Ghosts of an unforgotten slaughter
‘The dead are a mighty force,” said Professor Doctor Gernot Wolfram, “they are still infecting us.”
It was a Sunday morning in the Moabit neighbourhood of central Berlin, a short walk from the prison and the Criminal Court, and Wolfram – a cultural studies academic, former journalist and long-time consultant to the European Commission – was quoting Sigmund Freud.
As I would later find out, the line, taken from Freud’s final work, Moses and Monotheism (1939), was mostly about the author’s ambivalent relationship with his own Jewishness. Wolfram, however, was using it as an introduction to the private seminar he was hosting on German media.
The “Beutelsbach Consensus” of 1976, he explained, was the baseline context that we – a group of eight investigative journalists from across sub-Saharan Africa – would need to assimilate and apply. Basically, said Wolfram, it had been set up to ensure that public education in post-war Germany remained open and democratic. For the country’s media, he added, this spilled over into an unspoken prohibition on indoctrination and the need for clear and transparent signposting on all subjects regarded as “controversial”.
For us Africans, of course, whose public-sphere challenges tended to present in the form of ruling party apparatchiks who either wanted us pacified or removed, it all seemed a little abstract. Still, we had no problem intuiting the identity of “the dead” to whom Wolfram – via a misappropriation of Freud – was referring.
They were the victims of the Holocaust; the six million Jews who had been slaughtered by the Nazis in the most notorious genocide of the 20th century.
This abominable event, we already knew, had been exacting a heavy psychic price on German society for almost eight decades now, and so the Beutelsbach Consensus, as we were currently learning, was a major and ongoing attempt to balance the moral books. But what we couldn’t know, as outsiders, was the extent of the debt.
“If you look at the political scandals in Germany over the last 30 years,” said Wolfram, “more than half have to do with something that was said about the Holocaust.”
Presumably, such information was meant to provide us with a working knowledge of the playing field as we sought to establish investigative partnerships with the German media houses we would soon be visiting. Below the surface, however, there was a lot more going on. Just the week before, on 2 September 2024, the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) had made history by taking the vote in the eastern German state of Thuringia; the first time an overtly fascist party had won an election in the country since the era of World War 2.
“The AfD have been so successful because they have established in the background their own media system,” Wolfram explained, before pointing out that the party, which “uses the language of the Third Reich”, had risen to prominence on the anti-immigrant – and essentially anti-Muslim – ticket.
From there it was a short and inevitable jump into a series of impossible contradictions that were threatening to tear modern Germany apart, and it all seemed to hinge on what had occurred in the Middle East since 7 October 2023. Fortuitously (or not), unlike my colleagues from Africa, the global fallout from the Hamas attack of 7 October was exactly where my own interests lay – and, primarily, was the reason that I had found myself on this study tour in the first place.
My intense fascination with the unfolding subject had been awakened back in July 2024, when I had been invited to a guests-only screening of The Return, a feature-length documentary six years in the making by the Jewish-South African filmmakers Heidi Grunebaum and Mark Kaplan.
Kaplan’s personal invitation to the screening, coming as it did from a man who had been held in solitary confinement by the South African apartheid state – and whose previous films had won a slew of international awards, including an Emmy – had elicited an immediate “yes”, not least because he had reached out on the basis of an intimate interview I had recently sat for regarding the consequences of my journalism on Israel’s actions in Gaza (apparently, according to my brethren, I had fallen victim to self-hate).
“I think it will really speak to you as it’s a film that moves between SA and Germany and from there to Israel/Palestine,” Kaplan’s message to me had read. “It’s about many interwoven elements, but essentially about the return of fascism.”
The film had me hooked from the start. Three minutes in, it showed Grunebaum travelling via train through Germany to the birthplace of her grandmother, Emmy Oppenheimer Grunebaum, who had been “stripped of her citizenship”, deemed “not human, a virus, a louse”, and forced to flee into exile.
In the same sequence (which is what had me hooked), it was already clear that The Return was not going to follow the standard trope of the Holocaust documentary – in other words, it was not going to repeat the narrative, espoused in schools throughout Israel and across the Jewish diaspora, that portrayed the Holocaust as anomalous, exceptional, a one-off.
“In the devastating trail of her flight,” Grunebaum’s voice intoned, as the scene cut to yet another train, “I see now reflections of similar murderous forces that drove her out, and killed those who stayed behind. Going forth and back between South Africa and Germany, I’m struck by how the landscape only appears to be unscarred. How the past is not past, but oozes and seeps into the present, bearing down on the vanishing future.”
More than anything, as I went through my notebooks, this sounded like Wolfram’s well-placed misquote of Freud. Clearly, I was in the right place at the right time. If I was lucky, and if the media bosses answered my questions, I would learn something valuable about this emerging old-new world.
Shilling for the Jewish state
The Israeli flag on a giant pole at the entrance to the headquarters of the Axel Springer media corporation in the former newspaper district of downtown Berlin was something to behold. Just off the corner of Jerusalemer Strasse, about halfway down the block of the eponymous Axel Springer Strasse, it flew at least 15m up in the autumn air, alongside a flag of Ukraine and another flag bearing the brand of Die Welt, the corporation’s flagship daily.
Long considered a “newspaper of record” in Germany, Die Welt had been founded by the British occupying forces in April of 1946, a so-called bastion of “quality” modelled on The Times of London. With a current cross-media audience of almost 20 million, and a marketing pitch for advertisers that employed the questionable modifier “progressive”, I was very eager to see how the editors would handle my questions.
Mostly, to reiterate, I was interested in how Die Welt was dealing with the local return of fascism, as well as the policies – since Germany and Italy were considered the de facto birthplaces of the ideology – that the paper had put in place to cover its strange reverberations across the democratic world.
Of course for me, as a formerly indoctrinated Jew, the “strangeness” of the global resurgence was nowhere near as apparent as it was in Israel, a country whose democratic values were being obsessively lauded by an increasingly demagogic leadership, even though the homegrown experts had been warning of the nascent budding of fascist phenomena since at least 2019.
Because ominously, or so it appeared, by mid-2024 there was no longer anything nascent about it – on 31 May 2024, for instance, the influential American-Jewish magazine Forward had published a piece on the quashing of political dissent at Israel’s universities, under the unambiguous title, “We’re Israelis who study fascism. This week, our country took a terrifying step toward the abyss”; less than a month later, a different pair of Israeli academics would publish a piece in Ha’aretz titled “Israel Is on the Verge of Fascism. Will It Cross the Threshold?”
And significantly, while almost all of these studies had drawn the darkly ironic comparison to Nazi-era Germany, it was perhaps the opening sentence of the latter analysis that properly set the scene.
“The sound of thugs’ shoes in the alleys of the Old City on Jerusalem Day last week recalled the sound of the [Sturmabteilung] marches and the 1920s and 30s in Germany,” wrote David Ohana and Oded Heilbronner.
What in the name of hell, then – because for the Palestinians on Jerusalem Day of 2024, just like for the Jews in the path of the stormtroopers almost a century before, “hell” is precisely what it was – was happening?
Unfortunately, there was nobody at Die Welt who could help me out with this confounding hall of mirrors. While we were promised the attention of at least one senior decision-maker, what we got instead was the head of the picture desk and a junior member of the investigations team. And the picture desk boss, Stefan Runne, would only offer the following in response to my question about his “framing” of the war in the Middle East:
“It’s difficult to use pictures from the Gaza Strip, because you don’t know if people are called together or if they are really together.”
Clearly, Runne was implying – without any evidence – that many of the images of the collective suffering in Gaza were being wilfully staged. Of course, while this was hardly surprising from a media group that flew the Israeli flag at its corporate headquarters, its effects were far from innocent. As Europe’s largest publisher, Axel Springer’s framing had been influencing the minds of tens of millions of readers; not just in Germany, where Die Welt had recently run an editorial under the headline “God bless the IDF”, but in the US too, where the group’s CEO had written in the Springer-owned Politico that the pro-Palestine chant “from the river to the sea” was akin to calling for the genocide of all Jews.
Then there were the really serious issues. Back in February 2024, the US-based investigative outfit The Intercept had published an exposé that revealed how the Springer corporation, through its Israel-based classified advertising subsidiary Yad2, had been profiting off the listing of homes for Jews in the illegally occupied West Bank.
Also, exactly four days before our visit, on 6 September 2024, Die Welt’s sister publication Bild – Germany’s most widely read daily newspaper – had published an “exclusive report” that purported to reveal the contents of a secret document from the laptop of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. The problem, as The Times of Israel had disclosed on 8 September, was that the Israeli military had dismissed the document as a fake.
And this, it turned out, wasn’t just your garden-variety fake – it was an elaborate hoax, as suggested by the IDF itself, that had been intentionally leaked to misinform the public that Sinwar had never been interested in either a hostage deal or a ceasefire.
According to a report that would be published in the hard-hitting Israeli investigate outlet +972 Magazine on 11 September – the day after our visit to Axel Springer – Bild had likely been selected alongside the Jewish Chronicle, the UK’s oldest Jewish publication, for a clandestine influence campaign that had emanated from the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Here, the suggestion was that the Israeli head of state had intended to defang the mass protests for a hostage deal that had erupted across his country in early September; protests, as he clearly knew, that were calling for an end to the war.
It was, by any account, a lot to take in – but particularly, and perhaps most importantly, through the lens of fascism’s rise. Still, even though Bild had removed the offending article from its website, and even if nobody at Axel Springer seemed inclined to answer my questions, the coming days and weeks were destined to deliver a lot more context.
Germany’s ‘bad Jew’ problem
The “Staatsräson” of the Federal Republic of Germany – literally, its reason for existence – was a concept that got repeated at almost every organisation we visited. It was Professor Wolfram who had first brought it up, and it would be mentioned with reverence and respect by at least half a dozen local journalists. But, for me at least, it was from within the framework of the German office of Jewish Voice for Peace – which, in March of 2024, had its account purposely frozen by a state-owned bank – that the Staatsräson was most instructive.
In a nutshell, the reason for the existence of Germany, as conveyed by former chancellor Angela Merkel to the Israeli parliament in 2008, had been deemed “Israel’s security”. It was a decree that brooked no exceptions, and so it would be solemnly cited by Olaf Scholz, the current chancellor, more than once after the 7 October assault. And yet, in what was arguably the most memorable scene of The Return, Iris Hefets, an Israeli living in Germany and a board member of Jewish Voice for Peace, had summed up the inherent dilemma in a simple question to a police officer.
“Is this the solidarity of Germany with the Jews?” she had asked, while a crowd of silent onlookers were recording her on their phones, about a minute before the officer enforced her arrest.
Hefets, as I would discover, had made another media appearance at around the same time – May 2024 – in Anadolu Ajansi, the official news agency of Turkey. “This [police crackdown] is something that is not new,” she had said, “so it’s back to the Nazi roots.”
It was telling, or so I thought, that Hefets had chosen to express her most incendiary pro-Palestinian views in Anadolu Ajansi; as she must have been aware, the Turkish community of Germany had suffered sustained racial abuse since the 1960s, when hundreds of thousands had arrived to rebuild the country’s infrastructure in the wake of the Nazis’ catastrophic mess.
More telling, though, was that by 2024, with the AfD in the ascendant and the Turks of Germany at a population count of 1.3 million, it was this community that would draw the connection between the resurgence of fascism and an alarming uptick in the generalised racist heat.
Still, as for the country’s Jews, the situation was now a little more complex. Because, while it was no secret – and even less of a surprise – that the AfD had always been crammed with anti-Semites, when it came to Israel the party did not deviate from the Staatsräson line.
