Forthcoming From NGC


Issue #157 (Feb 2026)



Special Issue: German Memory Politics at a Crossroads


Special Issue Editors: Jonathon Catlin, Andreas Huyssen, and Anson Rabinbach


This special issue explores recent shifts in the landscape of German memory, including the reemergence of the colonial past, a new perspective on war following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and new uses and abuses of Holocaust memory amidst Israel’s war and genocide in Gaza. First, Andreas Huyssen remembers his friend and NGC colleague Anson Rabinbach, who co-edited the issue before his passing in January 2025. A comprehensive introduction by Jonathon Catlin provides a genealogy of recent debates in light of previous NGC issues on Germans and Jews, warning that “negative exceptionalism” regarding the Holocaust has severely limited the scope of German memory. An interview with historian Omer Bartov that first appeared in German critically intervenes in German discourses by rejecting the weaponization of antisemitism and explaining why, to his mind, the IDF’s policy in Gaza is genocidal. An essay by the late Y. Michal Bodemann offers a sociological portrait of the Jewish community in Germany, specifically analyzing recent rifts within that community. Hans Kundnani contrasts the shifting reliance on Nazi analogies in German discussions of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, while Sebastian Conrad explores the clash between two memory regimes: the official Holocaust memory, dominant since the 1980s, and the postcolonial/global turn developed in a diversifying Germany. Irit Dekel shows how the phrase “Never Again” has proliferated as a floating signifier that, in its collapsing meanings, excludes more universal interpretations. Jonas Rosenbrück explores how a privileged role for Jews and Israel in recent German discourse has resulted in an “imperception of Palestine” and of other racial and colonial crimes. Alarmed by the AfD’s mobilization of the term “remigration”—a euphemism for forced deportation of migrants—Johannes von Moltke draws on Victor Klemperer’s analysis of Nazi language to trace the persistence of fascist rhetoric in contemporary right-wing movements. Fabian Krautwald argues that resistance to the inclusion of German colonialism in official public memory reflects a long-standing provincialism among politicians, historians, and the wider public. Examining the repression of Palestine solidarity protest and the European border crisis, Daniel Loick and Vanessa E. Thompson introduce the notion of “surplus fascism” to describe the excessive violence to which certain populations are subjected. Finally, Robin Celikates analyzes authoritarian and repressive reactions to protest in contemporary Germany, arguing that anti-antisemitism in its currently hegemonic form functions as a cover for ethnonationalist policies.



TABLE OF CONTENTS



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