Helplessness, headless activism
and well-known rituals were the pillars on which the discussion in
Summer 2000 stood after the bombings, murdering and
cases of arson against ethnic minorities and even Jews in Germany.
There was no difference between
the past ten years and the last summer in the behavior of racists and
neo-Nazis – and the many bystanders acting against those minorities. The
community of mankind is living 55 years after the Second World War and the
end of the Shoah, but the history of Germany in connection to the
“Third Reich” does not allow looking at these
clashes against Jews and others in the same manner one does in France or
Great Britain. In July 2000, a terrorist bombing
in a bus station in Duesseldorf was like the wake-up call for many people.
The “target” was a group of mostly Jewish
immigrants from the former Soviet Union, waiting for the bus following
language lessons. Then there was a wave of other bombings, cases of arson,
threatening foreigners and asylum-seekers, Jews, homosexuals and homeless
people. The public reactions on the rising anti-Semitism were fluctuating
between worries about the image of Germany and wishful thinking that there
is no more anti-Semitism than in other countries. Those Jews –
representatives, journalists, immigrants – who said in public that there
is now once again a doubt whether it was right for Jews to start a new
life in Germany after 1945, faced attempts to
calm them down. One can state that Jews in Germany are somehow, as it
were, by their existence there, legitimizing for Germany that there is a
safe democratic basis to society.
This article questions the tension
between staying in and leaving Germany, the hopes and the disappointments
with which the Jews in Germany had to live in the Year 2000 – after a
period of feeling securely established.