Latuff: persona-non-grata in German-spoken IMCs

This past month I was invited, for the second time in as many years, to present a book in Germany. Last year Piper published The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering and this year Hugendubel put out Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. In significant respects, the receptions differed: The Holocaust Industry generated much public interest, Image and Reality relatively little. No doubt the reason is that Germans have a huge stake in the legacy of the Nazi holocaust but rather little in a just resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It would seem that this order of priorities, although understandable, is to be regretted. The Nazi holocaust, however horrific and even if forever a part of Germany's present, is - except for the handful of survivors - fundamentally a historical question. The persecution of the Palestinians is, by contrast, an on-going horror, and it is, after all, the crimes of the Third Reich that are used to justify this persecution. In the first instance, moral action by Germans is no longer possible; in the second, it plainly is.

Precisely for this reason I actually looked forward to the recent German trip. I made no secret last year of my conflicted feelings about promoting The Holocaust Industry in Germany. Many close friends and comrades counseled against it and - much more important - I was quite certain that both my late parents would have disapproved. Germans, I was told, could not be trusted to honestly debate Jewish misuses of the Nazi genocide (the subject of The Holocaust Industry). In addition, the huge media interest in my book prompted questions - in my opinion, legitimate - about whether I myself wasn't becoming a beneficiary of the industry I deplored. Ultimately I decided that, notwithstanding the real moral risks entailed, I should go to Germany, a decision which, in retrospect, I don't regret.

In the case of the new edition of my book on the Israel-Palestine conflict, such reservations seemed less pertinent. The post-war German generation had just redeemed itself by voting into power a coalition with a resolute anti-war platform. If Germans weren't now ready to honestly debate the Israel-Palestine conflict, when would they be? And no real danger lurked that this book would provoke a media circus if for no other reason than that it wasn't an easy read. Nonetheless, I arrived in Germany with high hopes that just as The Holocaust Industry somewhat succeeded, I think, at breaking a harmful taboo, so my new book would perhaps break the taboo on German public discussion of Israel's brutal occupation. With Palestinians facing an unprecedented catastrophe in the event of a new Middle East war, the stakes loom particularly large.

To judge by a steady stream of email correspondence and many conversations, it seems that The Holocaust Industry did stimulate a sober - and much-needed - debate among ordinary Germans. (A handful of neo-Nazis exploited the occasion but, as the dean of Nazi holocaust scholars, Raul Hilberg, observed, German democracy is not so fragile that it can't tolerate a few kooks coming out of the woodwork.) It's still too soon to gauge the popular reaction to the Israel-Palestine book. What can already be discerned, however, is the persistence among politically correct Germans of a pronounced animus to my work.

The nadir in the relentlessly ugly campaign of ad hominem vilification after publication of The Holocaust Industry was probably the article in a major German newsweekly, Der Spiegel, claiming in all seriousness that each morning after jogging I meditated on the Nazi holocaust in the company of two parrots. Either Germans had suddenly become engrossed by the (imagined) private life of an obscure Jew from Brooklyn, New York or - what seems likelier - the personalized attack on the messenger was a deliberate tactic to evade confronting the bad news that the Nazi holocaust had become an instrument of political and financial gain.

arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)