Nakam43
11th October 2006, 02:35
http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-urban-f04.htm
Anti-Semitism In Germany Today:
Its Roots And Tendencies1
Susanne Urban
The new millennium has witnessed a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the world, especially in Europe. Anti-Semitism certainly did not disappear in Germany after WW II. What is new is the blunt expression of anti-Semitism and the fraternization between left-wing and right-wing, liberal and conservative streams. Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism continue to spread in German society and are more and more openly expressed.
Right-wing groups and neo-Nazis are no longer the only ones who agitate against Israel and Jews. Together with "traditional" anti-Semitism, Germany has seen a growth of leftist anti-Semitism along with anti-imperialist, antiglobalization, and anti-Zionist attitudes, all reinforcing the new German claim of having been victims in WW II.
There is a widespread animus against Israel, clearly not only toward Israeli policies, that often goes along with pro-Palestinian partisanship. This development is intensified by anti-Israeli media coverage in Germany, often accompanied by anti-Semitic language and images.
This "new" anti-Semitism in Germany correlates with changes in the nation's attitudes toward WW II and remembrance of the Shoah. Laying the blame for "immoral" conduct on Israel, and therefore "the Jews," makes clear that "they" did not learn the lessons of the Shoah; whereas Germans see themselves as having learned the lessons by being watchmen against "immoral" politics.
In 1967 Jean Améry wrote: "The classic phenomenon of anti-Semitism is taking a new shape. The old one still exists, this I call coexistence....To be clear: anti-Semitism, included in...anti-Zionism as the thunderstorm is part of the cloud, is again respectable....But: a respectable anti-Semitism is not possible."2
More than thirty-five years later, it seems nothing has changed. Although anti-Semitism masks itself above all as anti-Zionism or "criticism of Israeli policies," its roots are pure, traditional anti-Semitism.
The Devil in Disguise
Améry’s appeal not to become complacent toward anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism has lost none of its importance. Born in 1912 in Vienna, Améry survived the Holocaust and after 1966 worked mainly as a journalist. His writings are responses to anti-Semitism by someone who lost faith in the world in Auschwitz. He committed suicide in 1978.
The new millennium has witnessed a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the world, especially in Europe. There is a clear link to the terror war in Israel, and a widespread animus against Israel (not just Israeli policies) and Diaspora Jews along with pro-Palestinian partisanship. This development is intensified by anti-Israeli media coverage including the use of anti-Semitic language and images.
In Germany, anti-Semitism certainly did not disappear after WW II. What is new is the blunt expression of anti-Semitism and the fraternization between left-wing and right-wing, liberal and conservative streams. Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism continue to spread in German society.
Anti-Semitism in Germany, 1945–2004
Anti-Semitism appears to be an essential part of the European cultural tradition, and in Germany, more or less conscious Jew-hatred exists by "tradition" as well. Former East Germany, and before that the Soviet Occupation Zone, never conducted a survey of anti-Semitism, and no data is available. Such surveys were, however, conducted in West Germany. In 1949, a quarter of the West German population described themselves as anti-Semites; in a 1952 survey, one-third said they were definitely anti-Semites.3
By 1980, however, the tracking of various population samples showed that anti-Semitism had decreased. Surveys conducted after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 revealed a huge gap in anti-Semitic attitudes between East and West Germany.4 Surprisingly, East Germany appeared to be very congenial to Jews with almost no anti-Semitism. This, however, was a fallacy related to the fact that many people and even researchers make a facile distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, despite the fact that scholars from the Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism in Berlin5 pointed to the similarities. In addition, East Germans were used to saying what was officially required of them. And, as implied, anti-Zionism and attitudes toward Israel per se were not probed. Indeed, in subsequent surveys the gap between eastern and western Germany closed quickly.6
In May 2003, the Federal Office for Protecting the Constitution published a special study on anti-Semitism and its links with rightwing and neo-Nazi groups.7 The same institution recorded more than 1400 anti-Semitic crimes in 2001,8 confirming a steady rise including a 100 percent increase for Berlin. Anti-Israeli activities, however, such as attacks on the Israeli embassy, are not included in these reports because there is still no systematic monitoring of anti-Zionism.
In 2002, as the neoliberal FDP Party maligned Israel, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and German Jewish leader Michel Friedman, anti-Semitism became an issue for the first time in a postwar German election campaign.
In April of that year, the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt am Main and the University of Leipzig confirmed a new height of anti-Semitism. In their joint study, 20 percent of the respondents agreed that "Jews are to blame for the major conflicts in the world," and another 26 percent shared this opinion to some extent.9
In May 2002, the weekly magazine Der Spiegel published a survey in which 25 percent agreed that "what the State of Israel does to the Palestinians is no different than what the Nazis did during the Third Reich to the Jews."10
As reported in 2003, studies now estimate overt anti-Semitism at around 23 percent, and covert anti-Semitism as existing among 30–40 percent of the German public.11
In 2002, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) in Vienna and the above-mentioned Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism conducted a study on "Manifestations of Anti-Semitism in the European Union: First Semester, 2002." In October 2003 the first version of the report was submitted to the EU, and by January 2004 the final report was in the hands of the EUMC, which kept the study - with the EU’s knowledge and approval - under lock and key. The research shows that, aside from the clear threat posed by "ordinary" right-wing anti-Semitism, Muslims and pro-Palestinian groups are also playing a crucial role. Furthermore, leftist and antiglobalization groups such as ATTAC were described as more or less anti-Semitic.12 The EUMC vaguely criticized the study, saying that "there was a problem defining anti-Semitism, the definition being too complicated," as a member of the Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism told the author. Once again, anti-Zionism was treated as distinct from anti-Semitism.
In April 2004, as the Conference on Anti-Semitism in Europe took place in Berlin, the Stephen Roth Institute of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University revealed that the countries with the highest rates of anti-Semitic incidents in the world are Germany, France, Britain, Russia, and Canada.13 Compared to France or Britain, in Germany Islamic and pro-Palestinian groups are involved in only a very small percentage of anti-Semitic incidents: indigenous German anti-Semitism does not need "support" from others. Since there was never a time free of anti-Semitism, it is necessary to ask whether the current wave is really "new anti-Semitism" or centuries old anti-Semitism that has been "modernized" and adapted to the circumstances. Above all, it is a post-Auschwitz anti-Semitism. For many people, provided they are not Holocaust deniers or neo-Nazis, Auschwitz as the symbol of the Holocaust is the obstacle to expressing anti-Semitism and aversion to Jews and Israel. Hence Germans, like many other anti-Semites, use the "anti-Zionist" disguise. This enables declaring Israel "the most evil country" and "nazifying" Israel with comparisons to the Third Reich, or advocating that it vanish from the world’s stage. This, in turn, opens the door to proclaiming Jews to be evil people in general.
These manifestations of anti-Semitism in Germany are deeply linked to the German past from 1933 to 1945 and the wish to get rid of guilt or responsibility for dealing with that past. Germany’s ideological unification since 1989 has two main pillars: a strong anti-American and anti-Israeli attitude, and a new position toward the history of WW II.
Rewriting History
For more than fifteen years, German intellectuals, writers, politicians, and ordinary people have gradually worn down moral and political barriers that for decades kept the overwhelming majority away from open and extensive anti-Semitism.
It started with the Historikerstreit, a series of articles written in 1986, and did not end with the anti-Semitic election campaign in spring 2002. The Historikerstreit was mainly propelled by an article by the historian Ernst Nolte in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which portrayed the National Socialist state and its terror as only a reaction to the Bolshevik threat, and the persecution of Jews and the Shoah as not really singular in human history. (Jürgen Habermas, a representative of the Critical Theory school and intellectual descendant of Theodor Adorno, sharply protested Nolte’s claims.) Germany is a country with far more memorials and museums to the concentration camps, as well as Jewish museums, than other European countries. The volume of Holocaust education in schools and other educational institutions, the number of conferences and workshops devoted to the subject, seems close to unique in Europe. As Yehuda Bauer, chief historian of Yad Vashem, said in an interview:
Germany is most active in promoting Holocaust education for which there is a very good reason. Given their history, they understand the importance of education as a means of preventing future disasters. The Holocaust today serves as a symbol for what we ought to oppose: racism, genocide, mass murder, ethnic hatred, ethnic cleansing, anti-Semitism and group hatred.14
Nevertheless, the opposition to inhumanity in general is no obstacle to German anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Holocaust education in Germany may be intensive, but most of the textbooks use cliche's and stereotypes. Moreover, many of the teachers convey compassion for the murdered Jews along with strong reservations toward the Jews of today and, of course, the anti-Israeli attitude. Although Germany is proud of its well-developed culture of Holocaust remembrance and education, which for many years was seen as a force against anti-Semitism, the latter force has gone weak. It was a fallacy to think that knowledge about the Shoah would lead people to love their neighbors or even their Jewish neighbors. Holocaust education in Germany is being slowly but steadily undermined by the new trend of seeing Germans themselves as victims, with many people feeling that they are fed up with the Shoah.15 Well-intended rituals and remembrances have not proved an effective shield against anti-Semitism and the rewriting of history. This widespread "victim" trend in Germany needs to be monitored carefully, since in the long run it may lead to a rewriting of the history of WW II and, in the worst case, to a minimization of the Shoah.
The leading figure among the German "new historians" is Jörg Friedrich, who has published two books on the Allied bombings of Germany.16 The first book deals with the strategy of the Allied bombings and condemns them as inhuman and pointless. Friedrich’s popularized style helped this book become a bestseller. He uses terms that for decades were associated with Nazi persecution and the Shoah; thus, cellars and air-raid shelters in which Germans died are "crematoria," an RAF bomber group is an Einsatzgruppe, and the destruction of libraries during the bombings constitutes Bücherverbrennungen. In this way the Shoah is minimized through language.
Friedrich’s second book was also a bestseller and also depicts Germans as victims. There are no SA men, no SS, no soldiers involved in persecution, murder, and "aryanization." The book contains horrifying photos of the effects of the Allied bombings of Germany. Ruins, burnt bodies, and ashes everywhere evoke associations with the Warsaw Ghetto after its liquidation in 1943 and well-known images from Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Friedrich even declared openly, in several television interviews in winter 2002: "Churchill was the greatest child-slaughterer of all time. He slaughtered 76,000 children." Yet Friedrich, formerly known as a serious historian, never devotes a single word to the 1.5 million murdered Jewish children.
German historiography increasingly portrays Germans as victims in WW II and not as perpetrators, bystanders, or people deriving benefit from persecution. The revised perspective on German history - from the Allied bombings to the Germans’ expulsion from Poland and East European countries - undoubtedly reflects a historical consciousness that is newly embraced by the majority, though not new in itself. There was never any taboo on speaking about the Allied bombings or the postwar expulsions; documentaries, books, journals, and films have dealt with these subjects since the early 1950s, and WW II was commonly discussed in families and by certain organizations. What is new, however, is the public reinterpretation of history, encompassing intellectuals and politicians of both the Left and the Right.
