Wunschmaschine Staatsräson

Part 1: Staatsräson as Desiring Machine

A machine is being built, J said to me. Its name, provisionally, would be Staatsräson, the concise (and somewhat untranslatable) term for Germany’s doctrine of unwavering support for and solidarity with Israel. The German public and political apparatus has scrambled to flesh out this obscure term ever since Angela Merkel made it prominent in the Knesset in 2008. The effort to concretize what it means has dominated large parts of public discussion and politicking in Germany for the past years, the months after October 7 being a time of feverish compilation and assemblage of parts that were manufactured years before. Germany in other words is building a machine, and since one of this machine’s effects has been Germany’s ability to publicly suspect (and accuse) large parts of the world and scores of people of antisemitism – to order the world into camps of potential or manifest antisemites and anti-antisemites – the following questions are plausible and necessary: Why would Germany want that? What desire is assembled with this machine? What does Germany covet?

On the face of it, Staatsräson seems to delineate a politics of relation between two states – Germany and Israel, locked by history in unilateral solidarity. It gave rise to a whole phraseology of speeches, public declarations of solidarity and duty, and arms deals. However, as a machine, its primary function is domestic, inner-German if you will, because „when Germans talk about Israel, they usually talk about themselves“, as Daniel Marwecki writes in his short history of the term „Staatsräson“. A term for inter-state-relationality, in other words, is employed as a stage or tool for national self-relation, for negotiating Germanness in Germany. While speaking Staatsräson thus means speaking toward Israel from Germany, doing Staatsräson in Germany means doing something to itself. The latter process has frequently little or nothing to do with its counterpart Israel, or „the Jews“, or „Jewishness“. At this specific moment, the machine works by-and-large independently of what is happening in Israel or Gaza, who governs or wages war there, how many people are killed, massacred, and starved, or Germany's alleged "change of stance" vis-a-vis the IDF's deadly military campaign. The machine works primarily to sort, organize, and remake Germany.

Staatsräson in other words is a machine to manufacture Germanness, and it does so in increasingly outrageous, punitive, isolationist, phantasmatic ways. This machine is not fueled by desire, because it precisely IS desire – a machine that assembles Germany’s desire into a productive assembly line or mechanism that almost effortlessly and constantly produces new German national and nationalist mythologies. Staatsräson is, to recycle an old term by Deleuze and Guattari, a desiring machine („Wunschmaschine“) – ready to be hooked up and linked with other machines of statehood: jurisdiction, law-making, policing, surveillance, exclusion, fascisticization, and so forth. It is a means to give Germany a place in the world (as e.g. righteous entity among nations labelled antisemitic), and to put people in Germany (citizens, immigrants, guests, asylum-seekers) into their respective places. Staatsräson is a way, and maybe the dominant way at this moment, to remake German desire into politics. Which indeed has a nasty ring to it.

1. Getting rid of the Nazis, getting rid of the Jews

Firstly, the desiring machine called „Staatsräson“ (in time, it deserves a new name adequate to its scope) allows for the translation of desire into statements, into discourse. It produces new sentences, provides them to politicians, journalists, and activists, makes them sayable and intelligible in the current climate. The desiring machine also produces silences, such as the silence of chancellor Olaf Scholz when Benjamin Netanjahu stood next to him in October of 2023 and said „Hamas are the new nazis“. A single journalist, from a blog called Nachdenkseiten, asked for this silence at a federal press conference: does Scholz agree with Netanjahu’s statement since he did not contradict it? The press secretary had no comment to offer on Scholz’s silence, or on Bibi’s transference of nazism from Germans to Hamas, which prima facie should be identity-shattering to the country of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, of nazi-children and grandchildren, such as Scholz or myself. There could be no comment, maybe because Netanjahu had pronounced a primal German desire, holding sway over the entire postwar period, a bit too clearly: not to be "the nazis" anymore.

But there is little clarity in silence, and there are plentiful clear or naked statements that the desiring machine produces and offers for public distribution. The following statement for example was given as a commentary by journalist Sebastian Engelbrecht. In public radio Deutschlandfunk on January 19, Engelbrecht commented on the international boycott called „Strike Germany“ with these words:

"Anti-Semitism is a ban. According to antisemitic thinking, what is Jewish must be excluded from the Volkskörper. What is Jewish must not be allowed to exist. It is astonishing that Germany as a whole is now also falling under this spell of antisemitism (...) If you open the Strike Germany page on the internet, the structure of antisemitism becomes graphically clear: the word 'Germany' is crossed out without further ado. In other words: Germany, the country of Jew-lovers, is crossed out, erased from the world. The ban of Jew-hatred is extended to those who show solidarity with Israel. (...) Germany will be banned and erased from our consciousness. This totality of Jew-hatred is one of its hallmarks." (1)

Aside from the problematic phrases and its obsession with typographic decisions, the comment (which is not transcribed on the DLF-page) is less a personal confession or political analysis than a channeling of collective and collectivizing desire. The journalist’s commentary tries to find words for this desire, which is basically that those who stand in solidarity with Israel themselves become victims – like Israel – of antisemitism. As the international BDS movement targets Israel with boycotts, and therefore in terms of Staatsräson is antisemitic, so Germany becomes boycotted and crossed out, subject to an antisemitic attack. Germany is subjected to the „ban“ (Bann) that antisemitism is – it is hated, boycotted, crossed out, and erased like that nation it stands in solidarity with – as a nation and a people. Germany, „country of Jew-lovers“ (“Land der Judenfreunde”) is treated as Israel, land of the Jews („der jüdische Staat“). Antisemitism, the hatred of Jews, can in other words target individuals or state bodies that love or are friends to Jews.

