Introduction: Antisemitismus und Aufarbeitung by Elke Rajal
Theodor W. Adorno once warned that “working through the past” can become a means of closure—a way of getting rid of what should be confronted. In the post-Shoah societies of Germany and Austria, this warning has not lost its relevance. We live with a dense, highly institutionalised culture of remembrance—memorial sites, commemorative rituals, public speeches—while antisemitism persists, shifts, and repeatedly resurfaces. Since 7 October 2023, this contradiction has become more visible internationally, but the underlying problem is older: what does it mean to live “after Auschwitz” in societies that remember a great deal, and yet continue to produce forms of denial, repression, and aggression that remembrance was supposed to overcome?
This monograph starts from a simple but uncomfortable premise: antisemitism in post-Nazi societies is not a residual anomaly that slowly fades as education progresses and moral consensus stabilises. It persists because it adapts to the very norms that condemn it. That adaptation is what I describe as the post-Nazi constellation: a historical situation in which the Shoah is publicly acknowledged—and yet the social and psychological impulses that make such acknowledgment difficult, above all the defence against guilt, remain active. In this constellation, remembrance is not merely a remedy. It is also a conflict field. It can become ritualised, turned into self-assurance, or mobilised to stabilise national and moral self-images—and antisemitism appears as a way of creating relief, restoring innocence, and re-establishing threatened identities.
Two interrelated forms of post-Shoah antisemitism are central to my analysis: secondary antisemitism (antisemitism “because of Auschwitz”) and Israel-related antisemitism. In the post-Nazi context—and, to some extent, beyond—both are shaped by guilt and its defence, but they do so in different registers. Secondary antisemitism transforms guilt into resentment: it targets Jews (as imagined moral authorities), the culture of remembrance, or the very act of remembering as an imposition. Israel-related antisemitism offers an additional stage for avoidance. Here, guilt is not confronted but redirected; responsibility is not worked through but shifted; and Jewish vulnerability—historical and present—is obscured by narratives that cast Jews, or Israel as a collective symbol, as perpetrators, manipulators, or beneficiaries of remembrance. The book does not treat these forms as separate boxes. It shows how they overlap: attacks on remembrance can slide into the delegitimisation of Jewish nationhood, and anti-Israel rhetoric can provide a socially acceptable vehicle for guilt-defence.
A key mechanism in this process is what earlier research has described as communication via detours: antisemitic patterns appear not always as explicit hatred, but as codes, insinuations, and displaced arguments. In societies where antisemitism has largely been tabooed, this detour logic becomes particularly consequential. It allows speakers to invoke antisemitic structures while maintaining plausible deniability; it enables a posture of innocence (“I’m not antisemitic, I’m only criticising…”); and it turns the critique of antisemitism into a problem of “oversensitivity,” censorship, or political manipulation. This is not a harmless shift in style. It is a way in which antisemitism remains present while becoming harder to name—precisely because it hides behind the norms that should exclude it.
Empirically, the monograph follows these dynamics through contemporary arenas in which antisemitism intersects with memory politics and political culture. One focal point is the German and Austrian “new” right and its ideological environment. Here, a characteristic dual strategy becomes visible: demonstrative distancing from “old” antisemitism combined with the continued circulation of antisemitic patterns of thought—sometimes openly, often in coded, conspiratorial, or “anti-globalist” forms. The rejection of antisemitism becomes part of self-presentation, while antisemitic world-explanations remain available as an alleged “system critique”.
A second focal point is the discursive landscape after 7 October 2023. In different political camps, one can observe a growing tendency to treat Shoah remembrance less as a normative commitment than as an obstacle: on the far right as an alleged “cult of guilt,” in parts of a self-proclaimed progressive milieu as the key explanation for Germany’s position toward Israel, and therefore as something to be “overcome.” The slogan “Free Palestine from German Guilt” illustrates this. These are not identical narratives, and the book does not reduce them to a simplistic symmetry. But they can share a crucial structure: they assume that remembrance cannot be honest, only strategic; that “memory” is coercive; and that liberation requires relief—from guilt, from ambivalence, from the burden of Jewish history.
