“Your papers, please,” she said rather stiffly. Judging from her pronunciation, I could tell she didn’t speak English very well. I placed my passport on the counter. “Ein Jude!” she exclaimed, as she inspected the Menorah-inscribed cover.
“I’m an Israeli citizen,” I politely replied in English. Already uncomfortable with having been identified as a Jew, I felt it important to assert my national identity. Turning to her colleague, she said it again: “Ein Jude.” I broke out in a sweat. I didn’t know what to say.
“Sprechen sie Deutsch?” (Do you speak German?) her colleague asked me. “Nein,” I replied. “Je peux parler Francais, or l’Espagnol, si vous preferez.” (“No,” I told her. “I can speak French or Spanish, if you prefer.”) She shook her head. She spoke neither.
Luckily, I’d completed the paperwork I’d come to file in advance, having had it translated into German by my wife’s employer. I handed it to the clerk, hoping that it would formalize the exchange. If it had been completed properly, there would be little else to talk about. Scanning the documents, the woman at the counter asked me how long I planned to stay. “Funf jahre,” (Five years) I said, after taking a moment to find the right words. The women behind the counter looked surprised. She looked back at her colleague.
Exiting the office door, I felt a little uneasy. All I’d come to do was register my American dogs. But I got my first lesson in German anxieties about foreigners instead. I’d learned that I was a Jew and, further, that being one meant that I would eventually have to leave the country. Live in Germany permanently? No chance.
“You must forgive them,” a Protestant theologian told us over Vietnamese food in Kreuzberg a few weeks later. “They were probably Ossis [Easterners). They grew up in an intensely monocultural society, that had not processed the war the way we did in the West.”
Given how much has been made of the reactionary politics of the East over the past twenty years, whether far right or far left, it was no surprise to hear this. Those who resided in the late German Democratic Republic had lived under authoritarian rule since 1933. The Nazis exterminated us. The Communists didn’t trust us. Why wouldn’t the people who grew up there be suspicious or even hostile towards us?
Still, the encounter came as a shock to me. I had arrived in Germany with an open mind, but with inadequate preparation for dealing with close-mindedness. And I certainly wasn’t expecting to have to parse the differences between the two Deutschlands that were once again one. How should I have known that I would be interacting with easterners when registering for dog licenses? What would have led me to conclude that their behavior meant they were Ossis, rather than generic Germans?
I had thought that with nearly three degrees worth of background in German philosophy – I wrote a bachelor’s thesis on Gershom Scholem, a master’s thesis on Theodor Adorno, and most of a dissertation centered on Jurgen Habermas – I’d be prepared. But, like many humanities-trained intellectuals, I wasn’t. I never learned German. My interest in German philosophy was guided principally by its utility to my political interests, not its original cultural context. In this regard, I was a typical philosophy student.
Whatever I knew about Germany beyond philosophical debates over culture was gleaned from the arts. Ever since high school, I’d been a big fan of the unique art noise band Einstrzende Neubauten. Towards the end of college, I began reading Christa Wolf. In graduate school, I fell in love with the films of Fassbinder. In other words, great names to cite at parties. Academic parties, that is. But it was not the stuff of graduate exams in German history. And my area of specialization, Frankfurt School critical theory, didn’t help much either. Its leading lights were more bothered by America than Europe; they taught me more about capitalism than Germany.
Maybe I shouldn’t denigrate my lack of savvy in this way. A friend who spent many years working for the BBC once told me that of course the World Service is better than domestic BBC programming. Why? Because its job is to represent the best version of the country. The German culture I’d been raised to consume performed the same kind of function. I could relate to it precisely because it communicated stereotypically left-wing, culturally sophisticated values. The kind that define what it meant to be post-war or post-Nazi.
If you wanted to rehabilitate Germany after Hitler, there was no better way to do it than to sell it to youth courtesy of such cutting-edge culture. It wasn’t just a con job – what Israelis call Hasbara, or pro-Israeli propaganda – in German drag. Not at all. A better way to put it would be that the Germany that foreigners like me came to appreciate in the 1980s was a real one. But it was a politically liberal, socially adventurous and highly educated Germany, the kind that would be in the minority in any country, but, which, in certain instances, best represents it to the outside world.
Ironically, though, it was not this Germany that I finally came to know personally, but one dominated by minorities. Not just any minorities, either, but mostly people with origins in the Middle East. The translator I hired to help us deal with our visas is Jewish. The attorney who represented us in the purchase of our apartment also turned out to be Jewish. One real estate agent was Turkish and the one before that Israeli. My wife and I are the only non-Muslims in our apartment building. I could go on.
