Whether the "ugly German" has returned
Rabinbach, Anson
Is the ugly German making a comeback only two years after unification? So it seems, at least from the almost daily reports of brutal mob attacks, arson, and beatings of foreigners in both parts...
...More than a quarter million asylum seekers have shown up in Germany in the past year, while a half-million ethnic Germans have already applied for admission and citizenship this year (their cases have yet to be decided, apparently as a delaying tactic...
...Unification has by no means produced a single German "identity," but instead has revealed how inadequate and paradoxical both German identities always were...
...in the cultural scene, in the churches and peace movements, and above all in the leadership of the anti-regime movement—has raised questions about the legitimacy of the GDR opposition...
...The kickoff may have already occurred, though, since some Social Democrats and most Greens oppose any change in the law and accuse the Christian Social Union of playing a "disgraceful and cynical game" by turning revision into a code word to attract voters who share the resentments of the radical right...
...For this reason politicians across the spectrum hope that the situation can be "displaced" if a comprehensive law regulating asylum and immigration is adopted by the European Community in Brussels, though none has yet been proposed...
...All of these developments would be incomprehensible if it were not for the epochal events that Europe has witnessed in the last few years...
...This article (116), was originally designed to include those Germans whose homes in Silesia or the Sudetenland ended up in Poland or Czechoslovakia after the war...
...Though the asylum seekers from the Balkans are legitimately included under the Geneva convention defining the politically persecuted as those endangered by war, many Germans perceive the asylum as a de facto immigration law...
...The German version of this sort of thinking is the image of America today as a sinking capitalist Titanic (as the magazine Stern recently depicted it) or, conversely as "a land of almost unbelievable social, cultural and ethnic integration," as the "anti–anti-American" left-wing Tageszeitung sees it...
...To make matters worse, Germany has no statutory immigration law whatsoever...
...East and West Germany are unified, but they are far from being united...
...Though the two leaders signed an agreement to that effect, it has clearly not been a priority for the Russians...
...The situation is exacerbated by the breakup of the Soviet imperium...
...But the response to the new wave of racial hatred has been an impressive campaign by the television and radio media and all the political parties, as well as demonstrations by hundreds of thousands against racism and Fremdenhafi (hatred of foreigners...
...Repression, poverty, and everyday misery would become universal, Germany could request international aid, no one would demand asylum, and all the foreigners would go away...
...150 • DISSENT The economic windfall created by the takeover of the east by west German firms and the "sell-off" of the communist state enterprises has emphasized the contrast between a wealthy and successful west and a rapidly deindustrializing, ecologically ravaged, and impoverished east...
...The liberal asylum law belongs to the atmosphere of 1949...
...But he was just kidding...
...GeiBler recommends an "extension" rather than revision of the law, which would impose restrictions on the asylum seekers (speed up procedures, curb length of stay, eliminate economic grounds...
...A majority of Germans believes that asylum seekers are abusing the social system, though more than two-thirds approve of the law...
...Second, relations between the western part of Germany and the five "new provinces" are tense...
...The disclosures of the incalculably extensive penetration of the State Security Apparatus (Stasi) into every nook and cranny of society—especially evident in the resignations of prominent politicians of the so-called "bloc parties...
...Even the Greens have backed away from their absolutist "open borders" stance...
...There is good reason for those of us who observe the German scene from a distance to be concerned about the emergence of a neo-Nazi right and the social and political dislocations that have occurred since the wall came down...
...It is not clear whether some believe that Germans would be more deserving or that the right of asylum is being misused for economic reasons and should be more tightly controlled...
...Though labor immigration was halted in 1973, many of those who arrived earlier have chosen to stay, with the result that Germany is rapidly becoming a multi-ethnic society, outstripping even France and England in the number of foreign-born residents...
...easterners feel colonized, demoralized, and see westerners as arrogant...
...So it seems, at least from the almost daily reports of brutal mob attacks, arson, and beatings of foreigners in both parts of recently unified Germany...
...Economic growth is declining, unemployment and housing shortages are rising, and the cost of aid to the former Soviet Union and the eastern provinces is pushing taxes upward...
...Despite professions of good will, many responsible leaders, for example, Peter Glotz of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), admit that Germany may eventually face a choice between the potential collapse of its social system or modifying its universally praised asylum law...
...First, there are signs of a new German lack of inhibition about throwing around its political weight...
...Bonn's pressure on the twelve EC member nations to fall into line was considerable, and the decision to act unilaterally, whatever its wisdom, unprecedented...
...The ethnic citizenship law, first articulated before World War I, and retained in 1949, belongs to the period of German chauvinism...
...The new and virulent racist and neo-Nazi fringe is not in itself dangerous, but it has become the focal point for a multitude of tensions and problems that have mounted since the dismantling of the Berlin Wall two years ago...
