Forthcoming From NGC

Issue #158 (Aug 2026)

In this wide-ranging open issue, Mirjam S. Brusius and Matthew Vollgraff examine recent debates surrounding museum acquisitions and collections, exploring how colonial race science and antisemitism continue to be entangled with global networks of trade, extraction, and exploitative labor, and connecting these debates to the shifting politics of memory culture in contemporary Germany. Then, Kyle Baasch’s study contrasts major figures Max Weber and Oswald Spengler, tracking the energetic reception of Spengler’s Decline of the West leading up to his legendary 1920 debate with Weber in Munich. In a new study of Hannah Arendt, Michael McGillen explores the figure of the “living corpse” in her famous analysis of concentration camps. By tracing Arendt’s debt to David Rousset, from whom Arendt derived some of her more controversial claims regarding victim passivity, McGillen thematizes the tensions between what Arendt viewed as her ethical obligations and her postwar political responsibilities. Then, Matthew Handelman analyzes conspiracy theories that have emerged around the Frankfurt School to examine the interconnection of mimesis and critique, illustrating how these narratives tap into both the dynamics of antisemitism and broader questions of cultural politics. Offering a reassessment of Habermas, Belén Pueyo-Ibáñez investigates the concepts of moral universalism and pluralism of values within discourse ethics, demonstrating that universalization and value plurality are, following Habermas, interdependent achievements rather than conflicting ideas. Tobias Dias presents a highly original exploration of Raul Hausmann’s “Revolutionary Optophonetics,” an alter-epistemological project that linked the very physiology of class struggle to pseudoscientific communities. Finally, Anna Mayer offers a new reading of Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, focusing on grid structures as “media of control.” Utilizing material from the German Federal Archives, Mayer shows how this classic film negotiated the dawn of our digital era, prefiguring modern mass surveillance.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Mirjam S. Brusius and Matthew Vollgraff • Skulls, Statues, and the Kaiser’s Museums: Divided Histories of German Antisemitism and Colonial Race Science
Kyle Baasch • The Sociologist and the Dilettante: Weber and Spengler in Munich
Michael McGillen • Hannah Arendt, David Rousset, and the Imagination of Living Death
Matthew Handelman • The Mirror of Critical Theory: The Frankfurt School in Conspiracy Theories
Belén Pueyo-Ibáñez • Moral Universalism and Pluralism of Values: Revisiting Habermas’s Theory of Discourse Ethics
Tobias Dias • The Artist as Epistemic Marauder: On Raul Hausmann’s Revolutionary Optophonetics
Anna Mayer • Grids of Control: A New Reading of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum in the Context of Early Digital Surveillance