Germany at a Turning Point: Political and Economic Challenges in Historical Perspective.
We are delighted to announce the publication of a special issue of German Politics and Society entitled: Germany at a Turning Point: Political and Economic Challenges in Historical Perspective.
Guest edited by CEES’ Alexander Reisenbichler, the special issue grew out of a 2024 conference jointly organized by CEES/JIGES and Cambridge University’s DAAD Research Hub. The special issue features contributions from our own Doris Bergen, Randall Hansen, and Phil Triadafilopoulos.
The outcome of a thriving collaboration between the University of Toronto and Cambridge University, this publication tackles a wide range of challenges facing contemporary Germany from a comparative and historical lens. Contributors draw on interdisciplinary perspectives to address migration and labour, (geo)economic challenges in energy policy, the current housing crisis, historical legacies of reunification, the Holocaust and cultural memory, and finally, and the German constitution.
In their introduction to the special issue, Randall Hansen and Alexander Reisenbichler place Germany’s current malaise in historical perspective, demonstrating that recurring swings between optimism and gloom have long shaped political, cultural, and economic debates about the Federal Republic. Invoking not just Merkel and Scholz, but theologian Thomas Fuller and Batman’s Harvey Dent, they provide historical perspective to (and a dose of much-needed optimism about) the problems facing the Federal Republic.
Their open-access introductory essay provides an overview of the sharp oscillations in post-war perceptions of Germany and, indeed, Germany’s ability to tackle its own political, economic, and cultural challenges. As Hansen and Reisenbichler write,
The highly cyclical recent history is the backdrop to this current special issue. As the reader will see from our presentation of evidence, we take the dystopian prognoses currently in vogue—especially in Germany—with a large dose of Salz. Indeed, if there has been one constant in post-war German economic history, it is that whenever pundits have declared the German economy dead, it rises again...
As the British journalist and one-time Berliner Roger Boyes put it in 2006, “Never write off the Germans. As every English football fan knows, they don't know when they are beaten.”
Continue reading here: From Merkelmania to Malaise in: German Politics and Society Volume 43 Issue 2 (2025)
