Far Away So Close: Race, Whiteness, and German Identity

Abstract

Race and nation have been difficult concepts in Germany since the Holocaust. Although race has seemingly disappeared from public discourse, the concept is very present in the narrative construction of white German national identities. In fact in Germany, race, and more specifically whiteness, disappears into a national naming. On the basis of a qualitative study on women activists, I examine to what extent the research participants struggle with the racialized discourse on German identity and what this struggle looks like. Using John Hartigan's (2000) approach to analyzing ethnographic accounts of whiteness, I show how a racialization of German identity plays out in complex and complicated ways. On the one hand, the narratives are complicit with a racialized Germanness, yet on the other hand, the idea of a unified, white, cultural community is being challenged. To move toward a postcolonial narrative of Germanness that includes Germany's history of colonialism as well as fascism, we need to move away from race, but we also need to move toward race. A starting point would be provided by focusing on racism, not as a fringe issue of German society but rather as an urgent matter that is located at the centre of German politics and is actively shaping its history.

Keywords:

• Identity
• race
• nation
• whiteness
• Germany

Acknowledgments

I thank two anonymous reviewers, the editorial board, and especially Sharryin Kasmir for her thorough and conscientious feedback. Above all, I thank the research participants for their openness and trust.

Notes

1. The German word used in this quote is Erinnerungspolitik; it refers to the politics for how the Holocaust was remembered in official public discourse.

2. Exceptions being the legal discourse and the Internet (Jäger 2008). It should be pointed out that there are differing opinions on the matter. Eske Wollrad, for instance, argues that, although contemporary research on racism claims that it is a taboo, “race” is well and alive in public discourses and not infrequently used (2005: 16).

3. For a discussion of how the word race has been used in a European context see, for example, Guillaumin (1998, 1999).

4. Various scholars used different terms, such as “cultural racism” (Hall 1992), “cultural fundamentalism” (Stolcke 1995) or “differential racism” (Taguieff 2000).

5. I have adopted this term from Mecheril (1994) and Campt (2004).

6. Paul Mecheril (1997), a German psychologist and cultural theorist, elaborates on the effects on Other Germans, of not having any language available to describe racism. Continuous experiences of exclusion are not perceived and not recognized as experiences of racism. In the study by Mecheril and Teo, the interviewee, although having grown up and feeling more influenced by the German culture than the Asian culture, refers to himself as Ausländer (foreigner) (1997: 194). This is one example of how the research participants reproduce, inadvertently, the racist structures that he is exposed to. Mecheril refers to this as the racism trap (1997: 197).

7. On critical whiteness, see, for instance, Amesberger and Halbmayr (2008), Eggers et al. (2005), Tissberger et al. (2006), Wachendorfer (2001), Walgenbach (2001), and Wollrad (2005). For critical perspectives on racism and/or Germany as a white, postcolonial space, see, for example, Antidiskriminierungsbüro (2004), Arndt (2001), El-Tayeb (2001b), Ha et al. (2007), Kilomba (2010), and Weiß (2001).

8. The name of the city has been changed. I use a pseudonym to protect the anonymity of the research participants.

9. The original quote reads as follows: “Ja, und zwar nur negative, also nur Momente wo es mir wahnsinnig peinlich war, daß ich zu diesen Idioten dazugehöre, zumindest so volkstechnisch.”

10. In German, she says: “mit welcher Selbstverständlichkeit ich erstens mal als Nicht-Deutsche wahrgenommen wurde.”

11. Paul Gilroy argues that characteristics of the new racism are the construction of a national culture that is homogenous in its whiteness (1992: 53) and a blurred distinction between race and nation (1987: 45). Nora Räthzel (1997) writes about the prevalent binary construction of a homogenous nation versus Ausländer (foreigners) in Germany.

12. The newly elected coalition consisting of the SPD (Social Democratic Party) and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (The Green Party) battled over a planned reform of the antiquated German citizenship law with the conservative Opposition Party, the CDU. The coalition had passed an agreement that children of “foreigners” born in Germany, and whose mother or father was born in Germany, would automatically receive double citizenship. In other words, ius sanguinis was intended to be supplemented by ius soli. The conservative party mobilized voters against the implementation of the citizenship reform on the grounds of a mostly racist discourse that reinforced the binary opposition Germans versus foreigners and represented immigrants as a threat to the internal security of the nation. They argued, for instance, that double citizenship promoted the import of terror and crime and that (Klärner 2000: 84; Perger 1999: 1) the reform would open the floodgates for new waves of immigration, which might possibly turn Germany into a country of immigration without any limits (Klärner 2000: 85).

13. That whiteness is a process and not a thing (Frankenberg 1997) and that whiteness has been made and unmade throughout history has been exemplified by numerous works (e.g., Brodkin 2000; Jacobson 1998, Roediger 1991). Whiteness is fluid and changes over time; who is white can be contested at any moment in history. Rosa's statements need to be seen in light of this line of reasoning. In Germany, I think, the whiteness of Eastern Europeans is, to a certain extent, contested, as Rosa's statements reveal a discourse that confirms this notion. Here Kristin Kopp's work is relevant. She, for instance (Kopp 2011) argues for the inclusion of Poland into the study of German colonialism, because in the Eastern-colonial discourse, a Slavic race is constructed in which Poles are identified as non-white and Germans are perceived as white (Kopp 2005). Kopp's work is important in this context, because it shows that whiteness, in Europe, as a social location of power and privilege is not only constructed vis-à-vis black skin but also vis-à-vis white skin.

14. “Way of life” is one criterion of the new racism; see for instance Barker (1981).

15. In German, she says here: “(…) Von wegen, ‘am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen’ (…)”. This is a reference to a German expression which originally was the last line of a poem called “Deutschlands Beruf” by Emanuel Geibel (1815–1884) a nationalist poet. Although not originally intended that way, it was later picked up by the National Socialists and became a slogan during this historical period. This line, as it is used here, stands for the nationalist and fascist politics of the Third Reich (see also http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/ger_enc/6124/Am).

16. APO stands for Außerparlamentarische Opposition (Extraparliamentary Opposition). In German the student protests of the 1960s and 1970s are also referred to as the APO movement, because one of the historically specific triggers for the emergence of the movement was the collapse of the government alliance between the Christian Democratic Union and the Free Democratic Party. What followed was a große Koalition, an alliance between the two large parties CDU/CSU and SPD. This meant that there was hardly any opposition to the government. Hence, students and other citizens formed an extraparliamentary opposition. The APO understood itself as a counterforce to the overwhelming political majority in the German Parliament (Außerparlamentarische 2003).

17. Within the women's movement a similar discourse was widespread; feminists did not define themselves as internationalist, but as women. For a feminist critique of this discourse, see Ahrens et al. (1994), Jacoby and Lwanga (1990), Hügel et al. (1993), Kappeler (1994), and Lwanga (1993).

18. See, for instance, Ege (2007), Fehrenbach (1998), Höhn (2001), and Partridge (2008).

19. In Partridge's study (2008) of white German women and their relationship to black men, white German men are described as stiff and boring by white German women.

20. A Gymnasium is a secondary school that students attend for nine or, in some federal states, eight years and that leads to the Abitur. Generally, without Abitur Germans are not admitted to university.

21. Susan Arndt (2005) offers a very nice article on the “racial turn” in which she elaborates in more detail on the necessity of establishing links between colonialism, fascism, and contemporary politics.

22. Shankar Raman (1995) makes this argument for colonialism; I have adopted this for the German context.

23. What I have in mind here is the postcolonial account Vron Ware gives on British identity in her book Who Cares about Britishness? (2007).