What’s the Matter with Germany?

The German government’s repression of pro-Palestinian voices confounds notions that Germany is a democratic success story. But it is entirely consistent with the country’s postwar history.

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News broke last month that distinguished philosopher Nancy Fraser, a professor at the New School in New York, had been disinvited from taking up the prestigious Albertus Magnus visiting professorship at the University of Cologne in Germany after she joined more than four hundred other philosophers in signing an open letter titled “Philosophy for Palestine.” The brief missive denounces Israel’s atrocities in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks of October 7 and encourages fellow thinkers to join an academic boycott of Israeli institutions. The university deemed it antisemitic—even though Fraser herself is Jewish.

The spectacle of a German university disinviting a Jewish philosopher in the name of combating antisemitism is no isolated incident in today’s Germany. Since October 7, the German state and mainstream media have thrown their weight behind Israel and against those who criticize it. Days after the attack, Chancellor Olaf Scholz insisted that “there is only one place for Germany: firmly at the side of Israel.” His government approved over $300 million worth of military exports to Israel last year, a tenfold increase from the prior year.

Over the last several months, pro-Palestinian protests in Germany have been banned, and the German police have detained, arrested, and even beaten protesters. Police in Berlin have forbidden protesters from using languages other than German, English, and occasionally Arabic. The phrase “from the river to the sea” is now criminalized in parts of the country, and uttering it can lead to prosecution.  In March, the Berlin police arrested a woman for writing the slogan on social media. Already in November, prominent members of the German government mulled deporting protesters, and Scholz himself insisted that the country had to start deporting foreigners “on a large scale.” Like students protesting across campuses in the United States, peaceful calls to end genocide have been met with extraordinary suppression and even violence.

Police walking alongside pro-Palestine demonstrators in Berlin on May 18 (BABAK BORDBAR/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

On April 12, police broke up a planned Palestinian Congress in Berlin. They cut power to the venue just hours after the event started, and dozens of officers arrived soon thereafter to shut it down. Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, a British-Palestinian surgeon invited to speak at the event, was turned away at the border. Another invited speaker, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, was informed that the Ministry of the Interior had banned him from engaging in political activity in the country, including giving speeches in person or over Zoom.

Cultural institutions have also felt the brunt of Germany’s policies. The state of Berlin, for instance, recently cut funding to the culture center Oyoun after it refused to cancel an event with Jewish Voice for a Just Peace, a Jewish-led anti-Zionist organization. Since then, a local bank has frozen the account of Jewish Voice. These efforts to censor cultural institutions critical of Israel have led artists and writers around the world to call on their peers to “strike Germany.” But as Israel’s outrages in Gaza mount, the German establishment buries its head ever deeper in the sand, aided by a panoply of repressive laws designed to shut out dissenting voices.

These developments are shocking, because in recent years many Americans have looked to Germany as a beacon of democracy. After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, journalists soon crowned German Chancellor Angela Merkel the new “leader of the free world.” Many commentators saw an intimate connection between how Germany memorializes its fascist past and its present-day commitment to democracy. Indeed, as progressives became ever more interested in grappling with the United States’ racist past, many looked to Germany’s reckoning with the Holocaust as a model, although they often overlooked the country’s lingering racial animus and Islamophobia.

To Americans accustomed to perceiving Germany as a country dedicated to fighting genocide and protecting democracy, then, its response to the occupation of Gaza has come as a shock. In the face of large anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian protests, the country is busy repressing freedoms of assembly, association, and expression—freedoms at the very core of what it means to be a democracy. But these repressions, the laws on which they depend, and the country’s impregnable support for Israel are not new phenomena. Their roots stretch back to Germany’s birth in the ashes of World War II and the anxieties and prejudices of its founders.

Moving on from the Nazis

Established in 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany, commonly known as West Germany, pursued a Janus-faced approach to its fascist past. After four years of Allied occupation, accompanied by what many Germans perceived as an overbearing policy of denazification, the country was ready for change. The early period of occupation had been brutal. The country lay in ruins and millions of Germans were internally displaced, without access to shelter, heat, or water. Millions more ethnic Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe as punishment for the Nazis’ crimes. Currency was practically worthless, and most had to barter for basic goods on the black markets that sprang up around the country. In 1946, rations in Berlin averaged only 1,600 calories per day.

