In diesem Editorial begründen wir die intellektuelle Agenda, die dem Themenheft «German Theory» zugrunde liegt. Um diese mit anglophonen, aber auch anderen (frankophonen, lusophonen) Theoriediskussionen ins Gespräch zu bringen, möchten wir aus der deutschsprachigen Geistesgeschichte entstandene Denkstile bewusster, autonomer, aber auch dialogischer in den Blick nehmen, in internationale Theoriedebatten einbringen, und so für eine Pluralität von Denkstilen werben.

In this editorial, we introduce the special section on the politics of memory of Kiel 1969, the famous German geographers' conference, in which, as the myth narrates, a revolution took place within the discipline of German-language geography. We introduce the three individual statements by Verne, Strohmayer and Weichhart, who all recount their entanglements with the myth of Kiel 1969, and place them in a wider context of the history of geography.

This paper studies a student movement that opened up spaces for radical geography at the geography department of the University of Zurich in the early 1980s, where these students demanded a new curriculum. Building on archival material and narrative interviews, this paper documents the "thought style" of these student initiatives and illustrates the antagonistic political mood, in which these initiatives operated. This case thereby shows the precariousness of radical theory in geography.

This paper critically examines critical geography’s moralizing high ground. The paper makes this critique through a detour via the analyse of the critical gesture of the Greek cynics that the philosophers Foucault and Sloterdijk take to be a political practice of provocative truth-telling: For Foucault and Sloterdijk, the cynics are anti-dogmatic, anti-theoretical and anti-scholastic. I will argue, however, that the cynic is in danger of speaking from the moral high ground of an anti-critique.

I critically interrogate the usefulness of the terminology of „post-secularism“ to understand the entanglement of religion and politics in multi-religious societies in the West and elsewhere. I suggest that the vocabulary of a descriptive political theology is better suited to study these dynamics and apply this conceptual vocabulary to analyse political-normative debates on Indian secularism and the everyday struggles of religious actors in the violent politics of Sri Lanka's civil war.