E-flux journal is publishing the English text of an email conversation on autonomy that the late great Marina Vishmidt and I had last winter. The timing of this issue is quite something: right after the American presidential election, and on the day that the German Bundestag has passed a resolution designed to stifle critical voices in academia, art and the media even more effectively. With the coalition government just having collapsed and the call for new elections getting louder, this is effectively a “lame duck” parliament, yet a depressingly impressive cross-party alliance has felt the need to intensify the repression of pro-Palestinian and anticolonial voices. It may look like like a genocide, walk like a genocide and quack like a genocide—but, for heaven’s sake, don’t say the g-word! With Netanyahu already rejoicing in Trump’s victory, the German parliament is effectively paving the way for a future right-wing coalition that will be in step with the US regime. And the latter, in turn, will no doubt take a page out of the German McCarthyite playbook.

I do hope that word is getting out about the situation in Germany. One way of honouring Marina would be to strengthen the Strike Germany movement as much as possible, and only agree to work with those (people within) German institutions that prove their divergence from the state of utter intellectual, political and ethical bankruptcy that marks the Tscherman governing caste. If you are invited by a German academic institute, art space or magazine, don’t say yes and be surprised later. If you don’t know the people in question already, or perhaps even if you think you do: Don’t assume shared values but press them, test them.