The German Campaign against Cultural Freedom: Documenta 15 in Context

The German Context The cloud of antisemitism deliberately hung over Documenta 15 was the culmination of serial campaigns that reflect a longterm tendency.The same debate about alleged antisemitism in Germany's intellectual and cultural sectors has been going on for over a decade.In 2012, for example, the philosopher Judith Butler was accused of supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement when the city of Frankfurt awarded her the prestigious Adorno Prize. 4 The constellation of actors arrayed against Butler repeated the pattern discernible three years before when a Federal Cross of Merit was bestowed on the Israeli-German lawyer Felicia Langer.For her criticism of the Israeli occupation and security politics, American-Jewish, German-Jewish, and Israeli organizations, prominent German-Jewish figures, along with non-Jewish German politicians and journalists, accused her of antisemitism and supporting terrorism.5 Although the context differed, this constellation and denunciatory rhetoric echoed the largely forgotten outcry in West Germany against Hannah Arendt for writing Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963.6 For their part, Jewish organizations and some Jewish commentators maintain that German politicians and organizations invite or bestow honors on "fringe" anti-Israel Jewish people who express the antisemitism that Germans want to hear.7 That assertion is impossible to prove.Certain, though, is that accomplished Jewish women are often such "fringe" targets, as the cases of the philosopher Susan Neiman (director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam), the writer Eva Menasse, and the publicist Emily Dische-Becker in 2021 and 2022 indicate.The first two were attacked in major German newspapers for defending the right to criticize Israeli policies as legitimate (i.e., non-antisemitic) political speech, while Dische-Becker was denounced for her role in advising Documenta 15 about antisemitism accusations.With good reason and some irony, Neiman pointed out that, while Arendt and Albert Einstein now enjoy saintlike status in Germany, they would be canceled if their critical views about Israel were known.8 The campaigns against Langer and Butler failed, in part because prominent German-Jewish intellectuals defended, in the name of Jewish pluralism, their right to speak.9 But virtually identical campaigns have ruined many careers since then.Throughout 2021 and 2022, Germans of Arab and African descent were dismissed from public employment or disinvited from conferences and cultural meetings because of their Palestine solidarity and "BDS proximity" (Nähe), a new term reminiscent of the "fellow traveler" designation used in the infamous anticommunist crusades of the 1950s.10 Foreigners, if invited to Germany, were not immune either.Prominent writers had their German literary prizes revoked when it was discovered that they had signed a BDS declaration.11 No less than a former International Criminal Court justice was also not immune: in September 2022, the Berlin mayor