germany’s Staatsräson — “Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson” — and the securitization of scholarship are intertwined. “Securitization” means that danger must be performatively created so that state institutions can justify extraordinary measures in the name of security. This also affects the production of knowledge. Repeated threats, in turn, fuel fear.
In this brief text, I would like to programmatically connect three points and outline how state security discourses endanger or attempt to curb what they themselves declare to be “dangerous knowledge” and how the security apparatus and structures of political opportunity intersect in the academic field.
I. State security and knowledge control
First, however, a note: the disproportionate focus on the Federal Republic of Germany and its destructive ties to the State of Israel once again distracts our attention from Palestine. There a “scholasticide” is taking place before our very eyes. Israel’s army has deliberately killed journalists and academics in Gaza and destroyed the infrastructure of knowledge production. No hospitals remain standing. All universities, schools, and libraries have been reduced to rubble. The evidence documenting this destruction was also buried and destroyed.
Staatsräson as a security mechanism with domestic political consequences serves a dual political function: First, it justifies or conceals Israel’s actions in the name of Germany’s past. And second, it legitimizes repressive practices at home. In the process, our gaze is repeatedly turned away from Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine and the current genocide in Gaza toward what the discourse of Staatsräson declares to be the enemy of Israel, which also becomes the enemy of Germany, the West, and its “civilizational achievements.” The ranks of this enemy are fluid and expansive. They include “imported antisemites” — everything “non-German” onto which Germany shifts its own antisemitism. They also include Jews who refuse to be lumped in with the state of Israel and to allow Israel’s systematic injustices to be committed in their name. And they also include people like Greta Thunberg, who end up on terror lists when they combine their commitment to climate justice with their commitment to justice for Palestine.
Not all numbers count. Not all knowledge is considered relevant, no matter how much it may meet all scientific standards.
Scholars can also become a danger to the nation when they call Palestine/Israel for what it is under international law — apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide — and expose, document, and analyze Germany’s complicity. Their findings are dismissed as “opinion” even when they use the entire toolkit that scholarship provides: numbers, data, facts, pie charts, graphs, and analyses. Not all numbers count. Not all knowledge is considered relevant, no matter how much it may meet all scientific standards. Knowledge becomes dangerous as soon as it thwarts the logic of Staatsräson.
Staatsräson therefore also drives academic knowledge production. The Bundestag resolution passed in February 2025, “Resolutely countering antisemitism and hostility toward Israel in schools and universities and securing free discourse” translates this relationship into concrete guidelines for action. However, the resolution does not secure “free discourse,” which, incidentally, is only mentioned in its title. The only thing it secures is the state security apparatus. Instead, the measures relating to order, sanctions, and hazard prevention are unambiguously directed at those who reject state-driven carceral antisemitism. The resolution explicitly calls for universities to work more closely with security services, to adapt security concepts to “changing situations,” and to take the “expertise of security authorities” into account “more strongly and systematically than before.” This security-obsessed grammar threatens sanctions. But it also regulates discourse preventively and with supposedly benevolent rationales. Protection and security. Precaution and prohibition.
The Archive of Silence continuously documents canceled events in the cultural and academic sectors, but is by no means exhaustive. The choreography is mostly the same: antisemitism commissioners, organizations such as the Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft (German-Israeli Society), or Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor intervene in university affairs and demand that events not be allowed to take place. University administrators go with the flow, agreeing or consenting, it’s hard to say. Their justifications follow a tiresomely uniform repertoire: unpredictable security risks, not neutral enough, too political, not scholarly enough, one side is missing. They invoke the mantra of balance. In doing so, however, they ignore the fact that one side has the favor of the state behind it, that it even represents Staatsräson, while the other is criminalized as a deviation that impacts security and regulated out of legitimate discourse.
German university administrations continue to promote cooperation with Israeli universities and research institutions. They eagerly make pilgrimages to Israel and unabashedly express their full solidarity with a state that is at the forefront of international violations of international law.
A relevant recent example is the conference “The Targeting of Palestinian Scholarship,” which was planned for November 28, 2025, at LMU in Munich. Palestinian scholars from Al-Quds University in Jerusalem and Birzeit University in Ramallah were to speak at the conference. The Network of Jewish University Teachers intervened and complained about the “one-sided thrust” that prevented an “objective debate.” The Bavarian government’s antisemitism commissioner, Ludwig Spaenle, joined other CSU politicians in taking up their talking points. The university administration bowed to pressure, and the event was canceled and postponed.