From a Trickle to the Mainstream
A few examples will illustrate this trend. In Frankfurt in 1998, when he received the Peace Prize of German Publishers, the famous German writer Martin Walser gave a speech in which he expressed his weariness at being confronted with Auschwitz; he was supported by large numbers of Germans including intellectuals and politicians. Jews who spoke out in protest were almost on their own. Four years later in 2002, for 8 May - the day marking the liberation in 1945 - Walser was invited for a discussion with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder on "Nation and Patriotism." Their dialogue focused on the question of whether the Allies of WW I were really the ones responsible for Hitler’s coming to power. Walser maintained that patriotism must be based on emotions and deeply rooted in history, and the German chancellor asserted: "The way we as Germans deal with our history shall be decided by each and every generation anew." The decision seems to have been made.
Since the second Palestinian uprising began in the fall of 2000, many consider that Israel is losing the media battle. The Israeli government is frequently blamed for not making its viewpoints known effectively. Pro-Israeli media watchers are an important source of information for their readers. But above all, they are private actors in the Arab-Israeli public relations war.
On 9 November 2002, the memorial day for Kristallnacht in 1938, German public television for the first time in years did not screen the usual quantity of movies and documentaries on this topic. The main news programs devoted about ten seconds to a historical review. Two documentaries were shown at around 11 p.m., one on Hitler’s secretary and the other, not broadcast on either of the two national channels but on three of the sixteen federal stations, on the Sonderkommando (Jews forced to work in the crematoria) in Auschwitz. However, this time the first national channel, ARD, presented the first episode of a three-part series on the German general Erwin Rommel and also the first episode of a six-part series on the SS, and although the SS was portrayed as a brutal organization its victims were absent.
On 17 November 2002, the Day of National Mourning, which is dedicated to soldiers and civilians who died in WW I and WW II, parliament held a four-hour ceremony. Tall black crosses were emplaced in the parliament despite the supposed separation of church and state. Between some classical music pieces, a young woman read from letters written in 1942 by German soldiers based in Stalingrad. During the whole ceremony there was not one word about war crimes, or about the army units that slaughtered Jews. ¨
Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher born in 1947, has stepped out of academia and become a star of German television. Since 2002 he has had his own show, Philosophical Quartet,17 in which he and his regular comrade Rüdiger Safranski, a philosopher and writer, host two other guests to discuss the latest issues. Sloterdijk is known for an elitist and anti-American attitude that goes hand in hand with a conservative view of the German past, a synthesis of leftist and rightist positions. His latest book, Airquake: At the Source of Terror18 recounts catastrophic events that for Sloterdijk are all similar: the Holocaust, the Allied bombings of Germany, the atomic bombing of Japan, and September 11 are the strange pearls on Sloterdijk’s string. He maintains that the source of all these catastrophes was the first attack with poison gas in WW I, which, he emphasizes, was primarily made possible by the German chemist Fritz Haber. With a cynical undertone Sloterdijk stresses the fact that Haber was Jewish, and then alleges a continuity between Haber’s experiments and the gas chambers during the Shoah. Although Sloterdijk does not make the connection explicitly, he implies a horrible conclusion: that without a Jewish chemist there would have been no Holocaust.
In November 2002 Sloterdijk invited to his show Luc Bondy, a theatrical director, to discuss the topic of anti-Semitism. Bondy told the audience: "After WW II, as small children, we were confronted with guilt. It was so massive. We as children in postwar times were under fire nearly nonstop and saw those pictures everywhere. My thesis is: the only possible way to get rid of anti-Semitism is therefore to be anti-Semitic again."19
These and many other popularized historical reinterpretations reflect the fact that Germany is on a path toward self-reconciliation. It is a reconciliation between the generations, as the gap that opened between the 1960s leftist movement and the parent generation, who were accused as participants in the war, is closed; and it is also a reconciliation between Left and Right. No longer do historical debates drive a wedge between Germans.
As Anne Applebaum has written:
The country’s collective conscience was enlightened by the TV-Series "Holocaust" to an extent that could never have been achieved by historical science and all its publications. What imperative message, fuelled by emotionalism, is carried by today’s self-reconciliation trend? The discussion on victimhood has now been extended to include the perpetrators. In the dispute over the planned "Centre against Expulsion," for example.20
The gates are wide open to a new cult of victimhood that minimizes - even without malicious intention - Germany’s guilt for the outbreak of war, its crimes against humanity (including those committed by German army units), as well as the uniqueness of the Holocaust.
Misusing the Shoah
The decreasing interest in the Holocaust does not prevent Germans from invoking it in political debates. The "lesson" that Germans now draw from WW II and the Holocaust is one of opposition to the United States and Israel.
It is often claimed that the German public has been sensitized to realities such as the 2003 war in Iraq or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by decades of education on German war crimes and the Shoah as a unique genocide. The Shoah is misused to oppose military conflicts, particularly if they are carried out by the United States or Israel against terror regimes, terror movements, and Islamic fundamentalism. Once a domain of the Left, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism are now embraced by ordinary Germans, reinforced by the books on the Allied bombings and the like. The extreme Right, which normally is identified with xenophobic attitudes, has discovered its solidarity with Islamic and Palestinian "freedom fighters." Pro-Palestinian, anti-American, and anti-Semitic themes were common in the 2003 demonstrations against the war in Iraq.
Israel is condemned, but terrorist movements in Spain, Ireland, or Israel itself are not. The German public does not organize demonstrations after a bus bombing in Israel, but it does after a Hamas leader is killed. Israel, and hence "the Jews," are accused of horrendous behavior that is alleged to be even worse because they are "former victims." In other words, Israel and the Jews have not learned their lessons from the Shoah, whereas Germans have learned them thoroughly.
To clear themselves of the suspicion of being anti-Semitic, Germans accompany every castigation of Israel with the mantra that it is "only criticism" motivated by a just, democratic preference for peaceful solutions. The other side of this coin is their claim that because of the Holocaust, Germans have to side with today’s victims, namely, the Palestinians. Undoubtedly the best tactic, however, is to quote leftist Jews or Israelis to buttress their own views. Jewish witnesses are taken to court against Israel.21
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism Go Hand in Hand
This anti-Israeli attitude is state-of-the-art in parts of the German media.22 Photos and illustrated reports present the Israeli Goliath against the Palestinian David, Palestinian children against heavily armed Israeli soldiers. We see ruins of Palestinian buildings with distressed women and children standing in front of them, juxtaposed with settlers who live in green, opulent surroundings and act aggressively toward Palestinians.
A 2002 study showed that German media coverage of the Middle East is often characterized by a lack of context and hostile undertones against Israel. Not uncommonly, the Holocaust is minimized by comparing Israel with the Third Reich, blood libels are invoked regarding Palestinian children, and Zionist conspiracy theories are mentioned. The study concluded: "German media coverage of the conflict contributed to an anti-Semitic view of Israel among the German population."23
At the end of 2002, the Federal Centre for Civic Education in Bonn followed up with its own study, which concluded that "an important effect in media is to present Israel and its military power only to convey the impression that Israel is the aggressor."24 During the official presentation of this study, however, the results were distorted and played down. The opening lecture was by Werner Stüber of the University of Düsseldorf, who had lived many years in East Jerusalem and taught at Bir Zeit University. He did not say a sentence about Palestinian terror, but did speak of the "powerful Jewish lobby in the United States." An attempt to dispute this lecture was stifled with the words that the lecture backed the position of the Centre for Civic Education - which, seemingly, did not consider the results of its own study, and, incidentally, is directly connected to the German state. As the conference continued, the focus was not on anti-Semitic tendencies in German media but rather on Israel’s "aggression," "inhuman" behavior, and so on.
After the Jenin operation in April 2002, Süddeutsche Zeitung published a cartoon showing Sharon in front of an Israeli tank that was identified as Jewish-Israeli with a Star of David. To the left of the tank was a bulldozer carrying away dozens of dead, emaciated bodies. UN staff were trying to approach, but Sharon shouted at them, "Go away, this is war!" The bulldozer with the dead bodies is a clear association with images from the liberated extermination camps, in which thousands of dead bodies were carried by bulldozers into mass graves. The simple message of the cartoon is that "the Jews" are Nazis. As Deidre Berger, head of the American Jewish Committee in Germany, noted succinctly, "Israel is under fire in the German media."25
Conclusion
There are various facets of anti-Semitism in Germany today:
* Pre-Auschwitz anti-Semitism, found above all in neo-Nazi circles
* Neo-Nazi anti-Semitism, typically combining Islamism and anti-Zionism
* Neoliberal anti-Semitism, combining massive anti-Israeli attitudes and resistance to both financial and moral responsibility for the Holocaust
* Leftist anti-Semitism, hand in hand with anti-imperialist and antiglobalization attitudes
* Anti-Semitism disguised by general, reflexive “criticism” of Israeli policies
* Anti-Semitism and, hence, anti-Zionism as part of the new German claim of having been victims in WW II
There are no effective, large-scale activities against anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and the majority of Germans would not support them. Although certain individuals and organizations try to put the problem on the agenda, this is much more cosmetics than a successful strategy.
As the historian Julius Schöps of Potsdam University put it in the newspaper Tageszeitung:
Protests against anti-Semitism, organized by small groups, do not get extensive attention in Germany. Resolutions by the German parliament to reject anti-Semitism are drivel of the worst kind....But all those ineffective actions are presented to the world as a strong defense against the charge of anti-Semitism. The truth is: no one is really interested in these matters. No one really cares.26
* * *
Notes
1. This article is based on a lecture presented at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs on 11 May 2004.
2. Jean Améry, "Der ehrbare Antisemitismus," Die Zeit, 25 July 1969 (German).
3. See Werner Bergmann and Rainer Erb, Antisemitismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Ergebnisse der empirischen Forschung von 1946–1989 (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1991) (German).
4. Bernhard Prosch, Reinhard Wittenberg, and Martin Abraham, "Antisemitismus in der ehemaligen DDR. Überraschende Ergebnisse der ersten Repräsentativ-Umfrage und einer Befragung von Jugendlichen in Jena," Tribüne, No. 118 (1991), 102–120; Emnid, for the American Jewish Committee, 1991 (German). ¨
5. Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, Technical University (TU), Berlin. Its director, Prof. Wolfgang Benz, is a renowned scholar in this field. Prof. Walter Berg, a member of the Institute, already decades ago pointed to the similarities between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in his research.
6. Surveys were conducted, e.g., by Emnid in 1994 (Zentralarchiv für empirische Sozialforschung, Cologne, No. 2418), Infratest Burke (1996), Forsa (1998), and Infratest Sozialforschung (2002), and published, e.g., in the weeklies Der Spiegel, Stern, and Die Woche.
7. Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, "Die Bedeutung des Antisemitismus im aktuellen deutschen Rechtsextremismus," 20 May 2003. See http://www.verfassungsschutz. de (German).
8. Ibid., p. 40.
9. Elmar Brähler and Horst Eberhard Richter, "Politische Einstellungen in Deutschland. Einstellungen zu Juden, Amerikanern und Arabern," results of a representative survey conducted in spring 2002. A press conference was held at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt am Main, 14 June 2002 (German).
10. Der Spiegel, May 2002 (German).
11. "Unser Verhältnis zu den Juden" (a survey by FORSA), Stern, No. 48 (2003) (German).
