On Germany – George Prochnik, Eyal Weizman & Emily Dische-Becker in Granta:

“Germany’s reckoning with its history of atrocities began as an undertaking by left-leaning German civil society. Today it has become a highly bureaucratized lever of the state that increasingly serves a reactionary agenda. In the lead up to the seismic events of this year, three controversies in Germany involving allegations of antisemitism reshaped the state’s relation to its memory culture, Israel, migration and colonial past.
In the summer of 2020, Cameroon-born philosopher Achille Mbembe was poised to be disinvited from the Ruhrtriennale Festival by Germany’s antisemitism commissioner amid reports that Mbembe had compared Israel to Apartheid South Africa and was a supporter of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) principles. The allegations proved correct in the first instance and inexact at best in the second.
In the summer of 2021, a fierce debate flared up in the wake of a polemical article – published in response to Mbembe’s treatment – in the Swiss online journal Geschichte der Gegenwart by A. Dirk Moses, the Australian scholar of genocide. Moses observed that people like Mbembe would be persecuted if they questioned certain articles of faith, such as the German state’s uncritical support of Israel, which form the basis of post-war German identity. Likewise, Moses argued that one risks being barred from public discourse in Germany today if one questions the uniqueness of the Holocaust or links it to Germany’s genocidal colonial past. Moses dubbed these articles of faith the ‘German Catechism’.
In the summer of 2022, additional disputes erupted around antisemitic imagery in a large political banner created by an Indonesian art collective and displayed before the main venue of Documenta, the contemporary art exhibition staged every five years in Kassel. While the banner (which contained hundreds of figures) focused on injustices of the US-backed Suharto regime, two of its subjects were depicted in a manner consistent with classic European antisemitic propaganda. After the banner was withdrawn from the exhibition, the lapse in curatorial judgment that allowed it to be exhibited became a rallying cry against not only Documenta as a whole, but also the wider discourse of post-colonialism in Germany.”

(…)

“Eyal Weizman: In another historical twist, an increasingly aggressive version of Israeli hasbara – that is, propaganda – takes its legitimacy from Germany’s memory culture. To borrow a term from our friend the philosopher Adi Ophir, the state of Israel has established a ‘discursive Iron Dome’. While the original Iron Dome was an anti-missile defense system capable of shooting down rockets mid-air, the discursive equivalent is a pre-emptive practice of delegitimization, meant to shoot down critiques of Israel before they cause damage.
While support for, or assumed proximity, to BDS is deemed antisemitic by Germany, the Israeli government has designated, without evidence, six Palestinian human-rights organizations whose main function has been to collect evidence against Israeli crimes for use in international forums as ‘terror organizations.’ Among the groups on this list is the Palestinian human-rights group Al-Haq, with which Forensic Architecture (FA) has formed a long-term partnership and co-investigated the case of last year’s targeted killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. While no other country accepted this designation, and even the CIA acknowledged that there is no evidence for it, Germany’s Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, is pushing the German government to accept the label. Whether by being designated ‘antisemitic’ abroad, or ‘terroristic’ inside Palestine, positions offering legitimate opposition to Israel are thus branded as ‘beyond the pale’.”

(…)

“Most documented attacks of an antisemitic nature come from white supremacist individuals and groups, but the German state focuses on antisemitism on the Left – which does exist. They use these examples to vilify the entire ideology of Leftism, as well as to contain migration from the Global South, acting as if antisemitism is only being imported to Germany from the outside.”

(…)

“At present, Germany’s alignment with Israel means that German nationalism has begun to be rehabilitated and revivified under the auspices of German support for Israeli nationalism.”

(…)

“Dische-Becker: ‘But Israelis do know Israel, which to many German Jews is primarily an idealized insurance policy.’

Prochnik: Can you provide examples of how German memory culture becomes even more regressive in an overtly political sphere?

