Memory Politics in Crisis: What is Going on in Germany? (II)

This text is the translation of the second part of a two-part publication entitled “Geçmişle Yüzleş(eme)mek: Almanya’da Ne Oluyor?,” originally published in November and December 2023.

Since the publication of the first part of this article, new scandals have been added to those that the German public has already witnessed, and which I now have difficulty keeping track of. Let me confine myself to a few examples: South African-Jewish artist Candice Breitz’s exhibition, planned to open at the Saarland Museum in 2024, was cancelled due to the artist’s “controversial remarks about the Gaza war.” The cultural center Oyoun, from which the Berlin Senate threatened to withdraw its financial support, is closing down. An article titled “A Heart Beating for Evil,” published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, targeted the critical open letter, supported by more than six hundred scientists, which I mentioned in my first article. Putting the five signatory academics in the crosshairs by name, the article ends by saying, “[c]olleges will have to carefully examine who they can trust in the fight against antisemitism.” In a statement made to Die Zeit newspaper, Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann said “they will fight more harshly against the antisemitism prevalent among immigrants” and that denaturalization is also an option if necessary. Many senior German politicians do not hesitate to make accusations that damage the reputation of the United Nations, its affiliated organizations, and non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International. One of the most striking examples of this was a statement from Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, a senior FDP (Free Democratic Party) politician and head of the defense commission. Strack-Zimmermann criticized United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in a manner incompatible with the language of diplomacy and claimed that Guterres was not suitable for his position. Finally, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, close to the Green Party, announced in a statement on December 13^th, that the award ceremony for Masha Gessen to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, which it financially supported, was to be cancelled this year. The reason given for cancelling the ceremony was Gessen’s description, in their finely woven New Yorker essay on the instrumentalization of the Holocaust, of Gaza as a ghetto. According to the foundation’s statement, “the implication that Israel aims to destroy Gaza like a Nazi ghetto” was unacceptable. Following the outcry from an international public suggesteding that, based on the Böll Foundation statement, Arendt herself would not have received the Hannah Arendt award, the foundation wrote a new statement that contradicted the accusatory tone in the first, claiming that the cancellation of the ceremony should not be understood as the foundation deeming Gessen unworthy of the award. It is possible to answer the question of what is going on in Germany with the observation that the political culture which gives life to the constitutional order is sliding into a severe crisis. The crisis has reached a level that threatens individuals’ constitutional rights and freedoms, as well as democracy.

As mentioned in my previous article, the public sphere in Germany is very sensitive to the interventions of public intellectuals due to its elitist and hierarchical structure. Despite this sensitivity, it would be naive to expect intellectuals to bring a solution to the crisis in question through individual interventions. However, an intellectual like Jürgen Habermas, known for the critical role he played in shaping the political culture of the young Berlin Republic and the democratization of state institutions in a way similar to the 19^th century Prussian state’s association with G.W.F. Hegel, was expected to at least make a statement that wouldn’t lead to a deepening of the crisis but instead invite the public to common sense. As is known, the declaration “A Statement on the Principles of Solidarity,” published on November 13^th by Habermas and his three famous colleagues who manage the Normative Orders Research Institute (Nicole Deitelhoff, Reiner Forst, Klaus Günther), did not meet this expectation and has been rightly criticized. The declaration also attracted attention in the Turkish public. Levent Köker offered a detailed textual analysis of the declaration, grounding his criticisms on the basis of Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception paradigm.” Köker points out that the declaration does not touch on the background of the Palestinian issue, nor the situation of Gaza, which according to him resembles a concentration camp. An article by Osman Erden points out that we should read the declaration within the framework of past discussions on coming to terms with the past in Germany, and paves the way for a better understanding of the issue among the Turkish public. While I agree with Erden that this framework is essential, I hope to show that recently the Memory debate has flared up again, and that we cannot justify the declaration simply by referring the political culture formed by the process of coming to terms with the past. My central claim is that the praxis of memory politics, which underpins the historical context of the declaration in question, has evolved into a state ideology. This ideological shift contradicts not only Habermas’ the political theory, but also challenges the intellectual framework of memory politics in Germany, a framework he significantly contributed to. I think that clarifying this contradiction will contribute to providing an explanation of what is going on in Germany, beyond tracing the successive scandals.

