“The Grandchildren, The Dialogue” (Die Enkel, Der Dialog) event was meant to be a chance for the people of Eisenach, a town of 42,000 in the central German state of Thuringia, to reflect on their collective Nazi past.
Part of a series of events focused on “interreligious and intercultural dialogue,” the event brought together public personalities in Eisenach’s St. George Church to discuss how their families addressed Germany’s antisemitic past and how they could confront it today.
Bodo Ramelow, Minister-President of the Thuringia State Parliament, said his family simply did not talk about it. “I only found out my family’s involvement with National Socialism later, in pieces,” he said.
Worried about this historical neglect, Ramelow said, “we thought antisemitism was gone, but it never really left. We just stopped talking about it and now, it’s back out in the open.”
Despite the nation’s “Culture of Remembrance” (Erinnerungskultur), antisemitism is still a problem in Germany. The Department of Research and Information on Antisemitism Berlin’s (RIAS Berlin) most recent report recorded a total of 410 anti-Semitic incidents in the first half of 2020.
The most recent prominent attack occurred in 2019 in the eastern city of Halle when a gunman killed two people outside a synagogue during the observance of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.
While some blame far-right politics or Germany’s Muslim community, data shows multiple sectors of society bear responsibility for the rise in antisemitic incidents, including Christians.
Data such as this has recently forced Christians to reconsider how their communities respond to anti-Semitism, or whether they address it at all.
Although sources say that churches have long sidestepped the issue, many are learning to confront the history of Christian complicity in the greatest sins of the nation’s past and build better Jewish-Christian relationships in the present.