I want to ridicule neither the phrase „country of Jew-lovers“ for its historical or present preposterousness, nor the problematic (but currently automatic) equation of Israel and „the Jews“. What is more interesting to me is that this commentary overshoots the current phraseology of solidarity and anti-antisemitism, because it is a discourse of desire: the desire for Germany to be as attacked as Israel is, and, by extension, for Germans to be as attacked as Jews are. This is a dream logic at work, the dream to be interpellated as a „Jew-lover“ (which nobody does, except Engelbrecht himself), and a dream to be attacked, erased, and hated like a Jew. This means, in the context of the commentary, two things: The German as “Jew-lover” is also expulsed from the Volkskörper (therefore no nazi anymore), and Jews and non-Jews are targeted by the same antisemitism. Antisemitism makes the Jew and the non-Jew equals because they are equally banned, erased, annulled. While the desire underlying this operation is somewhat banal (Germans don’t want to be nazis anymore), the function of the operationalization of this desire is not (Germans are like Jews). Its consequences – politically and institutionally – are grave: critics of German politics can be labelled (and persecuted) as antisemites.

This is in my opinion one basic operational move of the desiring machine called Staatsräson: supplanting, switching positions, and turning inter-national solidarity and German-Jewish relations into a domestic inner-German apparatus of control. It allows for practical and activist applications of German national(ist) mythologies in the name of fighting antisemitism, or – see above – in the name of “self-defense”: e.g. that Germany is the only country to understand and prevent antisemitism (and thus promised to intervene on Israel’s behalf at the ICJ), that no antisemitism can take place without German sanction (hence the bureaucracy of Antisemitismus-Beauftrage, who are almost exclusively non-Jewish individuals); that all attacks on Germany’s Staatsräson are also attacks on Israel, so that pro-palestinian or anti-Staatsräson voices in Germany can be persecuted in the name of anti-antisemitism and solidarity; that antisemitism is primarily “imported” to Germany; that policing of demonstrations, of students, of discourse, of institutional funding have to be closely scrutinized for antisemitic angles which in the current climate extends not only to critiques of Israel or anti-Jewish hate, but also criticism of Germany.

Interestingly, the move to extend the „totality of Jew-hatred“ to the non-Jew, to the German, is covered by the IHRA declaration, which has been criticized for equating attacks on Israeli governments with hatred of jews. What has been less commented on is that antisemitism, according to the definition, can extend to Jews and "non jewish individuals". FAZ-editor Jürgen Kaube spelled this out in a gleeful commentary on the verbal attacks against Mirjam Wenzel, non-jewish director of Frankfurt’s Jewish Museum, attacks that have been labelled as antisemitic. Kaube opened his article with the question “Can a non-jewish person become a victim of an antisemitic attack?”, only to conclude:

„In a variation of Adorno's dictum that anti-Semitism is the rumor about the Jews, one could better formulate that anti-Semitism is now the rumor about all those who deal with Judaism.“ (2)

What the Wunschmaschine Staatsräson allows for, in other words, is the imaging of antisemitism without the necessity for Jews, and victimhood in the vicinity of Jewishness – which for Germans, “who stand firmly on Israel’s side” – is almost everywhere. And since it is a machine, it facilitates the relentless production of these things, as well as the production of more and more potential or manifest threats (an increasing number of them Jewish) to fuel its desire.

[This text was reprinted and distributed by “Strike Germany” without my permission. I am not associated with Strike Germany, and was not contacted by them in any way.]

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Footnotes:

1) „Antisemitismus ist ein Bann. Was jüdisch ist, muss, dem antisemitischen Denken zufolge, aus dem Volkskörper ausgesondert werden. Was jüdisch ist, darf nicht existieren. Es ist erstaunlich, dass nun auch Deutschland als Ganzes in diesen Bann des Antisemitismus gerät [...] Schlägt man die Seite Strike Germany im Internet auf, wird die Struktur des Antisemitismus auch graphisch deutlich: das Wort ‚Germany’ ist kurzerhand durchgestrichen. Mit Worten: Deutschland, das Land der Judenfreunde, wird gestrichen, wird ausradiert aus der Welt. Der Bann des Judenhasses wird ausgeweitet auf die, die sich mit Israel solidarisieren. [...] Deutschland wird mit dem Bann belegt, und aus dem Bewusstsein gestrichen. Diese Totalität des Judenhasses ist eines seiner Kennzeichen.“ Sebastian Engelbrecht, DLF.

2) „In Abwandlung des Diktums Adornos, der Antisemitismus sei das Gerücht über die Juden, könnte man besser formulieren, inzwischen sei der Antisemitismus das Gerücht über alle, die sich mit dem Judentum beschäftigen.“ Jürgen Kaube, FAZ.