In opposition to the declaration issued by members of the Normative Orders Research Institute, a critical text co-signed by a group of social scientists whose fields of study intersect with Critical Theory was published under the title “Human Dignity for All: A Response to ‘Principles of Solidarity'” in The Guardian newspaper of November 22. The text summarizes the problems of the statement concisely. First of all, it points out that the “solidarity” which gives its name to the Normative Orders declaration, that is, the concern for human dignity, was not formulated to include the Palestinian people living in Gaza. Let me state that this justified observation is a very serious criticism for an institute which makes Kantian universalism the mainstay of its research projects. Moreover, the declaration makes no reference to anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia, which have increased with the criminalization of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Germany, even though, as the critical text says, “solidarity means that human dignity is a principle that should be applied to all humanity.”

The following sentence in the declaration by Normative Orders has undoubtedly attracted the most severe reactions: “Despite all the concern for the fate of the Palestinian population, however, the standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.” The critical text underlines that this sentence ignores the discussions by respected researchers currently working on genocide and applications made to the International Criminal Court. Moreover, another grievous dimension of this sentence that needs to be taken into consideration—and which the subtext of the critical text points to—is that this sentence attempts to dictate the criteria under which the discussion will be conducted. This approach completely contradicts the principles of the ideal of free and rational discourse expressed in Habermas’s Communicative Action paradigm which forms the basis of the understanding of deliberative democracy he has developed. In a public debate, the philosopher’s task is to clarify the formal qualities (veracity, truthfulness, sincerity) of the justifications that can be used in a given discourse, or to show how any justification with these qualities can offer us better reasons, while what is expected from ordinary participants is that they make a validity claim regarding the content of the debate, or if they do not find the conditions of the debate fair, they open these conditions to discussion. However, the authors of the Normative Orders declaration ascribe to themselves a self-proclaimed authority, going beyond the limits of what a philosopher or an ordinary participant is expected to contribute to a public debate. Thus, a communication in which we would want the best argument to gain validity is replaced by a claim of authority and domination.

As Köker points out, the fact that not a single word is mentioned about the Palestine issue in the declaration must similarly be related to the desire to determine what is open to discussion. The declaration dictates that only a debate about the nature of Israel’s response can be legitimate, not one about its allegedly justified response “in principle.” This prevents the issue from being addressed in its historical context and from discussing the policies implemented by the state of Israel. As we might recall from the excessive reactions to Judith Butler’s “The Compass of Mourning” in the German public, refusing to consider the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in its historical context is based on concerns over falling into moral relativism.¹ At the same time, Israel’s “principled” justification is made unquestionable in a veiled reference to the Holocaust by equating Hamas’s massacre with a “declared intention to eliminate Jewish life in general.” Moreover, as the above mentioned critical text written against the declaration underlines, it is noteworthy that among the possible criticisms that the authors of the declaration “deem appropriate” regarding the nature of Israel’s reaction, there is no demand to fulfil the requirements of international law. In summary, the declaration, which gives the impression that it was written to draw attention to the importance and binding nature of the German culture of remembrance, clearly takes a stand in favor of, and expresses solidarity with, the state of Israel. This is a position identical to the state’s ideology, which declares the existence of the Israeli state as the fundamental interest/raison d’être of the German state [Staatsräson].

As is known, one of the important achievements of Habermas’s state theory based on deliberative democracy is that the modern state—the liberal state based on rule of law [Rechtstaat], organized around the principle of protecting the rights and freedoms of the individual—replaces national identity and nationalism with “political culture” and “constitutional patriotism.” Both national identity and nationalism contributed to the democratization of the state throughout the 19^th century. And yet, Habermas points out that a national identity built on the mythological existence of a pre-political homogeneous culture contradicts the pluralistic social structure of modern democracies of the present. He also underlines that it is necessary to give up treating nationalism as a concept that motivates “democratic” participation, as it invites disasters such as those seen particularly in the 20^th century. A newly defined supra-identity based on “political culture” and “constitutional patriotism,” is needed to replace national identity and nationalism in providing an answer to these two problems.² The political culture that is intended to replace the national identity is nourished by discussions in the public sphere and finds its concrete expression in the constitution. What is decisive for political culture/identity is not a unitarian understanding of natural language and culture (or ethnic-identity), but the experience gained by citizens as a result of democratic struggle, learning processes that require the evaluation of moral values with a universal approach in the public sphere, and encounters that force citizens to filter through the criticism of their collective visions of a good life. To the extent that political culture enables citizens to participate in democratic decision-making processes—becoming democratized and inclusive—it offers a new identity beyond the sub-identities to which citizens also belong. The expression of protecting this identity is constitutional patriotism. It should be underlined that this framework imposes a strong limitation on the culturalistic demands of the majority regarding immigrants, or subcultures with a history of immigration, in immigrant-receiving, multicultural societies such as Germany. What is expected of all citizens is an ability to adapt to the political culture. Therefore, the demand for political integration directed at communities with a history of migration—which opens the door to the possibility of transforming society through relations of mutual recognition—is obliged to recognize the cultural differences of these communities, as long as they do not conflict with constitutional rights and regulations.³ In discussions on immigration policy in Germany throughout the 2000s, we saw that this framework, presented by Habermas’s state theory, was effective despite objections frequently voiced by the right that Germany should have a dominant culture [Leitkultur]. If the Habermasian vision of a multicultural society were to be fully implemented, a more egalitarian and liberal democratic society model would indeed be realized.

However, beyond the inertia of society in the face of change and the resistance of right-wing politics, Habermas’s model of a multicultural society has encountered an unexpected problem in practice in recent years. According to Habermas’s understanding of deliberative democracy, the culture of remembrance is an important part of the political culture that contributes to the process of social integration. In the German context, this means coming to terms with the Holocaust, embracing Germany’s responsibilities arising from this, and developing the democratic consciousness necessary to combat antisemitism. We see, however, that these reasonable political demands, in practice turn into an excuse for a new form of discrimination based on ethnic identity. Communities and minorities with a migration background demand that their memories of injustices and disasters receive equal recognition in the public sphere, and they inevitably establish a different relationship with the currently dominant culture of remembrance. As they are not “descendants of the perpetrators” in terms of their family history, and they do not naturally feel this way, they often view the Holocaust from a perspective in which they identify with the Jews who were persecuted and destroyed, due to their own experiences of racist discrimination. Esra Özyürek, whose recent work focuses especially on the rupture created by Muslim communities in the dominant culture of remembrance, points out that while different perspectives on confronting the past can contribute to a versatile history and culture of remembrance, they are othered in a way that provides legitimacy to racist and discriminatory discourses. Moreover, it is worth noting that some public intellectuals with a migration background, but who identify with the racist-discriminatory perspective of the majority culture, also contribute to the production of an alienating discourse that equates Islam and Muslims with Fascism and Nazis, which resonates even among the German left.⁴ This culture of remembrance, which resists making room for different historical narratives, such as Germany’s colonial past, on an equal footing and insists on determining the conditions for coming to terms with the Holocaust from the perspective of the majority culture, not only does not align with Habermas’s understanding of deliberative democracy, but also risks evolving from a practice that thrives in the public sphere into an ideology. In other words, the democratic perspective that frees the conditions of equal citizenship from the determinacy of cultural life paradoxically appears to emphasize a political identity where ethnic identity stands out as the defining factor. According to this perspective—which is based on ethnic identity in the last instance, though it covers up ethnic identity and gradually acquires an ideological function—the degree of being a good citizen is measured by a willingness shown in the fight against not only the familiar agents of antisemitism, but even more in the fight against a new, that is, “imported,” Muslim antisemitism.

