German Redemption Theology

Addressing political tensions in the Middle East, especially the Iranian nuclear crisis, the Chancellor then utters the following words:

Merkel concludes her speech with ‘Germany will never forsake Israel but will remain a true friend and partner.’ 16 years on and, so far, time has proven her right.

The current governing coalition, established in 2021 and succeeding the 16-year-long Merkel era, states in its coalition agreement that ‘for us, Israel’s security is Staatsräson’. Some days after the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, the present German Chancellor Olaf Scholz delivered a government statement at the Bundestag, the German parliament, invoking Merkel’s declaration of Staatsräson:

At the time of Scholz’s speech on 12 October, the nature of what has been unfolding in Gaza was already clear, at least to some observers. The following day, Jewish Currents published an article by the Israeli Holocaust and genocide scholar Raz Segal titled ‘A Textbook Case of Genocide’. Segal notes that ‘Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed’. He draws attention to the following statement by Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, from 9 October: ‘we are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.’ Segal compares it to the infamous ‘extermination order’ by General Lothar von Trotha, the chief military commander in German South West Africa, which led to the Ovaherero and Nama genocide. ‘Gallant’s orders on October 9th were no less explicit.’

Within days, hundreds of other scholars and organisations issued similar warnings. On 29 December 2023, South Africa brought forward a case against Israel for genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which, in a landmark ruling on 26 January 2024, acknowledged the violence in Gaza as a plausible case of ongoing genocide and ordered provisional measures. A comprehensive report from 24 March 2024, by Francesca Albanese the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, concluded that ‘there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met’.

And yet, the clearer this reality becomes, the more Germany seems to double down on denial. That is, its government, most of its public, and most of its intellectuals. It appears that no amount of human rights reports, court rulings, and scholarly references to Germany’s own genocidal history can do anything about this. What is particularly strange is the language. For a modern liberal democracy, Staatsräson seems rather archaic and absolutist terminology. The quasi-religious discourse of ‘guilt’ and ‘atonement’ seems out of place in the supposedly secular Federal Republic of Germany. But what if it isn’t? What if these apparent contradictions are the key to making sense of the state of Germany? What is the secular, anyway?

The typical dictionary definition will concur with the common understanding of the secular as the polar opposite of the religious. The former is seen as the realm of freedom and reason, which is encroached on by the latter, the realm of tyranny and irrationality. As the canonical Enlightenment account goes, the story of modernity is the story of the continuous triumph of the secular over the religious. In the social sciences, this notion is called the secularisation thesis. One of its great proponents is the foundational German sociologist Max Weber. He famously spoke of the disenchantment of the world. With increasing modernisation, that is, secularisation, the world is gradually stripping away myth and magic and moving towards direct access to the truth. Only secular modernity, the culmination of millennia of Western civilisation, can uncover a reality that, while assumed to always have existed, was inaccessible throughout pre-modern history.

However, while this notion may still be considered common sense in Western societies, the secularisation thesis has been increasingly questioned in the social sciences, or at least less triumphantly advocated. As the promise of secularisation as formulated by the likes of Weber is yet to be fully realised, less doctrinaire and more conciliatory tones can be heard from contemporary thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition. Jürgen Habermas, Germany’s greatest living public intellectual, now 94, proposes a translation of religious discourse into the secular—conceived of as neutral and universal—public sphere:

Be that as it may, what if things are actually not as straightforward in the first place? What if the very idea of the secular and the religious as fixed, stable categories, and polar opposites must be questioned? That’s exactly what the anthropologist Talal Asad does in his seminal studies Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity and Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason. He argues that the concept of the secular cannot do without the idea of religion, and that this binary is thought of too rigidly. Asad suggests that both terms ‘belong to what Wittgenstein called language games, games within which consensus and dispute occur as part of ordinary life—games that are always capable of being changed, with or without agreement’.

In fact, the very dispute over whether there is an essential continuity between religion and the secular ‘depends on the construction of both concepts on the basis of an a priori secular history and secular anthropology’. Asad warns, in particular, against conceptualising secular modern discourse as a direct translation or succession to pre-modern Christian history. The emergence of new discursive grammars and rearrangement of practices must be taken into account. ‘It is a matter of showing how contingencies relate to changes in the grammar of concepts— that is, how the changes in concepts articulate changes in practices.’