In fact, in a speech shortly following 7 October, the AfD’s honorary chairperson, Alexander Gauland, had offered the very same sentiment that Netanyahu himself, nine months later, would offer to the US Congress.
“The attack was not only aimed at the Jewish state, it was also aimed at us,” said Gauland. “Israel is the West in an environment that rejects and fights the West. When we stand with Israel, we are also defending our way of life.”
Perhaps, then, it had been the classic fascist shibboleth of a “clash of civilisations” that had encouraged a confused group of German Jews to join the AfD. Or perhaps, back in 2017, it had been the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president, with his implicit normalisation of anti-immigrant beliefs.
Either way, my list of questions was growing. And at Deutsche Welle, Germany’s state-owned international broadcaster in the tradition of the UK’s BBC, I was hoping for some answers.
“Especially as Germans, we cannot tolerate a certain kind of language when it comes to Israel,” explained Thomas Mösch, the broadcaster’s head of programming for Africa, from across the boardroom table in Berlin. “We have our limits.”
Mösch, to my amazement, was responding to an issue that had been brought up by one of my South African colleagues, regarding a scandal that Deutsche Welle had endured back in 2021. Although I was oblivious, it turned out that in December of that year the broadcaster had fired five Arab journalists over accusations of anti-Semitism. The German public, it appeared, had accepted the dismissals at face value. But ironically, six months later, it was Israel’s +972 Magazine that would reveal the more troubling truth.
In their deeply reported investigation, +972 would conclude that Deutsche Welle had not only been in likely breach of various labour laws, but that the broadcaster’s own investigation may have been “politically motivated and focused on scapegoating Arab and especially Palestinian journalists”.
Small wonder, I later reflected, that the discussion seemed to suck the air out of the room. As it was, I had been dwelling on the contents of a different discussion, which had been initiated by a question from a senior Deutsche Welle staffer back to us.
The man who asked it had included the qualifier that he was speaking in his “personal capacity”, and so it would be bad form to mention his name. From the expression on his face, though, as well as the evidence of his advancing years, it was obvious that it cut to the core of his identity as a German.
“Tell me,” he said, “do you really believe that Israel is guilty of genocide? Because I can’t see how the civilian casualties aren’t just a normal result of war. Do you really think that South Africa has a case at the international court?”
My colleagues looked to me, and so I offered a summarised version of how life at a Jewish day school – plus a short stint in the Israeli army – had once blinded me to the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause. It was our Tanzanian colleague, however, who properly brought the point home.
“All of us here support and appreciate South Africa,” he said, speaking for himself as well as the Mozambican, the Zimbabwean, the Kenyan and the Ugandan. “We all know what it’s like to be prisoners in our own land.”
A species out of luck
That Friday in September was the 13th, which, it occurred to me, may have explained why everything was popping. Just that morning, a Deutsche Welle article had appeared on my X timeline under the header, “When Germany targets Jewish artists as anti-Semitic”. The artist, it transpired, was not only Jewish but South African; her name was Candice Breitz, and in November of 2023 an exhibition of hers had been cancelled by a prestigious German museum – for, first, her support of the banned organisation Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS); and, second, her alleged failure to condemn the Hamas attack of 7 October.
Deutsche Welle, to its eternal and surprising credit, had done a thorough investigation, which had finally been published on 12 September 2024, the day after our visit to their newsroom. Breitz, according to the report, had posted the following to her Instagram account before the museum’s decision had been made: “It is possible to fully condemn Hamas (as I do, unequivocally), while nevertheless supporting the broader Palestinian struggle for freedom from oppression, discrimination and occupation.”
Near the bottom of the piece, Breitz had also been quoted on the “troubling dynamic in Germany” whereby a distinction had been created between “good Jews” and “bad Jews” in order to stifle dissent.
Precisely, I was still thinking, as I lingered on the steps of the Bundespressekonferenz hall – when, suddenly, I was called over by my colleagues to shake the hand of Oliver Bradley, whose business card told me that he worked for the all-powerful European Jewish Association, and specifically for its offshoot the Europe Israel Press Association, as media adviser to Germany and Italy.
