Where are you from. Here we go again, I thought, and answered: Tricky question! It depends on what you mean by where. The geographic location of the hillside on which the maternity ward stood? The national borders at the time of the last contractions? My parents’ background? Genes, ancestors, dialect? Whichever way you look at it, your origin is a construct! A kind of costume that you are forced to wear for the rest of your days once it has been fitted. And thus a curse! Or, with a bit of luck, a fortune, derived not from talent but adorned with benefits and privileges.
Saša Stanišić, Herkunft (2019)
Racism and Historiography
by Christina Morina und Norbert Frei
At the end of the day, the shelf life of a text on contemporary history, especially one that intervenes in current affairs, depends on the pace at which present events unfold and respond to it. When the AfD entered the German Bundestag in September 2017, we considered it to be a turning point for core understandings of our democracy as well as for our self-understanding as historians. Zur rechten Zeit (At the right time), which we co-authored with Franka Maubach and Maik Tändler, was therefore intended as a contribution towards a historically-informed debate on right-wing politics, nationalism and racism since 1945. Just a few months prior to its release, the Association of German Historians had also responded to the growing strength of right-wing populism by passing a motion entitled “Resolution on Current Threats to Democracy” at its bi-annual meeting in Münster.[1] Little and much has changed since.
A pointless resolution?
Whilst the “post-Münster” debate on whether a professional body should indeed comment on (current) political affairs has since abated, there is a growing demand in our discipline – as in substantial parts of politics and society and even within the Bundesverfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution) – for a systematic examination of extreme right tendencies to prevent longterm damage to our democracy. As is common practice in our profession, academic discussion circles, project groups and even partially institutionalized research networks were formed; in the political and social sciences, a journal on research on right-wing extremism is in the pipeline.[2] However, since the Covid-19 crisis, the deep concern that could previously be heard at many conferences, on podiums, in lectures, and in the corridors is hardly to be discerned anymore. The expected boost in academy activity on the topic became pre-empted. Focussed attention is a scarce ressource, even in academia, and even more so in times of an historically unparalleled fractured public.
But then we witnessed the harrowing video of May 25, 2020, and now the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis may well be a turning-point: the beginnings of a US-led and soon world-wide protest movement, and a (in many ways) “global” debate that, by being genuine, diverse and – as remains to be seen – persistent, sparks hopes of marking a moment of cultural transformation. Faced with this situation, we believe that we should not simply wait and see but should rather ask ourselves what we, especially in Germany and as German historians, can do to ensure that this moment takes on a truly transformative effect.
Racism as our problem
Of course, by “our”, we mean our entire discipline as well as every single individual. Most of all, however, we mean ourselves. For we do not wish to make yet another appeal for the thorough investigation of right-wing populism, right-wing extremism and racism in our society. Rather, we are calling for a fundamental change of perspective that would influence our own work and which can be illustrated by a self-critical look at the prementioned book: the events in Halle, Erfurt and Hanau, but likewise in Charlottesville, Christchurch, Minneapolis and all the other sites of right-wing violent crimes and anti-democratic movements, have forced us to accept that our account of reality was at least partially skewed.
When our book went into print in December 2018, we argued that right-wing populism had pushed authoritarianism, nationalism and xenophobia into the center of German society. In political terms, this is still an adequate way of describing the increase in votes for the AfD. But this intepretation fails to take into account that the AfD electorate are by no means on the fringes of our society. On the contrary, their ideas are widely accepted – and therefore also mobilizable – in the center of our society. Varying dosages of prejudice, stereotypes and racism can be found in all modern societies. In fact, racism, as a “social relation”[3], is so common and widely practised that you may well hope to be a “University without prejudices”, as an initiative at the University of Bielefeld is called, but it would be more honest and realistic to state that the university strives to limit prejudice. The extreme right takes traditional patterns of stereotypical thinking and remodels and radicalizes these into political programmes, practices, and justifications for violence, which are clearly at odds with the German Basic Law.
To state that racism is omnipresent is neither to raise a blanket suspicion nor to relativize it. But it could open a door to some much needed reckoning with the rules of everyday social interaction, especially in our academic work. To put it clearer and firmer than it has generally been done before, it is about making the experience and knowledge of students and colleagues with international or immigrant backgrounds visible and heard within the academic and public sphere. The attempted antisemitic massacre in Halle and the mass murder in Hanau of people with diverse roots, but who were overwhelmingly born here or have lived here for many decades, and whose life stories are closely intwined with the history of Germany’s transformation into an open, diverse and pluralistic country, was and remains a monstrous event. But the carelessness that soon returned after the first shock of the murders had passed spoke volumes. It seemed to say: We will not let racistly motivated crimes put a downer on the carnival season; in the Tagesschau newsroom, the images of mourners in Hanau were seamlessly followed by those of singing revelers.
