Hans Kundnani is among the best guides to Germans’ collective psyche and politics. One should therefore take seriously his analysis of how German attitudes toward Israel are changing. Hans builds his analysis around the reaction to Gunter Grass’ controversial new poem criticizing Israel’s nuclear weapons programme:
what makes the publication of [Grass'] poem significant is that it expresses a sense of anger against Israel that – justified or not – many Germans seem increasingly to share. This anger is partly a response to Israel’s rightward shift during the past decade. But it seems also to be a product of developments in Germany and in particular the way that the Holocaust has receded in significance during the last decade. Increasingly, Germans seem to see themselves as victims rather than perpetrators.
Tags: gunter grass, hans kundnani
Kundnani:
“The anti-war poem published by Günter Grass is a subtle but straightforward example of a tendency in Germany that the historian Dan Diner has called “exonerating projection”: the relativisation of the Holocaust through the implicit equation of Israel with Nazi Germany.”
To me, less a “best guide” than a classic smear artist.
Read the poem here, and try to find the “implicit equation”: Grass writes of Germany’s “ureigenen Verbrechen,/ die ohne Vergleich sind”. Note that Grass is protesting against an act of German policy, the sale of an advanced submarine to Israel; it’s far from gratuitous.
You misunderstand. There is a great deal that’s objectionable about this poem written by this person with his history and in the context of this situation, but specifically the portions that are most relevant to the point are these (translation from the Washington Post):
“It is the alleged right to the first strike — That could annihilate the Iranian people…”
“A further U-boat should be delivered to Israel, Whose specialty consists of guiding all-destroying warheads to where the existence Of a single atomic bomb is unproven…”
It’s the implication that Israel has any intention of using nuclear weapons in a first strike against Iran “that could annihilate the Iranian people” that constitutes the most grotesque over-reaching and projection in this context. That it is the Iranian regime which has threatened Israel’s existence, not to mention its Holocaust denial, adds yet another layer to the psychological and moral obtuseness (at best) of these lines.
It’s you who misunderstand. Grass’ obtuseness is not the issue. My objection was to Kundnani’s odious and unfounded accusation that Grass is making an “implicit equation of Israel with Nazi Germany.” What he’s doing is accusing Israel of planning a war crime, which is something states in bad neighbourhoods do all the time.
I didn’t read Kundnani. Although, first, the notion that a pre-emptive attack on a threatening power’s weapons of mass destruction is a “war crime” is extraordinarily questionable in and of itself. However, to your point, “annihilat[ion] of the Iranian people” isn’t any old war crime. It’s a specific kind of war crime. This is the implicit equation. I don’t even know how implicit it is. Would you demand that he have used the word “genocide” rather than “annihilate” before the parallel is applicable, or even arguable? Good grief.
Ausloeschen: extinguish rather than annihilate, but close enough I’ll grant you. Any use of nuclear weapons involves large-scale civilian casualties, but these do not automatically make it a war crime if they are incidental and proportional to a military target. (It’s very doubtful that Dresden and Hirosohima met that test.) Grass is apparently imagining that an Israeli muclear first strike (it may not be official policy, but it’s been discused) would be on population centres. This does not make much sense, but if it were true, his language would not IMHO be out of place.
Grass and other Germans are entitled to make the argument, and have it refuted on factual or moral grounds, not by exploiting the ghosts of the dead as moral capital to deny that Germnas have no standing.
There is no evidence that Israel is contemplating the use of nuclear weapons against Iran’s nuclear program. Moreover Israel has, presumably if without acknowledging it, had nuclear weapons for 50 years or more. They’ve never threatened to use them in a first strike and no one in the Middle East or anywhere else seems particularly concerned that they might. So this is an entirely “out of place” charge notwithstanding your assertion to the contrary.
And now we can proceed to the rest of the argument. We now see that it is entirely reasonable to raise the question of the parallel that has been drawn here between “annihilate” — or if you prefer, “extinguish” (a distinction without a difference in this context) — and “genocide”. Therefore it is entirely reasonable to ask the question why on earth someone would write something that enables such a parallel to be drawn, especially given the context. So it is not unreasonable to argue that this is an act of projection. Therefore your initial assertion that Kundnani is a “classic smear artist” pure and simple is unfounded. You should retract it.
