The debate about Augstein’s columns is a kind of continuation of a similar  one prompted by the publication last April of Günter Grass’s poem “Was gesagt werden muss” (“What must be said”), which suggested that “the nuclear power Israel” endangered world peace and might “annihilate” Iran. Grass was widely criticised for the poem, but Augstein was one of the first public figures in Germany to defend Grass - in a column a few days after the poem was published, he said quite simply that Grass was “right”. I argued that Grass’s poem was an example of what Dan Diner has called “exonerating projection” – that is, the relativisation of the Holocaust through the implicit equation of Israel with Nazi Germany. Augstein deploys the same strategy in his columns. For example in one of them he referred to Gaza as a Lager, or camp – a word that automatically (and especially in German) suggests Nazi concentration camps. (He has since admitted that it was a bad choice of word.) But is he an anti-Semite as the Wiesenthal Center claims?

In my previous post on Israel and anti-Semitism I said that criticism of Israel could be anti-Semitic if it either takes on the character of an obsession with Israeli policy or if it displays the structure of, or uses the tropes of, classical anti-Semitism. In a debate published in the Spiegel, Dieter Graumann, the president of the Central Council of German Jews accused Augstein of being obsessed with Israel, but Augstein pointed out that of his 100 or so columns for Spiegel Online, only five were about Israel. What is more problematic, I think, is the way Augstein writes. In his columns on Israel he claims that Israel is able “bend Germany to its will” and even at times seems to suggest a global conspiracy – the paradigmatic modern anti-Semitic trope. Augstein also writes about a “Jewish lobby” rather than an “Israel lobby” (the mistake that new US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel also once made). In other words, Augstein is at times in that difficult grey area between what is legitimate criticism of Israeli policy on the one hand and anti-Semitism on the other.

More interesting, though, than the question of whether Augstein is an anti-Semite is the shift in German attitudes to Israel that the views expressed his columns illustrate. In a previous post I wrote about the possible emergence of a “post-Zionist” Germany – in other words one that had moved on from its previous identification with the Jewish state based on a sense of responsibility for the Holocaust. According to Spiegel‘s own story last month about the Augstein controversy, the offices of Germany’s three main political parties were inundated with letters of support for Grass from ordinary Germans after his poem was published. Polls also show that younger Germans are more critical of Israel than older Germans (a reverse, interestingly, of the situation in West Germany before 1967). So what seems to be happening, as the Spiegel story also suggests, is that a gap is opening up between the political establishment and older Germans on the one hand and ordinary and younger Germans on the other. The question is whether that at some point soon Germany may reach a tipping point.

Last summer, shortly after Germany broke with its allies and partners and abstained in a vote in the United Nations Security Council on military intervention in Libya, it agreed the sale of up to 270 Leopard II tanks to Saudi Arabia, which had helped suppress pro-democracy protests in Bahrain. Now Saudi Arabia now also wants to buy hundreds of Boxer armoured vehicles – which are even more suited for suppressing protests than Leopard II tanks. Germany has approved the sale of about €1.2 billion in arms to the United Arab Emirates and Qatar is also interested in buying Leopard IIs. There has also been a big increase in the sale of arms – including frigates and Fuchs armoured personnel carriers – to Algeria. The sale of nuclear-capable Dolphin submarines to Israel was the subject of another Spiegel cover story in the summer; according to the latest Spiegel story, Israel now wants to buy German launchers for rocket-propelled grenades too – and opposes another sale of Type 209 submarines to Egypt.

Decisions about German arms sales are taken in secret by the Bundessicherheitsrat, or Federal Security Council, which consists of the chancellor, her chief of staff and seven other ministers. According to the latest arms report published by the German economics ministry, German arms export permits reached €10 billion in 2011 for the first time. There has been a significant increase in the proportion of weapons sold to countries outside NATO (and NATO-equivalent states such as Australia and Japan) and the EU. In 2010, just 29 percent of sales were to such so-called third-party states; it is now 42 percent. It is undemocratic states such as Algeria, Saudi Arabia and the UAE that account for much of that increase. Some such as former former chancellor Helmut Schmidt and former foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher have publicly criticized Merkel’s approach. Social Democrat Peer Steinbrück has promised a more restrictive arms export policy if he is elected chancellor next September.

