Abstract
This paper deals with the question of antisemitism in relation to the construction of national identity in late capitalist and post-Nazi societies. Its argument centres on the concept of ‘secondary antisemitism’, as developed within the Critical Theory tradition. Thus, I will elaborate on the complex relationships between post-Nazi antisemitism, the culture industry and the radical destruction of memory in late capitalist societies. The aim is to show the contemporary relevance of secondary antisemitism beyond the immediate context of the task of remembering the Nazi past. In the second section of this paper I will illustrate this by an analysis of examples from print media debates in Austria on the recent financial crisis and show that instances of secondary antisemitism are utilized for the discursive construction of an exclusive national(ist) unity.
Keywords
Introduction: A Terminological Approach to Secondary Antisemitism
The term secondary antisemitism is contested within the scholarly research on antisemitism. It is commonly restricted to the German-speaking context, as describing a particular form of post-Nazi antisemitism that involves different forms of defensiveness against guilt. Conceptually, secondary antisemitism is related to the inability to adequately come to terms with the Nazi past and may also be called ‘antisemitism after Auschwitz’, or ‘antisemitism because of Auschwitz’. Thus it is mediated through the generation of the parents or grandparents and has its motivation in legitimizing these generations’ antisemitism. Accordingly, scholarly debate centres in the first place on whether it is a new form of antisemitism, formed specifically as a reaction to National Socialism.
In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer referred to secondary antisemitism particularly in relation to ticket mentality. It is not only based on a lack of any first-hand experience with Jews, but characterizes a much more general reification of thought in late modern society (2002: 165–72). The general decline of human beings being able to have meaningful experience is seen as one basis of this new form of antisemitism. But this decline is not entirely a post-1945 phenomenon, but is mediated and structurally transmitted through the culture industry. It is a reaction to the shock of urbanization, industrialization, the mechanization of warfare, mass communication and the commodity fetish. This is analysed in detail in Walter Benjamin’s theory of modernity and it is fruitful to apply this cultural criticism to secondary antisemitism as a form of antisemitism characteristic for post-Nazi societies.
Indeed, antisemitism has shown a remarkable flexibility throughout Western civilization, with its particular forms corresponding to a large degree with the respective forms of sociation on the economic and political as well as psychological level. Political antisemitism in the 19th century was a reaction to social, political and economic transformation and modernization – especially to the development of the modern nation-state and capitalist mode of production (cf. Massing, 1949). Likewise, secondary antisemitism is a reaction to the disorder of the system and the shock felt by individuals after the breakdown of the Nazi regime. It is a specific adaptation to the needs of post-Holocaust societies, in the first place to the need for a sense of collective belonging and a re-legitimated national unity after Auschwitz (cf. Wodak et al., 1998). This is why it frequently intersects with various forms of nationalism.
Thus, in addition to its particular function – the defence against guilt – secondary antisemitism also marks a continuity with Nazi ideology in post-Nazi democracies, a ‘survival of National Socialism within democracy’, which Adorno (1998a: 90) considered ‘to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy’. A crucial motive for secondary antisemitism is the re-establishment of a feeling of national unity that seamlessly connects to the time before National Socialism. But this demands a radical screening out of the Holocaust by downplaying or even denying it (cf. Rosenfeld, 2011). There is, however, also a more sophisticated strategy for creating continuity with the pre-Holocaust period: namely, acknowledging the Holocaust as unique while at the same time presenting it as completely outside the historical process, as if it had descended upon civilization as something completely alien to it, like a natural disaster. This view denies the fact that the very structures of society and culture on which the post-Holocaust society builds were also preconditions for National Socialism, i.e. that the Holocaust as a rupture of civilization (Diner, 1998) was part of this very civilization. It is precisely this dialectic that is crucial for an understanding of secondary antisemitism – that whatever might be new in it legitimizes and re-establishes the same old order.
The term secondary antisemitism was introduced by Peter Schönbach (1961: 80) in order to describe the motivations behind a wave of antisemitism in 1959/60 in Frankfurt. With this term he aimed to capture those acts of defiance that preserve the traditional antisemitic attitudes so as to justify the Nazi past. A deep ambivalence towards that past is deciphered as the driving force of this form of antisemitism. It is largely a reaction to a vague knowledge about the parental generation’s role in National Socialism (Schönbach, 1961: 80). Since knowledge of the Nazi atrocities had been widely but not completely suppressed, this knowledge was transmitted to the younger generation via innuendo and vague allusions. Thus, the concrete guilt of the parents was transformed into a vague and abstract guilt feeling on the part of their children. Antisemitic attitudes were kept alive or maybe even hardened in order to legitimize their parents’ role in National Socialism (Schönbach, 1961).
