22 January

Walking back from Wolf Kino with L. through the streets of Neukölln. At Reuterplatz we stop at a small vigil for Gaza. The official death toll stands around 23,000. A few photographs of children, a few candles. Fifteen or so people standing in the cold. Stationed along Reuterstrasse, with motors idling, are a dozen white police vans. The officers encircle the vigil. They look at the group as if it were assembling a bomb.

17 February

I attend the Munich Security Conference, which doubles this year as a memorial for Israeli hostages in Gaza. Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, warns an audience that if IDF forces are not permitted to finish the job in Gaza, there will be ‘Gaza Strips in London, Gaza strips in Paris, Gaza strips in Berlin’.

At the local Amerika-Haus, where a large sculpture of an elephant stands in the atrium, there is a panel on antisemitism in Germany. Hillary Clinton upbraids protesters against the war in Gaza for being suspiciously well organized. ‘Within a few days, there were organized efforts in many cities, college campuses, all across the United States and Europe and elsewhere – as far away as Australia – that had been on alert for this’, she says, ‘whether they knew exactly it was going to be October 7, or whether they were just prepared and came equipped with directions that were being circulated’. The date of the Hamas-led attack, which had – at least apparently – escaped Mossad and Shin Bet, was common knowledge in Canberra and Morningside Heights? A vast anti-colonial conspiracy? The panel passes over in silence that one third of those rounded up for antisemitic offences by German police since October 7 have been Jews.

26 February

Palestinian directors Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, and their Israeli co-directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, win the Berlinale documentary award for their film No Other Land. Abraham uses the prize ceremony as an occasion to declaim against Israeli policies. His speech is labelled antisemitic by German lawmakers and Israeli vigilantes search for him at his home in Jerusalem. When it is discovered that Claudia Roth, Berlin’s culture minister, was clapping during Abraham’s speech, she clarifies that she was only clapping for the Israeli side of the collective.

16 April

A Palestinian congress assembles in Berlin. The police shut off the electricity just in time to save the country from a livestream broadcast from 85-year-old historian Salman Abu Sitta. It calls to mind Netanyahu refusing to be in the same room as Edward Said, saying he feared Said might kill him. An indelible moment: the swift little nod of the commanding officer to his colleague one minute into Abu Sitta’s transmission, to pull the plug. His nephew, Ghassan, Rector of the University of Glasgow, who has been performing medical operations in Gaza, was turned back at BER airport. Yanis Varoufakis reported he was banned from the country as well. At the congress itself, 200 more are arrested by the 2,500 police sent to quell the proceedings. The public prosecutor’s office declares the congress cannot meet in any other location in Berlin. An Israeli flag flies over the Rotes Rathaus. It was torn down by activists last year – an ‘antisemitic’ offence – then raised again.

5 May

The FDP and CDU call for police monitoring of Berlin professors or what Bild Zeitung calls – where is Victor Klemperer? – ‘Universitäter’ (academic perpetrators). Bild publishes photos of the professors ‘who stand behind the Jew-hating mob’, i.e. students protesting the war on Gaza. The method is the same one they used when the Springer press incited the murder of Benno Ohnesorg (1967) and the shooting of Rudi Dutschke (1968) by vigilantes. The anti-Springer impulse in German society has nearly vanished. Many old 1968ers have found comfortable positions in the conglomerate’s more respectable outlets, Die Welt, etc. You can sometimes overhear them commending Israel’s advances under Dutschke’s portrait in one of the city’s nominally left bars, a bowl of European Union matches on the table.

3 June

The images from Gaza are not real. So, in as many words, says Herta Müller in the FAZ. An expert on totalitarianism, having grown up in Communist Romania, she knows it when she sees it. ‘Hamas controls the selection of images and orchestrates our emotions’, she writes. ‘Our feelings are their strongest weapon against Israel’. In order to counteract this mass manipulation of feeling, she counsels keeping faith with the Israeli military forces, and renewed scepticism toward images of burning people, pulverized buildings, starving children, whether or not they are staged by Hamas’s Hollywood division. But are Hamas also doctoring the images Israeli troops circulate of themselves prancing in the underwear and playing with the toys of the murdered? They gave this media studies specialist the Nobel Prize. 

11 June

The Bundestag passes the non-binding resolution ‘Never Again is Now: Protecting, Preserving and Strengthening Jewish Life in Germany’ with votes from every party – CDU, SPD, FDP, Greens, AfD – except Die Linke, which abstains, and Sahra Wagenknecht’s alliance which votes against it. The resolution adopts the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which in its original wording states that not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. However, the federal government removes that caveat from the text they use for the resolution, which effectively abolishes the difference between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. Now any entity deemed critical of Israeli policies can be stripped of public funding. Legal scholars note that the resolution contradicts the free-speech guarantees of the Basic Law. But this is precisely the point: Germany’s appointed lawmakers passed a resolution because they wanted to raise the pressure to conform, to encourage self-censorship, and, most critically, to endorse competitive, self-serving piety as the order of the day. They knew they didn’t need the law for that. A resolution masquerading as law would do the trick.