Of course, Germany is not the only country that exports weapons around the world. The British and French governments are, if anything, even more open about promoting their defence industries (though, according to the latest SIPRI statistics on arms transfers, Germany now sells more than either of them). In my view, selling arms is also not necessarily a bad thing – in fact, it could be a legitimate way for Europeans to support democracies in Asia. But what makes the German case so striking, and problematic, is that Germany is often thought of as a “civilian power” – in other words, one that, unlike a great power, avoids the use of military force and tries to “civilise” international relations. However, although Germany is reluctant to deploy force itself (as the abstention on Libya illustrated), it is apparently not so reluctant to sell weapons to others to use (as the Saudi tank deal illustrates). Germany’s arms exports are a kind of blind spot in its “civilian power” identity. In fact, the loosening of German arms exports restrictions supports the idea that Germany is now becoming a “geo-economic power”.

In this context, the contrast between Germany and Japan – the other country that is sometimes thought of as a “civilian power” – is also interesting. Article 9 of Japan’s post-war constitution, passed in 1947, declares that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.” But, importantly, this renunciation of war includes arms exports: since 1967, the Japanese government has in effect imposed on itself a ban on the sale of weapons. Admittedly, against the background of the rise of China, Japan is now beginning to relax the ban. But, even before reunification, the Federal Republic never had such a ban. It is often said that Germany has made more of a break with its militaristic past than Japan (see for example Ian Buruma’s book The Wages of Guilt). However, in terms of arms-exports policy, it seems to me that Japan has actually been more consistent and thoroughgoing in its rejection of military force than Germany has.

My favourite passage in the English language is the last paragraph of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938). In it he describes coming back to Blighty after fighting in the Spanish Civil War, in which he was shot in the neck and nearly killed. Forseeing World War II and in particular the Blitz, he captures beautifully the sense of cognitive dissonance one often has on returning from the world to the familiarity of England. The passage also evokes Britain’s tendency to ignore developments in contintental Europe until it is too late: the “deep, deep sleep of England”. It seems to me as apt in 2012 as it was in 1938:

And then England - southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen - all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs. 

I recently read Quinn Slobodian’s book Foreign Front, which I was reviewing for the TLS. It is mainly about the role that students from Africa, Asia and Latin America played in the West German New Left in the 1960s and the complex relationship between intellectuals in the West and revolutionaries in the Third World. But it also includes a discussion of the early work of the German filmmaker Harun Farocki. I’d known Farocki was of Indian origin. But until reading Slobodian’s book, I hadn’t realised that his father was a supporter of Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian nationalist leader who went to Berlin during World War II and formed an alliance with the Nazis. That fact makes Farocki a particularly interesting figure who links the story of Germany’s 1968 generation with the story of the Indian independence movement.

According to Slobodian, Farocki was born in 1944  in German-annexed Czechoslovakia. His father, Abdul Qudus Faroqhi, was an Indian doctor who treated Bose while he was in Berlin from 1941 to 1943; his mother, Lili Draugellatis, was German. Farocki grew up in India, where his father was repatriated after the war ended, but moved back to West Germany in 1956. As a student at the German Film and Television Academy in West Berlin from 1966-8, Farocki was in the same class as Holger Meins – who famously saw the camera as a weapon and made a film about how to make a Molotov Cocktail, and later became a member of the Red Army Faction and died in prison after a hunger strike in 1975. Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard, Farocki made a series of films about the Vietnam war, including Inextinguishable Fire (1969, above) in which he puts a cigarette out on his arm in order to demonstrate the effects of napalm. Farocki’s recent video installations – also on war – have been exhibited at MOMA in New York.

In my book, Utopia or Auschwitz, I argued that 1968 in West Germany was a psychodrama in which the children of the “perpetrator generation”  was played out. Perhaps the best example of this is Bernward Vesper, the author of the posthumously published novel Die Reise (The Trip), whose father was the Nazi poet Will Vesper. But many other members of the 1968 generation in Germany were also acutely conscious of being the “children of murderers”, as Rainer Langhans (whose father was a member of the Nazi party) put it to me when I interviewed him. Given Bose’s alliance with the Nazis at exactly the time when the Holocaust was being conceived and implemented, the child of one of his supporters might feel just as implicated in the Nazi past as someone who had two German parents. The question is, did Farocki think of himself in this way? If so, how did it influence his work?

