Wunschmaschine Staatsräson

Pt. 2: Punisher comes to Germany

Read the intro to „Wunschmaschine Staatsräson“ in part 1. In the following parts, I'll be further speculating in my claim from the intro: "Staatsräson in other words is a machine to manufacture Germanness, and it does so in increasingly outrageous, punitive, isolationist, phantasmatic ways." Today: Punitive.

I have claimed that the desiring machine that imagines Germany as a potential victim of antisemitism also imagines a punitive space where that same „antisemitism against Germany“ can be punished – chiefly by authorities and institutions, but also by bystanders of “the discourse”. The historical obligation to fight antisemitism and to prevent a new fascism – for the longest time thought to entail an educational, moral, commemorative, and also partly legal project – is to be transformed into a hunt for antisemites and the exclusion of antisemitic voices from public venues and tax-funded platforms. Those who do not properly join in Germany’s historical obligation and rituals of solidarity with Israel become likely targets of such punishment – even preemptively, as the many violations of free assembly and free speech in recent months indicate.

Events like the „Palästina Kongress“ or the protest encampment at the Bundestag in Berlin have been cancelled and forcefully removed, university protests have been dissolved, organizers and speakers are barred from entering the country, they have been arrested and had their homes invaded – all measures where German police punishes or prevents activities under the rationale of „fighting antisemitism“. Around this topic in other words, a broad punitive apparatus has been assembled which in this form has not existed before. 

This punitive turn of state-controlled anti-antisemitism or Staatsräson comes as no surprise: It is the overspill of a symbolic space that had been established beforehand and a materialization of a desire to remake German national identity. It is part of a desiring machine overriding current political and cultural rationales in German politics. This specific overflow of desire into punishment was variously foreshadowed and evoked at various instances, primarily of course on social media – avenue of affective surcharges par excellence. I will focus on one particularly weird example of such phantasmatic overspill, and speculate on its significance: shortly after October 7, Julian Reichelt – ousted journalist of WELT/Springer now running the billionaire-sponsored rightwing news outlet NIUS – put this image in his Twitter bio:

The image shows a badge pairing a star of David with the stylized skull-symbol of Marvel Comic’s anti-hero Punisher. The image comes with a history: As 972mag reports, the punisher-logo had begun to appear in the IDF forces around 2020, after having been a staple in the US army and law enforcement for two decades. It had gained popularity among American soldiers during the „War on Terror“ in Iraq in the 2000s (also being adopted by Iraqi forces), and US police personel used it in response to the Black Lives Matter protests – stylizing police as active punishers of so-called „rioters“. The US-American alt-right also adopted the vigilante symbol around the time of Trump’s first win: The Punisher skull was displayed e.g. at the Unite-The-Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, where neofascist demonstrators chanted "Jews will not replace us“ (and fewer people were arrested than at Emory University last week), and the skull emblem was also visible at the Capitol Storm in 2021 where various groups engaged in violent action to protest the so-called „stolen election“. In other words, in the past 20 years a broad spectrum of actors has positively associated itself with Frank Castle aka Punisher, an ex-military who avenges the murder of his family by a shadowy mafia – using torture, military firepower, and reckless, indiscriminate killing. 

The Punisher skull in the past decade has been established as a rightwing symbol expressing „righteous and violent resistance“ and as a military emblem broadly associated with the „War on Terror“. The Punisher sits therefore at the center of a fuzzy coalition, a shared symbol of military, police and various forces of rightwing extremism. In light of this diverse history of the emblem and its memetic usage, it makes sense to ask for the narrative core of the Punisher-figure and its symbolic value for these groups, and by extension for Julian Reichelt. The Punisher’s storyline and motivation focuses on an original trauma or loss (the murder of his family) caused by generic „evildoers“ (the perpetrators vary between storylines from mobsters to terrorists) and therefore legitimate violent retaliation against that loss and the people who caused it. Because of his trauma and military training, the Punisher, in opposition to other righteous vigilantes such as Batman, follows no moral code: He tortures, uses bystanders as lure, and prioritizes killing enemies over protecting civilians. He is a walking „warzone“.

