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“THIS DISCOVERY OF CONDITIONS TAKES PLACE THROUGH THE INTERRUPTION OF HAPPENINGS.” (W. BENJAMIN) The TRIAL: A Journal of Poetry and Politics is a print-only literary journal based in the immigrant arts communities of Nuremberg, Germany. Printed, founded, and edited in the city and nearby towns, The TRIAL is international in its aims. It is distributed in cafés and shops locally—and distributed around the world. It features local artists, writers, and critics—and publishes new thinkers from all places. At a time of the rise of new fascisms, The TRIAL is a venue for radical resistance and new forms of human flourish.

Nuremberg, as the public center of fascism’s first rise, is synonymous with terror. It is synonymous also with putting fascism ‘on trial.’ While Hannah Arendt has produced influential left-wing critique of fascism in the occupied halls of Nuremberg, the story of the city’s ‘saving’ is contested. The 1945 moment is claimed to have inagurated a post-fascist era, where the nation-state endowed with liberal economics would cure us of all political ailment. The TRIAL emerges when the stupidity and self-serving danger of this interpretation of Nuremberg’s story is laid bare. Rather than saluting ‘the trials’ of nation-states—seduced now by the exact fascist ideology they were supposed to sweep away—The TRIAL entrusts the prosecution this time in the hands of artists, critics, and poets.

The TRIAL is the collectivist fruit of stubborn belief that social transformation occurs in the bellies and brains of the people. We believe that working people are eager to produce politics that accurately examine how political economy functions and to make art that transforms this consciousness into new, radical-democratic politics. It is in the art of working people where lies the synthesis that bears radical resistance. At this overwhelming political juncture, working people must fight against technototalitarian impulses and ground each other. In sturdy print, we can share new politics to produce more liberatory futures and new art to make the world more bearable—and beautiful.

We hope you will join us—workers, artists, thinkers—to put the gavel out of billionaires’ algorithims and back into the rightful hands of the people. This journal is the people’s court. Together: We’ll put the times back on TRIAL.

NUREMBERG, SPRING 2025