Return Of The Repressed In Germany

Even if we know it is the way of history, it is nonetheless jarring to witness time and again the return of the repressed in the cultural and political life of nations. It is never over, even after the fat lady sings.

The fat lady sang twice in Germany, first after Nazism was roundly defeated in World War II and second, after the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet bloc collapsed and “history ended.” Only decades later are we seeing an eruption of all that was left unsettled with the steady rise of neo-Nazi parties, mainly in former East Germany, and the demise of the mainstream political coalitions that were the pillars of post-war liberal democracy.

Looking Back To Three Decades Ago

Some three decades ago, New Perspectives Quarterly (NPQ) published an issue focused on the reignited embers of nationalism in Germany. It reads like a chronicle of the future foretelling the tremors shaking Europe’s most powerful country today.

Contributors to that issue ranged from Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the celebrated May ‘68 rabble-rouser and then-Green Party’s deputy mayor of Frankfurt, to the controversial playwright Hans Jürgen Syberberg, who broke post-war taboos with his movie, “Hitler: A Film From Germany.” Other contributors included Germany’s president at the time, Richard von Weizsäcker and then-foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher, whose essay was titled “Nationalism Has No Home in Germany.”

Even then, the issues that stirred the most virulent passions were around the influx of immigrants, lenient asylum policies and the “yearning for a lost sense of belonging.” At the time, isolated gangs were firebombing immigrant homes. Today, those sentiments have been channeled into political parties that garner as high as 44% of the vote in regional elections.

The introduction I wrote to that long-ago NPQ edition read: “Now that the long post-war parole is over, will Germany prove to be reformed or a repeat offender? Unable to face itself, Germany for decades assumed an identity for the benefit of others in order to absolve its crimes. It has become an alias nation hiding its soiled soul under the bushel of NATO and the European community, which, above all else, institutionalizes the liberal ideal of a rational order over a national one.”

Citing the filmmaker Syberberg on why the “democratic repression” associated with rational liberalism cannot forever bury the soul, it continued: “If the cool head allows the passions of the soil no expression, then those underground passions will surface in the ugliest form time and again. A culture made to live by an alias will inevitably revert to the identity that was repressed instead of evolve a new identity based on the open experience of a new reality.”

Syberberg argued that “after the war, intellectuals stood on the tradition of the Enlightenment and a hegemonic rationalism that focused on the head at the expense of the heart. Culture is built upon the way the light falls on the trees, the way the heavens look at night from the familiarity of a particular place where people live and feel a sense of belonging to a unique way of life, to our garden plots, folk tales and Teutonic fantasies.

“Yet we have felt compelled in Germany to repress this uniqueness. We feel safe excelling at mathematics, physics, business. Our people, dominated by facts and figures, are satisfied to dance around the golden calf of materialism and the strong Deutschmark. We are very efficient and methodical. But where is the heart?”

“Heimat,” or homeland, he went on, “was one of the aesthetic subjects that was forbidden territory after the war.” When the Cold War ended and the wall came down, 15 million people became orphans from an East Germany that no longer existed. “They have a strong sense of Heimat precisely because they have lost their homeland,” Syberberg said. “People need food and shelter, but they also need love, community, a home. This is part of the natural function of being human.”

“A culture made to live by an alias will inevitably revert to the identity that was repressed instead of evolve a new identity based on the open experience of a new reality.”

To the filmmaker, the extremism of gangs bombing the homes of immigrants was “frightening, like wild animals.” But he thought it was not enough to condemn it; he also needed to understand “what it is in the air nourishing it.” For him, it was a “reaction not fully formed” springing from the wound of historical dislocation and the prohibition, both explicit and implicit, against cherishing one’s own identity when strangers were welcomed.

Heiner Müller, the liberal playwright and counterpoint to Syberberg on the German literary scene, offered much the same analysis. He too addressed the dislocation of East Germans after the end of the Cold War. Today, the strongholds of the neo-Nazi parties are in the former East.

