Credit: Spiegel Germany
BY now, it’s an embarrassment to almost everyone in Germany that, in the grounds for one of its decisions, a regional court in Cologne almost off-handedly declared circumcision — a religious tradition dating back thousands of years — to be illegal. But the incident confirms a tendency toward rampant anti-religious prejudice and growing intolerance toward believers.

To be sure, the German government is rushing to re-establish peace under the law with new legislation, hoping to prevent Germany from becoming what Chancellor Angela Merkel called “a laughingstock.” But elsewhere in the world, people are shaking their heads over the fact that it’s the Germans, once again, who — as Rabbi Pinchas Goldschidt, the president of the Conference of European Rabbis, said — are trying to make it impossible for Jews to remain in their country.

Likewise, in a piece in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, philosopher Robert Spaemann justifiably expressed his surprise over the sudden realization that circumcision is a horrible crime against children, one that had elicited little concern over the years from the now-vocal advocates of a ban.

Now they are getting down to business and raising the volume, as if to make up for lost ground. The sharpness of the attacks is only surpassed by the absurdity of the justifications. A procedure that is hardly more painful than a vaccination — something for which parents also don’t consult their child in advance — is now being expanded and revamped to form a strategy of cultural anthropology.

Ralf Bönt, a commentator in the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, writes that, when a boy is circumcised, he is being shaped into a “soldierly man,” someone who is “smooth as stainless steel” and as “ready for liftoff as a rocket.” I’ve tried to discover the soldierly aspects in the Adagietto of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and the stainless steel in Heinrich Heine’s “The Lorelei,” both works by circumcised men, but I must admit that I have not succeeded (although Heine would certainly have had a lot of fun with the notion of a rocket ready for liftoff, if he had known what a rocket is). But perhaps I’m already completely desensitized to being a soldier in bed or elsewhere because I’m part of the roughly one-third of men around the world who perceive circumcision as an enrichment.
More: