The tragic narcissism of collective trauma
Years on, still waiting for the elusive Inquisitor-Nazi-Arab Boogeyman.
If you are following recent events in Germany, you probably know it’s not a great time for free expression and critical writing. That makes it an extra great time for independent support!
Here’s a favorite Jewish joke of mine:
Four Europeans get lost while hiking together. They run out of food and water.
"I'm so thirsty," says the Englishman. "I must have tea."
"I'm so thirsty," says the Frenchman. "I must have wine."
"I'm so thirsty," says the German. "I must have beer."
"I'm so thirsty," says the Jew. "I must have diabetes."
More on that later. First, here’s the current state of play in Germany. Jews have been detained, manhandled, canceled, and silenced. Expression curtailed, surveilled, and livelihoods upended. It’s not 1933, but 2023 — and all while German Officialdom claims to be acting to protect Jewish life, which Chancellor Olaf Scholz has called “a gift.”
Yet it’s clear from these actions that he doesn’t mean Jewish life in all its diversity, dissonance, and complexity, but a particularist kind that furthers a narrow end. Even as Germany officially admonishes Israel for its occupation and related violations of international law, it gives Israel the international legitimacy to get away with them as the price of righting its own, bigger historical ones. If Israel is not just Germany’s “Staatsräson,” but its salvation, then criticizing Israel — while theoretically permissible — in reality becomes nearly impossible.
Israeli officials know what they are doing when they liken Hamas’ attack to the Holocaust, as do German ones when invoking Nazi-era crimes in the context of sporadic incidents involving Jews today. If they didn’t, it would mean they are either ignorant to history or that history wasn’t actually all that bad. I have trouble believing the first and it’s illegal to claim the second, so that leaves a third: revisionism — a conscious effort to refit history to current political conveniences and distract from political failures.
Unlike Europe’s Jews back then, Israel does not face existential destruction and has ample means to defend itself. Hamas’ tactical success lies in Israel’s strategic failure. Unlike alarmist reports of exploding antisemitism based on questionable methodology and shifting definitions, the pogroms that took place 85 years ago this week across Germany were an “organized act of nationwide violence.”
That is not to ignore contemporary crimes that impact Jews, or even their uptick, but they are of a completely different character; Israeli policy plays a role in fueling them. If the victims of history matter, then the current state of affairs belongs nowhere near a sentence about the Nazi era. Yet here we are.
The 1930s in Germany was an era of all-consuming, despotic state-sponsored terror against European Jews that ended in their systematic destruction. By contrast, German officials today say they are “using all legal means” to protect Jews and are looking to create new means to make that easier, even as an interior ministry spokesperson acknowledged to me that any increased threat level against Jews in Germany is an “assumption.”
In the Bundestag, both the governing parties and the Christian conservative opposition (CDU/CSU) have submitted nearly identical resolutions that essentially dismantle any remaining wall differentiating Jews from Israel. They build on previous efforts to ban and criminalize the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which some Jews support, and seek to further tie German residency and citizenship rights to loyalty to Israel.
In the government’s version, “reason of state” applies not just to Israel’s security anymore, but “Jewish life.” Unlike the opposition’s one, it at least acknowledges that the “[German] culture and politics of remembrance must face up to the challenge of a migration society that brings together a variety of different cultures of remembrance and perspectives.”
But there is a big aber: “This pluralism also means that grappling with the Shoah and its lessons, saying no to antisemitism, and acknowledging Israel's right to exist must be a common denominator.”
Translation: Diversity is fine, as are differing experiences and opinions, so long as everyone already agrees with us and sees the world the way we do. Safeguarding Jews means supporting Israel. You have to understand our trauma, but we don’t have to understand yours. Our historical guilt must be yours, too.
We are way past German Officialdom telling us what antisemitism is and when it applies. We’re witnessing nothing short of the German state defining who a Jew is, what it means to be Jewish, and what behavior and perspectives are worthy of its protection. If “German Staatsräson is the protection of Jewish life,” then every Jew in Germany, regardless of circumstance or origin, should immediately get automatic German citizenship. Yet Jewish activists here live in fear of the legal consequences for their Israel-critical positions. Charlotte Knobloch, an influential Jewish community leader in Munich, is right that some Jews are “considering leaving Germany” — but not for the reasons she thinks.
