Jewish Political Studies Review

Secondary Anti-Semitism:
From Hard-Core to Soft-Core Denial of the Shoah

Clemens Heni

The core principle of secondary anti-Semitism is the refusal or rejection of remembrance of the unprecedented crime which Germans committed during the Second World War, namely the Shoah. This has a specific dimension in Germany which basically reflects the country's unique political culture. The cruelest version of secondary anti-Semitism is Holocaust denial. Three  categories of soft-core denial are proposed: distortion, universalization and projection of guilt/relativization/trivialization. People who generate such a soft-core denial do not often refer to the Holocaust as a lie or fabrication by Jews or their sympathizers. It is much more subtle. Disguising history by talking a bout history is the unstated aim. Research on anti-Semitism must be vigilant in the coming years to develop new strategies to fight this new brand of Jew-hatred. Soft-core denial today is already at least as dangerous and widespread as Neonazi, Islamic or Iranian varieties: liberals, left-wingers, conservatives, clergy and scientists of all persuasions are using this form of post-Auschwitz anti-Semitism in good conscience.

This article seeks to introduce secondary anti-Semitism, a relatively unknown and rather new concept for the analysis of anti-Semitism. It refers to the refusal or rejection of remembrance of the unprecedented crimes which Germans committed during the Second World War, which initially developed in Germany and other European countries. While the refusal to acknowledge the Holocaust as an unprecedented crime against Jews as Jews exists all round the world, in Germany it has a specific dimension which basically reflects the country's unique political culture. Outside Germany, political activists and journalists tend to be unfamiliar with this concept perhaps because it is difficult to clearly distinguish between primary and secondary anti-Semitism.

Secondary anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism after Auschwitz. Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex described its essence: "Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz."[1] German scholar Peter Schönbach, who worked with Theodor W. Adorno in Frankfurt in the 1960s originally coined the term secondary anti-Semitism.[2] While Schönbach concentrated primarily on the generational problem and the "afterlife of Fascist anti-Semitism," or more precisely National Socialist anti-Semitism, today the problem is more extensive. Jew-hatred is particularly easy to detect in the generations after 1945 and also after 1968. However, under a cloak of responsibility and mainstream consensus they have generated a secondary form of anti-Semitism.[3]  

The cruelest version of secondary anti-Semitism is Holocaust denial. After 1945, Nazis and their sympathizers immediately began to deny the Holocaust. The first known Holocaust denier was French fascist Maurice Bardèche, according to historian Deborah Lipstadt.[4] Later, such books as Richard Harwood's Did Six Million Really Die? published by Erich Zündel in 1974 simply propagated the same lies as Bardèche. But what happened in mainstream societies, especially, but not exclusively, in Germany - in both Germanys - and post-Holocaust Europe? French-Jewish survivors like the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch witnessed the silence surrounding crimes against the Jews, the deportations to t he concentration camps, the expropriation of Jewish homes, and the transport of the Jews from railway stations "to the East," all of which was widely known, and the mass murder during the Holocaust.  

In an important early article in 1948[5] Jankélévitch describes a typical Sunday afternoon stroll down the Champs Elysees in 1943, an enjoyable event where ordinary French people window-shop for new clothes, shoes, etc. Furthest from their minds are the Jews who had been deported the night before. The French silence persisted long after the Liberation in 1944. In Germany itself the situation was even worse. Not only was there no public debate about the crimes the Germans had perpetrated, but some former mass murderers received Persilscheine, de-nazification certificates of good conduct named after a popular laundry detergent.   

Both silence and the specific way Germans began to talk about National Socialism needs to be explored if we are to understand the workings of secondary anti-Semitism. In Germany, Holocaust denial is a crime. In its stead, a kind of "soft-core' denial has developed, to use a term coined by historian Deborah Lipstadt.[6] "Soft-core" refers to a veiled or rhetorically concealed form of Holocaust denial. People who generate such soft-core denial do not often refer to the Holocaust as a lie or fabrication by Jews or their sympathizers; rather, it is much more subtle. Disguising history by talking about history is the unstated aim. According to Lipstadt this "soft" version of denial is the most dangerous in terms of its anti-Jewish implications.

