“The Germans will never forgive the Jews of Auschwitz” is a saying that shocks many but tells you a lot about modern Germany. It’s attributed to Zvi Rix, an Israeli psychoanalyst from Vienna, who believed that Germans resent the fact that Jews, by their very existence, remind them of their nation’s guilt.
In public, at least, Germans are proud of how they dealt with the legacy of the Holocaust. When the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe was opened in Berlin in 2005, one historian said without irony: “In other countries, some people envy the Germans for this memorial.”
When I saw images of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, I didn’t think about 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. I thought about my grandmother’s story. In 1941, a group of SS soldiers came to her home town of Pukhovichi, 45 miles southeast of Minsk. They rounded up the Jews, beat and tortured them, raped the women, took them to a pit and shot them dead.
So, as I sat in my living room in Berlin, looking at pictures of women and children executed in the style of the Einsatzgruppen, I thought this was the moment when Germany would unite around its “Never again!” oath. Barely a week goes by without a politician intoning “there is no place for antisemitism” here, that we have “learnt from our history” and that we have a “historical responsibility for Jewish life”. So I thought: Go for it, Germany, this is your moment to stand up for Jewish people.
I remembered the demonstration by hundreds of thousands of Germans in front of the Brandenburg Gate when Russia invaded Ukraine last year. Of the thousands of Ukrainian flags that still hang in the capital. How naive I was. While Hamas terrorists were on their killing spree, a commentary appeared in the renowned German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung that condemned the attack but sought to blame Israeli politics for contributing to it.
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Left-wing activists, the first to defend victims with letters, petitions and marches, failed to condemn the murder of 1,400 Jews with even a tweet. A week later, sections of the German press spread Hamas’s claims about an Israeli airstrike on a hospital in Gaza. Anyone would think they were looking for an excuse to distract attention from the worst murder of Jews since the Holocaust. This problem goes far beyond the Israel/Hamas conflict.
There is a street in Berlin with the beautiful name Sonnenallee, literally “sun alley”. The fate of German Jews, perhaps even of Germany, is being played out there. When news of the Hamas attack broke, overjoyed Palestinians distributed Arabic pastries. It has hosted daily protests against Israel and earned the nickname “Little Gaza”.
The carnival of hatred prompts two thoughts. First, I will never eat hummus there again, a shame because it’s the best in Berlin. Second, that 80 years after the Holocaust there are places in Germany where Jews live in fear; a fear that forces many to deny their Jewish identity, to keep their mouths shut about Israel, and to avoid going to synagogue. Sonnenallee is not yet judenfrei. But it is free of Jewish life. And there are a lot more streets like it in Germany.
Filipp Piatov is deputy head of politics at Bild, Germany’s best-selling newspaper