12. The EUMC website now presents the study and some additional material, http://eumc.eu.int/eumc/index.php?fuseacti...sp–cat–content& (http://eumc.eu.int/eumc/index.php?fuseaction>content.dsp–cat–content&) catid>1.
13. See Stephen Roth Institute, Tel Aviv University, http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/.
14. Manfred Gerstenfeld, "From Propagating Myths to Research: Preparing for Holocaust Education - An Interview with Yehuda Bauer," in Europe’s Crumbling Myths (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Yad Vashem, World Jewish Congress, 2003), Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, No. 3, December 1, 2002, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, p. 1, p. 119.
15. A 1998 survey found two-thirds of Germans over age 14 saying there should be an end to discussions of Nazi rule and the Shoah. See Harald Welzer, Opa war kein Nazi (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002) (German). The study concluded that a high percentage of Germans tell myths about the years 1933–1945 and try to disguise their own role while claiming that there was no anti-Semitism and much resistance.
16. Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand. Deutschland im Bombenkrieg (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 2002), and Brandstätten (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 2003) (German).
17. See the TV channel’s website, http://www.zdf.de/ZDFde?inhalt/8/0,1872, 1021352,00.html (German).
18. Peter Sloterdijk, Luftbeben. An der Quelle des Terrors (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002) (German).
19. See http://www.zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/23/0,1872,2021239,00.html, and, there, the link to "Zitate aus der sendung" ("Quotes from the Show") (German).
20. Anne Applebaum, "Germans as Victims," International Herald Tribune, 15 October 2003.
21. See Susanne Urban, "Friend or Foe? Jewish Self-Degradation and Its Misuse by Anti-Semites in Contemporary Germany," Nativ Online, http://www.acpr. org.il/ENGLISH-NATIV/03-issue/urban-3.htm, and the printed issue, Nativ, June 2004 (Ariel Center for Policy Research).
22. There have been some analyses of the anti-Israeli media coverage, e.g., "Medientenor," Tribüne, No. 162 (Frankfurt am Main: Tribüne Verlag, 2002), p. 93. (German).
23. This survey was conducted by the Duisburger Institut für Sprach- und Sozialforschung (DISS) for the German office of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and published in 2002. See http://www.ajc.org/german/israel–medien.-asp, where many more articles on this topic are available (German).
24. On 9–10 December 2002, they held a conference called "Learn to Be Suspicious about Pictures" on media coverage of Israel and the Palestinians, during which the Bundeszentrale presented its study, "Nahostberichterstattung in den Hauptnachrichten des deutschen Fernsehens," http://www.bpb.de (German).
25. Deidre Berger, in the presentation of the study conducted together with DISS (see n. 24) in Berlin, 1 May 2002.
26. Julius Schöps, "Antisemitismus ist Teil dieser Kultur," Taz, 25 October 2002. See http://www.berlin-judentum.de/bildung/anti...usforschung.htm (http://www.berlin-judentum.de/bildung/antisemitismusforschung.htm) (German).
* * *
DR. SUSANNE URBAN is a historian whose current research, along with the subject of contemporary German anti-Semitism, deals with the topic of Youth Aliyah (an organization for Jewish children's immigration to Israel) during the Holocaust. She is affiliated with the Hebrew University and was a research fellow at Yad Vashem in 2004. She is also preparing a book on Jews at the Volkswagen factory in 1944-1945.
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Being Leftist and Anti-Semitic in Germany
Susanne Urban
*
After the reunification of Germany, 1989 surveys indicated that there was much more anti-Semitism in West Germany than in East Germany. This was a fallacy arising from the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Since then, Eastern German "anti-Zionism" has merged with Western German "anti-Semitism" into a homogeneous whole.
*
Since 2000, the German Left has voiced its solidarity and support for the Palestinians and for suicide bombers. This is an extension of the New Left anti-Zionism of the 1960s, with the same structural motifs and expressions.
*
There is also a major trend in the German Left of Nazifying and demonizing Israel, opening the door to proclaiming Jews to be the source of the world's evils.
In October 2004, the Dutch writer and filmmaker Leon de Winter said in an interview to the German liberal newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung: "The old poison of anti-Semitism is very much alive.... I will remain a stranger on this continent.... I fear that in Europe something will once more be done against the Jews."1
Common Ground between Right and Left
Today's German anti-Semitism is deeply connected to the Nazi period and the wish to expunge guilt and responsibility for dealing with it. Right-wing extremism, neo-Nazism, and extreme conservatism seem "naturally" linked to denial or minimalization of the Holocaust, or calling for a new one. As elsewhere in Europe, a relatively new "brotherhood" has emerged in Germany between the extreme Right and fundamentalist Islam.
Anti-Zionism, however - which is not mere criticism of Israeli policies, but the denial of the Jewish people's right to live in their own state - also links leftists and rightists. Since the Six Day War of 1967, both the extreme and the mainstream Left in Europe have shown strong anti-Zionist tendencies, not always distinguishable from anti-Semitism. Although leftist anti-Zionism seemed to decline after the fall of Communism in 1990, it was reanimated by the Second Intifada and the antiglobalization movement, which is today a main source of leftist anti-Semitism.
In a May 2002 survey in the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, 25% agreed that "what the state of Israel does to the Palestinians is no different than what the Nazis did during the Third Reich to the Jews."2 A new scholarly book analyzes how deeply anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are rooted in German society.3 Since 1989, united Germany seems to stand on two main pillars: a strong anti-American and anti-Israeli attitude.
The Postwar, Pre-1967 Roots
Anti-Semitism was never exclusive to the Right; Communism, for its part, often vilified Jews as capitalists. Communism in East Germany, as elsewhere, denied the right to practice the Jewish religion and sought to eradicate religion in general, including Judaism. East Germany's anti-Semitic policies first became evident in January 1953 when the Stasi - the state security service - confiscated documents of the Jewish communities, searched the homes of Jewish leaders, and spoke of a "Zionist conspiracy." After the Six Day War, East Germany officially adopted an anti-Zionist stance. However, no serious data on East German anti-Semitism is available before the reunification in 1989.
Although West German left-wing anti-Semitism also increased steadily after the Six Day War, before then the West German Left supported Israel generally, and specifically the Wiedergutmachung (Reparations Agreement of 1953) and the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1965. This friendliness was, however, based on an idealization of Israel, kibbutzim, and pioneering and was not on genuinely firm ground.4 Opposition to the conservative government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer also played a role in this left-wing philo-Semitism.
During the 1960s, the West German Left divided into a more "conservative" wing and a New Left trend. Whereas Chancellor Willy Brandt was said to be a true and unwavering friend of Israel,5 many young leftists took radical positions and opposed Brandt's "establishment" Social Democratic Party. In 1966 they founded the Nonparliamentary Opposition (APO), a popular movement that sought to "renew" German politics from the outside. Many of its members and supporters later showed sympathy for the RAF, a leftist terrorist movement that had ties to the PLO and whose cadres trained in terrorist camps in Lebanon.
Student Radicalization
During the Six Day War, the New Left definitively transformed its hitherto moderate pro-Arab positions into full support for Arab states and the Palestinians, and its fragile pro-Israeli attitudes dissolved into anti-Semitic slogans thinly disguised as "anti-imperialist" criticism of a "fascist state."
After 1967, however, not only the radicals but large parts of the German Left turned their backs on Israel. This went hand in hand with protests against the Vietnam War, against the conservative mainstream in Adenauer's Germany and afterward the "Great Coalition" that was headed from 1966 by Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a former member of the Nazi Party.6 The New Left also idealized Communist China and Ho Chi Minh, despite their involvement in mass murder against their own people.7
Well-known intellectuals who were more moderate leftists tried to dissuade the New Left from its extreme positions. Ernst Bloch, Jean Amery, Herbert Marcuse, Iring Fetscher, and Jean-Paul Sartre argued with the radicals and discouraged blind solidarity with the PLO, as opposed to legitimate criticism of Israeli policies. They warned that notions of Israel's annihilation were intolerable and linked to National Socialist ideology. However, they were not heeded by the radicals.8
A Friend of Israel, a Foe of Leftists
The publisher Axel Caesar Springer, whose press group included the tabloid daily BILD and the daily Die Welt, as well as many other newspapers and journals, was, according to the Israeli diplomat Asher Ben-Natan, a true friend of Israel and the Jewish people:
He expressed opinions I haven't often heard in Germany.... As the demands mounted to draw a "bottom line" under the German past, Springer thought there could never be Wiedergutmachung for the crimes Germans had committed against the Jews. He himself neither suppressed nor forgot the past and did not expect the Jewish people to forgive what had happened....Neither his moral values nor historical insights nor close relations with Jews and Israel involved benefit for him. It came from honest belief....During our conversations he never disguised his hatred for every kind of totalitarian dictatorship, including Communism....After the Six Day War Springer promulgated four guidelines for his employees and his newspapers that are still binding for the journalists and editors working for Springer publications. One was "Fostering reconciliation between Jews and Germany and supporting Israel's right to exist."9
Springer was, however, a major target of the New Left, one reason being that he and his newspapers were clearly pro-Israeli and condemned the anti-Israeli stream in the New Left. Many in this movement decided: "If Springer is pro-Israeli, we have to be against the state of Israel."10
In 1969, on the date marking Kristallnacht, an anarchist-leftist group painted graffiti on Jewish memorials saying "Shalom and Napalm" or "El Fatah." A firebomb was also placed in the Jewish community center in Berlin. The leftist groups' common perception was: "Jews who were expelled by fascism developed themselves into fascists, who in collaboration with American capitalism want to annihilate the Palestinian people."11
Sharing the Ideology of Terrorism
For the New Left, nothing could discredit anti-Zionism. Even after Israeli athletes were taken hostage and murdered during the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, the leftists strengthened their solidarity with the Palestinian terror organizations.
West German New Leftists participated in the 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe, Uganda, where Jewish and Israeli passengers were singled out from the others by a German terrorist. The German Left ignored the hijacking and subsequent rescue operation by Israeli forces, and the German Communist Party in West Germany published a solidarity letter addressed to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.
In 1982, after Israeli forces invaded Lebanon and the massacres in Sabra and Shatila were publicized, the whole German Left, moderate and radical, united for the first time in comparing Israel with the Third Reich and the Nazis. Thus, 1982 saw the launching of a new demonization, throughout the German public, of Israel and Jews in which they were frequently equated with Nazis.
The pathological need to compare Israel and Nazi Germany seems linked to the wish to discard the guilt and responsibility for the Holocaust. Also in 1982, the leftist newspaper taz called the Palestinians "the new Jews" and accused Israel of a "reverse Holocaust" in seeking to carry out the "final solution of the Palestinian question."12
The Green Party and the Peace Movement
After 1982, and parallel to the peace movement's agitation against U.S. influence and the deployment of missiles in Germany, the Green Party was founded. In those days both the peace movement and the Green Party were influenced by nationalistic, anti-American, "anti-imperialist," and also "blood and soil" motifs taken more or less consciously from Nazi ideology.
Over the years, the Green Party evolved into a liberal, moderate leftist party. Today its leaders mostly hold pro-Israeli views, while supporting a Palestinian state as well, and fight anti-Semitism sincerely. However, many party members, particularly young ones, have more leftist, pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist attitudes.