At the same time, the state is now so far on the other side of the Jewish safety equation, it is participating in the denunciation and vilification of groups of people for the actions of small numbers of mostly unknown suspects whose motivations and connections are unclear. That sounds more like a past Germany than a reformed one, when one Jew’s assassination of a German official became a convenient excuse to kickstart the Holocaust.
We are nowhere near that point, of course, but the rapid normalization of suspicion, speculation, and guilt transference is chilling. Not for the first time, a common refrain emerges across the German media and political landscape: Those backwards Arabs, why can’t they understand that we like Israel here and they should, too? Few seem interested in asking the obvious inverse: Why don’t they — and why, for that matter, many Jews with them?
It is antisemitic to conflate Jews and Israel, as it is to demand Jews speak for the actions of any other. So when some Jewish Israelis mocked and celebrated suffering in Gaza or, in past campaigns, enjoyed it as live entertainment, it is a relief that no one expected other Jews elsewhere to answer for their behavior. Yet the same standard does not apply to Arabs and Muslims, who are apparently all responsible for those who might hand out baklava in the wake of Hamas’ atrocities.
It is not 1938 again for the Jews. The association would be laughable if it were not so cynical. Jewish communities have the full sympathy and support of a state apparatus that once got close to exterminating them. If you insist on a historical comparison, however, here’s one: Hitler used the Reichstag fire in 1933 as a pretext for eliminating his political opponents. Scholz, amid a line of questioning about “many people with Arab roots” who hate Israel, wants to “deport people more often and faster.”
His deputy, Robert Habeck, insisted all Muslim groups in Germany denounce Hamas and implicitly gave them the choice to fall in line or leave. Among many issues with that binary, it suggests all Muslims are suspect and none is German. In almost the same breath, Habeck accused those who “contextualize” Israel of “relativization,” but then repeatedly engaged in his own relativization by setting current events against the backdrop of “80 years since the Holocaust.”
Most notable of the Green politician’s much-watched and widely-applauded video statement is how similar, in word and tone, it sounds to the 50-point “manifesto” the Bild tabloid put out shortly before. The rambling list of non-sequiturs, red herrings, and dog-whistling incitement targeting a presumed and ill-defined Other is hardly surprising coming from Germany’s largest newspaper owned by Germany’s most influential publisher that is proud of its loyalty to the state of Israel. What does surprise is the overlap with Habeck. When Bild isn’t writing sensationalist headlines about brown people, it’s scaring Dorf-Opa into thinking that Habeck’s city-slicker Greens are hell-bent on taking his car away and installing an eco-dictatorship.
When media, state, and political institutions across the board start to align their positions and repress critical ones, the process could be mistaken for a new kind of Gleichschaltung. The above line to the Reichstag fire is intentionally a stretch, but as then, factual evidence and due process matter less than political conformity and deep-seated, nativist assumptions. Homegrown hate crimes from far-right and white-supremacist groups are, in quality and quantity, more dangerous than those from alleged, Israel-hating immigrants, yet headlines about scared Jews appear only when Palestinians take to the streets.
For many centrists, in Germany and beyond, standing behind Israel and its policy choices is the palatable way to say the quiet part out loud, without sounding like the illiberal forces in their own polities they otherwise like to denounce.
In antisemitism-specific reporting, some of which is based on hearsay or little or weak evidence, a slur is the same as graffiti is the same as a violent assault is the same as a questionable glare. Hating Israel is the same as hating Jews. And it’s all the same as the Holocaust. In the end, “antisemitism” means everything and nothing — an insult to centuries of Christian Europe’s systematic repression of Jewish life and an instrumentalization of suspicion towards non-European groups.
The scare tactic is hardly new, or unique to Germany, even if it has picked up speed as Israel’s destruction of Gaza reaches heretofore unseen and unpredictable levels of carnage. The Anti-Defamation League, the go-to source for antisemitism stats in the United States, engages in similarly fuzzy math. It is part of a sprawling advocacy network, close to or directly supported by the state of Israel, tasked with keeping diasporic Jews confined to a ghetto of fear.
For as long as I have been a Jew, I have been warned that the Inquisitor-Nazi-Arab Boogeyman was waiting for me. To take just one, memorable anecdote, towards the end of high school we were led into an auditorium at the local Jewish Community Center for a presentation by a representative of the David Project, an organization that goes around the U.S. warning — Paul Revere style — of the antisemites coming to invade college campuses. After finishing her Powerpoint of dread, she hung around to talk one-on-one with these impressionable, young Jews. When she asked where I was heading to college — a small, private institution in the center of Boston — her reply came with a smug eye roll: “Oh, yeah. There’ll be lots of antisemitism there.”
