Journal of Genocide Research | 2021
Antisemitism, Anti-Racism, and the Holocaust in Germany: A Discussion Between Susan Neiman and Anna-Esther Younes
Abstract
Susan Neiman: I think there are two major failings in the German working through of the past, and I think they’re connected. One is the utter failure to take account of East German anti-fascism, namely the absolute dismissal of what was done in the East Germany. One of the charges that West Germans and other people tend to make about East Germany, if they pay attention to it at all, is that East Germany did not prioritize Jews. They won’t put it that way. Instead, they’ll say East Germany is antisemitic because they didn’t focus on the Jews. My view is that East Germany was right to focus on racism in general and antisemitism as a subspecies of racism. So it didn’t confine anti-fascism to antisemitism. It also talked about the fourteen million Slavic victims of the Nazis. What happened then, of course, when unification came and everything in East Germany was ignored or vilified was that antisemitism became the sole Nazi crime, and that’s just a mistake, because we know that the Nazis planned to colonize all of Eastern Europe and Africa. They were perfectly happy to murder vast numbers of people. But all of that got left out in favour of, the idea that, the only thing that the Nazis did wrong was antisemitism. And what that means, of course, is that in the present day Federal Republic of Germany we have the accusation of antisemitism as toxic, and it’s thrown around very easily. And it’s been thrown around atme ever since I joined the initiative, which is quite extraordinary. But other groups, especially people of colour who are discriminated against in various way, fall by the wayside, and one doesn’t really knowwhat to dowith them. And of course that’s particularly true of Palestinians, whether Muslim or not. So I think we’re in a dangerous situation. Anna-Esther Younes: It is a very dangerous situation indeed! And you are right about the political lens of anti-fascism and anti-imperialism that the GDR presented as its state ideology. But I think we would both agree that East Germany wasn’t entirely anti-racist. GDR policy still firmly located itself within parameters of ethnic belonging, making it illegal for instance for contracted socialist labour from so-called brother states to have children here or take root in any way that would diverge from the mode of contracted labour and give them equal citizen rights. Equally, everyday racism against people of colour generally, for instance, was pretty common and not eradicated. I think this case