Special Section Institutionalized Anti-Anti-Semitism in Germany

Introduction

This special section features an article by Heidrun Friese entitled ‘Institutionalized Anti-Anti-Semitism in Germany and its aporias’ and two short essays in response to her article by major German scholars, Aleida Assmann and Wolfgang Streeck.

Friese's article is an important intervention into the specificity of the German debate on anti-Semitism and addresses wider questions on the politics of memory after the Holocaust.

The article traces the ‘conjunctures’ (a term used by Stuart Hall) of ‘coming to terms’ with what we now call the Holocaust. While the post-war period in Germany was characterized by repression, silence, and at best a religiously tinged confrontation with the crime, the student movement and critical theory addressed the social, political, and above all economic causes and inscribed them in a critique of capitalism. This development continued in the 1980s but with a new interest in memory from below, which inscribed memory in a subjectivism of victims and perpetrators. Since then, postcolonial perspectives and recent Holocaust and Genocide studies have pluralized and universalized the debate, as in, for example, Michael Rothberg's book Multidimensional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in an Age of Decolonization (2009). Linked to these developments is the emergence in Germany of an institutionalized and bureaucratized surveillance of anti-Semitism and the illiberal doctrine of Staatsraison that determines what constitutes Jewish life and how it should be articulated. It is no coincidence that postcolonial perspectives are particularly attacked as a ‘new antisemitism’ because they seek to understand historically and compare genocides and structures of power and thus undermine the uniqueness of the Holocaust as beyond history.

These developments are manifested in the German slogan ‘never again,’ in the institutionalization of memory and unconditional support for the State of Israel. Antisemitism and the prevailing anti-anti-Semitism reiterate what Zygmunt Bauman called ‘allosemitism’ (meaning both philosemitism and antisemitism). It operates in two directions: on the one hand, it depoliticizes through ethnicization and the homogenization of Jewish life and its equation with the equally non-plural State of Israel; on the other hand, homogenization allows for politicization through unconditional support for policies of the Israeli state. This dual movement goes hand in hand with the repression of political plurality, especially in Jewish articulations of dissent, post-Zionism, diasporic views, (even Zionist) criticism of the state of Israel and the policies of settlement and occupation. It is a specifically German discourse—while having some basis in the IHRA definition of antisemitism—in so far as it is linked to unconditional support of one state for another state and its policies.

Such an enforced ‘anti-anti-Semitism,’ according to Friese, highlights aporias that arise from the enforced view of the uniqueness of the Holocaust which excludes historical comparison, indeed historicity altogether, the aporia between universalism and particularism, i.e., of human rights and the right to self-determination which is directed exclusively at the state of Israel, but not at the Palestinians; the aporias between history and event, i.e., context and a historical moment. As she perceptively notes, ‘the date of October 7^th, 2023 becomes an absolute, de-contextualized beginning, it becomes a zero point of history…it eludes assessment, criticism and legal judgement.’

In her response, Aleida Assmann, one of Germany's leading cultural historians of memory, agrees with Friese's analysis. She provides a highly useful and detailed reconstruction of the post-1945 shifts in memory politics in the Federal Republic. She notes that Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor, encouraged a politics of forgetting the past. This was challenged by Adorno in 1966, but forgetting not remembering remained the official policy of Germany until the mid-1980 when a shift occurred that gave greater space for a remembering of the Holocaust. Assmann forcefully reminds us that ‘it became the project of the postwar generation to restore the memory and recover the names and biographies of Jewish victims in the sense of Walter Benjamin's notion of Eingedenken’ (roughly remembrance or recollection).

Now, while Friese is more critical of the new culture of remembering as somehow tied to the official de-politicized Staatsraison (or Staatsräson), Assmann proposes a nuanced transnational ‘historical framework for this debate which offers also a contextualization for Friese's anti-anti-Semitism argument’ and the work of the IHRA. She sees in it some positive outcomes in dealing with the legacies of history and with the need to fight antisemitism. She does nonetheless concur with Friese in the view that the shift from an official culture of forgetting to an official one of remembering can easily be re-politized in a way that silences other responses to the past.

In contrast Wolfgang Streeck, a political sociologist, delivers a less nuanced critique of the politics of German memory and one that is entirely in line with Friese's highly critical position. He does so through an account of post-1945 German history and the pragmatic real-politik of Konrad Adenauer in forging a link with Israel's David Ben-Gurion to create a special relationship that was cultivated by the politics of forgetting. Not everything changed after 1945 in the Federal Republic as regards the governing elites who were content to forget the past and support Israel unconditionally. Astonishingly, despite the concerns of the docile German left, this became more entrenched after the 1967 Israeli annexation of the occupied territories. Streeck offers a vivid account of German support of unconstrained Israeli militarization, a politics that required new efforts to sell this to the German public. His argument provides a foundation for Friese's analysis: the German official public sphere defined criticism of Israel as a form of antisemitism. If this was not enough, to criticize Israel could only be a questioning of its right to exist. Since the war in Gaza, this authoritarian position became further entrenched.

Streeck's penetrating analysis concludes with incisive remarks on the role of the chief representative of critical theory in the silencing of dissent. Unlike T. W. Adorno, who encouraged the formation of a critical culture of memory and education, Jürgen Habermas along with others have opted to cosy up to the German state in a notorious statement of solidarity with Israel that posits criticism of Israel's mass killings in Gaza as antisemitic and effectively equates the right to defence as an existential right to exist and which cannot have any limits. In this extraordinary turn in the history of critical theory, vanished is not only critique but solidarity with the victims of state violence. In all of this, one is astonished by the absence of critical voices in the German public sphere and the predominance of an official yet legally elusive staatsraison.

Heidrun Friese and the two interlocutors, Aleida Assmann and Wolfgang Streeck, provide rich material for the need for an alternative reading of the current situation and the striking absence of any solidarity with those at the margins. They illuminate the strange peculiarity of an entrenched illiberalism at the heart of German political culture.