What explains Germany's stance on Israel?
Olaf Scholz' government is coming under increased scrutiny over its support for Israel. Central to this debate is what we read as the key lesson of the Holocaust.
Dear Reader,
At the weekend I did something that, as the father of two small children, gave me a deep sense of privilege. I went to the cinema.
The film I chose has arrived at a time when it is eerily relevant to world affairs.
The Zone of Interest portrays the life of the Höß family at their home under the walls of Auschwitz. Father, Rudolf Höß, is the camp commandant. But the camera never ventures inside the camp. Instead, it shows us the blissful family life next door. The children mill around in the garden; the mother is tremendously proud of her flower beds; Rudolf reads his daughter fairytales in bed.
The family seems oblivious to the muffled screams and dull thud of bullets in the background.
The film is Hannah Arendt’s famous description of Adolf Eichmann (the banality of evil) turned into 100 minutes of excruciating cinema. The Nazi commandant is no longer the comic book villain of standard Hollywood portrayal. He is a soft and gentle. He is disconcertingly familiar.
Director Jonathan Glazer has said that this is “a film about now, and about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims.” When the film won an Oscar, he even drew a connection to the current war in Gaza.
Judging by the mail I’ve received from some readers over the past few weeks, many people have the feeling that something similar is taking place in Germany today: terrible crimes are taking place and the German public seems able to completely blank them out.
Politicians engage in endless debates around delivering a single weapon system to Ukraine, but avoid discussing whether Germany should still be sending weapons to Israel at all.
Is that an accurate an accurate picture of what is taking place?
I don’t think so.
Rather, Germany is in a state of creeping moral paralysis as it realises that the lessons that it has drawn from the Holocaust appear to be in hopeless contradiction with one another.
Informing this contradiction is a debate that has been raging among historians over the past couple of year, which the German press have labelled the Historikerstreit 2.0.
As you can deduce, it is the sequel to the Historikerstreit 1.0, which played out in the 1980s.
In essence, both debates can be summarised as follows: the orthodox interpretation of the Holocaust - that it was both unique and a ‘civilisational break’ - came under attack.
In the 1980s, the revisionist challenge came from the right, where a historian called Ernst Nolte argued that the Holocaust should be seen in the context of the mass deaths in Soviet gulags. “Didn’t the gulag come before Auschwitz? Wasn't the class-based murder of the Bolsheviks the logical and factual precedent for the racial murder of the Nazis?” he asked.
Nolte’s thesis was red meat to the far-right, from whom it delivered the intellectual sugar coating to their insistence that Germany should cast off its Schuldkult (culture of guilt).
While Nolte’s arguments were broadly rebuffed, a new version of the debate has surfaced in recent years. The difference is that the new revisionism comes from the left. Led by Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses, these historians argue that the Holocaust should be seen in the context of earlier colonial crimes in Africa. By defining the Holocaust as “unique” and “Zivilisationsbruch”, Germany implicitly ignores massacres carried out by German colonists in Namibia at the beginning of the 20th century, they say.
Germany “fetishizes the Holocaust like a sacred object” and is thus incapable of seeing its similarity to other crimes, Moses has argued.
Once again, these arguments have caused outrage. Writing in Die Zeit in 2021, historian Saul Friedländer retorted that the Holocaust “differs from other historical crimes not only in individual aspects, but fundamentally.”
The difference, he argued, is that the Shoah stemmed from a delusional belief in an “apocalyptic battle” that had to be fought between the Aryan and Jewish races. The outcome was uncertain, but victory could only be achieved if “every trace of ‘the Jew’ was eradicated.”
While these are primarily arguments about the past, they are also intimately connected to the present.
Revisionists argue that the orthodoxy has led Germany to swear unwavering allegiance to Israel (Angela Merkel declared Israel’s security to be German Staatsräson in 2008) while remaining blind to that country’s treatment of the Palestinians. This argument has been adopted by activists in the chant “Free Palestine from German guilt” (note the similarity to the far-Right’s Schuldkult.)
On the other hand, those that see a distinctive logic in the murderousness of the Holocaust warn that this same logic has been adopted by Hamas and their paymasters in Tehran.
Islamists have blended European antisemitism with citations of the Hadith to conclude that they are engaged in an apocalyptic struggle with the Jewish people, argued historian Stephan Grigat in a recent interview with Die Zeit. Like all antisemites, they have a “delusional worldview” that can only be dealt with via “social ostracism, state repression and, if necessary, military force,” he said.
Immediately after the terror attacks of October 7th, Germany was clear in the lessons it had to draw. On his first visit to Israel after the atrocities, Olaf Scholz said that "there is only one place for Germany - next to Israel. That's what we mean when we say that Israel's security is German Staatsräson.” Back home, this stance was applauded by the German press and the entire Bundestag.
Slowly though, as evidence grows that the Israeli government is denying basic provisions to the people of Gaza, this sense of moral clarity has started to dissipate. Mainly, those nagging doubts have been reflected in a marked lack of coverage of the conflict.
But, some have also ventured a direct criticism.
Earlier this month, Der Spiegel ran an editorial that argued that the principle of Staatsräson was turning Germany into “a vassal” of the Jewish state. While Israel’s armed forces were carrying out a “campaign of annihilation,” Berlin was suppressing debate at home and increasing arms supplies. This is a “repulsive” state of affairs, the article complained.
(The Jüdische Allgemeine newspaper responded with an article that accused Der Spiegel of adopting the language of antisemitism in “a declaration of moral bankruptcy.”)
Aware of its increasingly isolated position in the world, the German government has upped its diplomatic efforts. In the past fortnight, both Scholz and foreign minister Annalena Baerbock have travelled to Jerusalem to try to convince their Israeli counterparts not to invade the southern city of Rafah.
Meanwhile Lars Klingbeil, chairman of the Social Democrats, acknowledged that Berlin’s stance was having a damaging effect on its reputation outside the West. “A feeling of outrage and accusations of double standards became very clear to me in the discussions I had during my trip to Africa two weeks ago,” he recounted last week.
At the same time, attempts to isolate Israel internationally will increase the domestic pressure on Germany’s leadership to stick by the Jewish state through thick and thin.
That’s because Germany remains acutely aware of a lesson from the Holocaust that the rest of the world doesn’t seem to have learned: that international isolation will embolden Israel’s enemies in their apocalyptic obsession with the eradication of the Jewish state.
This newsletter is funded entirely by its readers. Please consider becoming a supporter by signing up here.
It might be time to stop calling it "German guilt". It is not the guilt of what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, but the self-inflicted trauma and suffering experienced by Germany during and after the war. Every German family has a war horror story, loss of loved ones, destruction of a town, and years of suffering. It is what the Holocaust brought to the German people, that acts as the strongest force behind "never again". It is not guilt, it is the awareness of what hate and ideological war can do to your own family and life. This is why the German people can sense the ideology behind the Palestinian holy war and Israel's need to defend itself.
I guess because I'm not German I don't quite understand the guilt (the worldwide obsession with WW2 I get) around the holocaust.
The Russians don't feel guilty about their history
The French feel no guilt about Algeria
The British feel a bit guilty about empire
Americans feel no guilt about slavery
All of Europe willing participated in the holocaust and promptly forgot about it.
Africans (as far as I know) feel no guilt about participation in slavery.
So on and so forth,