German Cubanist scholar Katja Schatte reflects on the European refugee crisis and the representation of former Communist populations as “bad Europeans,” or less European, for their alleged lack of solidarity with those who have now taken their place at the margins of Europe, knocking at its door. The discussion on post-socialist Orientalism resonates with the complexities of U.S. immigration policies that favor Cubans, resulting in complex views of them as privileged, yet as dependent as uncharitable. Schatte proposes to turn the lens away from these populations-turned-into-scapegoats and into the government policies that sustain such state of affairs.
On October 3, 1990, the German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic of Germany. This date marked the official final point of the German reunification process. Anthropologist Katherine Verdery points out that the end of communist regimes all over Eastern Europe was often framed as a rescue scenario from the claws of totalitarianism and the beginning path toward life ‘as it should be’ in the formerly socialist block. Indeed, a teleological thinking seemed to take hold, expecting an upward path toward progress and success. Accordingly, in their reunification euphoria, German leaders as well as the public took for granted that the extension of the Western social, economic, and political structures would automatically lead to a prosperous and harmonious society. But it did not. The twenty-fifth anniversary of German reunification this past weekend coincided with what politicians and the media have called the “refugee crisis” and “a huge challenge which will affect German society lastingly.”
It is a good time now to take a moment to reflect on both the project of reunification and Germany’s stance on immigration. Neither has been a success story, and both combined have turned the challenge into what many people in Germany perceive as a full-fledged crisis. This impression of crisis certainly has to do with the sheer number of refugees currently arriving in Germany. But it is also the result of decades of failed immigration and refugee policies in both Germanys and the refusal to acknowledge the deficits of the German reunification project.
Since the plight of refugees has made it into the German mainstream media, a specific genre of writing has gained popularity as well: Individuals of different ages born in the former GDR express their concerns in an attempt to educate their fellow “Ossis” and help them leave their racist, xenophobic funk. From comparisons between former East German refugees and current Syrian refugees, to demands that xenophobic Easterners “finally shut up,” no predictable message has remained undelivered. In many cases, the disclaimer that the author of such statements is “from the East” prefaces these opinion pieces and interviews to lend them legitimacy. That does not render them any less problematic.
Comparing East Germans to Syrian refugees accomplishes little more than relativizing the plight of refugees leaving a war-torn region. It assumes that individual identification is the key to social change when, in reality, a pluralistic society requires just the opposite: being open to those who the majority cannot easily identify with. In addition, decontextualized “we (should) know what it’s like” approaches promote deeply problematic comparisons between Syrian refugees and postwar German expellees (“Vertriebene”) and thus pave the way for the instrumentalization of the refugee crisis by a nationalist fringe group. Moralizing East German identity politics are also hypocritical, considering that Germany just pompously celebrated a quarter decade of reunification. And most of all, they merely seem to be a convenient way for the GDR-born writers to position themselves as part of “the good ones” and “not like them,” while simultaneously distracting from the roots of right-wing extremism across Germany and the causes of its prevalence in the East.
So far, much of the responsibility has been placed on the shoulders of ‘the Others,’ whether Ossis or refugees. If immigrants and refugees assimilate and people from the East stop being racist, everything will be fine, goes this line of argument. Except that it won’t, because the roots of the issue run much deeper, and much further back in history. In the twenty-five years since reunification and half a century since the beginning of the so-called guest worker programs in both Germanys, the social and political mainstream have barely cared to explore the roots of right-wing extremism in the East, or the predicament of migrants, refugees, and Germans of color anywhere. Until now. Over the past months, there has been an outpour of support for refugees. Charity has come to replace indifference. It is important to support refugees, but it is only the first step. It is easy, because charity, where the hierarchy between helpers and helped is clear, is rewarding and much less difficult than tackling the tasks German society has been avoiding for decades: a serious commitment to a pluralistic society and the acknowledgment that the neo-Nazi ideology in the East has spread through the East after Reunification.
This past weekend, celebrations for the twenty-five years since Reunification took place throughout Germany. Yet the project of reunification remains incomplete. Twenty-five years after the fact, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia are still commonly called the “New Federal States,” and economic structural adjustment has failed anywhere but in a few urban centers in the East. The East does not only have a higher unemployment rate and a lower minimum wage in many professional sectors, its GDP has also stagnated at roughly 75% of that in the West for the past twenty years.