What work of supplanting is done in this transferral of a symbol used by rightwing extremists, by racist police in the US and soldiers in Iraq, by Israel’s army in Gaza, and now – as an expression of solidarity – by a German Ex-Springer journalist? What desire motivates Julian Reichelt to reference the IDF’s use of a murderous (American) vigilante figure avenging a fundamental trauma? What does Julian Reichelt covet? Because surely, while the combination of Punisher skull with the Israeli flag as used by the Israeli Defense Forces is one thing, the proud self-stylization of a rightwing attack journalist such as Reichelt with the same badge surely is another. In the context of the October 7 massacre by Hamas, the IDF’s use of the Punisher logo might embroil the logic of Israel’s military “self-defense” with a motive of killing for revenge, for the “higher justice” that marks superhero-inflected vigilanteism.

In Reichelt’s adoption of the image, however, a dream logic seems to be at work: Reichelt seems to take his solidarity with Israel and the IDF to the level of identification, imagining his twitter account to be part of such retaliatory forces. Supporting Israel means to support a “punishing” military, to feel and act militaristic and punitive about antisemitism in Germany. Donning the badge for the NIUS-journalist might mean to transform the historical lessons of „Never Again“ into the active punishment of antisemites, likely to be carried out in his journalistic, or rather agitational work. 

However, this is a different form of identification than what I laid out in part one – the desire to occupy „Jewishness“ and claim the status of „victim of antisemitism“ from a Herkunftsdeutsche positionality, to share into Jewish endangerment. For, to become Punisher means not to claim the other’s position, but to claim a loss of positionality or belonging in itself that funnels an individual into becoming pure and never-ending retaliatory action – a walking war zone, as it were. To become Punisher is not to become someone else, but to avenge the loss of something that secured one’s position in the world – and to retaliate against that loss of world by all available means. The Punisher does not aim to restore a stable world in which the victims might claim victimhood and the perpetrators are simply brought to justice so that morality is put in place again – he is retaliating to combat loss itself and to undo all possible distinctions between victim and aggressor. Punisher is a figuration that embodies pure desire for punishment that overcomes a defunct law, that enters immoral territory or a warzone beyond morality, inflicting loss because loss was caused. With the words of Lauren Berlant, Punisher would embody a form of desire itself, „… a law of disturbance unto itself to which the subject must submit to become a subject of her own unbecoming“ (Desire/Love, 26). Desire as a machine of infinite punishment.

Following Reichelt’s appropriative dream logic, one can therefore ask: What was violently taken from this German person and who is the punishment directed against? What have „majority Germans“ (Mehrheitsdeutsche), for whom Reichelt seems to speak, lost that sanctions an imaginative space of indiscriminate self-defense, righteous revenge, and violent vigilanteism? Quite simply, it might be what animates the current scramble to transform Staatsräson into a largely undefined, somewhat extralegal, and highly impactful machine of desire: What Germany has lost and wants to punish for, is its exceptionalism.

This exceptionalism stems from the Holocaust and the self-understanding that Germany, especially West Germany, had developed in the postwar period. With the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, triggered by historian Ernst Nolte’s comparison of nazi extermination industries with Stalin’s gulags and what he called the „Asiatische Tat“, the progressive position in Germany claimed the incomparability and singularity of the Shoah as a necessary counterpoint to such relativism: the nazi crimes were singular and nazi Germany’s inhumanity was exceptional, thus the nationally collectivizing „process of learning“ from them would also be singular and exceptional.

This position was hardwon from the broadly revisionist positions such as Nolte’s and led to a national consensus that the redemptive and commemorative culture of the Shoah in Germany had to be exceptional and exemplary, with clear demarcations of victims and perpetrators and broad moral and political obligations following from this exceptionalism– among them a recognition of all victim groups, a generalized fight against antisemitism and racism, and also a forgetting of colonial atrocities. The Land/Volk der Täter was to be clear in its commemoration of the victims and in the self-reflection of to how act on the imperative of „Never again“. In her comparative book Learning from the Germans, Susan Neiman supports such a notion of German exceptionalism in dealing with the past, and holds out Germany’s memorial culture and „acceptance of responsibility“ as a guideline for America’s engagement with its own racist histories. The current idea of Staatsräson purports to stand firmly in line with this unique German responsibility, indeed it is – as an internationally unique „reason of state“ – the very expression of exceptionalism.

