In 2019 I met another grad student through Twitter. A German who worked in national security spaces while also studying for their degree, this person was instrumental in connecting me with folks to interview whom I would never have reached without their quiet insider endorsement. They helped me make sense of German bureaucrat-ese and fostered a community of young security researchers passing through Berlin. My work would be less insightful, less far-reaching, without their help.
Last month I blocked them on all platforms for comparing Palestinians to Nazis.
I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be a researcher of white supremacy in Germany. After October 7, every German institution and political party with which I have had even a tenuous connection, save the leftist Die Linke party and its associated Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, fell in lockstep with Angela Merkel’s infamous 2008 statement that Israel’s security is Germany’s “raison d’état.” To abandon sanitized language for a minute, virtually every organization whose members I’ve thanked graciously for their help with my research has shat the bed on Palestine. They have excommunicated anyone who contextualizes violence in occupied Palestine and refused to meet with anyone who voices even the most milquetoast support for a ceasefire. They have jumped immediately to accusations of antisemitism and terrorist sympathy, waving the billy club of criminal liability. This isn’t new; it’s not unexpected; and yet the all-encompassing nature of German racism and philosemitism startles nonetheless. Part of it makes me wonder why I felt the need to ask the question “why does structural white supremacy persist in Germany” in the first place. The answer is right here.
Of course it’s also more complex than that: one could make, and many folks have made, entire lifetimes of picking apart German Holocaust guilt, the refusal to reckon with Germany’s colonial history, and the deep racism (and, yes, antisemitism!) still present in German society. Every few months, someone new discovers German Erinnerungskultur (remembrance culture) and Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (working off the past) for the first time and pens another thinkpiece. I am captivated by the sense of surprise this discovery seems to provoke in non-Germans, by the fantasy that persists of Germany as a model for confronting white supremacy. People ask me if there is a model anywhere and I have to re-sanitize my language so as to cut off a cold laugh.
I have thought about this also as someone who lived, for a time, just off of Hermannplatz, a public square in Berlin that marks the northern boundary of the Neukölln neighborhood. Germany is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora community outside of the Middle East, and many of them live in Neukölln, alongside Germans of Turkish, Kurdish, and other Arab descents. When the weather cooperates, vendors pour into Hermannplatz, grilling hot gözleme and selling entire baskets of fruit for a euro. The cause of the moment is regularly graffitied on a sculpture in the square; several times while I was there, it was “free Palestine.”
When Neukölln residents created memorials to the Palestinian dead in the streets after October 7, not dissimilar to the small memorials people often set up at the roadside for cyclists killed in car accidents, Berlin police stomped them out. This is not a figure of speech. Videos circulated; maybe you have seen them. As a researcher of political violence, I am good at avoiding graphic depictions of bombings and murders and assaults, or at compartmentalizing when I do choose to engage. For better or worse, it is a means of mental and emotional survival. But I could not numb myself to this. This is not the same, but I attended a vigil many years ago for victims of the queerphobic shooting in Orlando, Florida, where I was given a small battery-powered candle. I still have that candle. I try to imagine someone placing it on the ground and crushing it to pieces. The crack of the plastic is a snapping in my chest.
What do we do when the cruelty is the point? What do we do when the cruelty is kneejerk? What do we do when it is cheered on? What do we do when it is constant and we have chosen not to see? I got drinks once with the grad student I mentioned above and was subjected to an hour of misogynistic denial of rape culture. I endured it, even argued back, because I was the guest and I wanted to keep my access. In subsequent years, I listened to this grad student repeatedly refuse to comprehend police abolitionist arguments as something serious and not silly. Where is the line? What is your breaking point?
It means nothing consequential, ultimately, that many of the organizations that welcomed my notebook and questions through their doors in Berlin will never have me back. The bounded temporality of access is a feature, not a bug, of studying white supremacy in Germany. I know well enough what will set white liberal Germans off, to the point where I can control when my dismissal will be triggered. (It is uttering the phrase “white supremacy” and then clarifying that I do not mean it as a synonym for Nazism.) I did not need to criticize Israel or voice support for Palestine to shut down points of access. And, at the end of the day, my ability to access a research site is so far down the list of priorities when it comes to living with myself and the world that I cannot imagine anyone with the privilege of researching outside their home context actually caring about this. Imagine caring so much about being able to write one particular paper—not even any paper at all, just one!—that you would deny a genocide. Imagine doing so in Germany, which for better or for worse has become the archetype of genocidaire.
But it is strange to have moved in those spaces. It makes me wonder, for all I found, what else I missed.
Recently, Palestinians and their allies have moved to boycott academic events in Germany (and Austria, which is like Germany, though as I don’t study it or have connections there I won’t say much more). Senior academics have turned down invitations to speak; others have canceled their affiliations with German research centers. Some of these actions have been provoked, such as John Keane’s preemptive resignation from his fellowship at the WZB in Berlin after being threatened for allegedly posting “the flag of Hamas.” (He did not, and the layers of ignorance in that accusation are frankly embarrassing for an academic institution.) Others have been less a boycott than a forceful shutdown of Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish perspectives by cultural institutions, private foundations, and academic bodies of all stripes. That it makes sense to so many to withdraw all contact and engagement with an entire country underscores how unremarkable, how normalized, structural white supremacy is in Germany. It is a position others watching from abroad, whether from a UK trying to equate pro-Palestinian views with political extremism or a US doxing Palestinian and Arab students en masse, would do well to sit with. And the “learning from the Germans” crowd would do well to consider that this is not new. Where, again, is your line?
For now, I am thinking about a kebab shop in Neukölln, right off the Leinestraße U-Bahn stop, that in 2019 sold falafel wraps for one euro. I ate one on a bench outside on a day when the temperature would climb to 101 degrees Fahrenheit. Pasted on the outside of the shop was a sticker proclaiming “Macht eure Stadt selbst”—make your city yourself. The slogan is loosely associated with the climate movement, but I think we can also take its message more generally. If, as I have claimed before, Berlin is my heart, a harsh teacher, the best city in the world, then how I engage with it needs to shift. The places worth going, the people worth meeting, are not the ones now closed off to me. The questions worth asking cannot, can never, be connected solely to publishing or professional success. I am still learning how to navigate this, but the most important lesson is that, much as I have been thinking about research, this is not a research moment. But it is a moment of researching myself all over again. A participant in a teach-in I helped facilitate on Palestine said: you must do your own risk assessment. What can you take on, and how much does it matter to you.
I know what does not matter: playacting on some professional pedestal to appease the German security professionals who had been kind to me, good to me, and who have also embraced so much racism and violence without a second thought.
A free Palestine in our lifetimes.