Stranger in My Own Country by Yascha Mounk

Author:Yascha Mounk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

EIGHT

Poisoning the Well

In the minds of most Germans, their country finally managed to overcome its complex about the past in the summer of 2006, when it hosted the World Cup for the very first time. All over the country, black, red, and gold, the three colors of the German flag, were everywhere—from house windows to painted faces. Germans, until recently reluctant to display their patriotism in public, had lost many of their longstanding inhibitions.

For the duration of the tournament, the papers talked about little else. German nationalism had returned, and in a much more friendly and cosmopolitan form than most had dared to hope. Germany, everyone was saying, had become a “normal nation.” The “finish line,” for which Germans had long been so impatient, had finally been drawn.

The trope of a country that has finally become just another normal nation is very appealing. From the Jewish perspective, it promises to overcome the invisible wall that philo-Semitism has erected between Jews and Gentiles. From the German perspective, it finally makes it possible to treat Jews as individuals, rather than as complex-inducing representations of eternal historical guilt. Jews, just as much as Gentiles, would love it if we could establish a normal, complex-free relationship toward each other.

Unfortunately, though, the reality on the ground remains rather more complicated.

To some degree, Germany really has shed its complexes: in itself, the newfound readiness to fly the German flag, for example, is perfectly innocuous. But in most “normal” countries, newspapers don’t compete to emphasize just how normal the nation is. Indeed, just as a country’s attitude toward itself cannot be normal if its newspapers consider it necessary to proclaim, dissect, champion, and defend that normality in self-conscious editorials, so, too, a sheer act of will does not suffice to free the relationship of Jews and Gentiles from the neuroses that have long plagued it.

All of us, Jews and non-Jews alike, are ready to get behind a banner that demands: NO MORE MARKUS! But this seemingly attractive demand neglects to answer a simple set of questions: Who will stand in his place? Would it really be an improvement to move from Markus’s deeply flawed obsession with guilt to Stephanie’s ruthless, self-satisfied attack on what she considers the oppressive strictures of political correctness?

However much they, too, might long for normality in their daily lives, most German Jews find it impossible to ignore these questions. In their eyes, Germany remains a deeply ambivalent home. Far from ringing in a new era of normality, the recent agitation for a finish line has served only to make things distinctly less normal for them.

* * *

I was reminded of these hard lessons far from “home” when, a few years ago, I joined a private discussion group at an Ivy League university. The group consisted of prominent philosophers and political scientists; a few graduate students had also been invited to attend. Each week, someone would present an informal talk on a topic of particular interest to them. On my first visit, an expert

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