by Andrea Scrima
In November 2023, in an essay for the German national newspaper die taz, I wrote that Germany’s Jews were once again afraid for their lives. It was—and is—a shameful state of affairs, considering that the country has invested heavily in coming to terms with its fascist past and has made anti-antisemitism and the unconditional support of Israel part of its “Staatsräson,” or national interest—or, as others have come to define it, the reason for the country’s very existence. The Jews I’m referring to here, however, were not reacting to a widely deplored lack of empathy following the brutal attacks of October 7. In an open letter initiated by award-winning American journalist Ben Mauk and others, more than 100 Jewish writers, journalists, scientists, and artists living in Germany described a political climate where any form of compassion with Palestinian civilians was (and continues to be) equated with support for Hamas and criminalized. Assaults on the democratic right to dissent in peaceful demonstrations; cancellations of publications, fellowships, professorships, and awards; police brutality against the country’s immigrant population, liberal-minded Jews, and other protesting citizens—the effects have been widely documented, but what matters most now is now: the fact that the German press is still, four months later, nearly monovocal in its support of Israel and that over 28,000 civilians, two-thirds of them women and children, have died.
The recent, legally binding emergency ruling of the International Court of Justice ordering Israel to prevent acts of genocide and do everything in its power to facilitate basic services and humanitarian aid has done little to change the circumstances on the ground or to move the media dial in any significant way. Instead, in response to claims that twelve of its staff of 30,000 were involved in the Hamas attacks, Germany has become the latest country to pull funding from the UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, the main body entrusted with distributing supplies to the vast displaced—with the result that, only days after the ICJ ruling, and hours before the Israeli army is set to begin a ground offensive in Rafah, where over a million displaced Palestinians are presently shivering in tents and have little access to food or potable water, a complete and catastrophic collapse of humanitarian aid to Gaza seems imminent.
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Much has happened in Germany since the conference “We Still Need to Talk,” called to life by the artist Candice Breitz and the literary scholar Michael Rothberg to reflect on urgent questions concerning genocide, political violence, antisemitism, and racism, was cancelled in November 2023. Over 40 authors, academics, and artists had been scheduled to take part until the German Federal Agency for Civic Education revoked the invitation, offering by way of explanation only that “for the moment, everything is overlaid by the horrible events of October 7, 2023.” Since the event’s cancellation, innumerable additional events have been called off due to their “controversial” subject matter; people have been losing their jobs and seeing their reputations ruined for having posted an expression of compassion or grief for the Palestinian wounded and dead. In view of the civil rights violations taking place, wrote the signatories of the above-mentioned open letter, “we fear the atmosphere in Germany has become more dangerous—for Jews and Muslims alike—than at any time in the nation’s recent history.”
On December 15, 2023 the leading American–Russian journalist Masha Gessen, author of the acclaimed Surviving Autocracy, was supposed to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in Germany. Gessen, who identifies as non-binary, has written extensively on Russia and the Ukraine, autocracy, totalitarianism, and oppression; The New Yorker had just published their essay comparing Gaza to the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. When the news hit, a scandal erupted and one of the sponsors of the prize, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, retracted its support. The city of Bremen went ahead and awarded Gessen the prize anyway, albeit a day late and in a different location than planned—and, for fear of provoking violence, in secrecy. In their essay, Gessen describes how memory culture in Berlin initially exhilarated them, and then, “at some point, the effort began to feel static, glassed in, as though it were an effort not only to remember history but also to insure that only this particular history is remembered—and only in this way.”
On the other hand, the Bosnian/Serbian writer Lana Bastašić, winner of the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature for her book Catch the Rabbit, recently took matters into her own hands and terminated her contract with her German publisher S. Fischer Verlag in response to its failure to speak out against the killing in Gaza and its “systematic censorship” of pro-Palestinian voices in Germany. The German press quickly seized on the news, and in a frenzy of Schadenfreude seemingly aimed at taking her down a notch or two and tarnishing her reputation, attacked her for living up to what she saw as her moral and ethical duty. Catch the Rabbit is a novel about the trauma of a younger generation coming of age during the brutal killings of the Bosnian war; a writer awarded for writing about the effects of genocide on young impressionable minds is ridiculed for seeing and voicing shocking parallels to the current crisis in Gaza, in spite of the fact that she is doing this at a high personal and professional cost. Bastašić was recently informed by the Austrian Literature Festival Salzburg that a previous invitation was now, regrettably, being retracted; other cancellations are likely to follow.
