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After the second world war, Germany’s contrition and radical self-cleansing, under allied supervision, as the chief tormentor of European Jews ought to have been straightforward. No country, however, matches its convoluted journey from ground zero in 1945 to Gaza today.
In recent decades, solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the very foundation of its collective identity. Particularly since German reunification, a Shoah-centred memory has been comprehensively institutionalised. School curriculums and calendars emphasise anniversaries such as 27 January (the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz) and 8 May (the final surrender of the Nazis). Monuments, memorials and museums across the country commemorate the victims of German crimes. A resonant symbol of this memory culture is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe near the Brandenburg Gate in the capital, Berlin, probably the only major national monument to commemorate the victims of a nation rather than the nation itself.
In 2008, the then German chancellor, Angela Merkel, claimed before the Knesset that ensuring Israel’s security was part of Germany’s Staatsräson, or raison d’état. The phrase was repeatedly invoked, with more vehemence than clarity, by German leaders after 7 October 2023. Less than two months before the Hamas offensive, Israel had secured, with American blessing, its largest ever arms deal with Germany. German arms sales to Israel surged tenfold in 2023; the vast majority of sales were approved after 7 October, and fast-tracked by German officials who insisted that permits for arms exports to Israel would receive special consideration.
As Israel began to bomb homes, refugee camps, schools, hospitals, mosques and churches in Gaza, and Israeli cabinet ministers promoted their schemes for ethnic cleansing, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, reiterated the national orthodoxy: “Israel is a country that is committed to human rights and international law and acts accordingly.” As Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign of indiscriminate murder and destruction intensified, Ingo Gerhartz, the head of the German air force, or Luftwaffe, arrived in Tel Aviv hailing the “accuracy” of Israeli pilots; he also had himself photographed, in uniform, donating blood for Israeli soldiers.
The German health minister, Karl Lauterbach, approvingly retweeted a video in which an English far-right agitator claims that the Nazis were more decent than Hamas. Die Welt claimed that “Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler” and Die Zeit alerted German readers to the apparently outrageous fact that “Greta Thunberg openly sympathises with the Palestinians”. When the minister of culture, Claudia Roth, was caught on camera applauding the Israeli film-maker Yuval Abraham and his Palestinian colleague Basel Adra at the Berlinale film festival – for their now Oscar-nominated documentary – she clarified that her applause was intended only for “the Jewish-Israeli” Abraham.
For months, German leaders put up the strongest resistance to joint European calls for a ceasefire. The German president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, unstintingly backed Israel’s vengeful violence, much to the chagrin of many of her own colleagues; she also ignored repeated calls to sanction Israel from EU member countries such as Spain and Ireland. In October 2024, as Israel bombed hospitals and tent encampments in Gaza, and blew up entire villages in Lebanon, the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, justified these violations of international law, asserting that civilians could lose their protected status in war.
German authorities also launched a ruthless crackdown on public displays of support for Palestine. State-funded cultural institutions have long penalised artists and intellectuals of non-western ancestry who show any hint of sympathy for Palestinians, retracting awards and invitations; the German authorities have now turned to disciplining even Jewish writers, artists and activists. After 7 October, Candice Breitz, Deborah Feldman, Masha Gessen and Nancy Fraser joined those either cancelled or “lectured”, as Eyal Weizman put it, “by the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators who murdered our families and who now dare to tell us that we are antisemitic”.
Visiting Germany after the war, the philosopher Hannah Arendt confessed to being “oppressed by a kind of pervasive public stupidity which cannot be trusted to judge correctly the most elementary events ... A great number of Germans,” she wrote, “especially among the more educated, apparently are no longer capable of telling the truth even if they want to.”
Witnessing the German public sphere in recent months, it was hard to resist a similarly damning conclusion: that self-righteous hypocrisy had been normalised enough to turn into a mode of governance and thought. As hypocrisy lapsed into self-deception, and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) led a dramatic reshaping of the country’s politics and culture, it was also hard not to think about Germany’s past and to fear for the political future of Europe’s most important country.
“In less than six years,” Arendt marvelled, “Germany laid waste the moral structure of western society, committing crimes that nobody would have believed possible.” With the intimacy and bluntness of a former insider, she recorded that a “general lack of emotion, at any rate this apparent heartlessness, sometimes covered over with cheap sentimentality, is only the most conspicuous outward symptom of a deep-rooted, stubborn and at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened”.