All the while, occupation authorities prioritized massive campaigns of denazification, on which ordinary Germans quickly soured. Beyond the famous trials at Nuremberg, thousands more perpetrators were judged during the occupation period. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Germans were scrutinized in specialized denazification procedures—many of them losing their jobs, their pensions, and their civil rights, such as the right to vote or to hold public office. “Poor Germany,” survivors of the war lamented, seeing themselves as the true victims of National Socialism.

In the country’s first elections, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) eked out a narrow victory after campaigning on a promise to put an end to denazification. Its slim margin was enough to form a coalition with other parties on the right determined to move on from the Nazi past. Silence about fascist crimes settled like a thick fog over the country. The government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer backed a series of amnesties for lesser perpetrators. Those who had been purged in denazification procedures were rehabilitated. Many regained their former posts in what some historians have termed a “renazification” of the country’s civil service. Even high-ranking Nazis found employ in the new government. Hans Globke, a prominent lawyer who had helped formulate some of the most odious Nazi-era laws, was Adenauer’s chief of staff from 1953 to 1963. All the while, Adenauer insisted the country had moved on.

But the Chancellor knew that rhetorical gestures would not be enough to rebuild the German state’s trustworthiness. Without tangible signs of repentance for the horrors of the Holocaust, West Germany would not be welcomed back into the international fold. His government thus resolved that reparations would have to be paid to the victims of Nazism. This policy was not a matter of moral conviction, but rather of pragmatic strategy and statecraft. It is telling that Adenauer justified the decision to pursue reparations with the plainly antisemitic claim that “now as before, the power of the Jews in the economic sphere is extraordinarily strong.” As a result, he insisted, failing to atone would lead to a “foreign policy catastrophe.”

In 1952, the governments of Israel and West Germany thus signed the Luxembourg Agreement, which stipulated that the Federal Republic would pay Israel some 3 billion marks in material aid for the cost of resettling Jewish refugees as well as 450 million marks to the Jewish Claims Conference for the support of Jewish communities around the globe. The agreement also bound the West German government to pass new legislation to better compensate individual survivors. In addition to the sums paid to Israel, the Federal Republic has paid over 100 billion marks in reparations to individual survivors over the last seventy years.

The Luxembourg Agreement thus laid the foundation for close economic and military cooperation between the two countries. Germany remains one of Israel’s largest trading partners and its second largest supplier of military equipment, after the United States. Meanwhile, former Nazis remained in office for years—in some cases, even decades—after the end of the war. West Germany’s early attachment to Israel, that is, was paired with a vociferous unwillingness to confront the crimes of the Holocaust at home or to admit wrongdoing beyond a coterie of leading Nazis.

“Militant Democracy” and the Suppression of Dissent

The early postwar years also cemented a rigorous intolerance for opposing views in West Germany. The drafters of the postwar constitution were veterans of the Weimar Republic, and they remained haunted by its collapse in the early 1930s. Theodor Heuss, who had been a representative before the Nazi seizure of power, was leader of the postwar Free Democratic Party and would be West Germany’s first president. Kurt Schumacher, the Social Democratic Party’s first postwar leader, had likewise been in the Weimar parliament. Konrad Adenauer himself was mayor of Cologne from 1917 until 1933 as well as president of the upper house of the Prussian parliament for most of that time. In the view of West Germany’s founders, the failed Weimar republic had suffered an excess of democracy that had allowed a fringe extremist party to eventually win power. The new country’s constitution thus granted the government a range of extraordinary powers to deal with perceived anti-democratic forces.

One of the most prominent features of this “militant democracy” was the authority to ban political parties that endanger the “free democratic order.” This power has sometimes been used in ways many would sympathize with. Adenauer’s government employed the provision to ban the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party in 1952, for instance. The party, founded by former Nazis in 1949, spoke about the “Jewish question,” denied the Holocaust, and used barely concealed National Socialist rhetoric and symbols. More recently, German politicians have discussed using the measure to ban the popular far-right Alternative for Germany party.

Yet the provision has also been used to more disturbing effect. In 1957, it was deployed for the second and final time in order to ban the German Communist Party (KPD). Unlike the Socialist Reich Party, the KPD was a long-standing German party that had been active in the resistance against Nazism and had helped rebuild the country’s political order after 1945.

