Islamophobia in Germany, East/West: an introduction

ABSTRACT

In this Introduction to a Special Issue on Islamophobia East/West, we provide a general review of the topic. Despite similarities in Islamophobia between East and West Germany, significant contrasts persist. While scholars have understood them as residues of communist rule, here we argue for the importance of what followed its downfall. First, we sketch out the history of Islamophobia in post-reunification Germany. We suggest that the othering of easterners has shown close resonances with the othering of (particularly Muslim) migrants. Both are represented as in need of a reckoning with the German past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), unlike westerners. Such contrasts, we argue, are reproduced across multiple and different scales, from the geography of Berlin to the national territory, the EU (with its persistent East/West divisions), and beyond it. The politics of gender, we insist, is vital for understanding German Islamophobia. Both feminists and conservatives have framed Muslims at once as sexual predators and as repressive patriarchs. Meanwhile, the emergence of ‘welcome culture’ (Wilkommenskultur) has created opportunities for solidarity yet has also come to reference liberal naïveté. We conclude that neither Islamophobia nor the East/West contrasts are likely to disappear while eastern populations remain peripheral to the contemporary economic and political orders.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamophobia
• East Germany
• West Germany
• postsocialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Most notably Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, Paris in 2015, Brussels, Berlin, and Nice in 2016, and Manchester and Barcelona in 2017.

2. The term Biodeutsch has been used to describe ethnic Germans.

3. In fact, to the extent that capitalism did develop differently in the West as opposed to the East of Central Europe, the East-West border ran roughly along the western frontier of Prussia and Saxony. The transition of these German states from a traditional agricultural to a modern capitalist economy followed patterns that were very similar to those in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, in today’s Czech Republic and Poland. See Myška (1996).

4. According to data compiled by the Federal Office of Statistics, 47.3% of the population in the East is at least 50 years old, compared with 43.2 in the West. See https://www.destatis.de/.

5. Die Zeit adds, however, that this massive migration slowed eventually, and in 2017 more people moved from West to East than in the other direction.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst.