And in the end the Jews are to blame again

"Unfortunately, you couldn't live your story because you escaped the gas chamber, otherwise we would have been rid of you." Do you think that's funny? Neither do I. In Jochen Schölch's production of the play "Vögel", written by the Lebanese-Canadian author Wajdi Mouawad, there was hearty laughter about it in the Munich Metropoltheater. The play uses numerous other anti-Semitic tropes that strengthen the audience in the prevailing anti-Semitic resentment.

It tells the story of a young, Jewish scientist named Eitan, who falls in love with the Arab doctoral student Wahida, whom he wants to introduce to his family. Arguing with Jewish history and tradition, Eitan's parents - Leah and David - accuse their son of betraying their own people if he continues the relationship with the "enemy". The couple sets out to solve the pressing identity issues in Israel.

"If trauma left traces in the genes that we pass on to our children, do you think our people would then let another suffer the oppression they suffered themselves?" with the situation of the Palestinians and the questioning of transgenerational trauma.

Elsewhere, Eitan accuses his grandfather - a Shoa survivor - of not being able to "constantly compare everything that happens to [his] crappy concentration camp". Not only does the Jew in the play himself want to draw a line under the Shoah, he equates the persecution and murder of six million Jews with the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

It is not only at this point that the German public is invited to collective debt relief. After all, how relieving and encouraging is it when even a Jew demands an end to the confrontation with the Shoah?

While the survivors of the Shoah are exposed to the cynicism and lack of empathy of their descendants, these are also characterized as evil racists in the course of the play.

For example, Eitan's father David is portrayed as a hater of Arabs who indulges in his tirades and wishes for numerous deaths on the side of the Palestinians. A recurring Israeli soldier in the play explains to Eitan: “We count our dead without counting theirs, and when their dead outnumber ours, we celebrate the victory with shouts and merriment, and return to our seashores and they to theirs .” In this way, Jewish characters are demonized in the play as evil and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is presented in an under-complex and one-sided manner.

Schölch cut passages that would at least contribute to a little more balance from the production. Although he claimed to have created a "very true to the text, very precise" performance, some dialogues differ in the staging and thus exacerbate the anti-Israel dramaturgy.

For example, when a statement by Wahida is not just her opinion, but is conveyed as a social consensus: "Maybe because what happens to the man is more important than what happens to the woman. What happens to you is more important than what happens to me. Because you are a man and a Jew, and I am a woman and an Arab. And what is the pathetic story of every Arab versus that of the Jews? It's normal for you to be the center of attention.” The narrative of victim competition is also used here.

And yet the criticism goes beyond the staging and is directed at the play itself. The father David is said to have been found and stolen in a Palestinian village by the Shoa survivor Etgar, who was a soldier in the Israeli army in 1967. This only becomes apparent towards the end of the piece. At first it is said that Etgar protected the Palestinian baby, but the language in the play quickly changes to "kidnapped", "stolen", "stolen". In retrospect, Etgar justifies his act with the words: "I stole David to give life to Eitan."

Overwhelmed by this information, David suffers a heart attack and dies. In the Israeli hospital, David's relatives are to decide whether David's organs should be donated to save other lives. Eitan comments: “As a child he was stolen, alive he was stolen, and even in death we continue to rob him. Nothing is his.” The story of the baby stolen in the war, the stolen identity of the Palestinian child appears as a means to perpetrate genocide against a people. The Jewish Shoa survivor is accused of this in the play and applauded by a German audience.

Jewish students held their breath, they didn't want to let this go unchallenged. But able-bodied Jews are such a nuisance. Weeping for dead Jews is considered good manners. A little laughing about the Holocaust must be allowed, the Jews laugh about it themselves. But: Don't touch my memory theater!

Jochen Schölch speaks of reconciliation. Doesn't this seem particularly mendacious when Jews are portrayed as racist child murderers who are also using the Holocaust for their purposes? "The Germans will never forgive the Jews of Auschwitz," the psychoanalyst Zvi Rex is reported to have said. The sheer existence of Jews reminds the perpetrators and their descendants of their own family involvement in National Socialism.

"Birds" soothes the souls looking for debt relief. The audience reconciles itself with the story and needs the Arab-hating Jew to do so. When, under the pretext of tolerance and peace, Jewish figures put Shoa relativizations in their mouths or Jews and Israel are demonized, that is art, but anti-Semitic art, anti-Semitism in the cultural sector.

The reactions of the director and artistic director Jochen Schölch and the former mayor of the city of Munich Christian Ude (SPD), chairman of the Friends of the Theater, to the criticism reveal further dimensions of the defense against guilt.

Jewish students felt affected after what they saw. But today they are no longer silent, they are fighting back. The least would have been to take their criticism seriously. What happens instead is a destructive defensiveness and another perpetrator-victim reversal. If even one Jewish person finds something cross-border, relativizing, or offensive, that must be enough to take it seriously.

However, the Jewish students are stigmatized as aggressors because of their criticism: With a “moral guillotine”, according to Ude, they would want to damage the theater's reputation. But what we want is a substantive examination of the reproduced anti-Semitic tropes. Whether “guillotine” or “anti-Semitism club” – the use of a metaphor for violence cleverly turns the problem around: the problem is not the content, but the accusation of the supposedly aggressive and overly sensitive Jews.

The Munich cultural department announced that Jews should endure injuries that can happen. Because anyway, according to Ude, the students were just looking for a "hot topic" for November 9th. What impertinence! Jewish students are accused of campaigning on a day that commemorates how Germans betrayed their Jewish neighbors, attacked Jews, drove them from their homes, herded them together to send them to their deaths.

Part of it is about their own ancestors. This is an attempt to scandalize justified criticism as an outrageous accusation and, in an anti-Semitic manner, to accuse Jews of using the Shoah as an instrument for their own purposes. It is no longer about the anti-Semitic content.

Does that remind you of anything? The Jew as a troublemaker who doesn't just let art be art, even if it's anti-Semitic? The recent Documenta was just the tip of the iceberg. If Jewish people are not believed, then Jews are not safe in this country. It's all about this. Jakob Baier put it in a nutshell in his “taz” commentary on the documenta: “The blame for the anti-Semitism that can be found again and again at the documenta lies not only with the artists who incorporate it into their works, but also with all those who create it ignore, relativize and trivialize.”

The cultural scene in Germany is saturated with anti-Semitism – and not just since this year. But we will no longer remain silent. Because it wasn't the Jews who invented the "anti-Semitism club", but the Germans.

Anna Staroselski is President of the Jewish Student Union Germany.