Germany's necrophilia

A recent ruling by the Higher Administrative Court of Thuringia upheld the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial's right to refuse entry to visitors wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh. The court argued that such attire could disturb the site's solemn purpose and unsettle Jewish visitors, emphasizing the memorial's duty to preserve historical dignity and prevent political agitation.

This decision exemplifies a persistent necropolitical logic in German statecraft: the state’s attachment to the memory of Jewish death during the Holocaust functions as a cornerstone of its moral and political authority. Yet this attachment operates through a necrophilic gaze, prioritizing the dead while erasing or rendering invisible the living, particularly Palestinians.

In practice, the memorial’s exclusion of Palestinian symbols is not merely symbolic: it actively participates in the ongoing erasure of Palestinians, shaping which lives, histories, and solidarities are recognized or silenced. By policing Palestinian visibility, it forecloses solidarity movements, reinforces epistemic and scholastic erasure, and normalizes the conditions under which violence and systemic oppression—including the material and political precarity in Gaza—can continue unchallenged. In this sense, Holocaust memory, deployed as a moral touchstone, is directly entangled with contemporary structures of necropolitical power, sustaining both domestic repression of solidarity and complicity in broader forms of genocidal violence.

Scholars like Esther Romeyn note that Europe’s attachment to “dead Jews” functions as a moral compass: the haunting presence of Holocaust victims underwrites liberal tolerance and, in Germany in particular, becomes a matter of Staatsräson. At the same time, as Sanabel Abdelrahman and Hanna Al-Taher argue, German political and academic discourse exhibits necrophilia toward Palestinians: their living realities are erased, frozen, or intelligible only as symbolic victims. The Buchenwald ruling makes this tension concrete: the state’s necrophilic devotion to Jewish death sustains its authority while actively foreclosing recognition of Palestinian life, solidarity, and rights, linking memory politics to contemporary forms of structural and epistemic violence that amount to a genocidal continuum.