The adjunct ‘secondary’ indicates the somewhat ‘inauthentic’ character of this form of antisemitism. It could also be called second-hand antisemitism, as the individuals’ own primary experience of Jews does not play a role in it. The term ‘secondary antisemitism’ is frequently objected to because it insinuates that there was also some kind of ‘primary antisemitism’ that was a reaction to actual Jewish behaviour. But the major point of secondary antisemitism is not that it has nothing to do with Jews – this is not where the difference from modern antisemitism lies. Rather, ‘secondary’ means here that it is taken over from somebody else, in this case from the parents or grandparents, in order to justify what they did. Additionally, it is in a sense only secondarily targeted against the Jews – the primary concern is the justification of the parents’ and grandparents’ antisemitism. It is the form of antisemitism that legitimates Nazi antisemitism – antisemitism becoming its own legitimation.
Secondary Antisemitism and the Alienation from Experience
According to Adorno, the defence against guilt by secondary antisemitism involves and requires a radical ‘destruction of memory’ (Adorno, 1998a: 91) and a fragmentation of the capacity for conscious experience, an alienation from experience that results in a derealization of victims and perpetrators alike. This development, however, is not an individual psychopathology but needs to be contextualized within the social circumstances that Horkheimer and Adorno, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, termed the ‘culture industry’ and which they described as reification of social relationships. The alienation from experience that critical theory makes so central to its analysis of secondary antisemitism is closely connected with the fetishism of the commodity. 1
As a fixed ideology, secondary antisemitism is completely divorced from an individual’s primary experience of Jews. The antisemitic stereotypes and negative images of Jews are commodified and to a large extent institutionalized, i.e. they are not an individual and psychological phenomenon but a comprehensive ideology, which blocks off the experience of reality. In late capitalist society people are related to each other through intermediary objectified social processes (e.g. the exchange of commodities), so the stimuli through which antisemitism affects people – i.e. the various antisemitic stereotypes that blame Jews for capitalism and bolshevism alike, or that depict a ‘Jewish world conspiracy’, or, as in secondary antisemitism, deny or play down the Holocaust – are all in fact alien to the sensible experience on which the individuals claim their antisemitism is based. Of course, the disconnection of antisemitism from lived experience is not new, but rather a general characteristic of modern antisemitism. As Shulamit Volkov (1978) has put it, already in the 19th century antisemitism had become a cultural code that showed a considerable degree of social institutionalization. But in secondary antisemitism, the level of institutionalization, also a by-product of mass production and of the commodity fetish, has reached a ‘quantity which is likely to result in a new quality of attitudes and behavior’ (Adorno, 1997: 17).
We see that National Socialism did not initiate the alienation from experience, which is a major background factor for secondary antisemitism. Alienation from experience was, on the contrary, a precondition for National Socialism. As was explained by Walter Benjamin (2003) in his philosophy of history in the late 1930s, as well as by Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, alienation from experience was as much a precondition for authoritarianism and the rise of National Socialism as it was reinforced by Nazism and its related social, economic and psychical constraints. ‘Experience has fallen in value’, Walter Benjamin wrote already in relation to the First World War, with which ‘a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then.’ The alienation from experience became apparent in the ‘men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience’ (Benjamin, 2006: 362). The process itself, however, had started earlier. Benjamin locates ‘the birthplace’ of this alienation from experience in ‘the solitary individual’ (2006: 364) that dialectically bears its own end in itself.
This phenomenon corresponds to the dialectic that the Holocaust is simultaneously part of Western civilization and its breakdown. Understanding this dialectic is crucial for an assessment of secondary antisemitism: it is undoubtedly a by-product of the defence against actively remembering the Holocaust, and in this sense it is a consequence of Auschwitz; but simultaneously it is an expression of the prolongation of the very societal, economic and socio-psychological conditions that made National Socialism possible.