“After the death of socialism as epitomized by the GDR, Germany’s new demon has become neo-Nazi extremism,” he said. “This should surprise no one. With the demise of socialism, and then reunification, a vacuum was created. Capitalism no longer had an enemy, which meant it no longer had an alibi when people failed to thrive. In the wake of discredited left-wing ideologies, right-wing extremism has simply assumed the role of capitalism’s harshest critic.”

For Müller, “there can be no dialogue with the neo-Nazis. They are not interested in dialogue. They are merely following their own logic: the logic of the void. And they are filling the void with nationalism. In the 19th century, radicals sought to appease the ‘God is dead’ trauma through socialism. Today, not only is God dead, but utopias have vanished. There are no values left. From this extends freedom — but also longing — to belong, to be part of a group, a community, a nation.

“The decay of the East is only a prelude to the disintegration of the West,” Müller presciently remarked.

When I spoke in those days to Cohn-Bendit, aka “Danny the Red” of the May ‘68 Paris student uprising, he focused as well on former East Germany, where most of the bombings took place. As he put it, “People in the East unrealistically thought unification would bring their living standards up to the level of the West overnight. But that will take decades. In reality, their life will get worse before it gets better, and so they face a future of fear and uncertainty. 

“What happens when you throw 400,000 refugees into that cauldron of angst? The refugees and immigrants present the opportunity to give a name and a face to the fears that plague them. As such, they become a target for aggression. For the recently liberated Easterners, the new freedom from censorship means being able to say, ‘We don’t want foreigners.’”

As deputy mayor of Frankfurt, Cohn-Bendit dealt with the multicultural challenge up close. In those days already, 25% of the population was foreign-born. This experience led him to propose “tightening” German immigration and asylum laws, for which he was, in his words, “greeted with scorn and controversy by the old left, which steadfastly supports open borders at all costs.”

Zooming out to the big picture, he said: “I would like to see a world where no individual is obliged to leave their place of birth to seek safety, opportunity or even the basic necessities of life. Alas, that is not the world we live in. We live in a global society that is highly unequal with respect to chances in life.

“Unless the next 20 years can bring hope to the children of the poor South and East, the run on our borders won’t stop. Germans must adjust to this reality and impose limits but also realize we are already an immigrant society” that democracy must accommodate.

President von Weizsäcker wrote that Germans, above all, must respect the dignity of all persons given its past. Yet he acknowledged that the asylum laws were not designed for a “massive influx of foreigners” and that the bottleneck must be broken by a new system “that controls and limits immigration as well as protects the true right of asylum.”

Even as the passions of renewed nationalism stirred at the grassroots, the leadership of Europe was moving in the opposite direction. In NPQ’s forum, foreign minister Genscher said: “The new civilization of coexistence within our European community must never again be jeopardized by national self-interest. We must not only preserve and further develop this new civilization of coexistence for ourselves but extend it to our neighbors in the East. “ 

“The decay of the East is only a prelude to the disintegration of the West.”

In this, he was fully in tune with the mindset of the other elders of European integration shaped by the horrors of World War II. At the time, French President François Mitterrand put it bluntly: “Nationalism means war.” 

The disconnect that has become so manifest today was set in motion then. The good faith efforts to avoid repeating the past clashed with a lost sense of home and belonging. That nascent alienation has only grown, not diminished, over time.

And all this was compounded two decades later when Chancellor Angela Merkel opened wide the country’s gates to some 900,000 refugees from the Syrian civil war in 2015.

The Elusive Conundrum

The conundrum of how to calibrate the right balance between the human need for belonging and compassion for the peril, struggles and aspirations of the dispossessed trying to make a new life remains elusive — and global. The same issue haunts all of Europe today, the United States and even the developing world, from South Africa to the Bangladesh-India borderlands.

In this context, it is wrong to keep saying that governments which tighten strictures on immigration are “moving to the right.” What is happening is that the ongoing incapacity to find a proportionate balance between host populations and incomers has become a mainstream concern, and democratic systems are only responding as they should.

Lessons From The German Experience And Elsewhere

What lessons can be learned from the German experience and elsewhere?

First, liberals should stop treating every expression of the defense of belonging as somehow resurrecting the ghost of Hitler. “To be human means to belong,” the great pluralist philosopher Isaiah Berlin posited in a conversation we had at the outset of the Balkan wars in the 1990s. “If the streams dry up, where men and women are not products of a culture, where they don’t have kith and kin and feel closer to some people than to others, where there is no native language—that would lead to a tremendous desiccation of everything that is human.”

Second, communities, nations or unions like Europe have an obligation to their citizens to control immigration based on criteria that ensure newcomers will abide by their norms and values and contribute positively to the economic well-being of the given jurisdiction. Societies and cultures are not closed systems, but states are bound by the fiscal realities of bordered territories. The social contract of any polity with its citizens rests on this proposition.

To that end, borders must be secure, not porous. The best formulation of this comes from the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Texas, James Talarico. “Our border should be like a front porch — it should have a welcome mat out front and a lock on the door,” he has said, so the homeowner decides who to let in.

Absent this enforced conviction, we will see the kind of mean-spirited and cruel crackdowns being practiced in the U.S. today or on the Mediterranean Sea to remedy an out-of-control situation after the fact. Better to prevent that eventuality in the first place. As the French philosopher Régis Debray put it in an apt aphorism: “Borders are a vaccine against the epidemic of walls.”

Third, we need to redefine the concept of asylum for the times we live in. In the mid-20th century, asylum was meant to provide safe refuge for those persecuted by their governments or temporarily fleeing the ravages of war. It was never meant as a path to permanent residency or to offer a haven for the mass exodus of those from states too weak to protect their own citizens or provide them with economic opportunity.

Extending asylum so broadly overwhelms the carrying capacity — culturally, politically and economically — of even the most compassionate states. Bad faith results from good intentions if the capacity to fulfill moral claims is lacking.

The next conundrum on this front will involve climate refugees forced to leave their homeland because of the floods, droughts and famines associated with global warming for which the industrialized nations of the North are historically most responsible.

Fourth, aging societies in the North must shed the illusion that they can live without legal immigration, and that means a more multicultural mix than ever before. Avoiding cultural, security and economic clashes as this new reality takes hold entails proactive policies for assimilation and integration. 

“Extending asylum so broadly overwhelms the carrying capacity — culturally, politically and economically — of even the most compassionate states.”

The aim must be to prevent the further formation of the kind of cultural silos of immigrants concentrated in segregated neighborhoods that evolve into economic castes, as already seen for so long in places like the Parisian suburbs.  In Sweden, immigrants’ lack of necessary skills and education to compete in the job market has made them among the least integrated in Europe. The gap carries on to the children, who are disproportionately engaged in what have become violent street gangs in that one-time social democratic paradise.

Integration begins with the right immigration criteria. Canada is more successful at integrating immigrants than most because some 60% are admitted through the “economic class,” which counts both assets and skills that match labor market needs. By contrast, according to Harvard University’s Paul May, two-thirds of permanent residents accepted in the U.S are admitted for family reunification, while less than 20% are based on skills.

In areas where borders are contiguous, such as the U.S. and Mexico, and there is great demand for lower-wage employment in agriculture, services and construction, a work permit system that enables easy transit across borders but does not confer permanent residency is a sensible approach. To avoid the exploitative conditions of such prior programs, labor rights conditions need to be monitored and rigorously enforced.

Ongoing integration entails institutions designed for that purpose. In California, the majority of the population today is Latino and Asian, and mostly second generation. Though challenges remain, integration has been largely successful because public higher education serves as a cultural mixer and transmission belt to the middle class. The California State University System has 470,000 students at 23 campuses in every region of the state. Its students, often the first in their families to go to college, match the immigrant profile: 48% are Latinos and 16% are Asian.

Open Societies Need Defined Borders

Open societies need defined borders to sustain a common sense of identity. One is a condition of the other. The lack of either will condemn both to the untenable situation we face today. Among the many challenges of the 21st century, balancing belonging and becoming is the one closest to home.