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Less than two days after Masha Gessen beat German Officialdom to a draw, 170 police officers raided left-wing spots in Berlin. Whereas Gessen’s run-in with the limits of the Teutonic Imaginary was the result of calling Gaza a ghetto in a 7,400-word essay, the local lefties ran afoul of them over an Instagram post. The “successful” police operation resulted in the seizing of flyers and “internet-capable communications devices.” So, phones?
It was part of two investigations into whether a handful of feminists and someone who sounds like your proverbial Facebook Uncle may have posted some supportive things about or related to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the European Union considers a terrorist group. A cafe that serves as a meeting space for Kurds, among others, who have fled systematic brutality in Turkey, Syria, and Iran also got caught up in “racist repression against left-wing migrant spaces under the pretext of combating antisemitism.”
Terrorism, bad — sure. To that end, Berlin authorities might put their time to better use protecting against the sorts of physical violence that are almost the exclusive domain of the domestic far-right, which a reasonable person could consider terrorism. A state parliamentary inquiry is still investigating why Berlin police have been so abysmal at solving a decade-long series of such crime. Then there are those 300 cases that got misplaced in a drawer for a couple of years.
Given the amount of white-supremacist bombast that sloshes around the internet, a police raid over a #smashthepatriarchy post might strike the average taxpayer as a tad excessive.
What happened to Masha Gessen and what happened to someone’s ornery neighbors are, of course, unrelated. The former happened within the cosmopolitan onanism of the flute-clinking social elite; the latter is part of the plebeian caste of cultural activism. Both can come off as closed-circuit theater at times, albeit performing with vastly different levels of cultural currency. The difference determines how susceptible each is to shutting that theater down.
Masha Gessen is well aware of the stage Masha Gessen is on. A local branch of the German-Israeli Society can scare German Officialdom with a claim that awarding the widely respected, Jewish-Russian-American-nonbinary writer the Hannah Arendt Prize undermines the “necessary determined stand against growing antisemitism.” Most everyone else, however, will roll their eyes — and then strike back with the fury of a thousand think pieces.
That is, unsurprisingly, what happened. Even from my seat off to the side, the deadpan smirk in Gessen’s eye was hard to miss as the writer joined a “discussion” with two psuedo-intellectuals from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a prize sponsor affiliated with the Green party. As if waiting for a stage cue, Gessen almost too gleefully summed up the foundation’s decision to withdraw from the award ceremony as an “attempt at silencing that failed.”
It failed because the Teutonic forces that mounted the campaign play in a sandbox they usually have the luxury of believing is a real place, until they invite someone from a real place into the sandbox. It is easier for me to conceive the ever-expanding infinity of the cosmos than it is the scale of arrogance required for non-Jewish Germans to explain antisemitism to liberal-Jewish-New York royalty. They were, in effect, accusing the New Yorker itself of antisemitism — a rigorously edited magazine presently led by a Jew, read and contributed to by Jews, and that was the writing home of a Jew who fled Nazi Germany and now gets a German prize posthumously handed out in her name for “political thought.”
If Hannah Arendt covered the Gessen ordeal like she did the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem — for the New Yorker, no less — she might call it “banal.” The German position was, as it so often is, a lot of process and little substance. It is so fixated on the trees of exactitude that it gets lost in a forest of platitudes. (“Never again is now!”) Engaging with it starts to resemble a conversation with a ChatGPT trained exclusively on the discourse of German memory culture. If you ask it, “Is widespread bombing of civilian areas bad?” its answer would be, “That is not Auschwitz.”
Germany’s “responsibility,” to the extent it has one, is that literal. Gessen’s comparison of Gaza to a Jewish ghetto was not only an offense to highly attuned German sensibilities, but it also made no sense to them. Gaza is Gaza. A ghetto is a ghetto. Therefore, sorry Masha, Gaza cannot be a ghetto. Do not pass Go and do not collect your €10,000. (At least not so publicly.)
That was the essence of the foundation’s criticism — and it was far from the only one trying to argue it. Disagree with Masha Gessen, or anyone about anything, all you like, but at least have a more compelling counter-argument than das geht nicht. A political body that once drove out or murdered many of its Dichter und Denker couldn’t hack it. Instead, when basic assumptions underpinning the system were called into question, it fell back on authoritarian control.
This is a form of Gleichschaltung. As such, Germany’s antiantisemitism pathology is not much different than Iran’s insistence on head coverings for women. It’s just the quasi-religious way it is here, and dissent will not be tolerated. Ruling certain kinds of debate as “unacceptable” is how a society goes nowhere. It was also once unacceptable to show gay sex or pregnant women on TV, but poking at these taboos is the only way a culture evolves.
The exchange between Gessen and the Germans was a fabulous display of intellectual mediocrity and moral nakedness. It had little to do with safeguarding Jews and much more with reassuring Germans in their righteousness. To question the ways in which Israel exists is to question whether Germany should exist because they form a binary star in an ethnonational universe. If Israel can come anywhere close to doing to Palestinians what Germans did to the Jews it not only flips the Holocaust’s victim-perpetrator complex, but indicts European and specifically German political history. It’s no accident that Israeli cities have neighborhoods called the German Colony; Zionism springs forth foremost from Germanic ideas of nationalism.
It is a short walk from European imperialism to Israeli settler policy. The former would be co-conspirator to any of the latter’s crimes, so best that they don’t commit any.
