Übermensch über alles: Part II
First they came for the fireworks, and I did not speak out because I am not a firework.
Right on time, and right on the heels of one overheated battle in Germany’s war with its own sense of self, came another. Why discuss how climate change is giving the alps a snow-less winter when we can start 2023 distracting ourselves with moral panic about young people “who appear to be from the Arab region1” shooting fireworks at cops?
Coming up on 15 years living here and the needle on Germany’s identity crisis, which pokes an enlightened, liberal state with a small-minded, exclusionary nation has hardly budged. The same accusations, the same tropes, the same dubious claims hang out, in a state of suspended animation, in the rhetorical cryo-freezer, waiting for the next social spark to defrost them — only to be revealed to be hysterical exaggeration of fact, if not debunked outright.
Just like that, it’s 2015-16 again. And Germany has literally overnight woken up to learn that sexual assault and violence against women is a Thing — but only when the suspects are dark-skinned men, in groups, from less civilized, foreign and faraway places, to whom Germany has been humane and gracious enough to offer protection. Such things are certainly not part of the deliriously drunken and highly sexualized gutbürgerliche traditions of Oktoberfest and Karnival.
Dirndls will be dirndls, after all …
Just like that, it’s 2010-11 again. And Thilo Sarrazin on the center-left is warning that “Germany is abolishing itself,” by letting too many Muslims into the country. Or on the center-right it’s Hans-Georg Maaßen, whose far-right sympathies surfaced while running the domestic intelligence agency in charge of keeping a check on far-right activity, kvetching about anti-white racism.
The Social Democrats eventually kicked Sarrazin out of the party for those sorts of views, and the Christian Democrats are looking to do the same to Maaßen. The ideological gymnastics must be quite a challenge to conservative leader Friedrich Merz who, in the span of just a few weeks, has labeled as “unacceptable” both Maaßen’s Teutonic conspiracies and the lack of “respect” that those rowdy, migrant Arab boys show German authority.
Who needs a more self-critical review of structural norms when Germany’s establishment parties can pin insular attitudes on a few, bad Äpfel. Just push out the deplorables from within and push on with talk of Parallelgesellschaft from without, then wonder aloud how it is that populists successfully instrumentalize the fears of crime, disorder and social decay that you’ve sown into the voting population.
Before getting into the appalling language around, and irrelevant specifics of violence that reportedly took place on New Year’s Eve, let’s first get down a few facts:
New Year’s Eve in Germany is gross. If you can’t get out of the country, it’s best to stay indoors.
Fireworks are legal, and people are insane. The New Year’s Day news report detailing the number of severe burns and blown off fingers that hospitals treated — and how they compare to the year before — is as traditional as the chancellor’s New Year’s national address. Anyone who knows Berlin, especially, knows these scenes from my balcony are totally normal, if not tame. No one goes through New Year’s not having their windows shot at, if not themselves targeted. (Cyclists are a particular favorite.)
Young people do dumb things. Alcohol makes people do dumber things. And young men have shown themselves to be particularly good at being dumb and aggressive.
Cities are dense, diverse, troublesome places, which can be a challenge to keep together even under the best circumstances.
Cities are home to immigrants and their next of kin.
Income and education inequality disproportionately impact these groups, which is mostly a supply-side deficiency.
In German, linguistic or discursive definitions for terms like “expat",” “immigrant” or “migrant,” or “migration background” (a horror that this has infiltrated English parlance) are anything but fixed. They are also highly racialized, so that I as a white-skinned, college-educated American would never be called an immigrant here — and my descendants would never be considered to have a “migration background” — but a Syrian would, even if she shows up with an advanced degree in quantum physics.
Germany does a very poor job gathering data on these social issues, so a German citizen might get dumped into the “migration background” category just because his family is recently from somewhere else. And by “recently,” I mean as much as four generations.
Police and security officials are often wrong about events, especially in their first draft. Everything is alleged until it’s been proven, and even then the justice system can get it wrong. Either way, law enforcement is hardly a neutral arbiter of fact.
I know the pandemic is, like, so totally over, so it’s easy to forget that this was the first, unrestricted New Year’s Eve since COVID-19 canceled 2020 and 2021.
Germany woke up hungover on New Year’s Day to news that a normally rambunctious night took it to a new level, with police and fire personnel reporting the scariest moments of their careers. Before Berlin’s sanitation company was done cleaning up the trash from the night — a record amount, it said — the country had lost its mind.
For days, headlines as far as the eye could see ran wild with fear about the end of civilization as we know it. Dozens of injuries, hundreds of arrests, scenes of urban chaos so jarring and widespread that no one could quite make sense of what actually happened. But that didn’t stop people from trying. With investigators initially giving few details and no one on the ground to ask questions, media just reprinted official statements and politicians’ knee-jerk reactions. That means most everything reported was speculation, unreliable inference, the voice of a calculated interest group, or simply made up.
Very little of the coverage included voices of the alleged rabble-rousers, or the alleged milieu to which they allegedly belong. This is classic media myopia: Talking about people, not to them.
As they say, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. In the absence of anything real to go on, the narrative fell back onto myth: misfit migrants, mostly young, Arab males, ravaging Germany’s otherwise orderly cities out of disdain for authority since all they know is the abuse of dictatorship. This is, of course, a profoundly lame take, not least of which because it posits that immigrants and those with an “immigrant background” (whatever that means!) pose a threat to German society by engaging in … one of the most German activities there is: Shooting off fireworks on New Year’s Eve and generally making everyone miserable.
Once again, we were told, Germany has an Integrationsproblem. It took about 14 seconds for the country to abandon its collective skittishness towards authoritarian power and heavy-handed leadership, which it likes to say history has taught it to be wary of, and seek the “toughest punishments” as a means of “establishing respect” for the state and its enforcement bodies.
That Germany’s thin veil of humility, built on the presumption of “historical responsibility,” shatters the moment that status quo appears under threat, to reveal a festering, pathological need for order, authority and obedience, should deeply trouble everyone who lives here, knows its history, and values the rule of law.
Or, is this what Chancellor Olaf Scholz meant when he successfully ran on a campaign of “respect” in 2021. Save the far-left, which these days is all but a non-entity, nearly every political voice was calling for the full weight of the German state to bear down on New Year’s mischief. Even by the standards of German consensus politics, it was getting difficult to distinguish among the parties. They all started sounding largely the same and forgetting that Respekt ist keine Einbahnstraße.
After years of shooting down efforts to expand the use of bodycams due to frequent allegations of police abuse, police unions here have had a change of heart. Now that it’s their members in peril, rather than their members imperiling others, they’re all for them. Meanwhile, talk of taking the sensible step to finally ban fireworks was short-lived, as the right to lose fingers, poison the air, trash the streets and terrify your neighbors2 on New Year's Eve is about as sacrosanct in Germany as cruising as fast as you want down the Autobahn.3
As a largely, one-sided debate dragged on in all its iterations, police were busy revising their numbers. Lo and behold, not only were far fewer arrests made in direct connection to attacks against first responders, at least in Berlin, but a good deal of them were, in fact, holding the right passport. Although some of them, police and media made sure to highlight, simultaneously held a wrong one.
As touched on in Part I, the idea of dual citizenship in Germany is — excuse the pun — a rather foreign idea. To give some credit where credit is due, once a clearer picture began to emerge, some public officials and talking heads did begin shifting their focus away from red-herring questions of migration, and towards more pressing ones about missed socioeconomic opportunity, especially for boys and young men.
So much ink spilled over such a meaningless data point: German? Not German? German, but not really? German, but something else, too? … This is seriously the depth of debate we’re going to have?
Joachim Wagner, a journalist who fashions himself an expert in such things, took up an entire page of a Morgenpost in mid-January bemoaning exactly that. His prescription, however, was not that we need less identity pedantry, but more. Mental health, economic opportunity, social exclusion be damned — what’s really called for here is to more precisely pick apart who deserves to be considered a part of the exclusive German nation.
Never mind that, in both present and historical terms, it has been exceedingly difficult to become part, and accepted as a member of das Volk. Germany has an Integrationsproblem alright, but it ain’t a demand-side one. Best check the supply side. The host society lacks the cultural imagination — indeed, is ravaged by a Teutonic Un-imagination — to see beyond itself, and has spent so many centuries desperate to define itself against more tangible European nations that it has left itself very little space to adapt.
The task of incorporating different kinds of Germans over the years has been fraught enough. It isn’t a huge surprise that Germany’s record on doing so for non-Germans is even worse, which deteriorates as the cultural and geographical distance to Germany grows.
Germany may not be more racist than the big, Western countries it hustles to culturally compete with, but it is significantly further behind in addressing its societal shortcomings. That is not in spite of its history, but because of it, and the steadfast conviction that its past affords its present an immunity other nations lack.
Yet the kind of commentary that elsewhere is the clear domain of the xenophobic right — the proverbial hot-mic moments that are the stuff of spokespeople’s nightmares — is in Germany totally normal(ized) conversation smack in the heart of acceptable public discourse. When everyday people in everyday situations unabashedly talk about the parts of a city they don’t go to, or so casually delineate between the Germans and the non-Germans and the Germans-who-aren’t-really — with a well-you-know-what-I-mean tone — you begin to realize that the issue at hand isn’t racism per se, but a proto-racism. It is the unknown-known, waiting-in-the-wings-to-be-weaponized kind, which is arguably worse.
I’ll take a clearly defined, far-right agitator any day over a wishy-washy centrist who papers over similar attitudes with the liberal panache of “tolerance.” There are tools with which to confront violence and extremism, if people and institutions choose to make use of them. There are laws against calling Hitler great or burning down a refugee center. To the contrary, you can’t prosecute a preference to buy sesampaste at the safety of Bio Company because going to Sonnenallee for tahini makes you feel uncomfortable.
Indeed, the financial ability to make that consumer choice and the cultural capital that makes that option available in the first place are among the very few, and thin, dividing lines between shoppers in the organic aisle and Wutbürger at a revisionist Montagsdemonstration. Not only in Germany but especially so, it’s more palatable to talk about racial inequality than income inequality because the former can get shoved onto the clear-cut racists or, in the inverse, the pesky migrants who just won’t integrate, whereas the latter lands splat on the centrist consensus. That would call the entire system, and the assumptions it’s built on, into question.
Social flexibility and openness require a cultural confidence that Germany just does not possess. That’s how we get to the superiority-inferiority dynamic. The outward expressions of guilt and shame — there’s nothing more German than being anti-German — live in symbiosis with the need to overcompensate for that nagging sense of humiliation. It’s an imposter syndrome of national proportions.
German Officialdom by and large fails to see the illusion it is built on. Given Germany’s size, wealth and commitment to technocratic upkeep, it is easy to forget that its liberal apparatus evolves not out of norms and institutions of its own making, but those hastily foisted upon it by victorious occupiers4. Forgetting this feeds an undeserved assumption of democratic maturity that, in combination with a hypersensitive awareness of its own history, puts the onus of integration on the external group. For if the problem were on the host side, it would shatter Germany’s post-war raison d'être.
Much better to chalk it up to “Integrationsverweigerer,” and call it a day.
That so many serious people, including the interior minister and Social Democrat, Nancy Faeser, pushed this term — “integration refuseniks” — leads me to wonder if any of the officials dealing in these issues has ever actually met an immigrant. I struggle to imagine a person showing up in a foreign place, settling there, and not wanting to belong.
Fitting in is fundamental, and sticking out runs contrary to the basics of the lived experience. You don’t need an advanced degree in human behavior to understand; you just have to have gone to high school. If an outsider group does rebel, refuse or socially self-isolate, it’s probably because the dominant group has made them feel unwelcome.
If you’re looking for “integration refuseniks,” maybe get off the lower-income and Arab-dominated Sonnenallee and go one street over to Weserstraße. There, the Anglocized and mobile professional class enjoys the protected status of “expat.” As such, there is no pressure to be part of anything around them and no chance of ever getting accused of forming a “Parallelgesellschaft” — even though that is exactly what it is.
The double standard is gross, yet easily overlooked. One street full of Arabic or Turkish signage is cause for concern, while another street full of English is reason to celebrate. It’s the boutique craft stores and all-English cafes, after all, that lets Berlin get away with thinking that it has a cosmopolitan character. It’s a thought only a provincial place would have.
But let’s not pit one immigrant group against another, especially when matters of race, migration and integration are themselves just a symptom of a larger issue. For you do not need to be an outsider to be cause for suspicion. No, the uniquely German aspect here is a stubborn fear of disorder that threatens a conservative status quo inherently at odds with the proclamations of progress that German Officialdom routinely professes.
Amid fighting the external battle of broader notions of national identity, Germany has faced a much more domestic threat: young people, hailing from otherwise upstanding corners of society, angry that an era of Green governance is largely lacking an ambitious Green agenda. Their weapon of choice: glue.
Members of the Letzte Generation movement have been going around Germany adhering themselves to streets and fences, disrupting road and air traffic, in a curious expression of climate protest. Whatever the shortcomings in actual policy impact is more than made up for by the comic value of Keystone Cops dressed like storm troopers chasing human burlap bags around airport tarmacs. Or, in the case of last-stand protests in Lützerath5, which a German energy giant is set to demolish to dig for coal underneath, watching a bureaucracy literally getting stuck in the mud.
