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An interview with Ben Ratskoff
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On October 7, the Nova Exhibition opened in Berlin’s former Tempelhof Airport. Over the next six weeks, visitors can enter the immersive memorial, which is intended to pay tribute to the 378 victims who were murdered by Hamas in the attacks of October 7 at the Nova music festival. “The events on that black Saturday,” the exhibition website reads, “will be presented as a shocking contrast between light and darkness, good and evil, that is relevant to the entire world.”
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– Julia Bosson, Editor-in-Chief
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Julia Bosson: When we think about what it means for the exhibition to arrive in Germany, my instinct is to connect that to a larger trend of projected over-identification with the victims of the Nazis out of a misguided sense of historical responsibility or a perversion of Staatsräson. We hear over and over again Germans offering personal expressions of pain over antisemitism, even if the antisemitism in question is a peaceful pro-Palestine demonstration.
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Ben Ratskoff: When Jews in the United States appropriate the exhibition’s experience of victimization for themselves, there’s a problem of collapsing the real distance between their own lives and the conditions that they live in with those who were victimized on October 7. In the context of Germany, the problem of appropriation becomes ethically fraught as non-Jewish Germans — the beneficiaries of Nazism and the Holocaust — can, through experiencing the exhibition, in fact imagine themselves as a Jewish victim. In this way, they can shed the burden of post-perpetrator responsibility and claim the moral privileges of victimhood — without actually having to experience violence or suffering, of course. And by occupying the position of Jewish victims, by “communing with Jewish suffering” (a term I borrow from Adam Sutcliffe), they can make accusations of antisemitism against others.
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In this context, it works perfectly for a certain part of German society, for whom the so-called “new Nazis” are Palestinian Muslims. Despite the histrionics about “Holocaust relativization” in Germany, the projection of the memory of Nazism onto Palestinian Muslims is permissible because it converges with widespread anti-migrant xenophobia and policy. White Germans can rehabilitate an exclusionary nationalism while aligning themselves with Jewish victimhood — a remarkable, if grotesque, achievement. When I was in Berlin this past May, I saw a poster for a party/fundraiser at About:Blank that had the Nova logo and was called “We Will Dance Again.” Who is this we in Germany? It’s an imagined collectivity under threat from antisemitic barbarians. And it’s incredible to include the German public inside of it.
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In May of 2024, Platz der Hamas Geiseln was set up in Bebelplatz in Berlin, which had a reconstruction of what they called a “Hamas tunnel.” Visitors could walk through imagining they were simulating the suffering of Israeli hostages. Of course, again, it’s essential to emphasize that visitors would not in fact experience what the hostages were and are experiencing, but that they would think they were approximating it. When it opened, I heard that students at Jewish schools were specifically invited to visit. What does it mean for non-Jewish Germans to invite Jewish children to a simulation of what the former thinks of as antisemitic terror? This goes beyond voyeurism — there’s a certain kind of sadism there.
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