Last autumn I spent three days at the Buchmesse, the Frankfurt International Book Fair, thinking about Germany and Israel. Well, also about books and commerce and literary culture and translation. But mostly about Germany, and its unswerving support of Israel.
Germany’s relationship with Israel is shaped by events residing outside the lived memory of most people. The echoes of the past remain, of course, a formative experience for the post-war generation, now in their seventies and older. But first-hand knowledge of the awful path to war and slaughter is now confined to very few people. Another way of putting this: public understanding of the issues of guilt and responsibility at the core of this relationship have ossified over time. This isn’t unusual. The thing though, is that Israel and Germany have both changed a fair bit in the 80-odd years since the end of World War II. Israel was still Palestine then. A good chunk of what became its population in 1948 were still in Displaced Persons camps here and there. Germany for its part, was first divided and then reunified. That reunification was more than 30 years ago, though.
Israelis don’t always see, or are not always able to see, the social, political, economic and cultural differences that have evolved in Germany since 1945. Some older Israelis think of their age cohort in Germany as the children of the Nazi generation. Some extrapolation further down the generational chain shouldn’t surprise. (Younger Israelis, presumably, do not do this to the same degree – the sheer number of young(ish) Israeli migrants and temporary sojourners in Germany indicates as much.) But one can say much the same about Germans and Israel, about Germans and Jews. From what I’ve seen and heard over time, many don’t really recognize the manifold distinctions separating Jews in the Diaspora—in this case, German Jews—and Israelis who are Jews. Or, for that matter, the differences between the fragment of German Jewry who survived the Holocaust and stayed in Germany, and those who make up the majority of today’s Jewish community in Germany—migrants who mainly arrived in the early 1990s.
The headline expectations on all sides remain much the same, but none of the parties have remained as they were.
I was at the Buchmesse as part of a delegation of Israeli writers and book industry professionals invited to Germany by the country’s Federal Foreign Ministry. Israel’s position in the international community, always bumpy, has been rather uncomfortable over the last couple of years. The war in Gaza, that war of vengeance, it has …. Actually, I don’t know. Has the war concatenated latent and/or malignant strains of anti-Israeli sentiment? Has it betrayed and horrified the many who had accepted in good faith Israel’s protestations, that it didn’t have a committed partner for peace? Both, I suppose. The war has engendered both, and many other points of view lying between the two.
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Here’s a presumption worth testing. Does the book world naturally skew left? My instinctive answer is “yes.” But. I’ve always assumed the book world to be the province of the literate and the informed. Is that to say, then, that the political and social right have by definition excluded themselves from this place? Or that left-leaning positions, as of right, belong there?
Our party of 12 book people visiting Frankfurt from Israel were, if not of the left, certainly liberal in orientation. “Liberal” is a contested category and it isn’t always clear what it stands for – what they, liberals stand for – in today’s Israel. (Hint: what do we liberals think about the status of Palestinian citizens of Israel?) Amorphous though it may be, one thing for certain is that the liberal mindset is a lonely place to inhabit in Israel these days. On the one hand there’s the loathing for a prime minister who already, long before the war, had been assailing the portals of free thinking. But on the other there is awareness, if not out-and-out apprehension, of the specter of antisemitism or of anti-Zionism that emerges unbidden in many conversations about Israel these days.
Over the last two years, literate and informed book people have had much to say about Israel, about the People of the Book. Most of this has been not very good. The facts, and their varying interpretations, are available to all who have an interest, so I won’t rehearse these here. I’ll simply say that I was curious, and also a little apprehensive, about what we would meet in Germany.
What I found was Staatsräson.
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Staatsräson, which loosely translates into “reasons of state,” isn’t a new thing as such. In the years after World War II, West Germany positioned support for Israel’s security as a central building block in its endeavor to rebuild German identity after that war and after the Holocaust. The crimes of the Nazis destroyed Germany’s political and moral identity; to restore it, (West) Germany determined that it must extend a unique concern toward the security of Israel, which now stood as the last redoubt for Jews everywhere.
This imperative was not embraced uniformly. The Christian Democrats, as history records, placed more emphasis on the moral obligation of Germany; the Social Democrats engaged with this as one aspect in fully restoring democratic values to Germany. But the trajectory always positioned Israel as a principal factor in defining the new face that Germany wanted to turn to the world. Israel helped Germany’s political class shape an ideal that had quite significant domestic considerations.