Weizman: One instance would be the change of attitude toward antisemitism that’s become prominent in the extreme-right Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) discourse. Beyond their use of dog-whistle antisemitism in opposing Holocaust commemoration, they also attempt to make their form of racism and proto-fascist attitudes more palatable by forming an anti-Muslim alliance. They propose that antisemitism is an import to Germany, arriving like a virus through the channels of migration.”

(…)

“Dische-Becker: So if it’s not about justice for victims is it then about preventing a resurgence of exclusionary nationalism? Extraordinary resources are being poured into memory culture as part of the state-sanctioned program for the fight against antisemitism. Berlin alone currently employs five antisemitism commissioners representing different institutions and constituencies. It’s fair to ask, then, what is the efficacy of all this? While the fight against antisemitism has been escalating, the AfD, a neo-fascistic party, has begun polling ahead of the ruling Social Democrats, and at the same time there’s been a rise in far-right terrorism that is often bound up with the police, army and intelligence services, many of whose agents harbor right-wing sympathies and connections to right-wing terror networks. Yet these developments are rarely discussed in the context of antisemitism. It is apparently not within the mandate of Felix Klein, Germany’s Federal Antisemitism Commissioner, that there are German police officers sending each other Heil Hitler text messages every morning as a greeting. Rather than addressing the things that are actually a threat to the life and limb of all racialized minorities in Germany, the commissioner prioritizes policing anti-Zionism among artists.”

(…)

“Germany is very invested in the idea of being the best at being the worst. Being an antisemitic perpetrator is thus projected as a form of moral expertise to be shared with the world.”

(…)

“Weizman: It’s not that similar struggles aren’t being fought in Britain, in the US, and in other places, but it’s inflected differently in Germany because of its history and because of the responsibility that Germans have toward Jews. I do not deny that special responsibility; I just do not think that it’s for the Germans to say to us what kind of Jews we should be, what kind of project we should be part of. Both Emily and I, as Jewish intellectuals in Germany, find ourselves occasionally being deplatformed, being publicly disciplined – being lectured by the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators who murdered our families and who now dare to tell us that we are antisemitic.”

(…)

“Weizman: Once again, Germany defines who is a Jew, right? The irony that the German state would actually classify who is a Jew, and what’s a legitimate Jewish position, and how Jews should react, is just beneath contempt.”

Read the interview here.

It’s obvious that the official German memory culture that somehow started in the 70s was ready for a backlash. I wrote about this earlier this year, only in Dutch, you can read it here.

It’s also true that it’s unwise, to say the least, to declare all kinds of manifestations in solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians illegal. I’m against outlawing BDS, but the German parliament decided to do so. Sometimes the people and their elected representatives are unwise.

The ‘negative birth myth’ of the new Germany (we are best at being worst), of postwar Germany should not treated as something that is just another manifestation of (German) bad faith.

The irony is that since Germans are not a minority they seem to be excluded from sympathy or even serious attempts at understanding them.

Weizman’s flippant remark about children and grandchildren of perpetrators lecturing him about antisemitism is telling. Nobody likes to be lectured but the fact that this done by children and grandchildren of perpetrators is irrelevant.

And if it’s relevant then an attempt could be made to acknowledge their pain as well. Their position is not completely illogical.

After the war the Germans largely saw themselves as victims. It’s hard to acknowledge this, but this was understandable. Then slowly and in the 70s rapidly all of this changed and the new German culture, best at being worst, started.

The fight about memory culture and colonialism should be understood as a second “Historiker Streit” – for a serious debate about this it’s necessary to accept that not only minorities have their sensitivities, sometimes majorities have their sensitivities as well.

I’m not convinced that Germany needs Israel for renewed nationalism. And yes, the fighters against antisemitism seem to be blind to some rightwing antisemitism and focus with passion on perceived or real antisemitism coming from the left. This is a problem.

Also, I once noted that if we take Merkel’s declaration as more than something symbolic German soldiers should be ready to die for Israel. Here, we enter the world of speculative fiction.

That the fight against antisemitism is being used by the far-right is something that we see elsewhere as well, or example in the Netherlands. The nastiness of it is clear, I wrote about this several times, for example here. Only in Dutch again.