On Gessen - Dan Sheehan on Lithub:

‘The German Green Party-affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation, “in agreement with the Bremen Senate,” is withdrawing from awarding the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought to the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, citing Gessen’s recent New Yorker essay “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” as the reason for the decision.
In the essay, published on December 9, Gessen criticizes Germany’s Israel policy (including the Bundestag’s controversial BDS resolution, which condemns the Israel boycott movement as anti-Semitic) and its politics of remembrance, and compares the plight of today’s besieged Gazans to that of the ghettoized Jews in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe: For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.’

(…)

‘UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: According to Die Zeit, the presentation of the prize, originally scheduled to take place next Friday in Bremen, will now be presented in a different setting next Saturday, but without the involvement of the Heinrich Böll Foundation (an independent political foundation, affiliated with the German Green Party, which instituted the Hannah Arendt Prize in 1994 and which has sponsored the award every year since).’

Read the article here.

Volker Weiß wrote in de Süddeutsche on Gessen’s essay: ‘What follows are some more or less associative connections between the topics of Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto, thoughts on the boycott movement BDS and the situation specifically in Germany. At the end, Shoah survivors and displaced Palestinians are compared again in order to come to the conclusion, based on the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera, that one can be a perpetrator and a victim in one.’

Read here. Only in German.

To state that Gaza is not like ;the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany,' is a trite agitprop. The problem here is that it is so trite. And still manages to upset many. Trite agitprop can be very upsetting.

And indeed there’s something extremely disturbing about the slogan that we need to free Palestine from German guilt.

As I said before, it’s proof that German, Germans and their history can be discarded, and the knowledge about Germany and its memory culture is limited even among those who live there.

Germany is a post-nation state, a state after the death of the nation state, and this is not properly understood by many people living on German soil. From this post-nation state perspective one should approach Germany and its peculiarities.

But Gessen and others feel very well that something is rotten within the official memory culture. They should be applauded for that.

That after Shibli we have Shibli II, named Gessen, is proof that the German and maybe even European memory culture is weaker and more superficial than many thought it was.
The measurements are not only counterproductive, they reveal fatal weaknesses and uncertainty about the dogma’s that supposedly are the pillars of the memory culture.