Angela Merkel’s 2008 address to Israel’s Knesset did not define Staatsräson, but rather articulated it in a formal politically meaningful context—diplomatic backing for Israel, setting Israel’s interests as a guiding principle in Middle East diplomacy and (all too often) deescalations, that sort of thing. But strangely, in canonizing the concept Merkel might well have amplified attempts to contest it. Did it mean uncritical and unconditional support of Israel? Who determined what was best for Israel in this compact, Israel or Germany? Was it a geopolitical instrument, or did it extend to social and cultural engagement?
In matters of state and international affairs, Staatsräson has been predictable—and predictably contentious—since 7.10.23. Germany largely stood apart from the rest of the non-authoritarian international community in declining to criticize Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks. To be fair, this sometimes feels like a distinction without a real difference; despite the sound and light on all sides, Israel’s pre-2023 diplomatic relations remain more or less intact.
But domestically, and particularly in the sphere of cultural activity, Staatsräson has become extraordinarily contentious. Most post-industrialized nations are fighting one form or another of what have pithily been labelled “the culture wars.” In the United Kingdom it is the distinction between gender and biological sex. In Israel it is about extending the draft to ultra-Orthodox Jews. In the United States it is … well, yeah, you know.
In Germany, it is Staatsräson.
The dynamic that has emerged pits people demanding the right to criticize Israel as a matter of principle, alongside (not necessarily together with) people demanding the right to voice their support for Palestine, against those who hold that doing so traduces a compact that runs to the very core of post-war Germany. People in the world of culture and the self-styled intelligent arts embrace free speaking and the right to dissent as a defining tenet of their relevance. The problem, though, is that this class of people are often, at least to some degree, dependent on the patronage of the state. The state pays the piper; it assumes, thus, that it gets to dictate the tune that they play.
It might seem wishy-washy to say so, but I can see merits in the arguments made by both sides of this particular culture war. The thing though is that both sides share a failing—a rigidity of purpose that doesn’t always leave space for considered, non-dogmatic thinking.
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About our hosts at the fair. They were generous, patient, punctilious in the best possible sense of the word. We were personally welcomed by the foreign ministry’s director-general and the director of the Buchmesse—this on the opening morning of the event of the year. We were feted by literary dignitaries, shown round the German National Library by its director (who was very keen to show us an engaging permanent exhibition of the library’s German Exile Archives). The chair of the board of trustees of the national literary archives exhorted us, good naturedly, to read more than Goethe and Schiller, and assured us of a personal welcome should we ever make our way to the archive’s home in Marbach.
We were, in short, treated like distinguished and honored guests.
Also. Across three days of workshops, panels and guided tours, each and every one of our interlocutors started the session by acknowledging, in one form of words or another, the pain and violation that they understood us Israelis to have experienced on 7.10.23.
Staatsräson.
Given the circumstances, for literate and intelligent people to acknowledge the hard place that many Israelis find themselves in at the moment is gratifying. But. By the autumn of 2025 there was more than enough blame to spread around. This acknowledgement of the hard place, without at least tapping at the rock of Israel’s authoritarian, militaristic and unabashedly xenophobic current government, made me uneasy. I couldn’t but wonder whether, for all its good intent, Staatsräson was engaging fully with the object of these good intentions.
But this, of course, assumes that Israel is the sole object.
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During my trip to Frankfurt I was reading, very slowly, the newest book by a Well-Known Israeli Author. Like many Israeli writers who engage head-on with social and political themes, this author’s books tended to squeeze too many issues into a tableau too narrow to do them justice. But I could see that they, the author, always tried to do interesting things in their work, and I appreciated this. The author, and their books, have been a staple of the international literati circuit of opinion pieces and book festivals for some time.
I was reading the Well-Known Author’s newest book very slowly because I was reading it in Hebrew and I read Hebrew very slowly. Unlike their earlier books, I did not have the option of reading this book in English translation. The author’s long-time publisher, I’d heard on the grapevine, had decided not to commission a translation of this new book.
