of new authoritarian, xenophobic, racist and antisemitic tendencies, we will have to assume the relationship is much less simple than it was typically presented to be in the hegemonic discourse on Cologne.
Then what exactly is the problem of ‘Cologne’, according to us, if it is not (primarily) a global culture of everyday sexism and misogyny that makes violent excesses like this possible, indeed, inevitable? What is it, if not ‘toxic masculinity’, letting off steam in public by harassing women who are simply trying to enjoy themselves at New Year’s Eve celebrations, at carnival, football matches, military parades and beer festivals? What, if not something about the devout religiosity imputed – or, rather, naturalized as inherent – to the men involved (i.e., the perpetrators), something ingrained that means they scarcely know how to behave otherwise? How could their place of origin (supposed or actual) not be part of the problem? Our essay considers how the problem of ‘Cologne’ was defined, what exactly is being negotiated in it, and by whom.
Second, we, too, did not talk to any of the victims. It would have been irresponsible for us to try, since neither of us has journalistic training, and this is not a book based on first-hand empirical sociological research. Our methods can plausibly be criticized on that basis: indeed, they have been (in the course of the book’s German-speaking reception). In Chapter 5, via a dialogue, we reflect on these and related issues self-critically. However, we hope that our approach is one that also contributes to the task of making sexism and sexualized violence visible and legible without falling into racist reifications or objectifications.
Instead of leaving the links between things sinisterly implicit, we seek to determine: What are the concrete effects of one explanation of (or use of) sexuality compared to another? Whose discourses of naturalized – ostensibly traditional – logics of sexual violence are successfully put to work, with reference to whose violence, and how? How are notions of sexual freedom, equality between the sexes, secularism, enlightenment, emancipation, liberty and individualism themselves freighted with particular conceptions of sexuality? And how, in historic context, are these meanings sutured and shifted? Lastly, how do certain recourses to – and versions of – sexuality organize our very perception: our sensitivities, our receptivities? What politics, what judgments, are prone to emerge on that basis? The purpose of our treatise is to confront such questions. We believe they are just as relevant to a non-German readership as they are to ours, and we hope our rumination helps to clarify them. It is, indeed, urgent to grasp how the loci of gender and sexuality are functioning, in specific contexts, to draw and redraw the boundaries constitutive of social order: inside/outside, moral/amoral, vulnerable/dangerous, own/alien, us/them.
To reflect properly on Cologne is to be willing to regard social effects that might appear (from a feminist perspective) to be positive developments as profoundly ambivalent. For example: the explosive rise to prominence of the theme of sexual violence resulted in reforms of German sexual criminal law that feminist legal activists had long been calling for – albeit the topic was racially charged. To be sure, the legislative sea change was not due solely to the Cologne events and the ensuing controversy. It was brought about, in part, by decades’ worth of feminist struggles eking out partial victories. In the years immediately prior to Cologne, from 2013 on, mobilizations such as #Aufschrei10 had contributed to this trend, both online and offline. Nevertheless, it seems an ‘event’ was needed to implement the social redefinition of sexual violence already effected in German sexual criminal law. In the absence of those struggles, on the part of people in Germany and all around the world, the reform would not have been possible. For this reason, we want our book to be understood in the context of mobilizations against sexual violence all over the world: #MeToo, #NiUnaMenos, #SenDeAnlat, #BalanceTonPorc, #GamAni and more. These struggles – which go far beyond hashtags and ‘clicktivism’ – have been instrumental in making visible the scope and the local character of sexual violence globally. Behind each hashtag lies a multitude of stories, experiences, battles and flavors of sexual violence. And even in these mass mobilizations, what people are naming and negotiating is, more often than not, the difficult questions of the relation of the general to the particular, the specific to the common.11
There is no way to grasp ‘Cologne’ without reference to what the media were calling, at the time, ‘the long summer of migration’: the summer of 2015. The Syrian Civil War had raged, at that point, for five years. Eleven million Syrians had been displaced; almost 4 million of them became refugees. Syria’s neighbours had already exhausted their capacity to accommodate them. So, asylum seekers started to make their way to Europe – via the ‘Balkan Route’. Following Angela Merkel’s decision not to close the nation’s borders, Germany gave refuge to approximately 1 million people.12
But it wasn’t only the numbers of those seeking to enter Europe that increased dramatically that summer. Simple awareness of the realities of war spread rapidly during that time across Western European populations that had hitherto largely enjoyed obliviousness in this regard – at least ever since the so-called Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, during which Germany took in just under 400,000 refugees. Now thousands of people – mothers carrying small children, elderly people, entire families – sought to escape the conflict on foot, leaving everything they had behind, waiting for days on end in makeshift camps in Greece, at train stations in Hungary, at motorway rest stops in Serbia, on riverbanks and roadsides and next to walls and fences, hastily erected at the EU’s external perimeter, that they were prevented from passing through by Serbian, Croatian, Hungarian, Czech, Polish and Austrian border security forces. They drowned, wretchedly, trying to make the crossing to Greece or Italy. The Mediterranean Sea, that romantic destination, that paradise beloved of northwestern Europe’s middle classes, turned into a mass grave.
All this took place under conditions of ‘real time’ visibility, made possible by the new mass digital media – causing what Navid Kermani termed an ‘irruption of reality into our consciousness’.13 The German public, just like the global public, consumed the spectacle of desperate human beings on the verge of drowning in the Mediterranean, hoping for rescue. We were mesmerized. We saw the mountains of life jackets on Greek island beaches. We watched the people trek through the landscapes of southeastern Europe, in lines often miles long. Life vests and emergency warming foil (‘space blankets’) became readily recognizable symbols of a humanitarian catastrophe that was no longer unfolding far away, back then, over there, a long way away from us – but rather here, now, among us, where we are. The image of the three-year-old Alan Kurdi, whose body washed ashore on 2 September 2015, showed him lying on his belly on the sand, as though sleeping soundly. He was lying on the very same surf – the coast of Greece, Italy and Turkey – where middle-class German, French, Swedish and English holidaymakers love to work on their tans. We Europeans, with our money and our passports that provide unrestricted access to almost every country in the world, we for whom ‘mobility’ has exclusively positive resonances: we were confronted that summer with the deadly dimension of compulsory mobility. Was it also perhaps, in part, the historic traumas of the Shoah that were returning to German living rooms and intruding upon our smartphones? Did the images recall the ungrieved abominations of the Holocaust – or, perhaps, the ‘refugee treks’ of the late 1940s, whereby Germans were expelled from the so-called Eastern Territories after World War II? No doubt, many in Europe cannot stand to recognize themselves and their own families in the images of people and their families fleeing Syria and Libya.
Alan Kurdi, so the famous photograph informed us unequivocally, drowned during an attempt on the part of his family (who come from Aleppo) to cross from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos, which is part of the EU. When the photo in question was published, it was hailed everywhere in the mainstream media – paradoxically – as ‘a photograph fit to silence the world’.14 As though the world had not already kept silent long enough on the subject of the ordeal endured, for years, by the Syrian people! Still, Die Zeit recommended that one should ‘be silent’ in response to the image – and perhaps also, ‘insofar as one is human, weep’.15 The intention here, clearly, was to invoke an empathic silence: a silence of grief, bewilderment