Cultural Studies scholars, such as Paul Cooke and Anthony Enns, have argued that we should understand the rise of Ostalgie, “a combination of the German words for ‘nostalgia’ and ‘east’,” precisely in this context. However, in public discourse it is generally seen as another confirmation of the inherent backwardness of the East. Germany thus celebrated its reunification, while simultaneously continuing the discursive othering of the former East and accepting continued material differences. Historians have argued that we can understand postwar German history only by looking at how both Germanys were intertwined throughout the Cold War. And the reunification festivities were intended to remind Germans that they are part of one society now. Yet, when it comes to looking for the roots of Germany’s ongoing struggles with xenophobia and racism, there is a persistent refusal to acknowledge this shared history and present responsibility.
This is a dangerous trend. The GDR’s segregation of guest workers, racism, and its failure to account for its National Socialist past are real. They have been well documented, and we need to find meaningful ways of dealing with this history and its consequences. However, these conversations are not a substitute for a discussion of both historical and present shortcomings of the Federal Republic, the state in which all of us live at this very moment. It is the state that refused to acknowledge its status as an immigration society until the early 2000s, and needed to be forced by a court ruling into allowing female Muslim public employees to wear a headscarf. It is the state where a right-wing underground group could go on a nation-wide killing spree for over a decade in the early 2000s—without being discovered. It is home to a society where neo-Nazi parties and racist, xenophobic movements, such as Pegida, have been able to rise to popularity. The fact that this has happened especially in the East is alarming. Yet, the ensuing discussion again focuses on pre-reunification shortcomings in the East, rarely examining the political and social processes of the past twenty-five years.
But acknowledging the persisting economic inequality, tensions, and prejudices between East and West, and thus the mixed results of the project of reunification, is important if we are serious about this project. In 1996, Katherine Verdery argued that we can “expect nationalist ideas to bury the socialist past and reshape the postsocialist future.” Twenty years later, we are witnessing this process in reunified Germany. However, as Verdery also reminds us, nationalist ideas revolve around the notion of kinship, “shared substance, blood and bone, and exclusion.” These underlying ideas become visible in Germany’s citizenship law, which requires at least one German parent for a child to be a German citizen by birth. And unlike in the rest of the postsocialist world, these developments do not unfold outside of the West. They are taking place in its midst, blurring the very lines between the constructed East and West. They also are also unfolding in a society that is barely coming to terms with its pre-Cold War National Socialist past and, as anthropologist Jason James has argued, often seems to use the GDR as the “fundamentally other to the “democratic” West German order,” thus once again reinforcing the dividing line.
We need a different engagement with both GDR history and the shortcomings of the Federal Republic before and since reunification. We need to reconsider a flag-waving nationalism that has become so popular since Germany hosted the soccer World Cup in 2006. Moreover, a Chancellor and a President who were raised in the GDR do not amount to a successful reunification. By the same token, charity does not equal social change, as neither does a commitment to a multiculturalism that is just cosmetic. For decades, the German government has neither confronted right-wing extremism in the East, nor has it made sufficient efforts to meaningfully engage with migrants. The continuous demands that they integrate have often been codes for demands to iron out cultural, religious, and linguistic difference. All of these contradictions are now at the core of the so-called refugee crisis in Germany.
A glimpse of hope appears at a recent event at the Jewish Museum Berlin. Its title puts the finger in the wound by asking “How does mainstream society integrate?” This is an issue of urgent concern in Germany but one that holds lessons for all post-Communist societies as they too confront –or reject- ethnic and racial pluralism, and the need for a multicultural turn. Their only alternative to that is the current Hungarian path: to build another “Berlin wall” and become a fortress society in the middle of Europe, resisting all change. But for how long?
–Katja Schatte
Katja Schatte was born and raised in Dresden, (East) Germany, and moved to the U.S. in 2010 to earn her MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Chicago. In her MA thesis, Katja analyzed and compared the motivations of East German and Cuban emigrants and refugees in the 1970s. She is currently a PhD candidate in history at the University of Washington. She is also the founder of the digital oral history project Beyond the Iron Curtain and tweets at @streberkatze.
Cover photo: Billboard detail reading “SAVE US FROM THE INVASION” (Dresden, 2015). Photo by the author. All rights reserved.