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A few words of context:
In December 2023, journalist Masha Gessen was preparing to travel to Germany to accept the Hannah Arendt Prize, awarded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, when they discovered that the awards ceremony had been cancelled. After making inquiries, Gessen discovered that the Böll Foundation, and with it the city of Bremen, who had co-sponsored the award, had rescinded the award due to comparisons Gessen made in an article for The New Yorker between the cordon sanitaire Israel has enforced around the Gaza Strip since long before October 7, 2023 (in the name of its national security) and the ghettos into which the Nazis forced Jews as part of the Holocaust. This comparison fell foul of Germany’s official prohibition on comparing anything to the Holocaust, and especially the actions or policies of the state of Israel.
Gessen’s New Yorker article was already critical of the German government’s position regarding comparisons to the Holocaust and of Germany’s whole approach to Holocaust memory, and their criticism continued unabated in the wake of the Böll Foundation and Bremen’s snub.
In an interview with Politico, Gessen explained their investment in this question: “Part of what my essay was about was arguing that this kind of insistence on the singularity of the Holocaust — of placing the Holocaust outside of history as though it wasn’t humans who did it, as though it wasn’t Germans who are so invested in maintaining this memory — doing that makes it impossible to learn from the Holocaust. It turns ‘Never Again’ into a kind of magic spell rather than a political project.”
1
In the famous finale of Part Two of Goethe’s Faust, the court of Heaven sings of Faust, the man who, through his ceaseless striving, obtained redemption from his infernal bargain. Near the very end a “Penitent,” who a stage direction tells us “was once named Gretchen”—Faust’s lover who dies at the end of Part One—sings to Mary, the Queen of Heaven, of Faust’s advent. I quote the original German for reasons that will become obvious later:
Neige, neige,
Du Ohnegleiche,
Du Strahlenreiche,
Dein Antlitz gnädig meinem Glück!
Der früh Geliebte,
Nicht mehr Getrübte,
Er kommt zurück. (ll. 12069-12075)
Pay attention, Queen of Heaven, Du Ohnegleiche: Faust, the one I loved in youth, comes before the throne, his sufferings at an end.
In German, the epithet “Ohnegleiche” means something like “Peerless,” “Matchless,” “Incomparable.” In their attempt to capture the poetry of the moment in English, very few English translators even attempt to translate this epithet literally.
2
The modern German republic is, even by the standards of the European Union generally, a strong supporter of Israel. Germany’s official support has remained more or less constant even as the horror of Israel’s campaign of (and I am being generous) collective punishment against the people of the Gaza Strip in the wake of October 7, 2023 and its turning a blind eye to increased settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has galvanized a large swath of global opinion against Israel’s war. Repudiation of the National Socialist atrocities of the Holocaust is at the basis of the modern German republic’s political values, and its support of the state of Israel flows from those values.
The German Basic Law, Germany’s constitution, does not allow for freedom of speech and assembly akin to that allowed in the United States pursuant to the First Amendment to its Constitution. The Nazi party is illegal, as is hate speech inspired by Nazi rhetoric, especially its antisemitic rhetoric. More generally, cultural entities sponsored by the German state are allowed to withdraw support from individuals who have expressed anything they perceive to be antisemitic.
In judging what is and is not antisemitic, the Office of the Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Antisemitism, employs a 2016 definition of antisemitism promulgated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (“IHRA”). The IHRA definition is controversial in many circles because, in addition to covering the most paradigmatic and unquestionable antisemitic acts and expressions, also declares it antisemitic to draw comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, regardless of the factual accuracy of the comparison or the nuance or caveats with which it is expressed.
The German implementation of the IHRA definition by its Commissioner takes it to condemn virtually anything that compares the Holocaust to anything else, ever. In 2020, the Commissioner, Felix Klein, declared the philosopher Achille Mbembe antisemitic, ostensibly because he had previously compared the Holocaust to colonialism and contemporary Israeli policy towards the Palestinians to the apartheid system in South Africa. What the German government says it is opposing goes by many names: “Holocaust trivialization,” “Holocaust relativization,” “levelling of the Holocaust.” Of course there are blatantly reprehensible examples of this, the most obvious of which is, of course, straight-up Holocaust denial. The German government’s current policy, however, would notoriously forbid German Jewish intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein from speaking in Germany, since they were each in their own ways vocal about Israel’s violence towards the Palestinians and their attitude towards Holocaust memory, but also gets employed today against Jewish critics of Israeli policy.
