This talk examines postwar German–Israeli military-industrial relations as a constitutive site in which Holocaust memory, Cold War realignment, and contemporary security governance converge. Challenging interpretations that attribute the ideological and narrative architecture of Germany’s material support for Israel genocidal campaign to a “derailed” memory politics, it will examine how the dominant discourse of German historical responsibility for genocide— epitomized in the dictum “Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson” — has converted so-called “historical guilt” into a political economy of militarization and arms circulation.
The first part of the talk examines West Germany’s infrastructural role in Israel’s violent settler-colonial expansion between 1950 and 1967, shining light on the centrality of industrial transfer, infrastructural development, technical expertise, trained personnel, and military aid. These processes simultaneously enabled West Germany’s reintegration into the Cold War order and Israel’s consolidation as a regional military power.
The second part turns to shared military architecture that Germany and Israel have built up over decades, focusing on the co-development of counterinsurgency practices and Israel’s regional integration into global circuits of energy and resource extraction.
Taken together, the talk argues that Staatsräson functions as a euphemism for ongoing military cooperation, embedding German memory culture within enduring regimes of coloniality, militarization, and capitalist accumulation.

Die Vortragsreihe „Kapitalismus und Krieg“ wird von der AG Internationale Beziehungen und Politische Ökonomie (AB4 / AG Koddenbrock) an der Fakultät für Soziologie ausgerichtet.

Weitere Informationen unter: sekretariat.koddenbrock@uni-bielefeld.de