Who can, and who will, participate in this conversation in a globalized world shot through, whether we like it or not, with inequality, danger, precarity, religion and borders? Ultimately, these are the disquieting, difficult and fundamental questions that Cologne highlighted anew.
And these are the debates to which we – as sociologists, feminists and politically committed citizens – wished to contribute in writing this book. It seemed to us that public political discourse around the big questions of our time, post-Cologne, had become incredibly toxic: frequently (albeit not always) enacting the mere appearance of a debate. This was equally true of mainstream news features and talk shows; formal reportage and the blogosphere, vlogs, Twitter and other social media; parliamentary debates, seminar discussions, conference panels; political rallies, and posters brandished at demonstrations – all across the political spectrum. What was missing across the board, from our point of view, was and remains a certain quality of collective critical reflection that might enable a – controversial, yes, but deeply needful – series of debates about the practicalities of living alongside one another. Topics up for debate would necessarily include: the meaning of sexual freedom; relations between the sexes; bodily autonomy; the freedom to move around without constraint; freedom to love, pray, dress a certain way, and be sexually active – or not; and the right to be more than the object of public discussion, that is to say, to participate critically in public debates.
We could not agree more that what happened on the Cologne Domplatte on New Year’s Eve is not something we can dismiss with just a few pithy platitudes. None of the available cynical reactions, be it ‘nothing happened’, ‘we all know what happened – nothing special’, or ‘boys will be boys’ (i.e., men having fun will necessarily be men harassing women), are remotely appropriate responses. Of course, the popular blanket statements profiling ‘the’ Arab or Muslim man as a harasser of ‘our’ women – while pretending that such things do not happen in Germany, in the West, or within Christianity – are every bit as inappropriate. Without a doubt, sexual violence was perpetrated that night, and this represents a grave problem. At the time, it made both of us feel helpless and angry. We were angry that women, in 2016, could not move around in public space without risking molestation. We were angry that the police (as a committee of parliamentary inquiry for the North Rhine–Westphalia region later determined7) completely failed to predict the situation and, as a result, acted negligently. We were angry that the women who reported what was done to them to the police were not believed. But all this anger and dismay, fostered by that particular occasion, has the potential to make us forget that nothing about it was either new or rare in Germany – quite the reverse. Misogynist and often sexualized violence is part of German normality – not only against women, but also against queers, gays and lesbians, trans and intersex individuals, children and adolescents of all sexes, and structurally vulnerable people generally. Unfortunately, as international and transnational studies have shown time and again, sexual violence, misogyny and sexism are global phenomena: just think of #MeToo and #NiUnaMenos.8 But violence is nevertheless not an ahistorical, transcultural human disposition, nor even an anthropological constant, simply to be accepted as a fact of nature. It must always be apprehended in a context-specific manner, for its expression from place to place is far from uniform. By establishing this, we are by no means relativizing bad deeds and values: we mean it as an empirical statement, denoting a general epistemic starting point.
It would be difficult to overstate the hypocrisy of those countless German commentators who, in delivering their Cologne-related verdicts, suddenly now discovered themselves to be feminists – but only insofar as the criminals were thought to be non-German and (specifically) ‘Arab-born’. As vital and important as it is to fight sexism, and especially to struggle against sexual and gender-based violence, if that commitment becomes racist, xenophobic, or narrowly culturalist, it becomes destructive. And it is precisely that coupling, between feminism and cultural racism, that quickly became the dominant form of discourse concerning Cologne, both within Germany and internationally. Racism and culturalist stereotyping, in fact, became the condition for mainstream articulations of the problem of sexual violence. Or, to put it the other way around: sexual politics became, once more, a terrain for racist knowledge production. Openly racist and xenophobic rhetoric was now not just possible, nor even simply legitimate: it was now, seemingly, required in order to protect ‘our’ women, as part of the defence of ‘Western values’ and sexual equality.
Resistance to migration, in Germany, has always been racist insofar as it cannot be disentangled from the long history of normalizing divisions between those who belong to the national community – the Volk – and those who not only do not belong but actively threaten the community by their very presence. One particular form of racism experienced a substantial boost after the Cologne ‘sex mob’ events: feminist racism (or racist feminism). We saw the widespread co-optation of feminist arguments in the service of Europe’s border regime. We saw notions of gender- and sexuality-related emancipation, not to mention LGBTQ rights, mobilized to justify the primacy of European culture. Indeed, xenophobic, ultranationalist, and nativist movements, parties, and governments all over Europe have increasingly adopted concepts of sexual equality for their fundamentalist purposes ever since. They claim, for example, that male Muslim citizens (and non-Western male migrants generally) are incapable of respecting the rights of women and queers. It was our intense irritation about this that first initiated our thinking about Cologne.
We are not in the least interested in denying that violence was practiced that night. It remains an appalling reality in our society that victims of sexual violence are systematically disbelieved: accused of having somehow provoked or consented to what they endured, or else implied to be outright making it up. The fact that, more than four years after the events on New Year’s Eve 2015, only two people have been convicted for ‘sexual assault’, according to Cologne’s District Court, and only one for ‘groping’, does not indicate to us that there was an absence of violence. That particular tally merely indicates that charges could not be brought, because the majority of the offences reported could not be confidently assigned by name to known persons. A further aggravating factor came from the fact that, at the time, the majority of the sexual offences reported were not even punishable under German sexual criminal law. Nevertheless, we find it concerning that more than three-quarters of the original 1,200 criminal complaints were lodged against ‘Unknown’, and that, in the almost 300 proceedings initiated against named parties, only a few cases resulted in an indictment and conviction.
Superficially, at least, these figures contradict the attitude of total certitude that still characterizes the vast majority of commentaries on the ‘night that changed everything’. The sheer certainty with which civil society discussed, for instance, who was loitering outside Cologne Hauptbahnhof that night, who was the perpetrator, who the victim, what criminally prosecutable acts and violent actions took place, for what motive and why, was and remains truly remarkable. For many people – including many feminists – it remains a foregone conclusion that among the thousands of revellers who met up outside Cologne Cathedral that evening, there numbered ‘around 2,000 young men, predominantly Algerians, Moroccans, North Africans’, as Alice Schwarzer, editor of Germany’s oldest feminist magazine, EMMA, claimed once again in April 2019.9 Schwarzer contends, in her unbearably generalizing style, that ‘what we are dealing with’ is ‘uprooted, socially unaffiliated young men, most of them undocumented’ – a group of people who, according to Schwarzer, will ‘always cause problems’ for ‘us’ by seeking to import their violent and brutal misogynist methods (inculcated in them from childhood!) ‘into the heart of Europe’. Is this really the case? Is this a meaningful interpretation of the ‘Night in Cologne’? Our inquiry, in a sense, starts here.
At the outset, two things were painfully clear to us. First: yes, we, too, do not know what actually happened around the cathedral that night, and we, too, are deeply upset about the extent of the sexual violence. At the same time, we contend, thinking about how these acts form part of our present does not amount to a failure to take their implications seriously: quite the reverse. If we want to make sense of the relationship sexual violence holds to our present, in a context of migration, globalization and
