2024-08-17 1446 AH

Excerpts

German Redemption Theology

Adnan Delalic, 17 Jul 2024

Summary

"German Redemption Theology" explores how Germany's post-Holocaust identity has evolved into a form of moral superiority, where the nation perceives itself as redeemed from its Nazi past through its relationship with Israel.

This ideology has led to the externalization of Nazi guilt, projecting it onto others, particularly Arabs and Muslims, while simultaneously promoting militarism and imperialism under the guise of anti-antisemitism.

The text critiques Germany's selective memory, focusing on white European perspectives while ignoring other genocides and suffering.

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ChatGPT provided a summary in 80 words of this shortened text: "German Redemption Theology" by Adnan Delalic.

The complete text is behind a paywall, except for the first few paragraphs: criticalmuslim.io

Deutsch

Der Author Adnan Delalic von "Deutsche Erlösungstheologie" untersucht, wie sich Deutschlands Identität nach dem Holocaust zu einer Form moralischer Überlegenheit entwickelt hat, in der sich die Nation durch ihre Beziehung zu Israel von ihrer Nazi-Vergangenheit erlöst wahrnimmt.

Diese Ideologie hat zur Externalisierung der Nazi-Schuld geführt und sie auf andere, insbesondere Araber und Muslime, projiziert und gleichzeitig Militarismus und Imperialismus unter dem Deckmantel des Antisemitismus gefördert.

Der Text kritisiert Deutschlands selektives Gedächtnis, konzentriert sich auf weiße europäische Perspektiven und ignoriert gleichzeitig andere Völkermorde und Leiden.

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Zusammenfassung in 80 Wörtern einer verkürzten Version dieses Textes durch ChatGPT: "Deutsche Erlösungstheologie" von Adnan Delalic.

Der vollständige Text ist bis auf die ersten Absätze hinter einer Paywall: criticalmuslim.io

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German Redemption Theology

by Adnan Delalic

(Shortened Version, reading time 14min, original text 36min)

Merkel stressed (in Isra-l, 2008) the unique and eternal bond between the two countries through the memory of the Shoah, ‘which fills us Germans with shame’. As a lesson from the past, ‘antisemitism, racism and xenophobia must never be allowed to gain a foothold in Germany or Europe again.’ Today, Germany and Israel share the values of freedom, democracy, and respect for human dignity.

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This image was not part of the original article.

At the time of Scholz’s speech on 12 October, the nature of what has been unfolding in Gaza was already clear, at least to some observers. [ □ comment: and this is only three days after defence minister Gallant on TV declared for the world: 'we are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.'
And here we have the leader of a so-called civilised country, Germany, propagating human rights left and right, who guaranteed those messianic war criminals that what ever they will do, Germany will support them, while from time to time whispering sweet words and sending weapons at the same time.
What disgraceful, depraved leaders!]

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He draws attention to the following statement by Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, from 9 October: 'we are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.'

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On 29 December 2023, South Africa brought forward a case against Israel for genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which, in a landmark ruling on 26 January 2024, acknowledged the violence in Gaza as a plausible case of ongoing genocide and ordered provisional measures.

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And yet, the clearer this reality becomes, the more Germany seems to double down on denial. That is, its government, most of its public, and most of its intellectuals. It appears that no amount of human rights reports, court rulings, and scholarly references to Germany’s own genocidal history can do anything about this. What is particularly strange is the language. For a modern liberal democracy, Staatsräson seems rather archaic and absolutist terminology.

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This notion is called the secularisation thesis. One of its great proponents is the foundational German sociologist Max Weber. He famously spoke of the disenchantment of the world. With increasing modernisation, that is, secularisation, the world is gradually stripping away myth and magic [the spiritual!] and moving towards direct access to the truth [reducing truth to what can be measured, quantified]. Only secular modernity, the culmination of millennia of Western civilisation, can uncover a reality that, while assumed to always have existed, was inaccessible throughout pre-modern history.

However, while this notion may still be considered common sense in Western societies, the secularisation thesis has been increasingly questioned in the social sciences, or at least less triumphantly advocated.

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Asad warns, in particular, against conceptualising secular modern discourse as a direct translation or succession to pre-modern Christian history.

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In our dark and miserable world, humans carry on the project of redemption. But that project must start with the self as ‘the jungle is after all in the gardener’s own soul’.

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Germany has enjoyed the reputation of a country that has come to terms with its dark history uniquely well and was seen – and more importantly, saw itself – as a moral authority on matters of crimes against humanity and genocide. Germany’s global branding now seems to be falling apart. How did it come to this?

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II.

As laudable as Germany’s reckoning with the Shoah has come to be, the Porajmos, the Nazi genocide of the Sinti and Roma, is not being adequately remembered. How many Germans have even heard of the term Porajmos? Not to mention the Ovaherero and Nama genocide in German South West Africa, now Namibia, the first genocide of the twentieth century. German memory culture has been national and Eurocentric from the onset.

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As a matter of fact, this story has been about white German feelings all along. In Asad’s terms, referencing both the nineteenth century colonial and contemporary liberal discourse, the jungle is in the gardener’s own soul. Given its emancipatory origins, and ironically riffing on the concept of liberation theology, I call this phenomenon German Redemption Theology.

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In German redemption theology, Germany imagines itself as emerging from the Holocaust as purified from Nazism and antisemitism. In The German Catechism, the Australian scholar Dirk Moses describes this as ‘a redemptive story in which the sacrifice of Jews in the Holocaust by Nazis is the premise for the Federal Republic’s legitimacy’. The Holocaust here is rendered as redemptive violence. By redeeming themselves, the Germans have become (God’s) chosen missionaries, exorcising evil from this world, and in particular the Holy Land.

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In a perverse twist, the fact that the Germans were the most successful antisemites in history has here become a credential. By becoming the Jews’ consummate protectors, Germans have so thoroughly absorbed the moral lessons bestowed by Jewish martyrdom that they have no more need for the Jew except as symbol; by the logic of this strange supersessionism, Germans have become the new Jews.

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The Judeo-Christian, above all, serves as a marker of civilisational difference, in particular against Muslims and Arabs: ‘the secular Zionist, the figure that most represents the now fashionable “Judeo-Christian”, has been constructed through a distinction from the East, from the Arab, and from the historical-exilic Jew’.

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Perversely, the Shoah has become a source of secret pride and moral authority as it marks Germany’s belonging to Judeo-Christian civilisation and signifies its importance to world history.

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‘Judaism is not seen as a tradition in its own right—including the right to define itself—but as a historical phase of truth that has been superseded by a higher truth (Christianity) and that, in turn, by an even higher one (secularism).’

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Muslims and Arabs. Palestinians, in particular, are virtually assigned ‘neo-Nazi antisemite’ at birth. [Case in point, Nemi El-Hassan, 2021]

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The projection by Nazi descendants of their own monstrous history onto racialised Others in the present, has resulted in a virtual redefinition of ‘antisemitism’ to primarily mean ‘anti-Germanism’, especially regarding challenges to the country’s self-image and opposition to its war effort. This externalisation of Nazi evil casts brown people – the ‘new Nazis’ – as a threat to the white majority – ‘the new Jews’.

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III

In reality, there is no happy ending. History has not ended. As a matter of fact, we are witnessing the formation of a new German nationalism.

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Marwecki quotes the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, after his retirement. ‘We had done to the Jews so much injustice, committed such crimes against them that somehow these had to be expiated or repaired, if we were at all to regain our international standing.’ Adenauer goes on to note: ‘furthermore, the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated’.

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Germany sought international rehabilitation and western integration, and Israel needed financial and military support for state-building.

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The country whose modern history is virtually synonymous with the history of genocide is fully involved in what the ICJ has ruled to be a plausible case of ongoing genocide. From this perspective, German redemption theology reveals itself to function as a superstructure providing ideological legitimacy for German militarism and imperialism.

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Rheinmetall, which was vital for the Nazi war machine. Today, it forecasts record sales in part thanks to the war on Gaza.

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Bayer, one of the largest pharmaceutical and biomedical companies in the world, co-organised a mass demonstration ‘against antisemitism’,which really means ‘pro-Germany’s war effort’, on 10 December 2023. The demonstration took place in Berlin alongside, among others, Deutsche Bank, which once funded the construction of the Auschwitz death camp. What this absurd charade under the motto ‘Never again is now! Germany stands up!’ shows is that liberal antifascism and civil society are being tied to the arms industry and used for the whitewashing of Nazi heritage in the name of the polar opposite, namely ‘anti-antisemitism’ and ‘Holocaust memory’. German redemption theology plays a crucial role in getting parts of society on board that typically do not desire to be associated with arms sales, war efforts, or genocide for that matter. Only such an appeal to moral righteousness, white innocence, and self-redemption allows for the coalescence of national unity in a Germany that was meant to be post-national, post-racial, and purified of sin. 

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This elite-driven national psychosis is powered by the fact that its catalysts tend to be rather nebulous. What Merkel declared to be Germany’s Staatsräson is not actually enshrined anywhere. What’s the point, in this day and age, of using such an archaic term? It has something to do with foreign policy, especially German-Israeli relations, but what exactly does it entail? Is any Israeli government worthy of unconditional solidarity? Where does Israel’s security end and Palestinian insecurity begin? Does it comply with international law? What about its domestic implications? Former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt once presciently described it as ‘an emotionally understandable but foolish notion that could have extremely serious consequences’. He could not have foreseen just how serious the consequences would turn out to be.

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According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics, it ‘means that there may be reasons for acting (normally in foreign policy, less usually in domestic policy) which simply override all other considerations of a legal or moral kind’. This holds true for German Staatsräson today, a pseudo-constitutional doctrine that functions as an authoritarian tool to circumvent democratic checks and balances, typically in service of militarism and imperialism.

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When Scholz speaks of Staatsräson, it signifies authoritarian repression at home, and genocidal militarism abroad, justified in the language of German redemption theology.

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IV

The resolution is legally non-binding and would never qualify as a proper law, which is precisely why it’s so powerful. It spawned a climate of paranoid racist McCarthyism and self-censorship that has only been escalating. The crowdsourced Archive of Silence documents so far more than 130 publicly known instances of, often racialised, people being cancelled, silenced, censored, denounced, persecuted, de-platformed, de-funded, or forced out of their jobs since October 2023 alone. The McCarthyites don’t even have to fabricate ‘BDS proximity’ anymore. Just treating Palestinians as fully human, let alone being Palestinian, may be enough to violate the Staatsräson. Powered by the traditional white German values of conformism, moral cowardice, vorauseilender Gehorsam (anticipatory obedience), and snitching, as well as German redemption theology, a systematic re-aryanisation of Germany’s cultural, academic, and intellectual landscape has been unleashed. Or, if you will, a reshaping in the image of the German arms industry. One statistic shows that, while Jews comprise less than one percent of Germany’s population, almost one third of the people cancelled for alleged antisemitism are Jewish. This is what state antisemitism looks like. 

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German media bears much responsibility for this national psychosis. Media giant Axel Springer, in particular, fuels a perpetual state of racist panic. As it happens, it also makes money on Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, as a recent investigation by The Intercept revealed. One of its newspapers, Die Welt, bluntly states ‘Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler’. However, the quality press is not much better. The left-liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung suggests that wearing a keffiyeh is comparable to donning a Nazi uniform. This is German redemption theology in action. As actual neo-Nazis are at large, infiltrating the state, and rising in the polls, racialised minorities and refugees are being labelled the ‘new Nazis’ and cast as a threat to the nation by mainstream white Germany, which, desiring victimhood, imagines itself as the ‘new Jews’. This complete reversal of real power dynamics is reminiscent of far-right white supremacist conspiracy theories like the ‘Great Replacement’ and ‘White Genocide’. Moreover, in a revival of traditional European antisemitism, moral panics around such progressive ‘bad Jews’

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Not unlike the War on Terror and the War on Drugs, this ‘War on Anti-Semitism’ locates ‘the origin of Europe’s or American social ailments in the non-Western world, as well as in the migrant and people of colour communities within the West.’

What the German ruling class now has arrived at is essentially the establishment of a set of rulings for what is considered to be halal/haram vis-à-vis the new core national value of Staatsräson. Mind you, that’s halal/haram not according to Islamic law, let alone German law, but within a kind of state of exception. As Giorgio Agamben reminds us, ‘one of the essential characteristics of the state of exception… here shows its tendency to become a lasting practice of government.’

The authoritarian turn unleashed in Germany is, indeed, bound to be of lasting impact, and ruthlessly so.

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Israel is abstractly conflated with ‘the Jews’, who, implicitly, are held collectively responsible for Israel’s conduct. Apostate ‘bad Jews’ who oppose German-backed war crimes, disturb the logic of Staatsräson nativism and are, so to speak, ‘excommunicated’ by and from white Germany, as well as from Israel. Effectively, they are denounced, in the lingo of traditional European antisemitism, as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. The fact that ‘bad Jews’, including Holocaust survivors and their descendants, are routinely slandered as antisemites must be seen in light of the fact that, according to Staatsräson and German redemption theology, antisemitism primarily means ‘anti-Germanism’. The German state’s non-Jewish antisemitism commissioner, Felix Klein, once complained that ‘left-leaning Israelis in Berlin’ are not being sensitive enough ‘to Germany’s special historical responsibility’. In Staatsräson Germany, white-Christian Germans are the true arbiters and victims of antisemitism. 

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This sentiment was expressed in a speech by Vice Chancellor and Minister of Economy and Climate, Robert Habeck. Much-lauded as ‘the speech of the year’ in the German public, he threatened ‘Muslims living here’ that ‘they must clearly distance themselves from antisemitism so as not to undermine their own right to tolerance’.

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What’s the message? ‘Israel’s right to exist’ is linked to Germany’s ‘democratic ethos’ and declared to be worthy of special protection? This is simply a reformulation of Staatsräson, including its nebulosity! Does this right to exist encompass the right to commit genocide?

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The implication is that, while Hamas are truly genocidal, the Nazis were categorically not as bad. They merely committed unspecified ‘mass crimes’. 

This narrative resembles the flourishing right-wing discourse in the West of humanising the Nazis as ‘civilised’, at least in comparison to the real barbarians.

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A new Germany where any opposition to Germany’s involvement in an ongoing genocide is hysterically cancelled, denounced, persecuted, suppressed, and declared haram, as the country’s greatest living intellectual insinuates that the sheer ‘Muslimness’ and ‘Palestinianness’ of Hamas surpasses in evil the German industrial extermination of millions of Jews, Romani, and numerous other groups of people.

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Within a few months, Germany has squandered its international reputation and goodwill. Decades of meticulously established diplomacy, soft power, and memory culture are gone. There’s no way back. Germany has exposed itself on the world stage for everyone to see. The world won’t forget, and it will hold Germany accountable. This, in fact, is already happening.

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V

Namibia rejects Germany’s Support of the Genocidal Intent of the Racist Israeli State against Innocent Civilians in Gaza.

On Namibian soil, Germany committed the first genocide of the twentieth century in 1904–1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions. The German Government is yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil.

For the time being, it seems no self-reflection can be expected from the white-majority society. German redemption theology cannot be so easily overcome. The sole hope within the country lies in the continued resistance of the largely racialised pro-Palestine/anti-genocide movement. It is the only truly anti-racist and anti-fascist force in Germany today. It must weather the storm of the state’s continued descent into authoritarianism and nationalism. May it one day triumph, as Habermas’s generation once did.

As the future of Gaza, Germany, and the world at large remains unsettling, let us remember these words of caution from Talal Asad: ‘if Christianity has gifted valued secular sentiments to the modern world, the gift is certainly more dangerous than the claim would have us assume because what is most evident in a liberal democratic society is not divine love for all but state power over all’.

For this is indeed how the secular manifests at the present moment in history.

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