Ladies and gentlemen,
In the spring, when the topics for the lectures were being decided, my intention was to tell you why the talk about the many cultures is pure nonsense: nothing but the false consciousness of a half-educated middle class that is trying to package its racism better and uses the opportunity to scrounge a little attitude to life from the poor.
In the meantime, I fear that the subject needs to be taken more seriously. When the organizer writes in his invitation to this conference: “The coexistence of people from different cultures will be a simple fact of life in a reunified Germany and in a future Europe”, then I also see the danger today. In fact, since the Rostock pogrom, not a day goes by without proof that a second breed of people is living in the unified state, one with a strange mentality and deviant customs and traditions. It looks as if the many cultures were not an empty threat, except that in the end it is the compatriots themselves who install and form the ensemble of atavistic communities. In a sense, a lie is being made true before our eyes, and that is a somewhat confusing process. So don’t expect me to be able to provide at least a self-contained explanation for the latest development, although the person on the podium should be able to.
The difficulties begin with the vocabulary. When adolescents go on a manhunt every night in the new federal states, accompanied by the applause of the elderly, then complaining about xenophobia or right-wing extremism is tantamount to rebuking a belly slasher for lack of delicacy. What’s more, both terms refer to marginal phenomena and presuppose a different kind of normality. In 1935, for example, the Nazis were not right-wing extremists, they were not even right-wing, they were everywhere. Even today, right-wing extremism almost no longer exists, because the normality to the left of it, to which it should logically refer, is missing. So a dirty word has almost turned into a term of endearment. To speak of right-wing extremism used to mean ascribing everything bad to a certain political group and today it means unrestrainedly glossing over developments in New Germany. What is meant, for example, is that the SPD, with its turncoats at the top, is overtaking the “Republicans” on the right and that Schönhuber can already be considered a moderate alongside Kronawitter. We see how all the parties are huddled together in a corner, like the wings of a unified party that still lacks a program, a leader and a mass base.
So if someone today gets the feeling that they no longer know which is up and which is down, which is left and which is right, then it is not always their brain that is defective, but their disorientation often reflects the confusion of the situation. The unification of the parties seems to be linked to the dissolution of all institutions that previously gave society a certain shape. Today, the right to asylum is being sacrificed to the mood of the day, tomorrow it may be freedom of assembly or freedom of movement. The abolition of fundamental rights goes hand in hand with the abandonment of all political and moral principles, be it the sacred oath never to agree to military missions abroad or the simple principle that one should not be caught lying and cheating all the time.
Such considerations are not new; one reads concerns about the state of the parties or the republic in every second editorial, regardless of the party-political orientation of the paper. A certain connection between the decline of the state and society on the one hand and the ongoing, collectively committed violent crimes on the other is not usually denied. But the gang attacks on asylum seekers and their homes are only ever seen as symptoms, as side effects, and in my opinion this underestimates their true significance. You can only get to the bottom of it, if at all, if you don’t close your eyes to reality and come to the very unpleasant realization that there are things that shouldn’t exist.
Don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t intend to warn you for the hundred and fiftieth time about Auschwitz, which doesn’t scare anyone anyway, which is why it would be better to point the finger at Dresden instead of Auschwitz. I would rather draw your attention to the perpetrators, accomplices and sympathizers, to the fact that their moral and outward appearance in the new federal states seems to confirm the rule that racism leads to racialization, and that this is the case with the racists themselves. For unlike the animal, man does not belong to a race by birth, but by his existence in a pack of persecutors, as even Hitler himself admitted, insofar as he repeatedly emphasized, “We are not a race, we must first become a race” (Hannah Arendt, Elements and Origins of Totalitarianism). People become what they do because their activity shapes their consciousness, their physiognomy and their entire body. Identity in thought, feeling, action and appearance, as developed by the racial horde, is not a product of nature but an adaptation to the requirements of hunting other people. This adaptation ensures that the many individuals function as members of a pack and can act as if on command, without anyone having to give the order. It also serves the reflex-like identification of the enemy, which only distinguishes between equal and unequal or familiar and unfamiliar and therefore places the highest demands on the uniformity of the pursuing collective. Deviation from the species means mortal danger, as in war, where one risks being shot by mistake by individual comrades if one puts on a fantasy uniform for fun, or as in the rat cage, where the animal with the deviant smell is torn apart by the others.
