Germany has been in the news recently after a wave of cancellations made international headlines. The reason offered by the institutions involved, the German punditry, and the current government, is that contemporary art is saturated with antisemitism. But the rhetorical function of these unjust accusations becomes evident if we look at how they have been put to use: to mask racism as antiracism.

Though it is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when political encroachment began to manifest in Germany, it was well before the Hamas militants’ attacks on southern Israel communities on October 7. The allegations of financial mismanagement hurled at the Documenta 14 curatorial team after the 2017 edition offered a legal precedent to delegitimize exhibitions whose content proved not palatable to local authorities. The German parliament voted in favor of labeling the international Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as antisemitic in May 2019, subsequently giving cause for the cancellation of public events for figures such as Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, and for a demand to end tax-funded “Israel-hatred.” The hounding of the Indonesian collective ruangrupa, curators of documenta fifteen in 2022, and participants such as the Palestinian collective The Question of Funding, followed the same script: conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism or contending that any comparison or analogy with colonial crimes trivializes the Holocaust. In spite of its vibrancy, documenta fifteen was reduced to a singular image: collective Taring Padi’s mural People’s Justice (2002), which included antisemitic imagery and was taken down within days of its unfurling. The embattled exhibition never regained its autonomy. In June 2023, Documenta interim director Alexander Farenholtz suggested that curators had been disinvited from the Documenta 16 finding committee after being politically profiled. This admission seemed to alarm very few, considering Germany’s violent history 
of suppressing dissent. Shortly afterwards, a smear campaign resulted in curator Ranjit Hoskoté’s resignation from the Documenta 16 finding committee in November 2023 and the subsequent withdrawal of all other members.