Event Reports
Dr. Sharon Pardo, Director of the Centre for the Studies of European Politics and Society, opened the workshop, quoting from a speech by the Czech-French novelist Milan Kundera in 1985: “If the Jews, even after Europe so tragically failed them, nonetheless kept faith with that European cosmopolitanism, Israel, their little homeland finally regained, strikes me as the true heart of Europe – a peculiar heart located outside the body.”
Using this quote, Pardo outlined the topics of the workshop which was centred around the Jewish hopes and disappointments with regard to Europe, as well as the successful and difficult neighborhood of Israel and the EU.
The first Panel led by Harold Paisner, President of the BGU Foundation, focused on two outstanding German Jewish personalities who shaped the modern Europe with their visions and beliefs in very different ways: Walther Rathenau (born 1867, assassinated by right-wing extremists in Berlin on June 24, 1922) and Fritz Bauer (born 1903, died in Frankfurt am Main in 1968).
Ambassador ret. Dr. Hubertus von Morr portrayed Walther Rathenau as an industrialist and writer, liberal politician and intellectual of European importance. The Rathenau family contributed enormously to the industrial boom and to academic life that helped to catapult the young German Empire, founded in 1871, within a few years and decades into the rank of a globally respected great power.
Rathenau thought in transnational terms and – comparable to the representatives of the London Bloomsbury Group – built bridges among the economic, intellectual and artistic elites of his time. As an example, v. Morr referred to the encounter between Rathenau and André Gide in Colpach.
Above all, v. Morr elaborated on Rathenau as a visionary who developed pioneering models for the integration of Europe long before his all too brief tenure as Foreign Minister in 1922. In many respects, Rathenau had already anticipated the Schuman Plan after 1945. That applies for the geographical dimension of the original European Community. Moreover, it also refers to the assumption that economic integration will be the driving force for political integration. “The economy is our destiny” had been Rathenau’s anti-ideological credo. Nowadays, that observation became reduced to the campaign slogan “It's the economy, stupid!”.
It was part of the tragedy of the German patriot Walter Rathenau, whom right-wing extremists denounced as “fulfilment politician” after the First World War, that he was far ahead of his time. He wanted to protect Germany and Europe from the great catastrophes which he saw dawning with astonishingly clear views.
Franco Burgio, working with the European Commission in Brussels, praised the social democrat, judge and prosecutor Fritz Bauer. The jurist had returned deliberately to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949 to show his countrymen that the rule of law and a servile spirit do not go along with each other.
In 1952, as a prosecutor in the “Remer Trial”, Bauer succeeded that the judiciary recognized the actions of the resistance fighters of July 20, 1944 as legitimate because the Nazi regime had not been a state governed by the rule of law, but a state of lawlessness.
In 1963, as prosecutor in the Frankfurt “Auschwitz Trials”, Bauer was able to convinced the court and the public that the SS forces of the concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz could not build their defense tactic on saying that they had “only followed orders”. A criminal command was legally invalid. The conviction that higher-ranking legal norms existed, creating a yardstick for a state’s actions, was a fundamental idea of European integration.
Following that presentation, Michael Mertes, Director of KAS Israel, draw attention to the meaning of the Shoa for the European integration project. With regard to Franco Burgio, he pointed out that major criminal cases such as the Nuremberg Trials or the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem had sharpened the awareness of the existence of legal standards above the national level.
However, the war and the rejection of nationalism evolved as the cornerstone of European remembrance and history policies during the first post-war decades until the late 1980s. “Europe” had been conceived and legitimized as an alternative model to the destructive sovereignty fetishism of the European nations. At that time, the conviction could prevail in Germany, that May 8 was a day of liberation also for the defeated Germany.
Only in the 1990s, a paradigm shift took place within the European historical consciousness. The Shoa was recognized as a catastrophe if not totally disconnected from but certainly to be distinguished of the war. However, Europe today is still at least one generation away from a common understanding of history. So far, it has not been successful to integrate Central and Eastern European narratives referring to the decades of 1945 till 1989 into a common narrative of all Europeans.
In the first afternoon session, Ambassador Andrew Standley, head of the EU delegation to Israel, spoke about relations between the EU and Israel. At the same time, his talk was a record of his activity as EU Ambassador in Israel which after four years comes to an end in the summer of 2013. Standley stressed the relationship between Israel and the EU was much closer and better than one could occasionally suspect from the media coverage. As a matter of fact, European-Israeli economic relations were particularly close as was also true for the intensive cooperation in science and research.
