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fursasaida · 8 months ago

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[Excerpts from this piece on the particular German psychosis and relationship to an imagined Jewish life that props up the German repression, islamophobia, and racism against Arabs and Palestinians we've seen explode from their previous levels in the last few months]

Since October 7, German politicians have proposed rescinding the nationality of German citizens, restricting the civil rights of non-EU foreign residents, and limiting the number of children with a migration background who can attend any given school, which have been promoted as means for preserving and supporting “Jewish life” in the country. A German politician credibly accused of harboring neo-Nazi sympathies in his youth blamed the country’s antisemitism on immigration. Germany’s largest newspaper published a fifty-point manifesto on what it means to be German; number forty-seven reads, “Germany has a heart for children. They are not beaten but promoted.” A prominent German journalist published an article with the title: “The Jews or Aggro-Arabs: we have to decide who we want to keep.” The Anti-Semitism Commissioner of Baden-Württemberg, who is not Jewish, wrote, “The Nazis were still hiding their mass murders, whereas Hamas celebrated them in the media, like Daesh before them.”

Not everything is as it seems in Germany. That tree? It used to be a Jew. That building was once a Jew. That streetlamp was a Jew. And the Jews? It seems they’re all Germans. [...]

In the eyes of many German critics, Wolff’s greatest sin was to argue, in the guise of a Jewish identity, that supporting a boycott of Israel is not necessarily antisemitic, even though he did not support such a boycott himself. Wolff was subsequently castigated as a costume Jew (Kostümjude) by Germany’s largest Jewish and gentile newspapers. He’s been called an aspiring Kronzeugejude (key witness Jew). Contra Wolff’s complaints about German, this is a language with an astonishingly nimble capacity for creating neologisms on the word Jew:

Alibijude: an alibi Jew, one who provides cover for antisemitic (or anti-Israel) rhetoric

Berufsjude: a professional Jew, a Jew by profession

Faschingsjude: a carnival Jew

Großvaterjude: someone who has one Jewish grandfather

Kostümjude: a costume Jew

Kronzeugejude: a key witness Jew, providing testimony for antisemitic (or anti-Israel) rhetoric

Meinungsjude: An opinion Jew? Or a Jew by opinion??

Modejude: A fashion Jew??? Or fashionably Jewish????

Schmusejude: a cuddly Jew, one who presumably cuddles up with Germans

Vaterjude: someone who has a Jewish father

Vorzeigejude: a model Jew

With the possible exception of Vaterjude, these constructions are pejoratives about giving the appearance of being Jewish or utilizing your Jewish identity for gain. Far from an aberration, the revelation of Wolff’s fabricated Jewish identity turns out to be something of a German tradition. Not a year seems to pass without a scandal involving the identity of a prominent German Jew. [...]

Not everyone assumes a Jewish identity; some are satisfied with appearances.

The television journalist Lea Rosh was the public face and most vocal proponent of the campaign to build Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Rosh has cultivated a Jewish aura—a Scheinbarjüdin, perhaps. “I don’t look so Aryan,” she once enthused during an interview. Rosh changed her name from Edith to Lea, and unsuccessfully sued the (Jewish) author Ruth Gay for writing that she had done so to sound more Jewish. She once fiercely rejected a proposal to place the Holocaust memorial across from the Reichstag: “Did the ‘German people’ murder the Jews? Hardly.”

Then there are the literal costume Jews. I have twice witnessed large groups of Germans wearing kippot. Once at a rally against antisemitism and once marching with a large police escort down Sonnenallee, the hub of Arab life in Berlin, chanting pro-Israel slogans. To hold a sign that said “Stop Genocide” or ��From the River to the Sea” on that same street today would invite certain arrest and potentially criminal prosecution. The police violently suppressed demonstrations and even basic symbols of Palestinian identity on Sonnenallee in the weeks following October 7; I had to extricate a friend, a prominent (Jewish) journalist, from one such demonstration after he was pepper-sprayed for filming the brutal arrest of a man whose crime was to hold a Palestinian flag. But few here are trying to co-opt a Palestinian identity.

Some years ago, a friend of mine was invited to a Shabbat dinner. The attendees all gave the appearance of being religiously observant. They knew the hymns, the men wore kippot, one even had payot. The hosts insisted that my friend recite the various blessings. Through a chance comment during dinner, he discovered he was the only Jew in attendance. They were Germans who enjoyed enacting Jewish rituals, and wanted a Jew to unwittingly give his blessing.

Many more Germans than Wolff, Hingst, and Seibert “feel Jewish.” Jewish community archives evidence that many Germans attempted to “discover” their Jewish heritage after the war. Everyone seems to have a Jewish aunt here. Or their grandparents were in the resistance. Or maybe it was their great-aunt. Others have simply converted. [Note from me: obvious parallel to Americans' "Cherokee princess" great-grandmothers here.]

[...] German television recently ran an award-winning talk show called Freitagnacht Jews (Friday Night Jews) that featured a roundtable of Jews talking about what it’s like growing up Jewish in Germany. Vogue Germany once ran a column called “Jewish Today”—subhed: “The everyday life of a German Jewess, who takes us on a journey through a world we hardly know”—where readers could learn about Jewish bodies, Jewish sex, Jewish doubt, Jewish decision-making and why Jewish men can’t come as quickly thanks to circumcision. Germans love the peculiarity of Semitic sorrows, the specificity of Jewish joys. They love klezmer music. They will solemnly nod their head when you tell them, “My grandfather is a tree.”

The great beneficiaries of this funereal interest, assuming they don’t criticize Israel too much, are Israelis. In common perception, Israeli is synonymous with Jewish. The reality is more complicated inside of Israel, but Israelis are nonetheless regarded as the summa of all things Jewish by a German public whose thinking is still fundamentally characterized by a nation-state framework. And the cultural predilections of Israeli society—an obsession with interrogating Israeli identity as a sort of special existential condition, an enormous capacity for self-aggrandizement and self-pity—conveniently align with German expectations of “Jewish culture,” and largely mirror those of German society. Germany is the largest market for translated Israeli literature in the world.

[...] To be German is to be a Täter, a perpetrator. But the crux of Germany’s national identity, its famed memory culture and the “overcoming of the past,” is, paradoxically, its relationships with Jews, the universal victims. Through empathizing with and supporting Jews, conveniently embodied in the state of Israel, Germans can expiate the evil inherent in being German, passed down from generation to generation as though it were in their blood. Jews become the bearers of an inherited virtue as victims.

Yet far from overcoming the past, this dynamic seems to demand its constant reenactment. Non-Germans can only become German by checking their own histories at the door. Minister of Culture Roth recently told the new Cameroonian-born director of a state cultural institution: “You have become part of the Täternation.” Cameroon was formerly a German colony.

These prevailing tendencies have become ever more apparent in the wake of the horrifying violence in Israel and Palestine over the past months. Germany’s political, media, and cultural elites have rushed to demonstrate who can stand closest to Israel. The identification has been so intense and Israel’s security so frequently invoked as a matter of Staatsräson that at times I have wondered if some Germans don’t believe Hamas’s attack wasn’t obliquely directed at Germany. Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck gave a much-lauded speech in which he called on Muslims in Germany to “clearly distance themselves from antisemitism so as not to undermine their own right to tolerance.” No similar imperative was given to Germany’s good Christian citizens. Friedrich Merz, the leader of the CDU (Angela Merkel’s party) who is widely presumed to be the frontrunner to become the next chancellor, proposed mandating recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a condition of acquiring German citizenship. His proposal has become reality in the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt.

This formulation of German identity does not offer an inclusive vision for a diversifying country. A friend’s partner, the descendant of Kurdish “guest workers” who arrived after the war, was so impressed by her vociferous school lessons about the misdeeds of Germany’s prior generations that she briefly believed her own grandfather had likewise slaughtered Jews in Europe during the war. Germanness as such has no aspirational, positive content. It’s not hard to understand why some would want to escape this cycle of pathologized guilt, just as it’s not surprising that some would take identification with Jews a step further.

[...] The “I am Jew in Germany” essays articulate something like the opposite: a brittle, uncertain identity in a country that offers Jews many assurances and no certainty. They mark out “Jewish” and “German” as dichotomy of distinct, irreconcilable identities. These essays celebrate “Jewish humor” and are chronically unfunny. They nod to the profundity and factiousness of Jewish culture and hew to the schema of the local Weltanschauung. Profoundly awkward social mannerisms abound. It is almost as though they were . . . German.

The farce of this situation is readily apparent. But the tragedy has never lingered far from the surface, and that tragedy has come into clearer view since October 7, which occurred a few weeks after I initially turned in a draft of this essay to a different magazine. Since October 7, German politicians have authorized breaches in the country’s constitutional order on the basis of nebulous sensitivities, unwittingly setting a ruinous precedent for when the far-right Alternativ für Deutschland comes into power. Since October 7, German arms shipments to Israel have risen so substantially that the total for 2023 represented a ten-fold increase from the previous year, and now account for 30 percent of Israeli arms imports (another report puts it as high as 47 percent). And since October 7, those munitions have been used by Israeli forces to kill more than fourteen thousand children in Gaza. Germany has a heart for children.

#israel #germany #jewishness #gaza #commemoration #racism

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