New ways to combat anti-Semitism and racism are needed
The other day, Mehmet, a taxi driver and native Berliner in his early thirties, asked me if I thought it’s fair that Germany is still paying billions to Israel? Do we? I asked. I started explaining to him that Germany was not paying huge sums to Israel and that compensation for the Nazi crimes had left survivors with small monthly payments. Mehmet agreed that the Holocaust was really bad, but why should he, a German of Turkish background, pay his taxes to Israel? “What do I have to do with your history?” Mehmet asked. He repeatedly interrupted my attempts to explain. My answer threatened to overturn his long-held notions. Get yourself some history books, I told him. Read real newspapers. “I’ve got this so-called information, it’s all propaganda!” Mehmet quipped. His taxi beeper sounded and he rushed off.
Such stories are what scholars dismiss as “anecdotal” evidence, but the more you come across them, the more they become solidly “empirical”: anti-Semitism is still rife in Germany. Recent surveys show that at least 20% of Germany’s population has negative views about Jews, and many younger people know nothing of the Shoah and cannot associate anything meaningful with “Auschwitz.”
Many scholars have sought the causes of this specific and irrational package of hatred and prejudice known as anti-Semitism. Medieval superstition, economic competition, false concepts of the “other” – have all been explored as motives for this destructive phenomenon. Author Götz Aly sees envy at the core of this resentment. In the 19th century German Christians, confronted with how well many Jews excelled, frequently felt left behind. The result was envious resentment, Aly argues. Instead of learning from the Jews, Germans tried to demean them and thought about how to “get rid” of them. National Socialism was in large part a National Sadism – an ultimate “revenge” against intrapsychic enemies by an emotionally retarded group: the Germans.
The causes of resentment
Typical replies to such arguments are: Let’s not be psychological! It’s the economy, stupid! We need more education, information, stronger laws, tougher sentences! All of this is true. Everything we do, from child-rearing to making war or music, derives from emotions. But we don’t understand them. We treat irrational impulses as immature, but it’s the immaturity that must interest us. The most “rational” behavior can be driven by the most irrational, immature impulses – the utter suspension of empathy which drove the Shoah was organized by a “rational” machinery of destruction.
“I’ve got this so-called information, it’s all propaganda!” say the Mehmets. They may indeed have heard or read it, but what they lack is emotional insight, emotional education, empathy and imagination. They don’t know a thing about the causes of their resentments.
What is required to quell anti- Semitism – and indeed any form of racism or ethnic bias – is not only education, but a kind of New Enlightenment. It is emotional education; it’s about our own psychology. Two years ago I sat next to a German girl in her late teens watching Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds” when, during the fi rst compelling scenes, Jewish children hiding in the cellar hear how members of their family are shot upstairs, scenes almost unbearable to watch.
The girl was unmoved. Not a breath of compassion. She had been taught views such as Mehmet’s, hence the fate of “some film- Jew” did not faze her. The poverty of her emotional imagination was eerie.
Unless affluent, democratic societies invest as much energy into research and understanding of emotions as they do into global markets or the secrets of the universe, we will remain emotional paupers: Young people should be the focus. Projects like “Roots of Empathy”, where pre-schoolers are taught how to sense, name and regulate their emotions, deserve admiration and respect. This is about civilisation and its core content: Empathy. Remember, “It’s the emotions, stupid!”
Caroline Fetscher writes for the Berlin daily “Der Tagesspiegel”