He criticises Habermas, for instance, for arguing that the Christian concept of Imago Dei, ‘Man created in the image of God’, can be directly translated into the modern political demand for equality. This claim ignores the profound semantic rupture that occurred between how ‘equality’ was conceptualised in medieval Christendom and how it is understood today.

Such a rupture also occurs with the notion of redemption, which is still present in secular modernity but semantically differs from the pre-modern Christian understanding. Asad explains the difference as a shift towards imperialist self-redemption.

Asad’s idea of secular politics offers no redemption through a saviour submitting to suffering. There is not even a variety of types with regards to suffering put forward through a theological concept of evil, that which is awful, bad, or unfathomable. ‘Instead,’ Asad points out, ‘there is a readiness to cause pain to those who are to be saved by being humanised. It is not merely that the object of violence is different; it is that the secular myth uses the element of violence to connect an optimistic project of universal empowerment with a pessimistic account of human motivation in which inertia and incorrigibility figure prominently’. In our dark and miserable world, humans carry on the project of redemption. But that project must start with the self as‘the jungle is after all in the gardener’s own soul’. The narrative of redemption via Christ’s sacrifice differs from the secular myth by way of ‘different kinds of subjectivity, mobilises different kinds of social activity, and invokes different modalities of time’. All along, ‘Christianity’s missionary history managed to fuse the two to fold the spiritual promise “Christ died to save us all” into the political project “the world must be changed for Christ” – making the modern concept of redemption possible.’

Asad analyses the secular language of redemption in particular for the US, which is specific in certain regards due to its role as the self-professed leader of Western civilisation over the dark place in need of redemption that is this world. However, his conclusion, namely that it ‘works as a force in the field of foreign relations,’ could also apply to Germany.

This country has been catching the world’s attention for its support of the genocidal campaign in Gaza, which seems even more unwavering than that of Israel’s other allies. To some, this comes as a surprise, because Germany has enjoyed the reputation of a country that has come to terms with its dark history uniquely well and was seen – and more importantly, saw itself – as a moral authority on matters of crimes against humanity and genocide. Germany’s global branding now seems to be falling apart. How did it come to this?

First of all, it must be said that German memory culture came belatedly, and selectively. It grew out of grassroots activism in the late 1970s and 1980s. A milestone was the famous Historikerstreit, or historians’ dispute, in the late 1980s.This marked the triumph of finally dealing with the Nazi Holocaust and over wilful national amnesia. The thought leader of the progressive side of the dispute and intellectual poster boy for the new, modern (and eventually reunified) Germany was Jürgen Habermas.

In hindsight, however, this triumph does not look as progressive anymore. In light of what’s unfolding now, the limitations are becoming dramatically clear. As laudable as Germany’s reckoning with the Shoah has come to be, the Porajmos, the Nazi genocide of the Sinti and Roma, is not being adequately remembered. How many Germans have even heard of the term Porajmos? Not to mention the Ovaherero and Nama genocide in German South West Africa, now Namibia, the first genocide of the twentieth century. German memory culture has been national and Eurocentric from the onset. Habermas himself once spelled it out. When asked whether his analysis has anything to offer to the Global South, he bluntly replied: ‘I am aware of the fact that this is a Eurocentrically limited view. I would rather pass the question’.

As a matter of fact, this story has been about white German feelings all along. In Asad’s terms, referencing both the nineteenth century colonial and contemporary liberal discourse, the jungle is in the gardener’s own soul. Given its emancipatory origins, and ironically riffing on the concept of liberation theology, I call this phenomenon German Redemption Theology.