As for the German peace movement, it has not changed substantially since 1982, maintaining its anti-American and anti-Israeli emphasis. Although receding in importance after the fall of the Communist bloc, it came back with renewed force in 2002 as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were being planned. Millions of Germans, like their counterparts in other European countries, rallied in the streets to denounce the United States, Israel, and other governments that supported the war on terror.
An Evolving Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification, initial surveys in 1989 revealed a huge gap in anti-Semitic attitudes between East and West Germany.13 This, however, was a distortion fostered by a superficial distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Since it has become clear that East German "anti-Zionism" merged quickly with West German "anti-Semitism" into a homogeneous whole.14 In the Cold War era, readers of East German newspapers and also Western Communist publications were accustomed to "criticisms" of Israeli policies that used anti-Semitic caricatures and clichés. Protests by Jewish community leaders in East Berlin never appeared in public.15
The German Left stridently opposed the First Gulf War in 1991, and expressed strong sympathy for the Iraqi victims of coalition bombings. When Palestinians rejoiced as Iraqi missiles hit Israel, however, some Germans joined in their glee and attributed these attacks to "Israeli policies,"16 meaning "the Jews" are to blame when they are persecuted.
Up to 2000, however, both New Left and mainstream anti-Zionist attitudes differentiated between Israel and the Jews who lived in Germany - although, as mentioned, there were cases of anti-Jewish graffiti and attacks on Jewish memorials and institutions. Only rarely was the Jewish community targeted by hostile actions with an Israeli focus. One could be anti-Zionist yet show high sympathy for the Jews in Germany based on a vague empathy related to the Holocaust.
But since 2000 the Jewish community is no longer safe and has been targeted by anti-Israeli activity, from graffiti and hate mail to demonstrations against the war in Iraq that ended up facing Jewish-community buildings or even a memorial like the Alte Synagogue in Essen. Jews in Germany are somehow held as hostages for Israeli policies, no matter what their own views.
Leftist anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist clichés have also become the common, acceptable property of conservatives, liberals, as well as leftists in Germany since 2000, and are well evident in the German media.17 The trend intensified after the September 11 attack in the United States, which gave rise to new anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that blamed the event on the Mossad. Many books developing such theories were published in Germany, and they were all bestsellers.18 Another outlet for such sentiments was the anti-war demonstrations of 2002, as well as anti-globalization gatherings.
With the Second Intifada, the Left and many other groups rediscovered or discovered their solidarity with the Palestinians - including the suicide bombers. This is an extension of the New Left anti-Zionism of the 1960s, with basically the same structural motifs and expressions. Given the decline of Communism there is less of an "anti-imperialist" emphasis, but the trend of Nazifying and demonizing Israel has grown dramatically in Germany as in Europe generally.
Nazifying Israel, How to Get Rid of the Holocaust
In today's Germany, leftists who Nazify Israel and characterize it as the world's most evil country have opened the door to proclaiming Jews to be evil people in general. Since Nazis represent the pinnacle of evil in leftist ideology, those who allegedly resemble them and perpetrate Holocaust-like actions are seen as being on the same moral level.
In 2002, Freie Sender Kombinat, a radio station in Hamburg run by students and leftist groups, interviewed a Palestinian named Ahmed who described Israelis as "the Nazis of today," and compared the Holocaust to the Palestinian history "under the Zionists." He appealed to Germany to end the Wiedergutmachung and claimed that about ten billion Marks had been paid for each Israeli citizen. The presenters did not question him or even correct the absurd figure.
In October 2001, the far-Left academic journal Contraste published an article by the sociologist Christian Siegrist that claimed: "there are too many Jews in American politics. I think it is legitimate if they are overrepresented in science, this is somehow traditional, but it is not good if American Jews are involved in Middle Eastern politics." He also asserted: "The atrocities against the Palestinian people are a humiliation for the whole Arab world.... They have suffered worse than what the people in New York experienced on that one day."19
On 28 September 2002, the Palestine Committee in Stuttgart held a symposium. No protest was heard as the following statements were made:
*
We have to support the Palestinians unconditionally. This means: Solidarity with suicide bombers.
*
A two-state solution is no solution for Palestine. In the end the reactionary state of Israel and Sharon must fall. Israel must be eliminated.
*
In Germany some parts of the peace movement are under the control of the Zionists. They do not think independently; the Jews are pulling the strings.
*
Western politicians are under the control of the banks and holding companies. They need the aggressive and reactionary regime in Israel to get more and more power in that region. Sharon has nothing to fear since the banks are behind him. Is there any region in the world that is not under the rule of globalized capitalism?... Behind the Jews stands the financial capital - the reeking capitalism.
This gathering included leftist groups as well as the anti-globalization movement, Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens (ATTAC).201
ATTAC
ATTAC, a worldwide group with many members and promoters in Germany, was monitored very thoroughly by Jewish organizations, mainly in France and Britain, as it went beyond criticism of economic policies to address political issues. In a January 2003 demonstration against the meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, some of its activists, including Germans, staged a "masquerade." One person, disguised as President Bush, carried with another person a "golden calf." Both "Bush" and the calf were marked with large yellow stars.
Subsequently ATTAC came under heavy criticism and tried to deflect it with a "Discussion Site of ATTAC-Germany on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict."21 Although attempts were made there to deny anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, between the lines the message was clear: Israel is solely responsible for the escalation since September 2000, and European Jewish groups isolate themselves when they decline to attend "anti-racism" rallies together with ATTAC and other leftist groups.
According to one statement: "The killing of Israeli civilians is not only a moral, but also a political problem." In other words, is it morally wrong to kill civilians, or is it understandable that suicide bombers act as they do? The "political problem," however, is not attributed to the Palestinian Authority but to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for allegedly "using the bombings for his foreign policy."
Later, this statement denies that Israel is actually fighting a war against terror and belittles what Israelis undergo. Palestinian terror is legitimized as a "just fight" against the "Israeli occupation," whereas "Israel is only struggling for the continuation of the occupation." ATTAC Germany also asserts at the same site: "During World War II the Allies committed war crimes like the bombings of Hiroshima and Dresden, but their fight against Nazism was just." The Allies are meant to be analogous with the Palestinian terrorists, Nazism with Israel.
Conclusion
In Germany the circle between Right and Left, between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, seems finally to have closed. Israel is now blamed for worldwide problems, just as Jews were accused as the source of misfortunes during the Middle Ages. The centuries-old practice of demonizing Jews has now been transferred to the state of Israel, leading to its delegitimization and isolation amid open calls for its destruction.
The extreme leftist trend in Germany contains elements that envision a world cleansed of the Jewish state.
* * *
Notes
1. Leon de Winter, "Das Boese existiert," Sueddeutsche Zeitung, 18 October 2004 (the quotation is translated by Susanne Urban).
2. Der Spiegel, May 2002.
3. Wilhelm Heitmeyer, ed., Deutsche Zustaende (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005).
4. See Frank Stern, Im Anfang war Auschwitz. Antisemitismus und Philosemitismus im deutschen Nachkrieg (Schriftenr. d. Inst. f. Dt. Gesch. Uni. Tel Aviv 14), Gerlingen, 1991.
5. Based on interviews by Susanne Urban with Asher Ben-Natan, published as a biographical account of Ben-Natan's experiences in Germany: Bruecken bauen, aber nicht vergessen. Als erster Botschafter Israels in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1965-1969) (Duesseldorf: Droste, 2005).
6. See also Bruecken bauen, aber nicht vergessen, pp. 111-145.
7. Jean Amery, "Die Linke und der Zionismus," Tribuene, 32 (Frankfurt am Main, 1969); Thomas Haury, Antisemitismus von Links (Hamburg: Institut für Sozialforschung 2002); Martin W. Kloke, Israel und die deutsche Linke. Zur Geschichte eines schwierigen Verhaeltnisses (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
8. The article and appeals of these intellectuals were published in student journals, in the quarterly journal Tribuene (Frankfurt am Main), and in left-liberal newspapers like Frankfurter Rundschau.
9. B ruecken bauen, aber nicht vergessen, pp. 93-96 (the quotation is translated by Susanne Urban).
10. Kloke, Israel und die deutsche Linke, p. 17.
11. Bommi Baumann, Wie alles anfing (Frankfurt am Main, 1976).
12. Kloke, Israel und die deutsche Linke, pp. 137-143, where more such quotations can be found.
13. Bernhard Prosch, Reinhard Wittenberg, and Martin Abraham, "Antisemitismus in der ehemaligen DDR. Ueberraschende Ergebnisse der ersten Repraesentativ-Umfrage und einer Befragung von Jugendlichen in Jena," Tribuene, 118 (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), pp. 102-120; Emnid (a polling institute), survey conducted for the American Jewish Committee, 1991.
14. See, e.g., a 1994 Emnid survey (Zentralarchiv für empirische Sozialforschung, Cologne, No. 2418), and polls by Infratest Burke (1996), Forsa (1998), and Infratest Sozialforschung (2002). Many of the polls were published in the weeklies Der Spiegel, Stern, and Die Woche.
15. Lothar Mertens, "Staatlich propagierter Antizionismus: Das Israelbild in der DDR," in Siegfried Theodor Arndt, Helmut Eschwege, Peter Honigmann, and Lothar Mertens, eds., Juden in der DDR. Geschichte - Probleme - Perspektiven (Köln: Boehlau, 1988), pp. 125-159.
16. As stated in 1991 by Green Party member Christian Stroebele. See also Martin W. Kloke, "Kathartische Zerreissproben: Zur Israel-Diskussion in der Partei 'Die Gruenen,'" in Herbert A. Strauss, Werner Bergmann, and Christhard Hoffmann, eds., Der Antisemitismus der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1990), p. 124 ff.
17. Analyses of the anti-Israeli media coverage include a survey by Medientenor, published in Tribuene, 162 (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), p. 93 ff.; and a survey by the Duisburger Institut für Sprach- und Sozialforschung (DISS) on behalf of the German office of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), published in 2002. See under: http://www.ajc.org/german/israel_medien.asp. In addition, in 2002 the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Center for Civic Studies) presented its study, "Nahostberichterstattung in den Hauptnachrichten des deutschen Fernsehens," http://www.bpb.de.
18. One book has now analyzed these books' influence and anti-Semitic bias: Tobias Jaecker, Antisemitische Verschwoerungstheorien nach dem 11. September (Hannover: LIT, 2004).
19. Website no longer available; the journal quoted was available online.
20. The quotations are from various websites that are no longer available. Such discussion groups of anti-Semitic incidents disappear quickly.
21. www.attac-netzwerk.de; search "Antisemitismus," "Israel," or "Palestine."
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Dr. Susanne Urban is a historian whose current research, along with the subject of contemporary German anti-Semitism, deals with the topic of Youth Aliyah (an organization for Jewish children's immigration to Israel) during the Holocaust. She is affiliated with Yad Vashem and the Hebrew University. Recently she published a book coauthored with Israel's first ambassador to Germany, Asher Ben-Natan, about his experiences there (Bruecken bauen, aber nicht vergessen. Als erster Botschafter Israels in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland [1965-1969], 2005) and a book on Jews at the Volkswagen factory in 1944-1945 (Verschleppt, verborgen und ueberlebt, 2005).
