ConWatch: Week 1,817
Does Germany have a constitution yet? This week: Germany demands a Wiederwiedergutmachungsabkommen with Israel. Plus: Death of a satirist.
In a stunning moment in German television history, an accolade previously rivaled only by a 1996 ten-part Tatort retrospective and watching this stick of butter melt, former German President Joachim Gauck told NATO Secretary-General body double Markus Lanz that he is calling for a Wiederwiedergutmachungsabkommen between Germany and Israel.
A new reparations agreement, however, would not be for Germany to pay Israel. Now, it would be Israel that needs to pony up for offenses committed against Germany.
Calling himself a “precociously woke anti… not antisemite,” Gauck struggled to find the right words to express the pathological attachment he personally and the state he once represented feel towards the ex-post-facto Middle East recipient of German guilt gelt on behalf of Europe’s murdered and almost murdered Jews, before finally landing on the right turn of phrase: “rather, uh, philosemite.”
His unconditional love for the Jews Israel is why Gauck has become “so completely furious at what this government, this prime minister, and in particular his really terrible allies from such a strange rightwing are doing.”
Not what they’re doing to Palestinians, whom Gauck has determined are not the victims of genocide because he “can’t determine” if they are victims of genocide, nor to almost every other place around them, but more egregious than any of that — what they’re doing to Germany.
Israel’s “irresponsible actions” that aren’t “indiscriminate” or “criminal,” but merely “disproportionate,” are a clear violation of the original reparations agreement from 1952, for which reparations must now be paid.
Because someone’s got to pay for all the therapy that will be needed to dig the Teutonic Imaginary out of the bunker of denial it’s built for itself so it can “accept for now” claims that the claimants themselves don’t accept.
The whole point of the original deal was to allow Germany to return to being a country Gauck described as one of “pretty songs and lovely poems and philosophy,” which is why he was “totally thrilled when the Israelis had their own country where they could finally protect themselves” from the Nazi reenactors they conjured and “could shape their own reality, for which they established a democracy” that would finally answer Europe’s Jewish Question by creating a Palestinian one.
Israel, Gauck said, you had one job: Be good. To make Germany good again. That is literally what Wiedergutmachung is.
Instead, Israel is committing the crime of crimes: Making Germany feel bad.
Evidence supporting Gauck’s call for a new claims conference played out for all to see on live TV, as he had to “force” himself to criticize Israel, “with tears in my eyes.” How a country “we had so much hope in” and “you feel deeply connected to can go down such a path” stirs “not just anger, but deep sadness.”
Making the former German president cry over his inability to comprehend how one European ethno-national project spawned by another European ethno-national project could possibly reproduce similar results demands recompense.
Reparations are due, he added, regardless that “no Israeli has said, ‘We want to kill the Arabs because they are Arabs’” except for all the Israelis who have said that.
Such a distinction could prove an obstacle to any future Wiederwiedergutmachungsabkommen. Legal scholars suggest that, to enforce claims against claims, Germany would have to prove actual malice.
By Gauck’s own admission, all Israel has done is “take revenge against injustice committed” against it and “kill those responsible for it,” who, invoking Germany’s preeminent memory culture warper, is everyone from “that milieu” — literally a “middle place” otherwise known as the Middle East.
If efforts to enforce a Wiederwiedergutmachungsabkommen fail as a result, Germany could push for a Wiederwiederwiedergutmachungsabkommen.
In this arrangement, Palestine, as the rightful heir to German crimes, would pay Israel, as the rightful heir to all that is Jewish, to compensate Germany so it may continue the “tradition” of “every German leader swearing us to be Israel’s closest ally.”
Only then can Germany ensure it is the “last country to abandon its solidarity with Israel,” he added. “The last.”
Bupkes Shiva Bonus!
The Bupkes celebrates the life of one of our inspirations. Singer, songwriter, satirist, and nudzh extraordinaire Tom Lehrer died a few days ago at the age of 97. He was, as his name suggests, a master teacher of a form in which we are but a humble student.
He knew bupkes when he saw it.
He saw the era of exploding pagers coming long before pagers existed to explode. May his memory be a blessing, and may his ditties be a Kaddish unto themselves.