In February of this year, Germany's influential Bertelsmann Foundation published the results of a new public opinion survey on anti-Semitism in Germany and the view of Germany among Jews in Israel and the United States. The Bertelsmann study made for headlines both in Germany and around the world: among other reasons, because it came to the conclusion that anti-Semitism is on the decline in Germany. The Bertelsmann findings thus plainly contradict the widespread assessment of both academic specialists and journalistic observers, who have pointed rather to a remarkable banalization of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany in recent years. This process of banalization comprises both "classical" anti-Semitic prejudice and what researchers have dubbed "secondary" anti-Semitism: a peculiarly German phenomenon that might best be described as resentment of Jews not in spite of the Holocaust, but rather precisely because of it.
Thus in late February, just two weeks after the release of the Bertelsmann study, 83-year-old Holocaust survivor Isaak Behar was forced to interrupt his lecture in a Berlin police academy when students complained that they "did not want constantly to be reminded of the Holocaust." Some months earlier, in September 2006, the members of the Jewish soccer club TuS Makkabi were serenaded by fans with anti-Semitic threats and insults - including "Auschwitz is back" and "Gas the Jews" (link in German) -- during an amateur soccer game also in Berlin. When Makkabi player Vernen Liebermann appealed to the referee -- saying, on his account, "if you have the slightest shred of decency in light of the history of this country, you have to do something to help us now" -- he was given a red card and thrown out of the game. Weeks before that, during a summer festival in the small town of Pretzien, a group of local youngsters ritually burnt a copy of Anne Frank's diary, with one of them reportedly saying "it's all lies anyway."
Anti-Semitic crime has remained high in Germany during the entire decade, with over 1000 cases being officially registered every year since the year 2000. The desecration of Jewish graveyards, synagogues and Holocaust-related monuments is a regular occurrence throughout the country. Acts of violence against persons increased every year from 2001 to 2005 (reaching a high of 49 in 2005 and then falling, according to the official statistics, to 21 in 2006).
Nonetheless, the Bertelsmann Foundation's press release on its new study emphasizes that "the relation between Germans and Jews has improved significantly over the past 15 years." "The majority of Israelis and American Jews now have a positive opinion about Germany," the press release cheerfully notes, whereas what it calls the "sense of responsibility for the Jewish people" is supposed to have undergone a "marked" increase among Germans.
If the latter claim appears particularly incongruous in light of the abundant evidence of "secondary" anti-Semitism in German society, still more astonishing is the Foundation's claim that "Germans are more inclined to sympathize with Israelis than Arabs in the Middle East conflict." This conclusion is wildly at variance with other public opinion research, which -- mirroring what has been shown to be a conspicuous pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli bias in news coverage of the Middle East conflict in the German media -- reveals Germans to have an overwhelmingly negative view of Israel. Thus, most famously, in a 2004 survey of German public opinion conducted under the auspices of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence of the University of Bielefeld, 51 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is "no different than what the Nazis did to the Jews in the Third Reich." Fully 68 percent agreed that Israel is conducting a "war of extermination" against the Palestinians. (The phrase "war of extermination" will again have clearly invoked Hitler and the Third Reich for the German respondents.) Perhaps most revealingly of all, fully 82 percent of respondents agreed that they "become enraged [wütend werden] when they think of how the Israelis treat the Palestinians." (For the detailed Bielefeld results, see here (link in German; pdf-file).)
The virulence of German "criticisms" of Israel has indeed led researchers to postulate that the Middle East conflict provides a socially acceptable outlet for pent-up anti-Jewish resentments, whose "classical" form of expression remains subject to official repression and/or stigmatization in Germany. This has led some to speak of a "new" form of so-called "anti-Zionist anti-Semitism." It should be noted in this connection that the Bertelsmann survey reprised the items in the 2004 Bielefeld survey comparing Israeli to Nazi policies. In both cases, the Bertelsmann Foundation reports that "only" 30 percent of respondents agreed with the statements. The remarkably large discrepancy between these findings and the Bielefeld findings should give considerable cause to pause. It is hardly plausible that German public opinion could have changed so dramatically in the space of barely two and a half years. (The Bertelsmann survey was conducted in January 2007; the Bielefeld survey, in May and June 2004.)
If one considers the findings of the Bertelsmann study (.pdf file) in greater detail, moreover, a picture emerges that is significantly more troubling than that suggested by the Bertelsmann press release. Thus, for instance, according to the study, 40 percent of Germans are of the opinion that National Socialism had both "good and bad sides." This number is especially conspicuous in light of the fact that the survey also included the option "more bad sides than good" -- which won the assent of fewer, 34 percent, of the respondents. Another 21 percent of the respondents chose the option "only bad sides." According to this data, only a slim majority (55 percent) of Germans have an overall negative view of National Socialism, leaving a substantial minority who appear to have an at least "balanced" if not outright positive ("more good sides": 1 percent) view of National Socialism. (Five percent are listed as having refused to answer the question.) This alarming conclusion is made all the more dramatic by the fact that 58 percent of Germans, according to the Bertelsmann survey, are supposed to want to "draw a line" under Germany's Nazi past, i.e. to no longer be confronted with it.
"Whilst just under half of Israelis and 40 percent of American Jews suspect that a large number of Germans embrace anti-Semitic attitudes," the Bertelsmann Foundation notes in its press release, "the findings of this survey suggest that this only applies to a minority of Germans and that traditional anti-Semitic prejudices about the Jews tend to be on the wane in Germany." Thus, according to the Bertelsmann data, some 72 percent of Germans believe that there are only a small number of persons in Germany who have negative attitudes toward Jews or even that there is hardly anyone at all. When one considers this result in connection with the other findings, however, it is clear that many of the same persons who subscribe to this belief themselves express anti-Semitic attitudes -- without evidently perceiving them as such.
Thus, for example, nearly 50 percent of the respondents are of the opinion that "many Jews" try to "use the past of the Third Reich to their advantage." (This is a standard question employed in German public opinion research to measure "secondary" anti-Semitism.) Merely 27 percent unequivocally reject the assertion. Fully 19 percent, while not endorsing it, choose the non-committal "impossible to say" and another 9 percent "don't know." Thirty-three percent of the respondents in the Bertelsmann survey agree that "Jews wield too much influence in the world." Here again, as throughout the Bertelsmann results, the percentage giving no response (8 percent) is conspicuously high, suggesting a certain practice of self-censorship on the part of the respondents.
It should be noted, moreover, that the "waning" of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany asserted by the Bertelsmann Foundation is established by reference to just a single other opinion survey conducted in 1991. Furthermore, in light of the amount of time elapsed -- nearly the span of a generation -- the registered decline is remarkably slight: so slight indeed as to approach or fall within the survey's stated margin of error of 3.1 percent. Thus, for instance, in the 1991 survey 36 percent of respondents agreed that "Jews wield too much influence," as opposed to the 33 percent who did the same in the Bertelsmann survey. If in 1991 fully 77 percent of Germans surveyed could not bring themselves to reject the claim that Jews attempt to profit from "the past of the Third Reich," by 2007, according to the Bertelsmann data, this number had only dropped by 4 percent.
John Rosenthal wrote at length on German anti-Semitism in his essay "Anti-Semitism and Ethnicity in Europe" (Policy Review, October/November 2003). Samuel Salzborn is a Lecturer in the Political Science department of the University of Giessen. He is the author of the recent study Ethnisierung der Politik [The Ethnicization of Politics] (Frankfurt am Main, 2005). His homepage can be consulted at http://www.salzborn.de/.
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