The Guardian view on German responses to antisemitism: frankness and honesty

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/29/the-guardian-view-on-german-responses-to-antisemitism-frankness-and-honesty

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The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has spoken openly about the spectre of antisemitism in Germany. She told CNN that “We have always had a certain amount of antisemites among us ... Unfortunately there is to this day not a single synagogue, not a single day care centre for Jewish children, not a single school for Jewish children that does not need to be guarded by German policemen.” Her remarks came a week after the country’s ombudsman for antisemitism, Felix Klein, suggested that observant Jews would be wise not to wear kippahs (skullcaps) in public. Taken together, these developments might suggest that Germany is sliding back into its dreadful past. In fact, they are signs of a determination that this must not happen. The crime figures do not suggest there is a crisis under way – though crime statistics do not measure fear.

The Jews of Germany are alarmed. It is not just the success of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in recent elections that contributes to their feeling of unease. A short-lived campaign to ban circumcision in 2012 was the first alarm bell; large demonstrations against the Gaza war in 2014, in which hostility to Israel often seemed indistinguishable from antisemitism, was another. And they are aware of the rising currents of antisemitism around Europe, even if it takes different forms in different countries.

One imaginative reaction to Mr Klein’s statement about kippahs was provided by the mass-market tabloid Bild. This week the paper printed and gave away a cutout paper kippah for its readers to wear in solidarity. The gesture failed to inspire a national fashion for the new headgear, but it is difficult to imagine a British tabloid doing anything like that.

The chancellor and the newspaper, in their different ways, exhibited a moral seriousness that is one of the distinguishing characteristics of German public life. The determination of official Germany to look the past squarely in the eye and, where possible, to atone for it, has provided a moral example to the rest of Europe. That does not undo the signs that sympathy for the Nazi past remains in some parts of the country. But no senior German politician would say, after far-right protests that had led to a person’s death, that there were “very fine people on both sides”, as Donald Trump did after the Charlottesville white supremacist rally of 2017.

The first big challenge to modern Germany’s liberal order came from the far left, with the urban guerillas of the 1970s. One noted legal thinker then observed that the democratic, liberal state depends on conditions that it cannot itself guarantee. In other words, the written rules are not in themselves enough to hold society together. They must be supplemented by unwritten moral understandings. Finding and strengthening those was the task facing Germany in the 1970s, successfully accomplished then; it must be resumed now. It is also the task that faces a horribly divided Britain today.