The inference that defines solidarity with the Israeli state as the fundamental interest and raison d’être of the German state, based on the culture of remembrance, points to a more fundamental problem in terms of both the nature of the culture of remembrance and the theory of the democratic state. The concept of Staatsräson (the basic interest and reason for the existence of the state) that came into circulation in the public sphere with a speech given by Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of Germany, in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, in 2008, has, first of all, a meaning that directly contradicts the democratic claim of the modern state. Introduced to political theory by the Italian Renaissance, the concept maintains that the state’s interests should take a position above all moral and legal matters. Therefore, it refers to an ontological entity—we might say a superior intelligence—which is not and cannot be bound by the constitution or institutions that can be understood as the expression of the people’s will in a democratic state. Interestingly, while the concept originally advises that a state should prioritize its own interests above all else, as utilized by the German political elite, here it pertains to the determination of the interests of another state. Moreover, while the concept suggests that moral evaluations should be put aside in favor of utilitarian reasoning when needed—that is, most of the time—it is presented as a moral achievement in the sense that Merkel has added to the literature: Staatsräson is almost the unpleasant fruit of seventy years of coming to terms with the past. Lastly, even if all these contradictions are ignored, and in a well-intentioned reading the desire for unconditional solidarity with the state of Israel is considered as an expression of Germany’s aim to secure the life of the Jewish people in line with its responsibility from the past, the claim that Germany will serve this purpose by supporting the Netanyahu government’s war in the Middle East is questionable.⁵ What is more, when considered from the perspective of the culture of remembrance, the use of the concept is an admission that the practice of coming to terms with the past has turned into an ideology. For, when the culture of remembrance is presented as an outcome beyond the reach of ongoing debates in the public sphere, as a moral achievement that is beyond the democratic will of the people and thus must be given priority, it is implicitly claimed that the praxis of coming to terms with the past as a form of political action has come to an end. In this case, the subject of the culture of remembrance is no longer the people but the state. While we note that the only party that expressed reservations about the concept of Staatsräson after October 7 was Die Linke [The Left], we can say that a significant portion of the German left does not mind the culture of remembrance turning into a state ideology. In the rest of this article, I will make some observations about the problematics and the history of coming to terms with the past to clarify how this became possible.

The culture of remembrance is a project of the West German left. Since the East German state (German Democratic Republic) defined its existence through a sharp break with the National Socialist regime, reckoning with the past was replaced by a more general discourse of antifascist struggle defined in accordance with the requirements of the Cold War. Meanwhile, in the West, because the political elite was partly recruited from National Socialist cadres, silence prevailed in the public sphere throughout the 1950s. Perhaps for this reason, Karl Jaspers, who broke this silence at a very early period with his essay “The Question of German Guilt,” while writing on the necessity of coming to terms with the past, invited the German people to speak out. At the same time, however, he carefully avoided any reference to the elimination of the Jewish people in his definition of the political responsibility that should be taken.⁶ Since the 1960s, when, with the success of student activism, the silence was truly broken, right-wing conservative elites with a desire to prevent a thorough reckoning with the past have repeatedly brought up the same arguments against the culture of remembrance. The two arguments that stand out are (1) the banality of the actions of the National Socialist regime compared to other crimes against humanity committed in world history, i.e. relativization, and (2) outright denialism, as can be observed in the impudent dismissal of twelve years of Nazi rule in a 2018 statement made by a member of the far-right/right populist party AfD [Alternative for Germany] claiming that “1000 years of successful German History” cannot be reduced to “a bird shit.” In other words, while the right downplay the importance of the historical crime committed, it recommends that the German people “get rid of their guilt psychology” as a prerequisite to becoming a “healthy” nation. It should not be forgotten that the culture of remembrance, outlined by Theodor W. Adorno’s two important speeches to the general public in 1959 and 1966,⁷ was positioned against these very prescriptions of the German right that would make it easier to “forget.”

