The Germans and the Jews

It is finally time to write about Germans and Jews, and about the ominous mythology the present political order has fashioned from the atrocities of National Socialism.

A post like this requires some tedious disclaimers. I have no few Jewish readers, and no few German readers; I am also myself a German. I regard all of you as my friends. What follows is likely to offend some people in both camps and many others besides. This is because we are governed by a political ideology that has long since morphed into the equivalent of a state religion. Religious systems are incredibly powerful; they arrange moral sentiments and the emotions they summon are pre-rational. For these reasons, attempting an objective description of a religious system can anger the faithful. I’m sorry about that, but it is my goal here to maintain an outside perspective on the beliefs that arrange our lives and our politics. Personally, I am an agnostic when it comes to political religions; I’m happy to accept any system that works at a pragmatic level, but I’m sorry to say that I’m never going to be a believer.

Should any constitutional protectors be reading this, I’d like to point out that my use of words like “mythology” to describe political narratives about the past does not entail a denial of any historical claims. Myths are just stories we tell about ourselves and our societies; they are still myths even if all of their specific claims are true. I readily affirm that the National Socialists killed millions of Jews. I deeply regret this period in German history, but I also regret how these twelve years have been instrumentalised to guide politics in the present, often in wildly ahistorical and irrational ways – and not only in Germany, but also among the victorious, liberal Allied powers. There is a deep sickness here.

To bring the topic into focus, I quote the immortal words of the German dramatist Botho Strauß, which have shot like a bolt of lightning through my entire political vision since I first read them years ago. This is how he describes Adolf Hitler:

He is the tragedy of my late birth, the black sun around which all the planetary values of this Republic orbit – the moral, the intellectual, the aesthetic planets, the social, the psychological, the traditional, the emancipatory … This, the ugliest German, continues to dominate every passionate thought about the Germans … This, the most powerful of German vampires, is forever present in their endless chains of negations, radicalisms, annihilatory desires, feverish convictions. In my modern life, the past extorts everything from within and without. There is no writing and no thinking that is spared from it.¹

Nobody would say that the past should be revised away, or ignored or papered over with happy fairy tales of national virtue. Among other things, I find that kind of propaganda utterly insufferable. But there is a point beyond which the repudiation of historical misdeeds and the demonisation of villains begins to invest mythological enemies with a terrible power. It is no exaggeration to say that Hitler has become a kind of pseudo-Christian antichrist; he is potentially immortal and at any moment may be subject to reincarnation. The same goes for his political party. There have been no National Socialists in Germany for 79 years, and yet National Socialism somehow lives on, in the air or in the water, like a swarm of demons who are likely to possess anyone who listens to the wrong speech or reads the wrong book. Perhaps it was not the wisest move for liberal ideologues to endow their dead enemies with all manner of magical powers so conspicuously lacking in their unimaginative, unoriginal and banal selves.

Before I close the curtain of the paywall, I invite you to consider some peculiar facts about the political present. Why have the Palestinians become such a cause célèbre among both the anti-Western left and corners of you might call the hard right today? Whatever you think of the Palestinian plight, they are far from the worst-off people in the world. And yet, some readers are very angry with me for not writing more about the war in Gaza; I have been accused of strategic triangulation and worse. (It is always a telling sign, when people get mad at you for not saying the right specific things about the right specific events.) Alternatively, why has the simple civic commemoration of the civilian victims of the Dresden bombing in 1945 become such an important annual ritual for those remaining stragglers of the German ‘old right’ (the press call them “neo-Nazis”), while arousing such paroxysms of murderous rage among self-proclaimed antifascists?