The Spirit That Marches on Gaza
Translated by Julia Bosson
Editor’s note: The following was delivered on the opening night of “Der grosse Kanton: Rise & Fall of the BRD,” which was held in Zurich on 5-6 December. The Diasporist is collecting and publishing contributions to the symposium in our series.
In my last novel, Als wir Schwäne waren (When We Were Swans), the protagonist’s father, a sociologist who fled Iran in the mid-1980s, uses his sharp intuition and limited means to investigate a quality he sums up as “the spirit that marches on Stalingrad.” It is a peculiarly German form of idiocy: a fetishization of persistent action, which finds its expression in, among other forms, seeing things through with military discipline all the way to their end, regardless of how hopeless and fatal things may be, for the sole reason that one has started them — as in the march to Stalingrad, that would lead to both individual and collective ruin.
It is a mixture of obstinacy and obedience that the father tries to track down. He finds clues, but few that are reliable. A little in Adorno, a little in Arendt. Newspaper articles, proverbs, the behavior of neighbors. He remains trapped by confirmation bias. He finds and interprets the things that underscore his assumptions.
Nevertheless, he manages to capture the German spirit. And if the story were set not in the nineties, but in the months after October 7, the book would probably have been a few chapters longer.
Perhaps a few words about myself: I was a repeat juvenile offender, I failed my high school exams, I was enrolled in university for four semesters, only three of which I actually attended. I took drugs for decades, worked in night clubs, ran a bar. And if I had a better voice, I would have become a musician.
All of this may have made me a writer, but certainly not an intellectual.
But if the German feuilleton now has to seriously engage with the intellectual Karim Khani and fight unfairly to get the better of him, then it’s not because of my brilliance, but because of Germany’s own failures. That’s what this is about. Because standing here is a great honor for me, but also an accident. The result of a whole series of failures.
In its essence, the BRD is like a cell phone whose operating system hasn’t been updated for decades, and now all the new apps no longer work on it.
The upside, though, is that I am not an academic. Nor am I a historian. I am allowed to play a little. To be wrong. I can let you decide whether I am enjoying the freedom of the artist or the fool.
For example, when I deal in things that did not happen and claim that this is the real history of the Federal Republic of Germany.
When I look at the years from 1945 to today, what I see first and foremost is a history of failures. It’s not “what happened,” but rather “what didn’t happen,” “what has still not happened,” and “why not?”
In its essence, the BRD is like a cell phone whose operating system hasn’t been updated for decades, and now all the new apps no longer work on it.
What happened? The 68ers.
What didn’t happen? The 78ers, the 88ers, the 98ers, and so on.
The 89ers weren’t in the West. It wasn’t until “Fridays for Future” that something of serious magnitude that exerted pressure from the streets reappeared. But this is not a German phenomenon, but a global one, at least in the global North.
And almost simultaneously came Pegida1 — again, a German phenomenon — a movement that believes that the 1968 operating system should never have been installed in the first place.
What happened:
A discussion that was redundant from every perspective except the German one, called the Historikerstreit,2 and about a third of a century later, another discussion about whether there should be an update, a Historikerstreit 2.0. We could have been at Historikerstreit 4.0, 5.0 or 12.0 by now, and indeed we should have been. That did not happen.
What also didn’t happen — and this is the failure of us non-Germans — was to prevent Germany from claiming authority to define itself.
We should never have allowed them to answer the question of who they are on their own.
It was a mistake not to intervene immediately when more than two Germans tried to negotiate their identity in conversation.
We should have explained to them that atrocities also damage those who commit them.
We should have disrupted the obsession with remembrance — which, like any obsession, has something pedantic, sometimes fascistic and hypocritical about it — and replaced it with therapy, an endless dialogue about perpetrator trauma that would have bound them for all eternity, allowing them not even a second of moral elevation, no world championship, not the slightest cause for pride. Arms down forever.
That would have been honest and productive. It would not have led to the fanaticism of Staatsräson, nor to participation in another genocide.
And what if we had drawn the only correct conclusion from the atrocities of the Nazi era? Namely, that “Never again” applies to everyone, instead of developing this self-deception they called remembrance culture into a state ideology.
We should have prevented a — let’s call it — nation that fought to the last bullet, and when that was shot sent its twelve-year-olds to the front with guns without cartridges to die for a leader who had already killed himself, and then concocted a narrative that it had not been defeated but liberated, while the other part of the same “nation” solved the problem by building a wall and claiming that the fascists were on the other side.
We should have prevented all of this, never allowed the Germans to become German again, never allowed them to catch their breath again.
And what if we had drawn the only correct conclusion from the atrocities of the Nazi era? Namely, that “Never again” applies to everyone, instead of developing this self-deception they called remembrance culture into a state ideology, into Israelism, which — and here we see that spirit, that peculiar German form of idiocy, again — has it trotting behind Israel all the way to the defendant’s bench in The Hague, unable to take in a child from Gaza for treatment, but able to take in donkeys?
What an undignified self-degradation, what an intoxicating blindness one must have succumbed to when the largest writers’ association organizes an event called “Israel: Land without a Lobby” without a question mark, without a brain, but with a renowned historian with an Israeli flag in his profile picture.
When Germany’s last Nobel Prize winner in literature sees it as her duty to dismantle herself by publicly regurgitating the anachronistic propaganda of the Netanyahu government. As if she wanted to set a good example by saying: If I can make myself look so stupid, we can all do it.
Claudia Roth’s “Clapartheid” should also be mentioned. But that’s just to name a few of the countless instances of that peculiar German idiocy that have become state ideology today and would have fit well into my novel, and would have earned it additional coverage.
Germany is marching toward certain death, accompanied by all its narratives.
Before something collapses, its narratives often fall apart first. Its self-image, its beliefs, what it has defined as its core, its raison d’être, and its own faith in itself.
History makes itself clearly and unmistakably visible when it emerges with a dramatic appearance, on September 11, November 9, June 17, October 7. But history also emerges on all other days. Just not as loudly.
We do not hear the crumbling of narratives; the consolidation of new narratives happens at the molecular level, long before they become visible. Every seed grows downwards before it sprouts into the light of day.
The narratives of the Federal Republic of Germany are crumbling and collapsing. Not only has there been a failure to update them, but even the means used to defend them are outdated. They don’t work. They are as ridiculous as this country itself. And its narratives.
Germany lacks not only agility and flexibility. It lacks the basic cultural and intellectual tools required to recognize the need for change. Germany is not a country that will manage to reinvent itself. It is proving that on every front right now.
Germany is marching toward certain death, accompanied by all its narratives.
And just as the narratives of the Third Reich, of Lebensraum in the East, of racial doctrine, of the Jewish question, and of total war came to an end in Stalingrad at the latest, so too is the beginning of the end of the BRD narrative, of the culture of remembrance, of the “never again” of the constitutional state, to be found in a not entirely dissimilar annihilation. Namely, in Gaza.
Israel, dear Mr. Merz, is not doing the dirty work for you. Israel is doing it for us.
Related articles
- Pegida, or “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West,” is a far-right extremist and nationalist movement founded in 2014 [↩]
- The Historikerstreit, or historian’s dispute, was a debate in the 1980s among West German academics over how Nazis and the Holocaust could be integrated into a broader picture of German history [↩]