History of anti-Semitism | Germany made amends?

In May 1985, Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan visit the Bitburg military cemetery, where members of the Waffen-SS are also buried. Jewish students from home and abroad took part in a counter-demonstration. Photo: picture alliance/Thomas Wattenberg At the Junge Union's Germany Day in Bonn in mid-October, Chancellor Friedrich Merz railed against the red-green-red coalition in Berlin: "There is no place for anti-Semitism in Germany." This once again shows him as someone who basically has no idea about the matter - this is not contradicted by the fact that Merz martially announced: "We stand up against anyone who questions the right to exist of the State of Israel in Germany." Raise here of all people, the Israel Doctrine as a creed, which has been responsible for a fatal continuity of anti-Semitic thinking since the founding of the Federal Republic. This is dividing the country, without any involvement from the AfD.

Friedrich Merz just described the state flag of Israel as a “Jewish flag” and – while nonchalantly denaturalizing all German citizens of Jewish faith – anti-Semitism as “the most perfidious form of xenophobia”. Not surprisingly, the Bavarian CSU Prime Minister Markus Söder is firmly behind the Chancellor: "The Left Party is deeply anti-Semitic."

The current furor against the left can draw on a long anti-communist tradition. So in Bavaria everything would have its proven, hard-nosed correctness. Not long ago, in August 2023, Söder's deputy Hubert Aiwanger from the Free Voters was linked in the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" with a leaflet from the late 80s that pulled the rug out from under the feet of even hardened anti-Semitism experts. The leaflet advertises a "satirical" competition about who is "the greatest traitor to the fatherland." The first prize: “A free flight through the chimney of Auschwitz.”

Aiwanger, who died suddenly on November 4, 2026, was a teenager at the time of the drastic incident, 52 years old at the time of the revelation, Bavarian Minister of Economics and Deputy Prime Minister. What happened after the leaflet scandal led neither to his removal from office nor to his ostracism as a politician in the country of the perpetrators. No, the reference to his young age at the time of the crime and similar excuses were enough. An annoyed state father Söder presented his deputy, who styled himself the victim of a “smear campaign,” with a list of questions that, after apparently being answered halfway satisfactorily, did not lead to his resignation. Topic settled. Germany made amends. For the “middle of society” one thing is certain: the defensive constitutional arch has long since learned its lesson, post-Nazi anti-Semitism has been defeated. And if it exists, it comes from “immigrants” or the left. This is how you could summarize Söder, Merz and their choir of the past few months.

The opposite is true: “normal” anti-Semitism never went away. It has a long tradition (not only) in Germany, which goes back to the 19th century, when Christian anti-Judaism was replaced by racist hatred of Jews, which was part of the core of civil decency. The systematic exclusion, persecution and murder of Jews in Nazi Germany could be based on this. This anti-Semitism was expressed as a defense against guilt and memory after 1945, above all in the refusal of the Germans to recognize the madness of the Holocaust in its singular dimension.

The first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, CDU politician Konrad Adenauer, made several statements during his term in office that revealed unbroken anti-Semitism despite the Shoah, a breach of civilization. The fact that he made Hans Globke, one of the commentators on the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, his Chancellor's Minister and stuck with him despite the international astonishment about it, is not even mentioned here.

Friedrich Merz just described the state flag of Israel as the “Jewish flag”.

Adenauer harbored his own, apparently deep-seated resentments against Jews, which repeatedly broke out. There are, for example, statements made about the then French Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France, with whom Adenauer was annoyed in 1954 in the context of the negotiations on the European Defense Community (EDC): “Mendès-France is a player without a fixed concept. Look: Mendès-France is a Jew. We have experiences with our German Jews. They all have a national inferiority complex, which they overcompensate for with excessive nationalism.”

This could still be chalked up as an anti-Semitic “gaffe.” But even eleven years later, Adenauer is not lacking in clarity here, this time to the journalist Günter Gaus on German television: “And now as far as the Jewish question is concerned. ... The power of the Jews - even today, especially in America - should not be underestimated, and that is why I very consciously and very carefully put all my effort into bringing about reconciliation between the German and the Jewish people as best I could." Gaus doesn't pursue it any further. What is being formulated here is the reinterpretation of the German breach of civilization as self-defense - against the, yes: overwhelming, victims, the Jews.

