Germany’s unconditional support for Israel has been an easy way to avoid examining our brutal past. The colossal weight of the ongoing genocide in Gaza is crushing our facile myths and forcing us to re-examine our historical dogma.
We Germans live in a reality shaped by our genocidal history. But while the national narrative of “collective guilt” for the Holocaust is omnipresent, German lived experience exposes this as more myth than reality. With our performative “commemoration culture,” we instrumentalize the Holocaust to distance ourselves from our past, to deflect from our current far-right problems, and to rebrand ourselves as a champion of morality. A central part of crafting our self-serving image, our “genocide hubris,” is our current unquestioning support of Israeli war crimes, a hubris that has crumbled under the weight of our complicity in the Gaza genocide.
I loved growing up in West Germany of the 1980s and early ‘90s. As a half-German, half-French child, I only had a vague conception of nationality, or of why I should be proud of being what my passport says I am. Thus, I was happy that Germany appeared different from other countries, seemingly less concerned with national pride. That, after two catastrophic World Wars, we didn’t have to have our flag plastered everywhere like the Americans. We were reformed, we were sober now. No more nationalism, no more wars, and no more genocide. If we were proud to be German, it was because we were proud of our “constitutional patriotism” and our new, postwar humanistic values.
In German childhoods, our recent history loomed large. We knew how Germans had been sadistic, hateful, even genocidal in the past. We knew why movie supervillains, from Dr. Strangelove to Hans Gruber, were naturally German. In school, we learned everything about the genocide of the Jews, with footnotes on the Romani genocide, Aktion T4, and – since I went to a Catholic school – the persecution of the Catholic church. (No mention of the countless Slavic victims of Nazi Germany, however, those remained firmly below the awareness threshold.) A Holocaust survivor came to school to give us a first-hand account of the unspeakable horrors that the Jewish people had been subjected to. We read Anne Frank. We memorised Paul Celan’s Holocaust poem “Todesfuge,” with the haunting refrain that “Death is a master from Germany.” We saw Schindler’s List on a school trip to the cinema. We saw the first “Stolpersteine” memorials being installed in the ‘90s. Our school theatre performance was – naturally – Eugène Ionesco’s Nazi allegory, Rhinocéros. When our final high school trip took us to Prague, we made the obligatory, gut-wrenching stop at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
The lesson couldn’t be clearer: we, as a people, had committed the ultimate sin, and we had to be thoroughly educated to ensure it would never happen again.
And yet, while I was growing up, current affairs were more “again and again” than “never again,” as an endless string of neo-Nazi terrorism echoed uncomfortably the late Weimar Republic (more...)
How Gaza is exposing Germany’s ‘never again’ myth
