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It could have been a Mitchell and Webb sketch – a man with a very German accent and a distinguished Nazi grandfather complaining: “These foreigners, coming over here, importing their antisemitism.” Only this was not a comedy. The man was Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and he was making his complaint last month in an interview with Fox news in the US, attributing rising antisemitism in Germany to “the big numbers of migrants we have within the last 10 years”. How did Merz manage to miss the joke – apart from by being German of course?
The chancellor is not the only German politician to have made the dubious connection between foreigners and antisemitism. Hubert Aiwanger, the deputy premier of Bavaria, made headlines in 2023 when an antisemitic leaflet he was alleged to have written at school – better known as the Auschwitz pamphlet – came to light. Aiwanger denied writing the leaflet. Then his brother joined the fray, claiming authorship, and hardly anybody mentioned it again. However, it didn’t stop Aiwanger from declaring later that year: “We have imported antisemitism to Germany.”
How did “imported antisemitism”, a far-right anti-immigrant buzz phrase, make it into the political mainstream? After all, Germans didn’t exactly need to import antisemitism. But this is the way we see it in Germany: if you haven’t committed genocide you can’t properly claim to be against it. I’m not making this up. You couldn’t make it up. Indeed, the political scientist Esra Özyürek discusses the belief in her excellent 2023 book Subcontractors of Guilt.
The thinking behind it is that because of our history, we teach the next generation to make sure it will never happen again. At school we studied the Holocaust every year. We didn’t learn to analyse antisemitism, but we learned to be very wary of it – or as the writer Max Czollek put it: “Today Germans know mainly one thing about Jews: that they killed them.”
Immigrants to Germany need to know a bit more than that if they want to become German citizens. They need to know when the state of Israel was founded, and who is allowed to become a member of one of the 40 Maccabi sports clubs. If you’re not born in Germany you have to prove you’re not antisemitic by learning facts about Jewish people.
But even if you were born here, like me, the statistics still refer to you as an immigrant if one of your parents comes from a different country. And as such, you are viewed with suspicion when it comes to the antisemitism you may have “imported”. During the last election, Merz suggested revoking German citizenship from dual nationals if they committed a crime. When asked if that meant, for example, getting on a bus without a ticket, he made it clear it related to antisemitism.
However, antisemitism is not a criminal offence in German law, so we see it everywhere. Jews have been arrested for holding up signs reading “Jews against genocide”. An Irish protester was arrested in Berlin for speaking Irish at a demonstration for Palestine because the authorities did not have an Irish translator present to check if they were “importing antisemitism” too. This has gone so far that the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner has reprimanded Germany for criminalising protest against the war in Gaza – including curtailing the use of Arabic at protests. In the end Merz didn’t get his way, but he drove the message home: Germans like me with foreign heritage are Germans on trial.
In 2024 the German parliament adopted a controversial Never Again is Now resolution to fight antisemitism. One of the examples cited was the “Berlinale scandal”. When No Other Land won the documentary award at the Berlin film festival, the Israeli film-maker Yuval Abraham called for an end to apartheid and his Palestinian co-director, Basel Adra, added that he found it very hard to celebrate “when there are tens of thousands of my people being slaughtered and massacred by Israel in Gaza”. The outcry in Germany was so massive that the then culture minister, Claudia Roth, felt compelled to announce that she had only applauded the Israeli film-maker, not his Palestinian counterpart.
By contrast, the resolution made no mention of the 2019 Yom Kippur attack in Halle, in which a rightwing terrorist tried to break into a synagogue to commit a massacre (he failed to get inside, but killed two passersby). Nor did the resolution acknowledge the surely vital fact that 85% of all antisemitic violence in Germany is committed by rightwing perpetrators, and instead promised to combat antisemitism by “exploiting repressive options” in asylum and citizenship law. In other words: they are the ones with the antisemitism problem, not us.
When I was at school we read Friedrich, a novel by Hans Peter Richter, with the motto: “Back then it was the Jews, today it’s Black people, tomorrow it might be the whites, the Christians or the civil servants.” We didn’t think that all forms of racism were the same as Hitler’s antisemitism, but this was how we understood “never again”.
The problem with German exceptionalism is that it means we can’t really learn from the Holocaust. In fact, in April a woman was fined €1,500 by a German court for holding up a sign outside a government building that read: “Haven’t we learned anything from the Holocaust?” That same week, the German legal system decided that shouting “Piss off, foreigners! Germany for the Germans” wasn’t a problem.
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A further irony is that many of the people accused of importing antisemitism into Germany may well have grandparents who fought for the allies against the Nazis. I wish we had learned about that at school. Just as I wish we’d teach children – and politicians – that the kind of eliminatory antisemitism that peaked during the Holocaust was a European phenomenon. That doesn’t mean there is no antisemitism beyond Europe’s borders, in the Arab world or otherwise, but it has a different history. Some antisemitic tropes, for example the idea of an international Jewish conspiracy, only found their way into the Levant during the second world war.
Perhaps it would be more correct to speak of exported antisemitism.
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Mithu Sanyal is a novelist, academic, literary critic, columnist and broadcaster.
