The New Old Berlin
In politics and the mainstream media, Germany's elites are still addicted to obeying the US and sticking to Israel come-what-may, genocide and wars of aggression included.
“German postwar history is over. [And] it has all been in vain.” That was the response of a German political scientist and historian living in Switzerland to chancellor Friedrich Merz’s recent declaration that he is all for international law, just not when it’s in the way of what is, in reality though not in Merz’s fantasy world, the textbook-case war of aggression against Iran.
The expression of desperate exasperation was richly deserved. Factually misleading his national audience, Germany’s leader also clearly implied that the attack on Iran could be justified as a necessary form of prevention and argued – probably reflecting a residual awareness that preventive war is, actually, prohibited – that Iran had not observed international law. He then offered a short, demagogic, and breathtakingly unsound theory: International law “meets its limits,” he argued, when the opponent does not comply with it. As in: If they don’t play by the rules, we don’t have to do so either.
Let’s set aside for a moment that Merz’s claim about Iran’s behavior is factually false. In reality, it is, of course, Iran’s direct opponents, the US and Israel that have stunning records of violating not “only” elementary ethics (including of the basic “don’t-massacre-children” variety) but also international law, from wars of aggression to assassination campaigns to kidnappings to the Gaza Genocide committed together. (Merz might also recall the egregious case of the sabotage and eco-terrorism attack on Nord Stream, when, in peacetime, the US and Ukraine and assorted other “allies” blew up infrastructure vital for Germany; but then, it seems part of his job requirements not to remember such things.)
Finally, one of the key causes of the current war is the fact that the US, not Iran, broke the JCPOA agreement, which had provided a diplomatic solution to disagreements over Iran’s nuclear program and a precedent for finding further peaceful settlements, while Washington’s NATO-EU vassals obediently tolerated and facilitated that legal vandalism by continuing to, absurdly, demand that Iran comply anyhow.
Yet even on its own dishonest terms, Merz’s argument is obviously rubbish. With its weaponized appeal to a gut-feeling “common sense” (yes, scare quotes) that makes no legal, moral, or intellectual sense, it is either a perfidious misrepresentation or stunningly ignorant. Here is a German chancellor who is also a trained jurist pretending to be unaware of an axiom of much of domestic and international law and in particular humanitarian law (aka the law of armed conflict), namely the principle of non-reciprocity. Its essence is exceedingly simple and should be easy to remember: You must abide by the rules even if someone else does not.
It is also no intellectual challenge to understand why this principle is vital: Fundamentally, key rights and obligations adhere to natural or juridical persons because of who or what they are, not because of what they do. That is the – very good – reason, for instance, why it may, arguably, be permitted to put a torturer to death after due legal process with full protection of his or her inalienable rights, but it can never be justified to torture them, because of, again, those inalienable rights.
No less important is the fact that, practically speaking, if a claimed breach of the law by other governments did confer the privilege of breaking the law, as it were, in return, then all governments would have an irresistible incentive to use false claims of enemy offenses to justify their own. Add mutual escalation, and the result is a Hobbesian hell filled not only with atrocities but self-righteous and hysterical cant, too.
And that is, of course, what has happened all too often in reality. What makes Merz’s absurdities particularly disturbing, however, is the fact that specifically German history includes one of the worst cases of combining propaganda lies about prevention and the enemy’s barbarism with this tit-for-tat logic, namely the manner in which Nazi Germany deliberately and explicitly lifted crucial legal restraints when waging war against the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945.
In the Nazi case – of which not the only but most well-known instance is the “Commissar Order” – while the Soviet leadership offered mutual assurances to obey common rules of warfare, Berlin’s policy was threefold: Falsely depicting the German assault as really a form of defense, a preventive necessity; denouncing the Soviets as an enemy uninterested in complying with and beyond ordinary rules; and claiming a German right to abandon all compliance. The practical corollaries were uncountable atrocities, including a genocidal mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war.
Merz likes to display his admiration for his grandfather, a small-town mayor and conservative-turned-Nazi-after-1933. Yet Germany’s current leader is probably also simply not bright enough to understand what he has just done. It may be stunning, but it is true: Declaring Iran, while under a ferocious attack as falsely “preventative” as the Nazi onslaught on the Soviet Union, as beyond international law, Merz has become the first German leader since Adolf Hitler to explicitly exempt a whole war of aggression and the country and people that are its victim from laws and protections that are supposed to always be valid for everyone and everywhere.