It is precisely at this point—where remembrance becomes contested, where critique turns into defence, and where antisemitic patterns circulate “via detours”—that education enters the picture. Because these struggles are not confined to newspaper columns or social media feeds: they shape what can be said in classrooms and seminar rooms, how conflicts are interpreted, and which forms of knowledge are treated as legitimate. They also affect the conditions under which antisemitism is named—or left unnamed—in pedagogical practice. In other words, the question is not only whether education can “prevent” antisemitism, but how education itself is entangled in the very social dynamics it is asked to counteract.
“Education after Auschwitz”—referring to Adorno’s famous lecture—is often invoked as a moral imperative; yet the persistence of antisemitic attitudes among young people raises a basic question: what is being taught when the Shoah is taught? The book argues that Holocaust Education frequently focuses on persecution and murder while leaving the ideology of antisemitism marginal, abstract, or historically sealed off. In the most problematic cases, antisemitism is diluted into a generic lesson about prejudice or intolerance. The consequence is not simply a gap in knowledge. It is a gap in understanding: without a grasp of how antisemitic world-explanations function—how they reduce complexity, displace responsibility, and organise affects—education and remembrance can turn into ritualised displays of empathy and moral reassurance rather than a practice of critical insight and real empathy.
This is why the book insists on antisemitism-critical education as an approach in its own right—more, and different, than Holocaust Education or the teaching of Jewish history. Antisemitism-critical education treats antisemitism in the historical longue durée, differentiates its forms, and addresses it simultaneously as a social-structural phenomenon and as a set of subjective functions. It aims to expand knowledge about the “forces at play” in society, making antisemitism less attractive as a personifying world-explanation. It also takes seriously the role of defence mechanisms—especially the defence against responsibility and memory—and argues that antisemitic utterances in educational contexts must neither be ignored nor handled through moralising and shaming, but worked through in ways that strengthen non-antisemitic argumentation and a capacity for critical judgement.
Finally, the conclusion sharpens a point that runs through the entire book: education is not a panacea. The relationship between education and antisemitism is ambivalent—education can reduce antisemitism, but it can also reproduce stereotypes, and antisemitism can even emerge within pedagogical fields when such reproductions go unnoticed. If education and remembrance are to be part of a serious working-through, they must not function as individual or collective self-soothing. They must unsettle, highlight contradictions, and remain a critical “Stachel,” a thorn in the side. That requires spaces—often beyond formal schooling—where people can articulate ruptures and challenges to their inherited self- and world-images, reflect on internalised antisemitism, and confront their entanglement in power relations and, in post-Nazi contexts, in guilt and its defence. The book therefore points not only to schools, but also to informal learning spaces—youth work, adult education, associations—where reflection might be possible beyond the limitations of tight school curricula and the comfort logic of social media feeds.
The book is addressed to researchers as well as to those who have to navigate antisemitism in practice: educators and curriculum designers, journalists and public intellectuals, political and civic actors concerned with democratic resilience. Its guiding suggestion is not consoling: remembrance matters, but it does not immunise. The decisive question is how we remember—and what happens when remembrance collides with the desire for innocence, closure, and uncomplicated belonging.
The book is mostly in German, with two chapters in English, and is based on a cumulative dissertation. It was published in 2026 by the renowned German academic publisher Nomos in the series Interdisciplinary Studies on Antisemitism.
You can find the publisher’s page here: https://www.nomos-shop.de/de/p/antisemitismus-und-aufarbeitung-gr-978-3-7560-3744-5
The e-book is available here: https://www.inlibra.com/de/document/view/detail/uuid/8003d238-8b2e-32a7-b8a9-4eacac9784ad