In other words: There has been no coming to terms with anti-Semitism in Germany. The horror of Shoah and Porajmos (the genocide of Sinti and Roma), wars of extermination and occupation, mass murder of primarily Soviet prisoners of war, the murder of the sick in so-called euthanasia and the elimination of political opponents should not be an issue. Compensation, if paid, was more like hush money, and the shared responsibility of so many Germans, not only from the criminal organizations, but also from Wehrmacht members and civilians, should not be mentioned. They should be buried under the “We have suffered enough ourselves” narrative – expulsion, destruction of German cities and German division.

The German civil servants, the merciless Nazi judiciary, and the defeated soldiers were able to save their anti-communism and their anti-Semitism more or less unbroken into the new era of reconstruction, awakening and the “economic miracle” with almost complete personnel continuity. In the emerging bloc confrontation, Germany was also urgently needed as a frontline state on the side of the Western powers. The Nazi past shouldn't be treated too pettily.

A few grotesque examples of this sparing of Germans in the confrontation with their immediate past are listed by the former public prosecutor at the Central Office of the State Judicial Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg and anti-fascist Dietrich Kuhlbrodt in his book “German Film Miracle: Nazis Getting Better.” In the post-war period, West German cinema-goers apparently should not be exposed to anything that could hurt their battered souls, especially no reminders of their own crimes. US films such as “Notorious” by Alfred Hitchcock, “African Queen” by John Huston and even “Casablanca” were censored, defused, recut and purged of “anti-German” passages. Just imagine this: in the 1950s and 60s, no Major Strasser or other Nazi appeared in the 20-minute shortened version of the anti-fascist film “Casablanca,” which was shown in cinemas in West Germany. Wolfgang Staudte's "The Murderers Are Among Us" is one of the rare counter-examples of the confrontation with German perpetrators in the early Federal Republic of Germany.

The emergence and program of the important FRG writers' association “Group 47” was also characterized by linguistic continuity with National Socialism and by anti-Semitism. Descriptions of the mockery of the Jewish poet Paul Celan when he recited his Auschwitz poem “Death Fugue” to the group are almost astonishing. Or the anti-Semitic background noise and the self-exculpatory biographical retouches in Alfred Andersch's books, as demonstrated by the Germanist and Auschwitz survivor Ruth Klüger and the writer W. G. Sebald. Andersch was an integral part of the upper school curriculum (West) until the 1980s.

It was only the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt am Main and an initial inkling of the dimensions of the Shoah that led Germans to reluctantly come to terms with their past. But under the guidelines of “There were only a few who only acted on orders” and “Now it has to be an end,” the world-class “reprocessing” that Germany is proud of today did not really take place here either. “The first post-National Socialist decades,” as Max Czollek summarizes it, “simply cannot be reconciled with today’s self-image of good Germans.”

It was only in the 1960s and 1970s, forced by the student movement and extra-parliamentary opposition, that a real confrontation with German perpetrators and the dimensions of the collapse of civilization actually took place. The breakthrough for the majority German population's awareness of the Holocaust was not so much the kneeling of Adenauer's successor Willy Brandt in Warsaw in front of the memorial in honor of the Jewish ghetto fighters in 1970, but rather the US television series "Holocaust", which was also broadcast in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1979, ten years later.

»We have experience with our German Jews. They all have a national inferiority complex.”

In the 1980s, the narratives of “liberation” and “reconciliation” once again produced mixed results. On May 8, 1985, Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker (CDU) declared the end of the war in 1945 to mean the “liberation” of Germany from National Socialist tyranny. The following year, the so-called historians' dispute illustrated that the relativization and leveling of German guilt and responsibility as a "kind of settlement of damages" (Jürgen Habermas) was far from over. The then renowned historian Ernst Nolte, who was later largely discredited because of his proximity to the neo-Nazi right, classified the German attack on the Soviet Union as the result of a more “original,” “Asian act” of Stalinism.

This historical revisionism solidified the tendency to “historicize” the Holocaust in order to defuse it and make it more manageable. The devastating, nine-hour documentary "Shoah" by Claude Lanzmann, which was also released in 1985, was significantly less manageable with its ruthlessness and sheer length, as was the German translation of the monumental overview by the Austrian-American historian Raul Hilberg of the "extermination of the European Jews" - 20 years after its release in the USA and for a retail price of 128 German marks. In the mid-1990s, the Wehrmacht exhibition contributed to a merciless look at German crimes.

