Two Kinds of Staatsräson
IN JANUARY 2024, the late Namibian president Hage Geingob condemned what he called Germany’s “shocking decision” to support Israel in opposing the charges of genocide brought against it by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). He pointed out that in what is now Namibia, Germany had committed the first genocide of the twentieth century, in which tens of thousands of innocent people had died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions. Germany, he said, had “yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil.” The decision to support Israel was further evidence of “Germany’s inability to draw lessons from its horrific history.”
What was striking about the dispute was not just that Germany and Namibia were intervening on opposing sides of the case in the ICJ, but that Namibia also drew a clear connection between what was happening in Gaza — which it, like South Africa, saw as genocide — and the genocide that had been committed by Germany in Namibia a hundred years ago. By also linking this colonial crime to the Holocaust, Geingob raised questions that have been at the center of debates about Germany’s memory culture in the last few years and that have become even more fraught since 7 October.
Liability for genocide
In 1884 Chancellor Otto von Bismarck granted protection to a station set up by, and named after, a German merchant called Adolf Lüderitz. This station later became German South-West Africa — an acquisition that was confirmed by Europe’s great powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. Between 1904 and 1908, German colonial troops waged a war of annihilation and genocide against the resisting Herero and Nama, during which an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 Herero (up to 80 per cent of the entire Herero population) and up to 10,000 Nama (50 per cent) died. After the military commander Lothar von Trotha issued an “extermination order,” thousands were left to die of thirst in the Omaheke desert. Concentration camps were established all over the country to imprison the surviving men, women, and children. After the war, a racial state was established, in which the African people were supposed to serve as servants to the German “master race.”
Germany has long rejected the use of the term genocide in the context of its colonial wars. In response to a parliamentary question in 2012, the government explained that this was because the United Nations Genocide Convention only came into force in 1951 (and in the case of the Federal Republic, 1955) and was not retroactive. The statement said that international legal evaluations of “historical events” could only be made “using the rules and provisions of international law applicable at the time of these events and on the basis of the historical facts of the specific case.” Of course, the implication of this logic also would be that the Holocaust could not be classified as genocide either. No official ever commented on that fact.
Although Germany committed to pay Namibia €1.1 billion over 30 years, these payments were deliberately referred to not as reparations or compensation payments, but as “aid.” The German government was not prepared to allow even the slightest hint that it was obliged to make payments.
Above all, Germany opposed the term genocide because it feared that this would create an obligation to pay reparations. This fear had permeated German policy for decades. For example, in 2003 — shortly before the hundredth anniversary of the genocide of the Herero and Nama — the then foreign minister Joschka Fischer said that “he would not make an apology relevant to compensation” for the genocide. Fischer’s phrase illustrated that, at least in this case, coming to terms with the past and reconciliation with the victims were secondary — the German government would only apologize for the genocide if doing so did not create an obligation to make reparations.
Thus when Germany did begin negotiations with the Namibian government in 2015, its strategy was to offer an official German apology in return for a waiver by Namibia of any demands for reparations. Ruprecht Polenz, a former Christian Democrat member of the Bundestag member and chair of its foreign affairs committee, was named as special envoy to Namibia. But when he visited Windhoek in Namibia in November 2016, a spokesperson of the Nama accused him of “arrogance and insensitivity unbecoming a diplomat.” He had “admonished” his Namibian counterparts and told them not to compare the destruction of the Nama and the Herero with the massacres of Jewish people. “We are convinced Mr. Polenz’s utterances are a sign of blatant racism,” they said.
An agreement with the Namibian government was finally reached in 2021. It acknowledged that “the abominable atrocities committed during periods of the colonial war culminated in events that from today’s perspective would be called genocide” — a wording that was designed as a way to avoid the legal consequences arising from such an admission, and above all to prevent an obligation to make reparations. Although Germany committed to pay Namibia €1.1 billion over 30 years, these payments were deliberately referred to not as reparations or compensation payments, but as “aid.” The German government was not prepared to allow even the slightest hint that it was obliged to make payments.
The agreement met with enormous resistance, especially from the Herero and Nama themselves, who felt they were excluded from the negotiations, and as a result it has not yet been ratified. Further negotiations have continued behind closed doors. In 2024, then-Vice President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah (who since March 2025 has succeeded Hage Geingob in becoming Namibia’s first female president) indicated that an increase in the promised payment of €1.1 billion is now being discussed — and that an unspecified part of the payment would be made in advance. It will no longer be referred to as “aid” or “subsidy,” but rather as a contribution to “atonement” or as an “atonement fund.” Finally, Germany is also abandoning the “genocide according to today’s understanding” wording, though it remains to be seen what legal consequences this will have — even an “atonement fund” is not reparations.
Germany’s approach to responsibility for colonial crimes such as the genocide of the Herero and Nama is still ultimately focused on damage limitation rather than reconciliation with the descendants of the victims. After all, the only thing that would have been lost if the Bundestag had acknowledged the genocide of the Herero and Nama, or the German president had issued an apology, would be a bargaining chip. The German government does not seem to be making a serious effort to confront the mass violence and genocide in its own colonial history. Rather, even as demands for reparations are becoming louder, Germany aims above all to avoid liability for genocide.
The “singularity” of the Holocaust as the basis of German Staatsräson
This is of course a different kind of Staatsräson than the one that is invoked in relation to Israel — and yet the two are connected. Having signed the Luxembourg Agreement — the Wiedergutmachungsabkommen, or Reparations Agreement, it reached with Israel and the Jewish Claims Committee — in 1952, the Federal Republic has always sought to prevent it from becoming a precedent that would require payments for other crimes that Germany had committed during its history. The discussions about the Herero and Nama genocide are a case in point; the fear centers not so much on demands for payments from Germany’s former colonies but on those from its enemies in World War II — Greece, Poland, and Russia have all made reparations demands against Germany.
The idea of the “singularity,” or uniqueness, of the Holocaust can be understood as a way to contain the consequences of this precedent while still making political capital from the reparations for the Holocaust — narrowing what are to be regarded as the crimes of the Third Reich to the Holocaust and limiting the lessons to be drawn from the Nazi past. In the immediate post–World War II period, many West Germans saw themselves personally as victims rather than perpetrators: victims of the regime and its secret service apparatus; victims of the war through flight and expulsion from the eastern territories; victims of rape by soldiers of the Red Army; victims of the Allied bombing war; victims of the apparent “victors’ justice” that subsequently criminalized their behavior; and finally as victims of a “guilt cult” allegedly imposed from outside. It was only from the 1970s onwards that the Holocaust began to become the focus of German collective memory of the Third Reich and World War II.
The idea that the Holocaust is “singular” — often coupled with the claim that the Holocaust was the “worst” crime committed by humanity — seems to fulfill a similar exonerating function when used by non-Jewish Germans.
Even as late as 1985, in a famous speech on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war, President Richard von Weizsäcker had to persuade West German citizens that the end of World War II should be seen as a day of liberation, not defeat. They accepted this in part because he offered Germans of all ages a way out of personal guilt. By externalizing Nazism, after all, you are liberated from something that is not you. The confession of crimes that finally began in the late 1970s was made easier by the fact that younger West Germans were at least partly able to move from the side of the perpetrators to the side of the victims. Thus, although the famous von Weizsäcker speech rejected historical revisionism, it did so without confronting the majority of Germans with their own guilt — or that of their parents and grandparents.
The idea that the Holocaust is “singular” — often coupled with the claim that the Holocaust was the “worst” crime committed by humanity — seems to fulfill a similar exonerating function when used by non-Jewish Germans. In elevating the undoubtedly monstrous nature of the crime to one that is unique in the history of the world, it is implicitly detached from German history — it is dehistoricized. The idea of the Holocaust as a uniquely evil event, representing a Zivilisationsbruch, or rupture in civilization, can also be read as a rupture with history. The superlative “worst” thus has the effect of evading responsibility. From a multitude of horrendous crimes, one is singled out. The ideological foundation of antisemitism does make the Holocaust different from other crimes. But focusing exclusively on it pushes other crimes with other causes to the background.
In terms of historical causation, the idea of “singularity” is reductive. In reality, Nazism and the Holocaust were the product of multiple factors, ranging from social structures to militaristic, imperialistic, and eugenic ideas. Yet the evocation of “singularity” makes ideology — that is, antisemitism — the Holocaust’s sole cause. Simultaneously, as the Holocaust is turned into the ultimate crime, the rest of German history, insofar as it has nothing to do with antisemitism, is insulated from it. The corollary of this is that, as long as Germany remains committed to protecting “Jewish life,” other lessons from the crimes of the Third Reich fade into the background. “Never again” means fighting against antisemitism, but not — for example — fighting against racism.
It was as if there had been another Germany, as if Hitler alone were to blame for Nazism, as if it had not been German barbarism.
The physical embodiment of this narrowing of the lessons of the Nazi past is the Holocaust memorial in the center of Berlin. The memorial’s construction in the 1990s was directly related to the decision to move the capital of the reunified Germany from Bonn to Berlin. In order to allay the fears of its neighbors, Germany wanted to symbolically show that it had been purified through a “confession that this united Germany acknowledges its history and that it does so by remembering the greatest crime in its history in its capital,” as Bundestag President Wolfgang Thierse put it at the opening of the memorial. It is significant that the German parliament decided this memorial, at the center of its new capital, should commemorate only the Jewish victims of the Third Reich instead of all victims.
Thus the relocation of the German capital from Bonn to Berlin, and the shift of power from the West to the old center of the German Reich, was accompanied not just by a demonstrative acknowledgement of the country’s own problematic history but also by a narrowing of perspective. The monument, Thierse said, commemorated “the worst, the most horrific crime of Nazi Germany.” Taking up Weizsäcker’s formulation from 1985, he said he thought of the end of the war as “the liberation of our country and our continent from Hitler’s barbarism.” It was as if there had been another Germany, as if Hitler alone were to blame for Nazism, as if it had not been German barbarism.