At the same time, conferences are held at German universities where IDF military strategists such as Ofra Graicer proudly explain Israel’s relentless war of annihilation against Palestinians to German audiences in keynote speeches. In the congress catalog, warm greetings from politicians frame the conference proceedings. German university administrations continue to promote cooperation with Israeli universities and research institutions. They eagerly make pilgrimages to Israel and unabashedly express their full solidarity with a state that is at the forefront of international violations of international law — a state that, just a few kilometers away, has turned Gaza into a mass grave and continues to kill, displace, and rob Palestinians of their livelihoods. All scientific, apolitical, balanced, and above all: secure.
I wonder how this peculiar idea of “scholarly neutrality” might sound to those in Palestine who hold their dead children in plastic bags in their arms and fight for their bare survival amid bombings, hunger, and exhaustion.
II. Security creates fear and obedience
Security creates emotions. It creates a climate of caution, constant nervousness, and fear of missteps. In Germany, fear also seems to silence those who should know better. Holocaust historians, mostly obsessed with singularity or remaining silent; international law experts, whose outcry has largely failed to materialize; Middle East researchers who treat the “conflict” like a sterile object and show little concern; or the former prominence of critical theory around Habermas, who sent a sluggish greeting from Germany to the world public, in line with Staatsräson.
Fear not only eats away at the soul. Fear sometimes simply makes people stupid.
However, repression, (self-)censorship, and the economies of fear they generate are not enough to understand what is currently happening in universities and other areas of public life in Germany. It would be too simplistic to say that people censor each other and themselves because they are afraid of being defamed or jeopardizing their careers. It is not only fear that creates silence, but also the anticipatory adaptation to expectations. This is at least as dangerous as open censorship because it replaces thinking and criticism with perceived loyalty.
Colleagues emphasize how terrible they find the events in Gaza. In the next breath, however, they reaffirm their undivided passion for Israel.
We are witnessing the frightening reality that large parts of Germany’s intellectual elite have incorporated Staatsräson. An oppressive loyalty to the state is evident in academic circles as well. Colleagues emphasize how terrible they find the events in Gaza. In the next breath, however, they reaffirm their undivided passion for Israel. And they emphasize that Hamas and rampant “Islamism” are the cause of all evil, which must be fought by all possible means.
For the state of emergency, sharply delineated friend-enemy figurations are just as central as love-hate logics: Because we love the state of Israel and in this way are allowed to love ourselves again without shame, we must abhor everything that stands in the way of this (self-)love. The myth of a quasi-natural German-Israeli or Christian-Jewish community of destiny gains its internal coherence through shared denigrations — against those lives that are considered culturally different and politically unintegratable: Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians.
What is actually needed is an analysis of the various intertwined affects that generate and reproduce Staatsräson politically, publicly, and also academically. I believe that state control and the fear it stokes are only one component of this. It is not yet sufficiently clear when and why looking away or indifference became a socially normalized privilege, while Germany continues to provide Israel’s apparatus of violence with unrestricted material and political support.
III. Security creates incentives
The security apparatus of Staatsräson is not only repressive. It is also highly productive. Publication after publication conjure up the “Muslim antisemitism” that is immigrating to Europe, or the dangers of “postcolonialism” lurking everywhere — or both together.
Staatsräson offers opportunities. It creates incentives that are reflected, for example, in funding policies. In my field “Islam in Europe,” research on ‘Islamism’ has been highly valued since at least 9/11. And “antisemitism research” is also considered particularly eligible for funding if it obeys state logic. This has less to do with academic standards of quality than with attention economies and political loyalties. For example, Ahmed Mansour received 9 million euros from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research for his project “Israel-related antisemitism and Islamist radicalization in German schools,” even though external experts had found it neither “ethical” nor “scientific” and therefore not “worthy of funding.”
Staatsräson does not only govern knowledge. It is itself driven by a kind of knowledge that clings to the state.
We are currently seeing the rise of a new class of experts who produce “security knowledge,” as Werner Schiffauer aptly calls it — “radicalization experts,” “antisemitism and Islamism prevention experts.” These experts receive media attention, they receive research funding, and they gain political influence. However, their authority does not stem from originality, critical thinking, or scientific integrity. It arises primarily from the fact that they provide scarce and easily-instrumentalized knowledge. This knowledge is not intended to help us understand complex realities or critically question power relations and global injustices. Rather, it serves to reinforce power asymmetries. Above all, it can be used to govern population groups that are considered suspect, who are already racialized and narrated out of the nation.
The security apparatus creates knowledge, and it creates people who generate and legitimize this knowledge. It produces not only obedience, but also careers based on institutional compliance. In this respect, Staatsräson does not only govern knowledge. It is itself driven by a kind of knowledge that clings to the state.
In short, Germany’s intellectual elite is not only ceasing to think because someone is silencing it. It is ceasing to think because a system is signaling to it what it is better not to think about seriously. And it is ceasing to think because security is becoming the key currency of scholarship.