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As Holocaust survivor and Germany’s first female professor of political science, Eleonore Sterling, said in 1965, Germany’s deeply patronizing, paternalistic philosemitism replaces a “true act of understanding, repentance, and future vigilance.” It was a far-sighted observation for its time. The philosemitic moral stance of today—in its apparent need to lecture differently-minded Jews on the meaning of Jewishness and the only acceptable position to take in this war—reveals itself as especially absurd when it’s the Jewish and Israeli members of German society that have to point out this inconvenient truth. Any criticism of Israel’s actions is automatically equated with antisemitism; instead of rational arguments based on observable facts, a culture of censorship and seemingly synchronized silence can be observed.
This, of course, has wide-ranging repercussions beyond public discourse. In terms of the decisions made in policing and public funding, Germany implements a specific definition of antisemitism drawn up in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental organization endorsed by the U.S. State Department and an overwhelming majority of EU states. Among its examples of antisemitism, this definition includes “claiming that the State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” “applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation,” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” The German state took this a step further and criminalized the Palestinian flag and various expressions of solidarity, most notably “Stop the genocide in Gaza” and “From the river to the sea,” which were suddenly punishable by up to three years in prison until two German courts ruled in favor of their legality toward the end of last year. In response to the infringements on freedom of expression inherent in the I.H.R.A. definition and the need for a more precise tool for interpretation, a group of scholars of Holocaust history, Jewish studies, and Middle East studies formulated The Jerusalem Declaration, which provides a template for distinguishing between anti-Israeli and antisemitic positions. Among the examples it offers for opinions that one may not agree with, but are not in and of themselves antisemitic: “supporting the Palestinian demand for justice,” “evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state,” and “criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism.”
In its training manuals designed to teach law-enforcement officers how to recognize hate crimes, however, the German government has remained with the I.H.R.A. definition; in 2018, it created an immense bureaucracy of antisemitism commissioners whose sole purpose is to identify and publicly shame all acts and statements it deems antisemitic, including those criticizing Israeli policy or challenging the notion of the “singularity” of the Holocaust, i.e., that address it in a larger context that includes other acts of genocide. Curiously, very few of these commissioners are Jewish, whereas the number of Jews targeted by the I.H.R.A. definition is comparatively high. “The German government’s unconditional support for Israel doesn’t only prevent it from condemning the deaths of civilians in Gaza—it also allows it to ignore the way dissenting Jews in Germany are being thrown under the same bus as they are in Israel,” as the German-American author Deborah Feldman remarked following a conversation with Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck televised in November 2023. The majority of people murdered on October 7th were committed to social justice and a peaceful solution to the Middle East conflict. But, Feldman argues, their protection was sacrificed for the benefit of the radical settlers in the West Bank. In Germany, differences in opinion are negotiated along similar lines: as Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, observed several months ago, only those Jews who are loyal to the Israeli government are listened to, respected, and protected in Germany—in other words, the extreme right-wing, pro-government voices of the Israeli Embassy in Berlin and the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
Emotions are running high, but it should be possible to think and express several truths at the same time: Israel’s right to defend itself; the fact that over twenty-eight thousand Palestinian civilians have already been killed; the horror of the atrocities committed by Hamas; the displacement of two million people and the blanket destruction of their homes and cities. Instead, arguments are phrased in Biblical terms of good and evil, black and white—while anyone venturing into the historical context of Israel’s founding and the ongoing oppression—and now widespread killing—of Palestinians is denounced for relativizing the Hamas attacks and even the Holocaust itself.
