Antisemitism in Germany, and the CDU's search for answers

Berlin is a city full of graffiti: Colorful and loud, imaginative, annoying, and often political. Spray paint seems to have long since conquered the city. Yet on April 11 this year, three large words sprayed across the side of a building in the district of Prenzlauer Berg, calling in English for the killing of all Jews, provoked outrage and shock. 

The words were quickly covered and then painted over — yet the message still shows through if you look closely (top photo). True to Berlin's character, civil society responded: Residents held a vigil. Blue‑and‑white ribbons now hang from lampposts and traffic signs, bearing the words "Against all antisemitism" beside a Star of David.

'No place for hate'

Children used chalk to cover nearly a hundred meters of the sidewalk on the district's Ueckermünder Strasse with hearts and messages like "No place for hate," "Respect," "Togetherness," and "Our neighborhood stands together." Police notices were taped to front doors in the area, announcing: "Antisemitic incitement to hatred involving property damage through graffiti."

The day after the vigil, a few kilometers away in western Berlin, the executive committee of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) convened, led by party leader Chancellor Friedrich Merz, on the campus of the Jewish Chabad movement. They were welcomed by Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal, the capital's most prominent rabbi, who appeals to a focus on the good, for signs of hope, rather than on the darkness.

And the rabbi has built a campus, an outstanding complex with classrooms and a multipurpose hall, a kindergarten and a café. All of it lies behind a fortified entrance area that could just as well belong to an airport security checkpoint. Outside, under the open sky, schoolchildren greeted the politicians with a song. Merz responded by telling them: "We protect you." To ensure the children's safety, members of the press had been instructed not to photograph the pupils.

'Lack of empathy towards Israel,' ambassador to Germany says

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

"Jewish life in Germany is more threatened than it has been in a very long time," Merz said in front of the cameras. Much has been written in the German press these days about Merz' leadership style and its supposed lack of empathy. Yet in Berlin and Munich last fall, he briefly appeared to be fighting back tears as he delivered two speeches remembering the horrors of Nazi Germany's mass murder of Jewish people and addressing the renewed fear felt by Jewish women and men.

Such a meeting of the chancellor's party executive, held in this form for the first time at a Jewish institution, required careful preparation — it was not merely a response to the outrage over the graffiti. In his statement, however, Merz explicitly mentioned not only the "sharply rising number of crimes and assaults," but also the "smearings on house walls with antisemitic content." He added that anyone attacking Jewish life in Germany "attacks our society and attacks our democracy."

Along with the other executive committee members, Merz then attended a reception in the synagogue on the Chabad campus. The rabbi offered a brief prayer for peace and tolerance, and each guest received a gift: A Jewish book of Psalms embossed with their name. But the party leadership also wanted to send a political signal.

'Combat every form of antisemitism'

"Jewish life is part of Germany,” declared a five-page resolution that the party's top leadership later adopted during its meeting at the education center. "As the CDU of Germany, we will clearly identify and combat every form of antisemitism."

The document speaks in the familiar register of political resolutions: "Where hatred of Jewish life grows, democracy is in danger." But what does that mean in concrete terms for people whose building's facade is suddenly smeared with a hate slogan, whose names on the doorbell plates are sprayed over and marked, who — as has also been documented in Berlin recently — are harassed on the street because they wear a kippah, a traditional Jewish head covering?

In its search for answers to protecting Jewish life, the CDU has been looking to the growing popular discontent with the way Israel's government deals with its neighbors: Between Israel's war in Gaza, which, by conservative estimates, killed tens of thousands of civilians, Israel's strikes in Lebanon, and the US‑Israeli war with Iran, anti-war protests in Berlin have become a recurrent theme.

The CDU's declaration does include a few concrete points on criminal law and financial sanctions. Yet, it leans repeatedly on calls for a "broad societal stance," a "societal stance as a whole," a "clear stance." When it comes to actual measures, however, the document remains vague.

Germany's Jews and antisemitism: A complex reality

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

On May 5, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar arrived in the capital for a two-day visit, holding talks with German politicians and participating in an event hosted by the CDU Economic Council.

Sa'ar also visited the German Foreign Ministry, and made brief statements to the media together with his German counterpart Johann Wadephul . At one point he said that Jews are "the only people who are physically attacked everywhere — because they are Jews — even when they live far away from the conflict in the Middle East."

He went on to visit the Track 17 Holocaust memorial at Berlin's Grunewald S‑Bahn station, where visitors can stand at the edge of the very platform from which, in 1941 and 1942, the Nazis deported more than 10,000 Jewish women and men to their deaths. Part of the memorial consists of steel plates laid along the track, each listing a deportation train, its date, the number of people on board, and its destination in Eastern Europe.

It is a quiet place, despite the nearby railway line and motorway. Trees have long since grown between the tracks. Sa'ar arrived unaccompanied by any German politicians in a convoy of fifteen limousines, guarded by many police officers. The minister was given a brief explanation of the site, lit two candles, and then stood before the memorial plaque with Ron Prosor, Israel's ambassador to Germany, and Rabbi Teichtal.

Berlin's eyewitness and her warning

Berlin and its Jewish community, meanwhile, sent its own message this week: The square in front of the Berlin state parliament now bears the name Margot Friedländer Platz. The street sign was unveiled by Mayor Kai Wegner, who said beforehand that it sends a "powerful signal against antisemitism, against forgetting — and for democracy and human dignity."

May 9, marks the first anniversary of Margot Friedländer's death (1921–2025) and will be commemorated for the first time. Berlin's honorary citizen survived the Holocaust as a young woman, before emigrating to New York in 1946. In 2010, she returned to live in the capital city.

With each new shock and new instance of hatred toward Jews in Berlin, the significance Friedländer carried in her final years becomes even clearer. As an eyewitness to terror and a voice warning against hatred, she did not level accusations — she spent the rest of her life appealing to a common humanity.

Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer dies at 103

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

This article was translated from German.