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„German Theory“ is a theory that has not yet been written, but could have been. „Theory“ is here understood as a “territory of thought” that transcends the boundaries of its origins, and travels to other sites. „French Theory“, for example, is the label for the travel of French poststructuralism to Anglophone humanities. In this sense, „German Theory“ does not exist (yet), but as this paper will argue, it exists as a potentiality that has not (yet) actualized. To show this potential, this paper turns to the work of Friedrich A. Kittler. To illustrate why Kittler did not become a cornerstone of „German Theory“, and to discuss how it could have been, this paper proceeds in two steps: first, it traces the recent history of the reception of Foucault in German language geography and the humanities. This analysis shows that Kittler and German language geography morphed Foucault's discourse theory into two distinct thought styles – the „discourse school“ in German language geography into a „textual“ one; Kittler into a „materialist“ one. This incompatibility of thought styles, this paper asserts, obstructed the travel of Kittler to Anglophone geography, although Kittler's notion of „materiality of communication“ resonates with the „material turn“ in Anglophone geography. Nor did the Foucault of the „discourse school“ travel to Anglophone geography. Kittler's „German Foucault“ travelled to Anglophone media studies as „German School“, though. In the last part of the paper, I ask the question how Kittler's „German Foucault“ could have travelled to (anglophone) geography and what could have been gained theoretically through this travel.

In this editorial, we sketch the intellectual agenda for a themed issue on German Theory. We understand German Theory as a creative and dialogical space to engage a multitude of thought styles, common in the Geisteswissenschaften and to bring them into conversations with anglophone, as much as francophone, lusophone, Italian, Spanish and other forms of Theory. This agenda promotes a ‚provincialization‘ of anglophone Geography that is connecting these thought styles rather than confining them to bounded provinces in debate. „German Theory“, thus understood, is ultimately an entangled theory.

In this editorial, we introduce the special section on the politics of memory of „Kiel 1969“, the famous German geographers' conference, during which, as the myth narrates, a revolution took place within the discipline of German-language geography. By introducing and contextualizing the three individual statements by Julia Verne, Ulf Strohmayer and Peter Weichhart, who all recount their entanglements with the myth of „Kiel 1969“, we invite the reader to reflect upon the dynamics through which „events“ turn into „myths“ that shape individual careers and strategic struggles within the discipline.

In early summer 1980, radical geography students rallied around the slogan „Geografe nüme schlafe!“ („Geographers, stop sleeping!“) to take part in the radical youth movement that shook the city of Zurich at that time. In turn, these activist students brought these struggles back into the university and the geography department, where they confronted the professorate with their demands for a new curriculum. This paper argues that the antagonistic Stimmung, in which these struggles took place, produced a radical „thought style“ that flourished in a specific constellation of „thought events“: a prominent theory seminar in 1980, the AK WissKri, a network of radical geography students, the „Geoscope“ journal and, finally, a number of diploma theses on feminist, urban and historical geography. In these thought events, a radical geography materialized outside and beyond the mainstream of German language geography. Building on archival material and narrative interviews, this paper documents these student initiatives for a radical geography, and illustrates the precarious conditions of possibility of radical geography, in Zurich, and beyond.

This paper takes Foucault's and Sloterdijk's reception of the Greek cynics as an intellectual resource to critically examine critical geography's moralizing high ground. I analyse how, in 1983, Foucault and Sloterdijk paint the cynical impulse as a political practice of provocative truth-telling against the moral high-grounds of the dogmatic left of the 1970s: For Foucault and Sloterdijk, the cynics are anti-dogmatic, anti-theoretical and anti-scholastic. I will argue, however, that the cynical impulse is itself in danger of speaking from the moral high ground of anti-critique, a disposition that needs the anti-dote of skepticism.

In these afterthoughts to a themed issue on the Geographies of Post-Secularity, I critically interrogate the analytical purchase of the terminology of post-secularism. I suggest that the concept of the post-secular is ill-suited to provide a vocabulary for multi-religious societies in the West as much as elsewhere. Instead, I suggest that the vocabulary of a descriptive political theology (Assmann) better helps us grasp the continuing negotiation of the dialectic relations between the secular and the religious. I illustrate this conceptual vocabulary for the study of religion and politics in the postcolonial world, first, in the political-normative debates on Indian secularism, and second, in the everyday struggles of religious actors in the violent politics of Sri Lanka's civil war, to then return to debates on (post-) secularity. I conclude that, indeed, we have never been secular – that the dialectic relations between the secular and the religious are bound to remain, and to become further complicated in increasingly multi-religious societies.

This editorial provides the intellectual background for a themed issue that argues for a (re)consideration of human geography as a "Geisteswissenschaft". Engaging with the question of how a geography anchored in the arts and humantities might look like today, it tries to unsettle the kind of "theory-driven", post-structuralist research that has come to dominate human geography following the "cultural turn". In proposing a more thorough engagement with the potential of intrepretative, hermeneutic and phenomenological approaches, we conceptualise a "geisteswissenschaftliche" human geography as a much-needed irritation of the social scientific mainstream.

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Dieser Artikel analysiert den Gebrauch geopolitischer Diskurse zur Legitimierung politischer Machtansprüche an Raum und Territorien, wie sie in Sri Lanka seit dem Ende des ethnischen Bürgerkrieges zum Tragen kommen. Die Analogie der «Schurken»-Metapher dient als analytischer Rahmen zur Untersuchung nationalistischer Diskurse innerhalb der drei ethnischen Gruppen in Sri Lanka, den Singhalesen.Tamilen und Muslimen. In diesen Diskursen geht es um konkurrierende Territorialansprüche zwischen den ethnischen Gruppen. Diese Diskurse versuchen,die eigenen Ansprüche argumentativ zu legitimieren und diejenigen des «ethnisch Anderen» zu unterminieren. Gelingt es, die andere Verhandlungspartei als «Schurken» darzustellen, lassen sich Strategien der Stärke und Gewalt besser rechtfertigen und Konfliktlösungen auf territoriale Argumente reduzieren. Diese «Schurken»-Logik konstruiert die Fiktion ethnisch homogener Räume und verdeckt dabei die Existenz von komplexen, multi-ethnischen Siedlungsstrukturen in den umstrittenen Gebieten im Nordosten einerseits und die relative Dynamik von Minderheits- und Mehrheitsstatus einer ethnischen Gruppe im jeweiligen lokalen Kontext andererseits.

In «Die Erfindung des Politischen» (1993) beschreibt Ulrich Beck Subpolitik als den Ort, an dem die Grenze zwischen Politik und Nichtpolitik verschwindet. Aus der zunehmenden Wirkkraft von Subpolitik erwächst die grundlegende Frage, mit welcher Legitimation diese Art von Subpolitik in die Sphäre der institutionalisierten Politik eindringt. Beck’s Subpolitik soll im Anschluss an theoretische Arbeiten von Chantal Mouffe und Giorgio Agamben als post-politische Aspiration bezeichnet werden, die einen Ausnahmezustand herstellt, indem sie Räume für das Politische postuliert und diese Ausnahmeräume zur Regel erklärt. Dieses Argument wird anhand einer bürokratisierten Form von Subpolitik analysiert, die in der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit (EZA) Eingang gefunden hat: der partizipativen Planungsmethode PRA.