The prognosis is disturbing: it was recently revealed that the deeply xenophobic radical right-wing, neo-Nazi-affiliated party AfD (Alternative for Germany), which is rapidly gaining popular support, met in secret with leaders from German business and finance to discuss their plans for a massive deportation of foreign-born residents, including those holding German citizenship—unleashing a frenzy of demonstrations all over the country in protest against fascism and in support of democracy. And as an undercurrent of antisemitism continues to ripple throughout all sectors of German society, the AfD, in a perverse win-win scheme, has sanctimoniously appropriated the anti-antisemitism debate to camouflage its own racist prejudice and openly antisemitic actions and project it onto the country’s migrant population, many of whom are Muslim. The unfortunate result: for fear of being upstaged, Germany’s other political parties, including the ruling coalition between the Social Democratic, Liberal, and Green parties, have outdone the radical right in their call for mass deportations—essentially shutting down the possibility of anything resembling impartial discourse.
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As the saying goes, Germany’s relationship with its past is “complicated”: it turns out that there’s also a trauma of the perpetrator, and the country has undergone a long and painful process in its attempts to work through it. But with what success? “Solidarity with the Jewish state,” Pankaj Mishra writes, “has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity.” Yet while antisemitism is still, eighty years later, alive and well, it can seem that Germans, after all the hard work they’ve done, consider their country rehabilitated and themselves officially absolved. Among those most vociferously defending the unconditional pro-Israel policy, one nonetheless senses an unacknowledged ambivalence toward the dictates of “memory culture,” and perhaps it’s the fear that it might, like a sudden Tourette’s outburst, pop out at an inappropriate moment that makes them less invested in examining the complex landscape of their own inner contradictions than pointing the finger at, and punishing, progressive voices and the “incorrigible” Muslim minority, whom they hold responsible for the rise in antisemitism following the October 7 attacks. But for everything Germany lacks in conviction, it makes up for in efficiency and a pretense of moral superiority. Incidentally, it should be noted here that, according to the German Federal Police, hatred of Jews is anything but an import: 84% of all 2022 antisemitic incidents were committed by German right-wing extremists.
Heated debates over the documenta exhibition and pro-Palestinian BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) campaign, which was deemed antisemitic by a 2019 Bundestag resolution because it allegedly calls the existence of Israel into question, had already dominated coverage of Jewish affairs in the German media prior to the Hamas attacks, but anyone expecting a serious public debate confronting the concrete reality of Israel and Gaza, the explosion of illegal settlements, and the future of its displaced residents waits in vain. Germany, says Feldman, fetishizes Jewishness to the point of obsession; indeed, the country can be said to have a compulsive relationship to Jews. As of late, government voices have been calling for adding a mandatory pro-Israel declaration to the naturalization process, while in Berlin, a similar statement put in place by the Senate for Culture as a legal requirement for receiving arts funding was only retracted—albeit until further notice—after massive protest was mobilized in the cultural scene.
What is my place in all this? As an American who came to Berlin when Germany’s memory culture was in its nascent phase and who witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and German Reunification, I have been observing these long, difficult processes first-hand for forty years. I’ve come to view the reunited halves of the formerly divided country as two parts of a single schizoid self. As I wrote in my second book: “[. . .] because the two Germanys define themselves in opposition to one another, because each of them claims a moral superiority over the other, one that’s contingent on the depravity of the other—that blames the fascist past on the other—anything that touches upon this taboo is a threat.” When I studied Naomi Klein’s use of the German term doppelganger to describe the mirroring effect between Israel and Palestine, it struck me that viewing the parallels between Germany and Israel as two sets of twinned doppelgangers might explain something about the German position on the irresolvable sibling rivalry between Israelis and Palestinians. They each lay claim to exceptionalism: Israel as the only safe homeland for the Jewish people in a world that might once again, without prior warning, decide to annihilate them; Germany as the infamous bureaucratized epitome of the colonialist, racist, eugenicist, and genocidal campaigns Europe had already implemented to great success in the Americas and Africa. Both entail an expiation of guilt: in the case of Germany, through its self-definition as the successful outcome of a disciplined program of atonement; for Israel, through its unaccountability qua victim for the suffering it inflicts on its nemesis. Both are a product of psychological splitting and rely on dehumanizing racist tropes to justify a lack of basic human compassion: everything one cannot integrate into the self, everything that should be weighing on one’s conscience, is projected onto the shadow self, the doppelganger. This might explain why Germany has not, in fact, learned what the Holocaust should have taught us all—to see, name, and prevent the persecution and killing of oppressed peoples everywhere; why Israel is not willing to face what should be self-evident—that it is defending, through unspeakable violence, its own sacred status as victim.