One of the main problems of the culture of remembrance is the relationship between crime and responsibility. This duo of concepts brings to mind the distinction that Max Weber made between the “ethics of belief” and the “ethics of responsibility” over a similar concern after World War I.⁸ According to this distinction, which is also reflected in Jaspers’ discussion, the moral principles on which politics should be based must have a flexibility that will bear the responsibility of taking into account that our actions have consequences for the future of a community. Principled decisions that can be taken at the individual level, regarding the definition of the nature of a crime and its moral atonement, for example, may lead to undesirable consequences at the political level and even greater disasters arising from moral fanaticism. It is not difficult to see that this vague definition, which refers to Friedrich Nietzsche’s discussion of ressentiment, is open to abuse by right-wing politics. Nietzsche and Weber—and indirectly, Jaspers—claimed that a moral consciousness focused merely on past crimes should be replaced by an ethics of responsibility for the future. And yet, it is clear that a responsibility ethic that does not take the Holocaust into consideration after World War II, and assumes responsibility only towards the German people who survived the war, in other words, the perpetrators of this great crime against humanity, as well as collaborators and those who condoned the crime, will damage even the most primitive sense of morality. Adorno’s proposition, that from now on all discussions in the public sphere should be organized within the framework of a new categorical imperative, “Never again Auschwitz!” actually provides an answer to this problem. We can act within an ethic of responsibility only when free public debate, questioning the requirements of individual and public autonomy, is organized around a new moral principle that is the expression of autonomy. Adorno’s name for this new moral principle, instead of Immanuel Kant’s universal but abstract, ahistorical and unconditional imperative, is the new categorical imperative, which Adorno states was imposed by Hitler himself and which is historical and concrete enough to remind us of the physical pain caused by the Holocaust. Thanks to this principle, democratic politics and the practice of coming to terms with the past form an inseparable whole. This ethic of memory politics and political responsibility, which Adorno conceptualized by taking into account Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on History,” requires that the unrealized hopes and desires of those who were murdered be kept alive to the extent that they will affect social transformation.⁹ Adopting this ethic of responsibility not only doesn’t constitute an obstacle to punishing criminals and taking reparative legal measures for the damage caused by the past crimes, but it also creates space for the moral questioning of privileges arising from the crime for future generations, who cannot directly be seen as criminals.

I interpret the “Free Palestine from Germany’s guilt/feeling of guilt” banner, which frequently appears at pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Germany, in this context. The slogan does not refer to a feeling of guilt which, after all, many individuals do not have, nor is it—as portrayed by the state ideology which in Adorno’s words turned into “a context of collective blindness” [Verblendungszusammenhang]—an expression of relativization and denialism as adopted by the German right. On the contrary, activists call on the German public to take political responsibility. Should the “feeling of guilt” have a place in the culture of remembrance? Adorno was disturbed not by the “lack of guilt” of the post-war German people, but by the “bourgeois coldness” they displayed.¹⁰ This bourgeois coldness is an expression of the severe damage suffered to intersubjective relations and the inability of people to see each other as human subjects in relations with one another. Adorno argues that the ethics of responsibility should be organized in a way to overcome this coldness. Returning to the present day, the fact that civilians killed in Gaza were covered in the German media only under the definition of “collateral damage,” in language fitting to the Israeli state’s presentation of the war, is an indication that such a coming to terms with the past has not taken place at the level Adorno wished for.