We can go on to ask how someone of Grass’s intellect — and in fact a professional writer for heaven’s sake — could be unaware of this parallel or of what it might imply, especially given the context — which again, for heaven’s sake, is raised in the “poem” itself. If witting, that’s really gross. If unwitting, that’s how defense mechanisms like projection work. But lack of self-awareness doesn’t excuse people from being judged by their actions. In sum the charge is not unreasonable. Therefore while the situation is odious, the odium attends in this instance to the act, not the charge. Grass is obliged to do some soul-searching; and if he truly believes he has done nothing wrong, to defend himself.
I’m sorry for adopting such a pedantic and harsh tone. Your cluelessness in this matter is just bizarre to me. I understand that the prospect of war in the Middle East, or of even wider scope, is scary. There are worse things than war.
Who was it said, Europeans will never forgive Jews for surviving the Holocaust? Things would be so much simpler today if it had been more thorough… I think that’s a lot of it.
Brett: More odious nonsense.
James, I don’t agree with you on this one. I doubt Brett feels the need of my concurrence, but on this he has it.
Look at the original borders of the new country of Israel when it was created. It was absurd, and yet they defended them.
Now look at a current map. Look at the area of Israel, surrounded by the area of it’s avowed enemies. Look at the population data, too. Look at the absurd gerrymandering of territory that originally created the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to be eternal threats to Israel’s security. Do you suspect that the great powers were totally dedicated to giving the new country a good chance at survival?
Then read in the newspapers and the learned foriegn policy journals how Israel ought to be less belligerant in their talk and their actions. Do you suspect that Israel should talk nice, and play nice, and its avowed enemies will suddenly do the same?
Wow. Demonstrating once again your truly reprehensible opinions.
Katja?
This is Katja-bait. right?
Unfortunately, this is a bit of a problematic situation for me, due to my somewhat complicated family tree. My mother is German; I am named after my father’s grandmother, a Russian Jew who immigrated to America in the 1920s (via Austria and Germany and marrying an American businessman there), up to and including the exact spelling she used. (I never got my parents to tell me why they didn’t anglicize the spelling, especially given that they stuck me with “Alison” as a middle name, other than: “We just liked it that way, honey.”)
So, yeah, umm. A minefield, of sorts.
Let’s start with the debate in Germany, which, as far as I can tell, is still raging. On Saturday, the conservative Welt published a poem by Leon de Winter, titled: “The Günter Gives the Jews a Poem”, a hardly-veiled allusion to the pretty sick Theresienstadt propaganda movie the Nazis made. I can’t really blame de Winter, but talk about pouring gasoline on the fire. The Welt, of course, is part of the conservative Axel Springer AG (think Murdoch-lite, though the Welt is a cut above the usual Murdoch rags) and Axel Springer was always uncompromisingly pro-Israel (he was the first person to be awarded the Leo Baeck medal and received a honorary doctorate from Bar-Ilan University).
The day before Grass had retracted part of his criticism in an interview with the left-wing Süddeutsche Zeitung, saying that he should have avoided talking about Israel in a generalizing fashion and should have made it clear that his criticism was aimed at the current Netanyahu government.
And pretty much every other German newspaper made sure they had something to say, one way or the other.
In short, the German media love themselves a good political debate. There are still plenty of dead-tree newspapers sold in Germany (considerably more on a per capita basis than in America), controversies sell copies, and you can fill plenty of column inches (or centimeters) arguing the merits of the respective positions. It’s also good for TV; German TV loves the roundtable format, and this particular debate is more or less custom-made for it. Plus, whatever else you can say against Germans, unwillingness to express an opinion (with or without a basis in facts) is not a weakness a great many of them have (See: “Stammtisch” and “Stammtischpolitik”)
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As to the actual politics and policies of the Germany-Israel relationship, this is kinda complicated. The German government has traditionally avoided getting involved in the regional politics surrounding the state of Israel; in part because of German history, but I suspect that most German chancellors were relieved that they had an excuse for staying out of Middle-East politics.