The constitution likewise prohibits the right to associate in Germany to those “directed against the constitutional order,” giving the government broad powers to ban assemblies such as the recent Palestinian Congress that was to be held in Berlin. Even the constitutional article guaranteeing freedom of expression carves out several broad exemptions, including the protection of constitutional rights, the protection of youth, and “the right to personal honor.” Moreover, free expression is explicitly limited to opinion—anything that goes beyond opinion, such as statements of fact, can in theory be subjected to review.

These constitutional provisions find their most famous expression in paragraph 86a of the German penal code, which outlaws the public use of “symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organizations.” Best known, this law is used to ban the swastika and other emblems of the Nazi Party. But the same statute has also been employed to ban certain communist symbols and is now being used to criminalize the phrase “from the river to the sea.” The German constitution thus offers ample support for prior restraint, the particularly noxious form of censorship that the German government is now exercising against protesters to prevent their speech from ever taking place.

These measures are significant because they point to how postwar German politicians used antidemocratic policy to shut out dissenting or marginalized voices and to enforce a narrow political consensus in the decades after World War II. Already in 1950, Adenauer’s cabinet banned from public office anyone “against the order of the democratic state”—communists in particular. Two decades later, the progressive government of Chancellor Willy Brandt issued a new version of this measure, banning so-called radicals from public employment. In its first decades, the Republic also instituted broad censorship of homophile publications, which it considered “dangerous” to youth.

Like Adenauer’s amnesties for former Nazis as well as West Germany’s reparations payments, these measures grew from leaders’ particular experiences in the Weimar and Nazi years and their comprehension of what it would take to build a durable democracy in the postwar world. In short, despite calling the rights of expression, association, and assembly “fundamental,” the German constitution carves out broad exceptions to their exercise, precisely because its drafters feared that a democracy incapable of repressing its most extreme elements could not survive.

The Holocaust in Germany’s Memory Culture

Already in its earliest years, then, West Germany began to develop a particularly close relationship with the state of Israel, refused to confront still-festering antisemitism, and honed police powers to stifle dissent. In the decades since, the country fitfully came to terms with its fascist past as it grew into its democracy. Famous trials, like those of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 and Auschwitz guards in Frankfurt in 1963, led to growing public awareness of Nazi crimes. Thanks too to popularizations, such as the 1978 American miniseries Holocaust—which was a breakout hit in West Germany—the genocide slowly evolved into the center of gravity of what historian Wilfried Mausbach terms a “shared moral universe.”

A tipping point in public consciousness came in 1985, when Ronald Reagan laid a wreath at the Bitburg military cemetery, which includes graves of former Waffen-SS soldiers. The ensuing controversy set off what is colloquially known as the Historikerstreit, or historians’ dispute. In vitriolic newspaper articles, historians and philosophers contested interpretations of the Holocaust. Those on the right sought to relativize the genocide, claiming it was on par with the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II or, even more outrageously, that it had emerged as a response to Soviet persecutions. Those on the left, generally seen as the debate’s victors, contended that the Holocaust could not be compared to other genocides and that by doing so, their conservative interlocutors were seeking to minimize both it and Germans’ culpability. The controversy crystallized the German establishment’s acceptance of the country’s responsibility for the Holocaust and its incommensurability with other atrocities.

In subsequent decades, as the Cold War ended and the country reunified, Holocaust memory was slowly canonized in German culture. A so-called “memory boom” hit Germany, with dozens of new memorials and museums springing up around the country. It was an “exhilarating” time to be in Berlin, Masha Gessen wrote last year, to see a country “looking at its own crimes, its own worst self.” The first Stolpersteine—small brass plaques engraved with information about Holocaust victims and embedded in the pavement outside their former homes—were laid by artist Gunter Demnig in 1996. There are now over 100,000 of them across Europe. Berlin’s Jewish Museum, its famous lighting-bolt structure designed by Daniel Libeskind, opened in 2001. Similarly, the idea of a Holocaust Memorial in central Berlin was first proposed in 1989. A decade later, the newly reunified parliament approved the project. In 2005, the vast memorial consisting of a sea of 2711 concrete stelae opened next to the Brandenburg gate. It now draws a million visitors a year.

This was all to be welcomed, and many international observers lauded Germany’s reckoning with its past, suggesting that it explained the health of the country’s democracy. In her 2019 book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, philosopher Susan Neiman went so far as to suggest that other nations might have something to learn from Germany about confronting difficult pasts, although she has since recanted. In an essay published last October, Neiman argued that the country’s Erinnerungskultur, or memory culture, has gone “haywire.”

