Germany’s unprecedented crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech

“Take Away Refugee Girl Reem’s German Passport” reads the headline of an article in Germany’s most widely-read news publication, the tabloid magazine Bild. As a 14-year-old at the height of Germany’s so-called “refugee crisis,” speaking at a televised town hall in 2015 with then-Chancellor Angela Merkel, Reem Sahwil’s perfect German and tearful wish to remain in the country touched the hearts of many Germans, including in the media.

This sympathy, however, was conditioned on her silence. Despite gaining German citizenship this year, Sahwil now faces calls from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Germany’s largest political party, and the governing Free Democrats for her to be denaturalized and deported from the country.

Her alleged office: an Instagram post containing the words “from the river to the sea.”

Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, virtually every major institution in Germany has been engaged in a wave of repression of ethnic minority communities — the scale and intensity of which is unprecedented in Germany’s postwar history. The targets are Palestinians, other people of color and Jewish anti-Zionists alike.

A list of the most high-profile incidents of censorship since Oct. 7 demonstrates the intensity of the pressure media and cultural institutions feel to silence marginalized voices, some of which were previously lauded as heralds of a diverse, open literary and art scene.

The Frankfurt Book Fair canceled an award ceremony honoring Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli; the city of Bochum rescinded its Peter Weiss Prize from Berlin-based British-Ghanaian writer Sharon Dodua Otoo; the German Biennale for Contemporary Photography canceled their 2024 tour after firing curator and celebrated Bangladeshi photojournalist Shahidul Alam; and the Saarland Museum canceled a 2024 exhibition featuring Berlin-based Jewish South African artist Candice Breitz.

Most recently, the Bremen state senate and the Green Party–affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation reached a collective decision to withdraw this year’s Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought from Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, who is Jewish.

Demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians have been met with police violence. Numerous credible reports describe police racially profiling and arresting even nonparticipants off the street. Berlin blocked Youth Against Racism, a demonstration to mourn the children killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, as well as actions organized by Jewish and Israeli activists. According to police, a rally organized by the progressive group Jewish Voice could not go ahead because it was “explicitly open to participants of Palestinian origin.”

The CDU is now pushing a resolution to make support for Israel a condition of German citizenship, threatening all dual nationals with the same punishment they wish for Reem Sahwil

After Berlin banned Palestinian flags, colors and keffiyehs in schools, a teacher was caught on video assaulting a student holding a flag. Two students were suspended, while the teacher has yet to face consequences.

In the days following October 7, comparisons to 9/11 and the resulting American political climate were made with varying degrees of justification on all sides. But such comparisons seem to have the most merit in Germany, where the legal, political and cultural repression of anyone considered even a mild advocate of Palestinian rights is without precedent.

Cultural institutions in the self-styled “land of thinkers and poets” are dangerously out of touch, not just with the broader lessons of Germany’s imperialist legacy, but also with the poets and thinkers of the rest of the world.

German-Israeli art historian and archaeologist Katharina Galor is coauthor of the 2020 book “The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians.” She says that the codification of support for Israel as Germany’s Staatsräson or raison d’état means Germany’s Palestinian diaspora — the largest in Europe — “understand the history and the context of violence” but “cannot speak because it has not only social consequences. It can have consequences for their lives and survival, including job losses.”

The Berlin-based Jewish writer Deborah Feldman laments that, since moving to Germany, she hasn’t been able to discuss Israel-Palestine with anyone but Israelis and Palestinians themselves: “Germans tend to cut off any attempt at constructive conversation with the much-favoured phrase that topic is much too complicated.”

In a debate with German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck on the popular talk show “Markus Lanz,” Feldman recounts that, “At some point, I told him, ‘You are going to have to decide between Israel and Jews.’ Because those things are not interchangeable, and sometimes even contradictory, as many aspects of Jewish life are threatened by unconditional loyalty to a state that only sees some Jews as worthy of protection.” Later in the episode, the host admitted his producers had been unable to find Palestinian guests willing to appear on the program.

As genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses argued in a 2021 essay, contemporary German national identity has been constructed as “a redemptive story in which the sacrifice of Jews in the Holocaust by Nazis is the premise for the Federal Republic’s legitimacy. That is why the Holocaust is more than an important historical event. It is a sacred trauma that cannot be contaminated by profane ones — meaning non-Jewish victims and other genocides — that would vitiate its sacrificial function.”

Only in recent years, particularly since the antiracist uprising of 2020 in the United States, have Germans begun to reckon with their own colonial legacy, but the continuity between Nazi rule and German colonialism under Kaiser Wilhelm II is well documented.

The German Empire’s own settler-colonial policy of extermination in what is now Namibia is estimated to have killed nearly 100,000 people between 1904 and 1908, wiping out some 80 percent of the Herero and 50 percent of the Nama populations — while pioneering the death camps and gruesome medical experimentation that would become hallmarks of the Holocaust.

But unlike in the U.S., the notion that German society might be deeply racist, not at its fringes but at its core, is scarcely conceivable. Karamba Diaby, the first black member of the Bundestag, criticized in 2020 German society’s tendency to downplay deeply rooted white supremacy as race-neutral xenophobia. He received a slew of death threats and gunmen shot up his district office in Halle.

It is no longer possible today — if it ever was — to accurately analyze postwar German culture and politics without examining the role of Palestinian identity in Germany’s own national consciousness. The white Christian mainstream of German society will have to learn another lesson from the past, one which is far less easily overcome: that they no longer have the right to tell other people what to think.

Kumars Salehi is visiting professor of German at Oklahoma State University and cohost of the podcast "Delete Your Account."