With respect to German perceptions of Israel in general, I’d say that Israel has a Netanyahu problem (not surprisingly, given that Netanyahu has had problems with winning hearts and minds elsewhere, too). Contrast the perception of Netanyahu with that of Peres or Rabin. It can be illustrative, for example, to read the English and German Wikipedia entries on Rabin’s assassination side by side. The German one almost reads like a eulogy rather than a dictionary entry, emphasizing that Rabin was attending a peace rally (the English article talks about a mass rally), quotes part of Rabin’s pro-peace speech and notes the deleterious effect his death had upon the peace process.
Independently of that, there’s also still a fair amount of latent racism and anti-semitism going on in Germany, but I would characterize that as an separate phenomenon. Obviously, anti-semites will enjoy the opportunity of piling up on Israel, but I don’t see criticism of the Israel government inherently being connected to anti-semitism, contra Hans Kundnani. You get plenty of Netanyahu-bashing from otherwise pro-Israel German media outlets if you start looking for it. Netanyahu, in a way, is Israel’s George W. Bush (to the point that amidst a lot of justified criticism he also occasionally gets undeserved flak for things he didn’t really do).
One problem, of course, it’s that sometimes it’s hard to separate countries and their governments. Let’s go back about a decade or so. We’re dealing with the aftermath of 9/11. George W. Bush is trying to figure out how to make his case for a war with Iraq; Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, is beating the anti-American drums to improve his party’s electoral prospects. And I’m a German-American who was raised bilingually, so I have a slight German accent when speaking American and a slight Midwestern accent when speaking German, so I couldn’t really deny either half of my heritage even if I wanted to. Fun times.
My German friends and relatives ask me how on Earth my country can engage in a war of aggression; my American friends and relatives ask me why my other country can engage in such stupid populism/cannot see the evil of Saddam Hussein/etc. It doesn’t help that I point out that I voted neither for Bush nor for Schröder and don’t necessarily subscribe to the policies of either. And in the end, I addressed the problem by dating an English guy who just took me for who I was rather than trying to imprint the mental image of a generic American or German upon me (I’m only partly kidding).
But, in the end, I really learned to dislike collective judgements about entire countries, especially disparaging ones. Countries are too culturally and politically diverse for that: San Francisco is not Texas, Berlin is not Bavaria. Whether those judgements are targeted at Isreal in this context, or (per Hans Kundnani — the last paragraph of his article is really something I didn’t expect to see in the Guardian) at Germany, it’s really not advancing rational discourse. I prefer it if people are less indiscriminatory. Digging into the details is more difficult, but in the end has the benefit of accuracy.
A final note: A somewhat underreported aspect of the Grass poem (as James correctly points out) is that it also prominently targets German arms exports. Grass is a pretty hardcore leftie and the topic of German arms exports, Germany being the third-largest exporter of military weaponry in the world (after the USA and Russia), has been a sticking point with the German political left for ages.
It’s worth understanding what Grass is writing about. Germany and Israel have entered into a contract whereby Israel will buy a German-made Dolphin-class sub at a below-cost price:
“Christian Schmidt, [Germany’s] secretary of state for defense, told the [Jerusalem] Post that the contract was signed a few weeks ago [i.e. in January] and that Germany had agreed to subsidize its cost… Schmidt said that Germany was looking to increase its defense cooperation with Israel and was specifically interested in learning from the IDF about training and military doctrine… Dolphin submarines are versatile and heavily-armed … It is also rumored that Israel has tested a nuclear-capable version of its medium-range “Popeye Turbo” cruise missile design for deployability from the 650mm torpedo tubes in its Dolphin Class submarines …
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/germany-may-sell-2-more-dolphin-subs-to-israel-for-117b-01528/
It seems to me that a person should be able to protest his country’s subsidized sale of a nuclear delivery device to a nation that stands outside the international system for the regulation of nuclear weapons without being labelled an anti-Semite.
On the other hand, nuclear missile subs could offer Israel second-strike capability it may currently lack. Second-strike capability could make it more possible for Israel to live with a nuclear Iran, and thus reduce current tensions.
That is something that I have also seen mentioned.
Israel has traditionally included preemptive and preventive attacks in its military doctrine out of necessity, because it is too small and too open to allow for much of a territorial defense.