In the view of the EU's efforts to put the Israeli-Palestinian peace process on track again, Standley emphasized that the Israeli settlement policy was by no means the only obstacle on the way to an agreement. However, it was obvious that expanding the settlements further was hindering a two-state solution. Hence, Europeans, who had agreed on that paradigm ever since the Venice Declaration in 1980, reacted with incomprehension and criticism. The EU regards herself as a ‘normative power’, because the common ground could consist neither of language, ethnicity nor religion, but only of the values shared by all Europeans.
Ambassador Alvaro Albacete Perea, Envoy of the Spanish Government for Relations with the Jewish Community and Jewish Organisations, spoke afterwards about the European meaning of “Sefarad”. This expression is the Hebrew name for Spain – what is more it stands for a cultural concept of prosperous coexistence between Muslims, Jews and Christians which had been characteristic for a long period of time on the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. That life together was put to an end due to the completion of the Reconquista in 1492, the expulsion of all the Jews who had not gotten themselves baptized from all territories of the Spanish Crown, as well as the rise of the Spanish Inquisition.
There was a new awareness today in his country, explained Albacete, how much actually Spain hurt herself because of the persecution and expulsion of the Jews. At the same time, one was proud of the fact that Spain had been a model for successful culturally religious plurality for so long throughout Europe. Of course, you could not undo the course of history. Nevertheless, it was important to the Spanish government today to renew and foster the connections to the Sephardic Jews whose families had been handing down the memory of the heyday of “Sefarad” over the centuries.
In the final session, moderated by Dr. Sharon Pardo, the panellists took a look at the development of the European Jewish community after the Shoa. Regarding their future prospects, Dr. Dov Maimon from the Jewish people Policy Institute drew a rather sceptic picture. Hopes that a European Jewry could evolve in Europe after the end of the East-West conflict as a third pillar next to the Israeli and American Jewry, had not been fulfilled. Israel and Europe, Maimon explained, approached the imperative of “Never again!” in different ways, leading to a mutual alienation. As a result, the European Jews would become subject of enormous tensions.
For Israelis was of utmost importance to never again let others determine their fate, whereas most Europeans stressed the rejection of war as a means of politics. Israeli identity had strong national and religious connotations, while Europe increasingly perceived itself as post-national and post-religious. While Israelis put the emphasis on collective self-determination, Europeans underlined the primacy of individual human rights.
Europe confronted the European Jews faced with an impossible choice: either to assimilate at the cost of their collective identity – or to preserve their collective identity at the cost of becoming more and more a foreign body.
Dr. Shlomo Shpiro from the Argov Center for the Study of Israel at the Bar Ilan University focused on the (Western)German-Israeli intelligence and military cooperation in the 1950s. The role of Israelis of German origin regarding the rapprochement between the young State of Israel and the young Federal Republic of Germany was at the centre of that subject – hidden from the public eye.
Because for Israel it had been all about the question of existence, representatives of the Jewish State tolerated the cooperation with German partners who had eventually served the Nazi regime until the end of the Second World War. Both sides had benefited from the (Western)German-Israeli cooperation – the Federal Republic, not least by the fact that she received intelligence information that was denied to her by the intelligence services of former war-time enemies in the West.
Presenting (Western)German political actors involved in the matter, Shpiro recalled the Minister of Defense Franz Josef Strauß and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Adenauer of course had always aimed for Germany’s reintegration into the international community. But at the same time, he acted out of a genuine moral impetus – especially concerning the regulations of the call for amends (“Wiedergutmachung”) at the beginning of the 1950s, which was met by wide-spread resistance in the German Bundestag.
András Baneth from the European Training Academy presented the topic of combating anti-Semitism in the EU. In that respect, he remarked on the relevant standards (e.g. the “procedure of suspension” under article 7 of the Treaty on the European Union), and also referred to the responsible institutions (e.g. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, FRA). Moreover, the role of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg became topical, too, in particular its Venice Commission (European Commission for Democracy through Law).
Baneth warned against – specifically with in view of Hungary, his own country – to overrate Europe’s legal and institutional means to fight anti-Semitism. In the end, it was necessary to strengthen the immune system in individual societies to which the state could significantly contribute to through the education system.