As a followup to my post about the German Chancellor saying that “remigration” means ethnic cleansing, here’s a look at the same man at a Berlin political rally on Thursday saying that the hatred of Jews means… foreigners.
Die perfideste Form der Ausländerfeindlichkeit ist Antisemitismus.
That’s right, the leader of Germany is saying on a campaign trail that Jews can’t be Germans.
Is it a slip? It is deeply rooted in the conservative political German platforms who frame Jews to this day as a distant, unfamiliar, others who they tolerate. The Jewish museum in Berlin is an exhibition not about Jews as they are, how life goes today, instead about the people who were remigrated. It is like going to a dinosaur museum about life before the meteor strike.
Ausländerfeindlichkeit means hostility toward foreigners.
Friedrich Merz applied the word to Jews living in Germany, from the stage of his own party headquarters, as a promise of protection of those foreigners.
Dinah Riese at the taz named it for what it is. The sentence draws a line between a collective “we” and puts all the Jews in the “other” category.
The Jüdische Allgemeine report shows the frame in every passage it quotes.
Not a slip.
The Jüdische Allgemeine’s account has him listing the targets of recent attacks as German citizens, Jews, and Israeli citizens. Read as three groups, Jews get careful placement between German citizens and Israelis. Read as two, with Jews as the citizens in question, they remain the citizens who need a second label attached. Either way, an identity wasteland.
He then paired “Ausländerkriminalität” with “Judenhass” as the two things Berlin must stop tolerating, and, per the same report, insisted Germany remains an Einwanderungsland. Every mention of Jews sat inside his passage on immigration. Jews living in Germany for centuries? Merz tells the world they don’t count as Germans.
This is his settled, public view.
In June 2025 he told Fox News that Germany suffers from “imported antisemitism”, by which he meant to outsource German hate. A year later the import has become the Jews themselves. This is explained best in a book called “Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany” by Esra Özyürek in 2023.
Jews in Germany hold German citizenship by birth, by naturalization, and by restoration under Article 116 of the Basic Law, the clause written for people the Nazi state stripped of citizenship between 1933 and 1945. The stripping came in stages. The Reich Citizenship Law of 15 September 1935 (RGBl. I S. 1146) defined a Reichsbürger as a Staatsangehöriger of German or related blood, which moved German Jews into a lesser category of belonging while leaving their passports in their hands. The Eleventh Ordinance to that law, 25 November 1941 (RGBl. I S. 722), declared any Jew living abroad, deportees included, to have lost German nationality, and took their property with it.
The Chancellor’s sentence performs Hitler’s same sorting with a modern wink and nod.
He’s being openly antisemitic. On a main stage in Berlin, to win votes.
Riese adds the detail that shows what the Merz rhetoric does in daily life. The attacker who swung a broken bottle at a woman wearing a Star of David necklace in Berlin this month acted on the necklace. Her German citizenship was totally invisible to him. Six days later the Chancellor stood on a stage and said it is totally invisible to him too.
I have experienced it. On a S-Bahn ride from Wannsee, whose station still wears its 1935 Reichsbahn blackletter a short bus ride from the villa where the final solution was organized, a woman sat next to me and ranted and raved. She yelled that I am a foreigner, that I will be beat to death and have my children stolen and raped by strong and pure Germans if I do not flee. I didn’t fully realize she meant me, it was so atrocious, until someone whispered “she’s talking about you.” The S-Bahn was full of passengers. All around her they sat in silence and looked away as she went on and on, until I left the car.
Antisemitism begins with the sentence that says Jews are foreign by definition. The Chancellor said it while campaigning as the man who wants to be trusted as a protector of “Germans”.
