It could have been a Mitchell and Webb sketch – a man with a very German accent and a distinguished Nazi grandfather complaining: “These foreigners, coming over here, importing their antisemitism.” Only this was not a comedy. The man was Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and he was making his complaint last month in an interview with Fox News in the US, attributing rising antisemitism in Germany to “the big numbers of migrants we have within the last 10 years”. How did Merz manage to miss the joke – apart from by being German of course?
The chancellor is not the only German politician to have made the dubious connection between foreigners and antisemitism. Hubert Aiwanger, the deputy premier of Bavaria, made headlines in 2023 when an antisemitic leaflet he was alleged to have written at school – better known as the Auschwitz pamphlet – came to light. Aiwanger denied writing the leaflet. Then his brother joined the fray, claiming authorship, and hardly anybody mentioned it again. However, it didn’t stop Aiwanger from declaring later that year: “We have imported antisemitism to Germany.”
