The following interview with historian Michael Wolffsohn originally appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on July 8, 2024, and is published here in English translation by permission. See Russell A. Berman’s post today on TelosScope for comments on this interview. For background on the incident on the Markus Lanz talk show, click here. Translated by Mark S. Weiner.
Historian Michael Wolffsohn says that for Jews in Germany, the past has become present. Nobody in Germany should be complacent. An interview.
Mr. Wolffsohn, last week you were a guest on the Markus Lanz talk show on [the television channel] ZDF. The broadcast was about Israel and the Palestinians and the threat to Jewish life in Germany. After a little more than an hour, you stood up and said that you didn’t want to take part in “agitprop.” You were referring to the comments of author Deborah Feldman, who was also in the group. Why “agitprop”?
Ms. Feldman argues like the Western New Left of the 1960s. And since I’m a ’68er, at least in generational terms, though not ideologically, I know the technique. It’s a classic method of left-wing agitation, in this case about the Jewish issue. Ms. Feldman veers from one orthodoxy to another, from Jewish to left-wing orthodoxy. Both are equally anti-Israel. For Jewish orthodoxy [for instance, some outlier sects such as the ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic community, who are at odds with mainstream Haredi and Modern Orthodox Judaism—trans.], the State of Israel is blasphemy, and for the Left, the State of Israel is also unacceptable. In this respect, Ms. Feldman has remained true to herself.
The position claims that Jews aren’t safe in Germany because Germany has bound its state interest with Israel’s. Germany is preventing peace in the Middle East. If Jews feel unsafe in our country, it’s the fault of the state and its institutions, especially the police. Deborah Feldman claims that she almost has a heart attack when she simply beholds a German police officer.
This is total nonsense. And it confuses different issues. The German state wants to protect Jews. Unfortunately, it can’t. It wants to, but it can’t. It’s the same in other countries. It might also be noted that on her “X” account, Ms. Feldman equated the democratically legitimate police force of the Federal Republic of Germany with the Gestapo. This is an insane, provocative, unacceptable assessment that’s only made by orthodox leftists who polemicize against the democratic German state without analyzing it.
How can we explain that antisemitism has become more prevalent since October 7 than it’s been for a long time? One might have expected that after the Hamas massacre there would be solidarity with Jews. But the opposite is the case. Antisemitism broke out on the internet and on the streets before the Israeli army advanced into the Gaza Strip.
That’s right, but the description needs to be slightly amended. There’s been anti-Israel and anti-Jewish militancy since 1967. The Hamas terrorism of October 7 then gave left-wing and Muslim antisemites as well a green light to show their hatred of Jews in full force and in a seemingly more progressive society. The dam broke. But at its core this isn’t a new development. Beyond the Jewish-Israeli issue, we can perceive a fundamental ethical decadence in Western societies. What’s evident here is the reversal of victim and perpetrator. One can use better or worse arguments for or against respective Israeli policies, including against or for Israel’s military action on, mind you, seven fronts, not just the front in Gaza. But solidarity with the perpetrators, the identification with the perpetrators of the massacre, with terrorists who brutally massacred 1,200 people, is a sign of ethical decadence, regardless of whether it’s about Jews or non-Jews.
This phenomenon is particularly evident at universities. What do you think of that?
This isn’t a new phenomenon either, neither in relation to Zionism and Jews nor in relation to the ethical foundations of Western societies. Not only in Germany but throughout the Western world, universities are strongholds of anti-Zionism. In Germany that’s not just the Freie Universität Berlin [the Free University of Berlin] but also, for instance, the universities in Frankfurt and Marburg. At the same time, there’s anti-Americanism throughout the West, not least in America, originating in opposition to the Vietnam War, about which a lot of negative things could be said. But it wasn’t just an attack against America’s war in Vietnam but against the foundations of the West, against the ethics of the West as such. A specific, dramatic, yet partial deficit of Western ethics was projected onto the whole. Now for the historical dimension. After the last semi-free elections on March 5, 1933, the professors in Germany were the first to be among the “March soldiers” who defected to the National Socialist regime [the term “March soldiers,” used originally to describe liberals killed in the Revolution of 1848, is used here in an ironic idiom to refer to individuals who joined the Nazi Party out of professional expediency—trans.]. This wasn’t an isolated case, it’s a pattern. Intellectuals or purported intellectuals and the highly educated clearly have big holes when it comes to sentimental education. This is nothing new and has a lot to do with opportunism. The mainstream at universities in Germany and throughout the Western world has been anti-Zionist since 1967. It’s part of being respectable. It includes a little knowledge and a lot of opinion as well as the scientifically disastrous accumulation of lots of knowledge to cement one’s own views. All it takes is one occasion for this anti-Zionism to spill over and for anti-Judaism to break out because all Jews are viewed as Israel’s henchmen. In Shakespeare words, “Though this be madness, yet there is a method in it.”
Here too we see a reversal of roles. Two hundred university teachers sign an open letter pronouncing students’ right to peaceful protest, in this case against Israel. The fact that this protest isn’t always so peaceful and that Jewish students see themselves as under threat isn’t an issue in the slightest. I have the impression that antisemitism is now mainstream, followers are jumping on board and view themselves as the majority. Surveys always say that around twenty percent of people in Germany and in other countries are antisemitic. I would say it’s much more.