To understand what is currently happening in the Zone, but not only there, it may be useful to recall a theory according to which “savage tribes and barbarian peoples are not the beginning but the remnant of great civilizations” (Arendt), and what is true of great civilizations is of course even more true of small ones. I speculate that the regression of the highly organized polity that the GDR state once was is taking place, its regression into a horde, not unlike the Federal Republic, which has no longer existed in its old form for two years now. On both sides of the former border, people now live in an administrative structure that lacks something crucial. It lacks what other nations call their own idea of the state, and what probably corresponds to their self-confidence. This consciousness establishes my relationship to others, I compare myself with them, I measure myself against them, and they give me security by placing certain expectations on me.
The great advantage for the Germans, as long as they lived in the FRG and the GDR, was that both states knew who they had to please, in one case the West, in the other the Eastern Bloc. The awareness of the expectations placed on them established their relationship to humanity, to which they could therefore feel they belonged. As long as the East-West conflict existed, they were inevitably involved in the great game that entangled all nations with each other through the universal question of whether capitalism or socialism was the better form of society. In the dispute about the objective, people experience themselves as subjects of equal rank, one could say as members of the human species. Where only my subjective advantage is at stake, it doesn’t matter whether the other person is my dog or my neighbor. I can tussle with both because I want to keep my steak. But I can only argue with my neighbor about the question of whether two times two is four, and this argument gives us both the certainty that we are human beings. I believe that this awareness, which has never been particularly well developed here anyway, is currently being lost to our compatriots and that this loss explains why they seem to resemble the African indigenous tribes described by Hannah Arendt in some respects:
"They are the survivors of a great catastrophe, which may have been followed by other, smaller catastrophes, until they felt the catastrophic monotony of their existence as something natural and self-evident. What distinguished them from other peoples was not the color of their skin; what made them physically frightening and repulsive was their catastrophic inferiority or belonging to nature, which they could not counter with a human world. Their unreality, their seemingly ghostly goings-on, is due to this worldlessness. Since they are worldless, nature appears as the only reality of their existence; and it presents itself to the observer as such an overwhelming reality - with worldless people, nature can jump around at will - that, measured against it, people assume something imaginary, shadowy, completely unreal. The unreal lies in the fact that they are human beings and yet completely lack the reality proper to human beings. It is this unreality of the indigenous tribes, given their worldlessness, that has led to the terrible murderous exterminations and to the complete lawlessness in Africa."Worldlessness, as Hannah Arendt attests to the indigenous tribes, seems to me to be the more appropriate term for a phenomenon that could also be described as a loss of reality bordering on autism.
I am referring, for example, to the plan to celebrate the 50th anniversary of V2 in Peenemunde on the second anniversary of the third German unification – a plan that is not an isolated case and betrays more than just bad intentions and a dirty mind, namely a serious disorder of perception and an extraordinary clouding of the calculating mind. This behaviour is otherwise known from people who, in their self-seeking isolation, become completely neglected and no longer have any regard for the judgement of other people or the rules of civilization in general. Such a regression was observed last century, for example, in groups of white people who lost contact with civilization in South Africa, lived like natives themselves and thus, as the technical term goes, became caffeinated. Since they as a group no longer felt bound by the rules of civilization, these rules no longer applied internally either, which meant the complete collapse of conventional morality.
A similar breakdown could perhaps provide the explanation for one of the most puzzling phenomena in the wake of reunification, namely the fact that the “new division” is progressing so slowly. Since unification, the country has actually been a candidate for processes such as those that took place in Yugoslavia and are about to take place in Czechoslovakia, whereby the separation of the East Germans from the West Germans would be even easier to carry out than that of the Croats from the Serbs, because – with the possible exception of West Berlin – there are no disputed territorial claims. There are two populations competing for wealth, each of which has had statehood for longer than the Slovaks or the Croats. However, although the Ossis also form a group that everyone here must detest, there is no open dispute. There is a latent and justified dislike of them, but it is hardly ever articulated.
- “From dream to trauma” is what “Die Zeit” calls its reunification series (since 10.9.92), “Die neue Teilung: Deutsche gegen Deutsche” is the headline of “Der Spiegel” (from August 17), and even “Bild” from 5.9.92) admits: “In West Germany, practically the entire population is against additional burdens in favor of the people in the East.” …. Typical mood yesterday: _Kohl and Waigel should stick it to their hats. I’ve had enough of this.”
To make this thought clearer, I will try to talk about the Easterners the way anyone here in the West who has any common sense and a halfway intact moral judgment would actually have to think about them. Everyone here realizes that the shouting of the Ossis was a fraud when they called for democracy and unity in the autumn of 1989. They were only shouting because they wanted our luxury; being the richest in the Eastern bloc was not enough for them. This is evident now that they have unity and democracy, but not yet all our money. If we don’t give it away, they threaten us with social explosions. Since they have been allowed to vote, they no longer like it, as they understood free elections to mean free choice in the car showroom. Since they got the market economy from us, we are supposed to be the socialists, pay their pensions and health insurance and give them factories to boot.
They themselves admit that their racism is highly concentrated vulgar shabbiness, as they consider it their right to persecute others by referring to their own allegedly difficult situation. They feel good when they are the coward who brutally beats up his weak wife because he himself has crawled before someone stronger. The idea that Ossi buses could also burn in the West, those with commuters from Rostock, for example, who take the jobs of the people of Hamburg, never occurs to these strange people with a switched-off moral sense. They are relentless and merciless against the poor, but expect compassion and charity from the richer. Cruelty and tearfulness are each disgusting in their own right, but in the Ossi-typical mixture they form an emetic of particular potency. The Ossis themselves have sneaked into our country under the pretext of idealistic motives, not out of necessity, but because of the hoped-for material advantage. But when they meet a refugee in misery, they attack the needy person and insult him as a bogus asylum seeker, when they themselves are economic refugees in the most unpleasant sense of the word.
Because we are richer than them, they take the social route: sharing is a commandment among Christians, it is more blessed to give than to receive. If a poor person asks them for the bare necessities, he can be happy if they don’t kill him. If asylum seekers have to sleep under the open sky on their doorstep at night, the Ossis feel neither pity nor indignation that no one is helping the poor people, but they feel harassed. It is not the need but the needy that they want eliminated. They constantly demand solidarity for themselves without ever granting it to others. When they were allowed to go to the West after the Wall came down, they stole like ravens, lots of bits and bobs that they didn’t need. If a poor devil from even further east takes something from them that he urgently needs but can’t pay for, they would love to kill him. Everyone knows that in the zone tens of thousands cheated the state at our expense with the welcome money and are still cheating it with unemployment benefit, unemployment assistance and social welfare. But if a poor wretch from Romania gets just enough from the state, which we pay, so that he doesn’t starve to death, they rage and complain that their good money is being squandered. They obviously believe that everything should actually belong to them and that we should use their money sparingly.
They say that they will have to get used to foreigners very slowly. But they think it is our duty that we have had to cope with 17 million of their unpleasant, insatiable, greedy kind in one fell swoop. Not only were they always too cowardly to protest against the regime they supposedly disliked, when protesting would have cost as much courage as it would have taken to risk losing promotion and preferential treatment – for example, losing the allocation of one of the coveted apartments in the new-build district where the most disgusting racists now live in clans. Instead, in typical cyclist fashion, the eternal followers are once again only kicking the weak. Instead of getting into a fair fight with their peers of a different nationality, when they already feel like fighting and engaging in nationality wars, hordes of bald-headed louts attack families in asylum seekers’ homes, sparing neither women nor children. If you can stand it, you can look at the faces of these heroes for a long time and still not find a human trait in them. They are repulsively ugly and in their ugliness they are confusingly similar.
