Philosemitism in contemporary German media

Introduction

In May 2018 the German Radio Deutschlandfunk aired a podcast series named We ♥ Israel, directed by Noam Brusilovsky and Ofer Waldman. The podcast was subsequently chosen as the podcast of that month and nominated for Prix Europe in 2019. In its nomination, the German Academy of Performing Arts wrote: ‘On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Israeli state, German love for Israel (and Israelis) becomes the subject of a radio drama serial. But who we are, what kind of love that is, and what Israel means: the answers are always on the move, on both sides, the lover and the loved’. The German cultural commitment to express love toward the entity ‘Israel’ is at the center of this podcast series directed by two Jewish Israeli authors living in Berlin at the time for a national radio station. Nominating the podcast series for a prize occasioned a self-critical observation of the collectivity and identity of both the lover and the loved. Although arguably dynamic, this reflection focuses on feelings of two distinct groups: Germans toward Jews and Jews as associated with Israel.

I argue that the display of positive sentiment toward Jews, popularly termed philosemitism, is a practice that is shaped by complex relations to Holocaust memory and by proxy to Israel. It resonates with 19th and early-20th century deliberations on ‘the Jewish question’, as well as contemporary relations to minorities and to the character of Germany as a plural democracy. Philosemitism is performed within a culture that celebrates the revival of Jewish life in Germany as proof of a successful rehabilitation project after the Holocaust. Alongside rich, long-lasting relations with Jews, German culture represents them as unknown and unknowable. Similar to other minorities in Germany, Jews are exclusionarily incorporated in German society. Partridge (2008) analyzes the exclusionary incorporation of Black men into German society whereby noncitizens are incorporated into the nation-state, but only as compromised subjects. Jews are categorized as subjects of protection and are thereby incorporated in their uniqueness as deeply rooted citizens and as victims. This article offers a lens through which to observe national and post national projects of exclusion and inclusion, by discussing various perspectives on those projects in their media representations.

The various ways love for Jews is expressed in contemporary German media is one site in which social conceptions of minorities in Germany circulate. Carrier groups such as media professionals, educators, political actors, and religious leaders, inform this circulation and co-constitute its meaning. I discuss a non-representative sample of German mainstream media representations of Jews between 2014 and 2020, both reporting and editorials, published in print, and broadcast media, in periodicals and newspapers in broadsheet and tabloid form, by outlets whose ideological bent is recognized as politically left-, center-, and right-leaning. I also considered podcasts and special events coverage.

Studying mainstream German media representations of philosemitism this way, I offer a way to understand the struggle with and accomplishment of post WWII norms of civility in Germany. Media representation of belonging and national identity have changed within this period due to several social processes, some preceding it. Attitudes toward Holocaust memory have shifted from the focus on guilt to that of positive pursuit (Leggewie and Meyer, 2005), which casts Jews as ‘felt victims’ (Jureit and Schneider, 2010), particularly after the opening of the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in the center of Berlin in 2005 and the Soccer World Cup of 2006. These two events marked a turn in public perceptions of the legitimacy of expressing national pride, and the avowed celebration of diversity in German society. Two other important events joined in the second decade of the 21st century: the decision to open Germany’s border to about one million refugees in the summer and Fall of 2015, the majority of whom Muslims; and the entry of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to the German Parliament in 2018. Subsequently, state and federal organizations registered a rise in violent attacks on minorities among which were attacks on Jews.

RIAS, The Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism, founded in 2018, collects the data on antisemitic attacks. It noted a rise in antisemitic content on mainstream social networking sites such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, alongside anti-Jewish hostility in public discourse and public spaces. This study took place at a period of growing social polarization, racism, and attacks on minorities. Troubling examples were the attempt to murder Jews in a Synagogue on Yom Kippur in October 2019 in a Halle (Saxony Anhalt), in which a woman and a man, two German citizens, were murdered by a fast-food stand. The right radical perperator saw them as migrants and hence the next group to target after he failed to kill Jews. A second radical right terror attack took place in February 2020 in two clubs in Hanau (Hessen) in which nine German citizens, all from migrant families, were murdered. After both attacks, Jewish institutions as well as German Chancellor Merkel and the interior minister Seehofer noted the connection between racism and hatred toward minorities and the resilience of the German society, an important and necessary recognition of the intersection of racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitic violence.

Although it is attached to tightly monitored social rules in Germany, philosemitism is not openly acknowledged. Antisemitism is, and it is one of the most detrimental accusations against public figures in Germany, most recently directed against liberal intellectuals and journalists, predominantly women, who support black and brown solidarity, wrote in criticism of Israel’s policies or compared the Holocaust to other genocides (see Assmann, 2021; Dekel and Özyürek, 2021; Moses, 2021; Rothberg, 2021). The objects of philosemitism are predominantly imagined as males (Gilman, 1991), and males frame the fantasy about Jews (Braungart and Theisohn, 2017: 9).

Why should Jews, or any other minority, worry about being loved? Public representation that objectifies a group jeopardizes its capacity to participate equally in civil life. Furthermore, philosemitism engages images and ideas that are interwoven in larger cultural self-understandings regarding belonging, ethnic, gender, and religious inequality. It objectifies Jews as a group, a condition shared with Antisemitism and other forms of racism and discrimination. Thus, in its social consequences, philosemitism is not antithetical to antisemitism. Philosemitism is often enlarged to other spatial-temporal domains where Jews are thought to exclusively belong, like Israel, memorial sites and memorial days. These are domains where antisemitic attacks take place, according to the RIAS annual report (2020).

I see philosemitism as neither a solution nor a remedy to the abundance of antisemitic content on mainstream social networking sites, to anti-Jewish hostility in public discourse and in physical attacks on Jewish institutions and persons. Indeed, within a polarized political landscape, antisemitism became a site for political contestation. What is called by the German state ‘Jewish life’ is often being reduced to German Holocaust penitence and reticence about Israel’s policies toward Palestinians. Protecting Israel is defined by politicians as Staatsraison – a binding state interest (Moses, 2021). In 2020–21, the protection of Israel, coded by its’ advocates as the danger of Holocaust relativization, stood at the center of what is considered a second Historians’ Debate referencing the one from 1986 to 1987 (Habermas, 1998). Confusing Israel with Jews limits the possible positions Jews can take toward their life in Israel and elsewhere and jeopardizes the media space both for expressing Palestinian concerns and for criticism of Israel’s policies more generally (Confino, 2021).

Philosemitism in postwar Germany

A Google Ngram search reveals that writing about Philosemitism in books in German and in English began after WWII and spiked in the second decade of the 21st century. Philosemitism, according to Fischer (2011), was coined and applied as a pejorative in Wilhelmine Germany toward groups that had not sufficiently acknowledged the threat that Jews posed to Germany. Institutionalized antisemitism was officially banned after the Holocaust. Stern (1989: 472) claims that philosemites displayed an emotional liking for Jews and later the state of Israel. Post 1945, ‘Faced with this new public philosemitic code, the traditional antisemitic code retreated into the sphere of private life, and thus effectively removed itself from social control’. Romeyn (2014) argues that only in the past 30 years Jews have been perceived as Europeans, and their well-being as the assimilated paradigmatic victims of racism, turned into proof that Europe has transcended its murderous past.

Friendliness toward Jews [Judenfreundlichkeit] or positive assessments of the character of Jews, had been at work before the Second World War, employed by the Nazis and used after the war (Kabalek, 2013). Already in 1947, Levinas pointed out that often philosemitism’s exclusive concern with negating antisemitism creates ‘the Jew’ but ignores the ‘facticity’ of a Jewish existence that is not determined by antisemitism and victimization (Cohen, 2017). According to Satcliffe and Karp (in Karp and Sutcliffe (2011: 2), philosemitism entails ‘[A]n intricate ambivalence, combining elements of admiration and disdain’. Kauders (2003: 109) argues that the term Philosemitism ‘implies something affirmative [. . .], particularly in contradistinction with anti-Semitism’. This positive construction, which rests on negative assumptions about Jews as a race, was evident in the discussion following the publication and debate of Thilo Sarrazin’s book Germany does away with Itself (2010). Sarrazin was a long-standing member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and a board member of the Bundesbank. Both condemned his book as discriminatory. Gilman (2012) noted that Sarrazin’s positively assessing the ‘Jewish gene’ joined a genealogy of the racialization of minorities under the guise of proving the Jews to be better and more capable of assimilation than other Semites, the Arabs. It was established upon the racial tropes concerning Jewish blood in Nuremberg’s Laws.

 The literature on philosemitism often discusses it together with antisemitism insofar as both portray the Jew as an ‘other’ and stress that the former is not antithetical to the latter. Lassner and Trubowitz (2008: 7) define it as ‘any action or sentiment “directed in favor of Jews”’. Altfelix (2000) claims that in postwar Germany, xenophilia was in-group directed and preceded by bouts of xenophobia. Bauman (1998) terms this ambivalence Allosemitism, which can embrace both positive and negative feelings toward Jews. Allosemitism originates from allos one of two Greek term for other, which suggests a distant other, an other that is ‘over there’ or ‘beside the point’; chiefly, an Other not in relation to the same (in contrast to heteros, the second Greek term for ‘other’, which intimates a concrete other-in-relation). Bauman’s choice of neologism thus connects xenophobia and xenophilia. Antisemitism, allosemitism, and philosemitism are all constituted on the figure of the Jew as an ideal, distant other. Whether revered, hated, or avoided, relations with the Jew are contingent on this role, which disregards living persons’ social positions and choices, while casting them as a homogenous group.

