Germany is Israel’s biggest trading partner in Europe and one of its strongest allies in the world. Nevertheless, the two nations do not have a “normal” relationship and may never achieve one.
“Both are dealing with the aftermath of the Holocaust,” said David Akov, the consul general of Israel. “One is dealing with the demons of its past, and the other is dealing with the results of those demons.”
Akov made his remarks at a panel discussion that he co-hosted with the outgoing consul general of Germany, Bernd Westphal, on Wednesday, June 15, at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco.
The event, held to celebrate four decades of diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany, was well-attended by both Germans and Jews, many of whom had come straight from the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation’s annual meeting.
Westphal, who is soon returning to Germany, said in his introduction that he was profoundly grateful that he as a 60-year-old German could hold such an event.
Panelist Amir Eshel, a professor of German studies and comparative literature at Stanford University, chose to speak personally about his life, as an example of the relationship between the two countries.
Eshel, who recently celebrated his 40th birthday, is a native Israeli and the grandson of Holocaust survivors. In his early 20s, he explained, he visited Germany with the intent of trying to understand “why.” The question proved too elusive to answer in a short visit, and Eshel ended up obtaining a master’s degree and a Ph.D. at the University of Hamburg, studying how postwar literature, culture and foreign policy dealt with the Holocaust. He also married a German woman.
One story he told was how he worked — as so many young Israelis abroad do — at the Frankfurt Airport, providing security for El Al, the Israeli airline. He described one particularly cold night during which he found himself on duty with a German policeman who was considerably older than himself.
“He told me his life story, how his father was a German soldier and was killed the last week of the war,” said Eshel. “And I told him my life story, how my grandfather was in a forced labor camp in Romania, and my grandmother spent the war running from camp to camp. It was nothing more, we didn’t talk about responsibility or what lessons we took from it. We only spoke about who we are and where we come from.”
During the panel, Christina von Hodenberg, a visiting professor of history and German studies at U.C. Berkeley, described her generation of historians as the first to do detailed research on the Holocaust.
Also 40, she said, “The prior generation left that to the Israeli and American historians.”
The German-Israeli relationship was tricky in the postwar period, she said, because while West Germany began paying reparations to Israel after the signing of the Luxembourg Treaty in 1952, “the Arab states were vigorously courted by [East Germany] and were providing oil that West Germany relied on.”
In the question-and-answer period, Eisen said that once an initial period of silence about the Holocaust had been broken, American Jews hardly spoke of anything else.
Eisen found it especially upsetting when Jewish communities held Holocaust remembrance ceremonies, but did nothing to mark Israeli Independence Day.
“The Holocaust is a piece of our history, and an important one, but it shouldn’t dominate everything else,” he said.