This, ladies and gentlemen, was a short list of pertinent observations and correct considerations that really need no further commentary or elaboration in order to provoke anger, bitter reproaches and moral indignation. Strangely enough, they do not, and it seems to me that the main reactions can be characterized as a listless “That’s right”, an indifferent “What’s the big deal” or a resigned “There’s nothing more to be done”. Certainly, indulgence can play a role for reasons of sympathy or a sense of national community, but the Ossis are certainly not popular here either. It would also be an exaggeration to claim that the Ossis have become a shining example for West Germany through Hoyerswerda and Rostock, although since then their claim to political leadership has been de facto recognized as that of an avant-garde. The Ossis are pacesetters, protagonists, absolutely at the height of their time, while the West still has the – admittedly rapidly fading – memory of better days. But they are still not admired, even beloved national heroes, perhaps because the decay of thinking in moral categories is so far advanced that people are actually equally incapable of enthusiasm and indignation.
It may be that this is now what has been called culture, a word that means a merely vegetable mode of existence that falls even further behind the animal form of existence, beyond not only good and evil, but also beyond sadness and happiness, and sometimes a little uncanny, insofar as it also includes the proliferating formations that arise in the laboratory during experiments with fungal spores or bacteria.
As I told you at the beginning of my talk, I am not completely clear about the current context, nor the consequences. After Rostock, we are left feeling a little embarrassed, not because the event was so terrible, but because it has overridden the laws of logic one by one. It is hard to see what advantage the state expected to gain from encouraging and tolerating the pogrom, because capitulating to the mob means losing its authority. If the pogrom was not deliberately tolerated by the state, it is hard to see why those responsible were not brought to justice. The fact that the Prime Minister, the Minister of the Interior and the whole clique are still in office instead of standing before the investigating judge raises more than just the usual questions about the morality of politicians. Rather, it shows in an exemplary way that the law of cause and effect has been suspended for the people involved in such a way that their actions or omissions have no consequences for them. This, however, leads to a state in which thinking loses its meaning, and little sensible can be said about this state.
On the other hand, I know the long prehistory quite well. It is the story of conditioning, of getting used to the absurd idea that we can speak of cultures with regard to people today, and if you still have patience, I will tell you this story.
Allow me to quote myself briefly on the subject of culture, from a book published in 1984. It said: “Culture, ‘formerly the true, the beautiful, the good, later the best, later still having sunk very low in the public’s favor, has been enjoying steadily growing popularity again for some time now. The two cultures, the established and the alternative, which originate from a rumor allegedly started by Glotz, have multiplied like rabbits, and there is hardly enough food culture, home culture, body culture, free body culture and, last but not least, political culture to go around.”
Because nobody understands the allusion to Glotz anymore, I must briefly describe the background. You probably all remember that at the end of the 1960s there was a protest movement that saw itself as political. To see itself as political meant thinking in categories such as oppression and liberation, revolutionary and reactionary, right and left, bourgeois and Marxist, capitalist and proletarian, imperialist and anti-imperialist, nationalist and internationalist. The subject of such deliberations was the distribution of power and wealth, but the driving force behind the thoughts was indignation at the ruling class in the few rich countries. It was accused of wanting to use all means of power to perpetuate the state of a world it had created itself, in which two thirds of humanity suffered abject misery, appalling poverty and naked hunger. One difference to today was that back then it was about solidarity with the “damned of the earth”, not about protecting the tropical rainforest from them. The other difference was that French proletarians, American blacks, Vietnamese liberation fighters and Cuban revolutionaries were close to you in every respect, while German entrepreneurs, white-collar workers and average bourgeois were far away in every respect.
Ten years later, around 1980, the demand that people should not be classified according to their origin, but according to their consciousness, their will, their moral integrity, their political reason and, above all, their behavior in social conflicts was forgotten. Instead of the anti-imperialist left, there were the so-called alternatives, a home-bred movement of hard-boiled softies in baggy clothes. Like all egoists, they needed a communal experience to replace political solidarity. Community experiences arise when many people do the same thing and do it a little differently from the others. Christians pray, soldiers march, frat boys drink beer. In the case of the alternatives, they ate grains, slept in a self-made bunk bed and wore yellow oilskins. Because this was mainly done by a certain age group, people lamented the disintegration of the nation into two alien groups, which, for reasons I will explain later, were called the “two cultures”. Not only were the young people’s attitude to life, their hopes and desires far removed from those of the old, but the loss of even a common language threatened the hostile generations, it was said at the time. The relevant media hyped up the issue, the fate of the nation was once again at stake, and politicians such as Glotz, Eppler and Vogel saw the supposed rift as an opportunity to raise their own profile. They played the role of mediator and organized all sorts of “get-together” events under the heading of “dialogue between the generations”.
In reality, what happened was something that can be observed everywhere: The more similar people become to each other, the more tense the efforts to set boundaries become. On the threshold of their own couch set, just before the children become as senile as their parents, they dye their hair green again. What appears to be a sign of fierce resistance is already signaling surrender. It was a similar story with the protest movement, which during the 1970s abandoned all goals that had substantially differentiated it from the rest of society. Having become de facto identical with the once despised opponent and confusingly similar to him, it now depended on clear signs, as in war, where the soldiers of all parties do the same thing and have to wear different uniforms to tell them apart.
Political content was replaced by what was then called lifestyle. The grain-eater differed from the average citizen in his consumption habits, precisely because he demonstratively ate muesli. The communication problem between the generations did not stem from their disagreement, as was claimed, but from their tacit agreement on all fundamental issues. They had nothing to say to each other because there was no subject for controversy. As a convinced Marxist, one develops a missionary zeal and an annoying loquacity, because one has arguments enough to want to convince others. If, on the other hand, the Omo fan meets the Persil fan or the wine drinker meets the beer drinker, the rule applies that it is difficult to argue about taste.
So instead of “capitalism or socialism”, the decision of conscience around 1980 was “jute or plastic”, and that was a marginal difference that implied equality of essence. For two people must be devilishly similar if the main difference between them is that one swears by wool and the other by cotton. So why, so the question goes, was the trifle taken so tragically that one spoke of two cultures? Certainly, the desire to elevate trivialities to the rank of the significant played a role, but the need for significance cannot be explained by a simple need for recognition – after all, nobody had missed culture before. Until the end of the 1960s, it had been the private pleasure of the educated classes, the pastime of a small minority, whose members also defected to the protest movement, which demanded not culture but political partisanship and political messages from theater and literature. The very word was frowned upon, almost a swearword. If it was used at all, it was in the context of cultural revolution. It was not understood to mean the improvement of culture, but its destruction in the interest of a society liberated from traditional constraints, ideas, customs, taboos and rules of conduct.
It is therefore all the more astonishing that at the beginning of the 1980s, two cultures were suddenly on everyone’s lips in the Federal Republic of Germany and were spoken of not derogatorily or derisively, but seriously and approvingly. Apparently, the crisis awareness that subsequently fostered the emergence of nationalist and chauvinist movements was already beginning to stir at that time. Apparently, everyone suspected or sensed that capital was coming to an end once again.
For the Germans, this meant having to revitalize a national consciousness that had been extremely compromised by history. An intermediate step was therefore necessary. Instead of taking the Kulturkampf straight into the big arena, it was first practised at home in front of the mirror. Back then, no one would have dared to talk about German culture as opposed to foreign or alien culture, otherwise everyone would have smelled a rat. Talking about alternative and established culture, on the other hand, sounded quite harmless and innocuous. Was there any sport less suspicious of nationalism than arguing about the right lifestyle? Not even the word nation was mentioned.
You can often only understand social phenomena in Germany if you differentiate between content and form. The content – alternative versus established, grain eaters versus toast fans – was only of secondary importance at the time. It was more important to develop the form and to naturalize certain categories or ways of thinking. The fact that people are primarily distinguished not by wealth and power, but by culture, gradually became the basic noise of brain activity. Once this point had been reached, it was time to exchange content. Alternative and established were quickly forgotten, and their place was taken by the national, so instead of alternative and established culture, there were several national cultures. And what was the point: could it be a sin to talk about culture? After all, we’ve been talking about it all along.
