Secondary antisemitism is a distinct form ofantisemitism which is said to have appeared after the end ofWorld War II.
Secondary antisemitism is often explained as being caused bythe Holocaust, as opposed to existing in spite of it.[1] One frequently quoted formulation of the concept, first published inHenryk M. Broder's 1986 bookDer Ewige Antisemit (The Eternal Antisemite)[a], stems from the Israeli psychiatristZvi Rex [he],[2] who once remarked: "The Germans will never forgive the Jews forAuschwitz."[3][4] The term was coined byPeter Schönbach [de], aFrankfurt School co-worker ofTheodor W. Adorno andMax Horkheimer, based on theircritical theory.[5]
Adorno, in a 1959 lecture titled "Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit", published in his 1963 bookEingriffe. Neun kritische Modelle,[6] addressed the fallacy of the broad German post-war tendency to associate and simultaneously causally linkJews with the Holocaust. According to Adorno's critique, an opinion had been readily accepted in Germany according to which the Jewish people were culpable in the crimes against them. Jewish guilt was assumed to varying extents, depending on the varying incarnations of that antisemitic notion, one of which is the idea that Jews were (and are) exploiting German guilt over the Holocaust. Adorno further wrote:
Sometimes the victors are declared to be the cause of what the defeated have done when they were still in charge, and for the crimes of Hitler those are declared guilty who acquiesced his rise to power, and not those who hailed him. The idiocy in all this is in fact an indication of something mentally uncoped-with, of a wound, although the thought of wounds should be dedicated to the victims.[6]
Initially, members of theFrankfurt School spoke of "guilt-defensiveness anti-Semitism", an antisemitism motivated by a deflection of guilt.[7] The rehabilitation of many lower and even several higher-rankingThird Reich officials and officers appears to have contributed to the development of secondary antisemitism. These officials were rehabilitated in spite of their considerable individual contributions to Nazi Germany's crimes. Several controversies ensued early inpost-World War II Germany, e.g. whenKonrad Adenauer appointedHans Globke asChief of the Chancellery, although the latter had formulated theEnabling Act of 1933, the emergency legislation that gave Hitler unlimited dictatorial powers and had been one of the leading legal commentators on theNuremberg race laws of 1935.[8][9] According to Adorno, parts of the German public never acknowledged these events and instead formed the notion of Jewish guilt in the Holocaust.
An alternative explanation was proposed for the spate ofpostwar antisemitic violence in Eastern Europe. In 1946, the Slovak writerKarel František Koch argued that the antisemitic incidents that he witnessed inBratislava after the war were "not antisemitism, but something far worse—the robber's anxiety that he might have to return Jewish property," a view that has been endorsed by Czech-Slovak scholarRobert Pynsent [cs].[10] It has been estimated that only 15% of Jewish property was returned after the war, and restitution was "negligible" in Eastern Europe. Property not returned has been valued at over $100 million in 2005 dollars.[11]