I’ve been a fan of the movies of Powell and Pressburger since watching A Matter of Life and Death in a film studies class in high school. Last weekend I went to the National Film Theatre in London to re-watch another of my favourite movies of theirs, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), which has recently been restored and re-released. Martin Scorsese – another of my favourite directors – is a big fan of the film and says it becomes “more resonant, more moving, more profound” every time he watches it. For Scorsese, the film is about time, memory and loss. According to the BFI, it’s also “probably the greatest study of ‘Englishness’ in the cinema”. But, as I watched it again last weekend, I found myself wondering whether it’s also about Powell and Pressburger themselves.

The character of Colonel Blimp was created by the cartoonist David Low in the 1930s. An old duffer usually depicted talking pompous nonsense in a Turkish bath (hence the scene of the film in which we are introduced to the Blimp character in a bathing club), he became the embodiment of a British military that was seen as increasingly old-fashioned. For example, Orwell often wrote about “unblimping” - in other words modernising – the British military. Churchill famously wanted to stop Powell and Pressburger from making a film based on the character: his friend, Minister of Information Brendan Bracken (later the founder of the Financial Times), met with Powell and Pressburger before production began and told them that the “the old boy doesn’t like it” but did not stop them making the film. Powell and Pressburger went ahead, but instead of ridiculing the British military as Churchill presumably thought they intended to, they actually made the cartoon character sympathetic while also suggesting the British military had to change and had changed.

One of the things that make Powell and Pressburger’s films so interesting is their complex attitude to Englishness. According to the programme notes for Blimp, Powell and Pressburger’s work involves “such an inextricable criss-cross of un-, anti- and ultra-Englishness … that it is hard to decide whether they are insiders trying to cut their way out of hidebound traditions or outsiders trying to revitalise those traditions.” Presumably, part of that ambivalence is the product of the tension between Powell and Pressburger: one an Englishman; the other a Hungarian Jew who worked in Berlin but was forced to leave after the Nazis came to power and moved to Britain in 1935. The distinctive ambivalence towards Englishness in their films – in particular the way they seem simultaneously to criticise and romanticise Englishness – is presumably a function of these two very different perspectives.

What occurred to me when I watched Blimp again the other evening was how the two characters on whose friendship the film centres – the British officer Clive Candy and the German officer Theodor Kretschmar-Schuldorff – channel these two perspectives. Thelma Schoonmaker, Powell’s wife (and Scorsese’s editor), says in an interesting BBC radio programme that Roger Livesey, who plays Candy, was Powell’s alter ego. Kretschmar-Schuldorff, on the other hand, seems to contain elements of Pressburger, who, like him, came to Britain as an exile from continental Europe. One seems to hear Pressburger above all in Kretschmar-Schuldorff’s famous speech about England to an immigration officer (a speech that, as Ian Jack points out, has also been echoed by Ed Miliband). So perhaps the friendship between the two characters in Blimp actually stands for that between Powell and Pressburger.

In a compelling essay that appeared in Foreign Affairs in 2010, Mary Elise Sarotte describes how German reunification in 1990 “left behind fateful seeds, which sprouted into the 2010 crisis”. Although the idea of a single currency had been around since the 1970s, it took the prospect of reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to prompt Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President François Mitterrand to convene the intergovernmental conference that led to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. In a sense, it was a quid pro pro for reunification. But in what Sarotte calls the “mad rush” to agree the terms of monetary union, European leaders who knew little of economics created a single currency that did not have the ability to respond to crises or real political coordination.

At the time, Kohl talked about German reunification and European integration as “two sides of the same coin”. German reunification was only possible in the context of European integration – as Konrad Adenauer had said, “German problems can only be solved under a European roof”. Conversely, reunification was also a “catalyst”, as Sarotte puts it, for the creation of the euro – a further massive step in European integration (although because of French resistance it was not possible to agree the greater political integration that Germany wanted to accompany the currency union). In short, Kohl believed that there was a symbiosis between Germany and Europe. Initially, he seemed to have been proven right as fears about German power failed to materialise.

However, during the decade after the euro was created in 1999, Germany’s relationship with Europe began to change. As economic imbalances grew, economic interests within the eurozone diverged. Meanwhile, having achieved its goal of reunification, Germany became more Eurosceptic. As I have argued elsewhere, the size of the German economy, and the interdependence between it and those around it, is now causing instability within Europe. Germany needs the EU as a market for its exports and the euro to keep its own currency from being overvalued, but is not able or willing to act as a hegemon. One might almost say that Germany’s relationship with Europe has gone from symbiotic to parasitic. In fact, I am starting to wonder whether, if the euro crisis is not solved, German reunification may ultimately lead to European disintegration.

The debate about the euro in the last couple of years takes place against the background of what I think is a general tendency in Germany to what in a previous post I called “moral narcissism”. Germany tends to be somewhat inward-looking and, for obvious reasons, focuses on its own history and identity. In a sense, it is a good thing that Germany is struggling is to learn the lessons from its own past. But it can also make foreign-policy debates self-referential. Perhaps the best example of this is the debate about the Kosovo war in 1999. Although I think Germany ultimately took the right decision by agreeing to make a contribution to the NATO military intervention, the debate about it was one that seemed more about German identity after Auschwitz rather than the Balkans.

In this case, I think it means Germany tends to assume that the economic lessons of its own history are universal. In Germany the idea of an independent central bank enforcing “stability culture” is sacrosanct because it helped control inflation, create the Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle”, of the 1950s and 1960s and a strong Deutschmark. But Germany is now also seeking to impose those lessons throughout the eurozone. As George Soros pointed out at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month, Germany is also attempting to impose the lessons it has learned in the last decade. Austerity and wage restraint beginning under the “red-green” government helped Germany restore competitiveness in the 2000s. But that does not mean everyone in the eurozone can do the same thing. In fact, Keynesians would argue that this leads to a deflationary spiral.

Narcissism also implies a lack of awareness of your environment. Germans tend to think that their increased competitiveness is simply the result of their own exertions and to neglect the boost that the eurozone itself has given to the German economy. In particular, as I argued in a short piece for the Canadian international affairs magazine Global Brief, the eurozone has helped Germany to dramatically increase exports. The introduction of the euro cut the cost of borrowing in peripheral countries such as Greece, which enabled them to buy German cars and submarines. At the same time, the weakness of the euro compared to the Deutschmark has made German exports to the rest of the world and especially China much more competitive than they were before 1999. But listening to the debate in Germany, you would think Germany has simply pulled itself up by its bootstraps – that’s what I meant by “economic narcissism”.

The background to the possible emergence of what my colleague Daniel Levy calls a “post-Zionist Germany” is the reduction in the importance of the Holocaust as a factor in German foreign policy. From the 1980s onwards, the Holocaust became an increasingly important collective memory in West German public life. But during the last decade it has started to recede in importance. In the NATO military intervention in Kosovo in 1999, the Federal Republic sent troops into combat for the first time following a debate that centred on the Holocaust. In 2011, by contrast, it abstained on United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 authorising military intervention to prevent a massacre in Benghazi. Moreover, during the debate about it, few people brought up Auschwitz at all.

Against this background, there has been increasing resentment against Israel in Germany – in particular  around the issue of settlements – which has put pressure on Merkel. She reiterated her commitment to the Jewish state when Benjamin Netanyahu visited Berlin last January – but even she was disappointed with him. The following month, Germany voted in favor of a UN resolution demanding a halt to Israeli settlement expansion - an unusual break with Israel. Later in the year, Germany opposed the Palestinian statehood bid at the UN. But according to one poll,  84 percent of Germans supported Palestinian statehood and 76 percent believe Germany should act to recognise it – an even higher proportion in each case than in France or the UK.

There has been much discussion recently about the possibility of Israeli military action against Iran in 2012. In a list we made of possible developments in international politics in 2012, my colleagues and I at ECFR suggested that next year there could be a perfect storm in which the Netanyahu government might think it is the best time to strike. My hunch is that if that happens, the remaining sympathy the German public has for Israel would evaporate. An Israeli military strike would prompt another competition in Germany between the two principles of “Never again war” and “Never again Auschwitz”. In 1999, “Never again Auschwitz” seemed to win. But my reading of collective memory trends in Germany in the last decade tells me that in 2012 “Never again war” is likely to.

There is currently an exhibition in Holland about the love affair between the poet Paul Celan and Diet Kloos, a Dutch woman who had been a member of the resistance during World War II. I’ve written before about Celan – one of the most important figures in post-war German literature. However, until now I didn’t know much about Kloos, an oratorium singer whose husband was executed by the Nazis in 1945 after being tortured in front of her. Celan and Kloos met in Paris in 1949, when Celan was studying at the Sorbonne and Kloos at the conservatory in The Hague. The exhibition is based on the 12 letters that Celan sent Kloos during the following year (Kloos’s replies have been lost). The correspondence also includes three of Celan’s early poems, including his most famous, “Todesfuge” (“Deathfugue”, as John Felstiner translates it), which was written in 1944 and published in 1948.

Celan and Kloos first met at a cafe on the Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris in August 1949, when Kloos was on vacation with a friend. Celan and Kloos were both in their twenties and struggling to overcome the trauma they had suffered during the war and begin a new life. They started talking in French about their experiences during the war. However, Celan subsequently asked Kloos if they could continue the conversation in German – which was both his mother tongue and the language of the perpetrators. The 12 letters he subsequently wrote to Kloos – which inevitably remind one of Kafka’s famous letters to Felice Bauer - are also in German. Occassionally there is something of the strange syntax and vocabulary of Celan’s poetry that George Steiner has described as “Heideggerian”.

Although the Holocaust is mentioned explicitly only a couple of times, it resonates through them – much as it does in Celan’s poetry. In one of the  letters, Celan talks about the song “Strange Fruit”, to which he later returned in the poem “Mapesbury Road” – the subject of my previous post on Celan. Celan and Kloos had seen the African-American singer Gordon Heath perform the song at a cafe in Saint-German-des-Prés during the week they first met, so it had a special meaning for them. When Celan returns to the same cafe for another concert in September 1949, he gets into a conversation with a Norwegian man who, upon hearing Celan’s accent, begins asking him what he did during the war. Celan concludes he had been a Nazi collaborator during the German occupation. Just when you think you have escaped the past, Celan writes to Kloos, you realise it was there all along.

I’ve always been interested in Walter Rathenau, the German foreign minister who was assassinated by anti-Semitic nationalists in Berlin in 1922. The son of Emil Rathenau, the founder of the groundbreaking Berlin-based electrical company AEG, he had run the German ministry of war’s crucial raw materials department during World War I and created what some see as the first planned economy. However, after the war, he and other leading Jewish figures were blamed by the right for the German defeat as part of the so-called Dolchstoßlegende, or myth of the  “stab in the back”. In particular, as foreign minister, Rathenau became fatally associated with the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles. In a sense, his assassination symbolises the beginning of the end of the dream of Jewish assimilation in Germany.

In his book The Pity of it All, Amos Elon (whose biography of Theodor Herzl I’ve previously mentioned) shows how the Rathenau family epitomised the German-Jewish community’s dream of assimilation. But despite the family’s apparent success at a time when the Jewish middle class was at its most confident and optimistic, Rathenau seems to have had a deep sense of anxiety about being a Jew in Germany. Elon suggests that, like Theodor Herzl, he idolised the Prussian officer class and was deeply hurt when he was refused a commission in the army after completing his military service. Afterwards he wrote of the “painful moment” when he realised that, as a German Jew, he was a “second-class citizen”. You get a sense of Rathenau’s mixture of pride and insecurity from Edward Munch’s 1907 portrait of him (above).

One expression of this sense of anxiety was “Hear, O Israel!”, a strange, desperate text aimed at German Jews that Rathenau wrote and pseudonymously published in a journal just as he was turning 30 in 1897. In it, he described the Jewish middle class as “an Asiatic horde on the sandy plains of Prussia, … not a living limb of the people but an alien organism in its body”. He urged Jews to look in the mirror to see the signs of their “bodily decline” and urged them to undergo a “bodily rebirth” through intermarriage. Like Max Nordau’s analysis of diaspora Jews at the Zionist Congress in Basle in 1898, Rathenau’s description of German Jews, and in particular their physical characteristics, echoed anti-Semitic tropes. Seen from today’s perspective, Rathenau and Nordau both look like examples of the phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred.

The interesting thing is that these two figures shared a negative view of disapora Jews but differed about the solution. Unlike Nordau, Rathenau believed that the Jewish “problem” could be overcome through assimilation and thus opposed Zionism. Instead of settling in Palestine, he urged German Jews to “breath German mountain and forest air” and to “consciously adopt the tribal qualities of the host country”. Thus whereas Herzl saw the Jews as a Volk in their own right (he famously declares in The Jewish State that ”We are a people, one people”), Rathenau believed German Jews were part of – or at least could become part of – the German Volk. The similarities and differences between Rathenau and Nordau illustrate the way that both German assimilationists and German Zionists thought in terms of the concept of the Volk but differed on how to define themselves as Jews in relation to it.