Berlin suburb explains Europe’s far-right rise
GERMAN NEIGHBOURHOOD A MICROCOSM OF THE ‘HALO’ EFFECT OF IMMIGRATION
Buch, a small community on the outskirts of Berlin, seems at first glance to be the kind of place Goldilocks would declare “just right.”
It is not too rich or too poor, not too expensive or too scruffy, not too close to the crowded city centre but not so far that its tree-lined streets of tidy apartments are beyond a daily commute.
It is probably not the sort of place people picture when they think about the tide of far-right populism overwhelming Europe. But beneath the surface, this cosy, safe neighbourhood is starkly different from the depressed post-industrial zones often portrayed as the populist wellspring, and is emblematic of the forces threatening to upend Western politics as we know it.
In this apparent stronghold of ordinariness, the Alternative for Germany, a far-right populist party, won more than 22 per cent of the vote in the 2016 local election — more than any other party.
Buch, on the surface, appears to be an unlikely source of anti-immigrant anger.
For one, there are few migrants here. While many nearby parts of Berlin are tremendously diverse, filled with refugees and other immigrants from all over the world, Buch has remained overwhelmingly white, despite the presence of a small refugee centre in the middle of town.
Social scientists call this the “halo effect”: a phenomenon, repeated across Europe, in which people are most likely to vote for farright politicians if they live close to diverse areas, but not actually within them.
Jens Rydgren and Patrick Ruth, sociologists at the University of Stockholm, wrote in 2011 that people in such communities may be close enough to immigrants to feel they are under threat, but still too far to have the kinds of regular, friendly interactions that would dispel their fears.
Eric Kaufmann, a political scientist at Birkbeck College in London, has found that rising diversity can push the “halo” outward. East London was a centre of far-right activity in the 1970s, but as neighbourhoods there became more diverse, far-right support fell and rose in the whiter suburbs just beyond them.
Buch, too, seems to fit that pattern. Despite the arrival of some refugees, there are so few Muslims that the supermarket does not even stock halal meats. But it lies in a district that borders Wedding, one of the most diverse parts of Berlin.
Buch’s white residents, according to this theory, are fearful not because their lives or jobs have been upended by migration, but because they perceive this as happening in areas like Wedding and worry they could be next.
Across town, down a road lined with communist-era apartment blocks, Cornelia Reuter and her husband, Hagen Kuehne, live and work as pastors. Reuter said some of her parishioners were preoccupied with fears that more refugees would be sent to Buch.
She and her husband traced this fear, in part, to a deeper problem: Many within their community, they said, long for a clear sense of identity and belonging, but struggle to find one.
After the Second World War, celebrating or even defining German identity became taboo, often seen as a step toward the nationalism that allowed the rise of the Nazis. The attitude shifted somewhat with the 2006 World Cup, where the German hosts unabashedly flew their flag and celebrated national pride.
But there is still enough of a void that leaves people with an “inner emptiness,” Reuter said. This gap in selfdefinition has left them no way to express their identity except by what they are not — what is sometimes termed a “negative identity.”
“You can say ‘I’m not a Muslim,’ but most people can’t say ‘I am a Christian,’” or otherwise articulate a positive identity, she explained. “There is an emptiness. And I think that’s a society-wide thing. It’s not just one group. It’s a very wide problem.”
Germany’s identity taboo is not new. But recent events may have made it suddenly feel more painful.
Immo Fritsche, a political scientist at the University of Leipzig, has found that when people feel they have lost control, they seek a strong identity that will make them feel part of a powerful group.
Reuter said many people in Buch did feel a sense of lost control. The refugee crisis was perceived as a sign that Germany’s borders had become lawless. And the presence of the local refugee centre, though home to just a few hundred people, brought a sense of heightened stakes.
That has left an opening for Alternative for Germany, which promises to restore German patriotism. Far-right politicians like the party’s Bjorn Hoecke, Reuter said, know how to exploit that identity taboo.
“People like Hoecke are pushing against this thing,” she said.
“He knows to put his words right there.”
In an interview, Hoecke told me he believed identity was “the question” for Germany today.
Minutes later, he told a crowd of hundreds of cheering supporters that Germans were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of its capital,” referring to Berlin’s memorial to Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
“Germany needs a positive relationship with our identity,” he told me, “because at the foundation of being able to move forward is identity. The foundation of our unity is identity.”