I didn’t want to believe this. But I do know for a fact that many Israeli writers, of all political persuasions, have found themselves excluded from the international literati community since 7.10.23. The reasons for this vary, as does too the amount of intellectual energy expended in developing these reasons. Still. It is no good that the desire to decry everything that Israel has done in Gaza should manifest though shutting out the counterpoint Israeli voices who need international support now more than at any other time before.
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From the start, the Buchmesse consciously positioned itself as a place for intellectual and political discourse. The Nazis killed or exiled or silenced Germany’s intelligentsia; a book fair was a useful way of reminding the world that German was, and once again would be, a place of culture. 1949, the year of the first Buchmesse, was also the year that Germany was split into two. The political identity of Germany as a free democracy was a foundational tenet for the Buchmesse.
But these two impulses, politics and culture, do not always complement one another. The Peace Prize of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, awarded annually at the Buchmesse since 1950, is one of the most significant cultural awards in Germany. In 1968, the year of student discontent across Europe, the prize was awarded to Léopold Sedar Senghor, president of Senegal, on account of his role as an interlocutor between Europe and post-colonial Africa. But the 68-ers didn’t see him as this, or as a champion of Negritude, but rather as a “fascist dictator.” (“Authoritarian ruler” might be fairer. But again, this may be a distinction that does not offer any difference.)
Incensed, student demonstrators tried to disrupt proceedings with a sit-in, which led to the police being called to disperse them. That year’s fair is still known as the “Police Fair.”
If one accepts that culture, writ large, is tasked with challenging the comfortable orthodoxy, then it follows that cultural gatherings such as the Buchmesse are bound to create tensions between the great and the good inside the tent and the angry hoi-polloi baying outside. More so if the great and the good were once outside the tent themselves, as is quite often the case. Co-option (accompanied, sometimes, by minor concessions) can be a more effective tool for damping dissent than the strong hand.
Today, the natural target for challenging the orthodoxy in Germany is Israel. There isn’t even a need to use any of the epithets that have been deployed elsewhere. Germany’s consensus has created a name for it—Staatsräson.
Staatsräson has been a factor in several high-profile clashes between pro- and anti-Israel voices. The oddest of these, perhaps, was after the Israeli—and Jewish—documentary filmmaker Yuval Abraham was awarded, along with his Palestinian co-director Basel Adra, the best documentary film award at the 2024 Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival, for their film No Other Land. Abraham observed that when he and Adra returned to Israel, they would be returning to a land where they were not equal. This situation he called “apartheid.” Kai Wenger, the mayor of Berlin—and not Jewish—decried Abraham’s comments, declaring that “antisemitism has no place in Berlin.”
But there was none of this at the Buchmesse. In fact, the only place in Frankfurt where I found any conversation about Israel and Gaza during my time at the fair was outside the fair. Literally outside the fair, through the main entrance of the exhibition center and across the tram tracks outside, where pro-Palestinians had set up a modest encampment, the Palestinian Liberatory Book Fair.
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One day, one of the translators in our party said to me, apropos of everything, that publishing translated literature was basically an exercise in foregrounding a preferred national narrative. Like many translators, this one spent a lot of time pitching new writing from Germany to Israeli publishing houses. Most, the translator commented wryly, have little interest in modern German fiction. The preference was for elderly or deceased Germans, preferably male, and if at all possible wearing a hair shirt to atone for the actions of their countrymen.
I scratched about in my head for representative examples. Bernard Schlick, perhaps. Günter Grass. But Grass had made a mess of things by speaking out of turn about Israel. But then, also: Walter Benjamin. Joseph Roth. Maybe even Franz Kafka. They all had sharp things to say about the dislocations of their times, be this extremism or authoritarianism dressed up as bureaucratic absurdity.
No surprise, I think, that all three were Jewish. I bet they’d have a thing or two to say about our current age.
Actually, scratch Kafka. Israel has claimed him as their own. And this reminded me that I wanted to visit the stand of the Israeli Institute for Hebrew Literature.
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The Machon (“Institute”), as most people refer to it, is tasked with promoting Israeli literature to the wider world. Once, this largely consisted of making discreet enquiries with publishing houses outside the country. Nowadays, it has shaped a more dynamic profile for itself. The month before my Frankfurt trip, it had hosted in Tel Aviv a five-day international showcase of Israeli writing—and, bucking the trend, had convinced two dozen publishing professionals from around the world to attend.