(It is true that Germany has played fast and loose with international law before, with regard not only to Palestine and “Israel” but also, for instance, to the NATO war over Kosovo and the province’s subsequent and highly contentious independence, but Merz’s brutally open “outlawing” of Iran is still an unprecedented new low.)
Merz already has a history of boldly displaying his provincial cynicism – which he seems to mistake for realism, as small minds do – and legal nihilism, especially when Muslims and/or people of a browner shade of pigmentation are the victims of Western brutality. Infamously, during last summer’s so-called “Twelve-Day War,” that is, the Israeli-US war of aggression against Iran, Germany’s chancellor called on his people to be grateful for the “dirty work” (“Drecksarbeit”) done by their valiant American allies and Israeli friends-with-privileges.
This is, of course, a logic as old as human wickedness and the ability to be dishonest about it: It implicitly recognizes a moral and criminal offense to then pervert it into a special kind of heroism, namely the, so this rhetoric conveys, courage to do what is necessary even when rules must be broken, morality defied, and pangs of conscience suffered.
Merz is, of course, not Heinrich Himmler and cannot be equated with him. But it is a fact – whatever the discomfort of cognitive dissonance triggered by it – that this rhetorical device also played a key role in Himmler’s first Posen Speech of 4 October 1943. There the “architect of the final solution” praised his SS men for having dealt with “a very difficult chapter,” namely, “the extermination of the Jewish people.” He declared that it was hard to see – really, obviously, produce – a pile of a “hundred,” “five-hundred,” or a “thousand” corpses, implicitly acknowledging that a human conscience should naturally rebel against such very dirty work indeed. Yet Himmler’s conclusion was to claim this atrocity as proof of toughness and a mark of “glory.”
Last summer, Merz made a point of feeling no remorse about his vile “Drecksarbeit” comment. This time, it is true, he has quietly been shifting his stance, without – predictably – acknowledging or regretting his prior statements. After a demonstratively submissive trip to Washington, where he assured Donald Trump of his country’s total support for the US and Israel in “ridding [us] of this horrible terror regime” (Merzish for Iran, of course) and spinelessly sold out NATO and EU partner Spain, Merz’s extraordinary obsequiousness has provoked some criticism even within the usually extremely self-streamlining sphere of the German mainstream media.
In addition, since the German chancellor’s fresh if stolid genuflections on Trump’s Oval-Office domination-and-humiliation stage, Israel and its US forces have rapidly – and proudly – escalated their atrocities. Even Friedrich Merz seems to have a sinking feeling about being seen at the heels of, say, US secretary of war crimes, Pete Hegeseth, while the latter publicly wallows in a bloodbath. There also is every German right-winger’s greatest fear: that all those displaced, once again, by Western violence – if they survive – might be so bold as to try to escape to Europe. And then, it also may have dawned on this second Merz-with-ambitions eager to join the winners that it is not quite clear if choosing America is really the right bet. Now, in sum, Merz’s revised position is that Israel and the US should please go on with their dirty work but make sure not to cause a regional collapse so massive that even Germany – and Merz – would feel the shock waves.
Make no mistake: While a clear majority of Germans, when polled, are by now believing Israel’s actions in Gaza are not justified (a low bar indeed, but things used to be even worse) and consider the new war on Iran wrong, Germany’s “elites,” in politics and the mainstream media, are still addicted to obeying the US and sticking to Israel come-what-may, genocide and wars of aggression included. The polite terms for this immoral compliance are “transatlanticism” and the, in this case, untranslatable “Staatsräson;” the sin of no longer going along with it is called “anti-Americanism” and, in a truly Orwellian confusion of terms, “antisemitism.” Merz, in all his caricatural crudeness, is representative of what is dominant in Germany. The fact that majorities are silently diverging from this perverse national party-line has no discernible effects. What would it take to change that? No one knows. Judging by history, Germans are not quick to rebel. Alas!
Tarik Cyril Amar (@TarikCyrilAmar), is an historian from Germany currently at Koç University, Istanbul, and author of The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv. A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists.
