Only Hitler is Hitler
It's illegal to downplay the Holocaust, but German Officialdom does it all the time.
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Marco Buschmann seems like an OK guy. Sure, Germany’s justice minister may belong to a psuedo-libertarian party that fetishizes Silicon Valley brovado — except, of course, when it comes to protecting lucrative, legacy industry — but even an unregulated clock is right at least twice a day.
In its struggle to get government off your back, the FDP has supported getting it out of your bedroom, and out of the way between a woman and both her doctor and her dealer. The smallest, yet strangely savviest of the three parties running things these days wants to finally stop threatening prison time for Schwarzfahrer — people who ride public transit without a ticket. Too late, though, for the family who got manhandled by Berlin police in September because the father, allegedly, hadn’t paid a bus fine.
Most recently, Buschmann announced he was looking into taking it down a notch against people who “flee” the scene of an accident that results in no injuries. And by “flee,” I mean casually walk away and go about their day unbeknownst to them that anything happened because probably nothing did1. Until the reform goes through, you still face a steep fine or even jail if someone tells the police you did something that did nothing.
All in all, not too shabby for a stubbornly conservative country that has spent the better part of its time since Nazi rule under conservative rule. Germany’s criminal justice system may favor rehabilitation over punishment, but the nation’s social norms do a solid job making up for any lack of codified guilt and shame. A know-it-all neighbor can be more effective at keeping you in your place than any wag of the penal finger.
You might say that Buschmann is on something of a roll. If only he got out on top with his justice hat on. Instead, he saw the need to try on history’s for size.
As readers of these thoughtful kvetches know, Germany is under attack. No, not from regionally strong pluralities of disaffected voters who are open to giving the far-right a chance at governing; nor from bands of aristocratic-led Reichsbürger who do not recognize the post-Prussian republic and seek to overthrow it; and not even from members of German intelligence, military, and law enforcement accused or convicted of far-right and anti-democratic plots.
The Federal Republic of Germany may be unable to sufficiently house and educate its citizens, and faces an unprecedented workforce shortage that risks its long-term economic stability2, but what’s really pushing Germany towards the brink of existential abyss are kids who block traffic with sticky hands in the name of climate action.
Not exactly part of a political culture that understands subtle rhetoric, Buschmann was right on the nose about who these pesky protesters remind him of.
"In Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, there were battle-like conditions in the streets because people on the left and right political fringes felt empowered to put themselves above the legal system, and implement their own ideas by force.”
Wow, really! Here I am, living in Berlin, going about my day, totally unaware of the Bolshevik revolution and/or Nazi takeover lurking around any corner, waiting to ruin my sunny double espresso. Talk about a Weimar Side Story; take that, Sondheim and Bernstein!
Any way you break down Buschmann’s comments — which were top, national news the morning of — they are solid, face-palm material.
First off and for their own good, FDP officials really should cross-check their polemical putdowns before going public with them. Just a few months ago, they and other, more conservative voices were comparing Letzte Generation climate activists who glue themselves to asphalt to left-wing, RAF terrorists who carried out assassinations in the 1970s.
On the list of reasons to take a group and its politics seriously, causing gridlock ranks slightly lower than murdering industrialists — even in a country that loves its cars as much as Germany.
As the “party of the center,” the FDP appears to be confused about what it is in the center of. Knee-jerk reactions by liberal-libertarians to anything that smacks of socialism are understandable, as the "left" is the natural enemy of the market-oriented, liberal view that, by definition, sees individual “freedom” as more important than the collective good.3
Except, what do these so-called Klimakleber have to do with leftist politics? If anything, blocking drivers who include working-class people trying to get to their jobs to make ends meet is anything but. Block the CEO of Volkswagen from leaving his home in the morning, and we can talk.4
It’s entirely possible that Buschmann was not equating the protesters themselves to SA thugs, per se, but drawing a more general parallel between tensions around the protests and the downward spiral of street violence during the dwindling days of the Weimar Republic. Events, he said, that “cannot be repeated.”
Good news for Buschmann: They aren’t, unless Germany’s justice minister really can’t tell the difference between activists exercising their democratic right to non-violent protest, which ultimately succumbs to state authority; and organized guerrilla warfare aimed at upending the rule of law and dismantling democratic society, which the state was increasingly powerless to stop.
