According to
Aleida Assmann, "the empirical history of evolving
memory politics in postwar Germany and in recent times" is the key context for the emergence of institutionalised anti-antisemitism in the 21st century. In the decades after the war,
Holocaust memory was largely confined to the survivors and their communities, a period described by Assmann as "the time when forgetting was prescribed ... by the postwar society and [German Chancellor]
Adenauer’s
Schlussstrich policy (drawing a line under the past). and the
Historikerstreit ("historians' dispute"). The latter was a dispute in the late 1980s in
West Germany between
conservative and
left-of-center academics and other intellectuals about how to incorporate Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into German
historiography, and more generally into German people's view of themselves – a key focus of debate being the extent to which the methods and ideologies that led to
Auschwitz were not
unique to Nazi Germany but had roots in earlier historical events, in particular the
Stalinist Gulag system. In the wake of the Historikerstreit, the popularity of Holocaust memory peaked in the 1990s after the fall of Communism, and became central to Western historical consciousness as a symbol of the ultimate human evil. Genocide scholar
A. Dirk Moses asserted that "the Holocaust has gradually supplanted genocide as modernity's icon of evil"; renowned German historian
Wolfgang Benz described it as the "singularly most monstrous crime committed in the history of mankind".
Holocaust education, designed to promote citizenship while reducing prejudice generally, became widespread at the same time. According to
Wolfgang Streeck, by the mid-nineties and especially the 1995
assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, it became clear that the
Oslo Accords were doomed to fail and that Israel saw military superiority, colonization and annexation of the occupied territories along with
apartheid-like domestic repression as a more promising path than a negotiated peace settlement leading to a
two-state solution. Streeck argues that international criticism of Israel, especially from the
Global South, placed increasing pressure on Germany, from Israel and the United States, to intensify its support of Israel as mandated by its
Staatsräson, and the German government revised its reading of the lessons of the
Third Reich – originally understood to lie in supporting both
international law and the Jewish state of Israel – to emphasize the latter at the expense of the former. According to
Donatella della Porta and
Leandros Fischer, the
anti-German movement – a leftist splinter group known for flying the Israeli flag and wearing
IDF shirts that originally arose as a response to
German reunification – played a particular role in shifting the entire German left's discourse on the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict to the right. == Creation of antisemitism commissioners ==