Is Germany largely anti-semetic today?

In a conversation with my family, the subject of antisemitism in Germany came up. Everyone seemed quite adamant that Germany was largely antisemetic to this day and someone even through out the “fact” that 15% of the German Parliament was neo-nazi.

Also members of my family mentioned that the claim that the holocaust never happened is widely believed over there.

I find this very difficult to believe. I certainly acknowledge that I have little doubt that there is a fair share of ignorance and racism over there, just as there is here in the US. But to what degree is it apparent over there?

I also tried to make the point that making a generalization about the evils of German anti-semitism today based on the Holocaust is like making a generalization about the American white man based on treatment of Native Americans and blacks in the past.

Boy, that really got the crown up in arms. I was immediately countered by the claim that black slavery in America is a completely different issue because it was actually blacks who sold slaves to America.

(I know, but they are my family)

The truth is, I really don’t know the facts. I’d rather come here and get them before rejoining ignorance party.

I’ve talked with German foreign exchange students. What they told me is that anti-semitism and racism is a major no-no in modern day Germany. A person spouting off some anti-semitic crap in the streets of Germany today would probably get the crap beaten out of him.

Nazism is illegal in Germany. Denying the Holocaust is illegal in Germany. Singing the Horst Wessel song, the rally song of the SS, and the first strophe of the national anthem, which contains references to the 1939 borders of Germany is illegal. The swastika may not be displayed in public. Any NSDAP insignia may only be used in context that are clearly non-political.

In other words nothing of what your family claims is correct. All that being said Germany has problems with racism just like most Western countries do. These problems are on the other hand not as bad as in the US, Scandinavia or France = to just mention a few places that are worse off. Anti-Semitism is one of the absolute no nos, even to make a Jewish joke is way, way beyond socially acceptable.

I shall prepare a more complete answer with stats and figures during the night.

Sparc

Thank you for both for the responses so far.

I’m counting on more from others, and Sparc I am very much looking forward to your more detailed response (with appreciation).

I have just been doing some of my own research online in the interest in finding sources to support the POV of my fam. Afterall, there’s no better way to prove yourself right than to fail in trying to prove yourself wrong.

Well, thus far I must admit that I have failed to fail. I very quickly found this, a well-organized and articulate essay which convincingly argues the anti-semitism in Germany is alive and well. (just the first article. There’s more on this author’s homepage that I haven’t read yet).

I think I’m done reading for the night but I wanted to put this link in thread in case anyone has any comments on it.

Incidentally, are there any German dopers around? I’d sure like to get an insider’s POV.

I had a German roommate when I was in college and I asked him about what the Germans were taught about the concentration camps, etc. He said that from a very early age kids were sent on tours of concentration camps, and they were shown exactly what happened. When the Allies conquered Germany after WW II, they wanted to make sure that the Germans knew exactly what was going on in the concentration camps and started sending the Germans through the camps as soon as possible. The Germans know that the Nazi era was one of the darkest points in their history and they have no desire to see it repeated.

A friend of ours had a German exchange student staying with them during and after the 9/11 events - here in the USA. She [the student] honestly couldn’t understand all the US Nationalism pouring forth. While she plainly saw that the events of 9/11 were very evil, she was not “programmed” to think on the national scale having such unity.

Nationalism, apparently, has been squelched in Germany since WWII. I am not saying there isn’t hatred or prejudice against others here and there. But, as a nation, it is not mainstream. Also, realize that nationalism and “pride for the Fatherland” was drilled into German children from schools, etc., in an earlier Era. Apparently, things have changed for the better.

Just my $0.02,
Jinx!

Moe,

That very same link was posted in another thread, so instead of rehashing my assessment of it, I’ll just link to my response.

Here you go.

It’s a really mixed bag. I lived in Germany for two years and I think that anti-antisemitism (double negative intended) is a lot more prevalent than anti-semitism. That said, there are some very xenophobic right wing parties that have been winning enough of the vote to get seats in the German parliment. Most of this has been attributed to disaffected younger people who have been suffering from extremely high unemployment in some areas, particularly in the former East German states. The standard of living there is still far behind the old West and there is still a lot of environmental fallout from old policies.

So there still exists a small presence of people with a sad agenda. Think of these in terms of the disaffected Southerns who joined the Klan during the early part of this century. However, there is nowhere near the institutionalism of this due to the effect of some of the stringent German laws against support of Nazism. Often any hate crimes, which are anyway now more likely to target Africans, Turks or other non-Germans are ascribed to street punks perhaps with Neo-Nazi leanings.

I had a personal experience with this when in a bar in Frankfurt once. As background I have lightskinned and keep my hair very short or have my head shaved most often. This is not an unusual hairstyle in Germany but it’s influenced by genetics, not politics in my case. Anyway, a couple of guys with strong guttural accents (which is not the style of German spoken in Frankfurt) began to spout some Fascists shit to me with knowing winks and nudges. I couldn’t follow all that they said between their thick accents and my intermediate at best German skills, but I could understand enough to make me almost physically ill. I told them that they had the wrong guy and eventually told them to bugger off. So it still exists but nothing like the antisemitism which one experiences in the Arab countries.

In an interestingly parallel entry in Marilyn Vos Savant’s column today, someone asked if morality has declined here over the years. Her answer (abbreviated) was that she believed that public, formal and political morality has increased/improved - see civil rights laws, anti-discrimination statutes, etc. - but that individual morality has declined. I found myself agreeing with her, and I’m thinking that it might be a useful distinction for the purposes of this discussion. Formally, publicly, morality and decency have been established in Germany in many ways through statute, statement, etc. So, technically, as to the OP’s question, Germany itself is not anti-semitic. But, there’s no question that there are many bigots there, that the neo-nazis have a certain amount of support, that ugly nationalistic impulses tend to emerge from time to time, and that many people there are, in fact, anti-semitic, anti-foreigner, anti- lots of stuff. This is something that the state is most uncomfortable with, and tries to suppress with varying degrees of success. Is Germany anti-semitic? Not officially, but many individuals who live there are.

Before I get into this I feel the need to state that I think that anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance, bigotry and hatred are problems worldwide that still exists in far too many places, forms and fashions. Germany is not spared this problem. The recent upswing in Right Wing Extremism in Europe has also hit Germany, but nowhere near as badly as in France or Holland for instance. However, due to the horrendous mass-murder, oppression and suffering perpetrated by the Nazis, Germany stands apart in awareness and willingness to face this issue. The public debate on the topic is constant. The media is full of information about the Holocaust and the ensuing responsibility Germany has towards the world to safe-guard that it never happens again, anywhere.

Let’s start with some history. Germany was actually one of the least anti-Semitic countries in Europe before 1932. The Jewish population was gaining increasing respect and being integrated into the general culture much faster than in many other places, especially the Eastern European nations. This is one of the facts that make the developments after Hitler’s rise to power even more mind boggling. I think that one has to see this in the light of a general tendency towards anti-Semitism in Europe at the time and that the integration of the Jewish people into the national framework was so recent that it hadn’t ‘stuck’ yet. The fact is that it wasn’t as easy as the little guy initially thought to rally the German people behind the anti-Jewish cause.

His first attempt to persecute the Jews in 1934 was a public relations disaster. The next large scale attempt was the infamous Reichskristallnacht, or Night of Breaking Glass on November 9 1938, by now a gradual erosion of the human rights of the Jewish people and the constant pummeling of the propaganda machinery had had more effect and the SA/SS literally got away with mass murder, after the horrors of that night it just got worse.

For Herr Mustachio it wasn’t enough though, Hitler was furious that the masses had not actively turned out in the streets to murder Jews and felt betrayed by the German people and from 38 on he left the persecution of the Jews in the hands of the SS, the Gestapo and the inner party circle. He just didn’t trust the German people to “be ready for their great cause,” as he put it. All that being said, there is no excuse, the German electorate at the time bear responsibility, they put him in power, they supported the anti-Semitic agenda and many took active part in the persecution of Jews. Those who didn’t were largely looking the other way and hence condoned the atrocities by silent cooperation.

Today Germany is probably one of the least anti-Semitic nations in the West, at least in all obvious ways. The Germans are tremendously aware of what happened during the Nazi years. The feeling of guilt and responsibility is so high that even the postwar generations assume responsibility. In fact I am often shocked at how serious it is taken.

When I moved down here a few years ago I was having a few beers with a mixed group of Americans, Germans and Brits, one of the Americans cracked an extremely innocent Jewish joke to one of the other Americans who happened to be Jewish. We all laughed, except the two German guys who were ashen faced, and one of them just blurted out; “Hey that’s not funny, we’re in Germany you know,” It didn’t help that the Jewish guy, subject of the joke and all said that he didn’t mind and even appreciated the joke – the Germans were simply too mortified to even fathom how one could make such a joke.

Once you get under the skin of more and more Germans (that’s hard BTW) you realize that this not just posing – its dead serious. Still anti-Semitism exists and the 1990s saw the resurgence of extreme Nationalism in Europe, in Germany this resurgence was not as bad as in for instance France, the UK, Scandinavia, Belgium and Holland.

Hate crimes are a fair indicator of how wide spread active anti-Semitism is. The following is reported hate crimes against Jews in the year 2000, that I compiled from The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University.


**Hate Crimes Against Jews 2000**
Nation       #crimes   per 1000 inh.
USA          1,606*       0.006
Germany      1,378**      0.016
France         146***     0.002
The UK         405****    0.006

[ol][sub]
*877 cases of harassment and assault 729 cases of vandalism
**out of which 5 were violent, the rest were threats, vandalism, holocaust denial and anti-Semitic rallying
***only includes violent crimes and large scale vandalism
****2 attempted murder, 51 physical assault, 73 vandalism, 196 abusive behavior[/sub][/ol]
Note that the higher number of crimes registered in Germany is in part influenced by the much stricter laws against anti-Semitism. Less reliable figures for France that include lesser accounts of vandalism and threats give estimates in the vicinity of 1,000. Anti-Semitic hate crimes saw a sharp increase in Europe in 2000 due to a large number of incidents related to the launch of the Intifada in Israel. In Germany the increase was 70% to previous year and the total increase was attributed to extreme Islamist groups. The UK and France saw 50% increases also largely due to the Intifada. The increase in the US was 4% to previous year.

As the statistics show, active violent anti-Semitism is far lower in Germany than in the rest of the Western world. Statistics for smaller countries, not here listed shows the same relation.

Absolute nonsense of course. I think the 15% figure could be from the widely reported approx. 15% vote that DVU (Deutsche Volksunion) an extreme rightwing party garnered in local elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg in the last two elections. It’s nasty, but a) it is nowhere near the Bundestag (parliament) and b) not quite neo-Nazi.

The German Bundestag is divided as follows:


**Seats per Party in the German Bundestag**
Party        Seats  Translated name (place on spectrum)
SPD           285   Social Democrats (Liberal)
CDU           198   Christian Democrats (Conservative)
CSU            47   Christian Coalition (Conservative)
B90/GRÜNE      47   Green Party (Ecological Left)
FDP            43   Democratic Peoples Party (Centrist)
PDS            37   Socialists (Liberal Left)
Independent     1

Nary a neo-Nazi in that list I can tell you. All very mainstream and mostly pretty leftist. The CSU are the closest we have to the Republicans, but even they are far fiscally left of the GOP. The leader of the FDP recently made an absolute ass out of himself by making comments about Israel that came across as vaguely anti-Semitic in a public forum. The incident has spurred a huge debate about political correctness and made him a persona non grata amongst any politicians with the remotest survival instinct.

As I said it’s illegal to do that here. Jean-Marie le Pen, the French extreme right leader was recently prosecuted here in Bavaria for having trivialized the holocaust in a public speech in Munich and given a hefty fine. Known Holocaust deniers are denied entry into the country. Studying the Holocaust is an obligatory part of grammar and high school curriculum. Several of the Concentration Camps have been preserved as monuments of reminder. I would say that there are proably fewer denier of the Holocaust in Germany than anywhere else in the world, even including Israel (considering portions of the population that aren’t exactly lovers of the Jewish creed).

I can only conclude that there is no substance to what the family of the OP believes and I certainly hope that the OP has some use for the information that I have compiled, but having had these discussion myself a million times and more, I might caution the OP that sometimes these kinds of beliefs are so deeply rooted that there is no arguing. In any case I wish the OP all the best of luck in arguing the point.

Sparc

Anti-Semitism isn’t really a problem anymore in Germany. Kids are taught from very early ages what happened in the thirties and fourties of the last century. I remember not a single year in school that this topic wasn’t brought up in history classes or political education.

Nationalism and patriotism have also largely disappeared here. A German saying he’s proud to be German is almost associated with him being neo-nazi (although that may not be the case). However, racist and anti-semitic groups exist in Germany, but fortunately they are a minority. And racism as a whole is more common than anti-semitism. If some ignorant neo-nazi feels like blaming someone for his problems with getting a job or having a good education than it will rather be foreigners in general instead of Jews (which doesn’t make it less harmful of course).

In all fairness I should add that the statistics in my previous post should be read with the knowledge that Germany has a fairly small Jewish community. If you take the violent crimes for the US, the UK and Germany it pans out as follows as violent hate crimes per 1000 Jewish inhabitants:


The US    0.15
The UK    0.19
Germany   0.05

Note that the US figures do not distinguish between assault and harassment, which means that it is substantially lower than here given and probably closer to the German figure.

Sparc

Last piece of data before I go to get my well deserved forenoon’s sleep.

