How to remember horror? In my years in Berlin, I have seen so many traces of it: from the gallows of Plötzensee prison to the villa in Wannsee where the Final Solution was planned and the railway platform at Grunewald where the transports began. I have spent time at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the heart of the city, the underground library monument on nearby Bebelplatz where the Nazis burnt books and the Sachsenhausen concentration camp further afield.
I have been moved to tears by church services. I have stared countless times at the rawness of evil. Everywhere you go in Germany, you are confronted by the past. Sometimes it feels abstract. Other times, like now, it feels very close.
The massacres meted out by Hamas on 7th October and the resulting Israeli military bombardment of Gaza have catapulted Germans into another bout of soul-searching about their relationship with Jews and Judaism. More specifically, many have been asking with ever-increasing anxiety whether it is ever acceptable for them to criticise Israel. Their government has made it clear that seemingly it is not, and it is taking concerted measures to circumscribe the debate, leading one historian to describe the atmosphere as “philosemitic McCarthyism”.
The picture is fraught and complicated. Jews say they are scared to walk the streets.
The government’s commissioner on antisemitism said recently: “The bitter conclusion of recent weeks is that antisemitism has a place in Germany”. Security around Jewish institutions, always visible, has been stepped up since a synagogue in the north of Berlin was hit by Molotov cocktails and several houses were daubed with the Star of David.
The far-right is exploiting the tension, marching in support of the Jewish community, but with the sole aim of denouncing Muslims and stoking inter-communal tension. Islamophobic incidents have also increased. Police reported that by early November, at least three mosques had received parcels with torn-up fragments of the Koran mixed with faecal matter.
Mainstream politicians are doing what they often do during times of crisis and succumbing to moral panic. The two main parties of the ruling coalition, the Social Democrats and the Greens, are wondering out loud whether it might be time to clamp down on migration. Meanwhile, academics and artists, including Jewish ones, are being cancelled for expressing support for Palestinians. The Frankfurt Book Fair indefinitely postponed an awards ceremony to celebrate a book by the Palestinian writer, Adania Shibli. Schools have been told that they can forbid students from wearing the keffiyeh. Officials in one eastern state, Saxony-Anhalt, have announced that those applying for German citizenship will be required to commit to Israel’s right to exist in writing. Across the media, recriminations of antisemitism on the one side, and an assault on freedom of expression on the other become ever more bitter.
I have encountered some of this, albeit in minor key. When I wrote a piece for the Guardian early on in the conflict suggesting that Germany’s otherwise admirable Vergangenheitsbewältigung, its coming to terms with its past, might be a straitjacket preventing the country from an open debate, I was accused by people I know and respect of “relativising”. Worse still I had apparently committed the cardinal sin of using the argument “yes, but”—yes, of course, I stand by Israel and express my abhorrence at what happened at the start, but the scale of the military action that followed did constitute collective punishment.
Neither postwar Germany’s remembrance of war crimes nor its relationship with the state of Israel have followed a straight line. It is often forgotten that it took two decades or more for the Shoah, the Holocaust, to be properly recognised and atoned for. The initial generation focused on rebuilding the country economically, while the victorious powers quickly turned their attention to combatting the Soviet threat from the east. It was not until the 1968 anti-Vietnam protests that the younger generation forced on their forebears the reckoning that was long overdue.
Once it did happen, it became embedded in the culture and the psyche of the Federal Republic. Alongside that came kinship with Israel. German governments have dared to criticise Israeli policy in the past, particularly settlement expansion in the West Bank, but in general support has been staunch.
In March 2008, Angela Merkel gave a speech before the Knesset, marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel. She declared that support for Israel was an integral part of the Staatsraison, the essence of the German state. Exactly a year later, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power and, apart from a brief 18 months, he has been there ever since. The curiosity is that solidarity has increased throughout this period even though Israel has been run by a man that many Germans regard as similar in brutalist style and substance to their political nemesis, Donald Trump.
In 2017, Germany was one of the first governments to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which views most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic. The following year, the Bundestag passed a resolution condemning the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” campaign against Israel. It also forbade state funds from going to organisations deemed to support the movement.
The inconvenient truth for Germany is that it had assumed the Palestinian issue had been largely forgotten. All the attention was on Russia and China. Gaza and the West Bank were just about getting by, thanks not least to development aid to the Palestinian Authority, to which the authorities in Berlin were one of the biggest contributors.
This complacency was universal. The attacks on 7th October awoke pretty much all countries involved from their Middle East slumber. As the world scrambled for a response, the first western leader to visit Israel was Germany’s Olaf Scholz. Israel, the chancellor said ahead of his visit, had “every right to defend itself”. Unquestionable support, he had previously told the Bundestag, was a moral obligation on all German citizens. “Our own history, our responsibility deriving from the Holocaust, makes it our permanent duty to stand up for the existence and security of the State of Israel.”
