‘The Real Number of Antisemitic Incidents is Five Times What is Reported’: Federal Commissioner Felix Klein on Combating Jew-Hatred in Germany

Five years after being appointed as the German federal government’s inaugural commissioner for Jewish life and the fight against antisemitism, Felix Klein is now perched at the summit of a growing state infrastructure that aims to reverse the alarming increase in Jew-hatred across the country.

A career diplomat who took on the newly-created role in 2018, Klein has few illusions about the scale of the task that faces both himself and the local commissioners appointed to deal with antisemitism in each of Germany’s 16 states. “One of the most concerning aspects of my work concerns the trivialization of antisemitism in daily life,” Klein told The Algemeiner in a telephone interview on Monday.

Antisemitic invective on social media, off-the-cuff remarks demeaning Jews and the invocation of traditional stereotypes can easily “lead to criminal acts and terrorist acts, such as the attack on the synagogue in Halle,” Klein observed, referring to the life sentence imposed in Dec. 2020 on Stephan Balliet, a neo-Nazi gunman who murdered two people when he opened fire at a synagogue in the city of Halle during services on Yom Kippur, the most solemn day in the Jewish religious calendar, on Oct. 9, 2019.

According to Klein, there is a clear link between antisemitic rhetoric that skirts Germany’s robust laws against Holocaust denial and the glorification of national socialism with acts of violence.

“Western societies seem to be very tolerant of this phenomenon, which should not be tolerated at all,” Klein said. “This is what I’ve seen during the last five years and it is why I am concentrating on the fight against antisemitism in arts and culture, because in this field especially, it has been downgraded in people’s minds.”

Two events over the last year have highlighted what is, at best, a widespread indifference in the German artistic community towards antisemitism — the Documenta festival of contemporary art in the city of Kassel last year and the concerts in five German cities last month by Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman.

In the art world, the spread of antisemitic tropes is frequently the work of progressives who then angrily reject the charges of antisemitism that come their way, as both the Documenta festival and the Waters concert tour demonstrated. One of the most prestigious art festivals in the world that is mounted every five years, the 2022 edition of Documenta was curated by ruangrupa, a collective of Indonesian artists whose goal was to showcase artwork from the “Global South” and thus contrast the collectivist mindset that produces it from the individualistic approach that, according to the curators, prevails in the west. Given the support of some ruangrupa members for the BDS campaign seeking to isolate the State of Israel, such a framework is certainly amenable to anti-Zionist ideology, and was duly on display in several of the works exhibited. These included transparently antisemitic themes, for example in the mural titled “People’s Justice” that featured an Orthodox Jew with a hooked nose and fanged teeth, and an Israeli soldier wearing a helmet shaped in the head of a pig and emblazoned with the word “Mossad,” Israel’s security and intelligence agency.

Motifs involving pigs, an animal whose consumption is strictly forbidden to both Jews and Muslims, have also been used by Waters, a vocal BDS advocate who caused outrage on his concert tour five years ago when he unleashed a pig-shaped balloon marked with a Star of David while on stage. On his return to Germany this year, the pigs were still on view, but with the symbol of Judaism replaced by a list of international arms manufacturers, among them the Israeli company Elbit Systems. Even without that provocation, however, Waters managed to offend once again, with a screen backdrop that included the name of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who kept a wartime diary while hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam before she was captured and deported, alongside that of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian Al Jazeera correspondent who was killed during an Israeli military operation in the West Bank city of Jenin in May 2022.

On both issues, Klein spoke out to encourage the application of German laws against antisemitism. In the case of Documenta, he argued that the offending artworks on display could have plausibly appeared “in the Nazi hate newspaper Der Stürmer,” urging the consideration of “criminal consequences” for the festival’s organizers. He also expressed support for legal action against Waters, who is presently facing an investigation by the Berlin police for donning a Nazi-style uniform during his performance at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in the German capital. The investigation will attempt to establish whether Waters had engaged in the glorification of national socialism by wearing a black leather coat with an armband reminiscent of a swastika; for his part, the 79-year-old singer has countered that the uniform is a protest against fascism and racism that dates back to Pink Floyd’s 1982 conceptual album and movie “The Wall,” where it first appeared.

Yet the abiding memory of Waters’ 2023 “This is Not A Drill” tour will be the simple fact that he played at all, despite the opposition of Klein, the state-level antisemitism commissioners and several Jewish and anti-racist organizations.

In Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne, concert promoters and venues would have faced breach of contract proceedings for canceling Waters, while a ban on his show in Frankfurt, at the municipally-run Festhalle, was overturned on appeal. Speaking ahead of Waters’ concert in Munich, Charlotte Knobloch, the head of the city’s Jewish community, cynically wondered aloud whether “the law gives greater weight to protection for antisemitism than to protection from antisemitism.”

“It’s up to the courts to find the right balance between freedom of art on the one side and human dignity on the other, because antisemitism threatens human dignity,” Klein said. “According to the constitutional courts, you need more than just an antisemitic expression in order to ban a concert.” Given this reality, he continued, it was crucial for the police and the judiciary to remain “vigilant” in such situations.

Klein added that he was gratified that Waters’ presence in Germany had at least generated a public debate over his long record of “antisemitic” outbursts. “When I came into office five years ago, he was also in Germany giving concerts, and there was no debate,” he said. “Now we have one, which shows a growing sensitivity within German society to these issues. On the other hand, we have responsible people in the worlds of art and culture who tolerate this, who think this is a normal or permissible form of expression. Too many people in the media defended Documenta and diminished the situation.”

Klein maintains that the presence of antisemitic tropes at such high profile events has had a knock-on effect in terms of legitimizing them within public discourse more broadly, especially on social media. “People are inundated by unfiltered information,” he said, identifying Twitter, where antisemitic postings have increased by over 100 percent since its takeover by billionaire Elon Musk, and Telegram, a messaging app with global popularity, as two particularly worrying platforms. “These platforms should be treated like other media institutions,” he argued. “When you run a newspaper, the editorial director is responsible for content. The same rules should apply in the online world.”

Ultimately, antisemitism poses a tangible, physical threat to Jews, Klein observed. Data published in February by the Federal Criminal Police Office discerned a 40 percent increase in the number of violent offenses reported. Yet as worrying as the widely cited statistic of five antisemitic incidents per day is, the informed consensus holds that this number is a serious underestimate. “The dark field is much larger — those incidents that are not reported in the first place for various reasons,” Thomas Haldenwang — the president of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) — observed last year, asserting that those incidents which are reported to the authorities are merely the “tip of the iceberg.”

According to Klein, “only 20 percent of the antisemitic crimes are reported, so the real number should be five times what we have — 25 incidents per day.” Many victims of antisemitism were, he said, reluctant to report their ordeals “because they feel it won’t change anything or because they had a bad experience with police officers who think that Jews exaggerate.”

Klein regards more accurate statistics gathering as crucial to his work. “We can only fight something effectively if it is visible, so this is the first step for our prevention work.” Another goal, as part of the national strategy against antisemitism announced in Nov. 2022, is the creation of heat map that breaks down antisemitic incidents in Germany’s different regions as well as its type — from the far right, the extreme left, and within Germany’s Muslim communities drawn from across the Middle East.

Having been immersed in the fight against antisemitism for five years, Klein has developed a surer sense of himself and his task over that period. “As a non-Jew, I can call out and criticize developments, and also make clear that this fight shouldn’t be left to Jews alone, but involves the whole of our society,” he said.