...If the radical right's reemergence is troubling, Germany is still a liberal, secure, and, of course, orderly society...
...Though the article is clearly not racist in intent (it also restores citizenship to all exiles between 1933 and 1945, including German Jews), it has an undeniable ethnic dimension...
...But there are indications that the number of those sympathizing with their "motives" is rising, and, more important, that xenophobia, racism, and even good old antiSemitism are more prevalent than at any previous time in postwar German history...
...The laws regarding asylum and ethnic right of return are on a collision course...
...Only weeks after the Economic Community (EC) summit in Maastricht accepted the Bundesbank as its model, Chancellor Helmut Kohl declared that Germany was "number one in Europe in economic might...
...And with its unilateral recognition of Croatia and Slovenia in December, Germany has struck out on its own in foreign policy...
...Police reaction has been uncharacteristically reserved, and shortly after the worst incident last September—a vicious mob attack (lasting several nights) on a shelter for 150 Romanians and Vietnamese refugees at Hoyerswerda in Saxony—the neo-Nazi German People's Union (DVU) won 6.2 percent of the vote in the Hanseatic city of Bremen (the right got 8 percent if the Republicans are included...
...Since 1949 Germany has had an extremely generous constitutional provision (Article 16) guaranteeing that "persons persecuted on political grounds shall enjoy the right of asylum...
...The result is that social and moral responsibility is forced to compete with blood and ethnicity...
...There is resentment, mistrust, and suspicion on both sides: westerners perceive easterners as lazy, corrupt, and lacking in commitment to democracy...
...The difficulty is that the Basic Law also accords the right of citizenship to all persons of German ethnic origin and descent, if they can offer proof of German heritage or of having lived in the "territory of the German Reich as it existed after 31 December 1937...
...Conjectures abound, but it seems safe to say that the Stasi judged the declining fortunes of the GDR accurately enough to want to play the options...
...The wall could be put up again, this time around the whole country...
...Of course, there is one simple answer to the dilemmas that Germany faces, the one proposed by the Frankfurt cabarettist Matthias Beltz: to solve the foreigner problem the communist regime should be immediately reinstated for all of Germany...
...Conservatives threaten that if the SPD refuses to compromise, every further asylum seeker will become an "SPD refugee...
...These assaults are committed largely by neo-Nazi youths, mostly skinheads, who are at the margins of society and not much beloved by the wider population...
...This does not mean that there is no cause for concern...
...But it also grants citizenship to descendants of Germans living in Russia since the seventeenth century (Volga Germans) as well as German communities throughout Eastern Europe...
...Germany, like the United States, is a nation of paradoxes, and to understand these paradoxes, the stereotypes first have to go...
...The majority of Social Democrats, including ex-chancellor candidate Oskar Lafontaine, favor compromise on a law making asylum more difficult without fundamentally altering its intent...
...Public opinion is contradictory...
...Kiosks and walls are adorned with graffiti, posters, and stickers with slogans like "Nazis out," "We are all foreigners," "Foreigners welcome, we are all planetarians" and, "Tolerance —so that nothing worse occurs" (with a picture of a broken window...
...Article 116 has given ethnic Germans in the east new hope of citizenship, while the asylum law's guarantee of social benefits and the right to housing has driven increasing numbers of refugees from the Balkan civil war to Germany...
...SPRING • 1992 • 151 Municipalities are already overwhelmed, and conservative parliamentary chief Heiner GeiBler warns that the issue should be resolved before it becomes an electoral football...
...In an effort to stem the potential flood of new "settlers," Chancellor Kohl called upon Boris Yeltsin to establish an autonomous German republic in the former Soviet Union...
...Still, in comparison with France, England, and certainly Eastern Europe, the level of xenophobia and ethnic hostility is considerably less than elsewhere in Europe (not to mention the United States...
...These slogans are so visible that Der Spiegel complained that hatred of foreigners is being rapidly replaced by an officially sanctioned hatred of Germans by Germans...
...In the meantime Germany has attracted the highest number of asylum seekers in Europe...
...Third, and most important, the emergence of a politically visible radical right and the racist attacks, combined with the strains produced by the spiraling numbers of refugees from war-torn Yugoslavia, Romania, and other impoverished Eastern countries, has provoked a national debate about Germany's liberal asylum law...
...But it is a mistake to try to fit what is occurring into what novelist Peter Schneider calls the "deep-freeze theory" of the unchanged racist German who instantly defrosts when Germany is unified...
...However, the campaign is effective: whereas 34 percent of the population expressed sympathy for the motives of the racial attacks in September, the figure dropped a full 10 percentage points by December (interestingly, there was more sympathy for the attacks in the prosperous west than in the economically devastated east...
...All the political parties recognize that the intertwining of national identity with the right of asylum is explosive, even without considering the social costs of the new immigration...
Vol. 39 • April 1992 • No. 2