In Very Serious Germany, where respect for authority is a prerequisite and preserving the sanctity of the system comes first, such subversive behavior and embarrassing lack of control is not OK. Very Serious Germans very seriously tried to brand the antics of the Letzte Generation as domestic terror, with some going as far as to compare them to the RAF — an actual domestic terror group that kidnapped and murdered people, and blew shit up.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency thankfully decided it had better things to do than classify the loosely affiliated environmental group as such, despite political pressure to do so, but that didn’t stop police raids on college kids’ dorm rooms, anyway.
This may all seem like nothing more than a very silly overreaction by politicians looking to make headlines and score public opinion points — and it is — if doing so wasn’t a way to steer media coverage, and distract from the real and persistent threat to German democracy and the well-being of its most vulnerable groups.
Inexplicably, the country that, still, goes through the performative exercise of crossing off “_ days since we were Nazis” on the shared calendar stirs up more moral panic about mischievous foreign boys on New Year’s Eve and “good” kids in tree houses than it does state-affiliated neo-Nazis stockpiling weapons and body bags as they plan to assassinate political enemies and overthrow elected government.
Yes, there was plenty of attention when state and federal authorities launched their largest, coordinated nationwide raid to break up a princely plot at the end of last year. But the tone was quite different. No one thought the Republic was ending. There were no calls for public discussion. No one was asking if something has come undone in Germany’s social fabric.
In other words, the public, political and media response was exactly as it should be: measured, sane, and moving on. Yet the hand-wringing over Greta Groupies blocking traffic did not let up. The arrest of more than two dozen Reichsbürger, including a dusty old aristocrat, active and retired members of the military that included special forces units, and a Berlin judge that Germany’s legal system cannot seem to kick off the bench despite her far-right affiliations, still wasn’t enough to keep one of Germany’s largest dailies from asking: “How radical is climate protest allowed to be?”
It is getting difficult to keep up with the number of lone-wolf and organized efforts to kill or terrorize minorities and their political advocates, or take down the democratic state in its entirety, that involve elements of the state itself. Current and former members of the police and armed forces, domestic intelligence, and the justice system have all been regularly implicated in plots at various levels of seriousness.
And when not actively complicit, they have been inexcusably complacent. The botched NSU investigation, which authorities remain reluctant to talk about, is just the most infamous. In Berlin, an investigation of an arson spree targeting minorities and left-wing politicians went nowhere for years because the investigators themselves were possibly connected to the far-right suspects they were pursuing. The chief culprits were eventually found not guilty, though their neo-Nazi affiliations are undisputed.
In Berlin and elsewhere, police regularly pop up in extremist chat groups. Conservative lawmakers want to treat environmentalists like terrorists, but when weapons go missing from special forces units whose members are under suspicion of right-wing activity, all plotters have to do to atone is anonymously return them. At the geopolitical level, civil servants across German bureaucracy, including at the intelligence agency, the BND, have been investigated for spying for Russia.
Who is the bigger threat here?
So, the ideologies that have been Germany’s undoing persist, often with active or unwitting state support, while a false equivalence gets pushed to paint lefty-liberal protesters and dark-skinned outsiders as threats to law and order. We see this in other democracies, of course, but the bar is higher for Germany as a result of its history and professed commitment to remembering it.
Let’s recall that months before white supremacists coerced a crowd of useful idiots to bash their way into the United States Capitol, a similar scene of stupidity unfolded on the steps of its German counterpart. Across the Atlantic, state and federal prosecutors have since made steady progress pursuing charges, pleas and verdicts against those involved. Here, by contrast, most cases against those who charged up the Reichstag’s stairs and threatened to break in have been dropped due to lack of evidence or inability to identify suspects — that’s 61 of 85, according to Berlin police the last time I checked in with them (early December).
The legal process aside, the chaos that unfolded outside Germany’s parliament in August 2020 prompted lofty statements about safeguarding democracy, but very little of the concern for social order that we heard after New Year’s Eve revelry or sticky climate protests.
One of these things may not be like the others, but more importantly for Germany’s sense of self, one of these things doesn’t belong.
Ed. italics mine.
Not to mention pets and war refugees.
Some sociologists pointed out that keeping fireworks out of drunk and mischievious hands only addresses a symptom, not the cause, of the problem, and is therefore a distraction. That may be so, but it's not like the United States would be worse off if guns became harder to come by, even without getting to the underlying socioeconomic and mental-health drivers of gun violence.
The unfortunate thing here is that Germany actually does have a long history of its own tinkering with liberal ideas and rule of law. But 12 years of Nazi rule has, in the collective mind, made any of that largely moot.
A collection of climate activists of all kinds, not just Letzte Generation.