Stories of war, loss, and destruction are often met with claims that literature’s most noble function is to remember what otherwise would have been lost. But isn’t this symptomatic of a disturbingly limited conception of literature? When violence becomes the norm and cultural identities are suppressed, attacked, and eliminated, a literary practice that puts all its bets on memoria’s deeds runs the risk of coming too late. In its own subtle way, the reliance on not forgetting or not being forgotten might even legitimize the politics of destruction. And, generally speaking, should we not be wary when technologies designed in private minds are scaled up to entire groups, communities, and societies?
Yevgenia Belorusets places great value on documentation. Still, when I read her texts, these kinds of questions keep haunting me. On the one hand, she engages her subjects—whether it be people, images, rumors, or snippets from the news—with the kind of discreet inquisitiveness that one might expect from an ethnographer. But on the other, she never rests satisfied with just recording experiences, instead seeking other modes of representation not beyond, but within her calm, measured tone. Following up on her essays for the Berlin Review on the beginning(s) of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, the “infrastructural battle” over water in Mykolaiv, and the campaign of forced conscription, Yevgenia’s text in this issue contends with a cornerstone of her home country’s defense narrative: the supposed willingness of Ukrainians to endure the war, whatever the price; their unquestionable commitment to “being unbreakable.” Yevgenia’s brilliance lies in her capacity to identify the fissures in this narrative of heroism without ever pretending to resolve the contradiction “that the war is both a free choice and an unavoidable necessity.”
Many articles in this volume are joined by their interest not so much in memoria and more on what might be called “reconstruction.” In an era defined by the “desire for destruction”—the recent diagnosis of our times offered by Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey in a book reviewed by Jan-Werner Müller—the authors gathered here have no illusion that the destruction will let up any time soon, not even in places where the weapons have been laid down. But they reject the common conclusion that this insight necessitates a “return to realism,” a “defense of Western values,” rearmament, and more brutality and austerity both domestically and abroad. Demonstrating that this kind of rhetoric plays into the hands of malevolent forces is a decent start. But the authors featured in this volume invite readers to expand their temporal and intellectual horizons. How can we think of reconstruction when destruction is still going full speed ahead? Where can we find (empirical, poetic?) hope when the moral bankruptcy of the present hasn’t been acknowledged?
Our texts can’t answer these questions on their own, but they do our understanding of them. Drawing on his grave disappointment in Germany’s memory culture, A. Dirk Moses reflects on what “Education after Gaza after Education after Auschwitz” might look like without simply repackaging the self-centered legacy of the generation of 1968. Israeli society, writes Omer Bartov, must confront its complicity in a genocide before it can ever think about education and the politics of memory. And on a more elementary level, Didier Fassin asks how the rejection of violence in its many different forms can be seen not just as passive self-defense, but as active resistance and as a distinct mode of relating to the world.
Perhaps surprisingly (or perhaps not), the most concrete reconstruction in this reader plays out in its most fictional text. “A yenta on her deathbed rewrites Marx’s magnum opus, Capital. Liberties are taken”—these were that stuck in my mind from Jordy Rosenberg’s announcement of his forthcoming second novel. (The teaser has since been replaced by more serious-sounding selections.) The excerpt published here in Milena Adam’s fast-paced German translation recalls the moment when the narrating mother, lying in her “bed (soon to be deathbed?),” comes to understand that her “so-called daughter” will never have children. At first glance, “Mein Leben, von Barbara Rosenberg” seems to follow the classic formula of “memory as preservation.” But the cascade of minute details makes us doubt Barbara’s reliability, and we slowly realize that the real issue might not be some photograph in a casket, but the more fundamental impossibility of restitution and a last attempt, against all odds, to forge bonds nevertheless.
Tezer Özlü’s writing contended with the threshold between life and death, and not just at the end of her own all-too-short life—she died in 1986 in her early forties. Last year, Suhrkamp published her book Suche nach den Spuren eines Selbstmordes (“Search for Traces of a Suicide”), originally written in German; this year, it is publishing a German translation of her Turkish-language novel Cold Nights of Childhood. Her books defy easy categorization. Bildungsroman? Childhood novel? Meditations, travel stories, or conversations with the dead? The concept of autofiction never came up in our discussions of her work, and Esra Akkaya’s portrait of the author printed here likewise dispenses with labels.
“When we act together,” Özlü wrote to her friend and fellow writer Leyla Erbil, “we might be able to bring some truths to light more quickly.” In an era that either expects next to nothing from writing or demands that it place itself at the service of militant politics, our hearts yearn for literature skeptical both of language’s sheer representational function and its self-referential solipsism. That A.V. Marraccini’s critical epigrams, Miriam Stoney’s review of the Fitzcarraldo poetry list, and Lauren Oyler’s post-hedonist aubades deal with open rectangles, line breaks, ballet, and ketamine might be precisely what allows them to engage with the present. After all, just describing a world already known is the opposite of grappling with the present.
Memory as displaced action, perseverance at all costs, being unbreakable, resilience, reparations, autofiction—these are just a few of the hackneyed notions that have popped up in this editorial. One more might be “optimism.” In Germany, we’re always being reminded that we don’t have enough of it. Thus, it’s all the more surprising that Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey would assert that in the West, “an optimistic mood was dominant well into the twentieth century.” This is just one of many questionable claims that Jan-Werner Müller dissects in his review of their book. Ulrich von Loyen critiques the shallow self-help for the nation dished out in Frank Trentmann and Thomas Bergner’s new book. In contrast, Leif Randt, whose affirmative disposition is easier to share, has managed to outsource the question of optimism as his characters and narrator find ways to deal with and even indulge in their own discontent, as Anja Kümmel elucidates in her review of his new novel.
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When optimism is no longer an option, we have to find other ways of reconstructing our future. Images help, and few artists in recent decades have created a visual style with such consistent clarity as Wolfgang Tillmans. The photographer has known our publisher, Tobias, since he interviewed him in 2016 about his personal transformation into an activist (Brexit, Trump, What Is Lost Is Lost Forever—we all remember). That Wolfgang agreed to contribute two series of photographs to our fifth Reader in a year in which he has exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Haus Cleff in his hometown Remscheid, the Albertinum in Dresden, and the Bienal de São Paulo—well, it means the world to us.
Fortaleza, October 2025
