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“Nothing can be taken for granted – least of all freedom, democracy and security”. No one knew that better than our parents and grandparents. They had to live through terrible things. My father, a concentration camp survivor, lost almost his entire family during the Holocaust. My mother can barely come to terms with her own wartime experiences to this day and carries them with her throughout her life. We, the second and third generation, by contrast grew up – at least in the western part of Germany – in peace and freedom. Against the background of the dreadful experiences of our parents’ generation, we experience them as fragile and worth protecting, even though peace and freedom were our own normality. Freedom cannot be taken for granted, and if we treat it as though it could, we shall lose it. We Jews are highly sensitive to this and sense how hate speech on social media can escalate into a society-wide pogrom mood. Culprits are sought, found, attacked. It can happen so quickly. And yet we actually have an ideal safeguard for freedom: the Grundgesetz (Germany’s Basic Law, its constitution) serves all people living in the Federal Republic of Germany as the guarantor of their freedom. It is a protective shield and forms the foundation on which we can live together in freedom, democracy and security. The Basic Law is celebrating its 70th birthday these days, and it seems as though the Basic Law now needs us. We would have to honour it, celebrate it and fill its values with life through our daily actions. All structures are subject to constant processes of erosion; they weather, lose definition, become unstable. Bridges and railway tracks have to be maintained, and gardens need tending to stay in good shape. This applies no less to our democracy and our society. Voter turnout among the under-25s is always far below the national average. If parts of the young generation are giving up, that should help us to understand where things are heading. Too many people have decoupled themselves from political affairs and from society’s decision-making. We may lament this, but we search helplessly for the right way to deal with it. This helplessness has grave consequences: Right-wing, left-wing and Islamist fascists are gaining influence, the tone is becoming harsher and society is sailing into a storm. Already people in our country are placing themselves above the law and despising our values. From right-wing extremists in Saxony to Islamists in Berlin, freedoms are being abused for their anti-liberal agenda. Thus Nazis from the party “Dritter Weg” repeatedly march unhindered through Plauen. Posters of the party “Die Rechte” bearing the slogans “Israel is our misfortune” and “We do not just hang up posters” have for weeks now been on display throughout Germany in more and more places . Time and again imams preach things that are incompatible with a free and democratic culture of society. Young Romanians on trial for aggravated robbery insult a presiding judge as a “whore”. Drug dealers who have been arrested several times are provided with specially marked selling pitches in Görlitzer Park. A breach of taboo here, a petty criminal act there, a failure of the state somewhere else. We notice it and register that these things are “actually” not right. Perhaps we even feel the need to do something, but in the same breath we realise how difficult that would be. Instead of fighting those who are driving the erosion of liberal values, we readily take refuge in the supposedly high-minded argument that all these things must be accepted in the name of “tolerance”.
So what, instead of tolerance, should we set against this erosion?
A “functioning” society is the result of a balance: what stabilises society and what demands tolerance of society must be in equilibrium. We achieve stability by, for example, supporting associations and groups that invest time and work in order to serve society. Young people get involved in aid organisations, sports clubs, youth groups and residential homes for the elderly. Neighbourhood festivals can bring people together. The chain of lights marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, and public celebrations of other positive occasions (Europe Day or the anniversary of the Basic Law, for instance), stabilise our sense of “we”. “We” are democracy.
In social discourse the term “democracy” is a “space-creating term”. And “tolerance”, too, calls on us to widen that space to the very limit of what is bearable. Semantically these are two terms that stand on the same side of the equation. Both broaden the social spectrum and both foster a thoroughly positive diversity of society. In doing so, however, they achieve no balance.
Thus our tolerance is rightly called for towards very conservative role models of man and woman, towards curious sexual preferences and outlandish full-body piercings. And the opinion of another person that we do not like at all likewise demands our tolerance.
Society, however, only remains balanced and protected against erosion if, in that equation, “democracy” stands on the other side from “tolerance”. On the one side the militant democracy that represents the interests of the majority and protects minorities, and on the other side tolerance, which challenges the majority. Put differently: on one side of the balancing act stands tolerance and on the other “protective intolerance”. It should be directed at all those who, under the protection of tolerance, exploit the weak points of a free and democratic society. Above all, “protective intolerance” means that we do not remain silent when hard-won fundamental values are called into question. Thus we need protective intolerance, for example, towards Arab macho groups that make mischief in our major cities. Left-wingers who set cars alight deserve no understanding for their brand of “struggle for a better world”, but a court hearing, and the Reichsbürger (adherents of a movement that denies the legitimacy of the Federal Republic) deserve no credit for supposedly being afraid of globalisation, but a place in therapy. Ensuring this is the task of militant democracy with its protective intolerance. Here the “centre of society” is called upon! We Jewish Germans see ourselves firmly anchored in this centre. In doing so we observe that political and media attention is directed to too great an extent above all at the margins of the social spectrum. People often look far to the left or to the far right, or to wherever things look really odd. Since the centre by definition “causes no problems”, it receives little attention and is treated as something self-evident, which stabilises society more or less automatically. If “ordinary citizens” no longer feel seen and valued, populists, of whatever persuasion, have an easy time of it. Populism and the loss of values are a danger not only, but particularly, to Jewish life in Germany.
We Jews expect the German majority society not only to have learned something from history, but also to put what it has learned into practice. “Never again” must be more than an empty phrase – for us Jews too. It is therefore part of Jewish life in Germany to work on “never again” by safeguarding the values of us all.
Certainly we have a historically conditioned, particular need for freedom and security. A history thousands of years old and the experience of different cultures have given us an – often painful – surplus of intercultural experience and have produced a particular instinct for political and social developments. When we see that in Berlin alone antisemitic incidents doubled last year, we recognise a dimension in this that goes far beyond the mere worsening of the future for Jews in Germany. When a Jewish restaurant owner has to listen to a hate-filled, racist tirade lasting several minutes, and a young man wearing a kippah is beaten with a belt by an Arab youth, we see in this an attack on the entire free and democratic culture of society. So when we campaign so intensively for the preservation of the hard-won values of the free democratic basic order, we do so with a clear view of precisely what our Basic Law protects us from.
When we persistently point out antisemitic outbursts, we do so in the knowledge that antisemitism is an indicator of a generally anti-liberal and anti-democratic mindset. For in an antisemitic society the values of freedom from which the non-Jewish parts of the population benefit are also under threat. As a Jew, the feeling for the value of a liberal democracy is part of my DNA. For the 70th anniversary of the Basic Law I wish us all plenty of democracy, plenty of protective intolerance where necessary, and, on that basis, tolerance. Mazal Tov, Grundgesetz! Elio Adler