Anti-Semitism In Germany Today:
Its Roots And Tendencies1
Susanne Urban
The new millennium has witnessed a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the world, especially in Europe. Anti-Semitism certainly did not disappear in Germany after WW II. What is new is the blunt expression of anti-Semitism and the fraternization between left-wing and right-wing, liberal and conservative streams. Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism continue to spread in German society and are more and more openly expressed.
Right-wing groups and neo-Nazis are no longer the only ones who agitate against Israel and Jews. Together with "traditional" anti-Semitism, Germany has seen a growth of leftist anti-Semitism along with anti-imperialist, antiglobalization, and anti-Zionist attitudes, all reinforcing the new German claim of having been victims in WW II.
There is a widespread animus against Israel, clearly not only toward Israeli policies, that often goes along with pro-Palestinian partisanship. This development is intensified by anti-Israeli media coverage in Germany, often accompanied by anti-Semitic language and images.
This "new" anti-Semitism in Germany correlates with changes in the nation's attitudes toward WW II and remembrance of the Shoah. Laying the blame for "immoral" conduct on Israel, and therefore "the Jews," makes clear that "they" did not learn the lessons of the Shoah; whereas Germans see themselves as having learned the lessons by being watchmen against "immoral" politics.
In 1967 Jean Améry wrote: "The classic phenomenon of anti-Semitism is taking a new shape. The old one still exists, this I call coexistence....To be clear: anti-Semitism, included in...anti-Zionism as the thunderstorm is part of the cloud, is again respectable....But: a respectable anti-Semitism is not possible."2
More than thirty-five years later, it seems nothing has changed. Although anti-Semitism masks itself above all as anti-Zionism or "criticism of Israeli policies," its roots are pure, traditional anti-Semitism.
The Devil in Disguise
Améry’s appeal not to become complacent toward anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism has lost none of its importance. Born in 1912 in Vienna, Améry survived the Holocaust and after 1966 worked mainly as a journalist. His writings are responses to anti-Semitism by someone who lost faith in the world in Auschwitz. He committed suicide in 1978.
The new millennium has witnessed a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the world, especially in Europe. There is a clear link to the terror war in Israel, and a widespread animus against Israel (not just Israeli policies) and Diaspora Jews along with pro-Palestinian partisanship. This development is intensified by anti-Israeli media coverage including the use of anti-Semitic language and images.
In Germany, anti-Semitism certainly did not disappear after WW II. What is new is the blunt expression of anti-Semitism and the fraternization between left-wing and right-wing, liberal and conservative streams. Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism continue to spread in German society.
Anti-Semitism in Germany, 1945–2004
Anti-Semitism appears to be an essential part of the European cultural tradition, and in Germany, more or less conscious Jew-hatred exists by "tradition" as well. Former East Germany, and before that the Soviet Occupation Zone, never conducted a survey of anti-Semitism, and no data is available. Such surveys were, however, conducted in West Germany. In 1949, a quarter of the West German population described themselves as anti-Semites; in a 1952 survey, one-third said they were definitely anti-Semites.3
By 1980, however, the tracking of various population samples showed that anti-Semitism had decreased. Surveys conducted after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 revealed a huge gap in anti-Semitic attitudes between East and West Germany.4 Surprisingly, East Germany appeared to be very congenial to Jews with almost no anti-Semitism. This, however, was a fallacy related to the fact that many people and even researchers make a facile distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, despite the fact that scholars from the Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism in Berlin5 pointed to the similarities. In addition, East Germans were used to saying what was officially required of them. And, as implied, anti-Zionism and attitudes toward Israel per se were not probed. Indeed, in subsequent surveys the gap between eastern and western Germany closed quickly.6
In May 2003, the Federal Office for Protecting the Constitution published a special study on anti-Semitism and its links with rightwing and neo-Nazi groups.7 The same institution recorded more than 1400 anti-Semitic crimes in 2001,8 confirming a steady rise including a 100 percent increase for Berlin. Anti-Israeli activities, however, such as attacks on the Israeli embassy, are not included in these reports because there is still no systematic monitoring of anti-Zionism.
In 2002, as the neoliberal FDP Party maligned Israel, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and German Jewish leader Michel Friedman, anti-Semitism became an issue for the first time in a postwar German election campaign.
In April of that year, the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt am Main and the University of Leipzig confirmed a new height of anti-Semitism. In their joint study, 20 percent of the respondents agreed that "Jews are to blame for the major conflicts in the world," and another 26 percent shared this opinion to some extent.9
In May 2002, the weekly magazine Der Spiegel published a survey in which 25 percent agreed that "what the State of Israel does to the Palestinians is no different than what the Nazis did during the Third Reich to the Jews."10
As reported in 2003, studies now estimate overt anti-Semitism at around 23 percent, and covert anti-Semitism as existing among 30–40 percent of the German public.11
In 2002, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) in Vienna and the above-mentioned Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism conducted a study on "Manifestations of Anti-Semitism in the European Union: First Semester, 2002." In October 2003 the first version of the report was submitted to the EU, and by January 2004 the final report was in the hands of the EUMC, which kept the study - with the EU’s knowledge and approval - under lock and key. The research shows that, aside from the clear threat posed by "ordinary" right-wing anti-Semitism, Muslims and pro-Palestinian groups are also playing a crucial role. Furthermore, leftist and antiglobalization groups such as ATTAC were described as more or less anti-Semitic.12 The EUMC vaguely criticized the study, saying that "there was a problem defining anti-Semitism, the definition being too complicated," as a member of the Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism told the author. Once again, anti-Zionism was treated as distinct from anti-Semitism.
In April 2004, as the Conference on Anti-Semitism in Europe took place in Berlin, the Stephen Roth Institute of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University revealed that the countries with the highest rates of anti-Semitic incidents in the world are Germany, France, Britain, Russia, and Canada.13 Compared to France or Britain, in Germany Islamic and pro-Palestinian groups are involved in only a very small percentage of anti-Semitic incidents: indigenous German anti-Semitism does not need "support" from others. Since there was never a time free of anti-Semitism, it is necessary to ask whether the current wave is really "new anti-Semitism" or centuries old anti-Semitism that has been "modernized" and adapted to the circumstances. Above all, it is a post-Auschwitz anti-Semitism. For many people, provided they are not Holocaust deniers or neo-Nazis, Auschwitz as the symbol of the Holocaust is the obstacle to expressing anti-Semitism and aversion to Jews and Israel. Hence Germans, like many other anti-Semites, use the "anti-Zionist" disguise. This enables declaring Israel "the most evil country" and "nazifying" Israel with comparisons to the Third Reich, or advocating that it vanish from the world’s stage. This, in turn, opens the door to proclaiming Jews to be evil people in general.
These manifestations of anti-Semitism in Germany are deeply linked to the German past from 1933 to 1945 and the wish to get rid of guilt or responsibility for dealing with that past. Germany’s ideological unification since 1989 has two main pillars: a strong anti-American and anti-Israeli attitude, and a new position toward the history of WW II.
Rewriting History
For more than fifteen years, German intellectuals, writers, politicians, and ordinary people have gradually worn down moral and political barriers that for decades kept the overwhelming majority away from open and extensive anti-Semitism.
It started with the Historikerstreit, a series of articles written in 1986, and did not end with the anti-Semitic election campaign in spring 2002. The Historikerstreit was mainly propelled by an article by the historian Ernst Nolte in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which portrayed the National Socialist state and its terror as only a reaction to the Bolshevik threat, and the persecution of Jews and the Shoah as not really singular in human history. (Jürgen Habermas, a representative of the Critical Theory school and intellectual descendant of Theodor Adorno, sharply protested Nolte’s claims.) Germany is a country with far more memorials and museums to the concentration camps, as well as Jewish museums, than other European countries. The volume of Holocaust education in schools and other educational institutions, the number of conferences and workshops devoted to the subject, seems close to unique in Europe. As Yehuda Bauer, chief historian of Yad Vashem, said in an interview:
Germany is most active in promoting Holocaust education for which there is a very good reason. Given their history, they understand the importance of education as a means of preventing future disasters. The Holocaust today serves as a symbol for what we ought to oppose: racism, genocide, mass murder, ethnic hatred, ethnic cleansing, anti-Semitism and group hatred.14
Nevertheless, the opposition to inhumanity in general is no obstacle to German anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Holocaust education in Germany may be intensive, but most of the textbooks use cliche's and stereotypes. Moreover, many of the teachers convey compassion for the murdered Jews along with strong reservations toward the Jews of today and, of course, the anti-Israeli attitude. Although Germany is proud of its well-developed culture of Holocaust remembrance and education, which for many years was seen as a force against anti-Semitism, the latter force has gone weak. It was a fallacy to think that knowledge about the Shoah would lead people to love their neighbors or even their Jewish neighbors. Holocaust education in Germany is being slowly but steadily undermined by the new trend of seeing Germans themselves as victims, with many people feeling that they are fed up with the Shoah.15 Well-intended rituals and remembrances have not proved an effective shield against anti-Semitism and the rewriting of history. This widespread "victim" trend in Germany needs to be monitored carefully, since in the long run it may lead to a rewriting of the history of WW II and, in the worst case, to a minimization of the Shoah.
The leading figure among the German "new historians" is Jörg Friedrich, who has published two books on the Allied bombings of Germany.16 The first book deals with the strategy of the Allied bombings and condemns them as inhuman and pointless. Friedrich’s popularized style helped this book become a bestseller. He uses terms that for decades were associated with Nazi persecution and the Shoah; thus, cellars and air-raid shelters in which Germans died are "crematoria," an RAF bomber group is an Einsatzgruppe, and the destruction of libraries during the bombings constitutes Bücherverbrennungen. In this way the Shoah is minimized through language.
Friedrich’s second book was also a bestseller and also depicts Germans as victims. There are no SA men, no SS, no soldiers involved in persecution, murder, and "aryanization." The book contains horrifying photos of the effects of the Allied bombings of Germany. Ruins, burnt bodies, and ashes everywhere evoke associations with the Warsaw Ghetto after its liquidation in 1943 and well-known images from Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Friedrich even declared openly, in several television interviews in winter 2002: "Churchill was the greatest child-slaughterer of all time. He slaughtered 76,000 children." Yet Friedrich, formerly known as a serious historian, never devotes a single word to the 1.5 million murdered Jewish children.
German historiography increasingly portrays Germans as victims in WW II and not as perpetrators, bystanders, or people deriving benefit from persecution. The revised perspective on German history - from the Allied bombings to the Germans’ expulsion from Poland and East European countries - undoubtedly reflects a historical consciousness that is newly embraced by the majority, though not new in itself. There was never any taboo on speaking about the Allied bombings or the postwar expulsions; documentaries, books, journals, and films have dealt with these subjects since the early 1950s, and WW II was commonly discussed in families and by certain organizations. What is new, however, is the public reinterpretation of history, encompassing intellectuals and politicians of both the Left and the Right.