Contrary to the hard-core version, soft-core denial is often not easily identifiable. Often it is tolerated, or even encouraged and reproduced in the mainstream, not only in Germany. Scholars have only recently begun to unravel this disturbing phenomenon. Manfred Gerstenfeld discusses Holocaust trivialization in an article published in 2008.[7] In Germany in 2007 two scholars, Thorsten Eitz and Georg Stötzel, published a voluminous dictionary of German language and discourse regarding National Socialism and the Holocaust. It includes chapters on Holocaust trivialization and contrived comparisons, such as the infamous "atomic Holocaust", "Babycaust," "Holocaust of abortion", "red Holocaust" or "biological Holocaust."[8]

Although secondary anti-Semitism is most visible in Germany, it can be found elsewhere, as Gerstenfeld showed in his 2008 paper. When Germany needed to recreate a positive national identity after 1945, the meaning of Auschwitz had to be whitewashed, without using the traditional methods, something which today differentiates Germany from Muslim states and societies such as Iran. Political scientist Lars Rensmann analyzed secondary anti-Semitism in Germany in the following terms:

The rationale for the refusal to remember is, last but not least, according to Critical Theory, to restore a positive identification with German national identity that was shattered after Auschwitz. This was needed to overcome the collective narcissistic damage which affects anyone involved in German history either as an actor or descendant of German perpetrators.[9]

Secondary anti-Semitism often involves an "inversion of truth"[10] and anti-Zionism. In its Europeanized or universalized form, it tends to single out Israel and the Jews particularly for anti-imperialistic, postcolonial or poststructuralist wrongs. In this essay only the broad contours of secondary anti-Semitism can be delineated but it provides a preliminary but systematic overview of the phenomenon. Thus for purposes of a better understanding of secondary anti-Semitism, the main trends have been classified in this article into three categories: distortion, universalization, and projection of guilt, relativization and/or rivalization.

Distortion  

The Flick Collection

Friedrich Flick (1883-1972), one of the richest and most influential industrialists in Germany in the twentieth century, was mainly involved in armaments and steel production. In 1932 he supported the Nazi rise to power. In 1935 he successfully applied for membership in the Nazi Party. He became one of the most prominent financiers of the Freundeskreis des Reichsführers SS, the Circle of Friends of SS Leader Heinrich Himmler. Contributing 100,000 German Reichsmarks a year to the Circle, Flick sponsored the club of leaders of the Nazi unit that predominantly carried out the Holocaust, the Schutzstaffel (SS). During the Nuremburg Trials, Flick was condemned as a war c riminal and was sentenced to seven years in jail in 1947. He was pardoned soon afterwards and in 1963 received the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the Federal Service Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Some fifty thousand slave laborers had been forced to work in his factories, 10,000 of whom perished. After the demise of National Socialism, Flick was the wealthiest man in Germany. Friedrich Christian Flick, his grandson and one of his heirs, turned his valuable art collection into a permanent exhibit in Berlin known as the Flick collection in 2004. Unlike other German firms that committed crimes during the Nazi era, the Flick heir refused to contribute to the fund  known as the The Remembrance, Responsibility and Future foundation set up in 2000 to compensate slave labor under National Socialism. This contribution is a small symbolic act and is unrelated to reparations known as Wiedergutmachung.  