For as much as German Officialdom likes to snub its nose at Trumpian America, Buschmann’s comments get pretty close to “very fine people, on both sides.” If we really want to go down that dicey lane, Brownshirts are a better look on those attacking protesters in heretofore isolated incidents5 than the protesters themselves.
Notably, disgruntled drivers and passers-by have been subject to far less outlandish outrage at the political level. If the Klimakinder are the proverbial victim of sexual assault, their critics are effectively saying they are “asking for it” by wearing such a short skirt.
At this rate, I would not be surprised — should the protests keep up through November — if the 100th anniversary of Hitler’s Bierkeller-Putsch serves as a convenient occasion to draw yet another reckless comparison. Germans love a good anniversary, and the runder the better. Though they’ll have to work on a catchy label; Kleber-Straße-Putsch is a bit of a mouthful.
The RAF had some fairly violent tendencies. The Nazis murdered millions of people in backyard colonies. So, with what draconian demands are these menacing climate extremists threatening the democratic foundation of the German republic that could rise to the level of either? Better buckle up …
A highway speed limit and cheap public transportation. That is, what sensible countries already have (the former), and Germany could afford if it wanted (the latter). Basta.
If this is what political extremism in Germany looks like today, I’d say Establishment liberal democrats have it pretty good. Volker Wissing surely agrees, since the transport minister and fellow FDP member apparently felt comfortable enough to sit down for a kaffeeklatsch with the movement. His party leader, Finance Minister Christian Lindner, went even further — telling them to get off the streets and into the Bundestag.
So now I am very confused. If the Nazis were the worst people ever, and the Holocaust was the worst crime ever, why are centrists encouraging the political passions of the same people they’re comparing to German history’s baddies? Any Hindenburg will tell you that will not end well.
A more reasonable question: Why are the comments coming out of Germany’s center sounding so extreme, especially in a country where anyone who “violates the dignity of [Holocaust] victims by approving, glorifying or justifying the National Socialist regime” or “plays down an act … committed under National Socialist rule” faces a fine or prison time?
In simpler terms, surely Germany’s justice minister knows that it is illegal to minimize, trivialize or relativize the Holocaust.6
Buschmann is probably safe from prosecution. The law is vague, and anyway was written by his centrist predecessors who don’t see themselves as the problem. The criminalization of Holocaust denial is to keep little Hitlers from coming out of the woodwork, not liberal politicians from using the past as a bat to swat at things in their present that they do not like.
If not the letter of the law, Buschmann sure did violate the spirit of it. And he is hardly the only one. German Officialdom gets off on the rhetorical self-flagellation of focusing on how horrible it once was, and as a result never misses a chance to explain how do-gooder it now is, that it transgresses the very sanctity of the supposedly singular crime it committed in the process of trying to cope with having committed it.
Like how accessing a memory inevitably muddles the memory you want to recall, every contemporary reference to the Holocaust zaps it of its historical power. This is both an insurmountable contradiction and a fundamental flaw at the heart of German Erinnerungskultur (memory culture): Having trained the German eye to see only Auschwitz, just about everything else disappears into its shadow.
In Germany, with its rigid culture of categorization, it is all or nothing. That may be effective at warding off Never Again, but not so much the many, present-day never agains that, while falling far short of systematic ethnic cleansing, harm the liberal democratic state nonetheless. To get Germany’s liberal democratic institutions to pay attention, you have to draw the Holocaust card — like a fly to a blue light.
The very way Germany expresses Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coping with the past) is a trivialization of it. As such, Germany’s liberals are regularly in breach of German law, or at least undermining the rationale behind it, by reducing the memory of the Holocaust to a form of public performance, at best, and a tool for political sparring, at worst.
I’m not a Nazi; you are!7
Examples abound. No sooner did Buschmann’s comments fade from the headlines that Boris Palmer — the mayor of the southern German city of Tübingen, who has a history of putting his foot in his mouth — made new ones by repeatedly using the N-word at a conference on migration.8
When a group of upset people confronted him outside the event, shouting “Nazis raus,” he responded:
"That's nothing but the yellow star. … All it takes to be a Nazi is to say one wrong word. Think about it."
Yes, let’s all please think. I beg you.
