German Catechism, Antisemitism and Memory Culture
Or how Germany still hates Jews (and the rest of us)
Hey everyone, I'm sharing with paid subscribers a paper that I am going to present tomorrow at the British International Studies Association. It's not finished.
I won't make it available for the public until it's finished. Hope that's understandable. To the subscribers who will read it: I welcome any feedback you might have!
I am also looking to get it published somewhere so if you have suggestions please feel free.
But first, some quick admin:
The May class on Lebanese history and politics is done! This was the 3rd class this year. I've now had some 40 students and it's been a really rewarding experience. I'm already taking registrations for the August 2026 class here. For any questions please message me on ayoub@thefirethesetimes.com or Signal @ Ayoub.02
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Here's the essay. The first three paragraphs are free but the rest is paywalled. Sorry, would love to not do this at all but gotta manage to get paid somehow.
As this is a first draft, I will update it eventually. The newer versions will replace the older ones here.
Reading recommendations available at the end of the essay.
In 2021, the genocide scholar Dirk Moses coined the term “the German Catechism” in which he described German memory culture as implying “a redemptive story in which the sacrifice of Jews in the Holocaust by Nazis is the premise for the Federal Republic’s legitimacy.” “That is why,” he continues, “the Holocaust is more than an important historical event,” one which should be remembered and understood, but “a sacred trauma that cannot be contaminated by profane ones - meaning non-Jewish victims and other genocides - that would vitiate its sacrificial function.” Moses wrote this before the beginning of the ongoing Gaza genocide. He was referring to a broader trend in German mainstream memory culture - which is another of saying state-sanctioned remembrance - that is often used to scapegoat racialised Others today, including German and non-German Jews who dissent from it. Part of the argument was pointing out how Germany waited until 2021 to recognise the German genocide against the Herero and Nama people between 1904 and 1908, a recognition that did not come with meaningful reparations to descendants of their victims. This remains true today, but what has become even more obvious is the racialised treatment of anything related to Palestine, even or especially when expressed by Jews in Germany today.
As the editorial board of Jewish Currents put it months before the beginning of the Gaza genocide, in today’s Germany “migrants and racialized minorities are expected to assume the perpetrators’ legacy” and “a questionably conceived anti-antisemitism has become the mechanism for keeping Germanness Aryan.” These dynamics, they add, are “largely absent from the mainstream story about memory culture in Germany.” The performativity of remembering in Germany is deployed to forget, to forget the root causes of the Holocaust and to favour instead a translocation of White supremacist Nazism unto the racialised Other today. There has been no room in the mainstream, for example, for understanding the resurgence of the Far Right AfD which itself followed the February 2020 massacre against racialised people in the city of Hanau, when nine people were killed by a man who explicitly called for the “complete extermination” of “many races or cultures in our midst.” Instead, what we have been seeing in the past few years, and especially since the start of the Gaza genocide, is an increase in repression against any and all symbols of the inconvenient Other, particularly Muslims and Arabs and anyone who supports Palestine. No one made it clearer than the German chancellor Friedrich Merz himself who, in a 2025 interview with the defacto propaganda arm of the current American regime Fox News, blamed rising antisemitism in Germany on “imported antisemitism with the big numbers of migrants we have within the last 10 years.” This despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of antisemitic attacks in Germany today are committed by the local Far Right, a comparable phenomenon in both France and the UK.
This scapegoating of the racialised Other is the end result of the absence of a critical memory culture that seeks to confront the past in all its ugliness. Antisemitic tropes are being revived under the pretense of islamophobia, which cannot be understood as merely part of a wider xenophobic and racist European phenomenon, although it is also that, but rather a specifically German response that can be traced to its particular brand of memory culture. The Muslim, in this case, is not an individual at all but merely the unwilling embodiment of Germany’s latest Othering obsession, a recycling of the 20th century rootless Jew for a modern Germany. To understand this, we need to explore why German memory culture as we know it today did not immediately follow the Holocaust itself, but rather came about especially in the 1980s with the rise of memory studies and with, soon later, a newly reunited Germany’s desire to, and here I’m quoting Jewish Currents again, “show itself fit to enter the community of Western European nations.” The victims of the Nazi genocide were instrumentalised postmortem as proof of the viability of German nationalism, one which is different from the historical associations with the Third Reich. To do that, the German state decided to support the state of Israel at all costs, ironically proving that memory culture is a state-sanctioned affair rather than one which ought to be critically embraced by the wider population. Angela Merkel’s declaration of Staatsraison in her 2008 speech at the Knesset - declared six months before Israel’s first major war on Gaza since the occupation began - further cemented this, and it is this new arrangement that is threatened by the mere presence of racialised Others on German soil, a repurposing of Nazi blood and soil rhetoric for the 21st century.