18 June

‘Are you an antisemite?’: the favoured opening question of the Springer press when confronted with dissenters from the German consensus. The official death toll in Gaza is around 40,000.

27 June

The ‘Act to Modernize Nationality Law’ has come into force. The law is a way for the German state to move closer to the mouth-watering Canadian system of selective immigration, boosting the skilled labour force, but screening out undesirable migrants for whom ‘antisemitism’ tests can be used as a catch-all.

2 July

Freie Universität professor Stefan Liebig, member of the executive board of the German Institute for Economic Research, circulates a letter against antisemitism in response to the professors who supported students during the Gaza war protests. Students note that Liebig has cut-and-pasted the text for the letter from a right-wing blogger. The signatories of the letter, which include self-professed experts on academic freedom and liberal norms, keep their names on the letter after the source of its language is revealed. In a message to his Freie colleagues, Liebig suggests that distance from the right may be less important than distance from antisemitism. Liebig posts a photograph of the Israeli flag extending over all of the occupied territories, including Gaza. Liebig removes the post when students point out he has cut-and-pasted it from a far-right account, but only because it ‘apparently came from an X-account that was used to spread fascist content’, not because of the territorial coordinates of the image.

17 September

Volker Beck, former chief whip of the German Greens, president of the German-Israeli Society, and indefatigable campaigner against water and medical supplies to Palestine, picks out his ‘favourites’ among the hundreds of Israeli pager attacks in Lebanon. It seems plainer by the day that the Israeli military absorbs what remains of the suppressed schoolboy fandom for the plucky Wehrmacht, fandom that, vicariously speaking, has nowhere else to go.

30 September

Berlin police, 125 of them, conduct raids in Friedrichshain, Gropiusstadt, Tegel, Britz, and Schöneberg. They are in search of five men suspected of antisemitism. No arrests are made.

23 October

Verso Books makes a casual inquiry to the German publisher of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s essays.

The response from the publisher, ça ira-Verlag, a classical anti-Deutsch institution:

On the one hand, we are delighted that Sohn-Rethel is attracting international attention and are not completely averse to doing business with Verso. On the other hand and in the words of Marx and Engels: ‘The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims’. So to be open: as long as Verso is involved in the global antisemitic campaign with its publications, we have no interest in doing a licence deal. Until the ‘Palestine Pamphlets’ are removed from the website and delusional slogans such as ‘We are all Palestinians’ are no longer to be read there, we ask you to refrain from further inquiries.

4 November

The perfectly Aryan news editor of Bild declares Judith Butler a ‘fervent antisemite’. How is the Bild opinion editor now supposed to top that?

22 November

Nan Goldin appears at the Neue National Galerie for the opening reception for her lifetime retrospective, ‘This Will Not End Well’. She makes a defiant speech. ‘Why I am talking to you Germany? Because tongues have been tied, gagged by the government, the police, and the crackdown culture.’ It does not end well. Culture Minister Roth claims she is ‘horrified’. President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Hermann Parzinger, declares Goldin’s performance ‘does not correspond to our understanding of freedom of speech’. Berlin’s Culture Senator Joe Chialo condemns Goldin’s ‘obliviousness to history’.

28 November

Internal documents leaked to the press reveal that FDP headman Christian Lindner’s plan for dismantling the Ampel coalition was titled ‘D-Day’. He continues to show his face in public.

29 November

Not to be outdone, the CDU, whose political colour is black, have gone with ‘Black is Beautiful’ for their campaign slogan. The best and the brightest of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung first alighted on ‘Black is Beautiful’ back in 1972 as a desperate measure against the cool factor of Willy Brandt, unable to compute that they appeared to be performing a psyop on themselves, unveiling the slogan while Angela Davis met with Honecker in East Berlin. They have periodically trotted it out ever since. This is the party of Friedrich Merz, the former BlackRock board member and proud philistine, who finally wrested the party away from his old antagonist, Angela Merkel.

18 December

A Gazan man whose wife and daughter were killed in Israeli airstrikes loses his quixotic suit in a Frankfurt court to stop German transfers of arms shipments and gear boxes for Merkava tanks to Israel. In its ruling on behalf of accelerated arms transfers, the court cites the ‘Never Again is Now’ non-binding resolution. So the resolution is doing its work. The official death toll in Gaza has passed 45,000, though creditable reports put the number of Palestinian dead resulting from the Israeli invasion closer to 180,000.

Read on: Sahra Wagenknecht, ‘Condition of Germany’, NLR 146.