So first the lifestyle was the syrup and the culture was the pill. Once people got used to the taste, the culture itself became the syrup, and the pill inside was the nation. Of course, the cat was still not out of the bag. Instead of talking about one’s own national culture or national identity, people started talking about the other. That of the Jews, Roma, Sinti, Indians and Palestinians was now discovered and researched. Jewish, non-German history, customs and traditions initially fascinated ethnologists. Calling a Gypsy that was frowned upon, knowing about Roma and Sinti was obligatory – just as if the other person had to show me his ancestor’s passport and as if he could demand that I take an interest in his private affairs. Because it is his private matter which religious community or ethnic group he thinks he belongs to and for what reasons.
Back then, when the gypsies didn’t dirty German lawns, but made German hearts happy, especially those of the left, who annoyed us with the constant droning of Häns’che Weiß records – even then, the dogged folklore hype smelled strongly of racial science, but it was supposedly meant to be so heartfelt. Didn’t the peoples classified as inferior by the Nazis and therefore persecuted and murdered deserve that the Germans now showed them, i.e. not so much the people, but their culture, the necessary respect? And is there a better way to express respect for a people than by loving their music, exploring their history and studying their customs and traditions? Well, if the compatriots had known their own history better, they would have known that there were Germans in the SS who knew the history of Judaism and Hebrew better than most Jews.
It was then only a small step from interest in the foreign culture to interest in their own. Parallel to the peace movement, which identified the external enemy, namely the superpowers threatening Germany with their nuclear missiles, the search for national identity gained momentum internally. The national question should not be left to the right, but should be posed by the left itself. Terms such as Volk, Heimat and Vaterland were no longer regarded as reactionary lies that are always false and, in the case of Germans, criminal. Instead, the left-wingers who had converted to patriotism, who set the tone for the entire climate of opinion at the time, openly declared their support for them. If we are allowed to speak of the Jewish people and the Sinti people, why not the German people? If the others are allowed to be proud of their culture – and we expressly encourage them to do so – don’t we have the same rights?
Now we were free of our inhibitions, but we not only have to want to, we also have to be able to. It is not easy to acknowledge the culture of one’s own people when the population does not really know their own mother tongue, has no idea about any culture, mostly reads “Bild-Zeitung”, does not particularly like their own food, does not even have a real national dish.
But this problem was also solved with the help of the trick of speaking of different cultures in the case of different consumer habits. As an example, the term had become fungible, i.e. it could be applied arbitrarily. Before: If it says sugar on it, it must contain sugar. After: If it says sugar and it contains salt, we have to rethink. From now on, sugar is what you sprinkle into the soup. I decide what should be called what. When I talk about two cultures in the case of hard bread fans and soft bread fans, that’s what they are. That’s my definition of culture or my understanding of it. It may be that people used to think differently, but I’m not bound by that. I basically rethink everything.
This rethinking would be a pretty crazy but harmless parlor game if the rethinkers would invent new words instead of using the old ones. Of course they don’t, and the effect of this sleight of hand is that new content takes on old meanings. Stripped of all conventional definitions of content, culture, for example, had retained its meaning as a means of distinguishing essentially different groups of people; after all, the name was still the same. Only there was no longer any need for groups of people declared to be different in essence to differ in terms of such characteristics as most, if not all, people are unable to acquire today.
Traditionally, culture is understood to be – to quote from a philosophical lexicon – the totality of “the achievements and works of a people”. There is no doubt that this term, unlike the concept of civilization, already implies the relativization of ethnicity, i.e. the distinction not between true and false or good and bad, but between German and un-German. Nevertheless, the reference to achievements and works contains the claim that culture must be measured against an objective standard, and that not everything that exists in terms of human achievements is therefore already culture and therefore of equal value. The distinction between primitive cultures and advanced civilizations belongs to the concept of culture, just as the distinction between civilization and barbarism belongs to civilization. In turn, the distinction between primitive and advanced civilizations is only meaningful and possible if I have a concept of culture in general that is defined in terms of content, according to which it means, as far as I am concerned, the refinement of man’s senses, the development of his intellect, the overcoming of raw desires, the stabilization of his social conditions, the utilization of the land, etc., in short: emancipation from the constraints and hardships of the immediate natural context.
