War, Romanticism, and the End of the Nation State (“Germany Must Perish!” pt. 2)
Panel at the Forty-Eighth Annual German Studies Association Conference
Sept. 26-29 2024, Atlanta, Georgia

Theodor Kaufman’s infamous call for the abolition of Germany through the sterilization of all Germans and reapportionment of German territory in his 1941 Germany Must Perish! illustrates the tension between utopia and dystopia in radical responses to the Second World War. As the major force behind the twentieth century’s two most devastating wars, Germany remains a focal point for examining the connection between industry, capitalism, genocide, and the dialectics of war and peace. After World War II Germany became not only a concrete subject of discourse on how to deal with the criminal state, but also a figure of thought and catalyst for artistic, literary, and theoretical considerations of alternatives to the nation-state.
Historically the myth of united German lands as true advocate for world peace and prosperity began already with the idea of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation being the true heir to the Roman Empire while brutally ‘pacifying’ central Europe. Later, at the beginning of Modern German Literature, one finds the most devastating Thirty Years' War as setting for the adventures of Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus Teutsch, with the jester Jupiter fantasizing about the “Teutschen Helden, der die ganze Welt bezwingen, und zwischen allen Völkern Fried stiften wird”. Since then a permanent state of war, but also the superiority of an empire to come has frequently been part of the discussions about areas that are called ‘teutsch’. In the 19th century, as German nation-building was regarded as delayed, under the slogan of the “Sonderweg” the right imagined how Germany, as intellectually supreme to the other European countries, would finally become a dominant power in a colonized world. At the same time, under the catch phrase of “Deutsche Misere,” the left lamented the absence of a revolution (das Ausbleiben der Revolution, ‘Ausbleiben’ is not very well rendered through ‘lack’ or ‘absence’) while assuming that—when it finally came—the German revolution would skip the bourgeois phase and experience the most vanguard proletarian revolution, playing an almost messianic role in the future permanent revolution. In the meantime, some scholars and philosophers ague, 19th century romanticism invented Germany anew and paved the way for 20th century fascism, which leads to a certain opposition against romanticism in contemporary leftist theory.
Germany and its end was and still is in many ways a figure of thought and catalyst for artistic, literary, and philosophical discourses. The panel wants to bring together papers that examine the utopian and dystopian undercurrents of these visions in literature and the arts as well as in media and theory.
In addition to the above, the following topics may be of interest
- possibilities beyond the nation state
- utopia becoming dystopia and vice versa
- the (French) concept of Germanophobia
- Eike Geisel and Max Czollek against “die Wiedergutwerdung der Deutschen”
- Slime, Tocotronic, and Deutschpunk against Germany
- internationalist anarchist and Marxist movements
- the political movement of ‘Antideutsche’
- the political and ethical status of revenge
- (Jewish) revenge fantasies and their fetishization
- Rüdiger Safranski, Marie Rotkopf, and antiromantic resentment
- staged remembrance and lack of prosecution from National Socialism to NSU
- the end of the nation-state in general as only way to end National Socialism
- Deborah Feldman’s “Judenfetisch” and Jews in contemporary German culture

Please send a short abstract of about 350 to 500 words in English to julia.ingold@uni-bamberg.de by March 14, 2024. Please also contact me if you are interested, but the deadline is too tight.
Submission of the panel we want to compose is due March 18, 2024. Please note that the GSA demands that “all prospective participants, including moderators and commentators, must be paid members of the German Studies Association for the current year by the submission deadline.” For more info on the conference and the GSA please visit https://www.thegsa.org/conference/current-conference. Please don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions.