As unified Germany celebrated the triumph of liberalism in the 1990s, there was an ideological Stimmung that it could embrace the end of history, and thus the end of all ills and inconveniences that come with history. Now that the country was reunited, the historical error corrected and the guilt for the perpetration of the largest mass murder on an industrial scale in history atoned, it welcomed the present as if the promised future had finally prevailed. The same-old capitalist present meanwhile could shine anew because it was emerging upon the wreckage of the communist project of futurity. The incipient discourse of the final atonement in the post-historical present coincided with the total subsumption of the former Socialist East under the logic of capitalist market economy and liberal democracy as its political form. There was no room to imagine alternatives. Historical antagonisms were supposedly overcome and unity of the nation prevailed.

As the 1990s rolled, reunited Germany became a beacon of multicultural acceptance, internationalism, and a welcoming home for artists, writers, political dissidents, refugees and immigrants. There was a sense that the post-war West German economic and political reconstruction project had won and the former GDR could also be cured from its political and social ails. And as civil wars rocked the Middle East and North Africa since 2011 and revolutions were defeated by remerging authoritarianisms, Angela Merkel’s open-door policy of accepting a large number of refugees from war-torn regions of the world was seen as the ultimate triumph of liberal humanism. With the war in Ukraine since 2022 and the arrival of Ukrainian and Russian exiles, there was a sense that Germany and in particular Berlin, was akin to the Weimer republic of the 1920s, with its diverse artistic and intellectual communities and the sense of cultural freedom that prevailed. If the 1920s were akin to the Weimar republic, then, with the rise of the far right and the ongoing cultural repressions in the aftermath of October 7, are we in the 1930s now? A question that often lingers in Berlin artistic and academic circles these days.

In the meantime, the victory of the market and liberal democracy was coupled with the state institutionalized culture of the memory of the Holocaust embodied in museums, memorials, films, as well as advanced in textbooks, novels and testimonies. Engrained on plaques, graffiti, cobble stones, frescos, in train stations and in every nook and cranny of German cities that bore the marks of the unsummonable historical trauma of massacring entire Jewish families (as well as Roma, homosexual and other communities) this memory culture was to entrench the idea that the historical event was singular and unrepeatable. “Nie wieder!” has been the official mnemonic politics of united Germany, while Israel has been made into a material and spatial embodiment of Germany’s atonement.

However, it is since October 7, 2023 that the temporarily vague categorical imperative of “never again” has acquired a specific temporal marker as well: “Nie wieder ist jetzt!” (Never again is now). Every statement coming out of German institutions or petitions volunteered by overzealous academics against antisemitism or in support of “Israel’s right to defend itself”, dresses itself in this temporal imperative and assumes the morally militant position of defending its former victim at any cost. And because “Never again is now”, history cannot repeat itself. Its moral guardians will ensure the absolute singularity of the Holocaust and, hence, the moral triumph of the former historical criminal who is now a purified and reformed liberal defending civilization against barbarism. The former victim cannot be a perpetrator. Its victim cannot claim to be a victim. If it were, the entire bastion of moral atonement, together with the binaries between civilization and barbarism would collapse. And yet, after ten months of continued systematic, state-orchestrated and cold-bloodedly executed genocide of the Palestinian population, televised and reported live, this slogan, applied schematically and abstractly, can no longer mask the post-Cold war contradictions of the liberal order. The official memory culture and liberal internationalism characterizing the post-war West German project can no longer coexist.  And it is the figure of the Palestinian that has exploded this contradiction.

In the official German discourse, the Palestinian cannot be a victim. Any reference to the physical and political extermination of this subject is met with censorship and repression. The country that has purified and saved Germany from moral culpability and has been its raison d’état, cannot itself be amoral. It is not only the often-overzealous bureaucrats of academic and cultural institutions that act in the name of this “Staatsräson”, but, most worryingly, students and employees often denounce their fellow students and colleagues to the conservative press as “antisemites” and “Israel haters”. In the meantime, entire fields and disciplines such as postcolonial studies and certain trends of anticolonial Marxism are condemned as politically suspicious.

But the current official discourse is not satisfied with arbitrary cancellations and censorship. Politicians, from the Minister of Education and Research to the ruling “Traffic light” coalition of SPD, FDP and the Greens, have been making renewed attempts at engraining the practices of censorship and repressions in the law. If the Minister of Education and Research Bettina-Stark-Watzinger has infamously attempted (and failed) to open a probe into the possibility of cutting funding to academics who signed a letter in support of students’ right to protest, the governing coalition is in the process of preparing a joint resolution entitled “Never Again is Now: Protecting, Preserving and Strengthening Jewish Life in Germany”. The resolution, at least according to the currently circulating draft, proposes to make an overhaul of criminal, residency, asylum, citizenship, cultural, higher educational and budgetary laws, and make funding contingent upon the acceptance of the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Previously, such attempts have failed because they didn’t meet the legal test, and the constitutionally entrenched “freedom of opinion” prevailed. Now, politicians are attempting to weaponize the Constitution itself.  According to the draft, the bureaucrats from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (normally busy fighting terrorist and right-wing extremist activity) would determine eligibility for funding. Throughout the summer recess, the draft was being negotiated behind closed doors, and without public hearing or discussion to be ready to sent to a vote in September. Legal experts and academics, meanwhile, in a letter of objection sent to the governing coalition, have characterized the draft “as dangerous for democracy”, one that offers no protection against anti-Semitism, raises multiple legal concerns, and demonstrates carelessness in handing facts. Since the publication of the unprecedented July 19 advisory opinion of the ICJ that calls for the state of Israel to immediately de-occupy the Palestinian territories annexed since 1967, not to hinder Palestinian self-determination, as well as contains a clear warning that international institutions that directly or indirectly support occupation and apartheid are in violation of international law, makes the resolution itself stand in breach of the ICJ recommendation.

If German universities and cultural institutions continue to support an apartheid regime and collaborate with institutions on occupied territories, they do not only risk breaching international law but also losing their partners worldwide. Meanwhile, caught up between the Scylla of repressions threatening to be entrenched in the law and the Charybdis of boycotts, the German academic and cultural sphere is at the risk of becoming a “desert of the real”, a provincial sphere that has not only forsaken the liberal culture of the post-war West German reconstruction but also the liberal humanism of the 1990s and 2000s.

And yet, Palestinian struggle today has exploded the myth of the universality and irreplaceability of the postwar-liberal status quo with its end of history ideology. Appearing “beyond the pale of history” as in the Hegelian formulation, or rather, beyond the pale of the post-historical eternality of late capitalism and the liberal order it has given rise to, Palestine is the figure of historical repetition. What is being repeated is the de-humanization and othering of an entire population as sub-human, dejected and rejected from the body politic of the German nation and its “Staatsräson.” As opposed to the abstract atonement for moral ills at the end of history, Palestine is also the figure of the historically concrete futurity, one that is possible only if there is a post-genocidal Palestinian self-determination. This is a historical path to futurity that is being paved by those who are murdered on a daily basis and those who refuse to die, those who resist in camps, in universities and in art institutions as well as beneath the wreckage of liberal humanist post-history.