The elements of the media representations of Jews

The narrative elements that underlie the philosemitic representation of Jews are (1) Holocaust memory; (2) Protecting Jews and fighting Antisemitism. These underlaying elements of philosemitism were developed within a story of (Holocaust) destruction and (post-Holocaust) rehabilitation. According to Olick (2007), Holocaust remembrance in Germany is shaped by social processes in which groups articulate their relations to each other and to various pasts. Ever since the early postwar years, remembering the Holocaust was deemed to be a necessary task for the stability of democracy, though, as Moses (2007) notes, it mattered differently to different groups and was shared as a success story only from the mid 1980s. This story was celebrated, then debated, when West Germany attempted what Brumlik (1991: 11) termed ‘fatal philosemitism’: the failed attempts at forced reconciliation in the media controversy of the German – US commemoration ceremony of Reagan and Kohl in 1985, in Bitburg’s military cemetery, where Waffen SS soldiers were buried.

Taberner (2005) suggests that philosemitism’ re-imagination of Jews emerges from the self-projection of those who propagate the prejudice in an attempt to ‘normalize’ German Jewish relations. Kansteiner (2011) analyzes philosemitic television in West Germany as set of contradictory discursive rules about Jews, which permitted only positive statements about their extraordinary accomplishments, and preached the utopia of a peaceful Jewish-gentile coexistence. In both the German and the Polish case, as Zubrzycki (2016) demonstrates, interest in things Jewish involves guilt together with an attempt at cosmopolitanizing culture. Von Bieberstein (2016) further shows that in Germany, positive sentiment toward Jews is associated with protecting democracy.

Positive depictions of Jews have epistemological significance since, through their role in narratives, we come to know and make sense of our social worlds. Indeed, as Forchtner (2021: 304) claims, ‘it is through the stories which circulate amongst a group of people that the latter’s symbolic boundaries are constituted’. I study mainstream media’s depictions of Jews through an interactional approach, which views ‘storytelling as a social action that involves interaction with an audience and the co-construction of knowledge and social identities’ (Forchtner, 2021: 306). I draw on Forchtner’s (2021) typology to analyze the (1) thematic aspects of what the stories tell; (2) the functions of their structural units; and (3) the interactive co-production of meaning by various actors and audiences, in specific event contexts.

The examples, selected from media reports on events in which German-Jewish relations were widely discussed in different media outlets, as detailed above, analyzed in juxtaposition with widely circulated images of Jews and of how these are presented in relation to events spanning from demonstrations in support of Jews and Israel during the Gaza War in 2014; after anti-Semitic attacks or around Holocaust memorial days (January 27, November 9, May 8). I chose to focus on examples in which the narrative units of protecting Jews, German society and civility are used by state and civil society actors.

Remembering the Holocaust is presented in the German media as a dangerous and endangered pursuit. It is performed by different groups and in relation to various claims that use the memory of the Holocaust as a site for the contestation of personal freedom and citizenship. Most recently, right wing citizens used the yellow badge symbol in demonstrations against public health restrictions during the Covid pandemic, signifying that they themselves feel victimized as Jews were under the Third Reich. Various groups take up the victim role by appearing Jewish as they perform philosemitism. As an assessment of civility, Holocaust remembrance is additionally used as a test for German Muslim citizens and non-citizens, who are often deemed either to be not commemorating, or to be commemorating incorrectly (Özyürek, 2018). Holocaust memory is often discussed as being in danger in the former GDR eastern states (Neiman, 2019). Jews are protected by police forces and fortifications in memorial sites as well as in Jewish institutions, which are indeed targeted by Christian-background right radicals. In those sites, as we will see, the press often presents Jews as religious and/or faceless others, and marks the memory of their execution as proof of a normalized society that still faces existential dangers.

The unknown and unknowable Jew is a figure that emerged from the epistemology of fighting antisemitism, which Lapidot (2020: 6) calls Anti-anti-Semitism. In its negative epistemology, Anti-anti-Semitism asserts to know of and be against antisemitism, that antisemitism itself is no knowledge, and that the fundamental problem with antisemitism is that it claims to know, negating any positive relations between knowledge and politics. In light of the images and stories in which this negative epistemology is apparent, I argue that the narrative template that utilizes the categories of loving Jews as opposed to hating Jews after the Holocaust located the task of the accomplishment of civility at their core. A similar image of accomplished civility was employed in the German Media when refugees arrived in Germany in 2015. Indeed, the ‘Welcome Culture’ welcomed the asylum seekers on two moral grounds – learning from Germany’s murderous past and the memories of forced migration after the Second World War. However, it quickly turned to point to the danger migrants pose to the German culture, a danger to Jews living in Germany, and a site of possible degeneration, or de-civilization, as we will see in the following sections.

Philosemitism as the routine accomplishment of civility

The performance of philosemitism follows a change in standards of what the society prohibits, or a civilizing process. Elias (1978: xiii) describes the civilizing process as a process in which ‘the threshold of socially instilled displeasure and fear moves’. The daily enactment of loving Jews as Others who can be in danger from groups internal as well as external to the German body-politic is routinely performed toward the accomplishment of civility. Performing civility can take place around different issues such as celebrating Jews, remembering the Holocaust, protecting Jews, and curiosity about them. Philosemitism is expected to be performed by people living in Germany, including Jews. Performing philosemitism produces, mediates, maintains and reproduces the otherness of Jews as protected and celebrated in the German public sphere. Philosemitism is accomplished in German society in three social domains:

In the institutional domain, inherent antisemitism on the part of potential antisemites is introduced through the category of Judenhass [Judeophobia, or the hatred of Jews]. It is pre-modern, primordial and separates the Semitic groups from each other. In this process migrants, mostly those of Muslim-background, are introduced to the mechanics of the civilizational accomplishment of protecting Jews expected to be performed by German citizens, while state institutions make sure that Jews are safe.

In the group domain, the media focuses on the visibility of Jews. The contingent movement between philosemitism and antisemitism is apparent, presenting Jews as both strange yet belonging, and marking the boundaries of the German democracy. In this section, I analyze images in which Jews are depicted and marked in their religious visibility and where relations with them are being discussed.

In the individual domain, the media reveals citizens’ and journalists’ curiosity about Jews, most commonly in the form of performing ‘not knowing’ – a lack of some mastery in which individuals disclose embarrassment in regards to things Jewish, or inability to speak about Jewish matters, connecting the elusive category of the Jew, and the discourse on post-Holocaust guilt.

The analytical frame for understanding philosemitism as a routine accomplishment of civility is derived from West and Zimmerman’s (1987) classical article ‘Doing Gender’, which describes gender as routine, methodical, and recurring accomplishment. This form of doing, in our case, rests on one’s competence as a civilized member of society and involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional and micropolitical activities. The affinity between understanding the accomplishment of performing ‘femininity’ with that of performing ‘civility’ is not accidental and is based on the premise that both identities are inherently unstable and thus require continual reassessment. The situated performance of loving Jews becomes routine for the recurring attempt to accomplish civility. Migrants, Muslims, Persons of Color, Romani and Sinti experience routine marginalization in intersection with their class, gender, and sexual orientation, and develop techniques to deal with discrimination on an everyday basis, often through a form of consciousness in which they are more equipped Germans. For instance, ‘Deutsch plus, the initiative for a plural republic’ has been celebrated in the German media as a successful civil society organization that examines discrimination and encourages inclusion and diversity in civil institutions.

Safety for Jews and for the nation: philosemitism’s institutional domain

In the institutional domain, the German media focuses on whether Jews can feel safe in Germany. Categories of inherent or latent anti-Semitism get newly introduced through old categories such as Judenhass. German politicians declare their commitment to ‘Jewish life’ in Germany and see their support of Israel as ‘Staatraison’. In this domain one can trace an ambivalence regarding what kinds of subjects Jews are in German society. The following example is from Chancellor Merkel’s speech in the demonstration named Stand up: Never again Jews-hate [‘Steh Auf: Nie Wieder Judenhass’] on September 15, 2014, in response to antisemitic attacks against Jews during Israel’s offense on Gaza. The report is from the centrist Jewish weekly the Jüdische Allgemeine (2014):

Jewish Life belongs to us. It’s part of our identity and culture. Discrimination and exclusion have no place with us. People who exclude and discriminate, put me and all of us, the vast majority of people in Germany against them. We want Jews to feel safe in Germany. They should sense, that this land is our home together. Our common homeland in which they, like all people that live here, have a good future.

‘Us’ means in this statement Germans, who own Jewish life, and are defined by it, as it is ‘part of our identity’. Jews constitute the German Heimat together with all the people that live in Germany – referring to Merkel’s valuing of social diversity. The larger historical context to the discourse on ‘the new antisemitism’ is Muslim migration to Germany since the 1960s as part of the ‘guest workers’ agreement between Turkey and Germany (Özyürek, 2016). The German media has continually focused on whether Turks or Muslims generally are capable of integrating into Western European societies (Korteweg and Yurdakul, 2009). The arrival of about one million Muslim-background refugees in Germany in 2015 continued this discussion, one compounded by fears expressed by the Central Council of Jews in Germany and documented in the media that Muslim migrants would put the Jewish minority in Germany in danger. Germany’s then-Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, told an international parliamentary conference against antisemitism on March 15, 2016: ‘Arriving in the heart of German society also means accepting in one’s heart a commitment against antisemitism. As we see it, there is no place and must never be a place for antisemitism in a free, democratic and tolerant Germany’. This was reported in the German international affairs center – left news channel Deutsche Welle [DW] with the subheading: ‘According to Foreign Minister Steinmeier, flourishing Jewish life in Germany borders on a miracle. Nevertheless, the fight against anti-Semitism must continue - also within Muslim communities’.

DW’s report on Steinmeier’s statement amplifies the social division between ethnic groups as well as reflects the narrative that ‘Jewish life’ is a ‘miracle’ with little explanation and no agents. Steinmeier champions a doctrine, according to which integration in the German society would entail first a recognition of an alien object reaching the heart of a functioning body, then entering it. The heart of the German society is depicted as one body. The arrivals’ hearts are referred to in a bond with the German heart. This neutralized intruding figure shows its functioning within the German national organism by taking up the fight against antisemitism, and emotionally investing in it with other citizens and non-citizens in Germany. Considering the epistemological power of this statement, neither ‘new arrivals’ nor Jews are mentioned. This statement connects the narrative nodes of democracy, the putative threat to it and to freedom seen by the majority society in the arrival of Muslim migrants. This threat is checked through the litmus test of hatred of Jews.

Multiple parties sponsored a Bundestag motion titled ‘Resolutely Fight Antisemitism’ in January 2018 (19/444), in which the German parliament decided to appoint a Federal Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Anti-Semitism. Christian Democratic Union (CDU) diplomat Felix Klein was appointed the federal commissioner. There are sixteen other such appointments in the individual federal states. The Federal agency RIAS 2020 report on Antisemitism shows that about 5% of antisemitic attacks are ‘anti-Israel-activism’-related in Berlin and in Bayern, and between 1.4% and 2.3% in other federal states. Keeping in mind the important critique of the federal agency’s practice of casting criticism of Israel policies as antisemitic, we can see how both the love for Jews and Jews-hate are attached to Israel as an idea. This affinity makes possible the continual conflation of Jews with Israel by xenophiles and xenophobes alike.

Seeing Jews: philosemitism’s group domain

On May 27, 2019, the conservative daily tabloid Bild offered a do-it-yourself kippa to its readers, in solidarity with and support of Jews to be donned on the Israel Day demonstrations on June 1st. The Berlin daily Tagesspiegel and the left-leaning daily Tageszeitung offered such cut-out kippa on April 25, 2018 ahead of an action day ‘Berlin wears Kippa’ in response to a violent attack on men wearing a kippa in Berlin. This call for individual solidarity came after reports of 20% rise in Antisemitic attacks on Jews were published, on which Federal Commissioner Klein was quoted a week earlier in the German media, stating ‘I cannot recommend to Jews to wear the Kippa anytime and everywhere in Germany’. Zeit online, a politically centrist weekly targeted at an elite readership, reported Klein’s warning on May 25, 2019, and cited his reason a ‘growing social disinhibition and brutalization’.

BILD recorded middle-aged and elderly men – conservative politicians, celebrities, and Felix Klein himself – donning the kippa. They answered the question ‘I am wearing kippa because. . .’; among the answers were: ‘[B]ecause I am a friend of Jewish life and culture and don’t want anyone in this country to be fearful, because he is of the Jewish faith [weil ich ein Freund der jüdischen Lebenskultur bin und nicht möchte, dass irgendjemand in dieser Stadt Angst haben muss, weil er jüdischen Glaubens ist’.] Oskar Roehler (p. 60), Film Director from Berlin. Another statement listed as a reason ‘the past with Israel gives us the obligation that antisemitism must never happen again’ [‘die Vergangenheit mit Israel uns die Verpflichtung gibt, dass Antisemitismus nie wieder vorkommen darf’] – Justus Frantz (p. 75), honorary conductor of the orchestra ‘Israel Sinfonietta’.