The chorus of reactions to Germany’s curious stance on Gaza and rampant domestic repression speaks of guilt for the Holocaust that makes Germany behave the way it does. In fact, whatever guilt there may have been has run its course. It’s no longer The Question of German Guilt—the title of the German-Swiss psychologist and philosopher Karl Jaspers’s foundational philosophical 1946 text for what belatedly would become modern, Habermasian Germany’s self-image. It is now the German question. What is unfolding is not how guilt in any meaningful sense of the term looks. Let alone understanding or humility. ‘Instead, there is a readiness to cause pain to those who are to be saved by being humanised.’ If anything, we’re witnessing an unrestrained national jouissance, vicarious or not, of liberating the nation from the burden of the past, entitled to finally again indulge in racist panic, denunciation, authoritarianism, and murderous militarism with impunity. Put another way, it is the season of guilt-free nationalist excesses. Verily, this is not about guilt but the purified white German soul projecting itself onto the world. In other words, it is about white German identity politics and the making of a new German nationalism, one that, in Asad’s words, ‘must dominate the unredeemed world – if not by reason then, alas, by force - in order to survive’.

In German redemption theology, Germany imagines itself as emerging from the Holocaust as purified from Nazism and antisemitism. In The German Catechism, the Australian scholar Dirk Moses describes this as ‘a redemptive story in which the sacrifice of Jews in the Holocaust by Nazis is the premise for the Federal Republic’s legitimacy’. The Holocaust here is rendered as redemptive violence. By redeeming themselves, the Germans have become (God’s) chosen missionaries, exorcising evil from this world, and in particular the Holy Land.

Moreover, in the German psychodrama, white-Christian Germans cast themselves as ‘the new Jews’. Jewish Currents dissects the logic eloquently:

What is described here resembles the typical secular modern notion of the ‘Judeo-Christian’, which, according to the Israeli scholar of Judaism Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, emerged from the Christian ambivalence toward the Jews and the ‘internalisation of Christian perceptions of the Jews and their exile’. Now it likes to present itself as a sign of repentance and reconciliation, symbolising the end of the long history of Christian antisemitism that culminated in the Holocaust. However, the Judeo-Christian, above all, serves as a marker of civilisational difference, in particular against Muslims and Arabs: ‘the secular Zionist, the figure that most represents the now fashionable “Judeo-Christian”, has been constructed through a distinction from the East, from the Arab, and from the historical-exilic Jew’.

The Judeo-Christian, and the particular history it tells, is the reason why the German crimes against the Jews, and only these crimes, could be sublated into German redemption theology. This wouldn’t be possible with the crimes against the Sinti and Roma, or the Ovaherero and Nama. Perversely, the Shoah has become a source of secret pride and moral authority as it marks Germany’s belonging to Judeo-Christian civilisation and signifies its importance to world history. The fact of being the most successful antisemitic genocidaires in modern history is irresistibly flattering to the sense of German exceptionalism and civilisational greatness, which, paradoxically, is threatened by adequate remembrance of the Porajmos, and the Ovaherero and Nama genocide, not to mention acknowledgment of Germany’s historical responsibility towards the Palestinians at all.

Talal Asad recognises the notion of the Judeo-Christian, namely Judaism as an obsolete prelude to Christianity to the exclusion of Islam, in Habermas, too: ‘Judaism is not seen as a tradition in its own right— including the right to define itself—but as a historical phase of truth that has been superseded by a higher truth (Christianity) and that, in turn, by an even higher one (secularism).’

If the Jews have been superseded and the white-Christian Germans conceive of themselves as the new Jews, who, then, according to German redemption theology, are the new Nazis? The only logical conclusion is that it must be those who don’t belong to ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilisation: Muslims and Arabs. Palestinians, in particular, are virtually assigned ‘neo- Nazi antisemite’ at birth. In 2021, Nemi El-Hassan, a German journalist and medical doctor with Palestinian and Lebanese roots, was announced as the new host of a science program on German public TV. After a racist smear campaign, she was denied the job before it had even begun. El-Hassan recounted her experience saying, ‘I am and always will be Palestinian, whether the German public likes it or not’. She continued, ‘I refuse to deny this part of my identity. The last weeks have shown that in this country, I am considered an antisemite by birth. German guilt has been systematically outsourced to the Palestinians, the Arabs, the Muslims — the perceived sources of this alleged new antisemitism’.