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'Take it or leave it' those responsible seem to have said: the main thing is that we bring this collection to the Spree [the main river in Berlin]. Most of the liberal press also agreed. A Springer journalist immediately fell under the sway of the super-collector by describing Flick junior as a 'giant in corduroys and a polo-neck sweater, with steel blue eyes and silver white hair.' The more strikingly the biography of a collector is, the more these works appear to reflect his life, as a biographical project of forced interruptions and transformations [Projekt der Brüche und Wandlungen]. This enabled a German family story to be transformed on 22 September 2004 [the day the Flick Collection was inaugurated]. This metamorphosis will take place in Rieck Hall in Central Berlin, a 250 meter long and 6000 square meter space. Berlin Mayor Wowereit, Federal Minister of Culture Weiss will witness this transformation, surrounded by representatives from [the worlds of] culture, entertainment, politics, and the economy. The name 'Flick' no longer stands for cunning, unscrupulousness, war-profiteering and slave labor. The name now stands for one of the biggest collections of art in the 21^st century.[11]

The Flick phenomenon is a specific expression of a new German lack of inhibition, and the shamelessness of the Berlin Republic.[12] As Salomon Korn, Vice President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany stated, Flick is benefitting from the "bloodied money" of his ancestors. He added that Flick is promoting "a project of forced normalization".[13] From the very beginning Flick planned to cleanse the bloodstained name of his family. In a letter to his uncle Friedrich Karl he states he was filled with the desire "to put the name of Flick on enduring positive ground by founding an art museum."[14]

The "Bombing Holocaust"

In recent years, debate on whether the the Allied wartime bombing of Germany constitutes mass murder has been one of the highlights of anti-Semitic distortion of guilt. Authors such as Jörg Friedrich, who has acknowledged the crimes Germans committed during National Socialism, has now changed sides. Friedrich wrote a bestseller, Der Brand[15]. To popularize it, Europe's biggest popular daily newspaper, Bild-Zeitung, pre-published extracts from the book.[16] It thus received huge exposure. This is a typical example of the new discourse on victimhood in Germany.

In an anti-Semitic speech in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt in October 1998, the best-selling German author, Martin Walser broke the Holocaust taboo by publicly - and not surreptitiously, as had been the custom since 1945 - portraying Germans as victims in the ongoing Auschwitz controversy. Walser used the term Moralkeule, moral cudgel, and Einschüchterungsmittel, attempt at intimidation, to describe the use of Auschwitz to "place demands on Germany."  It is frightening and typical of the political culture in the Berlin Republic that almost the entire German establishment who attended his acceptance speech in 1998 gave Walzer a standing ovation with the exception of three people, two of whom were the former President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Ignatz Bubis, and his wife Ida. The words Walser used in this important speech are shocking even today:

It occurs to me, trembling because of my boldness, to say: Auschwitz is not suitable to become a threat as a routine matter, an attempt at intimidation or moral cudgel or just a compulsory exercise used every day.[17]

This formed the basis for Jörg Friedrich and several others to construct their German victimhood. Friedrich took the example of the wartime bombing in general and its importance for Dresden in particular. Since 1945, both old and new Nazis consider Dresden to symbolize an event that could counterbalance Auschwitz and the Holocaust. In this way, since 1945 Germans have referred to themselves as victims in a familiar litany consisting of "Who were the Nazis?" "Hitler, Himmler and maybe my neighbor, but I was not."

Friedrich had obvious forerunners in the Holocaust deniers, when he spoke of Dresden as a "crematorium." The analogy with the death camps is obvious. Similar trends can be found in publications by the Federal Agency for Civic Education,[18] which provides free books and publications for pupils, teachers, students and the general public. This German Federal agency turned public opinion against Arthur Harris, the WWII Royal Air Force pilot who was responsible for the bombing of Dresden, and defamed him as a "mass murderer."[19]

Renowned sociologists such as Wolfgang Sofsky have joined the chorus of German self-victimizers: "The German war of extermination in the East wiped out the distinction between war and crime, but the wartime bombing also massively repudiated the law of nations in times of war."[20] Despite some criticism of details, others have also praised Jörg Friedrich's "horrifyingly impressive picture.[21] The fairly left-liberal weekly Der Spiegel devoted a special supplement, Spiegel Spezial, to it.[22] Friedrich himself even published a propagandistic illustrated volume[23], including photos of mutilated corpses to generate anti- English and anti-American resentments.