These respondents mixed times and places where the Holocaust took place, and Germany’s relations with the Jewish state thereafter. Wearing a kippa for a tabloid interview is a substitutional act – the non-Jewish famous male appears Jewish. This is an objectifying memory form, part of the ‘mnemonic labour’ (Reading, 2021) of the Holocaust. Similar to the work of looking at the performance of philosemitism and accomplishment of civility in a tabloid, Zambon (2017) claims in her analysis of German popular TV comedies that show Turks, audiences watch them to reflect back their own identities. Those identities can subsequently be negotiated, as in the case of TV comedies. The accomplishment of supporting Jews by resisting antisemitism is reinforced when individuals who perform their love direct their actions toward the state (both the German and the Israeli) by appearing Jewish, and appearing with Jews, as we will see in the following example (Image 1).

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Image 1.

So Basteln Sie sich die BILD-Kippa [This is how you make your do-it-yourself BILD Kippa], BILD May 27, 2019.

Even though a kippa can include any pattern or color, the do-it-yourself kippa contains three Stars of David within three circles and bears the colors of the Israeli flag. This is a prevalent depiction of Jewish religiosity – male, visible, head cover with the Star of David and the Israeli national colors. Looking at Jews alludes to both Israel and the Holocaust in Germany and exists within a national memory atmosphere. National memory atmosphere (Dekel and Vinitzky-Seroussi, 2017) exists in a melancholic space where various forms of Holocaust remembrance are performed, and Jews are viewed as objects of remembrance by which other groups perform and test belonging to majority culture. Within this atmosphere, remembering the Holocaust, remembering Jews and WWII atrocities the melancholic becomes lamentable, and the most common roles are that of victims – mostly in the focus on Jews, but a to a growing extent, through presenting Germans as victims, or through claims of a growing ‘Schuld Kult’, from the political right that mock this commitment to remembrance together with its moral ground of Germany as a plural democracy.

Responding to the negative affinity cast by conservatives between Holocaust memory and democracy, Assmann (2017) asserted on the occasion of the International Holocaust Memorial Day that in his reference to the Holocaust Memorial as a ‘memorial of shame’ Björn Höcke, the leader of the AfD extreme Right party from Thuringia, was not the first to equate Holocaust memory to German shame and suffering. Assmann claims in an interview for the German public radio Deutschlandfunk that the Memorial is a stage on which democracy is played out, and that it has many faces, including extremist ones. Precisely because this metaphor describes the meaning-making process that brings together performing memory and performing democracy in contemporary Germany, we can examine its structure further and ask: who is playing ‘the Jews’? Can those players take different roles within this tight discursive regime (as Assmann observed later on in the Antisemitism debate of 2020 see, e.g. Assmann, 2021). Within this discursive structure, the declared protection of the visibly religious man fulfills the representational role of actual Jews, as we see with the do-it-yourself kippa. These actions could entail identification with, concern about or solidarity with Jews and Israel. However, also true is that imaginary, objectified Jews, or symbolic representations of their back heads, homes, and graves are created and employed in representing Jews so that Holocaust remembrance can function as protective, redemptive mechanism in the German society.

Attending to the co-production of meaning in mediated images, I note that donning a kippa also directs the onlooker’s attention toward other onlookers who might get triggered by the display of Jewish religiosity colored with the Israeli flag. Thus, the media representations of kippas connect the institutional and group aspects of performing philosemitism. Here the visibility of the Jewish male is key, and the relief that that male is not attacked, although he is visibly Jewish, redemptive. This image of Jews is not constructed in a vacuum. The relations between Jews and Germans, and German Jews as a diverse group now also populated by Israelis affect it to an extent, mostly in the discussion of Israeli migration to Berlin (Cohen and Kranz, 2017). This complexity is however seldom present in the iconic photo depiction of these groups as we’ll see in examples in this section. We therefore ought to recognize the contingent relations between philosemitism and antisemitism, which are constituted through interaction among Jews; with them to a limited extent, and between them and other minorities. On this level other Others are present both as potential threats or potential victims.

Broadcast and written media, including Jewish outlets, observe the visibility of Jews through signaling religiosity and Jewish rituals and in showing places where Jews and the Holocaust are remembered. Here the ambivalence appears robustly: unrecognizable religious young man observing a blurred Brandenburg gate, representing the state itself. We look at him from the back, while he stands looking at something else. He cannot look back or change positions as a subject of interpellation even if he, and people who recognize themselves as Jews, feel affirmed in looking at and reproducing the gaze in this photo. The gaze on the back of the Jew appearing in the open can also be understood as an act of co-witnessing affirmation of the Jew as an asset in philosemitic German media (see Kansteiner, 2011). Thus, the fact that documenting the men in Kippa happens in the city scape is important in co-constituting a public of such onlookers.

