Enemy Territory
Not too long ago, an acquaintance, who was born in Germany to parents from the Middle East, told me that he has been unable to consume German media since the end of 2023. When he opens a German newspaper, he feels as though he is entering enemy territory. And yet he still strives to preserve distinctions. On the streets of his city, he experiences a completely different sentiment; in conversations with strangers and friends, he encounters reactions to the events in Israel-Palestine that vary widely from the ones presented on television — disbelief, fury, and even guilt over Israeli offenses enabled by German state support. But, on the pages and in the studios of the country’s leading media outlets, he feels he is treated as “fair game.”
I have heard similar sentiments on many occasions from people who, usually for biographical reasons, have a perspective that extends beyond Germany. Most of these conversations were marked by disappointment, confusion, and incomprehension around the state of the German media. To understand how we’ve reached a point where, for many, even the semblance of debate can hardly be discerned, three points come to my mind, more anecdotal and fragmentary than a definitive diagnosis.
Prescribed empathy and a lack of empathy
A few years ago, when terms like “anti-racism” still belonged to the general consensus, there was a debate in the feuilleton sections about whether asking the question, “Where are you from?” to people who do not visibly or audibly read as ethnically German implied racism. Since October 7, it seems to me that asking (or not asking) the question “How are you?” carries a much stronger racist implication.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful. The days and weeks following October 7 were difficult for people of Israeli origin like myself. I was touched by messages from the people I knew well and the people I knew less well who asked after my friends and family. But at the same time, there was a slight aftertaste, especially when the concern was not coming from those in my close circle. The sympathy felt a bit like an obligation, like something mandated from above.
Later, in the winter of 2023, when I spoke with a friend from Gaza who lives in Berlin — many of his family members had already been killed by Israeli bombs in the month of October — he told me that not a single German colleague had reached out to him. He said that in the months that followed, in his highly-educated professional circle, he had encountered nothing but silence, even hostility. After that, the expressions of sympathy from German acquaintances and colleagues struck me as strangely hollow.
We are not just the Pope, following Bild’s famous exclamation following the appointment of the German Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy — Germany is now also Kibbutz Beeri!
I’m beginning with this personal observation because I want to address something that is emotionally difficult, particularly for someone who comes from Israel, who was filled with worry on October 7, and who personally knows victims of the massacre. The empathy invoked in German newspapers in late 2023 went beyond mere compassion: It was a staged sense of shared victimhood. An article in Die Zeit even stated: “Solidarity with Israel, so often a phrase uttered mechanically, is suddenly a living emotion once again.”
The way the German media offered these seemingly prescribed emotions, the way it cast a spotlight on such intimate details of the victims — with intensity rarely seen in other foreign conflicts — followed a logic that sought to internalize Israeli pain as if it were one’s own. The horror was not perceived as something happening in a distant country with a complex history, but as something happening to us: We are not just the Pope, following Bild’s famous exclamation following the appointment of the German Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy — Germany is now also Kibbutz Beeri!
And where the line between compassion and shared suffering was crossed, something terrible emerged. For those who suffer, those who are truly victims of a crime, are not trusted to think freely — to be objective, to hold multiple perspectives at once. Those consumed by their own pain cannot think clearly, cannot empathize with others — let alone with the alleged or actual perpetrator. To become a victim is to be freed from accountability. This was part of the function of this staging: Excessive empathy as license for a lack of empathy, for harshness, for not having to know or see what was already visibly unfolding before the whole world in the very first days.
The expansion of the feuilleton section
German newsrooms still enforce a clear internal distinction between departments: Over here is the foreign news desk, there is the investigative unit — and one floor up resides the feuilleton section. For older insiders, this organizational structure is a given and of great importance. For most readers, however, the separation of sections — even when visible in the print edition — is difficult to discern. This is not only the result of the internet, which acts as a kind of homogenizing force across all media products. Even within newsrooms, it is apparently becoming more difficult to maintain these divisions neatly.
The first-person narrator of the feuilleton section is no longer just a visitor of art exhibitions but now accompanies our soldiers or police officers as they are deployed in Rafah as well as on Berlin’s Sonnenallee.
In one instance, we have witnessed what is arguably the country’s most prestigious magazine assign an entire investigative team to determine where Greta Thunberg, in our German opinion, went off track. In another, we read a writer’s columns in a left-wing newspaper repeatedly reporting on atrocities in Israel that never took place. The demonstrably false information has still not been corrected. Fact-checking seems not to apply to opinion pieces.
As a result, a peculiar style of reporting has emerged in recent years, in which uncomfortable facts — if they appear at all — are hemmed in by didactic, solemnly-delivered admonishments that Hamas bears full responsibility for any atrocities Palestinians are yet to suffer, while fabrications and blatant exaggerations pass as opinion. The first-person narrator of the feuilleton section is no longer just a visitor of art exhibitions but now accompanies our soldiers or police officers as they are deployed in Rafah as well as on Berlin’s Sonnenallee.
Identity politics without diversity
We live in a media landscape that has discovered “standpoint epistemology:” more identity-based, more subjective, more emotionally driven — with more room for observation and often less for facts. That is not wrong in and of itself. After all, the old school of journalism, which elevated the “objective” reporter — often male, almost always white — to the status of a role model had its blind spots that needed correcting.
German newsrooms are often less diverse than some executive boards of Frankfurt banks, even among younger staff. People with Palestinian or Arab backgrounds are almost entirely absent.
This shift is nevertheless taking place in an extraordinarily unequal setting. German newsrooms are often less diverse than some executive boards of Frankfurt banks, even among younger staff. People with Palestinian or Arab backgrounds are almost entirely absent. It’s a sad, true joke: The self-prescribed extremism expert Ahmad Mansour, a conservative figurehead in the fight against Islamism, is, by a wide margin, the most published and most frequently quoted person of Palestinian origin in many newspapers.
When you also consider the reprisals faced by journalists of Arab and Muslim descent when they speak out on issues related to their personal backgrounds in a way that differs from the talking points of Mansour, as well as the campaigns that are waged against them (all too often successfully) it becomes clear why even “diverse” newsrooms offer little opportunity for visibly diverse perspectives. Concern, yes, but only for the “right” people. That seems to be the motto.
Where do we go from here?
The frustration and anger generated by its Middle East coverage in recent years have led many, like my acquaintance quoted at the beginning, to no longer want to set foot in the “enemy territory” of the German media. And the fact that a highly diverse media landscape across the political spectrum — with various public and private sources of funding — has, with very few exceptions, failed so spectacularly can itself be a source of despair.
What is to be done? Against such hardened fronts, we need to pull upon a variety of strategies to help, both within and outside established newsrooms. For one, the emergence of alternative, smaller publications in recent years is already having an impact and exposing the narrow-mindedness that dominates so many news departments.
But we also need more engaged readers and commentators who provide positive feedback to when the reporting follows basic journalistic standards, or, when necessary, remind the media through letters to the editor, complaints to the Press Council, and other interventions that they have a responsibility to report based on facts and in accordance with human rights principles.
For me, the key factor remains international networking, which must be much more firmly institutionalized. This allows non-Germans not only to be a source of information but also to actually provide critical feedback. It is no coincidence that some of the most important investigations of recent years came about through collaborations with journalists outside Germany. The best remedy for German provincialism, which has enabled extraordinary degrees of self-righteous dehumanization, is, above all, to open the windows to the outside world. The stench, however, has already soaked the wallpaper.