Germany, more than any other country besides Israel, has erected the caution against comparing anything else to the Holocaust into an official state policy. It’s a suave dialectical move, really: the Holocaust takes its place in history as an unrepeatable, incomparable event, with Germany’s guilt for it fixed, impossible to displace, part of the unassailable edifice of state memory—but the event is also frozen in 1945, without historical echoes, Germany’s guilt for it receding further and further into the past every day, every year. The Holocaust remains as it is, literally unrepeatable. Ohnegleiche.
3
In a now-rare monograph on Edmund Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness from his lectures of 1905, Gérard Granel, a writer prone to memorable lapidary statements, comments on Husserl’s rejection, early in the Lectures, of Franz Brentano’s theory that our internal consciousness of time passing is a product of the imagination. Granel writes: “[The phenomenological critique] returns to this point to deny that the original intuition of time could ever be “a creation of the imagination,” no more than life is an illusion of death, wakefulness an image of a dream. Plato, Descartes, and Brentano are on one side; Husserl is on the other.”[1] Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness is not without its discontinuities, but its overall tonality is one of continuity, one in which the past does not die and convert into a representation of the imagination, a cluster of monuments, just for its becoming past. The past is, for lack of a better term, alive.
Husserl was born in 1859 in Prossnitz, then part of the Austrian Empire but now part of the Czech Republic. His family was Jewish, but in his adult life he was thoroughly assimilated, nominally a Lutheran but above all else a philosophy professor—which meant, in prewar Germany, being a civil servant. He was nearing the end of a distinguished career as a full professor at Freiburg University when the 1933 National Socialist anti-Jewish legislation led to a policy of “bringing the universities under the Führer principle.” Husserl was briefly dismissed from the University entirely before being reinstated, but the handwriting was on the wall: he was denied the ability to publish in Germany, denied travel visas, ultimately withdrawn from the rolls of lecturers. He died in 1938 embittered by the way his country, the country he had served faithfully, the country for whom his son, Wolfgang, died in World War I, had so reduced his circumstances.
The National Socialist policy of bringing the German universities to heel went by the general name Gleichschaltung.
4
Goethe famously had little patience for orthodox Christianity in any of its manifestations. The final redemption scene in Faust, in which the “Penitent, once known as Gretchen,” addresses Mary, trades in Christian symbolism but isn’t an attempt to catalog orthodox belief, unlike, say, Dante’s Paradiso. In fact, the Penitent’s calling Mary “Ohnegleiche” may perhaps be a little tongue-in-cheek on Goethe’s part, since for the general run of Christian theologians, much less the theologians of the other Abrahamic faiths, only the Godhead is literally “Ohnegleiche”: that is, utterly peerless, exceeding any point of direct comparison, so much so that when God in the book of Exodus names God’s self to Moses, God only offers an empty tautology: “I am that I am.”[2] Theological opinion differs on the extent to which we can talk about the Godhead, since to do so means to use human language devised for talking about ordinary created things, and, if we can even talk of the Godhead, what worldly things the Godhead is most like and hence what language is appropriate.
Calling Mary “Ohnegleiche,” though? It’s at least odd if one is a Marian theologian. (I think so, anyway, only being an amateur, abstract sort of theologian myself.) Of course there is only one Mary, not two or seven or a thousand; in that sense she is without peer. Maybe that is what Goethe is after here. Or it’s just poetic license. But part of what makes Mary attractive theologically is that she is a mediator between humanity and God in a way different than Jesus, he who is both God and man. Mary is, as the title of a recent book by Catholic theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson put it, “truly our sister”:[3] in other words, she’s like us, and especially like women, being herself a woman. She isn’t remote, aloof, off-putting.