Merkel’s speech in the Knesset in 2008, in which she declared that Israeli security was German Staatsräson, must also be seen in this context. After all, what was extraordinary about the speech was not the commitment she made to Israel’s security — its right to exist had already been one of the cornerstones of German Middle East policy going back decades. Rather, it was that she linked this right to exist and security to the singularity of the Holocaust. Merkel justified German foreign policy in one of the most complex and conflict-ridden areas of international politics by referring to the obligations arising from German history and, in particular, the idea of the Holocaust as a Zivilisationsbruch, as a unique event. “The breakdown of civilization caused by the Shoah is unprecedented,” she said.
A new Historikerstreit?
It is against the background of this narrowing of Germany’s understanding of the Nazi past — even as it has come to be seen as having come to terms with it in an exemplary way — that a debate has taken place in recent years about how to understand the relationship between German colonialism and the Holocaust. The debate was prompted in part by articles I wrote more than twenty years ago, later collected in my book From Windhoek to Auschwitz? The book was published in 2011, though it is only in the last few years that its argument has been discussed beyond academia.
There I argued that, forty years before the war of annihilation in Eastern Europe and the Holocaust, German colonial troops in German South-West Africa had perpetrated the first genocide of the twentieth century. I interrogated the relationship between colonialism and National Socialism, using genocide, the “racial state,” and systems of forced labor as points of departure for comparative observation. I rejected direct causality between Germany’s first colonial empire (before 1914) and its second (1939–45) — Nazi crimes were not mere copies of what had happened in German and other European colonies, as some have argued. But I identified trajectories in which colonial knowledge and practices were passed on from imperial times to that after 1933. I concluded that Nazi expansion to the East should be seen as a colonial project.
The subsequent debate about German colonialism and the Holocaust led to an intervention by Jürgen Habermas, a key figure in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. He summarized the new debate as follows:
The controversy of the last few months essentially revolves around one argument: If one takes into account the colonial character of the aim of Hitler’s racist war of annihilation against Russia, and if one looks at the organized murder of the European Jews in this context in which it arose, one can recognize in the genocide of the Nama and Herero in South Africa by the German colonial administration those criminal traits that recurred in the Holocaust, intensified and in a different form.
In the Historikerstreit, prompted by the historian Ernst Nolte’s claim that the Holocaust was a response to Soviet terror, Habermas was among those who argued that the Holocaust was singular and accused Nolte of relativizing the Holocaust. Habermas still sees the Holocaust as “singular.” But unlike some others in the debate who have sought to defame those who seek to identify connections between the Holocaust and colonial crimes by implying that they are relativizing the Holocaust in the same way as Nolte did, Habermas acknowledges that what is stake now is very different than in the 1980s:
Just as all historical facts can be compared with other facts, so too can the Holocaust with other genocides. But the meaning of the comparison depends on the context. The Historikerstreit was about whether the comparison of the Holocaust with Stalinist crimes could relieve the Germans born later of their political responsibility … for the Nazi mass crimes … Today, under different circumstances, it is not about exoneration from this responsibility, but rather about a shift in emphasis.
I think Habermas still misses the point somewhat. It is, at least for me, not about a “shift in emphasis,” but rather about a better understanding of its origins and the traditions that supported the murder of Jews and the war of annihilation. In this way, a blanket “singularity,” with its potential for misuse for exonerating purposes, can be replaced by the far more productive question of what was unique about the Holocaust and what was not. This would give antisemitism its rightful place without ignoring or excusing the general, systemic nature of violence. It would link the history of antisemitism with the history of genocide, particularly in Germany’s century of violence.
While the victims of Nazism and the GDR deserve a place at the center of German Erinnerungskultur, the victims of colonialism apparently do not.
However, Germany does not seem to be ready for this — or perhaps, given the narrowing of the understanding of the Nazi past that has taken place since the 1980s, it is more accurate to say that it is no longer ready. One illustration of this is the failure of the current government’s attempt to expand its approach to commemorating German crimes. When Germany’s culture minister, Claudia Roth, sought to modernize the German government’s official approach by including colonialism within it, she faced massive opposition from the existing institutions that focus on the Holocaust and the crimes of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Roth, who had already been accused of antisemitism during the controversies around Documenta 15 and the Berlinale in 2024, backed down.
As a result, the planned reform was scrapped, and it was decided that the existing approach should be continued. Though lip service was inevitably paid to the “other important topics,” which were to be discussed separately, the hierarchy of crimes — and, by extension, victims — could not have been clearer. While the victims of Nazism and the GDR deserve a place at the center of German Erinnerungskultur, the victims of colonialism apparently do not. By first acknowledging the need to include colonial crimes and then backing down when she faced resistance, Roth has effectively cemented the second-class status of the victims of German colonialism. This amounts to nothing less than relativizing the genocide of the Herero and Nama.
This text was first published in Hyper-Zionism. Germany, the Nazi Past and Israel, edited by Hans Kundnani (Verso, London, 2025). Further reading and footnotes are available there.
