Berlin Diary

On my first day as a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, in the middle of January, one of the other new arrivals, a German woman who’s lived in the States for three decades, remarked that the view of Lake Wannsee was stunning from the dining room of the villa where the fellows stay, and would only be more beautiful in the spring. ‘As a Jew,’ another fellow replied, ‘I simply can’t look at the view without remembering that this house was occupied by a Nazi who was tried at Nuremburg, or that we’re only a short walk from the villa where the Wannsee Conference took place.’ ‘As a Jew’ – the phrase has always made me feel uneasy, though I might well have used it myself. Too many sentences in defence of the indefensible have begun with it, especially since 7 October. It evokes a distant memory of collective persecution while underwriting present persecution. There was something sinister about the lake, though, particularly when the sun came out and you found yourself thinking about the parties Walther Funk hosted in the villa, where Goebbels was apparently a frequent guest.

A few weeks later, we trudged through the rain and the cold to the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held. The guide, well-informed and energetic, told us that some industrial magnates who thought they could control Hitler had attended the conference, at which the implementation of the Final Solution was discussed. Whether or not the regime in the US is best described as ‘fascist’, it was hard not to think about Trump, Musk, Stephen Miller and their new friends Zuckerberg and Bezos. The basic governing coalition hasn’t changed all that much: thugs, zealots, careerists, entrepreneurs and grifters. As we left, we were told that there was a café. Run by an Israeli woman, it was advertised by a sign reading: ‘Enjoy Jewlicious babka.’

I kept meeting scholars of ‘German-Jewish studies’ or ‘memory culture’ in Berlin. The word ‘memory’ usually seemed to mean ‘memory of the Jews’. In one sense, it couldn’t be otherwise. That Germany has a responsibility to remember the Holocaust is beyond question. But it’s striking how little concern there is for other populations that have experienced racial discrimination or violence at the hands of the Germans: Turkish guest workers and their descendants, Syrian refugees and Palestinians, to say nothing of the Namibians whose ancestors were the victims of an earlier German genocidal campaign, or the Roma who perished alongside Jews in the camps. ‘Memory culture’ is used to refer almost exclusively to German-Jewish relations between 1933 and 1945. And under the policy of Staatsräson, which has made the defence of Israel a central pillar of the German state, the lesson of the Holocaust seems to be that Jews must remain eternally protected so that Germany can expiate its guilt, even if the state that now claims to speak in the name of the Jews is carrying out war crimes – even genocide – against another people.

To assimilate into German society, the children of Muslim immigrants are discouraged from identifying with the country’s Jewish victims and instructed instead to think of themselves as potential perpetrators of genocide against Jews. As the anthropologist Esra Özyürek argued in Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany (2023), the Holocaust education programmes designed for Muslim students imply that their ancestors also bear responsibility for the Judeocide, and give highly exaggerated accounts of Muslim antisemitism and collaboration (the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, figures prominently here, as he does in Netanyuhu’s speeches). While immigration has provoked widespread anger in Germany and helped foster the rise of the far-right AfD, the presence of an increasingly large Muslim population has also helped relieve German society of the burden of memory, allowing it to shift the blame for antisemitism to people of Middle Eastern origin, and thereby reaffirm Germany’s vigilance in facing up to its past. It’s the flip side of ‘memory culture’. As both the AfD and the Christian Democrats have learned, so long as you condemn Muslim antisemitism, you can continue to attack the ‘ills’ of immigration, as if xenophobia and racism had no connection to the German past.

‘Foreign words in German are the Jews of language,’ Adorno writes in Minima Moralia. There is a babble of languages to be heard in Berlin, particularly in neighbourhoods like Neukölln, and much of the graffiti is in English. But there are places where foreign words are prohibited. The use of Arabic is banned at demonstrations. So is Hebrew. A German intellectual I’ve known for a long time told me he had been shocked to hear expressions of antisemitism at a Gaza protest. When I asked him what he’d heard, all he came up with was ‘from the river to the sea’, and ‘globalise the intifada.’

His anxieties are typical of left-wing intellectuals of his generation. A protégé of Habermas, he grew up in the 1960s and is old enough to remember the attempted bombing of the Jewish community centre in West Berlin in 1969, as well as the radical left’s participation in airline hijackings by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. For a small but influential current of the German left, known as the ‘anti-Deutsch’, only by embracing a militant Zionism can Germany kill the Nazi hiding in every German soul. My friend despises Netanyahu and all that he represents, but in every pro-Palestinian chant he hears the echoes of Red Brigade terrorism and behind that the Hitler Youth. This leaves little to no room for Palestinians in Germany – the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe – to express their anger over the destruction of Gaza.