The destruction of experience and memory that is at work here can only be understood in connection with the development of the subject, as ‘a symptom of [the] societal weakening of the ego’ (Adorno, 1998a: 91). In psychoanalytical terms, the autonomy of the bourgeois subject and its conscience, manifest in the conflict between superego and id, had withered due to the changed circumstances. The result was an increasing outer-directedness of the individual whose behaviour, in contrast to the progressive activity of the liberal era, was reduced to mere conformism (Demirovic, 1992: 25; Riesman et al., 1989).
If we follow this interpretation that is essentially informed by Freudian psychoanalysis, a weak ego needs to repressively solve the conflict of ambivalence with the parents (Freud, 1999), an ambivalence that, post-1945, was reinforced by those parents’ Nazi past. The authoritarian personality is an immature personality that has got stuck in early childhood impotence and existential dependence on the parents’ support. Since in their adult life they still feel dependent on the parents, they cannot bear ambivalence and need to solve the resulting conflict in one direction. Thus the parents (like any other authority figures) cannot be viewed as contradictory in their character, as good and bad simultaneously, but are viewed as entirely ‘wonderful people’ for whom one had to feel ‘an undying love, gratitude, and respect’ (Adorno et al., 1967: 231). But their Nazi past is a disturbing factor in this anti-ambivalent image of a pre-existing stable harmony, which time and again triggers the ambivalence conflict and so needs to be obliterated. And one way of obliterating ambivalence is exclusive identification – mimicry of the parents’ antisemitism. For those doing the mimicry, this is a secondary, not personally experienced antisemitism.
In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno analyse the loss of experience and the decline of the subject as two aspects of a single societal development. This relationship is elaborated in the context of antisemitism. The last part of the Elements of Anti-Semitism starts off with the provocative sentence: ‘But there are no longer any anti-Semites’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 165). It might have been upsetting to read this in 1947, in view of the millions of murdered Jews. However, the authors were not saying that there was no more antisemitism, but ‘no longer any anti-Semites’, which indicates that the subject as a conscious carrier of antisemitism had lost much of its substance. Antisemitism itself had finally ceased to be an individual attitude that could be cured by clarification and information, or by appealing to any subjectivity – it had taken on a life of its own and been completely transformed into an ideology.
Hence, secondary antisemitism can be seen as a mutilated remainder of and surrogate for the destroyed memory and experience. It manifests the clash between an official attitude which is only superficially sanctioned and insufficiently internalized and which pretends to have left antisemitism behind on the one hand (cf. Fine, 2009), and an unofficial and repressed, and for this reason all the more vigorous attitude that continues to have a powerful effect.
Secondary Antisemitism, Deflection of Guilt and the Construction of National Identity in the Austrian Print Media Debates on the Financial Crisis
As we have seen, secondary antisemitism is a complex phenomenon that applies elements of the modern antisemitic ideology with the aim of deflecting guilt and getting rid of the Nazi past without consciously working it through. This ideology is a consistent presence in post-Nazi societies – it derives its wider meaning from its role in repairing the damage done to the national ‘we’ by the breakdown of the Nazi regime. Hence references to the Holocaust and to National Socialism in general are likely to occur in circumstances that are not directly linked to the past.
Surveys of Austrian print media debates on the recent economic crisis have indeed largely confirmed this assumption. 2 Here, allusions to National Socialism were quite frequent and secondary antisemitism played an important role in assigning responsibility for the crisis. In a subtle manner elements of guilt-deflection with regard to the Austrian Nazi past were woven into debates on who was to blame for the international economic crisis. In the following sections I will demonstrate this nexus by means of three examples taken from the media sample that we analysed in detail. I will thereby focus on the construction of a national ‘we’, on the interrelation of antisemitism and anti-Americanism and, finally, on particular gender images that are instrumentalized in order to transport an antisemitic meaning. In doing so I wish to show that antisemitism, however secondary, today seldom occurs as a unitary construct explicitly blaming the Jews, but rather as a component of a wider ideological framework which seeks to strengthen and reinforce a particular notion of exclusive national identification that aspires to be a pure, rooted and authentic ‘own’, under threat from alien forces.
