The term “frozen conflict” came to prominence in the 1990s. As post-Soviet Russia’s influence over Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia waned, the country waged two wars in Chechnya, but it also conducted smaller military operations in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and later Nagorno-Karabakh. Most of these smaller wars were never fully ended, nor were they formally declared in the first place. Russia deemed it more useful to keep these wars unresolved than to win them outright. “Frozen conflict” is a euphemism for this state of calculated aggression. It is a military situation in which overt fighting is too costly, not necessarily because both parties are evenly matched or because escalation would mean mutual destruction. Rather, it is advantageous for the stronger party to maintain a state of permanent non-peace, while the weaker party still musters enough resolve and personnel to avoid surrender.
When our Reader 6 went to print in early March, the U.S. and Israel had bombed Iran for several days. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, along with much of Iran’s military elite, had been killed by one of the first strikes on Teheran. Regime change, a goal Benjamin Netanyahu has pursued for decades, was now also on Trump’s agenda, or so he said. The Islamic Republic, which massacred thousands of protesters earlier this year, has retaliated with strikes on U.S. military bases in over a dozen countries and missiles fired at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
It may seem ironic to invoke the concept of frozen conflict against the backdrop of a hot war between the two strongest military blocs in the Middle East which dragging the world into an energy crisis along its wanton destruction of human lives and infrastructures. Even if bombings will last for weeks, it is unlikely that an illegal air war waged by the U.S. and Israel will usher in the Islamic Republic’s defeat or end its nuclear program forever. In two years of unrelenting ground war in Gaza, Israel has not been able to destroy Hamas. Like his threats or half-joking attempts to “buy” Greenland, “govern” Venezuela, or “take” Cuba, Trump’s show of force in Iran is more likely to usher in a sort of permanent non-peace that allows him to declare victory without establishing a new and permanent order. In this sense, Trump is indeed following the authoritarian playbook of Vladimir Putin, who has managed Russia’s sphere of influence with exactly that strategy for almost thirty years.
In its psychological dimension, frozen conflict is a misnomer. It is not a state of cool or calm, but one of constant alertness, a grinding down that depletes material and spiritual resources. Legally, it describes a gray zone that is all too handy for authoritarian rulers: there is no treaty or legal framework; everything is subject to their discretion. If, as Elad Lapidot describes in his essay “Gaza as World War,” we are indeed in the antechamber of World War III, then this is going to be a planetary frozen conflict with fits of hot war like in Ukraine or Iran.
This magazine is published in Berlin, a city that only a couple of years ago was touted as the “capital of the free world” and still takes some pride in its liberal self-image. Anyone who follows politics here knows the German fetish for legalism, rules, and order. Rechtsstaat—a state governed by law—is what many Germans associate with “democracy,” much more so than the American formula of “a government of the people, by the people, for the people.” This has deep historical roots. The Thirty Years’ War devastated the German lands more than any other part of Europe. When it ended, there was no German state able to guarantee prosperity or lead a national project. What instead emerged in the seventeenth century with the Peace Treaties of Westphalia was a decentralized order of sovereign and semi-sovereign polities, governed by rules designed to limit conflict and regulate coexistence. In many ways, the system of international law that emerged from the two world wars of the twentieth century still relied on these principles.
By March 2026, the German government no longer even attempts to present itself as a defender of “rules-based international order.” That position had long since been hypocritical, and became all the more visible when Germany, with its de facto support for Israel’s war of destruction on Gaza, opposed the legal opinions of the ICG (provisional measures for genocide prevention), the ICC (arrest warrant against Netanyahu), the UN Human Rights Council (accusing Israel of committing genocide). Also domestically, government representatives and authorities seem to care less and less about fundamental rights and principles once established as central to the Germany’s post-nazi identity.
It has been said that Trumpism is grotesque offspring of the U.S.’s algorithmic culture wars. If that is so, then the German turn toward an authoritarian, Israel-centered Staatsräson is, in effect, its own native version. This culture war over the semantics of particular statements on Israel and Palestine, waged by trolls, right-wing and conservative editorial writers, and unfortunately also German public officials, looks much more like the U.S. conflict over immigration, university autonomy, or reproductive rights than many liberal Germans care to admit. By its own figures, the Berlin public prosecutor’s office was conducting 420 open investigations against pro-Palestinian protesters at the end of 2025. Only a fraction of these will ever lead to charges, which in no way diminishes the chilling effect on freedom of expression. Both in the U.S. and here, it is ultimately the courts that must play a central role in upholding fundamental rights of free expression, political speech, and academic and artistic freedom.
Several battles in this culture war have unfolded around Berlin’s cultural institutions in recent weeks. On February 23, the Goethe-Institut in Exile—a Berlin-based branch of the state-funded Goethe-Institut, with which this magazine, like many cultural institutions in the city has collaborated—announced its immediate closure. A brief statement cited “current political developments,” “acute pressure on our structures,” and “limited financial resources.” Dozens of talks, reading groups, and concerts, as well as an entire festival scheduled for this summer, were suddenly canceled, apparently out of the blue.
