Elon Musk and JD Vance want to make Germany great

After helping his pal Donald Trump make America great again, Elon Musk has set himself a new goal of making Germany great again. Musk, who holds a bespoke role in the Trump White House, has flagrantly interfered in the German elections, set for February 23. He repeatedly declared his support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, a party that wants to make Germany great again by downplaying its Nazi past. South-African-born Musk thinks this is cool. Jews have every reason to think this is very uncool.

In a recent op-ed published in the major German newspaper Die Welt, Elon Musk claimed that only the AfD can save Germany. In his words, the radically right-wing party represents the “last spark of hope” for the country. During the AfD election campaign launch rally, the American billionaire joined via livestream and expressed his support for a party shunned by democratic forces in Germany. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, of all dates, he encouraged Germans to move beyond their “past guilt.”

At the Munich Security Conference on Friday, Musk’s support for Germany’s extreme right was followed up by no less than JD Vance. Who could have imagined an American Vice President giving a campaign speech for the far-right AfD a week before German elections in the very city Hitler had once declared the capital of the Nazi movement. It’s an affront to the mainstream democratic parties that represent 80 percent of German voters and have promised to build a “firewall” against the extreme right as part of the lessons drawn from German history.

The AfD does not just promote a radical anti-immigrant policy, it advocates a shift in Germany’s long-standing ways of grappling with its Nazi past. Mainly for this reason, all democratic parties, from the conservative Christian Democrats to the left-wing Social Democrats and the Greens, have vowed to not enter any coalition with the AfD, which is currently polling in second place. Not only did Musk and Vance ignore this broad democratic consensus in Germany, they blatantly meddled in the country’s elections to an extent that no influential voice in American politics has ever dared: After insulting Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz as an “incompetent fool,” Musk told Germans how to cast their votes. The result was a loud rejection of Musk’s interference across the German political spectrum.

The AfD Vance and Musk so admire rejects Germany’s approach to confronting the evil chapters of its past. Instead of building memorials, apologizing to the victims of the Holocaust, and paying restitution to Jewish and other victims, its leaders portray the period between 1933 and 1945 as an insignificant blip in history. One prominent AfD politician, Bjoern Hoecke, complained that “we Germans are the only people in the world who have planted a memorial of shame in the heart of their capital,” and suggested that instead Germans “need to make a 180-degree change in their commemoration policy.” For former party leader Alexander Gauland, the Nazi era was nothing but a “speck of bird poop” in German history. No wonder, then, that the party became home to many neo-Nazis who downplay or even glorify Germany’s Nazi past.

Rejecting the atonement model

Germany’s approach to the Holocaust during recent decades has often been hailed as a model for other modern democracies to emulate. Starting in the 1980s, the German education system, public institutions, and many private initiatives have worked thoroughly to uncover the country’s Nazi history, to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust, and to create a culture of memorialization. In a recent book, which won plaudits on both sides of the Atlantic, Learning From the Germans, philosopher Susan Neiman held Germany up as an example of how the United States should come to terms with the dark aspects of its own history and take responsibility for its wrongdoings.

Vance and Musk’s involvement in German politics offers a glimpse into how these extraordinarily influential members of the new US administration view dealing with history – not only the darkest chapter of Jewish history but America’s own past. In the most generous reading of Musk’s comments, he simply does not much care about a country facing its past wrongdoings. In a more critical interpretation, he may indeed believe that the negative chapters in a country’s history should be discarded.

That would mean doing away with much of what has been achieved in recent years with respect to an honest reckoning concerning America’s indigenous population, slavery, civil war, and also with its more recent wars. It’s an approach that is very much in line with the revisionist history politics of conservative think tanks and a president who neither knows much nor cares much about the country’s history. His “America First” statements sound like a translation of the former German national anthem, “Deutschland über alles” (“Germany above all – above everything in the world”). The now-outlawed text was fueled by the German sense of superiority that led to World War Two and its atrocities.

Those with the slightest grasp of history know that, given Germany’s past, AfD’s stated aspiration to “Make Germany Great Again” evokes quite different associations from Trump’s MAGA rhetoric. It stands for blindness towards the dark spots of history and for discrimination and marginalization of minorities and political opponents. German and European Jewish organizations have repeatedly condemned the extreme right-wing AfD. It must have been a slap in their face when Prime Minister Netanyahu recently met with Musk and called him “a great friend of Israel.” In response, one is tempted to quote another person who was not a great friend of the Jews, the philosopher Voltaire: “Lord, protect us from our friends. We can take care of our enemies ourselves.”

Israel and the Jewish community worldwide should not stay silent when any politician, no matter of what political stripe, elevates a party that belittles Germany’s Nazi past and the Holocaust. For Jews, this should be a red line. One thing is sure. We will never be able to say we did not know.