Kai Koddenbrock | Bielefeld University
With its national-socialist past and the steadfast support to the current Israeli government, Germany constitutes an important object of academic analysis and political intervention. The relationship of German governments and the German people to extreme violence is again an enormous analytical task for the social sciences. There are analytical resources to tackle it. During the rise of national socialism and after organizing the Holocaust, Germany became a heart of theorizing the relationship between imperialism, fascism, racism, and antisemitism, for example in the work of Franz Neumann and other Frankfurt School intellectuals. Yet hidden under the US security umbrella for the last 80 years and supported by the quick resumption of relations with Ben-Gurion’s Israel, theorizing German political economy and ways of relating to the world have tended to be dominated by liberal and institutionalist analysis unaware of this long and powerful tradition of critique. Complacency has set in. The contemporary institutions of German Peace Research and International Relations are far from nurturing that tradition of anti-fascist and anti-imperialist theorizing in the spirit of preventing mass violence. In the face of exploding investments into the weapons industry, the rise of the AfD, and the silence in the face of plausible genocide, Kai Koddenbrock’s talk explores how these old and more recent theories of fascism and of imperialism can help us make sense of the current German “model.” This “model” is a combination of a domestic growth and accumulation regime, of managing its citizens and labor force, and of relating to the world with its corporations and foreign policy. Ultimately, the question is whether and how Germany may manage to organize itself in a way that is less violent both domestically and globally.