You’re absolutely right. The quasi-magic number of twenty percent only describes a target group that espouses open, no-holds-barred antisemitism. When asked “Do you have anything against Jews or not?” every leftist and left-wing liberal will say: I’ve got nothing to do with antisemitism. People who describe themselves as “critics of Israel” don’t see themselves as antisemitic. They may not be subjectively, but that’s their objective effect. Because anyone who questions the existence of the Jewish state pulls the rug from under everyone’s feet. At the end of the day, a Jewish state is the only way to ensure the survival of every Jew. With opinion polls thus far we grasp only right-wing antisemitism, not left-wing and Muslim antisemitism.
You said that past has become present. What do you mean by that?
For 3,000 or “only” 2,000 years, depending on the historical classification, Jewish life has always been a contingent existence. My generation, including me, considered massive hatred of Jews to be a thing of the past—history. That our physical existence and quality of life in everyday Germany could be revoked, that I wouldn’t have expected. Most of us didn’t expect that. We thought that our existence was secured, in part because the state wanted to protect Jewish life—but, I repeat, it cannot. That is the fundamental problem, and in this respect the past is present. On the other hand, there is a basic difference. If we compare contemporary history, the history of National Socialist Germany, with that of today’s Federal Republic, one can’t say that we have a comparable situation to 1933. Back then, the German state sought to discriminate against Jews and then to liquidate them, today it wants to protect them. But it can’t.
The sad thing is that someone like Deborah Feldman claims exactly that, that the German state in 2024 is like the one in 1933, which is why you wanted to leave Markus Lanz’s broadcast.
Ms. Feldman is the Jewish alibi, the useful idiot of antisemites of every variety, especially antisemites on the left. Ms. Feldman is just a latest version of Jewish antisemitism that’s always existed as a Jewish mini-minority. There are German haters in Germany, in France there are France haters. Some people find Jewish antisemites somehow more interesting.
Do you think that a controversial, intra-Jewish debate about Israel and Hamas, Israel and Germany, and Jews in Germany, like the one you had on Markus Lanz with Adriana Altaras, Michael Fürst, and Deborah Feldman, is damaging to the Jewish community in our country?
No. Friends have told me that it’s not advisable to air internal Jewish disagreements. That on Markus Lanz’s show, Jews are, so to speak, put on stage. I can’t agree. I think it’s part of the open society that, thank goodness, we have, to engage in disagreements in public with better or worse arguments. I consider the open and public expression of different points of view, not only within the Jewish community but in general, to be indispensable.
What’s needed so that, as you say, the history doesn’t continue to become present? If the German state wants to protect Jewish life in Germany but can’t, if Jewish people think about emigrating because they’re not safe here, what has to be done—who has to do what?
I always try to see Jewish issues in a larger context. It’s not the case that the safety only of Jews in Germany is more at risk than previously, but also that of non-Jews. The number of violent acts against innocent citizens has increased dramatically. This has to do with demographic, population-level political changes. I say this in a totally nonjudgmental manner: because of the large number of people from culture areas in which violence as a familial, as an intra-societal, and especially as an inter-state phenomenon is an everyday occurrence, we have a new dimension of insecurity in German and western European society. This means that violence against Jews is part of the internal insecurity of Western societies. What’s to be done? I oppose special treatment for Jews. We need more security in general. Inside and outside. In this structurally pacifistic society of western Europe in general and in Germany in particular, this is not a popular topic. That is plausible and historically and psychologically understandable, but it is unrealistic in relation to the present. The state has to take its monopoly on violence seriously, and it fundamentally doesn’t do that enough, and not just with regard to Jews. The Jewish minority is structurally more at risk than other population groups. But this doesn’t mean that other population groups aren’t at risk. When distance from security matters reigns in certain parts of society, domestic security through the police and courts, external through the military, there can be no effective protection. Until February 24, 2022, when the Russian army attacked Ukraine, hardly anyone was bothered that the Bundeswehr could barely carry out its function. Since then, a certain reversal, a “turning point,” has been initiated, but it hasn’t yet been completed. I’d differentiate domestic security. I’d say that the vast majority of citizens in Bavaria view the police as “friends and helpers.” In some places, for example, in Berlin, police officers are “cops” or “pigs.” Ultimately, as with Deborah Feldman, they’re equated with the Gestapo. Anyone who thinks like that can’t have domestic security. And, mind you, this isn’t just about Jews in Germany.
There was a scandal on the Markus Lanz show when author Deborah Feldman asserted that the police, the Bundeswehr and the [domestic intelligence service], the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, are infiltrated by right-wing extremists. She confessed to being afraid of the state and to have “a heart attack” whenever she sees a police officer. “Mr. Lanz, I can’t take this,” said Michael Fürst, president of the regional association of Jewish communities in Lower Saxony. As Feldman explained that “a lot of Jews” would be arrested at demonstrations, “because they are committed to ending the war” and that peace in the Middle East is “actively prevented in Germany,” historian Michael Wolffsohn could no longer remain in his chair. “No, that’s it, Ms. Feldman,” he shouted and tried to leave the studio as Lanz persuaded him to stay. The other guests, like Feldman of the Jewish faith, tried to comprehend her position. “Explain to me what your problem is,” Adriana Altaras asked. But Feldman’s insistence that German state interest doesn’t allow for criticism of Israel, and that therefore she and many other Jews were afraid, increasingly irritated the group. Feldman grew up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York and for the past ten years has made her home in Berlin. Since the Hamas terrorist attack she has frequently claimed that the federal government’s support for Israel betrays Jews.