From a Trickle to the Mainstream
A few examples will illustrate this trend. In Frankfurt in 1998, when he received the Peace Prize of German Publishers, the famous German writer Martin Walser gave a speech in which he expressed his weariness at being confronted with Auschwitz; he was supported by large numbers of Germans including intellectuals and politicians. Jews who spoke out in protest were almost on their own. Four years later in 2002, for 8 May - the day marking the liberation in 1945 - Walser was invited for a discussion with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder on "Nation and Patriotism." Their dialogue focused on the question of whether the Allies of WW I were really the ones responsible for Hitler’s coming to power. Walser maintained that patriotism must be based on emotions and deeply rooted in history, and the German chancellor asserted: "The way we as Germans deal with our history shall be decided by each and every generation anew." The decision seems to have been made.
Since the second Palestinian uprising began in the fall of 2000, many consider that Israel is losing the media battle. The Israeli government is frequently blamed for not making its viewpoints known effectively. Pro-Israeli media watchers are an important source of information for their readers. But above all, they are private actors in the Arab-Israeli public relations war.
On 9 November 2002, the memorial day for Kristallnacht in 1938, German public television for the first time in years did not screen the usual quantity of movies and documentaries on this topic. The main news programs devoted about ten seconds to a historical review. Two documentaries were shown at around 11 p.m., one on Hitler’s secretary and the other, not broadcast on either of the two national channels but on three of the sixteen federal stations, on the Sonderkommando (Jews forced to work in the crematoria) in Auschwitz. However, this time the first national channel, ARD, presented the first episode of a three-part series on the German general Erwin Rommel and also the first episode of a six-part series on the SS, and although the SS was portrayed as a brutal organization its victims were absent.
On 17 November 2002, the Day of National Mourning, which is dedicated to soldiers and civilians who died in WW I and WW II, parliament held a four-hour ceremony. Tall black crosses were emplaced in the parliament despite the supposed separation of church and state. Between some classical music pieces, a young woman read from letters written in 1942 by German soldiers based in Stalingrad. During the whole ceremony there was not one word about war crimes, or about the army units that slaughtered Jews. ¨
Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher born in 1947, has stepped out of academia and become a star of German television. Since 2002 he has had his own show, Philosophical Quartet,17 in which he and his regular comrade Rüdiger Safranski, a philosopher and writer, host two other guests to discuss the latest issues. Sloterdijk is known for an elitist and anti-American attitude that goes hand in hand with a conservative view of the German past, a synthesis of leftist and rightist positions. His latest book, Airquake: At the Source of Terror18 recounts catastrophic events that for Sloterdijk are all similar: the Holocaust, the Allied bombings of Germany, the atomic bombing of Japan, and September 11 are the strange pearls on Sloterdijk’s string. He maintains that the source of all these catastrophes was the first attack with poison gas in WW I, which, he emphasizes, was primarily made possible by the German chemist Fritz Haber. With a cynical undertone Sloterdijk stresses the fact that Haber was Jewish, and then alleges a continuity between Haber’s experiments and the gas chambers during the Shoah. Although Sloterdijk does not make the connection explicitly, he implies a horrible conclusion: that without a Jewish chemist there would have been no Holocaust.
In November 2002 Sloterdijk invited to his show Luc Bondy, a theatrical director, to discuss the topic of anti-Semitism. Bondy told the audience: "After WW II, as small children, we were confronted with guilt. It was so massive. We as children in postwar times were under fire nearly nonstop and saw those pictures everywhere. My thesis is: the only possible way to get rid of anti-Semitism is therefore to be anti-Semitic again."19
These and many other popularized historical reinterpretations reflect the fact that Germany is on a path toward self-reconciliation. It is a reconciliation between the generations, as the gap that opened between the 1960s leftist movement and the parent generation, who were accused as participants in the war, is closed; and it is also a reconciliation between Left and Right. No longer do historical debates drive a wedge between Germans.
As Anne Applebaum has written:
The country’s collective conscience was enlightened by the TV-Series "Holocaust" to an extent that could never have been achieved by historical science and all its publications. What imperative message, fuelled by emotionalism, is carried by today’s self-reconciliation trend? The discussion on victimhood has now been extended to include the perpetrators. In the dispute over the planned "Centre against Expulsion," for example.20
The gates are wide open to a new cult of victimhood that minimizes - even without malicious intention - Germany’s guilt for the outbreak of war, its crimes against humanity (including those committed by German army units), as well as the uniqueness of the Holocaust.
Misusing the Shoah
The decreasing interest in the Holocaust does not prevent Germans from invoking it in political debates. The "lesson" that Germans now draw from WW II and the Holocaust is one of opposition to the United States and Israel.
It is often claimed that the German public has been sensitized to realities such as the 2003 war in Iraq or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by decades of education on German war crimes and the Shoah as a unique genocide. The Shoah is misused to oppose military conflicts, particularly if they are carried out by the United States or Israel against terror regimes, terror movements, and Islamic fundamentalism. Once a domain of the Left, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism are now embraced by ordinary Germans, reinforced by the books on the Allied bombings and the like. The extreme Right, which normally is identified with xenophobic attitudes, has discovered its solidarity with Islamic and Palestinian "freedom fighters." Pro-Palestinian, anti-American, and anti-Semitic themes were common in the 2003 demonstrations against the war in Iraq.
Israel is condemned, but terrorist movements in Spain, Ireland, or Israel itself are not. The German public does not organize demonstrations after a bus bombing in Israel, but it does after a Hamas leader is killed. Israel, and hence "the Jews," are accused of horrendous behavior that is alleged to be even worse because they are "former victims." In other words, Israel and the Jews have not learned their lessons from the Shoah, whereas Germans have learned them thoroughly.
To clear themselves of the suspicion of being anti-Semitic, Germans accompany every castigation of Israel with the mantra that it is "only criticism" motivated by a just, democratic preference for peaceful solutions. The other side of this coin is their claim that because of the Holocaust, Germans have to side with today’s victims, namely, the Palestinians. Undoubtedly the best tactic, however, is to quote leftist Jews or Israelis to buttress their own views. Jewish witnesses are taken to court against Israel.21
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism Go Hand in Hand
This anti-Israeli attitude is state-of-the-art in parts of the German media.22 Photos and illustrated reports present the Israeli Goliath against the Palestinian David, Palestinian children against heavily armed Israeli soldiers. We see ruins of Palestinian buildings with distressed women and children standing in front of them, juxtaposed with settlers who live in green, opulent surroundings and act aggressively toward Palestinians.
A 2002 study showed that German media coverage of the Middle East is often characterized by a lack of context and hostile undertones against Israel. Not uncommonly, the Holocaust is minimized by comparing Israel with the Third Reich, blood libels are invoked regarding Palestinian children, and Zionist conspiracy theories are mentioned. The study concluded: "German media coverage of the conflict contributed to an anti-Semitic view of Israel among the German population."23
At the end of 2002, the Federal Centre for Civic Education in Bonn followed up with its own study, which concluded that "an important effect in media is to present Israel and its military power only to convey the impression that Israel is the aggressor."24 During the official presentation of this study, however, the results were distorted and played down. The opening lecture was by Werner Stüber of the University of Düsseldorf, who had lived many years in East Jerusalem and taught at Bir Zeit University. He did not say a sentence about Palestinian terror, but did speak of the "powerful Jewish lobby in the United States." An attempt to dispute this lecture was stifled with the words that the lecture backed the position of the Centre for Civic Education - which, seemingly, did not consider the results of its own study, and, incidentally, is directly connected to the German state. As the conference continued, the focus was not on anti-Semitic tendencies in German media but rather on Israel’s "aggression," "inhuman" behavior, and so on.
After the Jenin operation in April 2002, Süddeutsche Zeitung published a cartoon showing Sharon in front of an Israeli tank that was identified as Jewish-Israeli with a Star of David. To the left of the tank was a bulldozer carrying away dozens of dead, emaciated bodies. UN staff were trying to approach, but Sharon shouted at them, "Go away, this is war!" The bulldozer with the dead bodies is a clear association with images from the liberated extermination camps, in which thousands of dead bodies were carried by bulldozers into mass graves. The simple message of the cartoon is that "the Jews" are Nazis. As Deidre Berger, head of the American Jewish Committee in Germany, noted succinctly, "Israel is under fire in the German media."25
Conclusion
There are various facets of anti-Semitism in Germany today:
* Pre-Auschwitz anti-Semitism, found above all in neo-Nazi circles
* Neo-Nazi anti-Semitism, typically combining Islamism and anti-Zionism
* Neoliberal anti-Semitism, combining massive anti-Israeli attitudes and resistance to both financial and moral responsibility for the Holocaust
* Leftist anti-Semitism, hand in hand with anti-imperialist and antiglobalization attitudes
* Anti-Semitism disguised by general, reflexive “criticism” of Israeli policies
* Anti-Semitism and, hence, anti-Zionism as part of the new German claim of having been victims in WW II
There are no effective, large-scale activities against anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and the majority of Germans would not support them. Although certain individuals and organizations try to put the problem on the agenda, this is much more cosmetics than a successful strategy.
As the historian Julius Schöps of Potsdam University put it in the newspaper Tageszeitung:
Protests against anti-Semitism, organized by small groups, do not get extensive attention in Germany. Resolutions by the German parliament to reject anti-Semitism are drivel of the worst kind....But all those ineffective actions are presented to the world as a strong defense against the charge of anti-Semitism. The truth is: no one is really interested in these matters. No one really cares.26
* * *
Notes
1. This article is based on a lecture presented at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs on 11 May 2004.
2. Jean Améry, "Der ehrbare Antisemitismus," Die Zeit, 25 July 1969 (German).
3. See Werner Bergmann and Rainer Erb, Antisemitismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Ergebnisse der empirischen Forschung von 1946–1989 (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1991) (German).
4. Bernhard Prosch, Reinhard Wittenberg, and Martin Abraham, "Antisemitismus in der ehemaligen DDR. Überraschende Ergebnisse der ersten Repräsentativ-Umfrage und einer Befragung von Jugendlichen in Jena," Tribüne, No. 118 (1991), 102–120; Emnid, for the American Jewish Committee, 1991 (German). ¨
5. Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, Technical University (TU), Berlin. Its director, Prof. Wolfgang Benz, is a renowned scholar in this field. Prof. Walter Berg, a member of the Institute, already decades ago pointed to the similarities between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in his research.
6. Surveys were conducted, e.g., by Emnid in 1994 (Zentralarchiv für empirische Sozialforschung, Cologne, No. 2418), Infratest Burke (1996), Forsa (1998), and Infratest Sozialforschung (2002), and published, e.g., in the weeklies Der Spiegel, Stern, and Die Woche.
7. Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, "Die Bedeutung des Antisemitismus im aktuellen deutschen Rechtsextremismus," 20 May 2003. See http://www.verfassungsschutz. de (German).
8. Ibid., p. 40.
9. Elmar Brähler and Horst Eberhard Richter, "Politische Einstellungen in Deutschland. Einstellungen zu Juden, Amerikanern und Arabern," results of a representative survey conducted in spring 2002. A press conference was held at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt am Main, 14 June 2002 (German).
10. Der Spiegel, May 2002 (German).
11. "Unser Verhältnis zu den Juden" (a survey by FORSA), Stern, No. 48 (2003) (German).