We did not choose to work with these people on the basis of their ethnicities. They were simply the persons we came into contact with as a consequence of our requiring their services. It was only ever by accident that we would learn of their backgrounds. So, for example, in filing papers, once again, with a local government office in Kreuzberg, I found our translator puzzling over the copy of the Ketubah (Jewish marriage certificate) we had to supply. “I never got one of these,” the blonde-haired woman told me.
The Germany we live in now is every bit the multiethnic, liberal bubble of art and politics persons like me were raised to desire, whether abroad or at home. The export market version of Germany has definitely not caught up with it yet. It may never. Yet, this is also why unsettling incidents that speak to a very different conception of Germany, such as what happened when I went to register my dogs, are so significant. For an equal number of Germans, if not more, there is a fervent hope that the version of the country represented by my translator, by my attorney, and by me, for that matter, will one day pass away.
Preparing to return to Berlin after working in England and Italy for eight months, I tried to catch up by reading newspapers and magazines about Germany. The experience did little to alter my expectations. Immigration remains at the top of the list of the country’s concerns. For example, no less than four stories in the English-language The Local during the third week in June were about racism.
One story discussed the Muslim community’s fears about new government efforts to combat Islamic extremism. Another covered the Greek immigrant community’s concerns over anti-Greek prejudice, in light of Germany having to rescue Greece from insolvency. A third story looked at the case of a university fraternity that was almost kicked out of its national association for admitting an ethnically Chinese German. And a fourth examined the substandard public housing pushed on Berlin’s Roma (Gypsies).
Capping it all off was a feature in Der Spiegel that highlighted anti-Semitism in Germany’s Die Linke. Alleging that the left-wing party is indulging racism in its stance on Israel – from promoting symbols reconciling a Swastika and a Star of David, to advocating boycotts of Israeli products, supporting 2010’s Gaza flotilla and creating Mideast maps without the Jewish state – the piece takes no prisoners.
Is it all true? Considering Der Spiegel’s politics, the situation probably isn’t quite as bad as that. Some of the incidents that the periodical cites as evidence of anti-Semitism are not racist. Is Judeophobia still a problem? Most likely. The kinds of debates taking place within Die Linke are common to many leftwing parties, and there are often racist overtones to them. In a German context, obviously, such things have greater resonance.
Throughout the article, though references are made to western Germans, there is a particular emphasis on the East German roots of Die Linke’s racism problem. In this, the article is in keeping with more common arguments like that of the Protestant theologian I had dinner with. From this perspective, the prejudice being disclosed is surely a German problem, but one that is, at its worst, reflective of the eastern political roots of this left-wing party. The apple never falls far from the tree.
Like much German talk of anti-Semitism, the problem with this article in Der Spiegel was its exclusive focus on the phenomenon. This is not to imply that the rise of hostility towards Israel or Jews more generally should be ignored. But its complexities would be much easier to grasp if they were considered in relation to other prejudices on the upswing, particularly those directed at people from the Middle East and its European equivalents such as Greece. One would think that with so many stories about racial conflict in one week, Spiegel’s editors would get it. Jews are being targeted. But they are not the only targets.
The article’s subtitle, “A Map Without Israel,” is especially revealing. While it is meant to focus on the left-wing party’s problem, the phrase also reads like an unconscious critique of the magazine’s middle-of-the-road readership. Like the government clerk who insisted on identifying me as a Jew rather than as an Israeli, I worry that, at least to many Germans, Jews will never have a real national identity. We will always be a people who are defined by our religious affiliation.
I realize that the Holocaust has something to do with that. But the zeal with which anti-Semitism is pointed out is where the biggest danger lies. Because if Germans are unable to recognize that they are already living in a multiethnic society, in which people of diverse origins have no intention of leaving to go “home,” they will continue to single out foreigners. In the end, it may not even matter that much whether they do so to persecute or protect.
Photograph courtesy of the author
Thanks for this inightful and deeply personal piece about my homeland. Just two anecdotes that may illuminate how complex German attitudes to having become a multiethnic society actually are. The most successful party in Parliament today, with a decent chance of winning the chancellorship in the next elections, are the Greens. They have been led by Cem Özdemir, a German of Turkish origin, ever since they strated their relentless rise in the polls.
The junior party in the governing coalition, the Liberals, are now led by Philip Rösler, an ethnically Vietnamese German, who is also vice-Chancellor. Unlike the Greens, the liberals, who got their best-ever score in a national election while being led by a homosexual who campaigned with his partner, are now in the doldrums. Rösler was recently named their head to reverse the Liberals’ slide.
German elections are run on a proportional system. One votes for a party list, not an individual representative. For that reason, it is extremely important to present one’s best in the top slot. That two of Germany’s five major parties have chosen ethnic minority leaders to represent them to the public is perhaps the best sign that Germany is, despite its flaws, rising above racial definitions of “who belongs”. From my perspective of living in Belgium, I would wager that Germany will have an ethnic minority government leader long before the Brits, the Spanish, the Italians or the French will – to say nothing of the quite unashamedly racist Belgians.
On a separate issue, you are right to distrust Der Spiegel. That it is still taken seriously is a constant surprise to me – it mixes reporting and opinionating as a matter of course, and approaches most of its stories with its mind already set, not with a quest to find and reflect the truth. It has degenerated to become a polemical rag, nothing more.
Thanks for your helpful comments, Patrick. I totally appreciate them. I agree with your analysis completely. I’ve been extremely buoyed by a number of recent political developments in Germany, in general, including the Greens victory in Baden-Württemberg, and the mobilization against S-21 in the state. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot of liberal energy making itself felt in many parts of the country, particularly in areas of longtime conservative hegemony.
It is the multicultural public sphere emerging in the country, as referred to in this piece, that the ascent of politicians like Ozdemir and Rösler to senior positions in their parties ideally reflects. As a foreigner, and as a minority, I find their success reassuring. I am equally hopeful for them. Nonetheless, I am concerned at the continuing national polling suggesting an increase in anti-Islamic sentiment in the country, and what that means for all minorities of Middle Eastern descent.
I am similarly concerned with the fact that so much of the incitement against minorities – the kind you find in tabloid newspapers here, as well as from CDU/CSU quarters – is not frowned upon the same way that anti-Semitism is. Whether it is against Greeks, Poles, Roma or Turks, it all ought to be regarded with the same sense of alarm. I’ve always been moved by the degree to which conservative German remorse for the Holocaust has not extended to more pluralist, multiethnic sensibilities in general.
I found the Chancellor’s statement about the failure of multiculturalism last fall completely offensive, and remained chagrined that politicians like Horst Seehofer have any public traction at all. The immense popularity of Thilo Sarrazin’s book was equally alarming. Nonetheless, I think that because of Germany’s unique mix of immigrants, and its experience with state-sponsored discrimination, that it is uniquely positioned to champion a new kind of public sphere. I can’t think of anything Europe needs more right now.
This is, excuse me, nonsense. If you closely examine the German political landscape and the people who vote for certain parties, you will very soon find that people tend to vote for such parties that do not represent the actual political view of their voters. You may ask the people who vote for the Green party whether or not they like immigrants, and you will be surprised. I don’t know why Germans are so stupid but they obviously are. The second point I’d like to mention is the fact that the German nation has always defined itself ethnically. And I cannot understand how a foreigner can be so arrogant to criticize our system. Even Emperor Charles V had to provide evidence for his German heritage before his election. And that was in the 16th century. The French king, who wanted to be elected as well, argued that he was of Frankish and therefore German blood, too. Heritage, heritage, heritage. And I ask you: why should that be changed? Why the hell should Germany change its self-definition? Goethe never possessed a German citizenship. Kant did not even live within the contemporary political entity called Holy Roman Empire but in an independent state Prussia. Wasn’t he German? Yes, he was, due to his German heritage, his blood. And so were thousands and tens of thousand of Germans in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Russia and Romania etc.
Cem Özdemir isn’t German. Neither is Philipp Rösler. And if you spoke to everyday Germans on the street, you would know that they think the same way. “Der Türke” and “der Vietnamese”, but not “die Deutschen”. That’s how Germany is, has always been and will always be. And I don’t think that this attitude is bad.
Would you be upset then, if I considered you a Nazi?
As long as you consider Goethe, Luther, Walther von der Vogelweide, Kant, Fichte, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Schiller Nazis as well, I wouldn’t be upset at all. All those great men–and the millions of other Germans now and then–defined the German nation, as I described, ethnically.
Franz, you subscribe to a nationalist definition of what it means to be German. Cem Özdemir and Philipp Rösler are just as German as Kant and Goethe.
The problem that you face is that what it means to be German has changed, just as all other European national identities have necessarily changed, too. One might say immigration is the catalyst. It all depends. Europe has always been ethnically and culturally pluralist, to varying degrees.
Germans like you have an especial obligation to develop flexible notions of national identity and citizenship. Otherwise you remain ideologically complicit in the Nazi genocide, on the one hand, and the Döner Killings, on the other. That’s why I asked you if you wouldn’t mind being considered a Nazi.
>>Franz, you subscribe to a nationalist definition of what it means to be
>>German.