The projection by Nazi descendants of their own monstrous history onto racialised Others in the present, has resulted in a virtual redefinition of ‘antisemitism’ to primarily mean ‘anti-Germanism’, especially regarding challenges to the country’s self-image and opposition to its war effort. This externalisation of Nazi evil casts brown people – the ‘new Nazis’ – as a threat to the white majority – ‘the new Jews’. What are the political implications of the jungle in the German gardener’s soul? James Baldwin and others have taught us about what racism means to the racists. It’s about them, they need it, regardless of what the Other says and does.

The affective attachment to white German innocence is not about what the Palestinian says or does. Neither is ‘Israel’ a real place in German redemption theology, but yet another projection of the soul. The truth about Gaza cannot be told, for what is at stake is white German innocence, which, despite claims to the contrary, stems from a sense of historical closure. Germany felt entitled to move on and regard the establishment of Israel as a post-historical ‘happy ending’.

Palestinian existence disturbs this sense of perpetrator closure. Logically, the Nakba and the nature of everything that followed must be denied to uphold the innocence and purity of the white German soul. As Asad suggests through secular redemptive politics, ‘there is no place for a theology of evil by which different kinds of suffering are identified’. Palestinians be damned.

In reality, there is no happy ending. History has not ended. As a matter of fact, we are witnessing the formation of a new German nationalism.

In some sense, things are actually going back to the roots. What the discourse on guilt and remembrance obscures is the fact that post- Holocaust Germany’s geopolitical and military-industrial relationship with Israel predates German memory culture by decades. The political scientist Daniel Marwecki’s book Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding shows that the two countries needed each other in the Cold War context, however grudgingly, for altogether pragmatic and diplomatic reasons. Marwecki quotes the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, after his retirement. ‘We had done to the Jews so much injustice, committed such crimes against them that somehow these had to be expiated or repaired, if we were at all to regain our international standing.’ Adenauer goes on to note: ‘furthermore, the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated’.

Germany sought international rehabilitation and western integration, and Israel needed financial and military support for state-building. This is the most relevant, enduring history for what is happening at the moment. ‘Germany has exported more than €300million of sensitive military equipment and arms to Israel so far this year, a 10-fold increase since 2022,’ reports The Financial Times on 8 November 2023.The country whose modern history is virtually synonymous with the history of genocide is fully involved in what the ICJ has ruled to be a plausible case of ongoing genocide. From this perspective, German redemption theology reveals itself to function as a superstructure providing ideological legitimacy for German militarism and imperialism.

As Adenauer’s antisemitic statement indicates, Germany did not emerge from the Holocaust purified. In fact, ‘denazification’ was fundamentally less substantial than Germany’s self-image as the ‘world champions of remembrance’ may lead you to believe. Marwecki summarised it well by saying: ‘the moral narrative is unconvincing simply because of the well- documented fact that under the first West German administration, led by Konrad Adenauer, the early process of denazification instigated by the Allied powers was aborted and partially even reversed. The newly-found [Federal Republic of Germany] was characterised by Nazi continuities on the level of state bureaucracy, functional elites and societal attitudes’.

The German ruling class and capital were left largely untouched as the Dutch investigative journalist David de Jong documents in his book Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties. Many of Germany’s biggest brands and companies today, like Siemens, Volkswagen, BMW, and Porsche, have a Nazi past. Among them is the arms manufacturer Rheinmetall, which was vital for the Nazi war machine. Today, it forecasts record sales in part thanks to the war on Gaza. Another example is Bayer, a successor company of IG Farben, which manufactured Zyklon B, the poison gas used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Bayer, one of the largest pharmaceutical and biomedical companies in the world, co-organised a mass demonstration ‘against antisemitism’, which really means ‘pro-Germany’s war effort’, on 10 December 2023. The demonstration took place in Berlin alongside, among others, Deutsche Bank, which once funded the construction of the Auschwitz death camp. What this absurd charade under the motto ‘Never again is now! Germany stands up!’ shows is that liberal antifascism and civil society are being tied to the arms industry and used for the whitewashing of Nazi heritage in the name of the polar opposite, namely ‘anti-antisemitism’ and ‘Holocaust memory’. German redemption theology plays a crucial role in getting parts of society on board that typically do not desire to be associated with arms sales, war efforts, or genocide for that matter. Only such an appeal to moral righteousness, white innocence, and self-redemption allows for the coalescence of national unity in a Germany that was meant to be post- national, post-racial, and purified of sin.

