In a public statement last week, the university said the reason was the public letter co-signed by Fraser.

The incident seems to be symptomatic of Germany’s uncritical and almost unconditional support for Israel. It has led to its legal defence of the country against charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice and diplomatic covers in numerous international arenas, including the United Nations, and which in turn led Nicaragua to bring a charge of complicity in genocide against Germany at the same court for supplying weapons to Israel.

I recently asked Hans-Georg Moeller, a philosophy professor at the University of Macau, to explain the political – perhaps even spiritual – crisis, over Palestine, of the country from which he originally came.

Moeller began by pointing out that the Palestine proclamation neither questioned Israel’s right to exist, as the university alleged, nor did it justify Hamas’ terrorist attacks on October 7. It did, however, call for a boycott of Israeli cultural and academic institutions.

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“It’s by no means an isolated case,” he said. “To the contrary, it is only the tip of the iceberg. There have been numerous academic and other cancellations. Many of these cancellations are related to support for Palestine and criticisms of Israel and have caught the attention of international media.”

Recent incidents include the cancellation of an art exhibition by Candice Breitz, a South African-Jewish artist, over her criticism of the heavy Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

The Russian-American Jewish writer Masha Gessen received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in a ceremony that was delayed and then scaled down in response to one of her articles comparing Gaza to Nazi ghettos. The Associated Press reported that the sponsoring organisation, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and the Senate of the city of Bremen, withdrew from the ceremony.

Across Germany, most pro-Palestinian protests have been banned. Moeller offers two reasons for Germany’s conundrum.

“The immediate context is the German so-called Erinnerungskultur (culture of remembrance), the semi-official civil religion of Germany, which has surged since reunification in 1990,” he said.

“It declares a collective historical and permanent responsibility (Verantwortung) for the Holocaust of Germany as a state, including all German citizens … The Holocaust is regarded as a qualitatively and quantitatively singular evil event in human history. Comparing it to other events is typically regarded as ‘relativising’ or ‘trivialising’ the Holocaust and therefore seen as deeply inappropriate. A major political consequence of the culture of remembrance is a declared moral obligation of Germany and Germans to support Israel by all means.”

As a result, the Macau academic explained, challenging Israel amounted to challenging a moral pillar of modern Germany.

“The major function of the culture of remembrance is to be the civil religious foundation for re-establishing a new German national pride after the Nazi catastrophe – and a new national profile,” Moeller said.

“This new pride is a paradoxical guilt pride: the Germans achieve a new kind of moral superiority by taking on permanent and full responsibility for the greatest evil ever. No nation before them has been so bold and good to do that. And it establishes such a lofty moral high ground that, paradoxically, a German university even feels entitled to cancel a Jewish person over her stance on Israel!”

It is indeed, paradoxical, indeed tragic, that after committing not one but two genocides in modern times – the Nazi Holocaust and the Herero and Nama genocide in what is Namibia today – Germany may end up facilitating another one – all because it claims to have learned the profound moral lesson from the Holocaust. How did this come to pass?

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Moeller explained further. “To say that Israel does something profoundly wrong threatens the logic and paradoxical identification of Germans with Israel as that to which everlasting and unique responsibility is due,” he said.

“Germans identify very strongly with the guilt pride profile. The cancellation of Fraser and so many others is ultimately not about her, not about Palestine or Israel or any other political issue – it is about maintaining German civil religious guilt pride. This leads to the complete paradox that even Jewish people, like Fraser, can become victims of it.”

He said Cologne University openly admitted it was worried about its public image.

“[It] explicitly states that Fraser’s professorship would have hurt the Wahrnehmung – that is the public perception – of the university,” Moeller said.

“It would have been a violation of its profile. This is precisely, and explicitly, what is at stake: the university leadership was concerned with being seen as publicly impious and as acting against not just the university, but how Germany and Germans want to be seen. This is what made them feel so uncomfortable with Fraser.”

Furthermore, rather than diversity, there is in Germany now a strong trend towards a commonly acceptable set of publicly held views.

“In the wider context,” Moeller said, “in recent years there has been a strong social trend towards an ever-stricter Gesinnungsgemeinschaft, roughly translatable as ‘community of opinion’ or a collectively binding world view, sometimes also called ‘community of values’, Wertegemeinschaft.

“An increasing spectrum of political views are considered socially unacceptable and, ironically, undemocratic, in Germany. Such views include anything considered anti-Israel or antisemitic; or anything that is labelled ‘right-wing’, which may include criticism of the EU or critique of immigration policies, or, for instance, critiques of LGBTQ legislation. It also includes a perceived lack of support for the war in Ukraine, or perceived ‘sympathy’ for Russia or China.”

It’s especially dangerous for intellectuals and academics to express public support for political parties labelled as “extremist”.

“Despite significant success in elections and polls, expressing public support for non-traditional right-wing (AfD) or left-wing parties (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht) can be highly damaging for someone’s career and reputation in Germany, especially for intellectuals,” the philosophy professor said.

A December poll found that only 40 per cent of Germans believe that they can freely express their opinions while 44 per cent no longer think they can.

Moeller said he experienced more academic freedom in Macau than in Germany.

“Judging from my own experiences in Germany, the feeling of not being able to express one’s opinion publicly is particularly strong among academics and intellectuals, and especially among those of middle-age and above,” he said.

“In my personal view, this reflects a major shift that has happened since the 1990s. There was a much greater diversity of accepted views and a much wider spectrum of ideas, approaches, and positions in West Germany before reunification, both in academia and the media.

“I work at the University of Macau, China, and my university offers more intellectual variety and freedom, among both colleagues and students, than average German universities.”