Lots of antisemitism? On a campus awash in Jewish life? In a liberal city home to a large and prosperous Jewish community? It seemed implausible. But she did have statistics and institutional clout, so who was I to say otherwise.
I kept waiting for the Boogeyman, but from Boston to Haifa to the West Bank to Neukölln, the Boogeyman never came. After waiting long enough, I began to wonder if he existed at all or was just a leftover figment of our collective imagination built on a history of collective trauma. Nothing I was told resembled anything I was experiencing, leaving me with the sneaking suspicion that, contrary to the dire warnings, I was actually part of one of the first generations of Jews in the millennia-long history of Jews that was truly free. It seemed like a tragedy, if not an affront to all those generations of suffering before me, not to embrace that freedom and live as just one person among many in a free society.
In a better world, the response to collective trauma would be empathy and compassion for people from other groups suffering from a similar experience. Unfortunately, that is not our world. Instead, the trauma response is fear, which expresses itself as anger, revenge, and a self-centered demand for more attention. When a “massive threat to Jewish life” in Germany today is compared to Kristallnacht, it is understandable that there is little headspace left to consider the massive threat to life in Gaza. When the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany looks at Arabs on the streets and only sees black-and-white Nazis burning synagogues, it can be tempting to allow “deeply rooted fears” to dismantle norms that were established foremost to protect Jews from the whims of the powerful.
Fear is a feeling and, as such, legitimate. But fear is not fact. It compromises reason, which is the foundation of post-enlightenment modernity. To pursue total security is to revert to totalitarianism, which didn’t work out so well for the Jews. “Safety,” therefore, is not the same as invincibility. That is as true in Germany’s liberal democracy as it is in Israel’s ethno-nationalist one, especially as Israel’s politics grow more extreme and polarizing. Even German media are willing to report as much:
I return to the joke I started off with, which is the funnier corollary to Habeck’s confused appeal. Aside from the immediate Woody Allenesque neurosis, the punchline deals with Jewish anxieties about national identity and longing for a national home at a point in history when other groups were forming their own. England for the English, France for the French, Germany for the Germans … and for the Jews? Bupkes.
The sentiment of the joke contains the seedlings of Zionism. By the time the Zionist movement was able to realize its goal, however, the (western) world was moving from a model of the exclusive nation-state towards a liberal-inclusive one. The irony is that the Holocaust was both an argument for Jewish self-determination as much as it was a warning against ethno-national hubris.
That irony remains at the forefront of German discourse on Israel and the Jews. It is on painful display in Habeck’s video, as he argues that Germany must help Israel to fulfill the “promise” of protecting Jews while also ensuring that “Jews can live freely and safely in Germany.” This begs an uncomfortable — some would say, antisemitic — question: If the latter is possible, why is the former necessary?
The fear-safety paradigm is the fundamental tension in the Israel-diaspora relationship. Israel needs Jewish communities around the world, as political constituencies if nothing else, while it also needs to leave them with at least a little bit of doubt regarding their prospects in those places. Benjamin Netanyahu has leaned into this more than others, but the role Israel plays in Jewish identity is far less direct or glamorous than German Officialdom likes to tell itself.
Years ago, during a leadership training in Jerusalem for a Zionist youth organization, a prominent rabbi gave a compelling lecture about the essential Jewish question: Who is a Jew? He offered five Jewish attributes and the metaphor of a stool, which needs at least three legs to stay upright. Jews are unlikely to agree on all five, but three is enough to constitute a common peoplehood and keep the “stool” from falling over.
One of these was Israel, whether in literal or metaphysical form. תיקון עולם — tikkun olam, literally “repairing the world” and typically thought of in terms of social justice — was another. Broadly speaking, the two stand, respectively, for particularist and universalist interpretations of Jewish values.
Increasingly, Jews are being pushed down the path of particularism — as universalism suffers from accusations of tribal betrayal — and forced to sit on a one-legged stool around a Golden Calf in national-political form. One leg makes for a wobbly stool, and when it topples, it will crush millennia of Jewish pluralism rooted in a diverse diaspora that has as much to do with the Arabic-speaking world as it does the Eurasian one. That will be bad for everyone, including Jews, and Germany will have helped make it all come crashing down.