‘The German inability to reckon with Israel’s war on Gaza grows out of a pathology,’ an academic who is German on his mother’s side and Palestinian on his father’s said to me. He meant that the German preoccupation with Jews is so consuming that Palestinians like himself are rendered invisible – or, worse, seen as an irremediable threat to German-Jewish reconciliation. Unable to land a secure job in Germany, he has spent much of the last decade teaching abroad, mostly in the Arab world, where he is seen as what he never quite manages to be back home: a German.

Artists and intellectuals – not infrequently left-wing Jews – are another focus of German anxiety about antisemitism. I soon lost count of the people I met who had lost funding or jobs, or hadn’t been hired, because they had been seen at a demonstration or had signed a petition on behalf of Palestine, and were deemed to have violated Staatsräson. Several academics I met had taken to communicating on Signal to ensure their conversations were secure and gathered at their apartments rather than at their universities, where public events on Palestine are all but banned.

A single tweet by Volker Beck, a Green Party politician and now a crusader against antisemitism (or, more accurately, anti-Zionism), seemed to be enough to get an event cancelled. When the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, the director of Forensic Architecture, and Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, arrived in Berlin in February to speak at the Free University, Beck fulminated against them on X, and their talk was quickly moved off campus. The audience at the rearranged event was, by German standards, unusually mixed: young people of various ethnicities, many of them wearing keffiyehs. In the Q&A, some spoke of being ‘traumatised’ by the violence of the rhetoric against them – and the violence of the police, who often beat up protesters at pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Kreuzberg and Neukölln, areas with large Muslim populations. Outside the venue the police were waiting in their vehicles, as if expecting a riot.

One way dissent on Palestine is often expressed is through graffiti. One morning, on a walk through Kreuzberg, I saw an unusual recommendation from a graffiti artist: ‘Read Nahum Goldmann’s Jewish Paradox.’ In that book, published in 1978, Goldmann, a Zionist leader of heterodox inclinations, warned against Zionism’s ‘worship of the state’. This earned him the wrath of Israel’s supporters, who were particularly angry with him for quoting David Ben-Gurion as saying:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does it matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

The veracity of this quote has been disputed, but other Israeli leaders have said similar things.

‘I can’t tell you how many Germans I know have gone to Israel and had themselves photographed wearing a kippah,’ someone who has lived in Berlin for several years said to me. ‘It’s as if they want to feel like victims, while feeling superior. Defence of the Israeli state is one of the foundational principles of the Axel Springer publishing house!’ – one of the largest media companies in the world. ‘But with the starvation campaign,’ she went on, ‘you’re beginning to see cracks – even the Germans are finding it difficult to defend.’

A German historian I know spoke to me about the role of the Jewish Council, which insists that anti-Zionism is intrinsically antisemitic. He said that when the historian Uffa Jensen of the Technical University in Berlin backed adopting the Jerusalem definition of antisemitism, not the IHRA definition, the head of the Jewish Council accused him of ‘rolling out the red carpet for left-wing extremists and Hamas sympathisers’.  

After an event at Humboldt University, a young journalist at Taz, a left-wing newspaper, asked me what Frantz Fanon would have made of 7 October. I said that whether or not he would have condoned the killing of civilians, he would have understood the anger and despair that gave rise to the attack; I also noted his observation that colonial repression often acquires the ‘aura of an authentic genocide’, with Gaza being a textbook example of revenge turning into annihilation. As soon as the question of Palestine was mentioned, an almost tangible silence spread across the room.

In early May, the Egyptian journalist Mona El-Naggar delivered a haunting lecture at the American Academy on her film about two Palestinians fleeing the destruction of Gaza. At the end of her talk, there was, again, almost complete silence. The director Volker Schlöndorff got up to speak, because ‘someone has to ask a question.’ Then El-Naggar was asked if she was afraid that the hatred caused by the war would lead young people in Gaza to join Islamic State. There was no acknowledgment of the hatred that has enabled Israelis to murder Palestinians en masse and celebrate the destruction in Instagram posts. A fellow at the Academy asked El-Naggar why she had chosen such attractive, well-connected Palestinians as her subjects (‘little Monas’ was the way he described them to me later). Did she want her subjects to be ‘relatable’ for Western viewers? Even if that were the case, who can blame her? Anne Frank wasn’t typical of the victims of the Shoah, most of whom were poor Eastern European Jews, widely seen as ‘foreign’ and backward – the internal ‘others’ of the West.  

