Legitimate grief,illegitimate protest in times of conjuncture? The moral governance of German Staatsräson on solidarity with Palestine

Abstract

Since October 2023, public expressions of solidarity with Palestine in Germany have been subject to extensive political and institutional repression. While such repression of pro-Palestinian sentiments is not extraordinary across Western contexts, Germany’s response is distinctively grounded in its doctrine of Staatsräson which claims that the lessons of the Holocaust mandate unconditional political support for Israel. Reading this moment as a conjuncture in Stuart Hall’s sense, our intervention examines how remembrance culture, racialisation and decolonial struggle intersect to redefine the moral boundaries of legitimate protest and belonging in contemporary Germany. Combining Hall’s conjunctural analysis with Lamont’s work on moral and symbolic boundaries and Fassin’s notion of moral economy, we show how the imperative of historical responsibility engenders a contemporary regime of moral governance of the German public sphere. We argue that this leads to a conditionalisation of empathy that renders expressions of solidarity with Palestinians morally suspect unless articulated within a state-sanctioned grammar of remembrance. Ultimately we demonstrate that Germany’s contemporary national identity is shaped by the selective recognition of suffering and the marginalisation of dissenting solidarities, in effect reproducing colonial hierarchies of life and loss.