This elite-driven national psychosis is powered by the fact that its catalysts tend to be rather nebulous. What Merkel declared to be Germany’s Staatsräson is not actually enshrined anywhere. What’s the point, in this day and age, of using such an archaic term? It has something to do with foreign policy, especially German-Israeli relations, but what exactly does it entail? Is any Israeli government worthy of unconditional solidarity? Where does Israel’s security end and Palestinian insecurity begin? Does it comply with international law? What about its domestic implications? Former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt once presciently described it as ‘an emotionally understandable but foolish notion that could have extremely serious consequences’. He could not have foreseen just how serious the consequences would turn out to be.

Raison d’état traces back to sixteenth century political philosophy and was in particular popularised by Giovanni Botero’s opus Della Ragion di Stato (The Reason of State) from 1589.This notion remained prominent at the time of the formation of the modern Westphalian state system in the seventeenth century. According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics, it ‘means that there may be reasons for acting (normally in foreign policy, less usually in domestic policy) which simply override all other considerations of a legal or moral kind’. This holds true for German Staatsräson today, a pseudo-constitutional doctrine that functions as an authoritarian tool to circumvent democratic checks and balances, typically in service of militarism and imperialism.

Merkel’s emotionally understandable but foolish notion snowballed into what is now arguably one of Germany’s core national values. As Asad points out, ‘the function of a secular democracy is to identify religions or ideologies that are dangerous to “national values” without which the nation-state means little.’ When Scholz speaks of Staatsräson, it signifies authoritarian repression at home, and genocidal militarism abroad, justified in the language of German redemption theology.

A similarly nebulous escalation occurred after the German parliament passed a resolution in 2019 condemning Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), a nonviolent, pro-Palestinian movement calling for these actions against Israel. Parliament equated BDS to antisemitism, based on the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, whose misguided or cynical adoption by governments has been condemned even by its lead drafter, Kenneth Stern. The resolution effectively calls for the no-platforming of anyone rumoured to be guilty of association, however vague. The resolution is legally non- binding and would never qualify as a proper law, which is precisely why it’s so powerful. It spawned a climate of paranoid racist McCarthyism and self-censorship that has only been escalating. The crowdsourced Archive of Silence documents so far more than 130 publicly known instances of, often racialised, people being cancelled, silenced, censored, denounced, persecuted, de-platformed, de-funded, or forced out of their jobs since October 2023 alone. The McCarthyites don’t even have to fabricate ‘BDS proximity’ anymore. Just treating Palestinians as fully human, let alone being Palestinian, may be enough to violate the Staatsräson. Powered by the traditional white German values of conformism, moral cowardice, vorauseilender Gehorsam (anticipatory obedience), and snitching, as well as German redemption theology, a systematic re-aryanisation of Germany’s cultural, academic, and intellectual landscape has been unleashed. Or, if you will, a reshaping in the image of the German arms industry. One statistic shows that, while Jews comprise less than one percent of Germany’s population, almost one third of the people cancelled for alleged antisemitism are Jewish. This is what state antisemitism looks like.

All of this is undoubtedly to the taste of the far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD). As a matter of fact, they kicked off the anti-BDS panic in Germany by proposing such a resolution. So as to not appear to be doing less against antisemitism than AfD, the other parties followed suit by proposing a softer version, which is the resolution that was eventually passed. When white people fight antisemitism without fighting racism, racism is the point. The far right sets the tone in German politics, even without being officially in power. While AfD shouts the neo-fascist battle cry ‘remigration’, Chancellor Scholz announces ‘large-scale deportations’. AfD nationalism vs. Staatsräson nationalism is a pseudo-conflict between different degrees of racism and nativism.