I was interviewed about Fanon at a gallery in Moritzplatz by Emilia Roig, a Berlin-based French political scientist who’s become a social media celebrity for her books and posts about race and intersectionality. Her ancestors are a microcosm of French imperial history: French settlers in Algeria, including OAS terrorists; Algerian Jews who became French in the late 19th century after the Crémieux Decree; blacks from Martinique; whites from the metropole. She arrived carrying a tiny dog. It can’t bear to be alone, she said; it growled when I tried to pet it. It soon became clear that she’d come not only with her dog, but with a small army of supporters, who clicked their fingers loudly after every remark she made. ‘I will get in trouble for saying this in Germany,’ she declared, before describing the Holocaust as little more than European colonial violence inflicted on fellow Europeans, a symptom of the ‘boomerang’ effect evoked by Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism. I said that neither Césaire nor Fanon had minimised the horror of the Nazi genocide.

The last question was from a young black German man who asked what Fanon would have said about the rise of authoritarian governments in the post-colonial world and the failure of violence, his chosen remedy, to produce more liberating outcomes. I responded by observing that Fanon was painfully aware that the revolutions he supported might result in repressive rule by a ‘national bourgeoisie’, but that, because he died in 1961, we can’t find answers to this dilemma in his writing. What’s more, Fanon, who asked of his body that it ‘make of me always a man who questions’, would have been perplexed that some readers, more than half a century after his death, see his writings as sacred texts. He believed in the ‘leap of invention’ as an expression of human freedom. Our task as readers, I suggested, was to remain faithful to his questioning, radical spirit even as we went beyond Fanon. ‘Beyond to what?’ a woman in the audience shouted. More finger clicking. Later I was told that Roig’s supporters had come to the event to heckle me because in not applauding the Al-Aqsa Flood I was trying to ‘recuperate Zionism’.

I was asked at an event in Potsdam a few days later what Fanon would say about the world as it is now. I replied that I could imagine him being horrified by Israel’s destruction of Gaza, by the persecution of refugees and by the brutal resource wars in Congo. A journalist for Taz, summing up the exchange, wrote:

Adam Shatz’s answer is altogether more flowery, saying – typically for this milieu – that today Fanon would be on the side of ‘the Palestinians’. At least he mentions China’s imperial exploitation of natural resources in the Congo, but he remains silent about the war in Sudan! Unfortunately, nothing is revealed about Russian belligerent colonialism in Ukraine either. If shame is a revolutionary sentiment, as Karl Marx apostrophised, then one could feel shame. 

A researcher from the Middle East working in Berlin told me about a conversation she had with her German supervisor after 7 October. (Her university’s leadership had promptly announced absolute solidarity with Israel and its dedication to the safety of its Jewish students, in observation of Staatsräson.) She had just returned from a trip to Beirut and told her supervisor she was finding it difficult to be an Arab in Germany, where there was so little understanding of, much less sympathy for, the Palestinian plight. ‘I can imagine that all this feels very different to you because of our different positionalities,’ her supervisor replied sternly. ‘But I regard Hamas as a terrorist organisation.’ ‘It was surreal,’ the researcher said. Her supervisor ‘spoke to me as if she assumed that I supported what had happened on 7 October’. Eighteen months later, the supervisor admitted that it was ‘beginning to look like genocide in Gaza’.

Throughout my stay in Berlin, I kept hearing from Germans quietly critical of Israel that ‘cracks’ had begun to appear in Staatsräson. These cracks sometimes assumed unsettling forms, notably a relief at shedding the burden of Holocaust memory, as if Palestine was an invitation to bury the Holocaust, at last, rather than to apply its lessons to the destruction of Gaza. A woman I know told me that a friend, an American Jew, had broken up with her German boyfriend after he told her that he found the Holocaust too painful to engage with, and therefore didn’t. When she suggested that they visit a site of Holocaust remembrance in Berlin, he started talking about Gaza, angrily telling her that he no longer supported Israel’s war, and that most Germans agreed with him. When she challenged him over his refusal to engage with difficult subjects like the Holocaust, he burst into tears and ran off.

In mid-May, just as my residency was coming to an end, the New York Times reported that even Israeli generals now admitted that Gaza was ‘on the brink of starvation’. The German government’s tone, too, was beginning to shift. Chancellor Merz, a Christian Democrat and a hardliner on Israel, said he found the continuing airstrikes against Gaza ‘no longer comprehensible’; the foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, said that Germany should no longer export weapons used to break humanitarian law in Gaza and described the suffering of Palestinians as ‘unbearable’. Felix Klein, Germany’s antisemitism tsar, said that starving people in Gaza and deliberately worsening the humanitarian situation there had nothing to do with defending Israel’s right to exist, and called for a debate on Staatsräson. On 8 August, a couple of months after I left Berlin, Merz announced that the German government was halting exports of ‘military equipment that could be used in the Gaza Strip’. Between 7 October 2023 and 13 May this year, according to Reuters, Germany had granted export licences for military equipment worth €485 million. Will anyone be left in Gaza to benefit from the supposed turning of the tide?