On the supposed turning of the tide – Adam Shatz in LRB:

“A few weeks later, we trudged through the rain and the cold to the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held. The guide, well-informed and energetic, told us that some industrial magnates who thought they could control Hitler had attended the conference, at which the implementation of the Final Solution was discussed. Whether or not the regime in the US is best described as ‘fascist’, it was hard not to think about Trump, Musk, Stephen Miller and their new friends Zuckerberg and Bezos. The basic governing coalition hasn’t changed all that much: thugs, zealots, careerists, entrepreneurs and grifters. As we left, we were told that there was a café. Run by an Israeli woman, it was advertised by a sign reading: ‘Enjoy Jewlicious babka.’”

(…)

“To assimilate into German society, the children of Muslim immigrants are discouraged from identifying with the country’s Jewish victims and instructed instead to think of themselves as potential perpetrators of genocide against Jews. As the anthropologist Esra Özyürek argued in Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany (2023), the Holocaust education programmes designed for Muslim students imply that their ancestors also bear responsibility for the Judeocide, and give highly exaggerated accounts of Muslim antisemitism and collaboration (the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, figures prominently here, as he does in Netanyahu’s speeches). While immigration has provoked widespread anger in Germany and helped foster the rise of the far-right AfD, the presence of an increasingly large Muslim population has also helped relieve German society of the burden of memory, allowing it to shift the blame for antisemitism to people of Middle Eastern origin, and thereby reaffirm Germany’s vigilance in facing up to its past. It’s the flip side of ‘memory culture’. As both the AfD and the Christian Democrats have learned, so long as you condemn Muslim antisemitism, you can continue to attack the ‘ills’ of immigration, as if xenophobia and racism had no connection to the German past.”

(…)

“She arrived carrying a tiny dog. It can’t bear to be alone, she said; it growled when I tried to pet it. It soon became clear that she’d come not only with her dog, but with a small army of supporters, who clicked their fingers loudly after every remark she made. ‘I will get in trouble for saying this in Germany,’ she declared, before describing the Holocaust as little more than European colonial violence inflicted on fellow Europeans, a symptom of the ‘boomerang’ effect evoked by Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism. I said that neither Césaire nor Fanon had minimised the horror of the Nazi genocide.”

(…)

“Throughout my stay in Berlin, I kept hearing from Germans quietly critical of Israel that ‘cracks’ had begun to appear in Staatsräson. These cracks sometimes assumed unsettling forms, notably a relief at shedding the burden of Holocaust memory, as if Palestine was an invitation to bury the Holocaust, at last, rather than to apply its lessons to the destruction of Gaza. A woman I know told me that a friend, an American Jew, had broken up with her German boyfriend after he told her that he found the Holocaust too painful to engage with, and therefore didn’t. When she suggested that they visit a site of Holocaust remembrance in Berlin, he started talking about Gaza, angrily telling her that he no longer supported Israel’s war, and that most Germans agreed with him. When she challenged him over his refusal to engage with difficult subjects like the Holocaust, he burst into tears and ran off.”

(…)

“Between 7 October 2023 and 13 May this year, according to Reuters, Germany had granted export licences for military equipment worth €485 million. Will anyone be left in Gaza to benefit from the supposed turning of the tide?”

Read the article here.

Jewlicious babka, the Shoah and heartbreak.

The end of memory culture, it has been said before, most notably by the Dutch historian David Wertheim who declared Auschwitz dead, is coming closer.

The dead of memory culture or not, there will always be worthy and less worthy victims.