Cover image for Keinheimisch by Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus (Ullstein Verlage, 2025)
Introductory Note: Keinheimisch (Ullstein Verlage, 2025) weaves together personal experience, literary analysis, and political theory: Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus draws on his grandparents’ stories—Holocaust survivors and Nakba participants alike—and his own upbringing in a militarized society to trace how Jewish indigeneity in the land is constantly reasserted, and how that reassertion curdles into supremacy. Theoretically, he argues for redefining indigeneity as something inherently opposed to nationalism and the nation-state, concluding that Jews cease to be indigenous to the land once they adopt Zionism. The chapter excerpted here turns to Germany, where he argues that since the Wiedergutmachung agreement, the country has abused its historical responsibility post WWII, using its relationship to Israel as cover to drift back toward right-wing policy, remilitarization, and support for genocide.
My grandfather killed himself on Israel’s Highway 1, the motorway connecting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Well, not exactly. In truth, my grandfather’s protracted suicide had already begun decades earlier in Warsaw.
At the start of World War II, the German army invaded Warsaw and immediately began raiding the homes of Jewish families there. My grandfather was a teenager at the time. He came home one day and found the living room of their third-floor apartment emptied. German soldiers were tossing their possessions out the window onto the bed of a truck parked in the courtyard below. And then he heard a scream. The soldiers had just thrown his baby brother out the third-floor window, too. His mother screamed as her infant son fell to his death.
From that day on, the sound of his mother’s screaming never left Mosche Dreyfus. Not when he joined the Polish partisans to fight against the Germans. Not when he immigrated to Israel (it was already called Israel by then). Mosche heard this screaming day and night. It quieted for a brief moment when my grandfather drove his car into oncoming traffic on Highway 1 between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, falling into the abyss that opened between him and his head-on collision with a semitruck. After my grandfather took the plunge, it all grew still. At least, until he realized that, unlike his baby brother, somehow he’d survived the impact. He awoke to find himself in the company of his mother’s screaming once again, only this time it was louder than before. Louder than the sirens of the ambulance transporting my grandfather to the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem where he threw himself out a window. I’m not sure what floor he was on. But it was high enough that he never heard those screams again.
The Germany I imagined when I immigrated there in January 2011 was a place that did not occasion screaming—internal or otherwise. A place that did not throw babies out of windows anymore. In 1949, the new German constitution came into effect. Its Article 131 outlined how the new West German government should take responsibility for former officials and civil servants of the German Reich. But this was meant, among other things, to reintegrate former public employees who had served under the Nazi regime and lost their positions at the end of the War, including former members of the Wehrmacht, along with others whose positions no longer existed at all as a result of the denazification process. This new law preserved their benefits as civil servants, including benefits for those officials whose actions had facilitated Nazi policy directly. Of course, I did not know about this then.
One year later, in 1952, the Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany, officially known as the Luxembourg Agreement, was signed into law. I didn’t learn about this in Israel. But today, I find their proximity uncanny—a law that critics called the “Enough with Denazification Act” and a Reparations Agreement with Israel. And so, while the victims of the Nazi regime were meant to consider themselves lucky to be living in Israel with Germany’s support, in Germany, the perpetrators were receiving pensions and cozy benefits. It was almost like Germany had deliberately and officially deferred its historical responsibility. Germany turned away from any orientation toward democratic values and universal safety for all people living in the Federal Republic (by, for example, promising to never again appoint Nazis to jobs as civil servants), and decided, instead, on an act of commitment: commitment to the State of Israel. As though the model of the nation-state was the only form of political existence possible for a given people.
Today, I sometimes wonder: What would have happened if Germany had not paid these reparations? What if Israel—bankrupt so soon after its founding—had not been capable of surviving as a nation-state? Would it have then been possible to reconsider whether the nation-state was truly the sole format available for self-determination? Reparation was, from the very onset, a problematic legal term. And it remains charged with problematic social and political significance today. Namely, the belief in Germany and among Germans that they have reconciled with Jewish people.
From its inception, German reparations policy prioritized Germany and not its many victims. And today, when someone like me—an Israeli living in Germany—criticizes the Israeli government and uses a platform or public space to do so, a lot of German promoters, German editors, and German institutions react with fear. What are they afraid of, you might ask? Perhaps the better question is: What are they afraid for? First and foremost: for their own image. Certain elements in German society seem positively addicted to the idea of their own redemption. This obsession with salvation and the belief that meaningful reparations are even possible at all seem like the real problem to me. Because the notion that there are prescribed rules to follow for redemption also leads to strange conclusions. Like: If you don’t follow Germany’s rules, then you’re an antisemite.
For Germany, the concept of reparations seems to have become a kind of redemption in and of itself. And in this construct of redemption, Germany is fundamentally bound together with the State of Israel. This began with official ceremonies where representatives of the Israeli state were received at the Bundestag by delegates from every German political party. And it has long since moved into the private sphere, as well. One of the first people I met in Germany described himself as “Antideutsch” [Anti-German]. He had a massive Israeli flag hung in his bedroom, and the only thing that topped how uncomfortable this revelation made me was his smiling expectation that I, as an Israeli, would appreciate this flag and his IDF t-shirt.
