On Germany and the Jews, once again – Pankaj Mishra in LRB:

“In March 1960, Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York. Eight years earlier, Germany had agreed to pay millions of marks in reparations to Israel, but the two countries had yet to establish diplomatic relations. Adenauer’s language at their meeting was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a ‘fortress of the West’ and ‘I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.’ Six decades on, Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked, with more vehemence than clarity, by German leaders in the weeks since 7 October. Solidarity with the Jewish state 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. But in 1960, when Adenauer met Ben-Gurion, he was presiding over a systematic reversal of the de-Nazification process decreed by the country’s Western occupiers in 1945, and aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Judaeocide. The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had ‘joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could’.”

(…)

“The novelist Manès Sperber was one of those repulsed by it. ‘Your philosemitism depresses me,’ he wrote to a colleague, ‘degrades me like a compliment that is based on an absurd misunderstanding ... You overestimate us Jews in a dangerous fashion and insist on loving our entire people. I don’t request this, I do not wish for us – or any other people – to be loved in this way.’ In Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding (2020), Daniel Marwecki describes the way that visions of Israel as a new embodiment of Jewish power awakened dormant German fantasies. A report by the West German delegation to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 marvelled at ‘the novel and very advantageous type of the Israeli youth’, who are ‘of great height, often blond and blue-eyed, free and self-determined in their movements with well-defined faces’ and exhibit ‘almost none of the features which one was used to view as Jewish’. Commenting on Israel’s successes in the 1967 war, Die Welt regretted German ‘infamies’ about the Jewish people: the belief that they were ‘without national sentiment; never ready for battle, but always keen to profit from somebody else’s war effort’. The Jews were in fact a ‘small, brave, heroic, genius people’. Axel Springer, which published Die Welt, was among the major postwar employers of superannuated Nazis.”

(…)

“In Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany, Esra Özyürek describes the way that German politicians, officials and journalists, now that the far right is in the ascendant, have been cranking up the old mechanism of sanitising Germany by demonising Muslims. In December 2022, German police foiled a coup attempt by Reichsbürger, an extremist group with more than twenty thousand members, which was planning an assault on the Bundestag. Alternative für Deutschland, which has neo-Nazi affiliations, has become the country’s second most popular party, partly in response to economic mismanagement by the coalition led by Olaf Scholz. Yet despite the undisguised antisemitism of even mainstream politicians such as Hubert Aiwanger, the deputy minister-president of Bavaria, ‘white Christian-background Germans’ see themselves ‘as having reached their destination of redemption and re-democratisation’, according to Özyürek. The ‘general German social problem of antisemitism’ is projected onto a minority of Arab immigrants, who are then further stigmatised as ‘the most unrepentant antisemites’ in need of ‘additional education and disciplining’.”

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“Shortly before the Hamas offensive, Israel secured, with American blessing, its largest ever arms deal with Germany. The Financial Times reported in early November that German arms sales to Israel have been surging since 7 October: the figure for 2023 is more than ten times as high as the previous year. As Israel began to bomb homes, refugee camps, schools, hospitals, mosques and churches in Gaza, and Israeli cabinet ministers promoted their schemes for ethnic cleansing, Scholz reiterated the national orthodoxy: ‘Israel is a country that is committed to human rights and international law and acts accordingly.’ As Netanyahu’s campaign of indiscriminate murder and destruction intensified, Ingo Gerhartz, the commander of the Luftwaffe, arrived in Tel Aviv hailing the ‘accuracy’ of Israeli pilots; he also had himself photographed, in uniform, donating blood for Israeli soldiers.”

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“Der Spiegel ran a cover picture of Scholz alongside his claim that ‘we need to deport on a grand scale again.’”

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“Frank Stern’s unsparing diagnosis in The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge (1992) holds true today: German philosemitism, he wrote, is primarily a ‘political instrument’, used not only to ‘justify options in foreign policy’, but also ‘to evoke and project a moral stance in times when domestic tranquillity is threatened by antisemitic, anti-democratic and right-wing extremist phenomena’.
This is not the first time invocations of Staatsräson have been used to conceal democratic deformations. In 2021, for example, while pursuing defence deals with Israel, Germany challenged the right of the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes in the Occupied Territories. In mid-December, with twenty thousand Palestinians massacred and epidemics threatening the millions displaced, Die Welt was still claiming that ‘Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler.’ German leaders continue to block joint European calls for a ceasefire. Weizman may seem to exaggerate when he says that ‘German nationalism has begun to be rehabilitated and revivified under the auspices of German support for Israeli nationalism.’ But the only European society that tried to learn from its vicious past is clearly struggling to remember its main lesson. German politicians and opinion-makers are not only failing to meet their national responsibility to Israel by extending unconditional solidarity to Netanyahu, Smotrich, Gallant and Ben Gvir. As völkisch-authoritarian racism surges at home, the German authorities risk failing in their responsibility to the rest of the world: never again to become complicit in murderous ethnonationalism.”

Read the article here.

The main argument here is absolutely true. The extreme-right, not in only in Germany but also other countries, is using Muslims as a scapegoat to whitewash their own sins. Antisemitism exists because we (i.e. the left) welcomed Muslim immigrants. A blatant lie needless to say (even though antisemitism exists in these communities but that’s not the point), and once again Jews are being used to attack and humiliate another minority.

What Adenauer did was far from perfect, but he was not a Nazi, and in hindsight the imperfect denazification might have been a blessing in disguise. A total denazification might have become a disaster. See what happened in Iraq after 2003.

The true reckoning in Germany, West-Germany for that matter, with the past started in the 70s, after the students (think of Dutschke) rebelled against the parents and their silence about the past. The idea that German’s culture of remembrance, which became lately a bit of monster, is just a cynical attempt at restoring power is just too easy. It was and is many things at the same time, but to reduce this attempts at taking responsibility for the past to sheer Machiavellianism is too easy. The rebirth of Germany can be and should be criticized, bur preferably with slightly more depth.

The idea that the AfD grew mainly because ‘economic mismanagement’ by Scholz is a grotesque simplification. Any serious factchecker should have taken this out.

The affaire Aiwinger is much more complicated than what Mishra makes of it.

Once again, whether you are a child or a grandchild of a Nazi or of a democrat doesn’t matter. We have moved beyond Sippenhaft.

Scholz said in an interview this fall in Der Spiegel that illegal aliens in Germany, mainly asylum seekers whose application wasn’t approved, should be sent back to their home countries. This is not a very effective policy, and the statement was mainly made to show the electorate that the SPD cares about their worries and their anti-immigration passion. A bit ugly, but very much in line with what is happening elsewhere in Europe. In the same interview Scholz said also that Germany needs hundreds of thousands migrant workers.
The not so informed reader of Mishra's article could think that Scholz is willing to send trains to the east once again.

The German arms industry and their client Israel, and the Israeli arms industry and their client Germany, deserve a more serious article.

It’s always good to see the name Manès Sperber, and philosemitism is ugly indeed. I wrote a novel about this subject.

But in general, if you want to say something about Germany and the Jews, at least take Germany and its history seriously.