K. is fortunate to have an editor like Julia Christ in its ranks; she gives no quarter to platitudes. Christ, born in Germany and now a researcher at the École des Hautes Etudes in Paris, is our point-person for affaires outre-Rhin. Her origins count less than her deep familiarity with Germany’s intellectual and political history; Christ’s academic writings range from a dissertation on Theodor Adorno and the Frankfort School to a recent volume on Hegel’s conception of the universal (L’oubli de l’universel: Hegel critique du libéralisme, Presses Universitaires de France, 2022, untranslated). Germany, the continent’s economic powerhouse, the nation that perpetrated the Holocaust, remains the elephant in the room from both a Jewish and European perspective.
K.’s summer reprise this week continues with a series of Christ’s articles on contemporary Germany. The first piece deals with the country’s “new historians’ quarrel,” in which a coterie of far-left intellectuals from around the world have attempted to shift the nature of Holocaust memory in Germany itself. The Holocaust, according to the group, is but one episode in a series of atrocities committed by Europe’s imperial powers. Jews, in highlighting the singularity of the Holocaust, stand as a ‘privileged’ victim class, whose suffering occludes that of others and enables the ‘imperialist’ state of Israel.
Christ dismantles in a cold rage this piece of sophism, which, based on the second article, appears to have gained purchase in German cultural milieux. This edition of Germany’s Documenta art festival, held twice a decade in Cassel, showcases a plainly antisemitic painting. Called “People’s Justice,” the canvas features two antisemitic images: the first of a Jew (a Star of David affixed to his shirt) with a pig head; the second of a man in an SS uniform drawn with stereotypical ‘Jewish’ features. The reluctance of some in the German elite to condemn the opus has much to do with the ‘subaltern’ nature of this edition of the festival, organized under the rubric of “The Global South” and hosting artists exclusively from the Third World, or collectives interested in related issues.
Add to the guilty conscience of German officialdom the bad faith of the festival’s organizers, who invoked cultural pluralism as an excuse for not having “understood” how the painting could be “read” as antisemitic “in the context of German history.” How do Germans cope with the guilty conscience that lingers seven decades after the Holocaust? One answer is mimesis, attempting to fill the void of one’s own identity with that of the persecuted group. Such is the solution of the protagonist is Katrina Volckmer’s novel, Jewish Cock, which Christ reviewed earlier this year. The work’s main character, a German woman undergoing a gender transition, relates her desires for not only a penis, but a Jewish one, circumcised. Volckmer’s character is sterile and self-obsessed; one suspects this might not be a purely personal trait.