Völkisch Discourse and the Construction of a Unitary National ‘We’
In our study of the Austrian media debates on the worldwide economic crisis 3 we observed a preponderance of nationalist discourse elements that can reasonably be interpreted as containing a hidden antisemitic meaning. A consistent division between us and them, self and other, in-group and out-group, presented in a specific semantic constellation that drew on a vocabulary often used in National Socialist propaganda, prompted this interpretation. Especially in the Neue Kronen Zeitung, the most influential and popular daily newspaper in Austria, 4 the other/alien is often identified with ‘high finance’, a cryptic group construction that can be personalized at will. The representatives of this cryptic group are described as unproductive, greedy, cunning, international, artificial, unauthentic and rootless – negative characteristics attributed in antisemitic discourses to the Jews. So, while every reference to ‘high finance’ does not necessarily bear an antisemitic connotation, there are contexts and constellations where the code words ‘international speculators’ and ‘high finance’ can be regarded as placeholders for the traditional antisemitic stereotype of the ‘greedy Jew’ that, due to the taboo on overt antisemitism, can no longer be used in public discourse. Internationalism and cosmopolitism are presented as endangering national unity and contrasted to a victimized national ‘we’ (cf. Rensmann, 2011).
An example of this is a passage by Wolf Martin:
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Konzerne, Banken, Hochfinanz schmarotzen an der Volkssubstanz und schädigen sie materiell nicht weniger als ideell. Politiker sind ihnen hörig, korrupt und drum total willfährig. In der EU ist’s konzentriert, was Völker in den Abgrund führt. [Combines, banks and high finance feed upon the folk-substance, harming it materially no less than ideally. The politicians are subservient, corrupt and totally compliant. The EU concentrates everything that leads peoples into the abyss] (Neue Kronen Zeitung, 17 March 2010)
This classic example of nationalist and völkisch ideology uses codes of a world conspiracy: international high finance is represented as omnipotent and ubiquitous, as rootless and non-transparent, as infecting the healthy national economy and thereby damaging the very heart of the Volk – its substance – in a material as well as spiritual sense. International banks and so-called high finance are deemed ruinous to the national ‘we’ and, even though not identified with Jewishness, the author nonetheless employs a vocabulary (schmarotzen, Volkssubstanz) known from National Socialist antisemitic propaganda. Moreover, ‘international high finance’ was an antisemitic code used by the Nazis in the 1930s: it referred to Jews who were regarded as parasites on the nation’s wealth. Thus, the National Socialist Gottfried Feder used the term ‘high finance’ as a key ideological device for propagating his antisemitic ideas about an international Jewish conspiracy (‘Kampf gegen die Hochfinanz’). Likewise, the term Volk is not as innocent as it may appear. Correspondingly, its use has become rare in contemporary German, particularly in official language and mainstream media discourse, since the völkisch connotation is lurking in the background. Rather than the collectivizing term Volk, the more individualized term ‘citizens’ is generally used in order to express a common interest or a shared frame of reference. Still, I certainly do not wish to say that every use of the term Volk is necessarily völkisch, or any use of the term ‘high finance’ antisemitic – it all depends on the context. But here, in this particular semantic constellation that openly makes use of Nazi jargon (schmarotzen, Volkssubstanz), both Volk and ‘high finance’ take on the connotation of two totally antagonistic forces. In this context, the financial sphere is not referred to as an intrinsic part of the relations of capital, but rather as an international conspiratorial force threatening the essentialist national ‘we’ from outside.
In the background of this argumentation lies the ideological division between financial and industrial capital, a distinction that in Nazi ideology culminated in the juxtaposition of rapacious (raffendes) and productive (schaffendes) capital, the former being identified with the Jews and the latter with the Aryan folk community. In this framework, the exploitative character of capitalism can be associated exclusively with the financial sector, while the industrial sector can be presented as enhancing the well-being of the nation as a whole. The antagonistic character of capitalist society as a whole is thus turned into a battle between international high finance (represented by the Jews) on the one hand and the nation (represented by the Aryan folk community) on the other hand, with financial capital viewed as eroding the national community. The function of this ideology is twofold: firstly, it surreptitiously demonizes the Jew as international in character while protecting capitalist production processes from criticism; and, secondly, the hypostatization of the nation and of industrial capital as rooted, authentic and serving the well-being of the whole obscures the fact that in reality the concept of the nation – as a universal concept – is an abstract form of domination that essentially consists in the repression of the particular, be it with regard to language (Habermas, 1998; Hobsbawn, 2003) or ethnic and gender relations (Yuval-Davis, 1997). The nation itself, particularly in combination with the separation of financial and industrial capital, is an ideological tool that serves the function of hiding class struggle by transferring class antagonism to the level of ethnicity.
Thus, the semantic constellation of the cited passage supports the interpretation that, along with nationalism and anti-EU propaganda, there is also a covert antisemitic drift here. The lack of any open allusion to Jews in this passage might render this interpretation far-fetched. However, the absence of open references to Jews may also be due to the taboo on antisemitic utterances. The codes used here trigger an understanding of who’s actually to blame. The discourse centrally operates with asymmetric counter-concepts (Koselleck, 1989) that are an intrinsic part of the structural binaries and exclusions characteristic of everyday understanding. Such devices are universally understood, and it is only necessary to name one side of these binary constructions; the readers will understand the corresponding other side automatically. Thus, if we read about ‘schmarotzende internationale Hochfinanz’ (parasitic international high finance), this implies a counterpart, such as ‘national productive capital’, even if it is not expressly mentioned.
Another code similar to that of ‘high finance’ often used in political antisemitism in Austria is that of the (US-American) East Coast, in which a rejection of a purported artificial and inauthentic American culture is amalgamated with the fantasy that Jews living in that area control not only US but also European politics. The East Coast-code has been in common use in Austria since the Waldheim Affair 6 as a euphemism for the ‘Jewish world conspiracy’. Very popular in right-wing circles, this antisemitic code combines the covert blaming of Jews for capitalist exploitation with an anti-American drift that goes far beyond a realistic critique of US American politics. This will be the focus of the next section.
Secondary Antisemitism and Anti-Americanism
Resentful anti-Americanism is different from a legitimate critique of American politics. A common feature is that the USA is held responsible for the deficiencies of capitalism as a worldwide globalized system. Anti-Americanism, however, explains the deficiencies by reference to a purported essence, a national character of the USA, as ‘typically American’. At the same time, similar phenomena and conditions in one’s own country are likely to be ignored, relativized or denied. Just like with antisemitism, anti-Americanism is likely to be expressed by people who have no direct experience of the US and its way of life (cf. Diner, 2002). The perception is guided by mere prejudice and clearly shows an antimodernist drift.
The linking of antisemitism and anti-Americanism was already commonplace at the turn of the 19th to 20th century when, in völkisch nationalism, Judaism and Americanization were regarded as synonyms for a deplored loss of identity and national belonging (Diner, 2002; Markovits, 2007; Wistrich, 2005). But while a hundred years ago antisemitism was in the foreground, in the second half of the 20th century this relation was reversed. Now the antisemitic argument is increasingly covered by and transmitted through anti-Americanism. After 1945 anti-Americanism became an intrinsic component of nationalism in Germany and Austria. The officially decreed positive view of America as the liberator from National Socialism was in the first place aimed against the Soviet Union; the development of a genuine appreciation of democracy as a founding value of human society was, if at all, a by-product. The manner in which America was worshipped after 1945 also suggested an authoritarian identification with the powerful. Under the surface of this worship, however, an ongoing resentment against America as the nation that defeated National Socialism can be discerned. This development was recognized in the Gruppenexperiment in the 1950s and Adorno (2010) pointed to the importance of the ambivalent attitude to the US for the process of re-establishing and strengthening a national identity in Germany. Today too, anti-Americanism can be seen as one major manifestation of a European chauvinism that is still influenced by the Austrian and German Nazi past and the widespread unwillingness to accept responsibility for the crimes of National Socialism (cf. Rensmann, 2005: 243). This makes anti-Americanism a device for covering an antisemitism that can no longer be expressed openly in public (cf. Diner, 2002: 326f.).
In our Austrian media sample a rather explicit example of anti-American-related secondary antisemitism is an article entitled ‘Kranker Mann USA: Der Tanz um das Goldene Kalb ist ausgetanzt’ (‘Sick Man USA: The dance around the Golden Calf is over’) published in the Sunday supplement of the Kronen Zeitung on 19 October 2008. Already the very title of the article evokes antisemitic associations: the dance around the Golden Calf is a scene from the Old Testament which stands for the worship of material wealth. Although according to the Old Testament the Jews gave up the golden idol, the Christian tradition used the image to claim that Jews idolize material wealth. This image links Christian anti-Judaism and modern antisemitism – the connecting element being the materialism to which Jews, in this view, are purportedly addicted and which thus makes them fit to be the secret rulers of an increasingly materialistic world. 7 The Golden Calf is a placeholder for the old antisemitic image of the ‘greedy Jew’ and ‘financial Jewry’. Simultaneously, as in this headline, the image is linked to that of the USA as a ‘sick man’, an image that also has a tradition within the context of ultra-conservative European cultural pessimism. In the fin de siècle it was used to denounce the purported decadence and decline of a formerly vital ‘culture’ (conceptualized as the folk community) and its transformation into alienated ‘civilization’ in the course of modernization, a process that is also referred to as Americanization and ‘Judaization’. 8
In the newspaper article ‘Kranker Mann USA’ we then read: Die letzten Zweifel sind verflogen: Das US-Modell hat ausgedient. Die Demokratie hatten sie ohnehin schon vorher verraten durch Folter und KZ. Jetzt ist auch die neoliberale Marktgläubigkeit gescheitert. Für den kleinen Mann, die kleine Frau in den USA ist der amerikanische Traum zum Albtraum geworden. [The US-model has served its time. In any case, via torture and concentration camp they had already betrayed democracy. Now the neoliberal faith in the market has also collapsed. For the little man and the little woman in the USA the American Dream has become a nightmare.] (Neue Kronen Zeitung, 19 October 2008)
In this paragraph the denial of guilt and the discourse about the past begins with the allegation that the USA has betrayed democracy. Concentration camps, obviously referring to Guantanamo, are discursively transferred to US territory. In German, however, the abbreviation KZ is used solely in relation to National Socialism and the Holocaust and does not have the more general meaning that may be attributed to the term ‘concentration camp’ in English. Thus, relocating the KZ to America can be seen as a strategy of defence against guilt that applies a reversal of victim and perpetrator – with the liberator being viewed as the perpetrator. Concentration camps and the betrayal of democracy, clearly linked to National Socialism, are updated and brought into a relation with the financial crisis and so projected on to America. Moreover, the ‘American Dream’, the dream of freedom and independence, is represented as a nightmare, built on torture and concentration camps – in the context of the National Socialism evoked by the text this is again a blatant deflection of guilt.
So while not every critique of America is anti-American and anti-American resentment is not always connected to antisemitism, the semantic constellation presented in this passage makes the nexus clear: while on the manifest level of argumentation it is simply about blaming the US for the crisis (which in itself is of course a reductionist view), the latent message of the argument – conveyed by the introduction of the term KZ – is to blame the liberator for purportedly doing the same as the defeated Nazis had done.
Breaking the Taboo: Gender Images as Means to Transport Secondary Antisemitism
After these two cases of secondary antisemitism – in the first instance connected to nationalist and völkisch discourse, in the second instance connected to anti-Americanism – I would like to highlight a third case that occurred in our sample: this time in connection with gender constructions. There are several articles in our sample that deal with Sonja Kohn, an Austrian banker who was said to be an accomplice of Bernard Madoff who, in 2010, was accused of a fraud that caused losses to his investors running into billions of dollars. It is indeed important to note that not a single one of our sample of Austrian print media texts dealing with the financial crisis, including those texts that subtly applied antisemitic discursive strategies, used the words Jew, Judaism, Jewish or Jewishness. If antisemitism was at work, it was always indirectly, in a latent manner. This result is in accordance with the findings of antisemitism studies in linguistics which show that antisemitism, particularly in Austria and Germany, has changed its shape due to the taboo on the Nazi past – it has been driven backstage and is now expressed in latent ways, via innuendo and covered by nationalist and völkisch discourse. This is also evident in the two examples that I previously discussed in this article.
Here, however, things are different. When it came to writing about the female Jewish banker Sonja Kohn, the taboo on openly referring to Jewishness was broken not only in one newspaper, but consistently throughout our sample. When female Jewishness, and not Jewishness in general, was being addressed, it was seemingly easier to circumvent the taboo without immediately arousing suspicion. In this case, the emphasis was put on a deviant femininity ascribed to Mrs Kohn, a deviant femininity decked with ‘Jewish ornament’. She was presented as a ‘very aggressive and uncontrollable personality who refuses to take no for an answer’ (Wirtschaftsblatt, 15 December 2010).
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Her alleged ‘pugnacious personality’ was underlined by an emphasis on her outward appearance, referring particularly to ‘the conspicuous wig which she is wearing allegedly for religious reasons’,
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i.e. which characterizes her as an Orthodox Jewish married woman. In another article she was presented as ‘Star saleswoman of the billion-dollar bankrupt [Madoff]’ (‘Starverkäuferin des Milliardenpleitiers’, Kleine Zeitung, 15 December 2010) in the title. The article itself establishes the connection to the Nazi past: Die Tochter jüdischer Flüchtlinge soll Madoff in den 80ern in New York kennengelernt haben, wo sie als ‘Austria’s woman on Wall Street’ bekannt war. Dass Kohn Jüdin ist, spielt eine gewisse Rolle, hat doch Madoff, ebenfalls Jude, vor allem seine Glaubensgenossen dazu überredet, in seine Fonds zu investieren. [The daughter of Jewish refugees is said to have met Madoff in the 1980s in New York where she was known as ‘Austria’s woman on Wall Street’. The fact that Kohn is a Jew plays a certain role since Madoff, also a Jew, persuaded primarily his brothers in faith to invest in his funds.]
The observation that Kohn’s parents were Jewish refugees unambiguously places her and the whole affair in the context of Nazi persecution. This information is also important for the reader’s assessment of the following sentence that states that both Sonja Kohn and Bernard Madoff were Jewish and that their fraud primarily victimized fellow Jews – therewith the whole complex becomes a ‘Jewish affair’. The article suggests that, via Wall Street, Sonja Kohn has turned into a perpetrator, while her parents had been victims. In the following quote from the same source she herself is presented as a co-perpetrator who pretends to be a victim (i.e. who exploits her parents’ status as victims for her own objectives): Laut ‘Tagesanzeiger’ residiert sie in Zürich in einer noblen Villa, fühlt sich aber nicht als Mittäter von Madoff, sondern als Opfer. Für das natürlich die Unschuldsvermutung gilt. [According to the ‘Tagesanzeiger’ she resides in a splendid villa in Zurich; however, she doesn’t feel like a co-perpetrator of Madoff, but rather a victim. For whom, of course, the presumption of innocence prevails.]
Here, victimhood related to her Jewish ancestry and to the Nazi past is cynically reversed. The coverage of Sonja Kohn and her involvement in Madoff’s fraud is permeated by a pervasive juxtaposition of power and impotence, perpetrator and victim. Firstly, Kohn and Madoff are called ‘allies’ (Alliierte), and the victims of the fraud, primarily Jews, as we learn from the article, are presented as victims of the ‘allies’. The word ‘allies’, however, in German is primarily used in contexts connected to the Second World War – defining the allied forces that defeated the Nazi regime. And the most prominent ally was, of course, the USA. So if we read that Jews are victims of the ‘allies’ Madoff and Kohn, the whole sphere of association around the Nazi regime and its defeat is opened – with the specificity that Jews occur as victims of the allies, who are themselves Jewish. Thus, in a subtle way the Nazi past is evoked and guilt is reversed. Sonja Kohn is portrayed as a Jewish victim who turned into a perpetrator who victimized Jews but who now denies any responsibility – this is exactly what secondary antisemitism needs in order to deflect guilt.
The ‘true’ victim of this affair, however, is neither Sonja Kohn nor her ‘brothers in faith’ but, as an article in the Wirtschaftsblatt suggests, ‘once again Austria’, the nation suffering from political corruption and negative publicity: Österreich hat es wieder einmal in die internationale Presse geschafft: Die Liste der Beschuldigten im Madoff-Prozess liest sich wie das Who is who der Wiener Hochfinanz – allen voran Sonja Kohn. (N.N., Wirtschaftsblatt, 15 December 2010) [Once again Austria made it into the international press: the list of those being accused in the Madoff trial is like a Who’s Who of Viennese high finance – with Sonja Kohn leading the way.]
What exactly does the ‘once again’ in this passage allude to? In what circumstances has Austria previously made it into the international press? Apart from sports highlights there was, of course, the Waldheim Affair in 1986 during which Austria was forced to give up her grand delusion of having been Hitler’s first victim. Only in the course of this affair did Austria’s chancellor admit Austria’s complicity in the Nazi regime. Then there were the international debates on the participation of the Austrian Freedom Party in government in 2000 and the related sanctions by the EU. These examples of Austria hitting the international headlines have taken firm root in the Austrian collective memory and can thus be evoked by the phrase that now, with the affair around Sonja Kohn, Austria has ‘once again’ made it into the international press. ‘The fact that Kohn is a Jew also plays a certain role’ here (to quote the article referred to above) – it indicates a subtle reversal of victim and perpetrator and distracts attention from Austria’s guilt. Because this time it is a Jew who has hit the headlines, a Jewish woman who is a leading figure in ‘high finance’ – that highly cryptic group construction which was already a code for Jewish conspiracy in Nazi jargon.
Against this background the passage points us towards the following interpretation: While hitherto it was primarily personalities with a dubious relationship to National Socialism who hit the international headlines (Waldheim, Haider, etc.), this time it is a Jew: both harm Austria’s international image, both are alien to a nation that is neither Nazi nor Jewish but puts itself outside the historical nexus of guilt. As in the other examples, here too elements of secondary antisemitism (transported via gender images) are utilized in order to reinforce the idea of a unitary national in-group that has fallen victim to international conspiratorial forces.
Conclusion
To sum up, we can say that secondary antisemitism is a complex consisting of several components that have to do with the relationship to the National Socialist past. It is a symptom to be found primarily in Germany and Austria, where the official taboo on open antisemitism after 1945 clashes with a widespread unwillingness and inability to recognize the Holocaust and accept responsibility. It is furthermore a strategy for justifying National Socialism and antisemitism. And thirdly, it is a manifestation of the very authoritarian relationship of society and individual that led to National Socialism and is still prevalent in post-Nazi societies.
Furthermore, secondary antisemitism has proved to be adaptable to areas that have nothing directly to do with the National Socialist past. It can be applied in contexts not directly related to National Socialism – like the debates about the financial crisis in Austria. The constant preoccupation with the Nazi past and simultaneous defence against it – the deep ambivalence – becomes obvious when one looks closely at the encoded messages. While Jews are blamed for constantly reminding of the past and for not being able to forget, secondary antisemites are themselves not able to come to terms with their own or their ancestors’ past. In the end, they are driven by an ambivalence that is structurally and psychologically induced, and while they demand that a line be drawn under the past, they cannot get free from it themselves. Otherwise it would be incomprehensible why the Nazi past is invoked in debates unrelated to that past, but to the recent economic crisis.
It is one of the peculiarities of secondary antisemitism that, since the resentment against Jews is no longer based on any personal experience, it may be expressed unintentionally and unconsciously. Additionally, post-Nazi antisemitism appears not in a manifest but in a rather coded and latent manner. For decades the taboo on overt antisemitism was so effective and impermeable as to ban remembrance altogether (cf. Judt, 2005). But the past has not been forgotten, nor even fully repressed, but rather covered over by communicative latency. Accordingly, Jews are rarely mentioned openly, even in circumstances where antisemitism is at work – with one exception, the debate on the banker Sonja Kohn, where her Jewish femininity or female Jewishness was excessively commented on. While the Nazi past and repressed guilt are still a topic and secretly identifying Jews with the financial sphere is in the background of the argumentation, nationalism and gender images have proved to be particularly effective in transmitting antisemitic content.
As a structural form of antisemitism, i.e. one not personally experienced but rather taken over as an ideology, it is triggered by the need to reinforce an existing order that is objectively threatened by crisis, economic as well as social. In the constellation of a society that views itself as increasingly post-national (Habermas, 1998) and which is entangled in a crisis-ridden, globalized economy, it is a major function of secondary antisemitism, or post-Nazi antisemitism, to re-establish a national feeling that has fallen into disgrace due to the Nazi regime. Today, national identity is again being challenged and a widespread feeling of uncertainty – which, however, is not consciously experienced – is apparent. Secondary antisemitism is able to reinforce certainty in a most reactionary manner: it enables the personalized attribution of guilt for the crisis through the mobilization of well-established defence mechanisms with regard to responsibility for the Nazi past.
Footnotes
Funding
The research done for this article was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (project no. J3384-G15) and the Jubiläumsfonds der Oesterreichischen Nationalbank (project no. 13549).