The Goethe-Institut in Exile was founded in 2022 in response to the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and worked primarily with exiled writers and artists from countries including Sudan, Syria, and Belarus. It was conceived as a gesture of refuge. The sudden dismantling of the entire institution came just forty-eight hours before a scheduled poetry reading featuring, for the first time, three Palestinian authors. (One of the invited authors, essayist Alaa Alqaisi, had only been able to flee Gaza last summer thanks to an academic scholarship in Ireland—you can read her Berlin diary here.)
The reference to “political developments” suggests that the institute had to close due to political pressure over the Gaza reading. But pressure from whom, and to what end? There was no public “controversy” surrounding the institute or its decision to host an event related to Gaza. Local press reported that an impromptu replacement for the reading took place without incident. Officials at the Goethe-Institut and the Foreign Ministry, which provides two-thirds of the institute’s budget, have remained embarrassingly silent about the sudden closure.
Compared with this secrecy, the minister of state for culture Wolfram Weimer’s clumsy attempt to establish an “advisory committee” for future Berlinale editions, after the Staatsräson right had fabricated yet another anti-Semitism scandal around a Syrian-Palestinian prizewinner, was refreshingly transparent. Tricia Tuttle, the festival’s director, ultimately kept her post, but it is unclear which international film curator would ever want to succeed her if they are to face what is effectively a censorship body imposed by the Ministry of State for Culture.
Since the Berlinale, Weimer has doubled down on his hardline course. When it became apparent in mid-March that his office had consulted the Verfassungsschutz to remove three bookshops from contention for a state-funded award, Weimer did not apologize for or repudiate the practice. His CSU colleague, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, defended Weimer’s approach and, according to press reports, is urging other federal agencies to make broader use of Verfassungsschutz checks when vetting funding applicants, especially NGOs. The Verfassungsschutz is a federal domestic intelligence agency answerable to the Interior Ministry, tasked with monitoring anti-constitutional activity. If the logic advanced by Weimer and Dobrindt prevails, participation in Germany’s still relatively generous system of public funding for culture and civic life could come to hinge on preemptive approval by an agency whose mission ranges from counterextremism and counterespionage to counterterrorism.
It was always an illusion that publicly funded culture in Germany had nothing to do with “state culture” (and, by extension, “reason of state”). If the past few weeks have shown us anything, it is this: the lines of conflict between a liberal and an authoritarian understanding of cultural policy are plain to see. The struggle for an arts and culture scene that can engage with themes of its own choosing according to criteria independent of government—including, but not limited to, the Israel/Palestine issue—has become a frozen conflict in which the struggle is waged by covert means and by virtually every other means available. If you ask cultural managers in this city, many simply no longer feel able to do their work under these conditions (not to mention the artists who are supposed to create it). If the arts are no longer free, the state can only grow more repressive—all the more so if the AfD soon enters government at state and perhaps even federal level.
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Our Reader 6 is illustrated with oil paintings that depict the reality of a cultural space stretching from Iran through the Levant and the entire Mediterranean to Europe, including its mythologically charged history and a present shaped by migration and hybridization, fast fashion, and tradition. These images were painted, with astonishing technical mastery, by the artist Rayan Yasmineh.
Yasmineh was born in Paris in 1996 to a Lebanese mother and a Palestinian father. Perhaps his parents wished for him to be a child “liberated from all the unfortunate determining factors that might attach him to a genealogy, a country or a history that preexists him,” as stated in Louisa Yousfi’s narrative accompanying the images, “A First Name is a Talisman,” perhaps they were also aware that such a lack of place and identity in this world is “a miserable ambition,” as Yousfi goes on to write. The duo Yousfi-Yasmineh is also responsible for the cover and content of a novel—my colleague Meret Weber explains more on page 75 of our Reader—and the two of them impressed us so much that we entrusted them with the centerfold of this print edition.
14 essays and reviews are arranged around this visual center, grappling more or less directly with the conflicts of the present. In his essay on the reactionary core of the Iranian diaspora, Damon Taleghani demonstrates just how far-fetched the projections between the Orient and the Occident still are. Deborah Feldman writes about German-Jewish conversions and their political instrumentalization; Roman Widder brings the Soviet “land reclamation specialist” and staunch anti-fascist Andrei Platonov back into contemporary consciousness. Verena Lueken portrays Toni Morrison as a whimsical yet determined strategist for Black literature in the U.S.; Nora Haddada describes how some of the U.S.’s most famous Black writers lost faith in Paris as a place of happy exile a mere generation earlier.
In his review of Safae el Khannoussi’s Oroppa, Frank Keizer discusses a Dutch debut novel that exposes Europe as the permeable and malleable construct that many people on this continent still believe it to be. Maxi Wallenhorst portrays the “Cuckold” as a contradictory connoisseur of heterosexual culture; Lianna Mark describes the two protagonists from Vincenzo Latronic’s Perfection as the most conformist Berliners of our time; and Lukas Haffert analyzes the problems with Gabriel Zucman’s Billionaires’ Tax. Ryan Ruby’s poems treat us all to a round of “Nothing Doing” at Café Pasternak, while Diedrich Diederichsen takes us into a “schism” in German pop journalism that, as one might suspect, has remained a frozen conflict of a very special kind to this day. At the end of Reader 6, Elad Lapidot and Alaa Alqaisi, as already mentioned, write about the world war over Gaza: one as an Israeli philosopher in exile, the other as a writes who escapedwith her life.
—March 23, 2026