So how and why is this exceptionalism lost? One might argue that the rhetoric describing Hamas or Islamic terrorism as „the new nazis“ (from Netanyahu to Springer) or the demand that Palestine need to be bombed out like nazi Germany (as per the antideutsche bulwark Bahamas, referencing this tweet) has at least in part compromised German exceptionalism: The privilege of being the singular Land/Volk der Täter has been somewhat surrendered. It is – joyously or strategically – given up in order to get the political, moral, and material support for Israel’s military campaign in line with Germany’s historical obligation (the antisemitic trope that „Israel have become the nazis“ does the same thing). Further, prevalent descriptions of the Hamas massacre as „the largest killing of Jews after the Holocaust“ (Frank-Walter Steinmeier), a „second Holocaust“ (Josias Terschüren), or a „reenactment of the Holocaust“ (Hedwig Richter) – phrases to evoke a “singularity in repitition” – have also consistently undermined the very exceptionality of the Holocaust that Staatsräson needs to uphold and derives its authority from.

This is a contradictory gesture: With their own argumentative measures to condemn Hamas’ violence against Jews and Israelis (Never again), mainstream German commentators compromise the very historical exceptionality that the Holocaust constitutes (It is happening again). In other words, they fail to protect „German exceptionalism“ while trying to fulfil it. If “other nazis” commit pogroms and the Holocaust is happening again, Germany has lost its status as a singularly redemptive Täter-nation and beacon of memory politics. This constitutes a fundamental loss for national mythology that sends the state apparatus on the path of desire, a Flucht nach vorne, „towards her own unbecoming“ (Berlant): Staatsräson can only avenge Germany’s lost exceptionalism by becoming exceptional in its punishment of those marked as responsible for the loss.

This is of course a paradoxical movement, a switch of logistics as it were, which might indicate why the Punisher’s flawed logic can be advanced as part of the collective imaginary: Revenge and punishment of „evil-doers“ will never undo the loss, but it will make you exceptional among those that practice a „higher“, extralegal justice – a justice which gets rid of due process, jurisdictional frameworks, and consistently blurs the line between civilians and enemies (e.g. between pro-Palestine protesters in the US and Hamas). The Punisher’s logic does not restore what was lost – neither family or justice – but forces this loss onto the world: It makes impervious to morals, is unafraid to enter ambiguous or plainly unjust territory, and allows for almost indiscriminate revenge. Its principle drive is punitive, not restorative or redemptive. 

Of course, Reichelt’s use of the Punisher-meme might also be read as plain if edgy solidarity with the IDF’s military campaign. However, I think such intuitive memetic operations – overspills of desire that attach to unexpected symbols – first and foremost domestic, and they aim to produce exclusionary, phantasmatic, and punitive versions of Germanness, of what it means to “do Staatsräson” in Germany. What Reichelt’s image politics articulate is an explicit version of the desire animating current efforts officially labelled as „fighting antisemitism“: It articulates the end of the „civilizing/educational project“ of memory politics and Holocaust-remembrance and its replacement with an escalating action program to cancel, ban, and otherwise punish „antisemites“ – who can be almost anyone articulating even mild critiques of this punitive turn. Punishment is extended for example to those international and domestic voices that have been articulating why an „end to German exceptionalism“ might be necessary – whether because of an ongoing genocide in Gaza, an volatile neofascism in many countries including Germany, or the necessity of acknowledging colonial violence and its ongoing racist legacies within the project of German national identity. Staatsräson, in my view, materializes a somewhat “prejudicial” apparatus that overrides all such possibilities of discourse, critique, participation, or contextualization in order to commit to excessive punitive action: An instrumentalization of “anti-antisemitism” for all sorts of preemptive and instantly executive measures – aiming not at redemption, but punishment.