A nuclear submarine force that allows for retaliatory strikes even if Israel were overrun could change that equation.
However, I’m not sure that the Middle East moving to a doctrine of mutually assured destruction would let me sleep any better.
James, I didn’t find the poem particularly offensive, but I certainly didn’t find Kundnani’s meditation on its implications offensive either. It strikes me as a bit of wishful thinking to divorce Grass’s poem entirely from Germany’s - and Gunter Grass’s - historical connections with their military past.
While I can empathize with young Germans’ desire not to be painted with the Holocaust brush, it also seems like an oversimplification to argue that Germans have no particular obligation to remember their past. The specter of American slavery hangs heavily over the US and forms a significant part of our educational curriculum, but despite the fact that I learned a great deal about that history I did not feel that I was specifically singled out for guilt by association. So the wish of young Germans to forget their past entirely seems like a push too far in the other direction. Similarly, the relationship of Germany to Israel (which was itself part of the reason for the state’s founding) is directly relevant to the discussion, even if you happen to disagree on the policy implications.
How much more so for Grass himself, who served in the Nazi military during World War II and then hid that association for many years. It seems to me to be eminently fair to assess how Grass’s history may have influenced his perceptions, and whether he may have mis-learned those lessons. As a matter of analysis, the poem appears terrible: Grass is mainly concerned about an Israeli nuclear strike on Iran, a strawman that even Israeli hawks have never broached, and which has not come to close to fruition despite Israeli nuclear capabilities lasting many years. To suggest that Grass may be exorcising personal demons in raising that specter - in a somewhat histrionic poem - seems quite reasonable. I think you may be misreading Kundnani’s essay.
Thanks Keith for linking to my Guardian piece and thanks to everyone for your comments. Just a couple of points in response to some of the comments:
1. I’m afraid Grass does implicitly equate Israel with Nazi Germany. In particular, the German verb “auslöschen” suggests genocide in general and the Holocaust in particular. None of the English translations (extinguish, annihilate, etc.) have quite the same connotation as “auslöschen” does in German. It is not a direct equation of Israel with Nazi Germany, but, as I wrote, an implicit one. There is a long history of this type of equation of Israel with Nazi Germany on the (West) German left.
2. I didn’t accuse Grass of anti-Semitism as Katja suggests. Clearly, criticism of Israel need not be anti-Semitic, though it sometimes is. Some have accused Grass of anti-Semitism since the poem was published but I didn’t, although I do think the poem was an attack on Israel rather than simply a criticism of Israeli policy.
3. The last sentence in the excerpt from the article above might sound somewhat simplistic, but it draws on academic research on collective memory trends in Germany during the last decade. Collective memories in which Germans are perpetrators (the Holocaust) have become less prevalent in political debates while collective memories in which Germans are victims (e.g. the Allied bombing of German cities during WWII) have become more prevalent in political debates. Hence my point that Germans seem to think of themselves increasingly (but not exclusively) as victims rather than perpetrators.
Hans
Thanks for taking the time to respond, Hans.
With respect to your second point, I think you may have misread what I wrote. I wasn’t saying you were accusing Grass of anti-semitism [1]. You did seem to imply a causal connection between distrust and criticism of Israel among Germans (not Grass) and latent anti-semitism (such as seeing themselves as the victims rather than perpetrators of the Holocaust). I’m somewhat skeptical of such a claim.
With respect to your first point, I fear that I do not agree with your interpretation. If you look at the German Wikipedia entry for Stanislav Petrov, you’ll find the verb “auslöschen” and the corresponding noun “Auslöschung” used to describe the result of a nuclear strike without any reference to Israel (for context, the English description of the incident is here). Google for “auslöschen” in conjunction with “Hiroshima” and you will get plenty of hits. That does not mean that the verb cannot also be used in conjunction with genocide, but it does not suggest genocide.
[1] For what it’s worth, my feelings towards Grass at the moment are neither sympathy nor antipathy, but mostly strong exasperation. On an internet forum, we’d probably classify him as a very successful troll. That he managed to lure me in, too, almost against my will, doesn’t make it any better.