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On October 22, 2023, friends in Berlin organized an event during the course of which we read, over more than six hours, the entirety of Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail in three languages—Arabic, English and German. A nominee for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award, Shibli was supposed to be presented with the Frankfurt Book Fair’s LiBeraturpreis, an award extended to exceptional women writers from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Arab countries. Instead, the prize ceremony was cancelled; the public announcement contained the false claim that the author herself had agreed to a “postponement.” Regarding the misuse of language, Shibli recently said:
“In Palestine-Israel, I, like many others, grew up realizing language is not merely a tool for communication. It often hides rather than articulates, holding between its silence endless possibilities not concerned with expression. Language can be attacked, abused. It can still offer the ultimate freedom of being and love you don’t have access to in reality.”
The pounding of tanks and artillery fire, the wailing sirens of ambulances, relentless bombs raining down from overhead: these have long been everyday realities in the Palestinian territories, but in Berlin, as Susan Neiman recently remarked, the term “apartheid” will get you canceled faster than the N-word in New York. Yet this is precisely the term Israeli human rights organizations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other groups have long been advocating for because it most accurately describes the structure of oppression in place in the country. Now, however, the term we are battling over—and seeing our professional reputations ruined over—is “genocide.” Unequivocal words are the basic prerequisites for critical thinking; repressive states can be recognized by their strict control over public discourse. Leaving aside the unacknowledged German genocide on the Herero and Nama tribes in German Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia) for the moment, it can be said that Germany insists on policing the public use of the word “antisemitism” according to its own narrow definition.
“Anyone who advocates for innocent children in refugee camps, for universal human rights and for the lessons that came out of World War II, is not an anti-Semite. To claim otherwise is gaslighting,” as Feldman has said. For her part, Neiman argues that Germans would be well advised not to equate Israeli politics with “the Jews” and should not, as Israeli journalist Amira Hass formulates it in Haaretz, give a “wounded, hurting Israel” a “blank check […] to pulverize and destroy and kill without restraint […].” Perhaps, as this tragedy continues to unfold, Germany will eventually recognize that its responsibility from the Holocaust—indeed, that the greatest lesson of its horrific history—is to dedicate itself to resolute action against the mechanisms of dehumanization, discrimination, and violence against all marginalized groups, wherever they occur. The fact that a vice chancellor debated a young writer on national television—the equivalent would be Kamala Harris sparring with Ta-Nehisi Coates on air, a virtually impossible prospect given the hermetic circles of power in the US—offers hope, however slim. The award-winning Israeli journalist Haggai Matar said that the only way to stop Palestinians from rising up against their oppressors is to end the oppression and denial of their human and legal rights. “It is justice, security, and a decent future for all of us, or for none of us.” Indeed, it’s becoming increasingly clear, particularly among progressive Israelis, that there can be no “extermination” of terror unless the causes of that terror are fundamentally changed and that Israel’s security is contingent on guaranteeing Palestinians the same safety and protection it claims for itself. If, that is, there are any left after the dust has settled on the ravaged landscape of Gaza’s ruins.
Andrea Scrima was born in New York and has been living in Berlin since 1984. She is currently the writer-in-residence of the city of Graz. Author of A Lesser Day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2010, published in German translation as Wie viele Tage,Literaturverlag Droschl, 2019) and Like Lips, Like Skins (Kreisläufe, Droschl, 2021); editor-in-chief of the literary journal StatORec. Editor of the anthology Writing the Virus (Outpost19 Books, 2021), featured by the New York Times as a “New & Noteworthy” book of 2021. She is a dual citizen.
Literature:
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