Another important problem with Germany’s culture of remembrance is the importance that the Holocaust and the memory of the Holocaust has or should have in terms of world history. Insisting on the uniqueness and singularity of the Holocaust is undoubtedly necessary against the German right’s efforts to trivialize the genocide. Moreover, the destruction of Jewish, Romani and Sinti people in death factories at the level of industrial and bureaucratic organization, and the fact that this effort to destroy these peoples did not lose its priority even when it was obvious that the war was lost, and that all of this took place in the heart of Europe, the cradle of Enlightenment thought, does make the Holocaust unique and singular among the genocides and crimes against humanity that took place up until then. While this is, paradoxically, an expression of a very trivial fact (genocides, like all historical events, are singular and unique), on the other hand, it de-historicizes the Holocaust by declaring it an absolute evil, and creating a hierarchy between it and other genocides and crimes against humanity, which gradually paves the way for an approach that sees any comparison with the Holocaust as an attempt to relativize it. The formal adoption of such an approach in Germany is the result of public debates and developments in Germany’s recent history.

If one goes back to Adorno, for example, the comparison of the Holocaust with other genocides was not taboo. His famous article “Education After Auschwitz” begins with a reference to the fact that although the Armenian Genocide was well known to the German public, it was met with silence, and Adorno’s argument is built on the thesis that genocides are a possibility that poses a constant danger for the modern world.¹¹ And yet, in Adorno’s late work, Negative Dialectics, we also encounter the (Eurocentric) thesis that the Holocaust caused a break in the history of civilization. In the Historians’ Debate [Historikerstreit] held in 1986, it became clear that a stricter stance needed to be taken against the relativization of the Holocaust. In this discussion, Habermas rightly describes and condemns Ernst Nolte’s attempt to justify the Holocaust (as a measure taken to protect civilization against Soviet barbarism!) as relativization and trivialization of the Holocaust. After the unification of the two Germanys, we can observe that the desire to trivialize the Holocaust gained strength on the right. The German right argued that a new politics of memory focusing on the injustices of the East German state should replace coming to terms with the Nazi past, or, at least, that a “line of demarcation” [Schlussstrich] should be drawn in dealing with the Nazi past. Again, Habermas rightly and strongly opposes this proposition for a culture of remembrance which compares the German Democratic Republic with the National Socialist regime. In the 2000s, however, when the singularity thesis, prohibiting any comparison of the Holocaust with other genocides and crimes against humanity, was turned into an official ideology and adopted by German conservatives as well, the state’s policy of commemorating the National Socialist past became the brand value, so to speak, of Germany, proving its democratic maturity in the international arena.

In 2020, the cancellation of an invitation to Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe to visit Germany and speak, based on accusations of antisemitism, triggered a new Historians’ Debate. Unlike the first debate, historians and intellectuals who argued that the Holocaust should be discussed comparatively did not aim to trivialize the Holocaust, on the contrary, in Historikerstreit 2.0, they argued that the historical significance of the Holocaust is better understood by investigating its continuity with the colonial past and by comparing it with the genocides that preceded it. One of the leading representatives of this view, Michael Rothberg, argues that there is a difference between making a comparison and identifying two different historical events with each other. He maintains that comparisons can enrich memory culture if not made with a competitive ethos, and that a multidirectional historical approach to memory culture is a prerequisite for ensuring political integration in multicultural societies.¹² To be fair, we should note that Habermas endorsed this approach, at least in an interview he gave in 2021.¹³ The provocative essay of another historian working in the field of genocide studies, Dirk Moses’ “The German Catechism,”¹⁴ was met with a strong reaction because it directly targeted the ideological form of the culture of remembrance. The five conditions of the official ideology, which Moses defines as a political theology, can be summarized as follows: 1) A state’s attempt to destroy a people solely for ideological reasons defines the uniqueness of the Holocaust; 2) The Holocaust marks a civilizational rupture; 3) Germany must take responsibility for ensuring the security of the State of Israel (Staatsräson); 4) Antisemitism cannot be equated with racism (antisemitism should not be seen as a form of racism); 5) Anti-Zionism is synonymous with antisemitism. I believe that Israel’s current war vindicates Moses’ provocative thesis, because these five conditions of the official ideology, which form the infrastructure of unconditional solidarity with the state of Israel, shed light on the presentation of the war in the German public sphere. Moreover, it should not be seen as a coincidence that Dirk Moses, Michael Rothberg and historian Jürgen Zimmerer,¹⁵ all of whom have researched the continuity of German colonialism and the Holocaust, were primarily targeted in the quixotic public war waged against post-colonialism.