Such mentalities were partly manifest in German treatment of the Jewish displaced persons. They were still languishing in West Germany in 1952, when the Bavarian customs police launched a raid on a displaced persons camp. The assault had, according to the Manchester Guardian, “all the trademarks of Nazi descents on the ghettos of Berlin and Frankfurt in the past”. As the newspaper reported, quoting the camp committee, “policemen yelled such slogans as: ‘The crematoria are still there’, ‘The gas chambers are waiting for you’, and: ‘This time you really will get it in the neck, you damned Jews.’” In communist-run East Germany, antisemitism was more subtle, if not less lethal, closely mimicking Stalin’s campaign against “cosmopolitans”, which assumed that most Jews were potential spies.
At the same time, as an American military officer told the photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, many Germans were acting “as though the Nazis were a strange race of Eskimos who came down from the north pole and somehow invaded Germany”. Bourke-White herself remarked: “I have yet to find a German who will admit to being a Nazi.” As late as 1949, the philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote to Thomas Mann that aside from a “couple of total and touching puppet-like villains”, he hadn’t met a Nazi yet, “not simply in the ironic sense that people will not admit to having been Nazis, but in the far more disturbing sense that they believe they never were Nazis”.
In his 2002 book Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past, Norbert Frei painstakingly measures the depth and the breadth in the early postwar years of popular German sentiment against prosecuting criminals of the Nazi era or ejecting tainted elites out of positions of power. In West Germany, according to the British historian Mary Fulbrook, of the nearly 1 million people who “were at one point or another actively involved in killing Jewish civilians” (the number of enablers was much higher), “only 6,656 were convicted of Nazi crimes” – “fewer even than the number of people who had been employed at Auschwitz alone”. By the end of the 20th century, only 164 individuals had been sentenced for the crime of murder – of 6 million Jews.
In a March 2024 article for Dissent, the historian Hans Kundnani wrote: “By the mid-1950s, the elite in the civil service, judiciary, and academia had largely reverted to that of the Third Reich. Many young people growing up in west Germany felt they were ‘surrounded by Nazis’, as one person I interviewed put it. By the mid-1960s, they had begun to see not just personal continuities but structural ones: the federal republic was a fascist, or at least ‘pre-fascist’, state. The student movement emerged as a protest against these real and imagined continuities.”
When in March 1960, the German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York, he had not only been presiding over a systematic reversal of the denazification process decreed by the country’s western occupiers in 1945, he had also been aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust. The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had “joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could”.
In September 1952, Adenauer had agreed to a deal that would compensate the state of Israel to the extent of some 3.5bn Deutschmarks. The deal was not popular: in 1951, only 5% of Germans had admitted to guilt over the fate of the Jews, and 21% thought that “the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich”. More embarrassingly, some in Adenauer’s own party voted against the deal. Nevertheless, Adenauer’s language at his meeting with Ben-Gurion was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a “fortress of the west”, adding: “I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.”
The German chancellor possessed the typical worldview of a western colonialist: as vice president of the German Colonial Society he had urged the German reich to possess colonies in order to create more living space for the German people. But, as the cold war intensified, he was also convinced that Germany’s “long road west” – the title of historian Heinrich Winkler’s bestselling book about German history – lay through Israel. “The power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated,” he said after his retirement. West Germany moved quickly along that road west after 1960, becoming a major supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernisation.
The postwar German-Israeli symbiosis was at the centre of the “unprincipled political gamesmanship”, in Primo Levi’s bitter words, that expedited the rehabilitation of Germany only a few years after the full extent of its genocidal antisemitism became known. By the mid-1960s, when the Jewish Austrian writer Jean Améry travelled through Germany, the country was savouring its so-called economic miracle, partly due to the American loans that were also sparking a broader European recovery. In “the industrial paradise of the New Europe”, Améry found himself unexpectedly discussing the latest European and American novels with Germany’s “refined” intellectuals. Yet the survivor of Auschwitz could not expunge from his memory the “stony faces” of Germans before a pile of corpses at a railway platform or of the Flemish SS man who beat him on the head with a shovel handle whenever he didn’t work fast enough. And he would discover that in this “thriving land”, he bore a new “grudge” against Germans and their exalted place in the “majestic halls of the west”.
