The Silly Moral Pretensions of the German Left

by John Rosenthal
A new book compares the anti-Semitism that led to the notorious Dreyfus Affair in France to "Islamaphobia" in America that led to Guantanamo.
The American novelist and essayist Louis Begley was in Frankfurt’s Old Opera House earlier this month to promote the German edition of his new book Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters. The English edition is first scheduled for release in late August. Oddly enough, however, a German translation has already been published. The German edition bears a different title: The Dreyfus Affair: Devil’s Island, Guantánamo, a Historical Nightmare [Der Fall Dreyfus: Teufelsinsel, Guantánamo, Alptraum der Geschichte].
The German title is not only grammatically puzzling. Why the emphasis on Dreyfus’s place of imprisonment — an incidental feature of the Dreyfus Affair? And what is the “historical nightmare”? And what does Guantánamo have to do with it? An article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on Begley’s Frankfurt appearance makes somewhat clearer the significance of these associations.
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