“Dear passengers, we will be landing in Berlin in approximately 20 minutes. Please fasten your seatbelts and make sure your luggage is safely stowed.”
As the plane descends through the clouds, my heart descends into my stomach, where it swims in a mix of anxiety and anger at the thought of returning home to Germany. Fortunately, I grew up with social media, which made my generation believe that anything can be shared online and that no consequences must be suffered. It is only thanks to this collective schizophrenia that I can publicly describe the nauseating effect the thought of setting foot on German soil again in less than 30 minutes has on me.
Most of the time, I find myself balancing on a fragile emotional tightrope, between overwhelming homesickness and a fear of returning—a feeling my friends say is common among those who leave home in search of freedom, adventure, opportunity, or luck.
After years of wandering, many of us come to realize that returning home might not happen for a long time, or perhaps ever, and that “home” has transformed—like Baba Yaga’s chicken-legged house, it has uprooted itself and walked away. Abandoned by this shifting notion of home, we are left to confront unsettling questions: what awaits us if we return, and what exactly is this home we dream about overseas?
It is this question which causes me nausea. Since 7 October 2023, I have organized anti-genocide protests, and facilitated and attended workshops about settler-colonialism, Palestinian history, pinkwashing, and colonial media. I have received countless hate comments from Zionists (both in person and via social media), and walked peers home to fight the fear of stalking and hate crime.
My pro-Palestinian stance has caused me to lose touch with some relatives and friends, and the accounts of police violence against peaceful protestors in Germany filled me with an unbearable anger which was followed by a grief that is hard to describe. Thinking of the political climate I will be welcomed by in Germany runs heat waves through my body – and not in a good way.
Consumer-friendly history
When I was about eight years old, my after-school care organized a trip to the Rabbi of my hometown. He was a survivor of the Shoah. I remember the visit to be a turning point in my life – a push to develop a political conscience and to recognize my heritage.
In the past year, during the protests at my university, I often encountered the surprised question of why I, a German citizen, would jeopardize my American student visa to organize protests for a free Palestine?
Though I – sadly – understand the confusion, the answer has always been implicit in the question itself: To be German means to grow up with the omnipresent ghosts of the Shoah, to recognize the nation‘s guilt and internalize the mantra ‘never again’. To be German means that “when injustice becomes justice, resistance becomes mandatory”, as Berthold Brecht once put it.
Well, after over a year of Germany‘s unwavering support for Israel‘s active genocide in Palestine, a few ugly truths about the country and its citizens are coming to light – thoughts and realizations that have been incessantly accompanying and poking me.
(Almost) every child growing up in Germany has visited a concentration camp before. This is what our educational law requires, aiming to educate us to be responsible guardians of our own dreadful history. The state builds expensive memorials, publishes volumes of books and films about the Third Reich, and we talk, talk and talk about the crimes of the Nazis until the words have rid themselves of any meaning. We, just like our parents and grandparents are historically well informed, but even though any German can effortlessly discuss the Shoah for hours, there are very few of us who can answer questions about their own family history.
After my last visit to my grandparents, I realized that we have sanitized and sterilized our history, packaging it into consumer-friendly bites that we readily offer to anyone who asks (or doesn’t). The immediate and heavy condemnation my grandparents voiced against the Third Reich—a system sustained by their own parents—grotesquely illustrates the schizophrenic split in our society between a guilt-ridden, eye-catching culture of remembrance on one hand and collective amnesia on the other.
Hypocritical guilt
But wait – isn‘t guilt the only appropriate reaction to our history? Why am I judging my grandparents for their political statements about Hitler if they recognize and condemn the Nazi crimes?
Because the German majority society is instrumentalizing their own, depersonalized guilt to justify the genocide of innocent Palestinian civilians. What does ‘never again’ nowadays really mean? Is it only never again against Jews? Never again in Europe? Never again against people who we nowadays consider white? Never again against the religion that currently is not our scapegoat?
Because sadly, that is exactly what it seems to mean, or else we would apply our lessons about guilt and political responsibility from the past to openly stand against (political) injustice despite any hegemonic convictions. Especially when this injustice is being funded with our tax money.
I believe that we may as well cut our hypocritical guilt declarations if those only apply to the past. Generational guilt is useless if its lessons are only applied on paper and in line with the current political agenda.
These are the bitter thoughts that have been sticking to me like my own shadow since 7 October 2023, always accompanied by the question of why. Why don‘t we apply Brecht’s mantra about the need for resistance against injustice?
The answer I could find goes back to my earlier allusion to our sterilized history; In all our academically abstracted discussions on guilt and the Third Reich, were we ever forced to face what everyday life under the Nazis looked like for people who worked their jobs and had a normal if not comfortable life?
How many of us have ever visualized what it must have smelled like when our (Great-)grandparents passed a camp on their way to school or work? How loud must the Pogroms have been? The Davidstar pinned on the jackets of Jewish citizens meant to implicate all citizens in the dehumanization of Jewish people
In brief: How many of us have had the sickening realization that every person living in Germany knew what happened to the Jews, Sinti, Roma, communists, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and all other ‘undesired minorities’?
How many of us have realized that it is not the past that should cause us the gravest guilt, but our own, continuous fear to stand against the stream of political agenda in the present? Because unfortunately we are not any better than our great-grandparents who knew everything but closed their eyes.
No, in fact, we are worse. Because we risk comparatively nothing when protesting our government’s funding of Israel‘s genocide against Palestinians and the appalling crimes committed by the Israeli army.
We all know about it. We all – especially my generation – can open Instagram and type ‘Palestine’ into the search bar and watch on livestream how the disfigured bodies of innocent civilians are being pulled out from under the rubble of their homes and hospitals. How children with missing limbs are waiting in endless queues for emergency rations. How women suffer through C-sections without anesthesia…
All of this is accessible to us. And we refuse its sight! Just so that one day, when even Western media can no longer deny and justify Israel‘s genocide, we can shake our heads in condemnation and welcome a new political propaganda.
This is us: The responsible, woke, feminist, civilized Germans who with shame and guilt remember a past as long as it has nothing to do with the present. We are gutless and guilty and don‘t see that our shame has become the button to politically mute us.
Lessons and responsibility
Accompanied by these thoughts I land on Berlin soil. And my questions deboard the plane with me: How can I turn my resentment into a loving form of resistance? This seems to be a crucial question since I know how easily anger turns into polarization – a lesson the previous three years of studying in the United States taught me.
The coffee in the subway station smells good and the sight of the familiar wall-tiles carries the feeling of home. The usual Berliner sourness makes me smile, but with every face in which I look, I cannot shake off the question of whether this person, too, would claim all Palestinians are misogynistic terrorists.
I am trying to suppress these thoughts while waiting for the train that will bring me home to provincial East Germany – another construction site in Germany‘s collective memory. The feeling of returning home from a country that my (grand)parents were indoctrinated to see as the worst of public enemies adds another layer of urgency to the recognition of the abysmal level of the freedom I have been raised in.
It is exactly this liberty that makes it a necessity to apply the lessons from our past to our present. If remembrance culture should have any meaning, then not that of condemnation towards our ancestors which we like to use as a boat carrying us away from our own responsibility, but that we owe it to these same ancestors to prove, that the citizens of a free Germany know their heritage – and accept the responsibility that comes with it. After all, we are the ones who have the freedom to do so – for now.
I am yearning to talk to the Rabbi, who many years ago played such an important role in my political awakening. Someone who survived so much cruelty and horror, and yet regards the world with such loving eyes cannot possibly endorse how the German politicians and citizens are indifferent to the genocide in Gaza…right?
