“‘Absolutely Appalling’A New Wave of Anti-Semitism Sweeps Across Germany”, Der Spiegel
By Jörg Diehl, Deike Diening, Maik Großekathöfer, Tobias Rapp und Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt, Berlin, 27.10.2023
Hamas’ terror and Israel’s counterattacks have unleashed levels of anti-Semitism not seen in years in Germany. Jews are living in fear and now wonder if they should leave the country. The political response so far appears to be doing little to change the situation.
Ivar Buterfas-Frankenthal, a 90-year-old with a wild mane and alert eyes, is one of the last living Holocaust survivors. He is sitting in his living room in Bendestorf, a community in the state of Lower Saxony, and talking about the anti-Semitic incidents that have occurred in Germany recent days. “We Jews are once again easy targets for all the idiots walking our streets,” he says.
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 44/2023 (October 28th, 2023) of DER SPIEGEL.SPIEGEL International
The house where he lives with his wife Dagmar is nothing short of a fortress. The window panes are made of bulletproof glass, and more than 20 surveillance cameras have been installed on the property, with their images appearing on a monitor placed next to the fireplace. After the sun goes down, spotlights illuminate the property. Buterfas-Frankenthal says he has received two dozen death threats over the years. One caller smeared him as a “Jewish swine” and told him he had built a box for him, even testing it out by gassing a pig that weighed 85 kilograms.
Ivar Buterfas-Frankenthal, Holocaust survivorFoto: Maria Feck / DER SPIEGEL
Buterfas-Frankenthal has made it his life’s work to tell the story of his survival under National Socialism. For 30 years now, he has been a guest speaker at schools and universities and appeared in theaters and town halls to warn against xenophobia and anti-Semitism. For his commitment, he has been bestowed with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, First Class, the World Peace Prize and the European Human Rights Medal. Photos of Helmut Kohl, Willy Brandt, Václav Havel and Mikhail Gorbachev are all hanging in his basement. He’s met them all.
He has told his story in public precisely 1,563 times, most recently in Hesse last week. But something was new: For the first time, he had police protection, he says. Two officers in black accompanied him as he spoke to high school students in a movie theater in the college town of Marburg. And in nearby Giessen, two patrol cars were parked on campus as he told of Nazi atrocities in the lecture hall.
Buterfas-Frankenthal finds it “absolutely appalling” that police officers must now provide him with protection when he speaks about the Holocaust and the importance of not forgetting what happened.
Does this make him worry about his children and grandchildren? “If they want to emigrate, they should let me know,” he says. “I’ll give them the money.”
A Watershed Moment
Since Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7 and murdered more than 1,400 Jews, including elderly people and children, Germany has also been gripped by a new wave of anti-Semitism.
In Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood, Palestinian terror sympathizers happily handed out baklava on the day of the attack, and a snack bar in the town of Bad Hersfeld in the state of Hesse, cut prices in half for two days after the horrific attack. In Berlin’s central Mitte district, Molotov cocktails landed in front of the Kahal Adass Yisroel Synagogue. In Duisburg, meanwhile, police arrested an Islamist they suspect may have been planning to drive a truck into a pro-Israeli demonstration. And at a solidarity rally in Munich, an Iraqi threatened: “Fucking Jews, we’re going to kill you all.”
Previous escalations of the Middle East conflict, including those in 2014, 2017 and 2021, have seen hatred and violence spill over into Germany. But the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic outbursts have likely never been as massive or as numerous as they are now. Police have counted some 1,800 politically motivated crimes since Hamas attacked Israel. “What we are experiencing now is a watershed,” says Thomas Haldenwang, the president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, which tracks extremism in the country.
German politicians are shocked, and their reaction has been in line with what the country’s difficult history demands. “We must now show what ‘Never Again’ really means,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said during a visit to the New Synagogue in Dessau, wearing a kippa on his head. “It is intolerable that Jewish people are today once again living in fear – in our country, of all places,” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said at a rally held at the Brandenburg Gate on Sunday.
But will words be followed with actions?
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Israeli Ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor (right) attend the opening of a synagogue in Dessau, Germany. Foto: Hendrik Schmidt / picture alliance / dpa
The pressure against supporters of Hamas and other anti-Israeli activists in Germany is set to be increased. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is preparing to ban certain events and to deport Islamists. “Anyone who glorifies the terror of Hamas and anyone who threatens Jews will be prosecuted with the full force of the law,” says the politician, a member of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD). Efforts to protect Jewish and Israeli institutions have also been strengthened.
The tone of politicians has so far been resolute, but overall, the policy response feels a little helpless. If Israel is unable to prevent an attack like the one perpetrated by Hamas, then how will Germany be able to provide a security guarantee that excludes the possibility of terror against Jews?
“Protecting Jewish life is a responsibility of the state – but it is also a civic duty!” the German president admonished on Sunday. But what happens if fewer and fewer citizens are fulfilling their duty? When the appeal fades?
A Bitter Realization
It’s not just the open hatred on the streets that frightens Jews. It’s also the bitter realization of how many minds in which anti-Semitism has taken root – among those born in Germany, among immigrants, among staunch neo-Nazis and even among cultured people who consider themselves to be intellectuals.
In Hamburg’s Harburg district, one young man with immigrant roots shouted at television cameras: “I’m for Adolf Hitler, gas the Jews!” And in the Dorstfeld district of Dortmund, neo-Nazis hung a banner from a balcony reading: “Israel is our misfortune.” In Berlin, apparently leftist youth could be heard chanting: “Free Palestine from German guilt.”