The flip side of west Germany’s accommodation of Nazis was what Améry called an “obtrusive philosemitism”. This philosemitism – parasitic on old antisemitic stereotypes, and combined with sentimental images of Jews – still shapes Germany’s relationship to Israel. By 1965, Eleonore Sterling, a survivor of the Shoah and Germany’s first female professor of political science, was describing how “a functional philosemitic attitude” had replaced “a true act of understanding, repentance and future vigilance”. The historian Peter Gay, who had fled Nazi Germany with his Jewish family in 1939, was among the German Jews “sickened” by his former neighbours’ new “greasy delicacy, an ostentatious admiration for everything that Jews said, did, or believed”. So was the novelist Manès Sperber. “Your philosemitism depresses me,” he wrote to a colleague, “degrades me like a compliment that is based on an absurd misunderstanding … You overestimate us Jews in a dangerous fashion and insist on loving our entire people. I don’t request this, I do not wish for us – or any other people – to be loved in this way.”
But the philosemitism was also a strategic mode of self-regard. Writing from Jerusalem in April 1961, Hannah Arendt reported that the Germans present at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, were “displaying an unpleasant overeagerness and finding absolutely everything wonderful. Enough to make you throw up, if I may say so. One of them has already flung his arms around my neck and burst into tears.”
In his writing on the trial of Eichmann, the scholar Daniel Marwecki described how visions of Israel as a new embodiment of Jewish power also awakened dormant German fantasies. A report by the West German delegation to the Eichmann trial marvelled at “the novel and very advantageous type of the Israeli youth”, who are “of great height, often blond and blue-eyed, free and self-determined in their movements with well-defined faces” and exhibit “almost none of the features which one used to view as Jewish”. On 7 June 1967, after the six-day war, the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung greeted Israel’s victory with an editorial titled “Der Blitzkrieg Israels”. This phrase, associated with the Nazi assault on Europe, was then emblazoned on the front pages of Die Zeit and Der Spiegel (which commented on German blood donations for Israel with “Aryan blood flowed for the Jews”). The newspaper Die Welt regretted German “infamies” about the Jewish people: the belief that they were “without national sentiment; never ready for battle, but always keen to profit from somebody else’s war effort”. The Jews were in fact a “small, brave, heroic, genius people”.
Axel Springer, whose eponymous company publishes Die Welt, and who was among the major postwar employers of superannuated Nazis, boasted after the six-day war that he had published Israeli newspapers in Germany for six days. The German New Left that turned anti-Israel around this time, alienating Améry among others, was partly reacting to Springer’s truculent propaganda, as well as to the presence of Nazis in the civil service, judiciary and academia, and to “the vocal support of West German political parties across the spectrum for the US military intervention in Vietnam”, as the historian Quinn Slobodian wrote.
Many students, including future terrorists such as Ulrike Meinhof, had idealised the US as a defender of freedom and democracy; they became disturbed by reports of American carpet bombing of Vietnam, using napalm designed to remove skin, and bombs built to explode in mid-air and inject shrapnel into flesh. They were frustrated, too, by the malicious caricatures of their idealism by Springer’s tabloid press as well as the German political establishment. “Fighting for the defence of western freedom with carpet bombing,” according to an activist quoted by Slobodian, did not only injure the “moral feelings” of many young Germans: “The entire existing framework for understanding the world was put into question.”
Imagining Jewish Israelis as Aryan warriors, the German press further undermined that framework for understanding the world. At any rate, Bild likening the Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan to the Nazi field marshall Erwin Rommel wasn’t a contradiction. Such comparisons were an imperative for some beneficiaries of the German economic miracle. Marwecki writes that Adenauer made a major loan and the supply of military equipment “dependent on the Israeli handling of the trial” of Adolf Eichmann.
The Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz remarked many years after Eichmann was hanged that his “trial was a total failure; Eichmann really was a small and insignificant cog in a big machine. I think it was a conspiracy by Adenauer and Ben-Gurion to clear the name of the German people. In exchange they paid us billions.” Marwecki provides the belated evidence for this scandalous claim while describing the “exchange structure specific to German-Israeli relations”: moral absolution of an insufficiently denazified and still profoundly antisemitic Germany in return for cash and weapons.
Cheap discharge of guilt was one motivation. Back in the early 1960s, however, it greatly suited Germany as well as Israel to portray Arab adversaries of Israel, including Nasser (dubbed “Hitler on the Nile” by the Daily Mail), as the true embodiments of nazism. The Eichmann trial underplayed the persistence of Nazi support in Germany while exaggerating the Nazi presence in Arab countries.
In her recent book Subcontractors of Guilt, Esra Özyürek describes the way that German politicians, officials and journalists, now that the far right is in the ascendant, crank up the old mechanism of sanitising Germany by demonising Muslims. Cheer-led by Elon Musk, who encourages Germans to abandon their “guilt” over the Holocaust and exult in their thousand-year-old “German culture”, and emboldened by the electoral triumph in Austria, Hitler’s homeland, of a far-right party founded by a former member of the SS, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has become Germany’s second most popular party. The suspicion that some prominent German supporters of Israel are projecting their long taboo nationalism on to a proxy state is deepened by the self-declared motto “Zionismus über alles” (Zionism above all) of Mathias Döpfner, present-day CEO of Axel Springer – the phrase alludes to the erstwhile first line of the German national anthem, Deutschland Über Alles, which was deleted due to its association with Nazi Germany.
Yet “white Christian-background Germans” see themselves “as having reached their destination of redemption and re-democratisation”, according to Özyürek. The “general German social problem of antisemitism” is projected on to a minority of Middle Eastern immigrants, who are then further stigmatised as “the most unrepentant antisemites” in need of “additional education and disciplining”. To denounce Germany’s Muslim minority as “the major carriers of antisemitism”, as Özyürek points out, is to suppress the fact that nearly “90% of antisemitic crimes are committed by rightwing white Germans”.
In his recent book Never Again, the historian Andrew I Port suggests that the conviction among Germans that “they had left the rabid racism of their forebears far behind them may have paradoxically allowed for the unabashed expression of different forms of racism”. This partly accounts for the extraordinary callousness, bordering on racial contempt, in Germany over the fate of Palestinians. Increasingly, Germany’s much-lauded culture of historical memory seems to have maintained an appearance of success only because the German ruling class had, until recently, less occasion to expose its historical delusions than, for instance, the Brexiters dreaming of imperial-era strength and self-sufficiency.
It is almost as though by claiming to be the culture most dedicated to memorialising the Shoah, Germany managed to avoid reckoning with the crimes that necessitated that culture in the first place. In 1975, the literary critic Hans Mayer, who moved from East to West Germany in 1963, derided “the fundamentally unsound relationship of the average German toward the phenomenon of the Jew and the state of Israel”. This unsoundness is now manifest in a variety of ways, including in the number of Germans fraudulently claiming to be Jewish, as a May 2024 article in the Baffler detailed in harrowing fashion.
As the historian Frank Stern unsparingly diagnosed in 1992 in The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge, German philosemitism is primarily a “political instrument”, used not only to “justify options in foreign policy”, but also “to evoke and project a moral stance in times when domestic tranquillity is threatened by antisemitic, anti-democratic and rightwing extremist phenomena”. Thus, German Israelphilia and philosemitism is peaking just as there is again a recrudescence in Germany of far-right furies.
This perverse dialectic helps explain why, while commemorating the Shoah and proclaiming its undying support for Israel, Germany ignores the atrocities Germans inflicted on Asians and Africans during the brief rampages of German colonialism. In China in 1900-01, German troops faithfully followed their Kaiser’s instructions to behave like “Huns”, in their bid to crush the “yellow peril”. Then in 1904 in German South-West Africa (contemporary Namibia) the German imperial army killed an estimated 65,000 Herero people out of a total population of approximately 80,000. German colonialists suppressing another uprising in east Africa in 1905-07 killed, with machine guns, dozens of people at a time – altogether 80,000 people died in the fighting and another 200,000 were consumed in the famine that followed.