Other scandalous events ran through the decades: from the commemoration of Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU) together with US President Ronald Reagan in 1985 at the military cemetery in Bitburg, where the dead of the "Waffen SS", which was classified as criminal, also lie, to the standing ovation for the writer Martin Walser at the awarding of the Peace Prize of the German book trade in Frankfurt's Paulskirche October 11, 1998. Walser was talking about a “moral club in Auschwitz” with which the Germans were being hit again and again. It was also Walser who spoke of a “monumentalization of shame” in the context of the discussions about the Holocaust memorial in Berlin – 20 years before the AfD Nazi Björn Höcke. With this vehement “It has to be enough,” the German establishment put the Jews in a headlock of “reconciliation.”

One of the representatives of Jews in Germany who had to publicly experience this course of appropriation was the long-time chairman of the Central Council, Ignatz Bubis. He and his wife Bea were the only ones who did not applaud Walser in the Paulskirche in 1998 and did not stand up to clap. As early as 1992, Bubis was confronted with open anti-Semitism when he was invited by the city council in Rostock to speak about the pogrom in Lichtenhagen a few weeks earlier. The chairman of the city's interior committee, Karlheinz Schmidt (CDU), asked him: "You are a German citizen of the Jewish faith. Your homeland is Israel. Is that correct? How do you view the daily acts of violence between Palestinians and Israelis?”

Years later, Bubi's trip to Rostock was once again smeared by Martin Walser: "People can't hear that anymore, this general suspicion. ... Look, when brutalities against foreigners, against asylum seekers, occur in the Federal Republic, our media is immediately ready to tie it back to this German past. ... I think I saw you on TV in Lichtenhagen near Rostock. Now I ask you: What were you there for?" After all, no Jews were affected there: Schmidt and Walser's message that he should mind his own business and not the racist pogrom against refugees, Vietnamese and Roma gave Jews a new place in Germany's self-image, which was to be given as part of the "reparation" of post-reunification Germany.

The comparison of Jewish and Muslim immigrants in a contribution to the million-seller "Germany is abolishing itself" by the former Berlin SPD finance senator Tilo Sarrazin had a philo-Semitic twist: on the one hand there were the "constantly new little headscarf girls", on the other the supposedly highly talented Jewish people as dream immigrants. Sarrazin is at the beginning of the drastic shift to the right in Germany, which, along its path through the rise of the AfD, the so-called refugee crisis, the pandemic, inflation and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, has led to today's fatal political situation.

At its core, this development always brought with it anti-Semitic conspiracy narratives from the historical dregs of German sensitivity and reactivated them with public effectiveness. Whether we are talking about “globalists” or specifically about the Jewish US billionaire George Soros – behind everything there is always the “grabbing capital” that wants to force “us” under its thumb through vaccination regimes and global influence. Familiar images, familiar resentments, known to be available at any time and regularly documented in Mitte studies in worrying approval ratings for anti-Semitic statements.

AfD co-founder Alexander Gauland, who comes from the German national wing of the Hessian CDU, remains completely within the revisionist framework of the Christian Democrats with his statements that trivialize the Holocaust and German responsibility. The Nazis as “bird shit” in 1,000 years of glorious German history fit in just as well as Björn Höcke’s rejection of the Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame.” The journalist Max Czollek once again says: “The Höckes and Kubitscheks, von Storchs and Gaulands may be stupid, but they are not stupid. That's why they have long since recognized that you can say almost anything as long as you are rhetorically on the side of the Jews." All of this, Czollek's conclusion, "is just the peak of the symbolic-political charge of the physical existence of Jews in the German memory theater."

And this memory theater can do without hearing Jewish voices - especially if they do not agree to the discourse of unconditional solidarity with the marauding, partly fascist Israeli government. For this twist in reappraisal and "reparation", the gloriously reunified Germany is prepared to confiscate even fundamental democratic rights in a completely disproportionate manner and to allow protests against violations of international law and war crimes in Gaza, the relevant Israeli prisons, in southern Lebanon and in the West Bank to be crushed by police baton squads. Any criticism of this is harshly canceled from the “Iron Dome of Reason of State” (Per Leo) and those affected, such as the “Ulm 5”, are subjected to brutal repression.

Reappraisal of history can produce bizarre results.

With us, no one has to pay to be informed. Sounds like a bad business model? It is too. But independent journalism and participation for everyone are more important to us than profit. Journalism still costs money: research, printing and all the people who do it. That's why we depend on you. We need 300,000 euros by the end of the year.

Donate once or regularly, every amount counts. So that nd remains.