Germany's psychodrama runs deeper than AfD and the far-right

Last week the world was shocked that Germany, of all places, voted in the far-right for the first time since World War II.

But for Germany's Muslims, Palestinians, and anti-Zionist Jews, who've known for years something is rotten in Germany, this was scarcely news. 

As the clock struck twelve, their suspicions were proven right. On the same day a party led by a politician convicted for using Nazi slogan was elected in Thuringia, another video was published on the Bavarian Interior Ministry's X page, showing a hijabi woman searching for religious advice online and ending up being brainwashed by TikTok Imams, wearing a niqab and being an unhappy second wife. 

"The Salafism Trap: It Can Go Faster Than You Think" appeared on screen alongside imagery that a former left-wing parliamentarian said was reminiscent of imagery employed by antisemitic Nazi paper Der Stürmer.

And despite the video being hastily deleted, it is yet another example of a state apparatus emboldened by a nationwide climate of Islamophobia. Angela Merkel said that "Islam belongs to Germany", but her successor now rants about the "little Pashas" from migrant families who disrespect female teachers and spread dodgy statistics about the supposed frequency of 'gang rapes' committed by migrants. 

In Germany, commentators who parrot Islamophobic talking points about cultural integration are now awarded lucrative contracts in the booming "deradicalisation" industry, with 5000-word long reads about Greta Thunberg's supposed antisemitism and state-funded video essays that associate the Palestinian Keffiyeh with the Nazis — conveniently forgetting the lederhosen — increasingly common mainstays in the press. 

Ten years after Pegida began its anti-Muslim marches in Dresden, the marchers' rhetoric has spread into the German mainstream and the state itself. Now one in two Germans sees Islam as a threat. 

After a secret "remigration" conference backed the ethnic cleansing of Germany of immigrants, millions took to the streets to fight the return of fascism.

But Palestinian activists at these demonstrations were abused, and many at the march flew the flag of Israel, a country proudly supported by the far-right AfD. This week, a young member of the liberal Green Party called for the "remigration" of three million of Germany's Muslims on X. His profile has "antifascist" in the bio. 

Germany has forced its guilt on others

I once thought that German Islamophobia was a bug, but I am increasingly convinced it is a feature. Ethnographer and Cambridge professor Esra Özyürek’s Subcontractors of Guilt argues Germany projects its redemption myth onto Muslims as antisemitic savages who need to be civilised away from their antisemitism to accept responsibility for a Holocaust that they had nothing to do with.

In this twisted fantasy, Germans are the priests willing to administer penance by ritualised admissions of guilt and visits to concentration camps.

Once the darling of international liberals for its open approach to refugees and supposedly world-class dealing with its historical crimes, Germanic exceptionalism has made a resurgence in mainstream discourse.

Books like Why the Germans Do It Better and Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans have played a role in whitewashing and rehabilitating Germany's image. However, Neiman later retracted her thesis after being dismayed by the German public's harsh backlash against pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) activists following the passage of a non-binding resolution in 2019.

And guess who wrote the first draft of the law? The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The far-right AfD bill was later adopted by the German centre. And here comes the complex part: understanding the dialectic between the nakedly nationalist AfD and what historian of the German-Israeli relationship Daniel Marweki called Ersatznationalism, the psychological projection that causes German liberals and leftists to Israel as it is were their homeland since historical responsibility prevents them from embracing their own. 

In this absurd opposite-land, protests against non-Jewish Germans with Nazi ancestry are described as antisemitic and commentators describe Germany as the "land of the Jew-friends" on public radio. And it goes further than that.

On my podcast, Mad in Germany, author of Unorthodox Deborah Feldman described the special pride in which some German Zionists relish in cancelling antizionist Jews, happy that the shoe is on the other foot and that Germans can be even more loyal to the Jewish state than Jews themselves, who they consider disloyal rootless cosmopolitan for not embracing a state in the Middle East that most of them have never even visited. 

This German brand of narcissism thinks it can understand the world and can lecture everyone, not despite but because of their role in history's worst crime. Therefore because Nazi antisemitism was genocidal and without purpose, they think that is the only reason that Palestinians and their supporters could be protesting a war that has led to the highest death rate globally since the Rwandan genocide. 

No wonder a popular slogan among German anti-Zionists is "Germany will never forgive the Palestinians for the Holocaust."

Since October 7, the mask in Germany has slipped.

Leading ministers and even antisemitism commissioners now feel duty-bound to retweet far-right commentator Douglas Murray's deceit, claiming that at least the Nazis felt guilty for killing Jews, unlike the barbarians of Hamas. But, as Muslims, Palestinians, and other targeted minority groups in Germany know, this is, in fact, innate to a country convinced by its own moral delusions.

It's the kind of country where a Nazi bloodline affords someone more of a right to speak than Holocaust victims and that Palestinians must die for the sins of their families. In the mental gymnasium of the German pysche, injustice is justified and, with the help of the Jewish state of Israel, the baddies are the goodies. 

James Jackson is a Berlin-based journalist and host of the Mad in Germany podcast, available on YouTube and Spotify

Follow him on X: @derJamesJackson

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or its staff.