12. The EUMC website now presents the study and some additional material, http://eumc.eu.int/eumc/index.php?fuseacti...sp–cat–content& (http://eumc.eu.int/eumc/index.php?fuseaction>content.dsp–cat–content&) catid>1.
13. See Stephen Roth Institute, Tel Aviv University, http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/.
14. Manfred Gerstenfeld, "From Propagating Myths to Research: Preparing for Holocaust Education - An Interview with Yehuda Bauer," in Europe’s Crumbling Myths (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Yad Vashem, World Jewish Congress, 2003), Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, No. 3, December 1, 2002, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, p. 1, p. 119.
15. A 1998 survey found two-thirds of Germans over age 14 saying there should be an end to discussions of Nazi rule and the Shoah. See Harald Welzer, Opa war kein Nazi (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002) (German). The study concluded that a high percentage of Germans tell myths about the years 1933–1945 and try to disguise their own role while claiming that there was no anti-Semitism and much resistance.
16. Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand. Deutschland im Bombenkrieg (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 2002), and Brandstätten (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 2003) (German).
17. See the TV channel’s website, http://www.zdf.de/ZDFde?inhalt/8/0,1872, 1021352,00.html (German).
18. Peter Sloterdijk, Luftbeben. An der Quelle des Terrors (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002) (German).
19. See http://www.zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/23/0,1872,2021239,00.html, and, there, the link to "Zitate aus der sendung" ("Quotes from the Show") (German).
20. Anne Applebaum, "Germans as Victims," International Herald Tribune, 15 October 2003.
21. See Susanne Urban, "Friend or Foe? Jewish Self-Degradation and Its Misuse by Anti-Semites in Contemporary Germany," Nativ Online, http://www.acpr. org.il/ENGLISH-NATIV/03-issue/urban-3.htm, and the printed issue, Nativ, June 2004 (Ariel Center for Policy Research).
22. There have been some analyses of the anti-Israeli media coverage, e.g., "Medientenor," Tribüne, No. 162 (Frankfurt am Main: Tribüne Verlag, 2002), p. 93. (German).
23. This survey was conducted by the Duisburger Institut für Sprach- und Sozialforschung (DISS) for the German office of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and published in 2002. See http://www.ajc.org/german/israel–medien.-asp, where many more articles on this topic are available (German).
24. On 9–10 December 2002, they held a conference called "Learn to Be Suspicious about Pictures" on media coverage of Israel and the Palestinians, during which the Bundeszentrale presented its study, "Nahostberichterstattung in den Hauptnachrichten des deutschen Fernsehens," http://www.bpb.de (German).
25. Deidre Berger, in the presentation of the study conducted together with DISS (see n. 24) in Berlin, 1 May 2002.
26. Julius Schöps, "Antisemitismus ist Teil dieser Kultur," Taz, 25 October 2002. See http://www.berlin-judentum.de/bildung/anti...usforschung.htm (http://www.berlin-judentum.de/bildung/antisemitismusforschung.htm) (German).
* * *
DR. SUSANNE URBAN is a historian whose current research, along with the subject of contemporary German anti-Semitism, deals with the topic of Youth Aliyah (an organization for Jewish children's immigration to Israel) during the Holocaust. She is affiliated with the Hebrew University and was a research fellow at Yad Vashem in 2004. She is also preparing a book on Jews at the Volkswagen factory in 1944-1945.
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Being Leftist and Anti-Semitic in Germany
Susanne Urban
*
After the reunification of Germany, 1989 surveys indicated that there was much more anti-Semitism in West Germany than in East Germany. This was a fallacy arising from the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Since then, Eastern German "anti-Zionism" has merged with Western German "anti-Semitism" into a homogeneous whole.
*
Since 2000, the German Left has voiced its solidarity and support for the Palestinians and for suicide bombers. This is an extension of the New Left anti-Zionism of the 1960s, with the same structural motifs and expressions.
*
There is also a major trend in the German Left of Nazifying and demonizing Israel, opening the door to proclaiming Jews to be the source of the world's evils.
In October 2004, the Dutch writer and filmmaker Leon de Winter said in an interview to the German liberal newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung: "The old poison of anti-Semitism is very much alive.... I will remain a stranger on this continent.... I fear that in Europe something will once more be done against the Jews."1
Common Ground between Right and Left
Today's German anti-Semitism is deeply connected to the Nazi period and the wish to expunge guilt and responsibility for dealing with it. Right-wing extremism, neo-Nazism, and extreme conservatism seem "naturally" linked to denial or minimalization of the Holocaust, or calling for a new one. As elsewhere in Europe, a relatively new "brotherhood" has emerged in Germany between the extreme Right and fundamentalist Islam.
Anti-Zionism, however - which is not mere criticism of Israeli policies, but the denial of the Jewish people's right to live in their own state - also links leftists and rightists. Since the Six Day War of 1967, both the extreme and the mainstream Left in Europe have shown strong anti-Zionist tendencies, not always distinguishable from anti-Semitism. Although leftist anti-Zionism seemed to decline after the fall of Communism in 1990, it was reanimated by the Second Intifada and the antiglobalization movement, which is today a main source of leftist anti-Semitism.
In a May 2002 survey in the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, 25% agreed that "what the state of Israel does to the Palestinians is no different than what the Nazis did during the Third Reich to the Jews."2 A new scholarly book analyzes how deeply anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are rooted in German society.3 Since 1989, united Germany seems to stand on two main pillars: a strong anti-American and anti-Israeli attitude.
The Postwar, Pre-1967 Roots
Anti-Semitism was never exclusive to the Right; Communism, for its part, often vilified Jews as capitalists. Communism in East Germany, as elsewhere, denied the right to practice the Jewish religion and sought to eradicate religion in general, including Judaism. East Germany's anti-Semitic policies first became evident in January 1953 when the Stasi - the state security service - confiscated documents of the Jewish communities, searched the homes of Jewish leaders, and spoke of a "Zionist conspiracy." After the Six Day War, East Germany officially adopted an anti-Zionist stance. However, no serious data on East German anti-Semitism is available before the reunification in 1989.
Although West German left-wing anti-Semitism also increased steadily after the Six Day War, before then the West German Left supported Israel generally, and specifically the Wiedergutmachung (Reparations Agreement of 1953) and the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1965. This friendliness was, however, based on an idealization of Israel, kibbutzim, and pioneering and was not on genuinely firm ground.4 Opposition to the conservative government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer also played a role in this left-wing philo-Semitism.
During the 1960s, the West German Left divided into a more "conservative" wing and a New Left trend. Whereas Chancellor Willy Brandt was said to be a true and unwavering friend of Israel,5 many young leftists took radical positions and opposed Brandt's "establishment" Social Democratic Party. In 1966 they founded the Nonparliamentary Opposition (APO), a popular movement that sought to "renew" German politics from the outside. Many of its members and supporters later showed sympathy for the RAF, a leftist terrorist movement that had ties to the PLO and whose cadres trained in terrorist camps in Lebanon.
Student Radicalization
During the Six Day War, the New Left definitively transformed its hitherto moderate pro-Arab positions into full support for Arab states and the Palestinians, and its fragile pro-Israeli attitudes dissolved into anti-Semitic slogans thinly disguised as "anti-imperialist" criticism of a "fascist state."
After 1967, however, not only the radicals but large parts of the German Left turned their backs on Israel. This went hand in hand with protests against the Vietnam War, against the conservative mainstream in Adenauer's Germany and afterward the "Great Coalition" that was headed from 1966 by Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a former member of the Nazi Party.6 The New Left also idealized Communist China and Ho Chi Minh, despite their involvement in mass murder against their own people.7
Well-known intellectuals who were more moderate leftists tried to dissuade the New Left from its extreme positions. Ernst Bloch, Jean Amery, Herbert Marcuse, Iring Fetscher, and Jean-Paul Sartre argued with the radicals and discouraged blind solidarity with the PLO, as opposed to legitimate criticism of Israeli policies. They warned that notions of Israel's annihilation were intolerable and linked to National Socialist ideology. However, they were not heeded by the radicals.8
A Friend of Israel, a Foe of Leftists
The publisher Axel Caesar Springer, whose press group included the tabloid daily BILD and the daily Die Welt, as well as many other newspapers and journals, was, according to the Israeli diplomat Asher Ben-Natan, a true friend of Israel and the Jewish people:
He expressed opinions I haven't often heard in Germany.... As the demands mounted to draw a "bottom line" under the German past, Springer thought there could never be Wiedergutmachung for the crimes Germans had committed against the Jews. He himself neither suppressed nor forgot the past and did not expect the Jewish people to forgive what had happened....Neither his moral values nor historical insights nor close relations with Jews and Israel involved benefit for him. It came from honest belief....During our conversations he never disguised his hatred for every kind of totalitarian dictatorship, including Communism....After the Six Day War Springer promulgated four guidelines for his employees and his newspapers that are still binding for the journalists and editors working for Springer publications. One was "Fostering reconciliation between Jews and Germany and supporting Israel's right to exist."9
Springer was, however, a major target of the New Left, one reason being that he and his newspapers were clearly pro-Israeli and condemned the anti-Israeli stream in the New Left. Many in this movement decided: "If Springer is pro-Israeli, we have to be against the state of Israel."10
In 1969, on the date marking Kristallnacht, an anarchist-leftist group painted graffiti on Jewish memorials saying "Shalom and Napalm" or "El Fatah." A firebomb was also placed in the Jewish community center in Berlin. The leftist groups' common perception was: "Jews who were expelled by fascism developed themselves into fascists, who in collaboration with American capitalism want to annihilate the Palestinian people."11
Sharing the Ideology of Terrorism
For the New Left, nothing could discredit anti-Zionism. Even after Israeli athletes were taken hostage and murdered during the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, the leftists strengthened their solidarity with the Palestinian terror organizations.
West German New Leftists participated in the 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe, Uganda, where Jewish and Israeli passengers were singled out from the others by a German terrorist. The German Left ignored the hijacking and subsequent rescue operation by Israeli forces, and the German Communist Party in West Germany published a solidarity letter addressed to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.
In 1982, after Israeli forces invaded Lebanon and the massacres in Sabra and Shatila were publicized, the whole German Left, moderate and radical, united for the first time in comparing Israel with the Third Reich and the Nazis. Thus, 1982 saw the launching of a new demonization, throughout the German public, of Israel and Jews in which they were frequently equated with Nazis.
The pathological need to compare Israel and Nazi Germany seems linked to the wish to discard the guilt and responsibility for the Holocaust. Also in 1982, the leftist newspaper taz called the Palestinians "the new Jews" and accused Israel of a "reverse Holocaust" in seeking to carry out the "final solution of the Palestinian question."12
The Green Party and the Peace Movement
After 1982, and parallel to the peace movement's agitation against U.S. influence and the deployment of missiles in Germany, the Green Party was founded. In those days both the peace movement and the Green Party were influenced by nationalistic, anti-American, "anti-imperialist," and also "blood and soil" motifs taken more or less consciously from Nazi ideology.
Over the years, the Green Party evolved into a liberal, moderate leftist party. Today its leaders mostly hold pro-Israeli views, while supporting a Palestinian state as well, and fight anti-Semitism sincerely. However, many party members, particularly young ones, have more leftist, pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist attitudes.
