If you’ve come across a picture of Volker Beck recently, there’s a good chance it showed him looking outraged. That wasn’t always the case. Voters from his district in Cologne might remember a bright-eyed, smiling young parliamentarian, whose charisma and ambition promised a dazzling career in the Bundestag, which he first entered in 1994 as a representative with the Green party. Beck always had a penchant for righteous anger, but when he was younger, he had a wider emotional range—he was reassuring, concerned, empathetic, mournful. At sixty-four, he still walks with the energy and determination of a man in the prime of life, and when I approached him at the conference on “Fighting Antisemitism with Criminal Law” he organized this past December in Berlin—he had not responded to earlier emails requesting an interview—his smile still had the same youthful radiance that helped him become Germany’s most prominent voice for gay rights before a 2016 drug scandal cost him his seat in parliament.

Beck has since devoted his energies to lobbying on behalf of German-Israeli relations and to fighting antisemitism according to a specific and embattled definition, work he has pursued with the vigor and determination of a “political street fighter of the first order,” as one German journalist who’s known him for decades commented in private. When Beck understood that I wanted to write a profile of him, he shied away from me and rushed back to the conference room. As he sat there alone, hunched over his phone, probably pecking out his next tweet, he seemed old to me, almost frail. There was something so human about him. He was one of the countless aging people who had turned to the internet to dispel their loneliness and vent their fear of irrelevance, only to be drawn into a hyper-specific form of political extremism.

Much of Beck’s social media content reeks of the proverbial uncle who ruins family gatherings with his casual hatred and endless bloviating on topics he knows little about. After Israel’s beeper attack on Hezbollah last September, which several human rights organizations denounced as a likely war crime, Beck triumphantly posted his “favorite” social media memes, among them a beeper displaying “your 72 virgins are waiting.” When the Vatican staged a nativity scene with the baby Jesus wrapped in a Kufiyah, Beck fumed that this pope was “not a theologian. He’s an opportunist.” After multiple sources reported Palestinian infants dying from hypothermia in late December, Beck was among the amateur German medical experts who called the fatalities into question. “Life in Gaza is a catastrophe,” he commented over a screenshot of the weather forecast for the Gaza Strip, “and Hamas must end the dying by capitulation. But I can’t understand the allegations that people are freezing to death that are going around here.”

While the war raged in Gaza with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians dead, wounded or displaced, dozens of Israeli hostages still held captive, genocide proceedings against Israel ongoing at the ICJ and an ICC arrest warrant issued against Benjamin Netanyahu for, among other things, the war crime of starvation, Beck seemed almost ravenous for evidence that the world was conspiring against Israel. A recent tweet suggests that the Red Cross and various United Nations Agencies might have colluded with the car manufacturer Toyota to smuggle shiny white pick-up trucks into Hamas’s hands; a clip Beck retweeted shows aid deliveries with the caption “every truck driving into the Gaza strip is an opportunity for Hamas to steal, make money, rearm and reattack”; another recent retweet tries to scandalize the fact that a pro-Palestinian woman spilled hot tea on a Jewish journalist at a feminist march in Berlin.

When the Hong Kong-based filmmaker Jun Li caused a little scandal at this year’s Berlinale—he had read out a statement in favor of Palestinian rights that ended with the slogan “From the River to the Sea”—Beck complained that he could no longer enjoy the film festival because it had devolved into “anti-Israel mass hysteria.” The slogan, which has been used by the secular Palestinian national movement since the 1960s, was declared a symbol of Hamas by the German Interior Ministry in November 2023. Over the past sixteen months, German police have routinely banned it from demonstrations and arrested activists for using it, often with brutal force. As Robert Brockhaus writing at Verfassungsblog has documented, there are hundreds of court cases pending in Berlin alone and, although various German courts have found bans and arrests to have been illegal, at least two women have been fined by Berlin courts for expressing the slogan.

Beck’s around-the-clock commentary on such matters generally stops short of calling for direct political repression or literal state violence, but his fear of “antisemitic codes and chiffres” has created an anxious and censorious climate that besets all levels of public life in Germany. Cancellations, indefinite “postponements” and disinvitations have become a kind of new German Nationalsport, with casualties in the hundreds. Beck’s political horizons do extend beyond Israel—like most of the German political establishment, he has argued strongly for rearming in the face of Putin’s war on Ukraine, and is still committed to various environmentalist causes. But his habit of playing David even when he is clearly Goliath, coupled with a glib disregard for human life and common decency typical of the very online, have reshaped Germany’s intellectual landscape.