The same iconic photo in Image 2 of the Jew from the back has been used widely in the German press: as a title photo for the left leaning targeted at elite readership Sueddeutsche Zeitung on June 26, 2015, under the title ‘Antisemitism is there and it scares me’; as a title photo for the Der Spiegel (a weekly center-right leaning magazine) in an article on Israelis migrating to Berlin in October 2014; in an article in the StuttgarterZeitung on May 9, 2017 on ‘Jewish Life in Berlin: Techno, Shabbat and the look forward’; in the state public Deutschlandradio on January 6, 2021 report on Jews who migrated to Germany from the former Soviet Union. For more than half a decade, this very same photo is being used in multiple outlets to represent Jews. Its use establishes time and again how Jews are represented as faceless men, strangers to this body politic, and looking at them affirms and confirms their ownership and protection by Germans who remember properly.

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Image 2.

A Kippa-wearing Jew in Berlin.

The individual domain of philosemitism: knowledge, embarrassment and ownership

In the individual domain of performing philosemitism, individuals disclose embarrassment and curiosity in regard to things Jewish. This can be understood within the narrative logic we encountered of the miracle of their existence in Germany. According to this logic, moving away from Nazi legacies created a parallel difficulty to produce and accept knowledge about and with Jews. This has historical roots in the early days of the Federal Republic. Stern (1989) provides an example in which in December 1949, the first President of the Federal Republic, Theodor Heuss, asked: ‘Can one even justify uttering the word “Jew” as was done during the Nazi period?’ (1989: 471). Neiman (2019: 10) similarly describes the embarrassment around the word ‘Jew’ in 2005 when she was invited to a committee headed by the Minister of Science for planning the Albert Einstein year. The committee preferred to describe Einstein as a fellow-citizen-of – Jewish-heritage. As the only Jew, Neiman suggested that the committee reconsider their designation, since Einstein preferred simply to be called ‘Jew’. The committee did not change the designation (Neiman, 2019: 10).

How should one understand the institutional as well as personal difficulties to name Jews and acknowledge their faces? According to Stern (1989), as antisemitism was rejected at the official political level, it was possible to express support for Jews – in lieu of a public rejection of those involved in spreading antisemitism. However, philosemitism remained abstract because it implied distantiation, akin to and informing contemporary modes of distantiation from minorities – Muslims, People of Color, or both.

Presenting others in the abstract belongs in the same exclusionary Holocaust mnemonic labor (Reading, 2021). The performance of philosemitism by passing as or appearing Jewish reflects the phantasy to look Jewish and to possess Jewish decorum. This aspect of the performance merits further study and ranges from giving Jewish and Israeli names to German Christian children (Neiman, 2019), conversion to Judaism (Tzuberi, 2020), declared fascination with the Hebrew language as well as fascination with how Israeli Jews become a seductive, natural presence in Berlin.

As stated earlier, German representations of Jews are framed by Holocaust memory and draws its images from historical periods in which their religiosity was visible: Shtetl Jews. A special issue of the Center-Right Spiegel-History (4/2019) was dedicated to the topic of Jews in Germany. Its title was ‘The Unknown World Nearby’: Jewish Life in Germany [Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland: Die unbekannte Welt nebenan]. The topics span between the story of Jewish community in Köln in the 11th century, Jews and reformation, pogroms and the Yiddish language, to name a few. Both editors were photographed by places associated with Jews: The Holocaust Memorial and the newly built Jewish Museum in Köln. The cover photo presented two ‘Shtetl Jews’, a photo from 1928 showing two religious men conversing outside of a Jewish bookstore, whose background changed in the Spiegel version to orange-red, and an orange star of David added (Image 3).

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Image 3.

Spiegel cover, Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung August 2, 2019.

The centrist Jewish Community weekly Jüdische Allgemeine and the Central Council of Jews in Germany as well as readers claimed that this volume spreads antisemitic clichés, and that the cover image does not represent the reality of Jews living in Germany today. The Spiegel, in fact, did not claim to represent Jews in Germany. It apologized and argued that it rather wanted to show ‘public, visible’ Jewish life before the Holocaust’. The image in a popular periodical in 2019 represents the fantasy about Jews as religious, unknown, and belonging in the past. Indeed, the return to the time before the Holocaust reproduces the learned and redemptive gaze that is used to looking at murdered Jews, now relieved to find them populating the cityscape. Jewish institutions and individuals react to this gaze and to the embarrassment about things Jewish expressed on the individual and group domains of the performance of philosemitism. One example of a Jewish response toward the public embarrassment about Jews is the initiative ‘Rent-a-Jew’, which facilitated meetings between young Jewish volunteers and non-Jews in schools. It was applauded in the German and in international media as a reconciliatory project.

