The title of this lecture serves as a conceptual lens through which to assess and explain change in German-Israeli relations; an analytical tool to help us make sense of the many questions raised by this strange relationship. Conceiving the origins of German-Israeli relations as an exchange between rehabilitation and consolidation, or whitewashing and statebuilding, allows for an analysis deeper than the normative philosophical considerations and official representations inherent in the above name pairs. It enables assessing with more distance and clarity the stakes and profits involved in the exchange which this agreement represented. To this day the Reparations Agreement with Israel has remained unique for Germany, as the Federal Republic has granted formal reparations to no other country… This is not to say that Germans refused to acknowledge the past. If we could afford a bit of irony to sum it up, as Robert Moeller has put it, “remembering selectively was not the same as forgetting”.
Here, I’m going to allow myself a short digression related to the reparations politics of my country as an example of how this should not be handled. The 2015 election of the conservative Law and Justice party in Poland (PiS) moved the question of reparations to the top of Poland’s agenda with Germany. By August 2019, following the work of a parliamentary commission, Germany’s reparations debt was assessed at more than $850 billion. Germany insists that the 1990 two-plus-four agreement made reparations moot, and besides Poland gave up their right to claims when it signed the Bierut Treaty with the German Democratic Republic in 1953. Poland retorts that the Soviet Union forced them to conclude the agreement, making it invalid. The head of Poland’s parliamentary Committee on Reparations has drawn a direct comparison with payments to Israel and individual Jewish recipients: “[There are still Polish citizens alive] who experienced the same suffering as the Jewish nation [but received nothing from Germany].” From time to time the ruling class in Poland use the term “reparations”, and the government and the president mention alternately reparations, compensations and satisfactions. At no point do we know though what exactly is meant. One thing would be to evaluate the losses suffered by Poland, another thing would be fighting for claims. It is a very specific category of claims. For clarity: there are very few victims who are still alive. When it comes to the damage to the property, the heir may inherit the claim, but for the fact that someone was a prisoner of Auschwitz the grandchildren will obtain nothing. A sad observation can be made here that for the politicians of Law and Justice party the empty phrases suggesting that the lack of reparations is “unjust” and that this should have been changed a long time ago are just very efficient fuel for the elections…
Israel and West Germany were born a year apart in 1948 and 1949 respectively. Their early history was shaped by the Cold War. Both countries were front line states in the US Soviet conflict, one in the Middle East, one in Central Europe. The founding periods of both were dominated by two elderly and extremely pragmatic statesmen, David Ben-Gurion and Konrad Adenauer. Both men were born in the 19th century. They had witnessed the two world wars and the long struggle between capitalism and communism. And both were well positioned to open and navigate the new international relations that occurred after World War Two. On May 12, 1965 Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany established diplomatic relations. The bilateral relations had begun, however, 13 years earlier, after several years of silence. On September 10, 1952, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Israel's Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, signed an unprecedented agreement in Luxembourg: the Reparations Accord between the two countries.Was it really a Reparations Agreement, and surely not a Restitution Agreement? What prompted both countries to establish such close relations just a few years after World War II? Let's take a closer look. I don't think that many people know a whole lot about it.
A discussion about the Reparations Agreement should begin with the contrasting names given to it by the two sides involved. These names are not incidental. They express differing political rationales, expectations and framings. Moshe Sharett, the Israeli foreign minister, coined the term Shilumim. Based on Jewish legal tradition, Shilumim denotes a punitive payment. It signifies an attempt to repair, handing back of stolen property; it is debt paid, not guilt forgiven. German term they gave to the agreement (and which is still used in the official parlance today): Wiedergutmachungsabkommen. Literally, this translates as “to make good again”. The closeness between reparation and absolution is also illustrated by the fact that in German, the words “guilt” and “debts” share the same root. The contrasting name pairs of Schuld and Schulden, or Wiedergutmachung and Shilumim, reflect the conceptual framing of this lecture: whereas Germany intended to absolve in guilt and rehabilitate itself, Israel sought a contribution to its consolidation in the form of a partial debt repayment. The practice of paying reparations and restitution, then, is also a practice of writing history; of determining who is remembered and who is forgotten.
To understand the Luxembourg Agreement, one must also answer the question: what was the motivation behind it?
For Israel, the establishment of diplomatic relations with West Germany provided an opportunity to secure reparations for the Holocaust and to gain economic support for its fledgling state. When Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel and oversaw the signing of its Declaration of Independence he knew that “States are not served to peoples on golden platters”, Using a Talmudic expression he could also put it in simpler words: “The State of Israel will be no picnic.” The overriding aim was to consolidate the new Jewish homeland against the overbearing odds. Statebuilding. The impetus for Israel's initiative to obtain reparations from Germany was Israel's dire economic condition which was harsh in the last months of 1951; graver, perhaps, than in any other period in the state's independent existence. All the indicators were negative, Israel's imports were exceeding their exports by five times, and at the same time Israel's Jewish population more than doubled, from 650,000 to 1,324,000.
On the other hand, West Germany, under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, was keen on demonstrating its commitment to reconciliation and making amends for the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. Adenauer's thinking was also highly pragmatic: he knew that Germany would not return to the “family of nations”, unless it dealt with its horrific past. Establishing diplomatic relations with Israel and signing the Reparations Accord was a significant step in this direction. It allowed West Germany to seek forgiveness, rebuild its international reputation, and integrate itself back into the community of nations. Quite certainly, it also was the decomplexification of Nazi criminality as it appears in reparation praxis, which made it possible for the German Federal Ministry of Finance to proclaim in the mid-1980s, that Germans should be ‘proud’ of postwar reparation policies.
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