This next highpoint of German victim discourse was when parliamentarians of the NPD - National Democratic Party - claimed on 21 January 2005 in the Landtag, the state parliament of Saxony, that the British had committed a "bombing Holocaust" against the Germans in Dresden in 1944.[24] In an earlier debate on 5 June 2003, Martin Hohmann, a Christian Democrat  who finally after prolonged discussion was expelled from the party because of other anti-Semitic statements, and MP Peter Gauweiler (CSU) referred positively to Friedrich.[25] When Queen Elizabeth visited Germany, Friedrich demanded she make a gesture similar to that of former chancellor Willy Brandt, who kneele d on 1 December 1970 in Warsaw in front of the memorial to the Jewish Ghetto.[26]

Friedrich shows us the way secondary anti-Semitism functions: it compares the Holocaust and the war against the perpetrators to events experienced by ordinary German bystanders. The stylization of the Germans victim became common after 1945 both in the former German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany, but with different emphases. During the 1950s and 60s in West Germany the widely read magazines Bunte and Stern painted the bombing of Germany in a tragic palette.[27] The Allies were portrayed as war criminals and not as liberators from National Socialism. The Germans did not feel liberated but rather domi nated by "foreign forces." Such World War II narratives illustrate this attitude. The history of the Holocaust is not the focus. Even worse, this press portrayed the Germans as the true victims of the bombing. Thus Friedrich and large parts of German public misrepresent when they claim that: "we could never speak about our dramatic history during the bombing ... "

Friedrich imagines himself as a leftist iconoclast. In fact he belongs to a revanchist tradition and is outclassed by the well-known German writer W.G. Sebald who lived in England for decades. He was considered to be highly cognizant of German history including the Holocaust, and delivered very problematic lectures about the Luftkrieg, the air war, in Zurich in 1997. Social scientist Annette Seidel-Arpaci[28] analyzed Sebald's formulations in the context of the new German victim discourse. She asks what Sebald wants to express by beginning his little book on the Luftkrieg by defining it as a historically "unprecedented action of extermination," a Vernichtungsaktion[29]:

The term "Vernichtung" has a disturbingly close proximity to what Victor Klemperer has called the "Language of the Third Reich" and may not be a term that we want to use for the murder of human beings. Nonetheless, the term acquired this connotation on a broad basis at least since the 1980s in the wake of the increasing public discourse on National Socialism and the Holocaust. "Vernichtung" then was translated for the English edition as "destruction" rather than as "annihilation", or, as "extermination." The word, "destruction," resonates much more with the meaning of "Zerstörung" - for instance, of buildings - than with "Vernichtung." I do think, therefore, that Sebald - an author very attuned to the subtleties of language - chose his terminology here as pr ecisely as Friedrich did at similar points. Furthermore, Sebald doubles his linguistic effort on appropriation with the addition of the term "Aktion" to "Vernichtung."[30]

The "Holocaust of Expulsion"

The same type of logic can be found in the debate over the expulsion of the Germans from the East. The Russians, Poles and Czechs are accused of having committed crimes against German victims. The interest group of those who were expelled, the Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV), the Organization of the Expelled, for decades has agitated incessantly for the idea of Volk und Heimat and the landsmannschaftlichen Gedanken; i.e., a people in its homeland and a kind of unified worldview associated with the regions which they left behind.[31] They intentionally present the Holocaust as being in the same category as the expulsion of German s from the East. Erika Steinbach, President of BdV underscored this when she said that both groups of victims are comparable, and that "Jews and expellee [Germans]" complement one another. In her view both groups became victims in similar ways of the entmenschte Rassenwahn, a delusion of dehumanized race.[32]

As in the case of the Allied bombing, this interest group has distorted the perspective in a new way, breaking the taboo in order to portray Germans as victims of National Socialism. The unprecedented crimes Germans committed during the Holocaust are stripped of their reality and Jews simply fall out of the picture as victims of the Holocaust. This soft-core denial must be clearly identified and analyzed. Research on anti-Semitism must take this tendency into account, especially in Germany. The Germans are basically proclaiming "It's our turn now! We are as much a victims of the Second World War - or of National Socialism in general - as the Jews." In a representative opinion poll, 90% of German population declared that they view themselves, ordinary Germans in g eneral, as victims of World War II.[33] Nazis and Neonazis now use the term Vertreibungsholocaust, The Holocaust of Expulsion."[34] 

"The Good Sides" of National Socialism

While discussion and remembrance of the Shoah are treated with reluctance, other aspects of Nazi Germany are coming to the fore. It is now claimed that not everything was bad damals,"at that time." When German use "damals" it is clear they are talking about National Socialism. Eva Herman, a television personality of many years standing (1989-2006) and host of the Tagesschau, the Day in Review, on ARD, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the leading news program on German TV, several times publicly declared tha t family and women's policies under Hitler were rather good. Herman is also in love with the German Autobahn (highways) and articulates views which many Germans hold. One only has to mention the city of Wolfsburg, where the head office and giant Volkswagen automobile factory are located. If it had not been founded in 1938 under the name of Stadt des KDF-Wagens as the biggest project of the Nazi organization Kraft durch Freude ("KDF") or Strength through Joy, this city would not have existed.[35] 

KDF was a large, highly popular National Socialist organization, not only for children and teenagers, but also for parents and adults who took part in their leisure time activities, including the screening of films for instance in rural areas where there had never been a movie theater, etc. The car-factory-city in today's Wolfsburg was its well known highlight. If someone commented publicly on the historical fact that slave laborers "helped" build these highways, he or she would be ridiculed.

In Germany's most popular and most highly rated television late night entertainment show Schmidt & Pocher which is also broadcast by the publicly financed ARD, the two hosts presented a "Nazometer" in October 2007. This Nazometer is a light bulb which begins to glow when a suspicious word is spoken, such as highway, gas, or shower: Autobahn, Gas, Dusche. Schmidt and Pocher got a kick out of saying "I have a gas cooker in my house"; a few minutes later, in a very different context, they said: "In the morning I take a shower." This kind of German humor deserves scrutiny: the entertainers find it extremely comical to associ ate words like Gas and Dusche saying, "These are harmless words, aren't they? Why does our Nazometer-lamp light up?" In Germany most of the viewers found this funny. For Jews and Holocaust survivors it is a sad sign of lack of emotion.

This is yet another indication of how the remembrance of the Shoah has been neglected and marginalized. For Jews it is no laughing matter to make fun of the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Germans don't mind. In a poll, 25% said that National Socialism "had its good sides." The actual percentage may be even higher, because not all dare to speak out in this way. But this represents a large number of people, roughly 20 million Germans.

Universalization

Heidegger, 1949: "Motorized Agriculture" and "Gas Chambers"

German philosopher Martin Heidegger said in one of his four Bremen lectures, which were published in 1949 under the title Das Gestell:

Agriculture is nowadays a motorized nutritional industry, by nature the same as the production of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockade and the starving out of countries, the same as the production of the H-bomb.[36]

Beyond its well-known projection of guilt on the USSR and the USA, something else stands out: the unprecedented crime of the destruction of European Jews in the gas chambers is equated with modern agriculture. This represented a new kind of anti-Semitism, which Heidegger promoted in 1949, a few years after the Shoah. This comparison is a banalization of the unimaginable by its universalization. 

Modern, motorized agriculture is indeed a product of modern capitalism - and at that time as well what was called "real existing socialism" - but it has nothing to do with the crimes against humanity which the Germans committed against the Jews. For scientific research Heidegger's 1949 lecture is of great importance, not only because Heidegger is arguably the world's most widely taught philosopher of the 20^th century, but also and especially because he was one of the founders of the concept of rejection and universalization of German guilt. He attributed the responsibility for the crimes of the Second World War on modernity in general, which then made it possible to deemphasize the responsibility of the German mass murderers.

