Description
In the context of Germany’s undying support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, Daniel Denvir recently asserted that “Germany has become without question one of the world’s most ridiculous countries.” Germany’s sponsorship of Israel runs parallel to its engagement with demands to account for its colonial history, which it does primarily through the idea of “Aufarbeiten” – (to “process” / “catch-up on”). Drawing on Indigenous, decolonial, and abolitionist theorizations of the colonial, this paper analyses the nature and extent of this engagement and what it reveals about how Germany perceives this colonial history and present. The paper evaluates these claims by studying three different spaces that differently implicate Germany: Palestine, Tanzania, and Mexico. Germany is one of the strongest allies of Israeli settler colonialism today. Further, German entities advance the anti-Indigenous “Tren Maya” in southern Mexico and land grabbing for fortress conservation in Tanzania. The paper argues that any engagement with the colonial must centre the question of land. When applied to Palestine, Tanzania, and Mexico, Germany appears to have not only failed to embark on a pathway toward redressing the colonial, but instead is actively advancing settler colonialism, coloniality, and racial capitalism. As such, this paper engages with one of the most pressing problems in international studies today: how does the colonial manifest in an international order in perma-crisis?