Something has indeed shifted in Germany, the country that perpetrated the Holocaust. Solidarity with Israel and the Jews appears to have become threadbare. Not among the country’s leaders, but clearly with many people. Hostility toward Jews has gripped broad strata of society.
Even before the new war in the Middle East, anti-Semitism had risen noticeably in Germany. In 2023, for the first time in years, the authors of Germany’s “Mitte” study, which probes the German population for anti-democratic and xenophobic attitudes, found a dramatic increase in openly anti-Semitic positions. Some 11.8 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that “the influence of Jews is still too great today.”
It was clear red flag.
Gasoline on the Fire of Anti-Semitism
“What was long considered unspeakable has become permissible again,” says Bielefeld conflict researcher Andreas Zick, who coordinates the study. He says this is partially linked to the rise of the right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and others subscribing to the exclusionary “völkisch” identity of nationality based on blood. Furthermore, during the coronavirus pandemic, anti-Semitic conspiracy narratives seemed to spread as rapidly as the virus. There were myths of powerful people in the background, such as George Soros or the Rothschilds, who supposedly wanted to use the vaccine to exert broad control. Some protesters even wore yellow stars with the words “unvaccinated.” Felix Klein, the government’s federal commissioner for Jewish life in Germany, described the pandemic as an “accelerant for anti-Semitism” in Germany.
These days, hatred of Israel and Jews among young people from immigrant communities and radical Muslims in particular is becoming increasingly obvious. From October 7 until the middle of this week, police had counted 1,254 politically motivated crimes, which they ascribed to the category of “foreign ideologies” – secular ideologies imported to Germany from outside the country – in addition to 172 categorized as “religious ideology.”
“Free Palestine” graffiti in Berlin’s Neukölln district Foto: Vladimir Menck / SULUPRESS.DE / picture alliance
A new variant of anti-Semitism is rearing its head on the left, cloaked in the guise of solidarity with the Palestinians. It has a new quality and goes beyond the hostility to Israel that anti-imperialists on the left have harbored for decades. Meron Mendel has coined the term “woke anti-Semitism” to describe it.
Mendel, the director of the Anne Frank Education Center, which raises awareness about the consequences of discrimination and prejudice, and also a historian and father of three, is currently on a book tour. It has taken him across Germany, to places like Hohenems, Freiburg, Schorndorf and Heidenheim. His book, out in German, is called “Talking about Israel.” As of October 7, it has taken on a whole new urgency.
Mendel, 47, who grew up on a kibbutz, is now no longer just the academic observer and chronicler. In a phone conversation, he describes lying in bed at night being haunted by the images of massacre victims.
A few days ago, he says, he did a reading at a “left-leaning immigrant club” in Bavaria, and Palestinians also sat in the audience. He says he was surprised: “Their thoughts were exclusively with the victims of the Israeli counterattacks in Gaza.” He, on the other hand, still finds himself preoccupied by the “civilizational abyss” that opened up during the Hamas attacks.
“How can men who are fathers torture and murder children?” he asks.
“Never again is now”: Memorial candles for the victims of Hamas terror at Bebelplatz square in Berlin Foto: Monika Skolimowska / picture alliance / dpa
For many years, Mendel criticized the government of Israel, campaigning against the occupation and in favor of an independent Palestinian state. But now he is shocked by the “complete lack of empathy” among those who, as he says, focus exclusively on Palestinian matters. “They completely ignore the lives of Jews,” he says.
Mendel says elements of the cultural scene are also finding it surprisingly difficult to clearly condemn Hamas, “as if they were left-wing freedom fighters and not a fundamentalist terrorist organization.”
Meager Words of Regret
Documenta 2022, the leading international art show in Kassel, Germany, already demonstrated that things were changing for the worse. The show was widely criticized that year for including anti-Semitic works: One included a soldier with a pig’s face and a scarf bearing the Star of David.
Now, Mendel says, all you have to do is look at the long list of international artists and intellectuals who signed an open letter in Artforum magazine. They include famous artists like Nan Goldin, gender studies pioneer Judith Butler and fashion designer Martin Margiela.
In the letter, they call for “Palestinian liberation” and describe themselves as witnessing a “genocide.” But there is no condemnation of Hamas’ crimes, “not even in the fine print,” Mendel complains. Only after several days was the letter amended to include a few meager words of regret for the Israeli dead. Mendel bitterly notes that he currently finds more common ground with conservatives than with leftists, despite the fact that he has always seen himself as being a part of the left.
In the worldview of young activists, in particular, an exaggerated form of anti-racism has become a central pillar of their thinking. Fed by postcolonial discourses and the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, they divide the world into black and white, privileged and disadvantaged, perpetrators and victims. In their eyes, the Israelis are privileged and the Palestinians disadvantaged. Apparently, even the most brutal massacres can be disregarded with the help of that thinking.
Anti-Israeli activists chant in front of the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. Foto: Maja Hitij / Getty Images
And that, it seems, can set the stage for scenes like the one that unfolded in front of Germany’s Foreign Ministry this week, where a group of activists dressed in hipster clothing gathered on the streets, chanting: “Free Palestine from German Guilt.”
Terms like the “cult of guilt” had previously only been heard in Germany from the extreme right wing. Extremists have been claiming for decades that German elites bow to Israel and the world because of the Nazi crimes. But now, it appears that some on the left are also longing for Germany to be freed from the its problematic history.
Marina Chernivsky is a psychologist who runs OFEK, a counseling center for victims of anti-Semitism that has offices in five German states. She says the number of requests at her center has increased thirteen-fold since October 7. “We’ve been experiencing exceptionally high volume for three weeks,” says Chernivsky, who was born in Lviv, Ukraine, grew up in Israel and came to Berlin in 2001.