I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few years about the nature of anti-Semitism and of racism generally. It isn’t simply a matter of hatred or of wishing people ill simply by virtue of their religion or race. Indeed I’m not sure that hatred or ill-wishes per se are even necessarily involved (although it may devolve to that and usually does in the end). The social and psychological functions of these syndromes are a lot more complicated than that. Projection really is the main issue. (Of sexual fears or desires for example, in a completely different context.) I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of the traditional anti-Semitic tropes have been re-invented by people who have no connection to historical anti-Semitism and indeed sincerely believe that they have nothing against the Jews, because those tropes capture the beliefs that serve the appropriate (social and psychological) purposes.
So I’m not nearly so inclined to let Grass off the hook in this instance. He even seems to come very close to holding it against us that he feels he needs to keep questioning himself about these beliefs because of his personal history. Well, he should feel that way, but it has nothing to do with the Jews, it’s got to do with having a reasonable and proper sense of guilt or shame. Getting around which is exactly the point of projection.
Mr. Kundnani, thank you for your perception and wisdom (although I don’t expect that you endorse everything I’ve said here).
Larry, adding psychobabble doesn’t help. People have attitudes towards Israel that they don’t have towards other countries, for good reasons.
I’ve *never* seen a US president criticized for not explicitly saying that US policy was 100% aligned with another country’s policies - except for Israel.
Yes they do, although whether their reasons are good, or more specifically commensurate with their anger, is an open question. However you’re responding to a topic I wasn’t talking about. Which is also interesting. Perhaps you think the explanations for racism and anti-Semitism (or for that matter sexism, or homophobia) are other than psychological and social. Chemical? By all means offer your own explanations. These are important issues.
For what it’s worth, an Ngram for “auslöschen” is here.
It’s really very simple. The above “analysis” is more about what each commenter wants to “prove” than about what’s really going on.
If you spend your entire life shouting that someone is an anti-semite, no matter what they do, then, at some point, they give up and say “fsck you — I can’t win so I’ll just do what I damn well feel like”. This is the situation Germany (and most of the rest of the world) has found itself in vis-a-vis Israel over the past fifteen years, where anything short of unconstrained praise of the most rightwing factions of Israeli politics are declaimed as anti-semitic.
What’s happening now is NOT (regardless of the paranoid fantasies of certain people) the beginning of the emergence of the Third Reich 2.0; it is rather a population collectively concluding that there’s no point in there being careful about how they criticize Israel; they can treat them and talk about them just as they did with South Africa twenty five years ago, or as they did with Burma say two years ago, and can call a spade a spade when that’s what they see.
What I find really frustrating is the Israeli government’s handling of the situation.
Grass had virtually nobody defending his position publicly (unless you count, “even if he’s wrong, he still enjoys freedom of speech” and “he is wrong, but that does not mean that he is an anti-semite”). That he accused the press of being “gleichgeschaltet” in a recent interview probably didn’t earn him any more friends, either. There was a fairly wide-ranging discussion about degrees of anti-semitism and other ancillary issues, as well as the literary quality of the poem (or lack thereof), and what the whole affair meant for German/Isreali relations, but no major newspaper that I’ve seen supported the underlying political claim of Israel being a danger to world peace. Instead, several major newspapers were starting to point out that Grass had inverted the Israel/Iran relationship:
Here’s the Süddeutsche Zeitung, for example, the same paper that originally published Grass’s poem:
Or the centrist Tagesspiegel:
(Pardon the somewhat makeshift ad-hoc translations.)
Netanyahu should have really liked where this was going (it’s not like he’s used to having pretty much all of the German press on his side). So, what does his government do? It … bans Grass from entering Israel. Because, obviously, the biggest danger that Israel was facing from the controversy was Grass suddenly and inexplicably deciding to visit Israel and to recite his poem to a spellbound Israeli audience. Riiiiiight.
Yeah. So, now Netanyahu has successfully deflected the discussion away from the dangers Israel is facing and shifted it towards a freedom-of-speech argument that in the best case may not hurt Israel too much.
Just great.
This is just silly. No one is impeding Grass’s freedom of speech. Nations usually have laws enabling them to restrict who gets to enter.
I think that making it clear just how grotesque and offensive Grass’s claims are is perfectly reasonable. If we could bar him from entering the US I’d be in favor of that. Let him be stigmatized and shunned. He’s earned it.
