It happened again. Another awards ceremony has been postponed to Germany, yet more collateral damage to the nerves left exposed by the reignition of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Russian-American writer and journalist Masha Gessen will not be awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in the Great Hall of Bremen Town Hall on Friday, as expected. The award will be awarded the following day in a much smaller room, with less pomp. This is because the foundation close to the Green Party, the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, decided to withdraw its patronage after Gessen’s essay on 9 December last on New Yorker, where the author – coming from an Ashkenazi Jewish family – compared the situation in Gaza to that of a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe and qualified Israel’s current intervention in the Strip with the technical noun “liquidation”. «Presumably – writes Gessen on New Yorker – the more appropriate term “ghetto” would have attracted attention for comparing the plight of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It would also give us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is liquidated.”
“This statement – clarified the German foundation in a note – is not an offer to an open discussion, it does not contribute to understanding” and therefore “it is unacceptable”. On Wednesday, the German-Israeli Society of Bremen (Dig) had asked for the award to be suspended because it was an obstacle “to the necessary determination against growing anti-Semitism”. His statements “are in stark contrast to the thoughts of Hannah Arendt” continued the Dig. In her essay «In the shadow of the Holocaust», Gessen, however, quotes Arendt’s words and then adds: «just three years after the Holocaust, Arendt compared an Israeli Jewish party to the Nazi party».
Gessen’s real “affront”, from the German perspective, is the criticism of the “culture of memory” in Germany. In a crude and merciless way the author highlights the German codification of Germany’s guilt towards the Jews. A fault that became, after the reunification of the nineties, the very essence of feeling German. But for this very reason it does not allow distance or comparative reasoning.