Articles by: Andreas Pohl

Author Biography:

Andreas Pohl is an educator and writer living on Wurundjeri land. He emigrated to Australia from Germany in the late 1980s and over the last two decades he lived in Vietnam for extended periods of time. His memoir Opi—The Two Lives of My Grandfather was published in 2023 by Arcadia, the general interest imprint of Australian Scholarly Publishing.

Postcard from Germany: The Paralysed Republic

In either case, the AfD’s landslide win is a pivotal moment for Germany. For the first time since 1945, an extremist right party has the opportunity to lead a state government. How did it come to that?

The Fallacy of Analogy: Gaza, Nazis and the Problem of Historical Comparisons

Referencing Nazism to criticize Israel’s conduct in Gaza is problematic for both pragmatic and moral reasons, particularly if one accepts that what happens in Gaza amounts to an attempted genocide

A Postcard from Madrid: Guernica, Gaza and the Power(lessness) of Images of War

Images heighten and transform suffering, but at the same time, and necessarily so, remove its immediacy.

Compulsory Democracy

The law surmises a flaw in the Australian political psyche, an inherent tendency towards political apathy, stronger than in other democratic countries. A flaw that apparently can only be combatted through coercion.

The Legacy of War: On the 50th Anniversary of the End of the Vietnam War

As the tourist industry in Vietnam has become more sophisticated, an amusement park version of the conflict has developed playing to the ghoulish fascination with a war in which the vast majority of visitors had no personal investment.

The Death of a General: Memory in Việt Nam

But there was no underestimating the outpouring of public grief. Yet was it grief for the man, or for the Kitsch of an idealised past of seemingly untainted noble political goals?

A Postcard from Albania: On the Legacy of Twentieth-Century State Socialism

As Albania remodels itself as a Mediterranean holiday playground, the connection between history and politics recedes.

History and Ancestry: On the collective imagination of our past

Harnessing the widely held belief of identity being connected to ancestry might well have the potential to break the spell of the triumphalist version of our history and hopefully others will follow in its wake.

A Culture of Remembrance?

Erinnerungskultur, or culture of remembrance, conveys the idea that the memory of Germany’s past needs to be permanently woven into both its political and its everyday culture.