to do with us, does something to us, touches us, alters us – when Cologne happened, Germany took the opportunity to turn the page. Society did not tarry to consider the extent to which grieving is politics – in that some lives have the right to be grieved, to be recognized as valuable, while others aren’t even granted access to the sphere of the grievable and the human. Instead of looking and learning from the inseparability of ‘us’ (in Germany) and ‘them’ (the refugees at Europe’s borders), the affective and political atmosphere took a turn for the worse.
Even as Germany’s racist and ultranationalist voices grew louder and louder, in the public imagination, the ‘long summer of migration’ was marked, perhaps above all, by Willkommenskultur (a culture of welcome).16 As we discuss in Chapter 2 of this book, this ‘culture’ included elements of genuine civil politicization, intense and sustained mutual aid and, yes, kitsch charitable naivety. But Cologne provoked the ascendance of already existing tendencies to cynically question universal human rights via xenophobic and nationalist commonplaces, fuelling the already intensifying appetite for völkisch, populist and belligerent public discourses. And what the ‘night that changed everything’ actually changed, according to these discourses, is the viability of this dangerously naive Willkommenskultur – an ideology that supposedly asks too much, both of individuals and of country – promulgated by people that could now be derided shamelessly as ‘do-gooders’. It is telling that ‘Gutmensch’ (i.e., Good Samaritan) could become a pejorative term in this context. It was even voted ‘Unwort des Jahres’ (ghastly neologism of the year) in 2015. As reported in Der Spiegel, the jury in the competition deemed ‘Gutmensch’ and ‘Gutmenschentum’ (alternatively: Gutbürger) to be words that ‘vilify helpfulness, kindness and tolerance in generalizing terms as naive, unworldly and stupid; as symptoms of moral imperialism; or as stemming from some kind of ‘white knight’ (rescuer) complex’.17 The good, in short, became a target for mockery. This was a key element of the transformation in German society effected by and through Cologne.
Further, Germany’s entire policy orientation on refugees, asylum and migration was rewritten in the shadow of Cologne. The idea that Cologne had revealed that those ‘we’ longed to call ‘welcome’ were abusing ‘our values’ – because they hail from patriarchal and misogynistic cultures, societies riven with violence that had made, of these young male refugees, woman-hating brutes – was now acceptable currency among state officials. We personally will never be able to forget the spectacle of Horst Seehofer, the then–Bavarian prime minister (and, at the time of writing, Germany’s minister for the interior and home affairs) – a man who was still, as it happens, calling migration ‘the mother of all political problems’18 in the summer of 2018 – flirting with making ‘abuse of the asylum system’ a criminal offence, and generally agitating against refugees in the late summer of 2015.19 Subsequently, Germany moved to make asylum and migration policy (even) more restrictive: tightening asylum law generally and, in particular, tightening regulations concerning accommodation for refugees; facilitating deportations; and militarizing the German side of intra-European borders (e.g., between Germany and Austria).
This course of action reflected, and worked in tandem with, a new direction in citizenship law embodied by the Nationality Act (Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz), which targeted Muslim ‘criminals’ and perpetrators specifically, requiring that claimants to German citizenship now be not only non-criminal but ‘integrated into the German way of life’.20 What on earth the ‘German way of life’ might be – who gets to define it, and how? – is a question that seems to us to have been left open on purpose, just like the question of what might happen to Germans who do not live that way. The presence of the völkisch, ethnonationalist dog whistle is unmistakable. For many years, at this point, Germany has been conducting a debate on the subjects of ‘Heimat’ (homeland) and ‘Herkunft’ (ancestry): a debate that could, in theory, prove quite useful and interesting, were it not so strongly determined by fundamentalizing conceptual foreclosures and ethnicized, identitarian preconceptions. Nonetheless, post-Cologne, there is an increased presence of new and alternative voices in this debate: polyphone, often post-migrant voices, interested in justice and equality rather than integration and assimilation. They/we are demanding to be listened to and insisting that their/our perspectives matter.21
It has long been clear to us that racism is a part of German culture as a whole: not only behind closed doors and not only among homespun ‘Stammtisch’ regulars in traditional taverns. Nevertheless, we experience the aforementioned poisonous and restrictive political direction, its simplistic ideological generalities and the attendant erosion of the human right to asylum as almost unbearable, especially in light of Germany’s particular responsibilities vis-à-vis history. Racist and xenophobic – also antisemitic – attitudes were never absent from Germany, in West or East; they were never even fully marginalized. Besides the remarkable continuity of Nazi elites in politics, economy, jurisdiction and cultural realms in West Germany, the white-supremacist assassinations carried out by the National Socialist Underground22 between 2000 and 2007 bear witness to such ideology – as does the well-documented participation of German law-enforcement officers and constitutional authorities in far-right networks. The pogroms targeting refugee shelters and hostels housing asylum seekers in Hoyerswerda23 in September 1991 – and in Rostock-Lichtenhagen24 in August 1992 – bear witness to the prevalence of racism in Germany. The racist murders in Mölln25 in November 1992 and in Solingen26 in May 1993 bear witness to it. The racist murder of Marwa El-Sherbini on July 1, 2009, in a German courtroom in Dresden bears witness to it.27 And the innumerable, sometimes subtle, sometimes clearly and openly articulated aggressions and microaggressions that characterize German everyday life – in all areas of society and all institutions, be they schools or universities, public bureaucracies or sporting arenas – bear witness to it. Such is the day-to-day reality, the normal state of existence, for everyone who does not present the ethnicized image of the ‘real German’. In Germany, too, Jewish institutions, such as schools and synagogues, have required police protections and armed security for decades. While we were finishing the English edition of this book, the synagogue in Halle was violently attacked on Yom Kippur (9 October) 2019 by a young German man, who on the self-recorded video he uploaded on social media during his terror spray identifies as a misogynist, anti-feminist, anti-Semitic and racist Holocaust denier. Luckily, the door of the synagogue resisted. But others weren’t as fortunate; the shooter gunned down a woman passing by outside the synagogue and killed a man in an Arab fast-food shop nearby. We mourn for all lost lives and are once again infuriated by the comments of many leading German politicians for their rhetoric of surprise and shock. As if this attack came out of the blue, fully unexpected. As if more or less violent anti-Semitism weren’t part of German normality.
In the German-speaking world, our book has experienced a gratifyingly broad and serious reception. At the time of publication, we gave a great number of readings and participated in many discussions. These always proved lively and often even explosive. In essence, this itself tended to clarify what was at stake and confirm to us the value of what we are advocating, namely the art of thinking-indifference: a practice of differentiation, of differentiating thought. On the one hand, speaking and arguing, controversy and debate, are needed now more than ever before. At the same time, they’re rendered more difficult through the prevalence of discursive authoritarianisms and fundamentalisms: discourses that foreclose things even as they posit them. For example, we have found it unreasonably arduous in practice to go about criticizing certain contemporary feminist positions. Certainly, feminist speech has always been structurally subject to devaluations and attacks, and it is reasonable to demand that criticisms be carefully formulated with the utmost sensitivity to context and effect. But we have noticed that people too often experience ambivalences and nuances as unendurable, literally: as too much to ‘endure’. We lay out the specifics of this in Chapter 4, with our critique of ‘toxic feminisms’ – a genre epitomized for us, inter alia, by Alice Schwarzer. An active and influential