Contemporary History as the Social History of Knowledge
Our role in teaching, research and public outreach – particularly as contemporary historians – is not only to disseminate our comparably “old” knowledge about the emergence, dynamics and aftermaths of racially organized societies in a much clearer and firmer way than we have before, but also to look historically at the relatively “new” knowledge of the human genome and the complete repudiation of racist “theories”, which were empirically disproven only at the beginning of this century.[4] The Jena Declaration of 2019 should become standard reading in higher education, not only in seminars on contemporary history and the history of knowledge.[5] Societies learn, but they learn slowly. Perceptions, discourses and practices, which developed hand in hand with modern science over the course of many centuries, and which laid the groundwork for our current work, can only be successfully deconstructed if we first acknowledge the incredible intellectual and social efforts required for such a learning process to take place.
Since George Floyd (and still more black US citizens since) was murdered by the police, much has been set in motion in our discipline, leading us to believe that this will surely have an impact on history as an academic and professional field in the Federal Republic as well. Earlier this year, on the June 3rd, the American German Studies Association set up a Committee for the Initiative on Diversity, Equality and Inclusion[6], and on the very same day, the British Royal Historical Society, whose Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion Working Group was established in 2017, declared: “Racial and ethnic inequality is a pressing issue facing the historical discipline.”[7] In 2018, the Royal Society had already published a Race, Ethnicity & Equality Report on the practice of History in the United Kingdom, the only report of its kind to date. Its depressing conclusions were paired with a clear course of action: “In UK universities, Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students and staff in History have disproportionately negative experiences of teaching, training and employment. [..] Our recommendations are based on the premise that the best way of tackling systemic racism within academia is to accept that it exists and that we are all responsible for playing a role in securing racial equality.”[8]
The aforementioned statements at the start of the summer prompted various email and twitter requests calling on German colleagues to declare antiracism and decolonisation an institutional challenge in this country as well. And rightly so, for it is not only a matter of abolishing the lasting structural, i.e. political, economic, social and cultural effects of slavery and colonialism right up until the present day. It is also a matter of eliminating forms of racism and historically evolved racial discrimination that can be found everywhere – including in our own (academic) world. The pledge made by the Association of German Historians in the autumn of 2020 during two online panels with american colleagues on “Racism – Crisis – Memory”, that they would “start a dialogue on exclusion from education, competing narratives on memory, state violence and protest movements”, is only a beginning; it is still a far cry from the institutional and systematic shift in perspective that can already be seen elsewhere.
Of course, historical research in postwar (West) Germany, which was increasingly conceived as critical research and teaching in the spirit of liberal democracy, has from its beginnings focussed on the racist and antisemitic crimes of the “Third Reich”, even though the postwar society of the 1950s rather spoke of “race delusion (Rassenwahn)” (as a way of distancing itself) than of racism per se. And yes, eventually, the comfortable illusion that antisemitism, racism and the social exclusion of minorities had ended with the war began to be unwritten. But how long did it take, for example, for the racist, anticommunist, homophobic and anti-minority exclusionary reparations regulations, that were written up only at the suggestion of the allied forces, to become effectively criticized and thoroughly researched? Despite a boom in the historiography of West and East and now also of reunified Germany, hardly any studies in contemporary history shed light on how persistent and retrievable lasting authoritarian and racist dispositions are; this field is covered mainly by demoscopic analyses and studies undertaken in the social and political sciences. In other words, German historiography still has a lot of work to do on the history and legacies of racism and colonialism, let alone on the entrenchment of right-wing extremism and terrorism throughout modern German history.