As for the German peace movement, it has not changed substantially since 1982, maintaining its anti-American and anti-Israeli emphasis. Although receding in importance after the fall of the Communist bloc, it came back with renewed force in 2002 as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were being planned. Millions of Germans, like their counterparts in other European countries, rallied in the streets to denounce the United States, Israel, and other governments that supported the war on terror.
An Evolving Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification, initial surveys in 1989 revealed a huge gap in anti-Semitic attitudes between East and West Germany.13 This, however, was a distortion fostered by a superficial distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Since it has become clear that East German "anti-Zionism" merged quickly with West German "anti-Semitism" into a homogeneous whole.14 In the Cold War era, readers of East German newspapers and also Western Communist publications were accustomed to "criticisms" of Israeli policies that used anti-Semitic caricatures and clichés. Protests by Jewish community leaders in East Berlin never appeared in public.15
The German Left stridently opposed the First Gulf War in 1991, and expressed strong sympathy for the Iraqi victims of coalition bombings. When Palestinians rejoiced as Iraqi missiles hit Israel, however, some Germans joined in their glee and attributed these attacks to "Israeli policies,"16 meaning "the Jews" are to blame when they are persecuted.
Up to 2000, however, both New Left and mainstream anti-Zionist attitudes differentiated between Israel and the Jews who lived in Germany - although, as mentioned, there were cases of anti-Jewish graffiti and attacks on Jewish memorials and institutions. Only rarely was the Jewish community targeted by hostile actions with an Israeli focus. One could be anti-Zionist yet show high sympathy for the Jews in Germany based on a vague empathy related to the Holocaust.
But since 2000 the Jewish community is no longer safe and has been targeted by anti-Israeli activity, from graffiti and hate mail to demonstrations against the war in Iraq that ended up facing Jewish-community buildings or even a memorial like the Alte Synagogue in Essen. Jews in Germany are somehow held as hostages for Israeli policies, no matter what their own views.
Leftist anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist clichés have also become the common, acceptable property of conservatives, liberals, as well as leftists in Germany since 2000, and are well evident in the German media.17 The trend intensified after the September 11 attack in the United States, which gave rise to new anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that blamed the event on the Mossad. Many books developing such theories were published in Germany, and they were all bestsellers.18 Another outlet for such sentiments was the anti-war demonstrations of 2002, as well as anti-globalization gatherings.
With the Second Intifada, the Left and many other groups rediscovered or discovered their solidarity with the Palestinians - including the suicide bombers. This is an extension of the New Left anti-Zionism of the 1960s, with basically the same structural motifs and expressions. Given the decline of Communism there is less of an "anti-imperialist" emphasis, but the trend of Nazifying and demonizing Israel has grown dramatically in Germany as in Europe generally.
Nazifying Israel, How to Get Rid of the Holocaust
In today's Germany, leftists who Nazify Israel and characterize it as the world's most evil country have opened the door to proclaiming Jews to be evil people in general. Since Nazis represent the pinnacle of evil in leftist ideology, those who allegedly resemble them and perpetrate Holocaust-like actions are seen as being on the same moral level.
In 2002, Freie Sender Kombinat, a radio station in Hamburg run by students and leftist groups, interviewed a Palestinian named Ahmed who described Israelis as "the Nazis of today," and compared the Holocaust to the Palestinian history "under the Zionists." He appealed to Germany to end the Wiedergutmachung and claimed that about ten billion Marks had been paid for each Israeli citizen. The presenters did not question him or even correct the absurd figure.
In October 2001, the far-Left academic journal Contraste published an article by the sociologist Christian Siegrist that claimed: "there are too many Jews in American politics. I think it is legitimate if they are overrepresented in science, this is somehow traditional, but it is not good if American Jews are involved in Middle Eastern politics." He also asserted: "The atrocities against the Palestinian people are a humiliation for the whole Arab world.... They have suffered worse than what the people in New York experienced on that one day."19
On 28 September 2002, the Palestine Committee in Stuttgart held a symposium. No protest was heard as the following statements were made:
*
We have to support the Palestinians unconditionally. This means: Solidarity with suicide bombers.
*
A two-state solution is no solution for Palestine. In the end the reactionary state of Israel and Sharon must fall. Israel must be eliminated.
*
In Germany some parts of the peace movement are under the control of the Zionists. They do not think independently; the Jews are pulling the strings.
*
Western politicians are under the control of the banks and holding companies. They need the aggressive and reactionary regime in Israel to get more and more power in that region. Sharon has nothing to fear since the banks are behind him. Is there any region in the world that is not under the rule of globalized capitalism?... Behind the Jews stands the financial capital - the reeking capitalism.
This gathering included leftist groups as well as the anti-globalization movement, Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens (ATTAC).201
ATTAC
ATTAC, a worldwide group with many members and promoters in Germany, was monitored very thoroughly by Jewish organizations, mainly in France and Britain, as it went beyond criticism of economic policies to address political issues. In a January 2003 demonstration against the meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, some of its activists, including Germans, staged a "masquerade." One person, disguised as President Bush, carried with another person a "golden calf." Both "Bush" and the calf were marked with large yellow stars.
Subsequently ATTAC came under heavy criticism and tried to deflect it with a "Discussion Site of ATTAC-Germany on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict."21 Although attempts were made there to deny anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, between the lines the message was clear: Israel is solely responsible for the escalation since September 2000, and European Jewish groups isolate themselves when they decline to attend "anti-racism" rallies together with ATTAC and other leftist groups.
According to one statement: "The killing of Israeli civilians is not only a moral, but also a political problem." In other words, is it morally wrong to kill civilians, or is it understandable that suicide bombers act as they do? The "political problem," however, is not attributed to the Palestinian Authority but to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for allegedly "using the bombings for his foreign policy."
Later, this statement denies that Israel is actually fighting a war against terror and belittles what Israelis undergo. Palestinian terror is legitimized as a "just fight" against the "Israeli occupation," whereas "Israel is only struggling for the continuation of the occupation." ATTAC Germany also asserts at the same site: "During World War II the Allies committed war crimes like the bombings of Hiroshima and Dresden, but their fight against Nazism was just." The Allies are meant to be analogous with the Palestinian terrorists, Nazism with Israel.
Conclusion
In Germany the circle between Right and Left, between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, seems finally to have closed. Israel is now blamed for worldwide problems, just as Jews were accused as the source of misfortunes during the Middle Ages. The centuries-old practice of demonizing Jews has now been transferred to the state of Israel, leading to its delegitimization and isolation amid open calls for its destruction.
The extreme leftist trend in Germany contains elements that envision a world cleansed of the Jewish state.
* * *
Notes
1. Leon de Winter, "Das Boese existiert," Sueddeutsche Zeitung, 18 October 2004 (the quotation is translated by Susanne Urban).
2. Der Spiegel, May 2002.
3. Wilhelm Heitmeyer, ed., Deutsche Zustaende (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005).
4. See Frank Stern, Im Anfang war Auschwitz. Antisemitismus und Philosemitismus im deutschen Nachkrieg (Schriftenr. d. Inst. f. Dt. Gesch. Uni. Tel Aviv 14), Gerlingen, 1991.
5. Based on interviews by Susanne Urban with Asher Ben-Natan, published as a biographical account of Ben-Natan's experiences in Germany: Bruecken bauen, aber nicht vergessen. Als erster Botschafter Israels in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1965-1969) (Duesseldorf: Droste, 2005).
6. See also Bruecken bauen, aber nicht vergessen, pp. 111-145.
7. Jean Amery, "Die Linke und der Zionismus," Tribuene, 32 (Frankfurt am Main, 1969); Thomas Haury, Antisemitismus von Links (Hamburg: Institut für Sozialforschung 2002); Martin W. Kloke, Israel und die deutsche Linke. Zur Geschichte eines schwierigen Verhaeltnisses (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
8. The article and appeals of these intellectuals were published in student journals, in the quarterly journal Tribuene (Frankfurt am Main), and in left-liberal newspapers like Frankfurter Rundschau.
9. B ruecken bauen, aber nicht vergessen, pp. 93-96 (the quotation is translated by Susanne Urban).
10. Kloke, Israel und die deutsche Linke, p. 17.
11. Bommi Baumann, Wie alles anfing (Frankfurt am Main, 1976).
12. Kloke, Israel und die deutsche Linke, pp. 137-143, where more such quotations can be found.
13. Bernhard Prosch, Reinhard Wittenberg, and Martin Abraham, "Antisemitismus in der ehemaligen DDR. Ueberraschende Ergebnisse der ersten Repraesentativ-Umfrage und einer Befragung von Jugendlichen in Jena," Tribuene, 118 (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), pp. 102-120; Emnid (a polling institute), survey conducted for the American Jewish Committee, 1991.
14. See, e.g., a 1994 Emnid survey (Zentralarchiv für empirische Sozialforschung, Cologne, No. 2418), and polls by Infratest Burke (1996), Forsa (1998), and Infratest Sozialforschung (2002). Many of the polls were published in the weeklies Der Spiegel, Stern, and Die Woche.
15. Lothar Mertens, "Staatlich propagierter Antizionismus: Das Israelbild in der DDR," in Siegfried Theodor Arndt, Helmut Eschwege, Peter Honigmann, and Lothar Mertens, eds., Juden in der DDR. Geschichte - Probleme - Perspektiven (Köln: Boehlau, 1988), pp. 125-159.
16. As stated in 1991 by Green Party member Christian Stroebele. See also Martin W. Kloke, "Kathartische Zerreissproben: Zur Israel-Diskussion in der Partei 'Die Gruenen,'" in Herbert A. Strauss, Werner Bergmann, and Christhard Hoffmann, eds., Der Antisemitismus der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1990), p. 124 ff.
17. Analyses of the anti-Israeli media coverage include a survey by Medientenor, published in Tribuene, 162 (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), p. 93 ff.; and a survey by the Duisburger Institut für Sprach- und Sozialforschung (DISS) on behalf of the German office of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), published in 2002. See under: http://www.ajc.org/german/israel_medien.asp. In addition, in 2002 the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Center for Civic Studies) presented its study, "Nahostberichterstattung in den Hauptnachrichten des deutschen Fernsehens," http://www.bpb.de.
18. One book has now analyzed these books' influence and anti-Semitic bias: Tobias Jaecker, Antisemitische Verschwoerungstheorien nach dem 11. September (Hannover: LIT, 2004).
19. Website no longer available; the journal quoted was available online.
20. The quotations are from various websites that are no longer available. Such discussion groups of anti-Semitic incidents disappear quickly.
21. www.attac-netzwerk.de; search "Antisemitismus," "Israel," or "Palestine."
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Dr. Susanne Urban is a historian whose current research, along with the subject of contemporary German anti-Semitism, deals with the topic of Youth Aliyah (an organization for Jewish children's immigration to Israel) during the Holocaust. She is affiliated with Yad Vashem and the Hebrew University. Recently she published a book coauthored with Israel's first ambassador to Germany, Asher Ben-Natan, about his experiences there (Bruecken bauen, aber nicht vergessen. Als erster Botschafter Israels in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland [1965-1969], 2005) and a book on Jews at the Volkswagen factory in 1944-1945 (Verschleppt, verborgen und ueberlebt, 2005).