These two countries, of course, happened to be exactly where the ideology of fascism had been born – but, as a non-believing journalist, I was required for the moment to ignore that odd synchronicity. Instead, I waited to see what the interaction would bring. Clearly, Bradley had been informed that I was a journalist from South Africa.
“Your government is doing this to divert attention from its own problems,” he said, with a familiar and knowing grin.
Had Bradley also been informed that I was Jewish? While I had no way of knowing, my answer was what it was.
“That may be true,” I said, “but it’s good that they’re doing it anyway.”
Bradley’s face darkened; obviously, he did not agree. “They don’t understand international law,” he replied, before holding my gaze and adding, “Very few people do.”
We were, it appeared, at a stand-off. “Anyway,” he concluded upon leaving, “we won’t know for at least 10 years.”
And there, it seemed to me, was his mistake. If South Africa categorically had no case for an Israeli genocide in Gaza, why would we need to wait 10 years to find out? I was mulling this over on the way to the door, when I remembered the book that Kaplan, the director of The Return, had recommended to me back in August. Titled Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, it had garnered universal and unconditional acclaim for its portrayal of ordinary Germans’ wilful repression of Nazi atrocities in the years immediately following the war.
“They saw themselves as the victims,” Harald Jähner, the book’s author, had written of these surviving Germans, “and thus had the dubious good fortune of not having to think about the real ones.”
But sadly, as poignant and applicable as this point remained, it would also soon dawn on me that it might be too easy to dismiss all “good Jews” as false victims. Despite what I had written in May – a piece on Jewish victimhood that had cost me many friends and family members – the world of 2024 was not the world of 1945. Mainly because now, I knew, the poison was everywhere.
After all, at the other media houses we had visited, the overlaps between the Western mainstream and the resurgence of fascism had seemed much more subtle, and therefore much harder to spot.
At NDR, for instance, a broadcaster that prided itself on its crack investigative work, we had learnt from just one of their stories – based on more than 40,000 internal chat messages between AfD MPs – that Germany’s rising fascists were suffering from a “desolate self-image”. And what was this if not a diagnosis of the malaise of countless Western citizens, as brought on (at least in part) by the failure of their leaders to stop Israeli aggression?
At Der Spiegel, the Hamburg-based weekly with a longstanding reputation as one of the most trustworthy titles in Europe, we had learnt that the brand had been fighting an ongoing battle for its credibility since the early years of the big-stadium campaigns of Trump. And what was this if not a diagnosis of the malaise of all credible Western media outlets, as would be so well articulated in late September by Branko Brkic, Daily Maverick’s own founder and editor-in-chief?
In this context, or so it appeared to me after I had returned home, it was no wonder that the West was cheering on Israel as it pushed its war into a new front with Lebanon.
Was it completely inadmissible, I would think to myself during those exceedingly strange days, that there existed an invisible thread between the wild applause on social media for Israel’s exploding pagers and the release of statistical analysis by The Economist – within the same 24-hour news cycle – that the US was becoming “less woke”? Was it so crazy to draw a link between the insistence of Berlin’s mayor that Israel was the victim and the Netanyahu regime’s closure, two days later, of Al Jazeera’s offices in the occupied West Bank?
The anti-woke, no doubt, echoing Netanyahu, would argue that any measure was justifiable in the face of the Tehran-backed plot to conquer the civilised world. Because what the anti-woke would not want to hear – especially from the likes of +972 Magazine – was that perhaps Tehran dreamt no such dreams.
And so, I wondered, had the anti-woke been co-opted by fascism? But then, it occurred to me, this was not the final question – the final question, as always, was about the truth: who was telling it, who was suppressing it, who stood to lose, who stood to gain.
Journalism, in other words. The boring old way it used to be done. DM
Disclaimer: A large proportion of the reporting for this piece was made possible by a study tour to Germany for African investigative journalists, sponsored by the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung. The organisation, as per Daily Maverick standard practice, had no say over its writing or editing.