“Everything you wish to forget will come back to you,” reads the first sentence from Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Repetition. It could just as well introduce any one of her gripping novels. And in truth, it could serve as the guiding principle of most good literature. Life is lived looking forwards and understood looking backwards. From the naked ego in front of the mirror to the “for-profit” nuclear family and its reproduction of injustice—as Natalia Lomaia writes in her essay on Hjorth—to the loftier collectives like circles of friends, countries, and nations, every form of human socialization is subject to this basic fact.

Berlin is a city defined by its memory culture like no other, and yet it is more oblivious to history than almost every place we’ve known. Living in Berlin confronts one with the question of whether the whole remembering and repeating thing has not regressed into a kind of toxic therapy. Psychoanalytic common sense holds that we have to work through our issues. If Berlin was an individual subject, it would have scarcely escaped destroying itself through its hubris in the last century, picked itself up off the floor, managed its pain through a range of obsessive symptoms, and might now be considered austherapiert, “beyond further treatment.” Yet for all that, its coping strategies consist in little more than denial and dissociation. There are days when Berlin still feels like a good place to be—and then there are the days that make you feel: no city for sane people.

So let’s look outside and take a breath of fresh air. After all, that’s what we set out to do when we started this magazine in February 2024. Alongside Natalia’s essay on Hjorth’s stalking kin, this edition offers some gentler content. Hebe Uhart’s narrator tends to her balcony plants like children, each according to its “way of being”: “one that can withstand the sun, tough, desert-ready”; another “big and handsome but vacuous, no attempt at originality”; finally, her favorite, “another ivy, uniformly green, has remained small … shady and protected by its precaution.” From Buenos Aires, Uhart passed away in 2018 and has scarcely been translated into German. Her story about cultivating ivy and witchy brews sets the imagination free so completely and beautifully that we could not resist publishing Dagmar Ploetz’s affectionate translation.

“I am a survivor, not a victim,” writes Nahil Mohana. Mohamed Al-Zaqzooq complements this sentiment: either my books remain or I’m leaving. Both authors send us their writings from Gaza, where they work and live. The meaning of this sentence has changed drastically since October 7—or perhaps it hasn’t? Nahil and Mohamed both confirm how genocide and displacement reduce existence to its bare minimum, as Susan Sontag noted in Sarajevo, but they also contest this situation. Where is the line between hunger and appetite, luxury and necessity? Why are bread and beans more important than chocolate, and what right does one have to think that one might burn one’s entire library—assembled over years, with all its books and dedications from friends—to bake a few loaves of bread? Children might be one reason, because their lives are sacred.

Nahil and Mohamed’s texts, translated into English by Katharine Halls and into German by Sandra Hetzl, were not intended as reports on Gaza (of which there are many if one only looks), but as works of literature, necessary luxury, written by people who reject being cast as victims in need of our sympathy or as fodder for our efforts to prove our humanity. Now a grandfather of twins, Holocaust and genocide scholar Omer Bartov returned to the other side of the demarcation line twice last year. Born and raised in Israel, Bartov recounts his shock at the apathy and resignation of many Israelis with a precision and force that transmits just how disturbing the indifference has become. The reader contains Tobias Haberkorn’s translation of Bartov’s essay “Infinite License,” in which Bartov defines Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide and questions the morality of the West.

One Day We’ll Understand is the title of Sim Chi Yin’s collection of photography that give this reader its color, its rhythm, and its stunning cover image. At first, we wondered if it was really a good idea to put a picture of a rusty pistol on the cover. “Weapons and sex, that’s what sells,” is what an experienced and chain-smoking editor, a man with taste and aesthetic instincts, once told us during an internship. Chi Yin’s rusty gun and the other “remnants” from her photo series stand for an archaeology of violence and resistance, but also for the comedy of the archive and, in the longue durée of history, the powerlessness of weapons.

“The Malayan Emergency” was what the British called the unfathomably bloody war that their colonial troops unleashed against communist guerrillas in Malaysia from 1948 to 1960. They also deported and executed Chi Yin’s grandfather. The Malaysian rebels sought to guarantee equal rights for the ethnic Chinese minority, most of whom were descendants of migrants from southern China. Tash Aw’s story “Traitors” investigates the connections between betrayal and conformity that shape the lives of those who, like him, are migrants many times over. Like Chi Yin, Tash Aw was also born to a Chinese-Malaysian family. He later moved from the periphery to the center of the erstwhile empire and into the heart of the elite system of so-called world literature dominated by Anglo-American voices.

Alongside Tash’s story and Nahil’s diary entry, the reader contains two more texts in English. In a review of Johan Grimonprez’s prize-winning, but flawed film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Eric Otieno Sumba recounts the 1961 assassination of Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba that was orchestrated by Belgium and the United States with the acquiescence of the United Nations. Belgium subjected the people of Congo to one of the cruelest colonial regimes for over a century. That it ended with a shameless crime meshes with the criminal history of the entire colonial venture.

Claudia Durastanti’s entry diagnoses contemporary Italian literature with fascism fatigue. Unwilling or unable to seriously grapple with Trump, Musk, Meloni, and hypermodern forms of (neo)fascism, Italian authors have produced a flood of morality tales and coming-of-age stories about domestic life and resistance under Mussolini. It is as if Italy’s writers, Claudia argues, had substituted the fascist credo “Dio, Patria e Familia” with a new trinity of “autofiction, crime, and family.”

There are other ways to write about growing up, as evidenced by Burhan Qurbani cinematic Shakespeare adaptation No Beast. So Fierce (co-written with Enis Maci). Moshtari Hilal reads the characters’ irreconcilable conflict as an honest parable of contemporary Germany’s failure to do justice to its claim to be a nation of immigrants. Meanwhile, Wolfgang Hottner, himself a resident of Bergen, explains the story behind Christian Kracht’s mystical search for refuge in Norwegian nature in his novel Air. In his review “Munelight over Amazon,” Clemens J. Setz—no stranger to internet culture himself—honors Kevin Killian, whose collected book and product reviews on Amazon were recently published by Semiotext(e).

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That’s all, folks. Well, not exactly. The difficulty with repetition and working through is that it has no inherent limits. The measures of memory must be derived from memory itself. Should Germany rely on itself in coming to terms with the past? In a now famous speech from May 8, 1985, West German Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker gave an answer that would define a generation: Yes, it should; indeed, it must. “We must come to terms with it on our own,” Weizsäcker stated just before the onset of the first Historikerstreit over comparing, relativizing, and explaining the origins of National Socialism.

While this might have seemed like a useful admonition back then, Germany’s practice of endlessly reminding itself of its own crimes has devolved into a kind of solipsism. Anything that questions the state-led rituals of memory culture is deemed suspect. Whence this stubbornness, so wrong-headed and regrettable as it is, and how might Germans take a different, more fruitful perspective on their own history and the histories of the victims and survivors of their crimes? Erhard Schüttpelz grapples with these questions in his epic rebuttal “Liberation Day,” which closes out the reader.

Berlin / Fortaleza, in June 2025