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'Illegality and Law-full-ness', by Stacy Douglas A week before the 13th Berlin Biennale’s opening in June 2025, a social media account took to criticizing Biennale curator Zasha Colah’s contention, made in a recently published interview, that “there is no censorship in Germany”.[1] The social media response was a result of some activists’ and artists’ perception that the curator was claiming that there is no legally-instantiated censorship in Germany. Individuals experiencing suppression of their words, especially those finding themselves out of work or targeted for being critical of Israel’s ongoing destruction of life in Gaza, took issue with the statement. My intervention here is to defend Colah’s assertion about the distinction between legally-articulated censorship and a more amorphous political culture of fear, discipline, and obedience, not because of a semantic difference, but because there is a strategic need for clarity. In most liberal democracies, it is somewhat straightforward to take a state to court when they explicitly infringe on stated citizens’ civil and political rights (of course, citizens’ economic unfreedom under liberal capitalism remains impenetrable in this arrangement); it is less easy to fight an unspoken, silent target. Moreover, while this is a pressing issue in contemporary Germany, conceptual clarity on what we mean by “legal” and a caution about fetishizing the law, is an important lesson for the global left more broadly. Read more: https://t.co/ugEnfGsrhc