Nuremberg is an attractive city with its mediaeval city walls circling the old town.  Despite 80 per cent of it having been destroyed in the war, it was successfully rebuilt and today is a popular tourist destination.

Hitler found it attractive, too. Its streets provided him and the Nazi party with the perfect backdrop for the political theatre he wanted to present. From 1923 onwards, the parades, military rituals and mass gatherings were propaganda spectacles that led to Nuremberg becoming known as the “City of Party Rallies”.

Nuremberg is in many ways a microcosm of the whole Nazi era. During the 1920s and ’30s, it was the headquarters of Julius Streicher, editor of the rabidly antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer (The Stormtrooper). The racist Nuremberg Laws were promulgated there in 1935. These laws prohibited marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans and restricted citizenship to people of German or “related blood”. The synagogue was destroyed in 1938, a year before Kristallnacht, as part of a program to remove non-Germanic buildings from the backdrop.

Perhaps the most famous association is with the Nuremberg Trials, currently the subject of a Hollywood film. Today you can visit Room 600, the venue for the trials, and see multiple exhibits of the war and of the Holocaust.

This is an example of Germany unfailingly remembers its past … or is it? I was recently in Nuremberg to launch the German translation of my book, The Radical Jewish Tradition, co-authored with Donny Gluckstein. During my book tour I came up against German memory culture and saw it in quite a different light from the official version.

What was the actual outcome of the trials? Apart from those executed, almost none of the convicted served their sentences: most were released within three or four years. The population of Nuremberg at the time was hostile to the trials. And on a national level, most people wanted to forget the Nazis and their regime as quickly as possible.

Denazification — the program to remove Nazi party and SS members from positions of authority — lasted only a few years. Although the government did pay reparations, for the next decade there was mostly silence and denial of personal involvement.

In the 1960s, a new generation tried to tackle the silence. They raised German responsibility for war crimes, condemned the many Nazis again in leading positions, and demanded acknowledgement of personal involvement. The process known as Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung (confrontation with the past) was partially successful. But by the 1980s Germans were openly saying that there should be an end to the discussions — that they shouldn’t have to continue to apologise.

Only from the late 1990s, fifty years and more after the war, do we suddenly get the Nuremberg monuments, the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, Jewish museums all over the country. Why?

Wieland Hoban, the chair of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, explained to me the origin of the contemporary idea of German memory culture.

After the second world war, Germany needed to rehabilitate itself, so they could be a respectable international player again. The first Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, decided he could represent relations with Israel as some sort of reconciliation, starting military collaboration in 1955 and official relations in 1965. But after reunification in 1989, Germany sought a bigger role in Western imperialism and the Trans-Atlantic Alliance. And so the moral justification became more urgent.

In 2008 Angela Merkel, the then Chancellor, introduced the word Staatsräson (reason of state), meaning national interests, in a speech to the Israeli parliament. For Merkel and the German ruling class national interest included selling weapons and having geopolitical access to the West Asian/Middle Eastern region, with the moral narrative providing a convenient packaging. Merkel’s phrase, that Israel’s security is Germany’s reason of state, became part of the standard political vocabulary.

So today memory culture means that Germany supposedly makes up for the Holocaust by its commitment to Israel. This then becomes the basic plank for Germany’s repression of the pro Palestine movement and a convenient justification for its rightward moving policy — increasingly anti-immigrant, for stronger borders and pro-rearmament.

So where did that leave me, as an anti-Zionist Jew? Support for Israel’s genocide and expropriation of Palestinians in no way compensates me for the loss of the dozens of members of my mother’s family who were victims of the Nazis in Poland. Nor does German repression of protestors and activists contribute to the fight against antisemitism.

I have a different memory culture, want to commemorate a different history.

Nuremberg itself is more than a story of fascist overlords. In fact, prior to the Nazi rallies, the city had a strong socialist history: the Nazis had to fight and defeat the local labour movement on their way to seizing power.

I wanted to remember Germans like them: the long history of socialists and Marxists in the nineteenth century and the post-WW1 revolutions. The communists and socialists battling fascists before 1933. The resistance groups under the Nazis, such as the White Rose group, the Baum group and the teenagers of the Edelweiss Pirates. More recently the German student and anti-Vietnam war movements of the 1960s with which I have a personal connection.

On my tour I met many people representing a continuation of those traditions. They, too, are well worth remembering. In a country whose government maintains that the existence of Israel make the world safer for Jews, I have the image of Rachel, a Berlin based anti-Zionist Jew, who described her fear sitting waiting in a police van watching “a policeman choke my wife until the blood drained from her face and she struggled to breathe”.

In Leipzig I met Yuval, an anti-Zionist Israeli and member of Jewish Israeli Dissent (JID pronounced Yid). The existence of such groups challenges Staatsräson at its roots, and underscores the argument that Jews don’t unanimously support Zionism.

Vivian, a German Australian now living in Leipzig, wrote to me:

There’s just something mind-numbingly surreal about a Jewish person being aggressively arrested by the Berlin police force for carrying a sign which says ‘Jews Against Genocide’ … We need to speak truth in moments of despair and actively stand in resistance to the forces of oppression which shackle this world.

In Jena I met with a group of students, none of them Jewish, but all active in a student movement that reminded me of my own days as a student activist. Not least because they all looked so young and enthusiastic.

In Munich I met Susannah, a Jewish woman who felt that she had to defy the conventions of her family and friends and stand up for Palestine. She did this in small actions not in acts of heroism.

Germany’s history of Jewish hatred is all around you and obvious to any tourist to the country. Yet chancellor Merz claims that antisemitism is an imported problem in Germany as a result of “the big numbers of migrants we have had in the last 10 years”.

Our publisher’s representative, Thomas Waimar, became a good friend. He warned our audiences of the growth of right-wing politics.

This German state can now, in the name of warding off the past, enact racist laws against imported antisemitism, restrict freedom of speech and assembly, arm itself against the supposedly looming threat of Russian fascism, and arm the Israeli state and its fascists to commit a genocide.

Although Hitler loved to present theatre, the growth of the right today is more than the spectacle of bands of extremists in uniforms. The Nazis grew in power using legal means. Let our own memory culture forewarn us.

Image: Wikimedia Commons