Ostensibly a non-governmental organization, the Machon had for many years been most closely related to Israel’s ministry of culture. It made sense but not everyone was happy about this. Somehow (actually I know exactly how, but now’s not the time or place for this), the ministry had come to be seen as a rather illiberal place, and being associated with it did Israeli writing no good at all.
More recently, Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs has played a more active role in supporting the work of the Machon. Not everyone is happy with this either, for the cogent reason that Israeli writers are not paid enough danger money to do public diplomacy on behalf of the State of Israel.
The Machon’s stand at the Buchmesse was quite stylish and also a little strange. It had a display of contemporary writing from Israel. It also had a bar, adorned with a big sign saying “A Bar, Literally.” I puzzled over this for a while but the associative link at play eluded me.
There was, to one side, a display dedicated to 7.10.23. There were books about the day and afterwards—“The Day That Changed Everything,” “One Day In October,” “If We’ll Be,” “Shelter.” (Full disclosure—I edited the English-language translation of the last.)
There was text accompanying the display, giving context to the sentiment being presented. The text started with a line from an Emily Dickinson poem that I didn’t know: “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” I wasn’t sure what the formal feeling could or should be, but it did make me think about another Dickinson poem:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all
Despite myself, I felt terribly sad.
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Before the trip to Germany, I’d thought about Staatsräson in terms of Germany’s uncritical support of Israel. But over the course of four days in Frankfurt, another perception began to take hold. At first, I had pigeonholed the policy in terms of a reductive, even unreflective, championing of Israel. It’s not as if this is an unknown thing, after all. (In the interests of balance, I will acknowledge that the same applies to the unreflective demonization of Israel too.)
But Staatsräson, I’d come to see, was anything but unreflective. It’s just that I’d been looking in the wrong direction while trying to figure it out.
The (predominantly) right-leaning tilt of political discontent of the moment is usually called “populism.” More than anything else, populism is presumed to align with the lowest common denominator—reductive thinking employed to manipulate the unsophisticated. There is much more to it, of course, starting with the fact that there isn’t a uniform populism cutting across national borders. Context and circumstances, unique to individual countries in most of the post-industrial West, would be more useful in trying to understand the rise of the authoritarian right.
The context in Germany differs from that of every other country for one simple reason: the history of 20th century Germany is dominated by the consequences of unaccountable demagogues finding their way to power. This history alone, though, is no inoculation against the fears of the present.
Staatsräson is a historical construct, engendered by what the Nazis did to the Jews. But first, the Nazis had to convince the population to give them the reigns of power. And they did. It happened once. It could happen again.
Enter Alternative für Deutschland, the loathed (at least in my Frankfurt bubble) AfD.
In several of the conversations and discussions that I was a part of at Frankfurt, speakers from Germany extolling the virtues of a vibrant literary culture opined that good books indeed were the medicine to keep the far right at bay. One literary professional speaking to our party observed that the AfD were using local cultural events as a tool for grassroots mobilization to the right-wing cause. “But books won’t be a part of this,” he continued, confidently.
Why not? I wanted to ask. Off the top of my head I could think of a few writers, respected writers, who had embraced at the very least nationalist instincts. Ezra Pound. D’Annunzio. Perhaps Yonathan Ratosh, the Caananite. All poets, oddly enough. My train of thought went to the Emily Dickinson quote from the Machon: After great pain, a formal feeling comes.
After great pain, at first numbness. But then what? I can’t help but think of Staatsräson as a formal construct, created with careful thought and with a very specific aim in mind. Jews were the visible victims of the great pain wrought by Nazi Germany. But the great harm turned inwards too, rending a sense of self that was the antithesis of the book burnings and the marches and the cult of personality and the violence and the unthinking obedience and most of all the brutal bastardly murders.
Support for Israel was a necessary condition for creating Staatsräson. But I wonder if Israel is but the pretext for its perpetuation? I don’t know. I’ll never know enough about Germany to know. But I do know a bit about Israel, enough to say that Germany’s support for Israel, Staatsräson, shouldn’t be taken for granted. Because one day, the policy may stop serving the purpose that Germany needs it to serve. And then…
Akin Ajayi was a guest of the Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany at the Frankfurter Buchmesse. He would like to thank them for their hospitality, and especially Stefan, Andrea and Vee for their patience and good humour.