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Anti-Semitic depictions of Jews from the Arthur Langerman Archive in Berlin: uncanny, bent over, with a hooked nose
Photo:
kind
The »Harry Potter« series has nothing in common with »Jud Suess«.
And yet there is something that eerily connects JK Rowling's kid-friendly saga with Veit Harlan's anti-Jewish film.
It is, as the US satirist Jon Stewart recently pointed out, about the bank of magicians run by goblins.
In the film adaptation, the enterprising operators of the financial institution appear as if Joseph Goebbels had personally approved the occupation.
They are sinister, hunched, with hooked noses and dubious intentions.
They're goblins, not Jews.
And yet an image is invoked here that is so ingrained in the public consciousness that it can be effortlessly and thoughtlessly "cited," as Lea Wohl von Haselberg puts it.
The media scientist is one of a number of informants that filmmaker Felix Möller interviewed for »Jud Süss 2.0«.
The documentary is an enlightening study of the nature and continued impact of anti-Semitic stereotypes - from their heyday during National Socialism to their current boom in, oh!, so social media.
Presented as the climax of the agitation is »Jud Süss« from 1940, commissioned by the Reich government and insidiously permeated by the motif of the wandering, greedy Jew as a foreign body.
At Hitler's personal instigation, "The Wandering Jew" became even more specific.
In the guise of a documentary on the "problem of world Jewry," as the subtitle of the 1940 piece of work was written, even the children were targeted after just a few minutes.
They are, according to the suggestive quote, "proud of doing it like the big ones" and therefore being able to haggle, because: "These youth are not idealistic like ours are."
Toxic effect
The Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Foundation in Wiesbaden keeps more than 400 such historical »reserved films«.
Their director, Christiane von Wahlert, attributes such a toxic effect to them that they cannot be broadcast or performed without comment - including even children's films such as an animated version of "From the little tree, the other leaves wanted it", a poem by Friedrich Rückert, in in which a Jew sneaks through the forest, "with a sack and a big beard."
Ideological special rubbish, some of which found abnormal distribution.
At the time, up to 40 million tickets were sold across Europe for »Jud Süss« alone – including in soon-to-be-occupied France, where German anti-Semitism was able to seamlessly follow that of France.
Rumors of demons and other atrocities
The historian Jean-Marc Dreyfus points to this continuity, as well as to motifs of demonization circulating since the Middle Ages and revived and modernized in the 1920s: with Jews as vultures, wolves, spiders, worms, rats, octopuses shown.
One of the merits of »Jud Süss 2.0« is that the actualization of these atrocities can be experienced with the senses.
What used to be stories, postcards or walking sticks with a "Jewish" hooked nose are now memes and codes on the Internet.
"Anti-Semitism is," Adorno wrote, "the rumor about the Jews."
Its spread is not only unchecked, it has even accelerated.
The talk then is of the “happy merchant”, the businessman rubbing his hands, of “globalists” as the beneficiaries of globalization – or of “cosmopolitans”, of whose supposedly octopus-like spread in a nice sequence of cuts about Hitler and Harlan Björn Höcke also stammers ; up to, by the way, a feared »liquefaction of all structures«, loosely based on Klaus Theweleit. If you are still wondering why you can call the AfD politician an anti-Semite, you will find an explanation here.
Not only prominent politicians like Höcke or Viktor Orbán, but also the rank and file of the racists talk incessantly about "the Jew" in their forums and chat groups - sometimes without even mentioning the word. Codes such as Wall Street, cultural Marxism, Freemasonry, the World Bank, Bilderbergers, Rothschild, the media, Soros, LGBTQ or “population exchange” are sufficient. Möller illustrates the multiplication of anti-Semitic gossip on the Internet by having individual pages divided again and again until there is only a wall of anti-Semitic pixels.
Like a stubborn virus, anti-Semitism attaches itself to any situation.
Currently it is Corona.
Jews are either behind the virus or the pharmaceutical industry, at best both, want to either poison humanity with injections or make money with it.
In a particularly brazen volte, radical opponents of vaccination identify themselves with the Jews and victimize themselves. And there it can be seen again on the streets: the Jewish star.
»Jud Süss 2.0« not only illuminates the continuities, not only illuminates the topicality of the topic.
The film also conveys an idea of the menacing dimensions that the agitation granulated into a myriad of tiny channels has meanwhile assumed.
Incidentally, without clearly assigning anti-Semitism to a political camp, which is also a credit to the documentation.
One learns here that the wrong people are all too happy to draw their conclusions from history.
And it's never over.
»Jud Suss 2.0«. Tuesday, January 25, 10:40 p.m., Arte
– and in the Arte media library.