The two sides, moderated by a person from the German-Israeli Future Forum, could only talk past each other. More than once Gessen, after patiently listening to the translation of a leading and long-winded question, would respond with cool and anti-climactic confidence: “I don’t understand your question.” A delightfully squeamish silence would then linger in the room.
Such a curt retort is as much reflective as it is performative. Watching the Böll people try to acknowledge weakness (inferiority) while rejecting accountability (superiority) revealed irreconcilable differences that shape the respective imaginaries to which the people on stage belong. The Jew’s is one only of questions; the American’s is one only of opinions; and the German’s is one only of a single, correct answer. Real debate is impossible because it injects discontent into a culture with a bias for consensus even when coalescing around bad ideas.
The inevitable resulting clash is an extension of what Hannah Arendt observed in 1950:
“Watching the Germans busily stumble through the ruins of a thousand years of their own history, shrugging their shoulders at the destroyed landmarks or resentful when reminded of the deeds of horror that haunt the whole surrounding world, one comes to realize that busyness has become their chief defense against reality.”
As the old Jewish joke goes, when will the Germans forgive the Jews for the Holocaust? A new field of science, which I call “Quantum Teutonics,” is required to understand how replicating many of the habits of history becomes the best way to honor and avoid the consequences of that timeline. It is the ability to occupy universal and particular positions simultaneously without succumbing to the crushing universal force of cognitive dissonance. This is possible in a time-space continuum in which Germany destroys democratic thought to save it, but hardly notices thanks largely to the “mercy of a late birth.”
So, the effort to silence Masha Gessen failed because Masha Gessen is Masha Gessen. While embracing the resulting schadenfreude, however, it is important to remember that not everyone is Masha Gessen and the story is not about Masha Gessen. The Masha Gessens of the world will be fine. Many other canaries in this McCarthy coal mine will go first. The state will threaten protesters, investigate activists, and defund art spaces — Jewish and not — in the name of national self-preservation dressed up as historical reckoning they call
.
An expert opinion that went to the Bundestag’s internal and legal affairs committees thoroughly picked through the long list of constitutional problems inherent to using the IHRA working definition of antisemitism as a legal basis for securing fundamental rights. The IHRA is not only “unnecessary,” but “partly an obstacle to effectively combating discrimination against Jews.”
The non-binding resolution against BDS, from 2019, has had equally chilling effects on constitutionally protected speech. It isn’t law, but that hasn’t stopped lawmakers and law enforcers from acting like it is. Some very bright scholars are saying it’s got to go.
The opposite is more likely, however, as centrist and conservative liberals line up to do the work of the far-right while they simultaneously express utter dismay by the record surge of support for the far-right. The central-eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, home to one of the smalles foreign populations in the country, has implemented the Israel loyalty proposal that’s on the table for naturalization nationwide. The Greens’ Jürgen Trittin, a veteran lawmaker, thinks it’d be great if all German news organizations followed news-adjacent Axel Springer by obligating their staff to support Israel.
No need for the marching orders, says the chair of the German Federation of Journalists. German media don’t need Gleichschaltung imposed when the “vast majority of reporting in the German media over the past decades has impressively shown that journalists are very aware of Germany's responsibility towards the Jews and the state of Israel.”
If only there was just as much responsibility towards accuracy and context. Now that would be impressive.
So you will have to excuse my yawning at recent headlines of doom about a tiny city in sparsely populated Saxony electing a mayor representing the Alternative for Germany. For other parties that might like to avoid the local result becoming a national bellwether, they may want to consider adopting the advice readily handed out to Palestinians looking for a future without Hamas: If you want people to choose something better, offer it.
For all its fawning over Hannah Arendt, German Officialdom seems to have missed, or ignored, or forgotten some of her most salient arguments. An entire Holocaust remembrance industry has been erected to remind Germans to be nice. That is a strange lesson to draw. If hate alone were at the heart of the Holocaust, it could have happened anywhere in Christian Europe, where there is no shortage of Jew hating. The systematic destruction of the Jews and others required a second ingredient, which the Germans had in spades: rule-making and compliance. When combined with obsession with racial purity, truly awful events were able to rapidly unfold.
That’s why so much of the 1930s-era Gleichschaltung was self-directed “with gusto.” The speed with which German society embraced authoritarianism even took the Nazis by surprise. “Hitler himself acknowledged, in a remark to his minister of justice, ‘we are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.’”
Too much for Hitler.
It’s pretty easy to get people to come out on a sunny summer’s day for a techno street party of solidarity against the mean, ugly, old baddies who shout gross things about refugees. It will be much more difficult when the threat is the slow, boring creep of bureaucracy under the heading of Gesetzentwurf zur Verbesserung der Rückführung. Much less fun, harder to Instagram — let alone pronounce — but just as real.
This and other illiberal efforts are not the fascist fantasies of the far-right, but routine legislative efforts that slide in from the center of respectable German politics. That, more than the AfD, is the lineage of Nazi legacy — not the absence of law, but a preponderance of it. Efforts to overcome the past have fine-tuned Germany’s hate-dar to make spotting the extremists easy, but have utterly failed at exercising the muscle of imagination, without which empathy is hardly possible.
Arendt’s “banality of evil” is the “inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another.” If that sounds familiar it’s because it strongly captures the era we are growing into — not only in Germany but especially so. Like Arendt argued about Eichmann, Germany’s “primary motivation” is not hatred, but “commonplace hubris.” Writers, artists, and activists are right now waging a campaign of public shaming against Germany. It’s difficult to see how they can succeed when the institutions they face show no sense of humility.