Review of a new book of essays about Germany’s hyper-Zionism
Hossam el-Hamalawy is a journalist and scholar-activist who researches the Egyptian military and security services.
Cross-posted from Middle East Eye
Hans Kundnani’s Hyper-Zionism: Germany, the Nazi Past and Israel arrives like a work written with nerves exposed.
It reads as an intervention, a warning, and a reckoning with a country that has elevated its remembrance culture and supposed moral duty to Israel into a civic religion.
The collection is celebratory in the sense that it honours dissent and clarity at a moment when both are punished.
It is literary in its commitment to voice, mournful in its portrait of a society haunted by a past it claims to master, and passionate in its refusal to accept silence.
Kundnani curates a book that confronts Germany’s public morality at its most fragile point.
Its terrain is where history becomes policy, memory becomes discipline, and solidarity becomes suspect.
What emerges is not a dry academic volume but a living document of a political rupture.
A sacred phrase and its heavy cost
The book opens with a phrase that has come to shape German foreign policy and domestic policing of speech: Staatsrason or “reason of state”.
It functions almost like a seal carved into stone, a formula repeated so often that many forget its political construction.
The editors and contributors insist on treating it neither as taboo nor as eternal truth, but as a strategic choice that evolved through contingent decisions, diplomatic bargains, insecurities, and misread lessons of history.
After October 2023, the uncritical invocation of Staatsrason hardened into something close to liturgy.
Unconditional support for Israel became framed as proof of democratic credentials.
Conditionality, restraint, or even basic human rights language were recast as dangerous.
Hyper-Zionism describes this transformation not through polemic but through an anatomy of its effects: weapons shipments increased, diplomatic shielding intensified, and criticism folded into the category of national betrayal.
The cost is visible at home. Artists, academics, cultural workers, activists and even school children found themselves under scrutiny.
A single post, signature or phrase could trigger administrative panic. Memory culture, which once aspired to broaden moral horizons, now polices them.
Yet the book never treats Germany’s Holocaust memory as a burden to be discarded. It treats it as a responsibility that has been narrowed and instrumentalised.
The sadness lies in realising how a lesson learned in grief can stiffen into an instrument of exclusion.
A myth reconsidered
One of the most arresting sections of the collection revisits a story often told as a fable of reconciliation: the arc of German–Israeli relations from the 1950s to the present.
The contributors dismantle the romantic myth, revealing a relationship shaped by Cold War strategy, power rehabilitation, and diplomatic calculation.
Even reparations, far from pure moral gestures, were entangled in geopolitical manoeuvring and, at times, residual antisemitic thinking among West German elites.
This demythologising does not diminish the dignity of actual reconciliation efforts undertaken by individuals, survivors or civil society.
Instead, it reveals how state narratives flatten complexity. By placing history back into its messy context, the book frees readers from the suffocating weight of official storytelling.
And in that openness, a sharper question emerges: if the relationship began in the register of realpolitik, why has it come to be narrated as an eternal moral duty? The answer across chapters is clear.
The story is less about history and more about politics: the desire of post-reunification Germany to present itself as redeemed, responsible and strong.
Israel becomes not only a partner but a symbol of German virtue. That symbolic role, once installed, becomes untouchable.
The shift from universal to particular
Kundnani’s own chapter traces a quiet shift that has taken dramatic shape in the past two decades: the movement from universalist lessons of the Holocaust towards an exclusive, particularist focus on responsibility to Israel alone.
In the earlier decades, “Never again” was invoked to support universal human rights struggles, anti-racist coalitions, and even multicultural policies.
By the time Angela Merkel declared Israel’s security part of German Staatsrason, the universal frame had contracted. A singular lesson had been recast as a singular obligation.
The book locates this shift not only in political leadership but in the fusion of elite support across parties.
The Greens, paradoxically, often act as the most assertive guardians of unconditionality, wrapping it in the language of progressive anti-fascism.
Social Democrats participate through moral choreography. The Christian Democrats embody it through steadfastness and historical anxiety. Through repetition, the stance becomes consensus.
The mournfulness here is quiet but unmistakable. A democratic society can slip into intellectual conformity without requiring censorship laws. All it needs is a moral consensus that masquerades as historical fact.
The catechism and its machinery
A central concept running through the book is what one contributor calls the “German catechism”: a set of unwritten rules that determines who is allowed to speak, what counts as legitimate critique, and how accusations of antisemitism are deployed.
Its power is not bureaucratic but atmospheric. It hovers over cultural institutions, public broadcasters, foundations, universities and NGOs.
Breaking the catechism means risking denunciation. Complying with it becomes a survival technique. The result is a chilling effect that does not require formal censorship, because the fear of reputational ruin does the work.
A striking observation emerges across different chapters: the catechism became far more rigid after 2005, then almost immovable after October 2023.
Public institutions that once embraced nuance now default to pre-emptive restrictions.
Immigration offices use political declarations as tests of belonging. Courts flirt with the idea that anti-Zionism is legal yet disqualifying. Police departments regulate protests on the basis of assumed suspicion.
This is where the book’s passion is at its most electric. The contributors refuse to surrender the public sphere to fear. They defend the space where argument, dissent and complexity can breathe.
Outsourcing of guilt and legal entrenchment
Another thread running through the volume explores what happens when Holocaust remembrance becomes a national identity marker rather than a universal moral compass.
One contributor traces how German philosemitism evolved from opportunistic friendliness after 1945 to a national posture that often conflates support for Jewish life domestically with support for Israeli state policies.
Another examines how responsibility for contemporary antisemitism is increasingly outsourced on to Arabs, Muslims, and particularly Palestinian communities, obscuring the ongoing reality of far-right antisemitism.
The ethical implications are stark. Germany’s desire to present itself as morally rehabilitated leads to a displacement of guilt on to migrants, especially those who never benefited from Germany’s historical reckoning. A memory culture meant to prevent exclusion becomes a mechanism that reproduces it.
What lingers after these chapters is a sense of sorrow: the tragedy of watching a society use its darkest past to produce new hierarchies.
The cultural sector receives some of the book’s most vivid attention. Writers, artists and musicians describe an environment where invitations vanish, exhibitions collapse and careers buckle under the weight of political scrutiny.
Some cultural institutions abroad have begun to question partnerships with German institutions, worried about their credibility.
Another chapter explores how Staatsrason has begun to seep into legal reasoning. Court cases around arms exports, immigration and citizenship now include language about Israel’s security as a condition of belonging. A political position is quietly becoming a legal test.
This section is among the most unsettling because it shows how swiftly symbolic politics can harden into administrative practice. Once a phrase enters legal vocabulary, removing it becomes nearly impossible.
Hyper-Zionism is shaped by grief yet powered by defiance. It mourns the narrowing of Germany’s moral landscape while celebrating the voices that still try to widen it.
It restores conflict, nuance and argument to a field that has been flattened by official piety.
What gives the book its power is insistence: remembrance is not a museum exhibit but an ongoing struggle over meaning. If “Never again” is to stay alive, it must allow resonance with the present rather than quieten it into ritual.
This volume invites readers to imagine a memory culture that does not fear solidarity across borders, that does not confuse critique with betrayal, and that does not demand silent obedience as proof of moral clarity.
It gestures towards a future where historical responsibility does not shrink into dogma but expands into empathy, complexity and courage.
The sadness never leaves the page, yet the book insists on carrying it with open hands rather than clenched fists.
Hyper-Zionism: Germany, the Nazi Past and Israel, edited by Hans Kundnani, is published by Verso
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