It was surreal. It was also revealing. And then it took a sentimental turn. The prominent Russian-American journalist and writer Masha Gessen was awarded the prestigious Hannah Arendt Award for political thought. But the event, which was supposed to be a grand ceremony hosted by the Heinrich Böll Foundation at the city hall of Bremen, came close to being canceled after Gessen published an essay in The New Yorker comparing Gaza before October 7 to the Jewish ghettoes of Nazi-occupied Europe, a comparison, they wrote, that «would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.»

The ceremony eventually took place not in the city hall but in a small room far away from the city center in the presence of three dozen people and in an atmosphere that recalled the underground meetings of Soviet dissidents in the 1970s. For Masha Gessen, it might have felt like time travel, like returning to a Soviet childhood, for others, it could have seemed to be an unwanted peek into the future.

The awardee’s speech was moving and thoughtful, arguing that every comparison is also a warning. Gessen insisted on the need for politically incorrect and uncomfortable comparisons. When comparing Gaza with a Jewish ghetto under the Nazis (or comparing Trump to Putin), Gessen is aware of the differences. But such parallels serve to remind us how wrong things can potentially go. Gaza could end up like this or Trump could end up like that. Made up predominantly of aging Arendt admirers aware that, in today’s cultural climate, Arendt herself would never get the Hannah Arendt Award, the audience perfectly understood the painful forewarnings.

The secret of the «Gessen scandal» and its relevance for the much-discussed unraveling of the liberal international order is the extent to which so many commentators mistook what was actually scandalous about it.

It is easy to criticize Germany’s politics of remembrance as nothing more than a political instrument employed during the Cold War to integrate the country into, or ingratiate the country with, the West. For sure it was better for Germans to recount the horrible story of Nazi crimes fully themselves than to have it always told to them by others. It is equally easy to blame Berlin for a lack of sympathy with the fate of Palestinians. (One historical irony is that East Germany was PLO’s Promised Land and that many Palestinian terrorists of an earlier generation were trained in the GDR.) But the tragedy of German identity as it has revealed itself in the Gessen case is in many ways different from what powerful critics of German moralism like Pankaj Mishra suggest.¹ It is not about German hypocrisy; it is about German rigidity, a failure to adapt to a convulsively changing world.

Germany’s problem is not that it is prioritizing the fight against anti-Semitism at a time when Israeli fighter jets obliterate the civilian alongside the military infrastructure of Gaza. Robert Habeck was only stating the obvious when, in an emotional speech, he argued that «after the Holocaust, the founding of Israel was the promise of protecting the Jews, and Germany is compelled to help ensure that this promise can be fulfilled. This is a historical foundation of our republic.» Nor is it wrong for Germany to condemn any attempt to justify Hamas’s bloodbath of October 7. The problem is that, when directed against a Jewish person like Masha Gessen, German rigidity is unwittingly accelerating the de-legitimization of the liberal principles under which Germany was reintegrated into the west after WW2 and united after 1989.