Personal, professional and institutional consequences
This not only concerns our historical research. It also applies to our teaching practice, our professional environment, our lectures, conferences, and research networks, in which some people experience discrimination on a daily basis without the general public – both within and outside of the university – even noticing. But, as the founding statement of the Committee for the Initiative on Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion puts it plainly: “Universities, which we claim to be our professional homes, do not exist in societal isolation”.[9] If we open up to this perspective and invite students in the Corona-semester of 2020 to a conversation about everyday racism in the university – as chance would have it, during a seminar on the origins of the modern-day concept of “race” –, a short exchange was enough to bring to light some sad realities: students at the next table drawing swastikas, invasively “asking” a recently married German-Kurdish student whether she was now living in a “forced marriage”, and fears of gender and/or ethnicity biases in exam situations. Even at an institution like the University of Bielefeld, which developed a comprehensive diversity strategy and completed one of only a few studies on experiences of discrimination at university[10], bachelor and graduate students alike do not know who they can turn to for help and which concrete rules and procedures are in place to counter discrimination. For that very reason, we desperately need more conversations of this kind, with institutional backing and funding, in and beyond the relatively safe space of the university. We need this kind of teaching practice not least because it raises awareness of racism in an entirely different way than even the best specialist lecture.
A change of perspective is not brought about by controversy itself but by a shared willingness to reflect. However, those of us who consider themselves part of the majority should think especially hard about their own influence on and interaction with colleagues, students and researchers, who (are forced to) identify as minorities: those with other ethnic or cultural backgrounds, who frequently face great difficulties in asserting themselves and in gaining due respect – not rarely paying the price by having to recount their humiliating experiences word for word, only to then be accused of “playing the victim”. As the political scientist Nikita Dhawan puts it, it ultimately comes down to being able to recognize the unequal distribution of “vulnerabilities and privileges”.[11] We have to take an active interest, both as humans and as institutions, in the inequality of opportunity in our (academic) society. And we have to take action against it, personally and structurally, through task forces and focussed mentoring, empirical studies and personal conversations, formal rules and professional commitment.
Click here for the German version.
Reaktionen auf den Beitrag
Kommentar
Danke, Gülizar Seven
Kommentar
„Die Allgegenwart von Rassismus zu konstatieren, bedeutet weder einen Generalverdacht zu erheben noch zu relativieren. Aber es eröffnet vielleicht den Weg zu jener dringend gebotenen Selbstverständigung über die alltäglichen Grundlagen unseres gesellschaftlichen Miteinanders, gerade auch und ganz konkret in unserer akademischen Arbeit.“
Als Studentin der Geschichtswissenschaften an der Universität Bielefeld habe ich mich in den letzten Semestern u.a. mit der Geschichte des Kolonialismus und des Antisemitismus auseinandergesetzt. Aktuelle Feindseligkeiten gegenüber Migranten/Ausländern in Deutschland sind meines Erachtens von Ressentiments und inneren Vorbehalten gegen Minderheiten gespeist, die sich in kolonialen Denkmustern und antisemitischer Ideologie sozial, kulturell, religiös und politisch manifestieren. Und rassistische Mechanismen, die ich aus der Antisemitismusforschung kenne, lassen sich in der Diskriminierung anderer ethnischer und/oder religiöser Minderheiten beobachten. So gibt es neben einem „anti-jüdischen“ Rassismus viele Formen von Rassismus, die sich als „anti-afrikanisch“, „anti-muslimisch“ oder „anti-asiatisch“ bezeichnen lassen.
Obwohl ich hier in Bezug auf Dimension und Verbreitung von Feindseligkeit gegenüber (ethnischen) Minderheiten keineswegs eine Parallele zum genozidalen Antisemitismus des Nationalsozialismus ziehen will, ist die Bedrohung, die vom Alltagsrassismus ausgeht, real. Und analog erinnern die Mechanismen der Abwehr von Rassismusvorwürfen gelegentlich an das Abwehrverhalten derjenigen Deutschen, die sich seit 1945 im Angesicht des Völkermordes an den Juden von Schuld und dem vermeintlich damit verbundenen Leidensdruck befreien wollen:
„Das Unbehagen, als Glied in der Generationenkette an der historischen Verantwortung mitzutragen, beschwert viele, die daraus den Schluss ziehen, da sie keine individuelle Schuld trügen, ginge sie das schlimme Erbe der Nation persönlich nichts an. [...] dafür hoffen viele auf ein Ende der Erinnerung durch die zeitliche Distanz und andere auf Befreiung des Nationalgefühls vom Alptraum des historischen Judenmords durch Vergessen und Verdrängen oder durch Relativieren mit dem Hinweis auf die Sünden anderer.“ (Wolfgang Benz: Was ist Antisemitismus? München 2004, S. 24).