The reason for the transformation of an open-ended political culture based on deliberative democracy—which Habermas wished to substitute for a pre-political national identity—into a rigid official ideology, should be sought in the social struggles of the 1990s. I find it appropriate to conclude by introducing a small but influential left faction that played a leading role in these struggles and in the acceptance of the five conditions of the official ideology defined by Moses, because, as mentioned earlier, the culture of remembrance is a project of the West German left, and this project seems to have ended for now with a Pyrrhic Victory.

The rapid collapse of the German Democratic Republic predictably led to a serious crisis within the radical left. One of the legitimate and justified concerns that emerged during this period was that unification would bring about a new wave of nationalism. Based on this, a group within the antifascist left formed a new faction that put a radical critique of German nationalism and the various forms of antisemitism at the center of their political analysis: Antideutsche. It should be emphasized that the antisemitism analyses of this predominantly Frankfurt-based faction are insightful. Adopting “Never again Germany!” as their slogan, after Adorno’s categorical imperative, they draw on the classical analyses of Adorno and Max Horkheimer, as well as the works of intellectuals such as Moishe Postone and Micha Brumlik. Thanks to the public interventions of this group, publishing in Bahamas, Phase 2, Konkret and the more widely circulated Jungle World, it became clear that discourses of the anti-imperialist left can indeed contain antisemitic elements, and that, for example, a criticism of capitalism which is not holistic but focused merely on finance capital may result in antisemitism, or that an anti-Israel discourse may quickly turn into an antisemitic one. The defining feature of the group, however, is their unconditional solidarity and identification with the state of Israel. Therefore, even though they view the nation-state as a reactionary/fascistic institution, they argue that the state of Israel is the last nation-state that should disappear. For the same reason, solidarity with the Israeli state turns into a prerequisite for the fight against the German state, that is, against fascism. This priority has played a decisive role in the positions taken by the faction, allowing for the defense of views that have become increasingly dogmatic and ideologically odd for a faction of the socialist left. Some of these ideological positions include viewing the United States as a liberating superpower, celebrating the bombing of Dresden, labeling leftist factions that support the second intifada as Islamists who back Hamas, considering Iran—which does not recognize Israel’s right to exist—as an Islamofascist regime even more “reactionary” than the shah’s, and drawing similarities, or even equivalences, between the struggle of the Kurds and the Americans(!) against ISIS, and Israel’s assault on Gaza. It should also be noted that some groups within this faction have expressed solidarity with Slobodan Milošević for similar “Antideutsche” reasons, defined Islam as an “essentially” fascist religion, and adopted racist discourses, especially against Arabs.¹⁶

Today, we see that the Antideutsche approach, which diverged from many positions taken by the German state, especially in the international arena during the 1990s, now shares the same perspective as the state. Could this completely Germany-specific “socialist” approach, which does not hesitate to advise or even scold Israeli leftists and leftist Jewish citizens living in Germany, herald a new nationalism produced by a poorly managed memory culture? The latest issue of Bahamas magazine is titled Ausweitung der Kampfzone [Expansion of the Battlefield], a reference to a famous novel by Michel Houellebecq, an anti-Islam writer who has shifted increasingly to the radical right. International socialist thought and practice, in contrast, has only one primary goal: to end the war.

