Ariel Center for
Policy Research

A JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND THE ARTS

 

NATIV   ■   Volume Fifteen   ■   Number 1 (84)  ■  January 2002   ■  Ariel Center for Policy Research

 

SYNOPSIS

 


German Anti-Semitism in the Year 2000

Susanne Urban-Fahr

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. 

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