The Prophecy

In 1945 former Gestapo officer Erich Hohn returned to Bamberg, Germany, where he presented himself as the concentration camp survivor Julius Israel Holm. He joined the Association of the Persecuted of the Nazi Regime, even going so far as to become vice-president of a local branch. Shortly after, he was recognized by one of his own victims and exposed. We might not have learned of the swindle, of which there were apparently many at the time, had Hohn not aspired to such a representative position.

Hohn was tried for war crimes and sentenced to three years imprisonment in 1948. A newspaper report on the case would later catch the attention of the German–Jewish author Edgar Hilsenrath (1926–2018), who preserved the clipping among his papers. The grotesque reversal—a perpetrator passing as a victim—offered more than sensational intrigue; it crystallized, for Hilsenrath, a disturbing moral paradox at the heart of postwar European society.

From this inversion emerged the premise of his now canonical novel The Nazi and the Barber. Written in the 1960s and enjoying international success by the time it was published in the US in the 1970s, the book nevertheless initially failed to secure a German publisher—even though Hilsenrath had originally written the novel in German. When it finally appeared in his native country in 1977, published by a small press, it did so without the mass audience that its success abroad should have guaranteed. The hesitation is hardly mysterious: Hilsenrath’s plot follows a former SS officer who assumes the identity of his murdered Jewish childhood friend, reinventing himself as a military hero in yet another ethnonationalist movement—transposing Nazi fanaticism onto the zionist cause. In a country whose postwar moral rehabilitation depended on a zealously performed love of Jews, such subversive satire erred dangerously close to sacrilege.

Although Hilsenrath, who had fled Germany in 1938, eventually returned and lived in Berlin until his death, he excoriated postwar German society for its shallow philosemitism, describing it as the simple inverse of the hatred it sought to disavow. He was not the only one with these views. German–Jewish historian and political scientist Eleonore Sterling prominently published a reckoning in Die Zeit in 1965 that is considered a formative example of a longstanding (and mostly Jewish) attempt to confront postwar German hypocrisy.

Sterling, who had been sent to the U.S. at the age of thirteen, lost both her parents to the Holocaust, yet chose to return to Frankfurt as an adult to earn her PhD under the supervision of Max Horkheimer. In her article, she exposed German philosemitism as a superficial and self-serving affair, worshipping “dead Jews” like Einstein and Heine while living Jewish critics were routinely dismissed as “German-haters.” Moral fetishization, she argued, reduced Jews to symbolic resources rather than recognizing them as individuals and equals, even as repressed antagonism was redirected at new, permissible others such as guest workers, Eastern Europeans, and leftist intellectuals. Notably, she used the term “Götzenkult”—idolatrous cult—to describe what she saw as the “petrification” of Judaism, an effort to suppress lived Jewish reality and replace it with an idealized monument.

When academic scholarship on philosemitism began to emerge around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, historian Frank Stern expanded on Sterling’s diagnosis in a book appropriately titled Whitewashing the Yellow Badge, demonstrating how philosemitism facilitated the psychological management of unresolved guilt while deflecting confrontation with persistent political continuities, bringing Jewishness to ever more cultural prominence even as Jewish social life remained marginal and imperiled.

Interestingly, The Nazi and the Barber is well-known and quite respected in Germany today; it was reissued to widespread acclaim in 2004. However, another canonical experiment in this genre remains unpublished in German: George Steiner’s 1979 novel, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. This is surprising insofar as the Vienna-born, Paris-raised scholar who described himself as having “three mother tongues” was otherwise beloved by his publisher Suhrkamp, a house he had helped elevate to its elite status in postwar Germany. But this particular literary experiment of Steiner’s drove a stake into the very heart of philosemitic hypocrisy: in his novel, Hitler is captured in a South American jungle and placed on a hastily-improvised trial, which culminates in his defense that he was the modern Messiah:

“Did Herzl create Israel or did I? Examine the question fairly. Would Palestine have become Israel… had it not been for the Holocaust? It was the Holocaust that gave you the courage of injustice, that made you drive the Arab out of his home… because he was in your divinely-ordered way… Perhaps I am the Messiah, the true Messiah, the new Sabbatai whose infamous deeds were allowed by God in order to bring His people home.”

“The Reich begat Israel,” says Steiner’s Hitler, “These are my last words.” Publisher Siegfried Unseld, worried about backlash for his press (which had published many prominent German–Jewish thinkers from the early- and mid-twentieth century), consulted several of his marquee authors about the manuscript. The Swiss novelist Max Frisch was aghast at Steiner’s fiction; Unseld recalled that he declared it “an antisemitism only Jews are capable of.” Along with novelists Uwe Johnson and Martin Walser, Frisch vetoed its publication. Hans Magnus Enzensberger was the only expert in favor of it, rejecting the idea that a specific German sensitivity should be a reason to withhold a satiric book that had been successfully published and received in other European countries. Unseld, in a private note, described his own irritation at the time: “[Steiner] is disappointed that I don’t want to turn his book into a bestseller. You don’t want money, he says. Always money.”