(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Like people in Australia, Britain, Brazil and other places, Germans have been taking to the streets to protest the killing of George Floyd in the U.S. and the racism that it represents. But in a country with a long tradition of anti-Americanism, the smug confidence of righteous rage at the sins of others often wafts through the public debate here. In the mainstream view, it’s all to do with America’s legacy of slavery, and Germany never had that.
Germany had something else, of course: the Holocaust. If slavery is the original sin of American civilization, the Shoah is the foundation on which not only Israel but also postwar Germany was built. Explicitly or implicitly, the worst crime in history hovers above every aspect of the country’s politics, culture and psychology, including this latest debate about racism.
The legacy of the Holocaust generally exhorts Germans to be better. For example, it motivated article 1, paragraph 1, of the postwar German constitution, which says that “human dignity is inviolable.” At other times, the Holocaust’s influence is more oblique.
Unlike the U.S. or the U.K., for instance, Germany doesn’t keep detailed records about the racial and ethnic makeup of its population, lest the authorities could one day use this information to persecute minorities again. In a jarringly technical sense, Germans are therefore right to claim that they don’t have a systemic problem with bigotry, since you’d need data to show that. In reality, they simply don’t count what needs counting, which is why black Germans are now pushing for an “Afrozensus.”
Psychologically, the Holocaust also forced West Germans during the postwar decades to find a new identity beyond that of perpetrators. So they defined themselves through atonement. This found expression in reparations paid to other countries and opposition to everything from nationalism and nukes to racism and, naturally, anti-Semitism. They tried hard to be good in every way. I’ll never forget seeing, some time in the 1980s, a band of pale, blond and rather awkward men wearing African dashiki shirts and dourly playing Klezmer jazz.
The problem with an identity of atonement was that it also seemed to confer absolution, and thus the license to stop probing more deeply and subtly. Much could have been found. For West Germany was simultaneously welcoming millions of foreigners, called “guest workers,” who were needed in the booming postwar economy. Most were Turks or Greeks, but many came from Africa and elsewhere.
It never occurred to the allegedly reformed Germans that these “guests” were immigrants who might like to stay and assimilate as citizens and full members of society. The blowback is visible today, in urban ghettos of alienated minorities. Young Germans of foreign descent live in a twilight zone between inclusion and exclusion. “I’m German when we win, but I’m an immigrant when we lose,” said Mesut Ozil, a soccer star born in Germany to Turkish parents, as he quit the national squad in 2018.
Cultures from Japan to Scandinavia also have a keen sense of the in-group and outsiders. But in Germany, which became a nation state late in its history, notions about us and them seem baked into identity. The very word “deutsch” (originally “teutsch”) once meant “belonging to the Volk,” the tribe. The unaddressed aspect of German bias is this closed mentality.
America, too, has often excluded groups — from blacks and native Americans to Chinese railroad workers and Japanese-Americans during World War II. But America is also good at including newcomers of all backgrounds and is, in that sense, open.
I once talked to a German professor who immigrated from Syria in 1962. More than five decades after his arrival, after he’d written 30 books in German and married a German wife, the “locals” still treated him like a foreigner, whereas during his brief stints at American universities he felt right at home.
If atonement didn’t quite lead to openness in West Germany, it was hardly even attempted in East Germany. After the war, the communist zone segued effortlessly to blaming the atrocities on the “fascists” and “capitalists” now in “the West.” Many East Germans just skipped the soul-searching and retained their suspicion of otherness. After reunification, this was sometimes aimed at their new “Wessi” compatriots. More recently, it focused on refugees, especially Muslims.
Mind you, owing to the Holocaust, the vast majority of Germans, east or west, are horrified by the far right. The Alternative for Germany, a populist and xenophobic party, appears stuck at about 10% in the polls, and roughly twice that in eastern Germany. Neo-Nazi attacks and anti-Semitism have become more common. But Germany probably has no more of that problem than some other European countries.
What makes German bigotry different is the suffocating inability to talk honestly about its subtler and mundane forms in a country that feels so self-evidently “good.” This week, for instance, Saskia Esken, a leader of the Social Democrats, dared wonder whether there might be “latent racism” in the German police too. She was promptly drowned out by a huge chorus averring that, beyond a few bad apples, Germany has no problem. Horst Seehofer, the interior minister, found her suggestion “absolutely incomprehensible.” The police union called it a “conspiracy theory.”
The lived reality of Germany’s black residents tells different tales. Take, for instance, Karamba Diaby, the only black member of Germany’s parliament, from Halle in eastern Germany. He says he gets two or three insults or threats every day.
Or take Jennifer Neal, a black woman in Berlin who one night asked noisy neighbors to turn the music down, only to be accosted and harassed enough for her to call the police and report a hate crime. (I was Jennifer’s editor when she wrote her account.) The police showed up but then ignored her. Germany has no legal concept of “hate crime,” it turns out. Atonement for the Holocaust, Jennifer concluded, “marked the end of a frank discussion about how racism persists in German society.”
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Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. He's the author of "Hannibal and Me."
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