The group was right to accuse Palmer of “relativizing the Holocaust” by making himself out to be a victim of their shouting down to the extent Jews were of the yellow star that the Nazis forced them to wear. But the group shouting, “get out, Nazis,” in the first place is itself relativizing the Holocaust.
They may not have liked what he said; he may have been offensive; but your upset, and his less-than-clever polemic does not a Nazi make. Nobody comes off looking very good here.
A less overt relativization came from Chancellor Olaf Scholz last year, when he didn’t like that a few climate protesters interrupted an event he was speaking at. Following some brief commotion, he said to the audience:
“These black-clad productions at various events by the same people over and over again remind me of a time long ago — and thank God for that.”
Scholz’s striking recall of a time he didn’t live through is impressive. I bet at least a couple parliamentary investigations might wish the erstwhile Hamburg mayor’s memory was as sharp when it came to a time he did — specifically the multiple meetings he apparently had with officials from the Warburg Bank, around the time it was at the center of a complex tax scheme to defraud the German government.
But I digress.
Finally, we have perhaps the finest flouting of the corner of legal code Germany holds most dear, which is simply to score points against your political opponent. Bonus when there’s an election to win, and make it a hat trick if the accusation of anti-Semitism is anti-Semitic itself.
Paul Ziemiak pulled off just such a feat in pandemic summer 2021, just a few months before voters went to elect their first, post-Merkel government. The then-secretary general of Merkel’s conservative CDU party — on the most appropriate forum for nuanced discourse of complex issues, Twitter — accused a German author of an “unbelievable and history-forgetting offense” for a statement she made at a Greens party conference:
"The radical hostility to science, the cynical exploitation of societal insecurity, populist mobilization, and the readiness to resent and resort to violence will remain. There will certainly be talk of elites again. And presumably it will not be the Jews and cosmopolitans, or the feminists or the virologists, who will be targeted, but the climate scientists."
That’s about as much Holocaust relativization as Martin Niemöller’s poem, “First they came.” But in the upside-down world in which the likes of Ziemiak operate, where Christian Democrats are somehow the guardians of Jewish life, simply uttering the J-word is tantamount to besmirching the memory of the Holocaust.9
The author, Carolin Emcke, doesn’t get off fully, either, because she had to have known that going anywhere near persecution of the Jews would unleash a torrent of rhetorical, teutonic shock, which is great for drumming up media buzz for whatever point you’re pushing.
These days, if you want to get heard around here, you’ll have a lot more success by raising the ghost of German past. Which may be great for your book deal or Twitter engagement, but six-million Jews didn’t perish so that Germans today can make their career, or break someone else’s. Talk about “violating the dignity of victims.”
As a journalism professor of mine liked to say way back when: Only Hitler is Hitler. We can call out the bad stuff without resorting to comparisons to the worst stuff. Doing so only cheapens the thing whose value we are trying to preserve — and must.
Here’s an idea: Let’s just put a moratorium on the Holocaust hyperbole. Because when everything is Auschwitz, nothing is. Including Auschwitz itself.
Point of transparency: It happened to me.
Thanks a lot to rigid migration policy and labor uptake culture.
“Freedom” is a term that gets thrown around a lot, especially in politics, but is rarely well defined. Eye of the beholder sorta thing, usually to mean freedom from whatever policies the people you don’t like are pursuing.
Speaking of talking, what is next to no one talking about amid all this “controversy”? The climate.
Another obvious difference to Weimar-era political violence: that was systematic, not random.
And, since the end of 2022, any war crime or crime against humanity (though the Holocaust is still a higher offense). The Bundestag voted to change the relevant legal code, after some 15 years of noncompliance with European Union law, which led to an EU reprimand.
Red herring, because no one is a Nazi. All the Nazis are dead, or very soon will be. But that doesn’t mean everything is OK.
Not a fan of censorship myself, and certainly not the self-made kind, I am also not a fan of needlessly hurting people just to make a point. Hence the abbreviated form of this racial slur here. When it comes to speech, you may have the right, but that does not make it right.
And, to his credit, Ziemiak acknowledged as much, when he deleted the tweet and apologized by saying, “I am always particularly sensitive when I hear comparisons to Jews.” For German Officialdom, a Jew only exists in the context of anti-Semitism, Israel and the Holocaust (which are all intertwined), which takes away a Jew's agency and is thereby — wait for it — anti-Semitic.