Von Alltagsrassismus betroffene Menschen, die sich über eine Diskriminierung durch die Mehrheitsgesellschaft beschweren, müssen oft mit einem ähnlichen Mechanismus der Schuldabwehr rechnen wie heute in Deutschland lebende Juden, die gegen den wachsenden Antisemitismus protestieren. Sie treffen in ihrer Kritik nicht selten auf Unverständnis, das mit der Behauptung kombiniert wird, sie seien selbst daran schuld, dass ihr Verhalten Ressentiments hervorrufe. Dieses Muster wird unreflektiert auf Ausländer/Einwanderer/Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund übertragen: Ausländer sollten keinen Rassismus beklagen, sondern sich besser integrieren. Es verbreitet sich zudem auch in der Mehrheitsgesellschaft eine zunehmend geschichtsvergessene Haltung, die den Zusammenhang zwischen Rassismus und Gewalt nicht konsequent genug reflektiert.
In (zeit)-geschichtlicher Perspektive zeigt sich, dass der Rassismus eine Geschichte hat, die noch nicht vergangen ist. In Deutschland macht sich „Deutsch-Sein“ tendenziell immer noch nicht an der deutschen Staatsbürgerschaft (citizenship) fest, sondern an einer spezifisch deutschen kulturellen Identität, die jeder Zuwanderer erst erwerben muss, aber im Grunde niemals erwerben kann. Dazu hat er/sie angeblich das „falsche“ Aussehen, die „falsche“ Religion und das „falsche“ Bewusstsein. Im Grunde zeigt sich hier, dass das Konstrukt des ius sanguis, das lange Zeit deutsche Zugehörigkeitsvorstellungen zugleich reflektiert und geformt hat, noch lange nicht überwunden ist.
Abschließend möchte ich als Deutsche mit jesidischen Wurzeln betonen, dass persönliche Rassismuserfahrungen nicht der Phantasie oder Hypersensibilität eines „falschen“ migrantischen Bewusstseins entspringen. Als Schülerin und Studentin habe ich im hiesigen Bildungssystem ambivalente Erfahrungen gemacht: Einerseits habe ich von schulischen und universitären Lehrpersonen profitiert, die mich vielfach ermutigt und unterstützt haben. Andererseits wurde ich auch von Lehrerinnen und Lehrern unterrichtet, die mir ein akademisches Potential von vornherein absprachen und meiner Mutter mitteilten, dass ich doch nicht auf das Gymnasium gehöre, sondern bestenfalls auf die Realschule. Mein Deutsch reiche für den erfolgreichen Besuch des Gymnasiums nicht aus. Am Gymnasium musste ich in der Erprobungsstufe gegen die Vorurteile einiger Lehrpersonen kämpfen, die mir trotz meines hohen Engagements im Bereich der sonstigen Mitarbeit konsequent schlechtere Noten gaben als eher passiven „deutschen“ Mitschülerinnen und Mitschülern.
Nun haben sich die Zeiten geändert. Nicht nur ältere deutsche Menschen machen mir auf dem Weg zur Universität Komplimente dafür, dass ich meine Muttersprache so gut beherrsche. Andere äußern ihr Erstaunen darüber, dass ich in so kurzer Zeit „so gut Deutsch gelernt“ habe, als wäre ich eine Einwanderin, die gerade das Flughafengelände verlassen hat. Ich bekenne angesichts solcher Erlebnisse, dass mich auch sicher nett gemeinte Kommentare – etwa über die hohe Integrationsfähigkeit meiner Familie („Deine Mutter spricht und kocht ja wie eine echte Deutsche!“) genauso irritieren wie xenophobe verbale Entgleisungen im Gewand eines widerwilligen Kompliments („Ihr seid wenigstens Schwarzköpfe, die nicht von Stütze leben“). Wirklich enttäuschend, wenn auch nicht überraschend, ist die Erfahrung, dass Klagen über alltagsrassistische Erfahrungen bei nicht-migrantischen Bekannten und Freunden immer wieder zu Abwehrreaktionen führen: Solche Empfindlichkeiten seien doch potentiell wehleidig und/oder beruhten auf einem kulturellen Missverständnis („Das bildest du dir ein, jetzt sei mal nichtüberempfindlich“). Doch keineswegs handelt es sich hier um ein rein oder „typisch deutsches“ Phänomen. Während eines einjährigen Auslandsaufenthaltes wurde ich, wenn ich mich als Deutsche vorstellte, nicht selten nach meiner „echten“ Herkunft gefragt: „Where do you really come from? You don‘t look German at all!“ Da gewöhnte ich mir an, Bemerkungen wie diese als Kompliment aufzufassen.