Rent-a-Jew took place between 2015 and 2019, financed by the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Jewish Community’s Janusz Korczack Academy. The program used humorous slogans such as ‘You never forget your first time: rent a Jew’; or ‘Do you all speak Hebrew? No, but Tacheles [in Yiddish-to the point, openly]’. The program received several prestigious prizes such as the BAP-Preise for political education in 2019, recognizing that it contributed to reducing antisemitic views. The initiators play with the tensions inherent to their perceived identities around topics of ownership and pay – in promising or rather warning, that they are speaking openly, and are available for hire, also a reference to sexual relationships (‘you never forget your first time’). The German press covering the program responded to the same tensions, often by reproducing them in showing the same faceless photo of a religious man as a cover image, as in the following example, in Deutschlandradio Kultur on August 27, 2019 under the title ‘Talk and get to know each other’ (Image 4).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Image 4.

‘Person with Kippah in Berlin’.

The freedom of remembrance and speaking openly

This section addresses the modes in which ‘performed civility’ works in German media through the question of whether it is possible to speak openly about Jews after the Holocaust. It illustrates the narrative nodes in the performance of philosemitism: Holocaust memory and protecting Jews. On May 4, 2015, the 10th anniversary ceremony for the opening of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the Berlin centrist daily Tagesspiegel ran a cover article with the title ‘The Soul of the Stones’, with the opening caption: ‘The Life, the everyday, the currywurst and all that in the place of memory to the murdered Jews of Europe. That this would function nobody could believe ten years ago. With the Holocaust Memorial Berlin was granted the freedom of remembrance’.

Moving from the visible (‘life, everyday, currywurst’), through the unspeakable (‘and all that’) to the invisible (memory, murdered Jews) illustrate the categories at work. The Holocaust merits the status of taboo. This status creates the story about incredible liberation (‘that this would function’; ‘the freedom of remembrance’). The editorial describes the mechanics of this assemblage as a miracle, through metaphorical rumination of un-orchestrated action. This unforeseen miracle is defined by the power to describe, imagine, interpret and participate in Holocaust memory work today. The Tagesspiegel editorial elaborates on the national memory atmosphere where German remembering is devoid of speech and allows surprising enjoyments.

The claim that speaking about Jews should remain limited in contemporary Germany has been criticized by progressive Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals. For instance, Omri Böhm criticized Jürgen Habermas’s declaration that Habermas, as a private German citizen of the immediate postwar generation, should not speak about Israel. Böhm responded in the New York Times opinion Blog on March 5, 2015: ‘A German refusing to comment about Israeli conduct — remaining true to the private commitments generated by his German past — is quite literally refusing to assume the stance of enlightenment when addressing Jewish affairs [. . .] Exactly because [. . .] enlightenment thinking was haunted by its relation to anti-Semitism — that is, especially because it was often tempted to treat the Jews and their tradition as Enlightenment’s mythical “other” — repressing public criticism of the Jewish State is dangerously stepping into a familiar trap’. Israel as a topos of silence joins the meta communicative silence criticized in the ‘Rent-a-Jew’ example. Sincerity and assertiveness are celebrated as Jewish traits but avoided in the modes Jews are addressed.

Concluding remarks

If we look at the commitment to Jews in Germany expressed by Chancellor Merkel together with the ‘freedom of remembrance’ trope, and everything that the iconic image of ‘a man in a kippa seen from behind’ both shows and hides, we get closer to understanding the mechanics of German routine accomplishment of civility as situated within a complex of monuments in the city scape, that contain and present ideal ‘Jews’. This mise en scène contains white Christian-background Germans who point to the danger for Jews and for German democracy that emanates from Muslims and to an extent from right radicals. As a routine performance, philosemitism strives to accomplish civility which was broken by the Holocaust.

This piece considered the critical contributions of civil society actors from various groups that address media makers, educators, and politicians as key definers of public opinion formation and debate. I have argued that philosemitism as a routine accomplishment of civility is manifested in three social domains, each with its own normative focus. Namely: the institutional domain, where the focus is on safety; the group domain, where it is on visibility; and on the individual domain, where it is on knowing and speaking with authority about Jews. This last problem of knowing and speaking about Jews points to the systematic avoidance of addressing Jews as equal subjects in the German public sphere. Notwithstanding the diversity that exists among members of this group, the role of Jews in the mainstream public discourse on Holocaust memory hardly changes, despite critical interventions by intellectuals and activists mentioned above. As this article attempted to show, examining ‘othering’ mechanisms in media representations of Jews requires a comparative intergroup perspective, taking into account Jewish as well as other minority actors. Such an approach, if pursued by Jews and other minority groups (in their intersections), would expand our understanding of variations in media-specific ‘othering’ mechanisms and their effect on public life and the democratic fabric in Germany and beyond.