When Germany looks at the world today, it does so largely through two lenses.
It was bad, so it defends the institutions and international law that restrain the worst impulses of national hubris.
It was foremost bad to the Jews, so it supports the Jewish right to self-determination as means of self-preservation.
In the Teutonic Imaginary, these pillars are straightforward and compatible. The Jews are the object of the Imaginary’s gaze and thus powerless victims to it. International law protects victims and the powerless from the excesses and imperial designs of the powerful.
Outside the Imaginary, the tension is clearer. One of those pillars is particularist. The other is universalist. For them to go together Germany needs Jews to remain the victim. Since that has long ceased being the case, it needs to find another way to make them work — or at least convince itself nothing has changed.
Fortunately, Angela Merkel, ever the political genius, had the answer: “Staatsräson.” In 2008, the then chancellor went to Israel and gave a historic address to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. In it, she laid out what Germany’s commitment to Israel meant to her:
“Every federal government and every federal chancellor before me were committed to Germany's special historical responsibility for Israel's security. This historic responsibility of Germany is part of my country's reason of state. This means that Israel's security is never negotiable for me as German chancellor.” (Ed. bold mine.)
Merkel didn’t invent the term, nor did she establish a policy. But she did set a precedent, which has since transcended party, events, and other considerations to become a fixed, inviolable, quasi-constitutional fact hardened to the fundamental existence of Germany as a state power. Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, has been fond of the term, “Staatsräson,” since Hamas’ brutal surprise attack left at least 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, dead. On his visit to Israel, Scholz spat it out right at the top of his news conference with his counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu.
It’s hard to blame him; “Staatsräson” does sound significant. The thing is, no one can really say what “reason of state” means, beyond making for excellent political rhetoric. The term exists in political philosophy and international relations discourse, but it is wide open to interpretation.
Carlo Masala, a media-friendly political scientist in Germany, summed up the dilemma on a political talkshow on public broadcaster, ZDF. Though the concept has “never really been spelled out,” he said that if Israel’s existence is tantamount to Germany’s own, it logically follows that Germany would have to “actively” defend Israel if its existence were at stake. (Masala made clear that this is not currently the case.)
That is some idea for modern-day Germany to sit with. Most of its post-war positioning has been pacifist, its strategic takeaway from the Nazi experience being that nonviolence and demilitarization are the only answers to “never again.” It is a somewhat backwards conclusion to draw, of course, as only massive military action waging total war was able to unconditionally defeat and dismantle that era of German totalitarianism.
Ahead of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, German officials thought 5,000 helmets was a bold show of support for defending the liberal order that underwrites German political and economic viability. Much has changed since, though Germany still takes its time in approving Ukraine’s requests for one particular weapons system or another. When Israel asked for naval munitions in the days after the initial attack, the German response was immediate and open-ended.
Had Russia’s war not already broken the weapons taboo, perhaps Hamas’ brazen terror would be Germany’s Zeitenwende moment. Perhaps it’s only thanks to the Ukraine experience that German foreign policy is more attentive to security realities. An impossible counterfactual, but Ukrainian sovereignty, while a new and important interest, does not rise to the lofty heights of “reason of state.” It took Scholz months to visit Kyiv, but less than two weeks to get to Tel Aviv. Both countries currently have Jewish leaders, but Germany has classified one as more “Jewish,” in terms of its national interests, than the other.
Short of Masala’s unthinkable scenario, which sees German forces fighting side-by-side Israeli ones, “reason of state” doesn’t really change much in practical terms. The alliance is already deep and multifaceted on the grounds of shared membership in the community of western, market-liberal states. There are ample overlapping interests connecting the two sides. Israel doesn’t need to be part of Germany’s “reason of state” to get the backing to defend itself. In that regard, Israel is no different from Liechtenstein.
Where “reason of state” does make an impact is in its moral and historical implications. Israel did not exist at the time of the Holocaust, so it wasn’t a victim of Germany’s Nazi colonial project. Ukraine did and was, along with Poland and the Baltics, among others. That is where Jews met Germany’s Final Solution, but no such “special responsibility” applies to those places now — a major blindspot in Germany’s so-called memory culture. Not all survivors went to Israel, and while Germany has paid reparations to them, they are not part of its “reason of state” any more than rebuilding the Jewish life in eastern Europe that Germany destroyed.
Likewise, since not all Jews are Israeli and not all Israelis are Jews, there are some inconsistencies here, to say the least. Even the “safe haven” argument starts to falter, as Israel’s increasingly nationalist government faces widespread and especially Jewish protest of its efforts to undermine domestic rule of law and redefine what it means to be a Jew as far as the state is concerned. The less representative the state of Israel becomes of Jews, the more difficult it becomes for Germany to argue that “reason of state” has anything to do with its guilty history vis-a-vis the Jews.
The claim is also, counterintuitively, unwittingly anti-Semitic. No matter how much the likes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blurs the line between Jews and Israel when it suits, “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel” falls under the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism, which Germany adopted in 2017. So to argue that Germany’s national interests hinge on Israel’s because of the Jews, thus conflating the two, violates at least the spirit of that definition.
