It took Germany four decades to take responsibility for the evils of the Nazi era and to largely end its collective silence and denial. The country was willed toward this introspection by a postwar generation that could have shrugged off personal responsibility for crimes committed before they were born.
They instead asked uncomfortable questions of parents, grandparents and neighbors, many of whom had been Nazi perpetrators or bystanders. They were ashamed at what they heard and started doing their own research, channeling their emotions into a powerful remembrance movement that eventually drew worldwide attention.
Germany was praised as a role model for how a country could reckon with a violent, racist past. As a child of Holocaust survivors, I can attest to its success. That work helped me better understand how my father’s family lived for centuries in the North Rhine-Westphalia region before he escaped, and how my mother’s family lived in Bavaria before they fled. Other relatives were murdered.
I’ve traveled to Germany several times in a quest to reclaim my heritage. My German friends were with me as I stood where my ancestral homes did. An elderly neighbor shared vivid memories of my great-grandmother and described the scene when she was deported along with her two daughters. My friends took me to pay homage to cemeteries where family members who died before the 1930s were buried, and to memorials bearing the names of relatives who were killed in the years after. I sat in synagogues where my ancestors worshipped, whose interiors the Nazis set ablaze and which Germans had more recently restored.
No, they aren’t “righteous gentiles” akin to those who protected Jews from Nazi barbarians. They didn’t save lives…but they saved memories.”
But the global perception of Germany as a model for reconciliation efforts crumbled soon after the terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023. A chain of events that rippled from Hamas’s barbaric murders and hostage-taking and Israel’s destructive invasion of Gaza unleashed a potent wave of antisemitism worldwide. Germany was no exception. Denunciations of Jews were soon heard in chants at large pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli rallies. Stars of David were painted on some buildings where Jews live. A watchdog group reported 4,782 antisemitic incidents in Germany in 2023, an 80 percent increase from the previous year. More than half occurred after October 7.
German officials and cultural institutions generally remained steadfast in their support of Israel and condemned antisemitism. But they did so in a heavy-handed way, intolerant of criticism of Israel, including from Jews. A museum cancelled an exhibit of works by Berlin-based artist Candice Breitz, who is South African and Jewish, explaining that she hadn’t sufficiently condemned Hamas’s attack. “Need I point out the absurdity,” Breitz told The Guardian, “of Germans dictating to Jewish people how they should articulate their reactions to the heinous massacre of Jewish people at the hands of terrorists?”
Praise for Germany’s reckoning with its Nazi past is getting harder to come by. “Something has gone terribly awry in Germany’s famed ’culture of memory,’” wrote Manuel Schwab in a December 2023 Los Angeles Times op-ed. (Schwab is an anthropology professor who lives and works part time in Berlin.)
Erinnerungskultur, the “Culture of Remembrance,” had already been tarnished domestically in recent years by accusations that it had devolved into a kind of performance art. Germany’s recriminations, in this view, have less to do with making amends to the victims of genocide (and their descendants), than with redeeming the perpetrators (and their descendants). Max Czollek, a Jewish author and political scientist, tweeted even before the October 7 attacks that his parents’ generation’s assurances that Germany had come to terms with its Nazi past was “a gaslighting like no other.”
More chilling has been the growth in popularity over the past several years of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), especially in eastern Germany. The AfD is a right-wing populist party characterized as nationalist, anti-immigration and Islamophobic. Polls show the AfD is supported by about 20 percent of the public ahead of next month’s federal elections, in second place. It also received a warm embrace from Elon Musk.
[Read: “Is Elon Musk Antisemitic or Not? Either Way, He’s Dangerous.”]
The speed with which antisemitism has accelerated in Germany has forced those in the remembrance movement to reconsider what they’ve accomplished. “All this really deep and honest ’learning from the past’ has been and still is an ’elite project’ shaping many intellectuals, the media, the churches, the schools, the active citizenship—but not the majority,” said the late Norbert Reichling, former director of the Jewish museum in the town of Dorsten, where my family is commemorated with artifacts and displays.
The most impressive aspects of Germany’s efforts of working through the past—known by the unwieldy name Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung—were never what these activists built, though that drew the most attention. It was how they went about their work. They wanted to uncover the truth about how Jews had lived in Germany and how they were persecuted. Theirs was a loose coalition of citizens—not renowned historians or powerful elected officials—focused on what took place in their own hometowns.
No, they aren’t “righteous gentiles” akin to those who protected Jews from Nazi barbarians. They didn’t save lives, and it’s become clear they didn’t end racial and religious hatred. But they saved memories, uncovering traces of a Jewish past, restoring synagogues and cemeteries, building memorials and museums, creating websites and educating members of subsequent generations who approached their history with open minds. These achievements are worth honoring, too.
They’ve made history by helping those who are willing to do so remember history more accurately. Their actions, however incomplete to the task, ought to be included in any telling of the Holocaust and what came after. I’ve become as interested in their personal journeys as much as those of my relatives. My life is enriched by friendships that overcome the hate that motivated prior generations of their ancestors to terrorize mine.
I know there’s fatigue when talking about a historical chapter that ended 80 years ago. I understand the resentment stirred by implying more recent acts of persecution against other groups pale in comparison to the Holocaust. But the Holocaust remains a valid cautionary tale about how quickly democracies can tumble. How demonizing people because of their race, religion or ethnicity can turn longtime friends and neighbors against one another. And how each of us bears personal responsibility to connect with others, striving for tolerance while recognizing that as humans, we’re destined to fall short.
I hope I’m not being naïve in thinking that what these memory activists accomplished endures and their dedication still inspires. More than a million people protested against the AfD in demonstrations in about 100 locations last year. Still, Dirk Hartwich, who cofounded a history workshop in Dorsten four decades ago, is hearing more of his neighbors complain about “the Jews.”
“I object always and everywhere, and try, clearly and unambiguously, not only to counteract the opinion expressed, but to promote more tolerance,” he told me. “I don’t have any other solution.”
Jeffrey L. Katz is a retired journalist and current part-time bookseller. He is writing a book about the German remembrance movement and his family’s experiences in the country before, during and after the Holocaust.
Top image: A band marches in front of the author’s family’s house in this photo taken in 1930 (Credit: Jeffrey L. Katz).