Journalist Michel Friedman has sharply criticized the commemoration of the Holocaust in Germany and the handling of right-wing extremists and the AfD. “There is no remembrance culture in Germany” he said to the “Tagesspiegel” (Wednesday edition).
“The German remembrance culture is a black hole” Friedman said. “There are bright spots of millions of people who make an effort to remember, who lay Stolpersteine. But there are also the millions who turn the remembrance culture into a frightful brown hole: there, the perpetrators are made into victims, and only the Allied bombing raids are talked about.”
Friedman, a former vice chairman of the Central Council of Jews, criticized the fact that only 0.5 percent of those who had a share in the guilt in the concentration camps have appeared before a court, and that in the young Federal Republic of Germany “the old Nazis were reinserted into administration, BND, politics, police, and elite functions.” When he hears “Wehret den Anfängen” (Defend the Beginnings) today, he can only answer: “What beginnings? We are already in the middle of it. Because we have hardly learned anything from history. That is very painful.”
That the remembrance of the Holocaust is fading away, 80 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp in January 1945, does not lie in the death of the last witnesses. “The relativization began already when all were still alive. There was always the complaint: Now it’s enough with Auschwitz. It increased until the concept of the ‘Auschwitz club’ was coined” said Friedman, whose parents survived the Holocaust because they were on Schindler’s list.
“The Holocaust Memorial Day came very late at the end of the 20th century” Friedman lamented. Since 2005, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27 has been an international memorial day for the victims of National Socialism.
The silence about the guilt of the Germans in National Socialism could not only break the silence of the victims, said Friedman. When teachers called him to ask for the names of survivors for the lesson, he once said into the phone that there were millions of survivors and one should ask one’s own parents. “The suffering could be learned from the victims. But how something like this can happen, which we mean by ‘Wehret den Anfängen’ could only be learned from the perpetrators. There were millions of them, millions who actively or through inaction participated, and later said nothing about it.”
The journalist demanded the examination of a ban on the AfD. “If the evidence is sufficient to responsibly ban the AfD, it is the duty of the democratic institutions to do so. This is anchored in the basic law” said Friedman. The Federal Republic of Germany is today structurally democratic. “Despite this, the attack we are currently experiencing from the party of hate is structural, because for the first time an anti-democratic party has infiltrated the democratic systems to hollow them out.”
Friedman, a former vice chairman of the Central Council of Jews, lamented that Germany was still blind on the right eye. “A country whose government admits for the first time in 2022 that right-wing extremism is the greatest danger to democracy, is suffering from collective repression” said Friedman. “The assumption that there is hardly any right-wing extremism and right-wing terrorism is one of the most significant revelations of the Federal Republic of Germany since its founding until now” the journalist said. “Rostock, Hoyerswerda, Mölln, the NSU, Hans-Georg Maaßen as the head of the constitutional protection agency – always it was said: isolated cases. A judicial solution does not change anything about this social reality.”
80 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp on January 27, 1945, Friedman also lamented that “our society, in self-assured relaxation, has lost the muscle strength.” Those who wanted to destroy democracy were training every day, while the democrats were in the majority, but there were many apathetic, bored, and untrained democrats, he said.
He warned Germany against retreating in the face of many crises and wars. “The sentence ‘War is not a means of politics’ which we like to hold in front of us, is meant to relieve us” said Friedman. “We have retreated into a land of plenty.