That position also erodes Germany’s stated obligation to safeguard Jews. No doubt, some kinds of criticism of Israel are thinly veiled sleights against Jews, but it’s a bit rich for official, German and Israeli interpretation of anti-Semitism to increasingly broaden the definition and then wonder how on earth folks who hate Israel might also hate Jews. Germany’s media and state institutions share a good deal of responsibility for the confusion, which endangers Jews who may have nothing to do with Israel.
The case for “Staatsräson” isn’t much stronger if we look elsewhere for meaning. It isn’t a law, so it doesn’t pass through the normal, democratic process. As such, it can pretty much mean whatever the state wants. Again, Masala put it succinctly: “Staatsräson is something that rises above society to serve the preservation of the state.”
In a democratic context, as legal scholars have noted, that is problematic. The state exists to serve its society. The state’s interests, at home or abroad, are supposed to protect and improve the welfare of those living within its borders. They are also up for debate, and can change, in the course of democratic politics. “Reason of state,” by contrast, walls off whatever falls within it beyond reproach and subordinates other fundamental rights.
This is how we get to a place where authorities, especially in supposedly freedom-loving Berlin, have issued far-reaching bans for any protest that is not 100 percent in support of Israel’s warpath. That includes Jewish groups, which have been accused of antisemitism. Even Felix Klein, Germany’s commissioner for “Jewish life,” says the bans are a concerning threat to “basic rights.” This is the same Felix Klein who undermined basic rights in 2021, when he jumped the gun on accusations of antisemitism by an Israeli singer at a Westin hotel in Leipzig. The singer, Gil Ofarim, is now on trial for making false statements, among other legal troubles, and Klein issued a semi-apology for backing Ofarim’s claims before anyone knew anything.
At the political level, we have seen Saskia Esken, the co-leader of the ruling Social Democrats, cancel a meeting with Senator Bernie Sanders while he was in Berlin recently to promote his new book. The Jewish senator, whose close relatives were murdered in the Holocaust, was not sufficiently pro-Israel enough in her view, which in the Teutonic Imaginary means he is not Jewish enough.
“Wer Jude ist, bestimme ich” — I decide who’s a Jew — gets attributed to the Nazi official, Hermann Göring. The sentiment remains alive and well in the German establishment today.
Germany can support Israel as a matter of policy, but on the basis of “reason of state” there is no discussion of what that looks like. It is a very different set of circumstances for Ukraine, even though it faces the far graver threat than what Hamas poses Israel. In arming Ukraine against a nuclear-armed state, one of Germany’s biggest concerns has been avoiding becoming a “party of war.” No such worry accompanies Germany’s standing offer to help Israel, as it works towards achieving its stated goal of eliminating Hamas. Even the United States, Israel’s closest ally and major arms supplier, has expressed its doubts whether that is doable.
As the balance shifts from grieving victim to vengeful war-maker, however, Israel’s claim to Germany’s “reason of state” opens Germany to more than just the possibility of becoming part of the war. It puts Germany at risk of becoming a co-conspirator in violations of international law. That is Germany’s other post-war pillar, which crumbles under the weight of “reason of state.”
Self-determination by definition affords agency. In the Teutonic Imaginary, however, the Jews are always the object and it’s forever 1943. Israeli officials oscillate between the two roles as it suits their state’s policy goals. This has been on clear display since Hamas’ heinous surprise attack, as Israeli officials have helped spread the sound-bite-ready comparison to the Holocaust while simultaneously saying, “2023 is not 1943. We are the same Jews, but we have different capabilities.”
So, which is it? Those capabilities, if properly applied, could have halted the horror that unfolded, as they have many times in the past. So, no, Hamas’ unprecedented strike, while a clear crime against humanity, has nothing to do with the Holocaust, when Jews were powerless to avert their destruction with their own means. To put the two in the same sentence is a cynical abuse of history, which either gives Hamas way more credit than it deserves or Nazi Germany far too little.
It also justifies a whatever-it-takes response, because when the threat is made into an existential one all other evils are the lesser of annihilation.
If Germany’s stance on Israel is motivated by anything, it isn’t “reason of state,” but a state of un-reason. Collective trauma, which national narratives love to instrumentalize, causes history to collapse into itself, like a black hole. In that flattened time-space, different threats and fears all start to look the same. Jews have “become angry at the Germans and also the Arabs, who are the same thing as the Nazis, Jew-killers, fucking murderers, they took our land or something,” as the writer Gary Shteyngart recounts in his memoir, Little Failure, of his time as a Soviet immigrant child at the Solomon Schechter School in Queens, NY.
Right on the event horizon of that black hole is Germany, pulled between increasingly contradictory commitments. The cosmic tension leaves Germany to confront two, unsavory understandings of its “Staatsräson,” as it relates to Israel. Either it is an expression of Germany’s historical debt to Jews, at the expense of that owed to others and in the service of a diluted understanding of antisemitism; or, it is a cynical revisionism of that debt in the course of carrying out a policy between two states that has nothing to do with the welfare of the people it purports to be about.
If that’s the case, then Germany’s efforts of Vergangenheitsbewältigung — overcoming the past, a central tenet of German political expression today — are null and void.