Germany, more than any other country, is struggling to disentangle the horrors of the 7 October Hamas massacre in Israel, the subsequent death of more than 30,000 Palestinians and the demolition of Gaza, and the killing of aid workers, from the scale of the Holocaust more than eight decades earlier.
History has come back to haunt Germany with unpredicted ferocity. The confusion is intense, but it predates 7 October and permeates wider questions about the nature of the country’s contemporary society.
Multiculturalism snuck up on Germany without most people realising. Waves of immigration from the 1970s onwards were initially regarded as a temporary layer of labour, dispensable at a whim. The guest workers, mainly from Turkey, were deliberately not integrated. The idea was they would do the dirty jobs (coal mining, cleaning) and go. Except they didn’t; their families joined them, a new generation emerged. After 2000, citizenship rules were loosened. Then came the great wave of migration in 2015, many of them Muslims from war-torn countries such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Germany has changed, and the discomfort is not hard to find. A decision by the council in Frankfurt, the country’s fifth-largest city, to illuminate a pedestrianised shopping street with half-moons, stars and lanterns with the greeting (in English) of “Happy Ramadan” led to a debate about the cost (€75,000) and the appropriateness in a country that still thinks of itself as Christian – even though it is becoming less so.
There are about five million people who identify as Muslim living in Germany (about 6% of the population), but there are few role models in senior positions throughout Germany. Integration is haphazard at best. One example is Germany’s church tax, which is charged at up to 9% of a person’s income depending on the state. The tax – which citizens must opt out of – applies to practising Catholics, Protestants and Jews. German governments have toyed with the idea of extending the tax to those who declare themselves Muslim, but this has not yet happened, with officials claiming they are uncertain which Muslim organisation to designate as the official channel to administer the tax through.
When it comes to Israel, Germany is more determined than ever to show its unwavering commitment and to atone for its past. Angela Merkel made clear the country’s approach in a 2008 speech before the Israeli parliament, declaring that support for Israel was an integral part of the Staatsraison, the essence of the German state. Commemorating the Shoah is ubiquitous but it is highly formalised. In day-to-day life, pro-Jewish sentiment is frequently shown, but can sometimes come across as cringey. As one Anglo-German Jewish acquaintance put it recently: “I do wish they would stop being so unctuous. It makes me uncomfortable.”
The fraught past few months have shown that this formalised approach to Erinnerungskultur, memory culture, is in need of a reassessment. As Ruth Ur, director of the German section of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center, puts it: “For many people, the Holocaust means almost nothing. It’s not their history or they don’t relate to it.” She believes that it is time for a reset in remembrance culture.
What should that entail? Not a diminution of Germany’s attempts to come to terms with the past, nor its allegiance to Israel. But, as generations pass, memories recede and demographics change, these inviolable principles need to be tested and debated with greater transparency.
The dialogue between the political class, which has no truck with anyone or institution that criticises Israel, and the cultural community, for which this is seen as an attack on free speech, demonstrates the failure of the present approach.
In the past several months, a number of cultural figures and intellectuals, some of them Jewish, have been dropped from institutions over their criticism of Israel. Berlin’s culture senator, Joe Chialo, was forced to scrap a clause that required all artists in receipt of public funds to abide by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s broad definition of antisemitism, after a backlash by artists. Almost as soon as the definition was adopted in 2016, there has been heated debate about whether it was so broad it censored most criticism of the state of Israel.
Berlin and other German cities continue to experience acts of antisemitism, from the firebombing of a synagogue in October to the defacing of the Kindertransport memorial next to Friedrichstrasse station in January that commemorates 10,000 Jewish children who were sent to safety in England in 1938 and 1939. There is little argument that the perpetrators need to be brought to justice.
But there is less agreement over where to draw the line for other actions that could, in certain circumstances, be construed as antisemitic, such as chants at pro-Palestinian demonstrations that some people find intimidating or believe incite violence against Jews.
Fraught arguments over the boundaries between freedom of expression and offensive language that harms social cohesion extends far beyond the perennially disputed line between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. In Germany, this debate is paralysed by the atrocities of the Third Reich.
When I wrote in early November of Germans’ perpetual difficulty in taking an objective stance towards Israel, I was criticised by some. Four months on, with thousands more Palestinians dead, Gaza all but destroyed, aid workers killed and Israel diplomatically beleaguered, I stand by that view even more staunchly.
With the US president, Joe Biden, at loggerheads with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, it could be said that Germany’s government is now Israel’s staunchest ally. Germany has more leverage in this conflict than it realises, but as ever in international affairs (as with Ukraine), it remains more comfortable operating behind the scenes.
It needs to operate more openly. Domestically, Germany needs to encourage vigorous but respectful debate about free speech versus antisemitism, rather than try to shut it down. Internationally, it needs to show the courage to differentiate between specific actions of Netanyahu’s hard-right government and principled support for Israel.
The abominations of the past – and the requirement for all sections of German society to engage in learning the lessons from its murderous history – should give its government more, not less, legitimacy to act robustly in the present day.