It’s THE definition that makes Germany German. A German citizenship was introduced in 1934 by Adolf Hitler. Before that every German state had its own citizenship, and in the passport of, let’s say, the Weimar Republic or the German Empire, you were citizen of Prussia, Bavaria or the glorious state of Waldeck-Pyrmont. If you define Germany by citizenship, its history begins in 1934, and its founder is Adolf Hitler. Surely not a nation most Germans long for.
>>Cem Özdemir and Philipp Rösler are just as German as Kant and Goethe.
>>The problem that you face is that what it means to be German has changed,
>>just as all other European national identities have necessarily changed,
>>too.
If people want the definition to be changed, ok. But then they have to face the consequences: you cannot re-define Germanness and yet declare all those people from the 19th, 18th, 17th etc. century as part of the German nation although they wouldn’t be Germans according to the new definition. You have to decide whether you want an ethnic German nation including Goethe, Mozart and, yess, the Swiss, or whether you want a German nation defined by citizenship and thereby excluding all those people.
This is the point were most people simply argue in a way I cannot understand, as you do: they declare Philipp Rösler (who himself doesn’t feel German, as he said in an interview) a German because of his passport, but they also declare Immanuel Kant a German although he lacks that passport. Where’s the logic in there?
>>Germans like you have an especial obligation to develop flexible notions
>>of national identity and citizenship.
Do you speak German, sir? I would appreciate it if you watched two videos on YouTube giving proof to my last point I’d like to mention: the fact that those “new Germans” you talk about don’t feel German themselves. This is a weird situation: people like you call immigrants with a German passport German. But those people don’t feel German at all. So we ethnic Germans ought to accept them as countrymen although they don’t want to be Germans:
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAE8RI1o9hg
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv8XAaBJaes (watch from 1:11) The Turks in this video clearly state that they are and remain Turks due to their blood and heritage. And they are right.
EDIT: 2. (I mean 1:11:00, one hour and eleven minutes, concerning the second video)
No Franz, it’s not. It’s the definition that makes Germany “German” for nationalists. And it is racist because it is so narrow. So, for example, by said criteria, Jews and Roma, whose families may have lived in “Germany” for 500 years, would not be considered German. Similarly, by making “exceptions” for historic minorities, as well as more recent ones, this has no bearing on whether or not one can consider Kant “less” German.
Franz, while you may be technically correct in saying that German identity was traditionally defined by blood instead of citizenship — hence the efforts to repatriate people of German descent from the former Soviet Union — I don’t see how insisting on that definition right now benefits anyone. Having lived in Germany, I know what an important contribution immigrants have made in the postwar era, both economically and culturally. There’s a reason Germans eat Italian and Turkish, for example, and it’s not a bad one.
Coming from the United States, I do think it’s easier for me to see the benefits of a model of national identity in which genetic heritage is irrelevant. There’s something inherently deceptive about insisting on “blood,” anyway. The so-called “ethnic Germans” west of the Rhine have far more in common, in terms of their ancestry, with the French across the border than they do with those from North Sea coast in der ehemaligen DDR. Using blood as a criterion is not scientific, but political.
Do you know of Nietzsche’s comment that the two greatest writers in the German language were “not German”? He meant Heinrich Heine and himself. His point was that there’s no necessary correlation between heritage and identity.
Mr. Bertsch, have you watched the two videos? In Europe, things are different from the U.S. It’s not only we Germans who are so evil and define ourselves by blood. The immigrants do that themselves. Five years ago, I served my time in the army and had a comrad of Asian origin who was born in Germany, of course, a German citizen, whose native language is German and who served Germany in the army, as I did. But when we once talked about the lack of patriotism he said (and I’ll never forget that): ‘Why should I care? I’m not a German.’ And the Turks in the videos say the same: they are Turks because they are of Turkish origin with Turkish blood. And they are right.
Furthermore: if nations aren’t defined by heritage, they have no real reason to exist. Why is there a country called U.S.A. and a country called Canada? Both define themselves solely by citizenship, both speak English, both used to be English colonies, both share the same values and principles. So why have two independent countries instead of one? Germany exists because it’s German. And German is different from Turkish, French and Italian. This is, how it’s defined. But how would you define the difference between the U.S. and Canada? Both define themselves by immigrants? Than there is no difference.
She gave a look at Menorah inscribed on the cover and she exclaimed “ein Jude “. Not a very smart woman…..does she work for the police ? It would maybe happened tha same in Italy ( where 44% showed perjudice teards jews in a recent poll )or in France – yet in Germany sounds different. Maybe it is not either rational or fair saying this but yes..this episode could sound sinister
Thanks for the comment, Andrea. The official in question worked for a city government office in Berlin. I completely understand concerning Italy. My wife and I lived in the Piazzale Loreto-Via Padova area, in Milano two years ago. The security forces were unbelievably rough on immigrants living in the neighborhood.