Germany: racism and fascism
01 January 1991
Germany: racism and fascism
artdoc December=1992
As we move ever closer towards the Europe of Maastricht, a new,
common market racism is beginning to emerge, writes A Sivanandan.
The countries of Europe are drawing from the lowest common
denominators of each others national racisms to formulate racist
immigration laws and policies. That such laws and policies are
being hatched in secret by ministers and officials and police
chiefs in ad hoc committees of the Trevi group, and not in the
European Parliament, bodes ill for the future of European
democracy.
Because Germany is in the forefront of shaping the destiny
of Europe, what is happening there is of vital concern to all of
us. Hoyerswerda, Rostock, Eberswalde, Cottbus, Mannheim, Hnxe,
Mlln-that is what we know of Germany today, as we once knew of
Germany as Buchenwald and Dachau. And all those deaths, of a
Ghanaian, an Angolan, a Turk, a Gypsy, a Turk something like 25
deaths in as many months, on the basis of their race, their
colour, their "difference"-should not have happened.
But if these are horrendous crimes in themselves, what is
more tightening is the official attitude towards them. In Hoyer-
swerda, the regional government, instead of protecting the
refugee hostels against fascist attack and arresting the
attackers, removed the attacked. After Rostock, Chancellor Kohl
and a whole host of leading @es found cause not to condemn the
neo-Nazis but to blame Article 16 of the constitution for, in
federal interior minister Rudolf Seiters' words, "this continuing
flood of economic refugees". The logical conclusion of which
would be: no refugees, no fascists-which is not a far cry from
the "final solution".
If such official attitudes compound the problem of racism
and give a fillip to fascism, what is still more unnerving is
that Germany has not even got to first base in owning up to its
racism or calling it by its proper name. Instead, it uses terms
like xenophobia or Auslanderfeindlichkeit, hostility to strangers
/foreigners.
Xenophobia is the other side of the coin of national and/or
racial homogeneity. That homogeneity is written into Article 116
of the German constitution, which bases German citizenship on
blood and defines the German nation in ethnic terms. And so a
whole cult of Germanness has grown up that not only denies
residence and citizenship rights to "guest-workers' who have been
settled in the country for over a generation, but also keeps
their German-born children for ever strangers and foreigners in
their own land.
The insane injustice of that situation emerged very clearly
recently when Eugen W, the son of a German-Jewish father and a
Romanian-Christian mother, having returned to Berlin in 1982 and
worked for a state-owned transport company for nine years,
applied for citizenship-and was refused. Eugen appealed. In
September 1991, the High Court rejected his application on the
basis that he was ethnically Jewish and could not, therefore, be
ethnically German.
In contrast, the racism in the GDR, had never been part of
state policy as such. On the contrary: the state declared itself
anti-racist. Its anti-racism, however, operated on a
state-to-state, not people-to-people level, so that while the GDR
government welcomed Angolans, Mozambicans, Vietnamese and others
to work or study in their country, they were still looked upon
as foreigners and kept apart in hostels and barracks.
Hence, though East Germany's anti-racism was part of state
dogma, it never got translated into popular culture. People were
prepared to be anti-racist and helpful to "other races", so long
as they lived over there, in their countries. But their presence
in the GDR, though tolerated (because of state strictures), was
resented by ordinary people, particularly in times of hardship.'
The moment the state strictures were removed, the dogs of racism
ran amok.
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