Not Too German, but Not German Enough

Six days late. Given the fight this country is having with itself, I could not summon the will for the usual dutiful exercise on the 20th of July.

And yet that fight is exactly why the day matters. So today I am writing this:

The 20th of July shows where this country's pride should come from: the darkest conditions human beings have ever created. Germans who had sworn an oath decided that the oath did not cover the crime, and risked everything to do the right thing.

I have often asked myself what my duty is, as a German not born in Germany, with a family history rooted elsewhere, and an uncompromising love for this country. This day is the answer. Uncompromising love, and a strength that does not bend.

What could be more German than that?

Navid Kermani said it plainly at the Bendlerblock last Monday, to recruits taking their oath: "Das Grundgesetz steht über jedem Befehl." The 20th of July, he told them, stands for the duty to resist when doing your job becomes a crime; and should a future German government try to lead them into a war as manifestly unlawful as the present one against Iran, their duty would be to refuse the order.

For that I thank him.

Then he named the man who had made that warning necessary: "Kein Geringerer als der Bundeskanzler hat es sich zur Gewohnheit gemacht, das Völkerrecht klein- und Völkerrechtsverstöße schönzureden, wo es ihm politisch opportun erscheint." Said to recruits, in uniform, in the courtyard where Stauffenberg was shot.

Kermani had a specific incident in mind. Friedrich Merz called Trump's threat to wipe out an entire civilisation "Teil seiner Strategie", part of his strategy. No other Western head of government has done so.

A misunderstanding runs through the German debate. Friedrich Merz is exhibit A.

International law is not a decoration hung on war by people who have never seen one. It is bound up with the military reality of lawlessness. It was written for precisely the conditions in which it is hardest to hold: fear, overwhelming firepower, an enemy already declared less than human, and a chain of command in a hurry. Its home is the battlefield, not the seminar room. It binds a single person: the soldier receiving the order. That is why §11 of the Soldatengesetz forbids obeying an order that would mean committing a criminal offence, and why Innere Führung was built around that sentence rather than around obedience.

And the law does not protect only the other side. It protects the one who obeys it. Not in the abstract sense of reciprocity, that you might be the weaker party tomorrow and benefit from the rule yourself. Directly.

Kermani reminded the recruits of Article 1: "Nur wenn Sie die Würde auch Ihres Feindes achten, werden Sie dem Gelöbnis gerecht, das Sie heute ablegen." Anyone carrying out an order is, in that moment, state power, which is precisely the power Article 1 binds. And human dignity is inviolable, including for the person who holds it. Under settled German case law nobody can sign their own away; dignity cannot be waived. The Basic Law protects it by forbidding anyone to be made a mere object. Whoever kills without being bound by the rule makes an object of the other, and thereby lays down a principle under which a human being may be an object. From that principle he cannot exempt himself. He loses his dignity; he is brutalised. And that loss does not stay with one person. It is contagious. Even the perpetrators knew it. When Himmler ordered the shooting of a hundred prisoners in Minsk in August 1941 and watched it done, he was himself shaken. He feared for the mental state of his men and ordered a search for other methods of killing. Not to spare the victims. To spare the murderers.

Killing without process is not an abstraction either. A decapitation strike on a head of state, a power grid, a fuel depot, a hospital, a residential block. Each is a decision taken by a person who should have said no. The law exists to reach that person. When the Chancellor talks it down out of political calculation, he is not making a diplomatic gesture. He is taking from the soldier the one instrument that lets him refuse, and from every human being the protection of the law.

This war has had no shortage of applause. When Ulf Poschardt greeted it in Welt with "Endlich!" and dismissed everyone who objected as "deutsche Moralposeure", he was not being brave. He was cheering on killing he will never have to carry out, from a desk no drone will find, and calling the demand for due process weakness. Insisting on the law is not a reflex of the small. It is the demand we make of the strong, and the only thing that separates an army from a gang.

The applause has a history. When thousands of pagers and radios detonated across Lebanon in September 2024, in streets, in shops, in hospitals, at least 37 dead and around 3,400 injured, two children among the dead of the first wave, Jan Fleischhauer, then as now a columnist at Focus, made a joke about testicles. He deleted the post. Asked why, he answered that he had spelled "off" with one f. The content was not the problem. The typo was. Poschardt called the same operation "next level terrorbekämpfung!"

The law of war leaves no discretion here. It forbids attacks on civilians, and it forbids booby traps disguised as harmless everyday objects. For the doubters: that is exactly what the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said at the time.

The law reaches further than the debate in this country cares to admit. A soldier is not a target everywhere and at all times; the rules of engagement apply to armed conflict. When the United States killed Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad in January 2020, there was none between the two states. The UN Special Rapporteur called the strike an arbitrary killing, a breach of the Charter's prohibition on the use of force, and a violation of Iraq's territorial integrity. Anyone wounded, captured or surrendering may never be attacked, even if he was shooting yesterday. Scientists and journalists remain civilians too, even with the best of contacts on the other side. The prevailing expert view is that research on a nuclear programme is not direct participation in hostilities. They were killed anyway, at least six Iranian nuclear scientists, several in their homes, with their wives and children. A commander may be a lawful target in war; in a war that is itself unlawful, killing him remains a breach of the Charter. And where there is no armed conflict at all, as in the attack on Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in 2020, physics professor and member of the Revolutionary Guard, that is not an act of war. It is murder.

There is a simple test of whether a man believes in the law or only in his own invulnerability. When the threats against Donald Trump came out of Tehran, he let it be known that the United States would decimate and destroy all areas of Iran, a thousand missiles at the ready. He avoided his new plane, a gift from Qatar, on the Secret Service's advice, and denied in public that his own safety was the reason. One life under threat, his, outweighs a country. Nobody has ever run that sum in the other direction. That is not a view of the law. It is the expectation that killing is a one-way street, and that the others always stand at the far end.

The same expectation underwrites the justification for killing journalists in Gaza: the dead man had really belonged to the other side. The evidence stayed disputed. The dead stayed dead. Anyone who lets that rule stand has signed it, for himself too. It makes a target of everyone who can be assigned to a side, down to the man at his desk in Berlin who defends such killings. That is exactly why the rule has to fall. And whoever applies it only to the others declares the protection under which he himself writes to be a favour.

We have trained ourselves to read this as normal. That is where the real danger lies. Every boundary crossed without consequence becomes the starting line for the next. That habit is what the 20th of July warns against.

Behind this habituation stands a school of thought older than this war. Its core assumption is that peoples do not know their own interests, that "freedom" may therefore be "brought" to them against their will and against those interests, and that the reasons offered for doing so need not be reasons the speaker believes. Iraq in 2003 was its masterpiece. It is not a fringe position. It has advised governments, and it is advising them again. The contempt continues at home. The ordinary citizen exists to be lied to and steered by a perfidious machinery. In Germany the Springer press supplies the tone.

Its double standard can be measured. Saudi Arabia, like many others among our close friends, has no elected offices at national level; Iran votes, though under the filter of the Guardian Council. Nobody has ever proposed bombing Riyadh. Noam Chomsky sharpened the comparison years ago: Saudi Arabia is the most extreme fundamentalist state, and next to it Iran looks like a free society. You need not follow him there. The point stands without him. A state that takes one autocracy as a partner and declares the other a reason for war is not fighting for human rights.

A limit follows, and it holds at home as well. We have to live with the convictions of our fellow citizens, including the ones that look wrong to us in the moment, and we have to endure other societies with theirs. We can support the people we consider progressive. We do not have to accept the other, but we do have to respect him. No more than that. This limit is not complacency. It is the lesson of every attempt to liberate a people against its will.

But it has a condition. Coexistence rests on the law. Whoever places himself outside the law and approves the killing of human beings has ended coexistence.

Our own Federal President called this war a breach of international law and was attacked at home for it, from within the governing party, with the argument that the legal assessment is the government's business and not the head of state's. The attack gives the game away. It aims to ensure that nobody calls the law by its name any more. We should do it more often, not less.

The same reflex is at work where the past is concerned. Michel Friedman speaks today in the Festspielhaus about antisemitism, Wagner, and the Nazi history of the Bayreuth Festival. He very nearly did not. The festival management had cancelled the memorial event on security grounds, and it came to light only because Friedman spoke about it. After the outcry they invited him back and called the cancellation a fatal misjudgement. The critic had never been the problem. The problem was the unrest he stirs.

"Der Boden in Bayreuth ist kontaminiert," Friedman says, and nothing has been cleaned up here since the founding of the Federal Republic. He is right: the crimes of National Socialism have never been adequately confronted. But the proof of that is neither the magic of the Bayreuth Festival nor Wagner's masterworks. The proof is the casualness, the chutzpah, with which we support crimes against humanity. From the part of the left that calls itself anti-German to the right-reactionary Springer press.

And finally Friedman himself. Of Gaza he says: "Das ist kein Genozid." Genocide is the crime of crimes, as the Rwanda tribunal called it. To rule it out, while the International Court of Justice has ordered provisional measures over the risk of genocide and the UN Commission of Inquiry in September 2025 found reasonable grounds to conclude that genocide is being committed, is not a legal finding. It is a decision. Whoever insists that the ground in Bayreuth is contaminated should also call the present by its name. Or hold his tongue.

Germany does not suffer from too much German. It does not suffer from heroes too little scrutinised. It does not suffer from too little shame. It suffers from too much. It suffers because support for crimes against humanity goes undiscussed today, while we debate at length whether one may listen to Wagner, and what follows from the entanglements of our great-grandparents.

Our problem is not too much German but too little. That the most German speech in years came from Navid Kermani is a verdict on the state of this country. That it could be delivered at all gives me hope.