The Loudest Goy

Beck is not Jewish. He has degrees neither in religion nor law nor any professional experience in diplomacy or international relations. He dropped out of the University of Stuttgart in 1987 and dedicated the bulk of his long and successful political career to domestic issues. Nevertheless, as the director of the influential Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft, president of the Berlin-based Tikvah Institut (there appears to be no connection to the American Tikvah Fund) and co-founder of the “Expert Initiative on Religious Policies”—one of the many pedagogical structures successive German governments have put into place to save democracy—Beck is unambiguously among the most influential voices on Jewish life in Germany.

Beck, everyone I talked to who knows him agreed, is highly intelligent and clearly has detailed knowledge of a wide range of subjects. He also has a long and storied career as an advocate for gay rights and humanitarian causes. Still, whenever Germany delves into a scandal about allegations of antisemitism or uses its ill-defined Staatsräson to justify disregard for international law, freedom of speech and fundamental principles of universal human rights, it’s likely that Volker Beck’s Twitter profile will trumpet about it, just like there’s something of Truth Social about every petty, sweat-panted bully who screams “’Merica” before committing some casual act of brutality. When German bureaucrats accused Jews like Masha Gessen, Nancy Fraser, Nan Goldin, or Yuval Abraham of antisemitism in major scandals after October 7, they do so with the backing of a legal and PR-apparatus that would be unthinkable without Beck.

Germany isn’t the only place where it is difficult to figure out who gets to say what about Israel and when. But the debate here is perhaps unique in that the country is exceedingly interested in Jews in a society where Jews are an exceedingly small minority, surrounded not only by persistent antisemitic prejudice among non-Jewish Germans, but also by an identity politics violently torn between ritualistic emphasis on Nazi crimes and a more diverse and multi-ethnic approach to Germanness.

Eighty years after the Holocaust, most synagogues and Jewish institutions in Germany are still guarded 24/7 by police officers. It is perhaps understandable that the organizers of the conference where I approached Beck made sure to place a banner reading “we include Jewish perspectives” next to the speakers’ podium. However, only one person in the line-up of that day identified herself as Jewish. More problematically, the perspectives of the often left-wing American and Israeli Jews who constitute (alongside German Jews and recent immigrants from Eastern Europe) a large part of Germany’s jüdische Community, have been systematically repressed in order to protect what seems to be the only accepted perspective on Israel and Palestine. According to journalist Emily Dische-Becker, one in four of the people who got cancelled in 2023 in Germany because of their position regarding Israel were Jews. Jewish artists and scholars are routinely accused of antisemitism by a sprawling bureaucratic apparatus built to monitor anti-Jewish hate.

It’s worth keeping that simple absurdity in mind when thinking about Beck. The fear of antisemitism that animates many Germans, driven and enforced chiefly by Beck, has started to reorganize society on the model of its own obsessions, just as American society has once-again fallen prey to what historian Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style” in politics. The nature of the absurdity is different, though. Germany is in little danger of falling into the kind of attention-seeking “fascism for the lulz” that has beset the US. Rather, it is undermining large parts of the legal apparatus it developed to prevent the reemergence of fascism through a very earnest attempt to fight antisemitism.

The far-right AfD plays a role in this development, as it initiated the first of several parliamentary resolutions that prioritize the repression of so-called Israel-related antisemitism over freedom of speech, artistic expression and academic inquiry. But there is something else, a kind of obsessive adhesion to arbitrary rules and processes. Roman law distinguished between querimonia, legitimate lawsuits, and spurious legal claims used to undermine the juridical system called querela. The Nazis infamously used the term querulants to silence critics that resorted to the legal system to express their opposition to totalitarian rule. Yet in doing so, they relied on a 19th century psychiatric tradition that saw people with a penchant for spurious and nonsensical lawsuits as suffering from a medical condition that was only incidentally about the legal system and more fundamentally about the utter compulsion to being right, even when all evidence and common sense was against them. The condition was first described in 1858 by the forensic pathologist Johann Ludwig Casper as “Wahnsinn aus Rechthaberei,” the madness of being right. Especially but not only where speech on Israel is concerned, Germany seems to have become a nation of querulants.

Policing Speech on Israel

By the end of his career as a parliamentarian, Beck was not only the most effective advocate for gay rights of his generation: he was among the best political hopes to stem the rising tide of far-right extremism in Germany. In a widely praised 2016 talk show appearance with Frauke Petry, then head of the AfD, he established himself as one of few German politicians capable of defending human rights with enough clarity and moral urgency to paint the extremist politician into a corner. It was, Andreas Petzold wrote for Stern, “a masterclass on how to knock out your political opponent on the slippery stage of a live broadcast.”