Back when I was still on dating apps, I wrote “no Israel fanatics, please” on my profile. By this point, I’d been living in Germany for a few years and had already encountered certain people who only dated Israelis. Being in their presence made me uncomfortable. Especially in a romantic context. It felt like dating my government. But of course, my comment only drew more Israel fanatics to my profile, people who’d inevitably ask me at some point: “But, why not?” and then proceed to argue with me about Zionism.
I can’t count the number of times Germans have tried to draw me into conversation so they can make jokes about Arabs or Muslims after finding out that I’m Israeli. How often I’ve been lectured by non-Jews—by Germans—because of my criticism of Israel. Because I should know better. Because I should really stop and consider German sensitivities before I speak out against Israel.
Germany’s use of Israel transcends social circles and class, from the highest political elite down to the most average everyday German. It serves as an outlet for Germany’s own nationalism, militarism, and Islamophobia. When Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced that “Israel is doing our dirty work for us,” he meant this in more ways than one, whether or not he was aware of it himself. Israel is also performing catharsis for Germany, and the ablution of dirty thoughts is dirty work, indeed.
But there is also more to it than that. The non-Jewish editor-in-chief of an Axel Springer media outlet can now brand Israel-critical Jews “antisemites” on X. Klaus Biesenbach, the non-Jewish director of the New National Gallery in Berlin can invite a Jewish artist like Nan Goldin to a solo exhibition and profit off her work for months while simultaneously denigrating her in public for her position on Israel. Such acts do more than simply comment on the Jewish people they concern. They reveal something about the people doing them, as well. They demonstrate that these people consider themselves in a position to say such things at all. They show who is permitted to determine just who gets labeled as an antisemite and who doesn’t: who has successfully completed the German program of becoming good again.
Today, Germany is back. And Germans now get to decide not only who is and who is not an antisemite, they also get to determine who is and isn’t Jewish, who counts as a victim of antisemitism and who does not. Because when being Jewish becomes synonymous with being a Zionist, the path suddenly becomes a whole lot shorter to that place where non-Jewish Germans can begin to see themselves on the side (or in the place?) of ‘Jews’ simply by virtue of being Zionists.
“Loving Israel” has become an instrument for the creation of a new kind of Germanness. And this kind of Germanness no longer even requires love bombing Israelis anymore. With the war in Ukraine at their doorstep, Germany is rebuilding its military at breakneck speed. And when Chancellor Merz declares that Germany is “back on the European and international stage,” he blends this new development with a fatal—if fully predictable—implication I can summarize with the following logic: After so many years of “Israel can be nationalistic” and “Israel can be militaristic” and “Israel can be expansionist” and “Israel can violate international law”—Germany can finally do all these things, too.
The logic of the nation-state dictates that I must feel a sense of indigeneity in Israel—a logic that dominates in both the countries I find myself torn between. And if I reject this, my very existence confronts my German counterparts with a bitter truth: that Israel is not the salvation for us Jews, and can, therefore, also offer no salvation for Germans. That’s annoying, isn’t it. Jewish people are welcome in Germany, but only as long as they know and emphasize and think incessantly about how their ‘real’ country is elsewhere.
Sometimes I think we find our indigeneity at a particular point in time and not necessarily in one particular place. We, as in: we Jews. That’s the thing about a diasporic people: We live in the USA, Germany, Yemen, Morocco, Palestine, Israel, you name it. But we are at home in moments of exile. Our indigeneity is located somewhere between homeland and non-homeland. In the desert that the Book of Numbers called BeMidbar in Hebrew, literally “in the desert.” The desert is a no-man’s land. A place where we, as Jews, find our indigeneity. There where the Bible tells us we received our Law. We were called Hebrews then: ‘Īvrīm in Hebrew, from ʻēḇer, like the German word: Ufer [shore]. According to the Bible, Abraham, the first Hebrew, came from Aram-Naharaim to Canaan, to the other shore of the Euphrates River. A nomadic life, this state of being from another place, is also built into the word, into the very heart of what it means to be Jewish. And a Jewish sense of indigeneity? Temporary. Found in moments of transition, crossing the river, in the desert, for many, also in Auschwitz: that eternal transition into the hereafter or into the broken world of trauma. For my grandfather, in his mother’s screams. He was born there, found in it a window, and he died there, as well.
Germany has invested so much money into its public relations: “More than any other country in the world!” a proud employee of the Federal Foreign Office once told me. And yet, all of us still failed to understand just what this means. There is no reparation, no redemption, for the Holocaust. Talking about it, not to mention making it one’s goal is futile. It’s far more important—and would be far more productive— if we could finally initiate policies of responsibility when it comes to the prevention of war crimes and genocide. So that another Holocaust will truly never happen again to anyone. Because in a way, Germany has made it possible for Israel to become the nation-state it is today: with blood on its hands precisely in Germany’s own image. And for this, too, there can be no forgiveness.
Translation by Jon Polizzi. Used by permission of the author.