Another example is American historian and anthropologist Ward Churchill, who was finally dismissed as Professor of Indian Studies at the University of Colorado in 2007. In a voluminous monograph in 1997 he writes about "the Holocaust of the Americans", as applied to the history of the native inhabitants since 1492.[37] Churchill mocks the September 11^th World Trade Center attack by calling the victims of this Jihad massacre "little Eichmanns":

If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.[38]

In 2005 he made the following anti-Semitic statement:

What I said was that the "technocrats of empire" working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of little Eichmanns. Adolf Eichmann was not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies.[39]

By making a parallel between a multicultural democracy like the United States and Nazi Germany, Churchill is engaging in secondary anti-Semitism. He rejects any substantial reflection on the essence of dictatorship when he treats it as just another form of democracy and capitalism. He belittles the Holocaust, and as such his argumentation is anti-Semitic.

Like Churchill, who considers himself a left-winger, the most important theorist of the right wing extremist New Right in Germany, Henning Eichberg, is another representative of the universalization of Auschwitz, another act of soft-core denial. For him, the destruction of European Jewry did stop with the end of National Socialism. He sees Auschwitz as a paradigm for the modern world as such,[40] like Heidegger in 1949 or Churchill in 1997:

After the industrial eradication of the "parasites" [referring to IG Auschwitz industries, C.H] work began - in the name of the same values: progress, productivity, competitiveness - to create new minority problems .... The extermination of people of the 19/20^th century, of the Sinti [gypsies], Jews and Indians is being played down, if one regards them as archaic remains of old behavior ("prejudices of the Middle Ages", "barbaric contempt for mankind"). The destruction of the "parasites" in the name of progress and productivity wasn't old, but new, not backward, but modern and industrially. In it the subjugation of volklich [ethnic] identities[41] and progress itself coincided in a murderous way. 1945 did not represent a break with history [a caesura]. The end of the industrial genocide and ethnocide rests still with us.[42]

Eichberg repeats the argument that 1945 was not a caesura found in several other articles. This can best be illustrated by an article published in a handbook on history and education by the German historian Dieter Langewiesche who ultimately won the Leibniz prize.[43] Eichberg considers the Holocaust, not in its own right, but as a typical byproduct of every modern industrial society. This argument could be called anti-productivist anti-Semitism.

While anti-Jewish propaganda portrayed the Jews as "pests", in Poland of 1939 the first ghettos emerged. In 1940 "one" started with deportations and in1941 mass destruction began. Several million human beings [!] were the victims of the finally industrial organized and mechanized eradication. Out of the fixation of production of industrial society, the industrial destruction of the "unproductive" resulted.[44]

Germans are not presented as perpetrators, rather Eichberg - who is not being singled out as an individual, but as a proponent of a special kind of secondary anti-Semitism - suggests Heidegger's "man" did kill. Who was murdered is not clear, in that aside from the mention of Jews being sent to ghettos they do not appear as a specific group of victims, because Eichberg writes about "several million human beings who were killed." Even though Eichberg is not quoting Heidegger, the veiled reference to the term "motorized nutritional industry" is obvious. Under no circumstances do these authors wish to mention the anti-civilized Germans who committed unprecedented crimes. Thus, Auschwitz is universalized and the killing of the other half of European Jewry by the Polizeibatallione, the Wehrmacht, the Sichheitsdienst (SD) and the SS and others in the East, in Babi Yar, or the woods of Lithuania and the villages of the Ukraine are simply ignored. The destruction in the gas chambers is seen as the ultimate consequence of modernity itself, an assumption of the philosophical school of post-structuralism as well (see the works of the French writer Michel Foucault, the British writer Zygmunt Bauman or the Italian Giorgio Agamben). For the analysis of soft-core denial this technique is crucial.