Emotions have driven part of Germany’s response. One statistic from 7th October particularly struck home with Germans: the fact that more Jews had been murdered on that one day than on any single day since the defeat of the Third Reich. But the events of the past two months also fall into a wider attempt by the country to reinterpret its role in the world. This new role is still in-the-making, still hesitant and sometimes contradictory; it is also long overdue. Its origins are traced back to just under two years ago, and to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The standard analysis of Germany under Merkel and her predecessors is that it subcontracted its defence to America, its energy to Russia and its trade to China. In its naivety, Europe’s largest economy laid itself vulnerable to outside forces. The truth is more complicated than that, but the criticism has stuck.
Within a year, the Scholz government had pretty much rid itself of oil and gas dependency on the Kremlin, by striking deals not just with the US and Norway but also, while holding its nose, with Qatar. As Germany became less squeamish about talking of, and using, hard power, it has in recent months overtaken the UK as the biggest provider of weapons to Ukraine.
A harder-headed foreign policy has been emerging. The Israel-Palestine crisis forms part of that. The new, more muscular Germany is not squeamish about backing Netanyahu’s use of massive force inside the tiny strip of impoverished land that is Gaza.
At the same time, domestically and internationally this approach is producing fissures. Almost three million people in Germany are of Turkish heritage, many of whose families date back to the “guest worker” era of the 1960s; the land of their origin pays the salaries of close to 1,000 imams for German mosques. Since the huge influx of 2015, the EU, led by Germany, has paid Turkey to control migration in the Mediterranean. The two governments, however, are at loggerheads over Israel. Other emerging powers that Germany and the wider west have been courting in Africa, Latin America and Asia have taken different positions on Hamas, framing its resistance through their own postcolonial history. Much of Berlin’s painstaking recent diplomatic work of looking for new allies is being challenged by a crisis that nobody had expected.
Domestically, all the political parties—including the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany)—continue to express their full support for Israel even as Netanyahu’s demolition of Gaza becomes harder to justify. Germany’s senior leaders, such as Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier have struggled to elucidate the complexities of the German position.
The most powerful intervention so far has come from Robert Habeck, the economics minister and one of the two senior Greens in government. Early in the crisis, he issued a video online calling out some Muslim groups for failing to condemn the Hamas attacks and criticising parts of the left for seeing Israel as part of a “great resistance narrative”. Habeck declared: “The responsibility of our history also asserts that Jews can live freely and safely in Germany. That they never again have to fear to show their religion, their culture openly. But precisely this fear is now back.” The target of Habeck’s statement was clear. He was speaking to the million-plus migrants from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere who arrived in the major wave of 2015 and 2016, in effect requiring them to fall in behind the government’s approach to Israel—which they won’t.
The pre-existing demographic tensions are therefore being stoked further by the Gaza crisis. The beneficiaries are likely to be the political extremes.
Along with his support for the Israeli state, Scholz is doing everything he can to try to reassure Germany’s small and nervous Jewish community. He may struggle with words, but he is adept at embracing symbols and has made a point of being visible at Jewish ceremonies across the country. In the latest, on 7th December, exactly two months after the Hamas attacks, the chancellor attended a memorial at the Brandenburg Gate to mark the start of Chanukah, the Jewish festival of lights.
One of the great sadnesses of the German-Jewish story is how at different times in history the two have been intertwined.
Over the past eight centuries, Berlin in particular has become a magnet for the displaced and the traumatised, the Jews among them, escaping persecution from the early Medieval era onwards. Jews were at the heart of the cultural flourishing of Berlin during Frederick the Great’s rule. In 1866, the consecration of the New Synagogue in the heart of the city was the hottest ticket in town. Everyone wanted to be seen there: military generals, politicians, industrialists taking their place alongside Bismarck and other luminaries.
Since the advent of the Federal Republic and particularly since reunification in 1990, Germany has gone out of its way to welcome Jews, both those who had once called the country their home and those who were born further afield. The process is often messy; but it is also sincere and optimistic.
Berlin has developed a modern Jewish outlook. For several years it had been the destination of choice for thousands of young Israelis, many aspiring artists and musicians wanting not so much an intense reconciliation, but more a fun city to hang out in. Israeli restaurants were all the rage. Will that confidence survive this moment?
History constrains Germany; it also gives it an unlikely opportunity. If Netanyahu is finally toppled, if as a result, a less pugilistic Israel emerges, more open to finding a sustainable political solution with the Palestinians, then Germany might find itself with a significant role to play in helping to make peace. That, however, feels a long way off.