5
Germany’s—and Israel’s—insistence that one cannot, under any circumstances, compare any actions or policy of Israel with respect to the Palestinians to National Socialism or the Holocaust does not, of course, prevent Israel from liberally comparing its enemies to Nazis. Israel, and especially the Israeli right, has, almost since its inception, wielded the memory of National Socialism and the Holocaust as both sword and shield. Sword, in that it gets to equate Hamas and the Palestinians and its other critics with Nazis, regardless of the tenuousness of the comparison, leading to absurd excesses such as Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem before World War II, having the second-longest entry in the American Encyclopedia of the Holocaust next to Hitler’s.[4] Shield, in that even the most obvious parallels between certain aspects of the National Socialist genocide of Jews and Israel’s policy with respect to the Palestinians yield angry op-eds in Western publications calling for a stop to weaponizing the memory of the Holocaust.
Contemporary Israel is, in some ways, just another country in the grips of right-wing nationalism, like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or the Trumpist faction in US politics. Like all such right-wing states and parties, rhetorical consistency is not its strong suit. But it’s not as if any of these right-wing factions is aiming at consistency and failing. No, the message in this instance is: You don’t get to say what is like Nazism and the Holocaust; we do. We refuse to see ourselves in the mirror you are holding up to us. You have no right to hold a mirror in front of our face; you are not our peer.
6
In 1968, after the 1967 Six-Day War left Israel in control of Gaza and the West Bank, Patrick Modiano published his first novel, La place de l’étoile. It was the first in Modiano’s long and illustrious career of novels that interrogate the complicated history of France’s complicity with the Holocaust and the contested struggle over that memory and its attempted erasure.
The novel’s protagonist, Raphaël Schlemilovitch, is a French Jew who undergoes a phantasmagoric journey of memory and imagination reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut or Mel Brooks. Schlemilovitch, the son of a Jewish collaborator with Vichy France, begins the work as an antisemite working for the Gestapo in Geneva. His travels, real or fictitious, take him to Vienna, where he becomes the “official Jew” of the Third Reich and Eva Braun’s lover.
He then ends up in Israel—Schlemilovitch’s journey obviously has no regard for historical time—where he is intercepted by the Commission for Youth and Moral Development and its commissioner, Tobie Cohen. Cohen’s agents found telltale signs of European Jewry in Schlemilovitch’s suitcase: a volume of Proust, Franz Kafka’s Journals, photographs of Charlie Chaplin, Erich von Stroheim, and Groucho Marx. Israel’s Commission on Youth and Moral Development will not tolerate this nostalgia, this effete decadence, in his country.
“Listen to me,” Cohen tells Schlemilovitch: “You find yourself now in a country that is young, vigorous, dynamic. From Tel Aviv to the Dead Sea, from Haifa to Eilat, Jewish unease, fever, tears, misfortune interest no one anymore. No one! We no longer want to hear about the Jewish critical spirit, Jewish intelligentsia, Jewish skepticism, Jewish contortions, humiliation, unhappiness… (Tears flooded his face.) We leave all that to young European esthetes like you! We are energetic guys, square of jaw, pioneers—not Yiddish singers like your Kafka and Proust and Chaplin!”[5] He gives Schlemilovitch a choice: either he repents of his “Jewish cosmopolitanism” and gets reformed at a “penitentiary kibbutz” or submits to a savage beating and gets thrown out of the country. Schlemilovitch, who is nothing if not a survivor, chooses the kibbutz.
The reform doesn’t take, though, and just as he is returned to France and shot in the head by Cohen’s goon squad he wakes up on Sigmund Freud’s couch in Vienna. Freud tries to reassure him that, despite appearances to the contrary, he has throughout his fantastic tale been the victim of his own paranoid delusions. Himmler is dead, the world is pacified; no one is trying to get him, because, as Freud puts it: “You are not a Jew, you are a man among other men, that’s all.” (Never mind, of course, that Freud died in exile in London in 1939, five years before the end of the war in Europe and six years before Himmler’s death by suicide in 1945.) Schlemilovitch looks out Freud’s window and ponders the cure Freud is offering: “The world, full of amazing workshops, of buzzing beehives. Beautiful Potzleindorfer Park, right there, the greenery and its sun-drenched paths.”