German media bears much responsibility for this national psychosis. Media giant Axel Springer, in particular, fuels a perpetual state of racist panic. As it happens, it also makes money on Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, as a recent investigation by The Intercept revealed. One of its newspapers, Die Welt, bluntly states ‘Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler’. However, the quality press is not much better. The left-liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung suggests that wearing a keffiyeh is comparable to donning a Nazi uniform. This is German redemption theology in action. As actual neo-Nazis are at large, infiltrating the state, and rising in the polls, racialised minorities and refugees are being labelled the ‘new Nazis’ and cast as a threat to the nation by mainstream white Germany, which, desiring victimhood, imagines itself as the ‘new Jews’. This complete reversal of real power dynamics is reminiscent of far-right white supremacist conspiracy theories like the ‘Great Replacement’ and ‘White Genocide’. Moreover, in a revival of traditional European antisemitism, moral panics around such progressive ‘bad Jews’ as the American philosopher Judith Butler, the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, and the English filmmaker Jonathan Glazer are being fabricated, reminiscent of the classic ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ conspiracy theory. ‘Islamo- Gauchisme’, a newer form of racialised conspiracism that contains elements of both contemporary Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, as well as traditional anti-communist antisemitism, is gaining traction too.

It should be said that the German question is not coming out of the blue. The past several months mark an escalation of longer-term shifts, which go beyond the nationalisation of grassroots memory culture into a catechist-bureaucratic orthodoxy. In her 2020 article ‘Fighting Anti- Semitism in Contemporary Germany’, the German-Palestinian scholar Anna-EstherYounes – another at the receiving end of Staatsräson – parses the emergence of ‘an assemblage of policies about national belonging and security that are propelled primarily by white racial anxieties’ in twenty- first century Germany. Not unlike the War on Terror and the War on Drugs, this ‘War on Anti-Semitism’ locates ‘the origin of Europe’s or American social ailments in the non-Western world, as well as in the migrant and people of colour communities within theWest.’

What the German ruling class now has arrived at is essentially the establishment of a set of rulings for what is considered to be halal/haram vis-à-vis the new core national value of Staatsräson. Mind you, that’s halal/ haram not according to Islamic law, let alone German law, but within a kind of state of exception. As Giorgio Agamben reminds us, ‘one of the essential characteristics of the state of exception... here shows its tendency to become a lasting practice of government.’

The authoritarian turn unleashed in Germany is, indeed, bound to be of lasting impact, and ruthlessly so. As Asad notes, ‘the modern state has no conscience, and even if its officials have, they are required to carry out their duties impersonally.’ Nor will it be happening by accident. ‘Unlike the individual paranoiac, the modern state doesn’t simply look for what it sees as threats nesting in the gap between “public behaviour” and “real intention” in order to protect itself. It seeks to remake citizens in its image.’

The Staatsräson rulings leave little room for ambiguity. Some things, for example both-siding, crocodile tears, stating basic facts, and humanitarian appeals may fall under mubah (neutral) or makruh (disliked), but in general, opposing what the ICJ ruled to be a plausible case of ongoing genocide in which Germany is fully involved, is considered haram. Support for it, from conformist to triumphalist, is considered halal.

These rules cut across identities and contexts. Either you bow to the white German masters, or you do not. A ‘good Muslim’ is one who complies with Staatsräson. A ‘bad Muslim’ is one who does not. The same goes for ‘good Jews’ and ‘bad Jews’. This distinction, inherent to Staatsräson, is, in itself, antisemitic and reveals the fact that Germany has never truly moved on from a völkisch, blood-and-soil, worldview. Good or bad, ultimately neither Muslims nor Jews are seen as unconditionally belonging to Germany the way white-Christian Germans do.

Israel is abstractly conflated with ‘the Jews’, who, implicitly, are held collectively responsible for Israel’s conduct. Apostate ‘bad Jews’ who oppose German-backed war crimes, disturb the logic of Staatsräson nativism and are, so to speak, ‘excommunicated’ by and from white Germany, as well as from Israel. Effectively, they are denounced, in the lingo of traditional European antisemitism, as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. The fact that ‘bad Jews’, including Holocaust survivors and their descendants, are routinely slandered as antisemites must be seen in light of the fact that, according to Staatsräson and German redemption theology, antisemitism primarily means ‘anti-Germanism’. The German state’s non- Jewish antisemitism commissioner, Felix Klein, once complained that ‘left- leaning Israelis in Berlin’ are not being sensitive enough ‘to Germany’s special historical responsibility’. In Staatsräson Germany, white-Christian Germans are the true arbiters and victims of antisemitism.

The duality of contemporary German philo/antisemitism splits as follows: total identification of ‘the Jews’ as abstraction with a fetishised simulacrum of Israel for ‘good Jews’, and traditional European antisemitism for ‘bad Jews’. This very much resembles the philo-Zionism of European far-right figures like the Netherlands’s Geert Wilders and France’s Marine Le Pen, who indulge in antisemitic narratives about ‘globalists’ and ‘cultural Marxism’ while standing in ‘unconditional solidarity’ with Israel because they see it as a ‘Judeo-Christian’ bulwark against Islam. Germany is lurching to the right, with or without AfD.

Muslims, on the other hand, are under collective suspicion and seen as guilty until proven innocent. They are a priori held collectively responsible for Hamas’s conduct. They must publicly ‘condemn Hamas’ and ‘condemn antisemitism’ if they aspire to be regarded as ‘good Muslims’, otherwise they are automatically relegated to the baddies, the ‘antisemites’, and ‘terror sympathisers’. This sentiment was expressed in a speech by Vice Chancellor and Minister of Economy and Climate, Robert Habeck. Much- lauded as ‘the speech of the year’ in the German public, he threatened ‘Muslims living here’ that ‘they must clearly distance themselves from antisemitism so as not to undermine their own right to tolerance’.

Despite claims to the contrary, this is doing nothing against antisemitism and Holocaust revisionism. The opposite is true. In fact, the point is to establish halal forms of antisemitism and Holocaust revisionism. If it is in line with Staatsräson, it is permissible.

Let us return to the quasi-state philosopher of the Federal Republic of Germany, Habermas. He signed a statement titled ‘Principles of solidarity’, published on 13 November 2023, which is perfectly compliant with Staatsräson. It said: ‘the Hamas massacre with the declared intention of eliminating Jewish life in general has prompted Israel to strike back’. The statement went on to say: ‘despite all the concern for the fate of the Palestinian population, however, the standards of judgement slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions’. Eventually it stated: ‘the democratic ethos of the Federal Republic of Germany, which is orientated towards the obligation to respect human dignity, is linked to a political culture for which Jewish life and Israel’s right to exist are central elements worthy of special protection in light of the mass crimes of the Nazi era’.

What’s the message? ‘Israel’s right to exist’ is linked to Germany’s ‘democratic ethos’ and declared to be worthy of special protection? This is simply a reformulation of Staatsräson, including its nebulosity! Does this right to exist encompass the right to commit genocide? Not only is this not clear, Habermas renders the notion outside the sayable and thinkable. In sharp contrast to the hundreds of genocide scholars who have been warning of genocide in Gaza since October, as well as what the ICJ eventually ruled, Habermas declares categorically that ‘the standards of judgement slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions’.

Furthermore, he alleges Hamas’s ‘declared intention of eliminating Jewish life in general’, while the Holocaust, the paradigmatic genocide in modern European history, is reduced to ‘the mass crimes of the Nazi era’, leaving the Nazis’ declared intention and exercise of eliminating Jewish life in general unsaid.The implication is that, while Hamas are truly genocidal, the Nazis were categorically not as bad. They merely committed unspecified ‘mass crimes’.

This narrative resembles the flourishing right-wing discourse in theWest of humanising the Nazis as ‘civilised’, at least in comparison to the real barbarians. The notorious British far-right figure Douglas Murray, for instance, a known peddler of conspiracy theories like the ‘Great Replacement’ and ‘Cultural Marxism’, trivialises the Holocaust as ‘the Germans mucked up’. He bluntly states that Hamas are ‘worse than the Nazis’, while humanising the SS and other killing units as reluctant genocidaires who felt bad about exterminating Jews. Unlike the real barbarians, the Nazis were capable of such civilised human emotions as guilt, shame, and remorse.The purpose of this discourse is to kill two birds with one stone: establish a respectable form of Holocaust revisionism that doubles as a marker of civilisational difference against enemies within and without. Whatever their faults, at least the Nazis belonged to ‘Judeo- Christian’ civilisation, unlike the ‘new Nazis’. A video in which Murray expresses this sentiment was approvingly shared on X by Karl Lauterbach, the German Health Minister, Michael Blume, the antisemitism commissioner for Baden-Württemberg, and other members of the German ruling class.