1
Indeed, the fact that Seyla Benhabib’s text, “An Open Letter to My Friends Who Signed ‘Philosophy for Palestine’,” which deals with the Israel-Palestine issue in its historical context, did not cause such an anxiety in the German public opinion raises severe doubts about the rationality/sincerity of the anxiety.
2
See Jürgen Habermas, “Der europäische Nationalstaat – Zu Vergangenheit und Zukunft von Souveränität und Staatsbürgerschaft,” in Die Einbeziehung des Anderen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), pgs. 128–153.
3
See Jürgen Habermas, “Inklusion – Einbeziehen oder Einschließen? Zum Verhältnis von Nation, Rechtsstaat und Demokratie,” in Die Einbeziehung des Anderen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), pgs. 154–184.
4
Esra Özyürek, “Muslim minorities as Germany’s past future: Islam critics, Holocaust memory, and immigrant integration,” Memory Studies, 15(1), (2022) pgs. 139–154. Also, see Özyürek’s current interview in Die Zeit newspaper about her latest book, Subtractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory & Belonging in Postwar Germany (2023), which I have not had the opportunity to read yet. https://www.zeit.de/sinn/2023-10/esra-oezyuerek-deutschland-nahostkonflikt-antisemitismus-muslime-soziologie/seite-2. The journalist who conducted the interview seems to believe that Özyürek’s proposal that the culture of remembrance should be re-evaluated to be more inclusive, would mean making concessions to “Muslim antisemitism.”
5
For a detailed discussion of the legal and pragmatic dilemmas created by the use of the concept see Ralf Michels, “#Staatsräson. Zum Gebrauch des Begriffs nach dem 7. Oktober,” in Geschichte der Gegenwart, (2023) https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/staatsraeson-zum-gebrauch-des-begriffs-nach-dem-7-oktober/
6
For an assessment of Karl Jaspers’ limited but essential contribution to the culture of remembrance, see Devrim Sezer “Soykırım, Geçmişle Yüzleşme, sorumluluk: Raphael Lemkin, Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt,” Toplum ve Bilim, 132 (2015) pgs. 7–32.
7
Theodor W. Adorno, “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit” and “Erziehung nach Auschwitz,” in Erziehung zur Mündigkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2019 [1959 and 1966]), pgs. 10–28 and 88–105.
8
Max Weber, Politik als Beruf (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1992 [1919]).
9
For the “new unconditional imperative” and the idea of progress developed by Adorno with reference to Benjamin and Kant, see Volkan Çıdam, “Adorno’s two track conceptualization of progress: The new categorical imperative and politics of remembrance,” Constellations, 28, (2021), pgs. 78–94.
10
Adorno, ibid., pgs. 98–103. I think it may be productive to consider the concept of “shame,” developed by Özgür Sevgi Göral with the help of another conceptual background, together with Adorno’s “bourgeois coldness.” See Özgür Sevgi Göral, “Su altında kalanlar, inançlılar, dövüşenler, failler, umursamayanlar ve utancın katmanları,” Cogito, 110 (2023).
11
Adorno, ibid., pg. 89.
12
For a more detailed presentation of Rothberg’s theses, see Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009).
13
Jürgen Habermas, “Staat eines Vorworts,” Ein Verbrechen Ohne Namen. Anmerkungen zum neuen Streit über den neuen Streit über den Holocaust (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2022), pgs. 9–13. For the original edition, see Philosophie Magazin, 9 September 2021.
14
The title refers to Heinrich von Kleist, one of the rare thinkers and writers who took a nationalist stance during the Napoleonic wars.
15
See Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz?: Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust, (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011).
16
For a recently published critical article on the Antideutsche, see James Jackson, “What’s up with Germany’s Pro-Israel ‘Left’,” Novara Media (2023), https://novaramedia.com/2023/12/11/whats-up-with-germanys-pro-israel-left/. While the article also includes the views of activists and journalists who write in Antideutsche circles and are well-known to the German public, it allows one to obtain information about this dogmatic perspective.

July 31, 2024