Many more Africans, 350,000 in one estimate, were killed between 1914 and 1918, when Germany, attempting to hold on to its colonies, turned the natives under its control into grist for the first world war’s slaughter machine. The Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose grandfather in Zanzibar was conscripted as a carrier by German troops, is among many who have wondered “why the history and experience of German colonialism in Africa was so ferociously brutal”. In many ways, Germany’s brutality toward Asians and Africans prefigured its atrocities in eastern Europe: in 2006, Raffael Scheck described in Hitler’s African Victims how the killing sprees of the Einsatzgruppen in the bloodlands of the east – shooting people by the edge of mass graves which the victims themselves had been forced to dig – was prefigured by the massacres in May and June 1940 of thousands of French African soldiers. But there are no incentives to project a moral stance in the case of black Africans, let alone declare their wellbeing to be Germany’s Staatsräson as domestic tranquillity is again threatened by antisemitic, anti-democratic and rightwing extremist phenomena.
The political and moral deformations and intellectual helplessness of Germany today are more dangerous than at any other time since 1945. The AfD is no aberration; it benefits from a broadening lurch to the extreme right among mainstream politicians and journalists. The likely next German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, the leader of the centre-right Christian Democrats, has recently broken the German mainstream’s “firewall” against the AfD, promising to work with politicians overfond of Nazi slogans and salutes. Meanwhile, German courts are trying a far-right group for plotting the violent overthrow of the government. The country that laid waste the moral structure of western society looks feeble again before the economic crises and social breakdowns of capitalism that first produced fascism.
Worse: Germany’s long road west now leads straight to Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Germany’s pre-eminent philosopher Jürgen Habermas once hailed the “unconditional opening of the federal republic to the political culture of the west” as the most important achievement of postwar Germany. According to this argument, Germans had strayed too far off the road to the west and ended up committing monstrous crimes. Thus Habermas lauded an exemplary “western civilisation” from which Germans had unwisely dissociated themselves. Germans could become part of a superior west again by putting the Shoah and undying commitment to Israel at the centre of their collective identity and by renouncing ethnonationalism.
But this entire framework for understanding the world, and Germany’s place in it, has been tottering in recent years. Habermas and others have convinced themselves their country safely converted to liberalism on its high road to the west through Israel; they don’t, however, seem to ponder the fact that the old idea of the west has never seemed more incoherent and unconvincing.
Refined during the cold war, this conception of the west had a large, self-flattering Anglo-American component, signifying electoral democracy, free markets and individual freedoms, in contrast to totalitarian regimes. But the US has lurched in the last decade from calamitously failed wars to far-right demagoguery, and Britain, deceived by blustery rogues into Brexit, is unlikely to recover soon from an extreme act of self-harm. The “political culture of the west” does not inspire great admiration even within the west today.
Revealingly, the binary of the enlightened west and unenlightened east – once used to authorise the Nazi quest for Lebensraum in the east and then adapted to serve cold war policy agendas – is the currency today of far-right nationalists across Israel, Europe and America. During Israel’s assault on Gaza, Netanyahu announced that he is fighting the “new Nazis” in Gaza in order to save “western civilisation”. Others in his cohort of Jewish supremacists kept up a supporting chorus denouncing the people of Gaza as “subhuman”, “animals” and “Nazis”. Hitler himself was convinced, when Jews were conceived as subhuman and animals, that the fate of western civilisation rested on his shoulders. And there was much about western democracies – especially their foundations in white supremacy, and cultures of racism and antisemitism – that allowed Hitler to believe that they would welcome his extermination of Jews.
Germany’s postwar quest for normalisation – whether through philosemitism and west-philia, or Staatsräson and proud and ostentatious self-reproach – has reached a dead end. It always seemed implausible that a collective moral education could produce a stable, homogeneous attitude across the generations. There are too many other factors determining what is remembered and what is forgotten, and the German national subconscious is burdened by a century of secrecy, crimes and cover-ups. It should not surprise us then that, as völkisch-authoritarian racism surged at home, Germany yet again became complicit, through its unconditional solidarity with Netanyahu, Smotrich, Gallant and Ben-Gvir, in murderous ethnonationalism. As Günter Grass wrote in his 2002 novel Crabwalk: “History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising.”
Adapted from The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra, published by Fern Press on 6 February