We do not know what Schlemilovitch decides: the novel ends with him telling Freud, “I am so tired…so tired.” Does he accept the path Freud offers him in which he is just “a man among men,” his Jewishness, with all its complications, erased? Or does he take back up the heavy burden of his memory as a European Jew?
If Schlemilovitch is meant to be any relation to the author, he definitely chooses the latter. Modiano defies the hagiographic tendency in Holocaust memorialization, instead focusing on French Jewish collaborators, profiteers, crooks, teenage girls who run away from their parents. All inconvenient, perhaps even unpleasant, memories, but as Modiano put it in a 2020 interview on the occasion of the English translation of his novel Invisible Ink (Encre sympathique):
These are the two contradictory functions that have always stood out to me with respect to memory … On the one hand, a long-buried memory that suddenly resurfaces is like invisible ink that appears on the page after it is chemically treated. On the other hand, an unpleasant memory that seemed to have been erased with time, but which reappears like a blackmailer, shows us that we are at the mercy of certain “silences” in our memory. But these silences risk rupturing one day or another.
7
On the moon one can scream and scream and no one will hear because there is no air and hence, no sound. There is nothing it sounds like to be a scream on the moon. It does not echo into the future.
For better or worse, we do not live on the moon, and what we scream echoes, reverberates. What we do also. Silences rupture here. No matter how much the machines of war make Gaza look like the surface of the moon, there is still oxygen. How else would the fires burn, the bombs explode?
The long, painful history of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians from 1948 forwards has echoes. It is arguably itself an echo. I am a white American Christian, arguably the last person who should be holding up a mirror to Israel’s behavior; and yet, it’s happening in a world I share, to other humans both like me and unlike me, gleich and ungleich. I long to live in a world whose carefully constructed silences of historical memory can be brought into the light before they come back to blackmail us. I don’t want that for anyone.
Yet we currently live in a world full of powerful actors not only committed to maintaining this historical silence, this selective historical memory existing in a vacuum, like a museum on the moon, but also committed to doubling down on the erasure of those who might have a different story to tell.
It makes me tired. So very tired.
[1] Granel, Gérard. Le sens du temps et de la perception chez E. Husserl (Paris : Gallimard, 1968), p. 42 (translation mine).
[2] There is also, of course, the Tetragrammaton, which Moses Maimonides calls the Shem ha-meforash or nomen proprium of God (Guide for the Perplexed, I.LXI). But the Tetragrammaton does not describe God any more than my proper name describes me. All of the rest of the “names” of God—even “I am that I am”—“convey to us some notion of the perfections of the Creator, or … express qualities of actions emanating from Him.” Id., I.LX (trans. M. Friedländer).
[3] Johnson, Elizabeth A. Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints. Continuum, 2006.
[4] Pappé, Ilan, Ten Myths About Israel (London: Verso, 2017), p. 64. Pappe explains: “In the circumstances [of the British Mandate in Palestine al Husayni] was forced into the arms of his enemy’s enemy, in this case Italy and Germany. While in political asylum in Germany for two years, he came under the influence of Nazi doctrine and confused the distinction between Judaism and Zionism. His willingness to serve as a radio commentator for the Nazis and to help recruit Muslims in the Balkans to the German war effort no doubt stains his career. But he did not act any differently from the Zionist leaders in the 1930’s, who themselves sought an alliance with the Nazis against the British Empire, or from all the other anticolonialist movements who wanted rid of the Empire by way of its alliance with its principal enemies.” (63-64)
Pappé is one of the Israeli “New Historians” who starting in the 1980’s argued that the expulsion of Palestinians after the formation of Israel in 1947, rather than being a matter of “voluntary evacuation” or of an unplanned outcome of Israel’s response to Palestinian intransigence, was instead a deliberate and planned act of ethnic cleansing. See e.g. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld; 2007). Before leaving Israel for London in 2008, he was formally condemned by the Israeli Knesset.
[5] Modiano, Patrick. La place de l’étoile (Paris : Gallimard, 1968), p. 185-6. Translation mine.
Thought Required; Pants Optional. 