No, they are not actually stopping him from doing anything — my point exactly. They have, however, shifted the focus of the debate when they shouldn’t have. Unforced error.
I don’t think it’s an unforced error at all. I don’t think anybody in the Israeli government cared at all what a German poet was saying just as I think the question of whether Iran really is working on a nuclear bomb is a secondary concern for Netanyahu. The objective of the exercise is to drive a wedge between liberal Jews in the West and the center-left political parties in those countries. I think there is also the further objective of isolating Jews from their national communities and making them identify only with Greater Israel and thus with the extreme-right parties such as the Republicans in the USA and the FN in France who are prepared to support Greater Israel.
Katja, it’s relatively trivial, and as you know a result of the complicated political structure of the country and the current make-up of the cabinet. So again if people feel like seizing on the grandstanding for internal political reasons of a smaller coalition partner then they were going to seize on something. These aren’t arguments in the normal sense I’m afraid. Anyway I see nothing wrong with official expressions of disgust.
Just to chip in my slightly off-topic two cents worth:
I think when the Israelis welcomed the assassination of Rabin by electing Netanyahu, a man who campaigned and instigated for Rabin’s murder, they made a decision to change the nature of Israel from a Zionist state into a fundamentalist religious state on the Iranian model. It is a completely different country with values diametrically opposed to those of its founders. The decision of the Israelis to totally commit themselves to the sickness of Greater Israel (and drag the rest of worldwide Jewry along with them) is a commitment to travel the same road dark as that taken by the Serbs under Slobodan Misosevic. It will lead us to the same heart of darkness.
There is also a certain irony that Israel dredges up the Nazi past of Grass when it suits them even as the Israelis have themselves begun to make common cause with people on the right whose political forebears committed unspeakable atrocities during the Second World War, including atrocities against the Jews. A small example: The National Front in France is making a play for the Jewish vote and it seems that the Israeli government has decided to help them. Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor attended a luncheon given by Marine Le Pen in what I can only assume was an attempt to legitimize the heirs of Vichy. Unless perhaps he was somehow unaware of where the French Jews sent to the Nazi death camps might last have seen the FN’s slogan of “work, family, country”. If ever Ambassador Prosor ever visits Paris, I would hope the he would give equal time to the victims of Israel’s new friends by visiting the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation. There he would find the ghosts of the 200,000 Frenchmen (many of whom were Jews) deported to the Nazi death camps who would explain to him that you while you must forgive Grass, no Jew should ever forget who it was that committed these atrocities and no Jew should ever ally himself with such evil.
I think when the Israelis welcomed the assassination of Rabin by electing Netanyahu, a man who campaigned and instigated for Rabin’s murder
Thank you for writing this, Mitch. I now realize that I no longer have to pay attention to anything you say in the future. This will save me valuable time. Good day.
Really?
Do you deny that Netanyahu gave inflammatory speeches steeped in religious extremism at rallies organized by the Likud where posters portrayed Rabin in a Nazi SS uniform or being the target in the cross-hairs of a sniper and where demonstrators chanted “Rabin is a Nazi” and “through blood and fire, Rabin shall expire” and “death to Rabin”? Do you deny that Rabin himself accused Netanyahu of seeking to foment violence? Do you deny that Netanyahu called Rabin “a traitor” shortly before the murder? Do you deny that Netanyahu and the Likud created the atmosphere which led to Rabin’s death? All of these things are true and well documented.
Do you deny that Netanyahu’s supporters in the settler community called Rabin’s murder the “heavenly retribution”? And if the majority of Israelis didn’t welcome Rabin’s murder then why would they have voted to make the man who did so much to campaign for Rabin’s murder the next prime minister? Why would they elect the man who asked whether there was someone in the religious community who would ensure that the “traitor” Rabin would be unable to continue?
Netanyahu didn’t pull the trigger that day, but he did everything in his power to ensure that somebody would. What country would elect such an evil man as their leader—not once, but twice? So good day to you, too.
He doesn’t try to deny, because it’s provable.
I thank you for saying this. I echoes what I’ve felt, that Rabin’s assassination marked the end of democracy in Israel. One side can assassinate the leadership of the other side, and get away with it.