Bulletin from Abroad
As right-wing parties prosper, Germans still don’t have the hang of dealing with non-Germans.
Cathrin Schaer in Berlin
It’s been a great month for European xenophobes, full of newsworthy events for them to cheer: street battles between asylum seekers and local right-wing youth in the East German town of Bautzen and a home-made bomb left outside the door of a Dresden mosque – the latest in a long line of similar attacks around the country.
In mid-September’s state elections, the right-wing party known as Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has campaigned mainly on an anti-immigration platform, made significant gains in the north-eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and in Berlin. That’s despite the fact that the AfD is continuously criticised for links to far-right extremist (read: Nazi) parties.
In fact, the AfD managed to claim 14% of the vote in Berlin, a city that’s about as multicultural and left-wing as it gets; Hitler’s propaganda guy, Joseph Goebbels, once called it “the reddest city in Europe besides Moscow”. The AfD, whose leader has said she thinks it’s okay to shoot refugees at the border, says it plans to become the third-largest party in the country.
So what the hell is going on here? Given their history, shouldn’t the Germans know better? And why all the hate? Don’t they know racism is not cool?
Maybe not. The kind of comment that would scandalise people in New Zealand – which, despite its problems, is still more genuinely multicultural than Germany – hardly raises a Teutonic eyebrow. Newly arrived Antipodeans are often surprised, for example, at how Germans categorise hip hop and R&B as “Schwarze Musik” (black music). A Mallow Puff-style cake is still colloquially called a Negerkuss (you can look that one up yourself), even though the branding changed years ago.
Despite decades of trying to make up for the sort of overt prejudice that ended in genocide and war, Germans still don’t have the hang of dealing with non-Germans. Open prejudice is not acceptable – the German constitution says so – but even some of the most right-on younger folks, people who are mostly carefully politically correct, have dabbled in what may best be described as accidental racial profiling: they may assume that an Asian woman in a Vietnamese restaurant must be a waitress, not a diner, or an African-American should be the one giving up his seat on the train, or a Turk will leave a messy trail of seeds and nuts because, hey, that’s what you people like to eat, right? Excuse me, bearded Arab guy, is that your suspiciouslooking bag? Clearly you can’t be a hipster, you must be a terrorist.
Subtle racism cuts the other way, too. Germans are also known for fetishising the exotic, engaging fervently with what is known as “multikulti”. They’re so desperately open to other cultures it’s like they’re ashamed of themselves.
For some, racism is a nasty choice. But to be fair to the kind-hearted perpetrators of casual, almost unwitting prejudice, most of the time it’s not even really their fault. They grew up in an almost homogeneous society in which everyone looked the same, so now it’s just “us” and “them”.
And they’ve never had the nuanced discussion on race that New Zealand, Australia and the US have been conducting for decades.
Maybe local journalist and media commentator Jakob Augstein put it best, after his appearance on a chat show to discuss Bautzen’s teenage rioters: “The immigration crisis of the past two years shows how fragile German identity is,” he wrote. “You end up with a sad and lasting truism: the Germans get along best with foreigners when they meet them on holiday”.
Germans also fetishise the exotic, engaging fervently with “multi-kulti”.