Other observers also began to point out how the Erinnerungskultur had calcified, becoming a set of rituals progressively hollowed of the critical edge they were originally intended to wield. In 2021, historian Dirk Moses published “The German Catechism,” an inflammatory article that accused Germans of instrumentalizing Holocaust memory to ward off discussion of other racial atrocities, particularly the Germans’ 1904 genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples of Southwest Africa as well as the country’s support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine. According to this argument, Holocaust memory was not a bulwark of democratic governance or a promise to prevent future genocides but instead a shield against critical self-reflection and an excuse for smug self-satisfaction.

Moses’s article set off a furor of debate now often called Historikerstreit 2.0, but with the positions flipped. Now it was the old guard arguing that the Holocaust could not be compared to other atrocities. The younger progressives insisted that the ban on comparison had stifled Germans’ ability to recognize other genocides and forms of racist abuse. Israel’s war in Gaza has now made the case better than any historian could have, and more and more English-speaking readers are starting to take note of the interconnections among Holocaust memory, Zionism, and the German government’s refusal to atone for its genocide in Namibia.

Indeed, when it came to Israel, the country’s recognition of its historic responsibility to prevent genocide slowly hardened into Merkel’s 2008 formula that “the security of Israel” is the German “Staatsräson,” the reason for the state of Germany to exist. For many Germans, the past had an increasingly simple lesson. Responsibility for the Holocaust gave Germans a special obligation to protect Jewish people as represented by the state of Israel. Any criticism of Israel was therefore to be considered antisemitic, a position endorsed by Merkel’s cabinet in 2017. And because antisemitism is antidemocratic, critics of Israel were to be denied the fundamental rights of the German constitution. Yet, in its fear of losing democracy, the German state has resorted to increasingly antidemocratic measures.

Of course, the irony of such a limiting definition of antisemitism is that it pits the German government against Jews, putting it in the absurd position of censuring and even arresting Jewish intellectuals and activists on the grounds that they are antisemitic. In addition to Fraser’s disinvitation, Gessen was (initially) un-awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, the leader of Germany’s largest party abruptly called off a meeting with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, and a conference planned by scholar Michael Rothberg and artist Candice Breitz was cancelled. The journalist Emily Dische-Becker has estimated that thirty percent of those “cancelled” in Germany for criticizing Israel are Jewish, despite the fact that Jews comprise less than one percent of the country’s population. Even as Germans insist that they are fighting antisemitism, their commitment to Zionism leads them to silence and harass Jewish people in the here and now. “At this rate,” Naomi Klein quipped in December, “Germany is going to run out of Jewish intellectuals to ban.”

Democracy and Antisemitism in Postwar Germany

Even before October 7, the German government had started employing its extraordinary police powers to clamp down on criticism of Israel. In 2019, the Bundestag declared the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement antisemitic, as did numerous German states and municipalities. While the resolution was not legally binding, it recommended defunding any event or institution that endorsed the movement. The following year, after an annual arts festival in Germany announced renowned philosopher Achille Mbembe as its keynote speaker, high-ranking politicians accused him of antisemitism and called for the event to be cancelled. Palestinian events have been banned in recent years by German police and a number of public cultural institutions have lost their funding because of their criticism of Israel.

All the while, Germany’s Jewish population has been suffering a sharp increase in antisemitic violence. While mainstream German political discourse has pinned the blame on Arab and Muslim minorities, evidence shows that most of it stems from the far right—which has, at the same time, been gaining ground at all levels of government.

Although these developments may surprise foreigners used to thinking of Germany as a democratic success story, they have developed from longstanding characteristics of the postwar German state. The Federal Republic always placed strict limits on the amount and kind of democracy to which its citizens would have access, erecting powerful guardrails on the rights of citizens to organize politically, assemble in public, and express their views. At the same time, the bond between Israel and Germany, which began in the first decade after World War II, has only strengthened over the years, calcifying into the received knowledge that Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson. These lessons of the Nazi era are perhaps the reason that the German political establishment has fallen in behind Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign in Gaza, even as a majority of German voters report thinking that Israel’s response “goes too far.” But so long as the government shuts out dissenting voices, it is unlikely that anything will change.