Address at the commemoration of the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht
Joseph-Carlebach-Platz, Hamburg, 9. November 2023
Who don’t want to talk about hatred of Israel should keep silent about antisemitism
By Deniz Yücel
When Daniel Sheffer [Board Chair of the Bornplatz Synagogue Foundation] invited me to this event last week, I felt very honoured, but I did have a warning and a follow-up question: The warning was that solemn commemorative speeches are not my strong suit. That wasn’t the intention at all, Daniel assured me. The follow-up question was: »Am I the only Ausländer?« (foreigner) Daniel immediately wanted to protest against the word »Ausländer«, but I didn’t let him finish. »I’m Turkish, I’m allowed to,« I said, borrowing from Oliver Polak. And I said, in essence: »Sure, 30 years ago I, together with many others, vehemently rejected that word and insisted that people like us – immigrants and their children and grandchildren – are not Ausländer but Inländer (foreigner / domestic). That’s settled today, which is why I sometimes say Ausländer, because it’s so nicely simple.«
Yet the disturbing reactions to Hamas’s mass murder of 7 October, as well as the half- and non- and yes-but reactions from parts of the immigrant communities, have made it clear that there is still a need for clarification here. Therefore let it be said here, with all emphasis: Anyone who quite rightly claims to have been born and socialised in this country, anyone who says: »I’m from Hamburg, I’m from Berlin, from Essen, I am German«, cannot evade this country’s responsibility for its history.
Of course, in an immigration society this remembrance cannot proceed throughout according to the practised patterns as before; of course people without family entanglement in the mass murder by the millions can in part have perspectives different from those of the descendants of those who planned and carried out the annihilation of the Jews in Europe, who enriched themselves through the Holocaust, who elected Hitler or allowed him, who, as soldiers of the Wehrmacht, ensured that behind the front the annihilation continued – just as Jewish Germans or the descendants of non-Jewish resistance fighters – I mean the few genuine ones, not the many imagined ones – have perspectives different from the descendants of the perpetrators.
But that changes nothing about the principle on which large parts of this society, after a decades-long and at times bitterly fought argument, have reached agreement and which today is being contested, among others, by a 20-percent party of organised resentment. This principle is: There is no Germany without Auschwitz – not even a Multi-Culti Germany, not an open, liberal, climate-neutral, let alone a self-confident Germany, no other, new, better Germany. None at all.
There is no general obligation to profess
However, outrage over the events must not lead us to forget other principles that characterise this society. For example the principle that you do not defend the rule of law by abolishing it. That also means: There is no compulsion to profess. One is required to sing along and pray along and march along only in authoritarian and, even more so, totalitarian regimes, but not in an open society. The right to freedom of expression also includes the right to remain silent. The calls for distancing and for professions of faith, repeated since 11 September, in case of doubt achieve only one thing: that, in the face of this unshakeable mistrust, people actually turn away in resignation.
But what applies to private individuals does not apply to the same degree to public figures or to institutions – above all to those that claim to represent Muslims and are very quick to condemn Islamophobic or racist incidents. Not because anyone is demanding disavowals of them, but for their own sake Muslims must face the fact that the jihadist mass murderers of Hamas also understand themselves as Muslims. Not because anyone demands it of them, but out of their own interest, Palestinian and Arab immigrants should no longer leave the role of standard-bearers to the radicals on the street. And, formulated as an ideal: Not because they must as Ausländer (foreigner), but because they want to as Inländer (domestic) and Bindestrich-Deutsche (hyphenated Germans), they will condemn every form of antisemitism – including the kind that disguises itself as supposed criticism of Israel.
Those who don’t do that, or who hide behind phrases like »Der Islam hat mit alledem nichts zu tun«, risk something quite different from sanctions: they risk their credibility. Anyone who dreams of a caliphate, or of destroying Israel, will inschallah find the door on his own.
Yet the reactions from the immigration society to 7 October were, fortunately, not so uniform. On the short walk from the entrance to the stage I was greeted several times with Hamburg’a hoş geldiniz, »Welcome to Hamburg«. And in my view it was no coincidence that some of the German politicians who, after 7 October, found the clearest words were named Özdemir, Nouripour or Bayaz.
Ignatz Bubis, of blessed memory
This, too, is an echo of the work of Ignatz Bubis, zichrono livracha, of blessed memory. Together with many others of my generation, for whom the waves of far-right violence in the post-reunification years were formative, I have not forgotten the role he played back then. At a time when immigrants were scarcely represented in public and large parts of politics and society showed all manner of understanding for the pogrom-like events of Hoyerswerda and Rostock, it was Ignatz Bubis who found the right words. For him, »Nie wieder« was always now – also in the knowledge that the step from racism to antisemitism, and from antisemitism to racism, is only a small one, as the attacker in Halle most recently demonstrated in as literal as bloody a fashion.
Yet this knowledge remains incomplete if it does not take into account what transformation this as malicious as delusional rumour about the Jews, known as antisemitism, has undergone after Auschwitz. Just as the Jews were once not regarded by the antisemites as a minority but, as Adorno and Horkheimer put it, as »Gegenrasse, das negative Prinzip als solches«, the State of Israel has assumed the role of a »Gegenstaates«. Therefore the commemoration of the Jews murdered 80 years ago requires a basic solidarity with the Jewish state of the present. A basic solidarity that, of course, does not exclude the suffering of the Palestinians. But those who do not want to talk about hatred of Israel should also keep silent about antisemitism.
A word to the Federal Chancellor
Therefore, Mr Mayor [Peter Tschentscher], allow me to address one of your predecessors with a direct word: It merits every recognition that you, Mr Chancellor, after 7 October, were the first foreign politician to visit Israel. But I find it intolerable that the Federal Government, only one week after today’s commemorations of 9 November, will roll out the red carpet for a head of state [Recep Tayyip Erdoğan] who has made himself the global standard-bearer of hatred of Israel and of solidarity with Hamas, and who also endangers the internal peace in this country. Therefore my appeal: Mr Chancellor, do not receive this antisemite!
And so that it does not remain merely symbolic politics, and since we are here in Hamburg, I would like to end with a second concrete point. Luisa Neubauer has just set out what civil society can do. But there are things that civil society cannot do: for example, close this representation of the Iranian regime disguised as a mosque, the Islamic Centre Hamburg. Madam State Secretary [Juliane Seifert from the Federal Ministry of the Interior], you have just said that it must not remain with words and that deeds must follow. Quite right. Therefore I would like to invite and call upon the Federal Government: shut it for good, this representation of the mullah regime, disguised as a mosque, without which Hamas could not have become the terror apparatus that it is today!
Never again is now, never again will be tomorrow.