The Frankfurt School’s groundbreaking work on social beliefs in postwar Germany toward Nazi Germany’s criminal past provides crucial findings on the meaning of deep-seated political and cultural legacies after Nazi rule and the genocide against European Jewry. The Critical Theorists’ studies also advance critical insights into specific new dynamics of secondary antisemitism. Such new antisemitism absorbs various anti-Jewish tropes—from presumed revenge fantasies to myths about conspiratorial Jewish power and control over media and images of Jews ruthlessly pursuing their own material benefits. These tropes emerge in ever new configurations. They are itself the product of modern antisemitic legacies (and as such point to an unprocessed Nazi past), and they can be linked to specific socio-psychological needs—namely, the pressing wish to split off and trivialize Holocaust memory, to whitewash Germany’s national history, and to downplay the country’s crimes, guilt, and responsibility. In this context, Jews once again become the target of hate. Jews often become identified with the whole murderous complex of the Holocaust and the unpleasant, unwelcome feelings it may cause. By splitting feelings of guilt and superego functions from one’s self, one may project these feelings onto Jews. According to Adorno, this projection, which is not just an individual perception but carries social force, represents a particular socio-psychological defense mechanism: the wish to repress the memory of the German atrocities helps reproduce the resentment that has caused these crimes. Such a wish may be especially strong among citizens harboring unprocessed guilt feelings, among
Jews as “parasitic,” “alien,” and homeless people who threaten European nations and their autochthonous populations—ideologies from which one allegedly seeks distance. The equation of the democratic Jewish State of Israel with Nazism’s terror regime is another marker of such peculiar secondary antisemitism. It demonizes Israelis as it simultaneously downplays the horrors committed against Jews in the past, whereby Israel serves as a "collective Jew" onto which classical antisemitic stereotypes are frequently projected. Commonly invoked Nazi references and inversions vis-a-vis Jews as a collective entity are displayed in phrases like Palestinians are the "victims of the victims," or "Muslims are the Jews of today" (implying that Muslims are persecuted on the same level today in Western societies as Jews were in Nazi Germany). Such inversions may also point, following Critical Theory, to the deep wish to turn the persecuted victims of European history into today’s perpetrators. These constructs collectively denigrate Jews and turn them into a morally reprehensible, guilty party by demonizing Israel as a unified, evil entity that represents Jews. These tropes relativize the genocide and the still unmastered legacy of the Holocaust as well as the historical guilt associated with it on the European continent. The Frankfurt school’s analysis of collective defense mechanisms, Holocaust relativization, and tenacious old and new resentments exposes how anti-democratic attitudes and social hatred have lingered on—indeed have even been reinforced by new motives—in the institutionally democratized context of post-Holocaust Germany. Part and parcel of this observed social trend that