Habermas’s plunge into Holocaust revisionism marks nothing short of an historical turning point.The intellectual figurehead of modern, liberal Germany, who is chiefly responsible for the country’s belated reckoning with the Holocaust, has become this Germany’s tragic gravedigger, and heralds the dawn of a different Germany—one where anything goes, as long as it’s halal according to Staatsräson.

A different Germany where, having redefined ‘antisemitism’ to primarily mean ‘anti-Germanism’, the pure white German nation (the ‘new Jews’) is once again said to be threatened by foreign, malevolent, subversive forces. One where Arabs, Muslims, and refugees are denoted the ‘new Nazis’, while the actual new Nazis continue to rise in the polls.

A new Germany where any opposition to Germany’s involvement in an ongoing genocide is hysterically cancelled, denounced, persecuted, suppressed, and declared haram, as the country’s greatest living intellectual insinuates that the sheer ‘Muslimness’ and ‘Palestinianness’ of Hamas surpasses in evil the German industrial extermination of millions of Jews, Romani, and numerous other groups of people.

In a new study of Habermas, he is quoted as saying that, at present, everything to which he dedicated his life is being lost ‘step by step’. He himself is leading the way for this loss.The story of Habermas is the story of modern Germany: from Hitler Youth to Historikerstreit and now to Holocaust revisionism. They are burning down the entire house.

Within a few months, Germany has squandered its international reputation and goodwill. Decades of meticulously established diplomacy, soft power, and memory culture are gone. There’s no way back. Germany has exposed itself on the world stage for everyone to see. The world won’t forget, and it will hold Germany accountable. This, in fact, is already happening. In a statement that went viral, the Namibian President, Hage Geingob, called out Germany’s continued inability to draw lessons from its horrific history. It begins like this:

For the time being, it seems no self-reflection can be expected from the white-majority society. German redemption theology cannot be so easily overcome. The sole hope within the country lies in the continued resistance of the largely racialised pro-Palestine/anti-genocide movement. It is the only truly anti-racist and anti-fascist force in Germany today. It must weather the storm of the state’s continued descent into authoritarianism and nationalism. May it one day triumph, as Habermas’s generation once did.

As the future of Gaza, Germany, and the world at large remains unsettling, let us remember these words of caution from Talal Asad: ‘if Christianity has gifted valued secular sentiments to the modern world, the gift is certainly more dangerous than the claim would have us assume because what is most evident in a liberal democratic society is not divine love for all but state power over all’.

For this is indeed how the secular manifests at the present moment in history.

Citations

The following works were referenced in this article: Faith and Knowledge by Jürgen Habermas, in The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by Major Thinkers, ed. Eduardo Mendieta; The German Catechism by Dirk Moses can be found at https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/the-german- catechism/; Bad Memory by Jewish Currents can be found at https:// jewishcurrents.org/bad-memory-2; Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Secularism, the Christian Ambivalence Toward the Jews, and the Notion of Exile; Konrad Adenauer’s quote is taken from Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding, Daniel Marwecki, Hurst, 2020; David de Jong, Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties. Harper Collins. 2023; Principles of Solidarity can be seen (in German and English) at https://www.normativeorders.net/2023/grundsatze-der-solidaritat/; and The new study of Habermas is Der Philosoph: Habermas und Wir, by Philipp Felsch. Propyläen Verlag. 2024.

For the fact that a third of those ‘cancelled’ for ‘anti-semitism’ are Jewish, see Kenan Malik’s article ‘Denouncing Critics of Israel as “un-Jews” or anti-semites is a perversion of history’. The Guardian. 11 February 2024. For the ‘state of exception’, see Giorgio Agamben’s essay The State of Emergency as a Paradigm of Government at https://www.tabletmag.com/ sections/arts-letters/articles/state-of-emergency-giorgio-agamben.