Since Nazism is a crime in Germany, intelligence is kept over all known neo-Nazis. This is a unique situation in as much as that it gives us an indicator of how many the organized neo-Nazis are (no other nation has such figures available to the public). There is of course a large discrepancy in these figures. Nevertheless the estimate is that Germany has about 35,000 active neo-Nazis, in percentage of population this is 0.04%.

The only figure that I have to compare that with is the 42,000 strong membership of the Le Pen’s Front Nationale in France before they split in two. That would be 0.07% of the French population, and then we are only talking of the card-carrying members of the FN.

You can find more data like that in the depths of the Tel Aviv University site that I previously linked to.

Sparc

Sparc my friend, my far side of the big puddle perspective perceives the neo-nazis in Germany as more xenophobic than purely anti-semitic. Jews constitute barely over one tenth of one percent of the population (and it depends who you ask as nobody seems completely sure about who they’ll count as a Jew). That’s based on a figure of 92,000 Jews in a population of 82 million as of 2000. There are currently a bit over 2 million Turks living in Germany, and they seem to loom large on the neo-nazis’ radar.

I’m going to bed soon, too.

The problem with this is that because membership of these groups or spouting Neo-Nazi rubbish is forbidden, I am not sure how meaningful these numbers are. All this data shows is how many people are so extreme that they are happy to sign up to an outlawed group - it doesn’t give a real indication of how many people’s views tend towards this end of the spectrum.

I don’t know where any other data is, though. All I know is what I experience - there doesn’t seem to be much anti-Semitism about. It’s been pretty much drummed in to everyone that such views belong to a Germany that no-one wants to see again.

Of course, a lot more than 0,07 % voted for Le Pen…

There’s anti-semitism everywhere. I think our German neighbours are the least jew haters of Europe.

Sparc

?

Where did you get that wisdom? Where are the Dutch on your list? Did you perhaps confuse Belgium with Holland?

Say anything about the Dutch. We’re not anti-semitic. :mad:

There is an interesting article on the Historikerstreit (‘Historians’ Dispute’) of the 1980s, although not without a bias of its own in interpreting the events. This was a debate played out through the German media between historians trying to decide whether Germany could close the chapter on the Holocaust rather than it being used (to paraphrase one of the parties) as a ‘moral cudgel’ against modern-day Germany. The storm over it is an interesting indicator that the question of anti-semitism and Germany’s relationship with the Jewish remains highly sensitive.

I think I should have included some caveats with that data. First of all it’s not just membership. It an estimate based on the intelligence gathered around these groups and includes anyone that is known to have affiliation, membership or not. It also includes all members in the legal Nationalist extreme rightwing parties.

More importantly, I do not think that this figure is equal to the number of people that actually harbor rightwing sympathies or are anti-Semites. The figure is only interesting if you put it in relation to for instance membership in FN in France. Hence it is more of an indicator of how big the rightwing problem is. Magically enough these figures do transport on to electoral results as well. As sirjamesp pointed out, the FN (only one of many rightwing parties in France) has 0.07% members, but they received over 15% of the vote in the recent Presidential elections in France, while in Germany overall the extreme rightwing remains well below the 4% barrier for parliament entry save in two state parliaments, Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt.

Didn’t mean to imply you were käse, I was speaking of rightwing extremism – Lijst Pim Fortuyn for instance. As a matter of fact anti-Semite hate crimes are very, very low in Holland, however anti-Muslim hate crimes have been an increasing problem lately.

I think that it is important to acknowledge what Ringo notes here and several other members have brought up. The problem with racism in Europe is serious, just like in America, but it does not primarily direct itself towards Jews these days. The problems with xenophobia (nationality based discrimination) and anti-Muslimism are far more rampant across the continent than anti-Semitism. Germany has not been spared from these problem, although once again is not as bad as some of her sister states. In the East we still see widespread racism against the Roma, in particular in the Czech Republic. Let’s also remember that everywhere in the West, these problems go beyond the White Supremacist groups. The range includes the type of xenophobia voiced by the OP’s family, which is obviously based on past conflicts within the West, anti-immigrant sentiments, religious bigotry and classical race bigotry.

Sparc

I have forwarded this thread off to my father.

Thank you guys for the responses, and special props to Sparc; no doubt it took you some time to put together your posts and I certainly appreciate it.

I was actually pretty concerned about the truth when I posted this. Afterall, I really didn’t know. I had a gut feeling, but what if I was wrong? Germany is a country I look forward to visiting someday, particulary because of its rich musical tradition (me being a musician and student of musicology).

Anyway, don’t let my response stop the discussion if there is more to say on the subject. I hope to use this thread as a reference for similar conversations in the future.