It exists the idea of the soul of a country which is hard to verify since you can’t put it on a couch and ask it hard questions, but assuming there was some suggest that after the Shoah Germany adapted a rather strange coping mechanism in which it turns what other nations have as national pride into a pro Israel anti-antisemitism. National pride of course was not an option after the second WW and the Shoah.

[ Edit: the transition was rather rough here previously. So I added this insert. ]

The idea is to perform ourselves as guilty, as ashamed, as monsters and therefor cannot be accountable, because we distanced ourselves from this event. By separating the new Germany from the old and bad Germany we work around the fact that there was continuity in political personal, security personal, judges, public servants and so on from the third Reich into the Bundesrepublik. But by performing specific ritualistic proclamations of guilt, we become a separate entity. And because we committed it, we know all about it.

[ End of insert. ]

This leads to rather strange behavior, that somehow random Germans are able to tell diaspora Jews and Jewish Israelis what is and isn’t antisemitic.

During the currently paused Gaza war most speakers in Germany who were denied podiums on the topic due to accusations of antisemitism were Jews. This also leads to the institutionalization of guilt into specific rituals of proclaiming our guilt and assuming we are therefor forgiven. Stunningly this also doesn’t need validation from any Jew. We can forgive ourselves by these rituals.

Nobody actually knows what these rituals do, or if they help any Jew in any way, but we said and did the magic things and now you cannot be mad at us. This in turn leads to people not giving a fuck, because Look we said the magic words, did the magic deep of a knee fall, we are done with it. Letting actual and or casual antisemitism slide, because we had our absolution.

The core of this is “Das Existenzrecht Israels ist deutsche Staatsräson.” translating ruffly to “Israel’s (unquestionable) right to exist, is identical with/required for the idea of the German state.”

We build giant ugly concrete monuments, on which children play and adults take a dump in and somehow don’t need to think what the Shoah means for Germany in the year [whatever the current year is]. This mind boggling bending of reality is however so deeply entrenched in the German “psyche” that nobody can talk about it without being marked as antisemitic and a general disturbance to the major consent narrative.

There is honest guilt in some Germans. The fear of it happening again. Seeing the writings on the wall and going “ah shit here we go again” when humanity once more turns to genocide. People who really believe that “never again” should actually mean something. Something which has to do with me, with the history of my family, with the way we conduct social interactions and politics, but there is also the option to just do the rites and be done with it. And in politics, people play it safe. And safe is to not tell Israel that what they do amounts to war crimes/genocide/ethnic cleansing but instead supply weapons and words of encouragement.

When the EU suggested that a special treaty with Israel for cooperation, which as far as I know was mostly symbolic, should be paused during the ongoing fighting in Gaza the German foreign minister threw themselves on the ground and screamed till they dropped it.

All because of the strange intersection of guilt and identity, which poisons any pride we could take (e.g. our constitution is fucking A*) and prevents any substantial discussion about what we need to do now, with this history, with this responsibility.

Once again, as I wrote in the beginning, this is psychology on the state or society level. Nothing that can be definitely proven (as far as I’m aware, there isn’t any paper I could link or other academic publication), but it comes up again and again, especially when intellectual Jews talk about the topic, something German politicians and intellectuals are very sensitive about.