{"id":1074,"date":"2026-10-19T17:00:49","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T21:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn449-f26\/?p=1074"},"modified":"2026-10-19T17:38:46","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T21:38:46","slug":"sanitized-past-sanitized-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn449-f26\/sanitized-past-sanitized-present\/","title":{"rendered":"Sanitized Past, Sanitized Present?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As someone who is fascinated by Holocaust remembrance and Palestinian liberation movements, I was particularly curious to see how Berlin would reckon with and commemorate its genocidal past, and how current debates over Israel-Palestine politics would unfurl in Europe\u2019s largest refugee hub. We\u2019ve only been in Berlin for a day; I recognize that the city harbors a plethora of opinions. But today, I discovered a paradoxical unwillingness to engage with the anti-Semitism of the past coinciding with an institutionalized tendency to dismiss the pro-Palestinian sentiment of the present as anti-Semitism.<\/span><\/p>\n

This morning, I interviewed two student activists from the Technical University of Berlin who have been bravely collecting evidence that their university has helped fund MedWater, a water distribution system that restricts Palestinian access to water in the occupied West Bank. H. was small and gentle, ensconced in a red-and-black keffiyah that seemed to swallow him. He hugged me when we split off — he had to lead a workshop teaching high schoolers in South Berlin how to make good trouble. M. was broad-shouldered and more brusque; H. frequently interjected to explain that it was the injustice of water apartheid and not my questions that prompted his indignation. I asked them if any professors had been supportive of their campaign to expose the university\u2019s entanglement with a project that violates international law, and they said that even though 90% of their student body supported their divestment demands, faculty were reluctant to speak out publicly due to fear of being maligned as anti-Semites. The activists told me that no German journalists will publish the story of TU\u2019s sponsorship of MedWater, presumably for the same reasons. I was shocked.<\/span><\/p>\n

This atmosphere of self-censorship is probably overcompensation for Germany\u2019s violently anti-Semitic history. But it struck me as contradictory that given its perpetration of the worst genocide in history, Germany would be so quick to stifle criticism of a present-day genocide. I had hoped that, at the very least, fear of the \u201canti-Semitism\u201d label would prompt German institutions to substantively contend with their former Nazi ties. So I was incredibly disappointed by the presentation we attended this morning at Bayer Pharmaceuticals.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bayer was a founding member of I.G. Farben, a chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate that served as the largest corporate donor to Adolf Hitler\u2019s election campaign. I.G. Farben tested newly developed drugs on prisoners at Auschwitz and Dachau, injecting healthy inmates with diseases like typhus and causing many deaths. Bayer also had a controlling interest in the company that distributed the poisonous gas that the Nazis used in their death camps. All of this, however, was absent from or glossed over in Bayer\u2019s presentation about the corporation\u2019s Nazi involvement.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At Bayer, we ate salmon and lavishly decorated chocolate mousse; servers in white uniforms cleared our plates. Our bespectacled guide, who had the bland affability of a high school science teacher, smiled while he narrated the story of elite Germans\u2019 complicity in the most monstrous regime in history. He told us that Bayer initiated a \u201cHistory Project\u201d in 2022 to disseminate information about the Nazi history of the company. (It only took almost eighty years.) But a quick Google search revealed that the history we received was highly sanitized. The presentation felt less like an effort to demonstrate genuine remorse for the past and more like a public relations campaign designed to assure skeptical Americans of the company\u2019s present-day ethical commitments. I was disturbed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I know that America\u2019s free speech liberalism breeds disinformation and hate speech, and Germany\u2019s more restrictive speech laws have effectively combatted extremism. But I wonder if they haven\u2019t also circumscribed the terms of civic debate, rendering frank, open discussion of both Nazism and Palestine taboo. Today, I felt that Berlin\u2019s facade of cosmopolitanism and Holocaust memory belies an aversion to difficult conversations that allows injustice to proliferate in the present.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As someone who is fascinated by Holocaust remembrance and Palestinian liberation movements, I was particularly curious to see how Berlin would reckon with and commemorate its genocidal past, and how current debates over Israel-Palestine politics would unfurl in Europe\u2019s largest refugee hub. We\u2019ve only been in Berlin for a day; I recognize that the city<\/p>\n

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