To claim that in the given case we were dealing with two different cultures and groups of people separated by them was originally a serious judgment with serious consequences. At the same time, however, it was one that could not be made absolutely arbitrarily, but had to stand up to scrutiny. Attributing others or oneself to a particular culture did not promise entirely carefree pleasure in that certain conditions had to be fulfilled. For I am only a member of French or German culture, let’s say a fully-fledged Frenchman or German, if I have at least enough knowledge of the achievements and works of my people to be able to reproduce them. Not that I, as a German, necessarily have to be a Goethe, but I do have to have read Goethe and retained something of it.
If you put this argument forward in discussions, there is always someone who will tell you that you are a bit behind the times and have missed out on scientific progress. That used to be the case, he says, for example, but in the meantime the reformers have purified and modernized the concept of culture, and today it is defined quite differently. Demanding Goethe and Mozart is old-fashioned and elitist, he says, and culture is by no means absorbed into the ideas that the educated middle classes have of it. In addition to bourgeois culture, there is also peasant or proletarian culture, in other words everyday culture. The judgmental concept of culture had been replaced by the non-judgmental concept of ethnologists or cultural anthropologists. All regularly recurring activities are therefore culture, whether I eat my jacket potatoes with boiled herring every evening and then throw myself on the straw sack, pumped full of potato schnapps, or whether I go to the theater every evening and then dine like a king. In one case it’s proletarian culture, in the other it’s bourgeois culture. Or if the man-eaters eat human flesh, that’s just their culture, nobody should argue about it. On top of that – and with this particularly stupid objection, the progressive man always thinks he’s particularly clever – it’s wrong to talk about culture at all, when today every layman knows that there are only cultures and that the expert also knows the subcultures. Or has anyone ever seen a banana when in reality you only find bananas? Of course, the clever one has not considered that I must already have the banana in my head in order to be able to identify certain objects as bananas in reality.
One could lament for a long time about the epistemological implications of this modernized concept of culture, and even longer about the moral value of a theory that seems to come across as so folksy and philanthropic when it glorifies poverty and misery as a culture on a par with any other, which no one should look down on with contempt, which in other words only means that there is nothing wrong with one person sleeping in a comforter and the other under a bridge – to each animal its own little plaything, each group its own culture.
Here, however, I am concerned with another point, namely the trick of leaving the content of the term to arbitrariness, declaring it to be a question of definition, and at the same time retaining the word with its nimbus. What culture is, and when two cultures are different, is then determined by me according to my subjective interests, since I have the absolute power of definition. For example, I say that the gypsies who have immigrated from Romania have a culture that is different from the German culture because they don’t know how to flush the toilet. This decision is completely justified and in no way discriminatory in the sense of cultural anthropology, which does not require the subjects to master the 60,000 characters of the Chinese standard language and the other to have a sound humanistic education, so that one can speak of two different cultures. The only important thing is the regularity, people go to the toilet quite regularly, and how they do it is an element of everyday culture that is as suitable for distinguishing between different cultures as any other, even if it takes 20 years to learn the Chinese characters or acquire a humanistic education and perhaps 20 seconds to learn how to use the flush valve.
So that I can make my decision as I please, I first relativize the concept of culture to the point of meaninglessness, call the demands that used to be made of it elitist, and claim that it merely serves to classify and does not contain any value judgement. Once the decision has been made, however, it suddenly no longer has the character of a mere classification or subjective preference. Then the term strikes with the full force of the weight of meaning that it traditionally possesses in Germany. The other culture is then no longer just the other, but the foreign, and the foreign is no longer just the foreign, but the inferior. Although the natives know nothing, not even their own language, so well that a foreigner could not catch up with and surpass them in two years; although they are, measured by an emphatic concept of culture, actually cultureless barbarians, they count themselves as belonging to a high culture which differs from the primitive one of the immigrant Romanian gypsies, and invoke their ability to pull the right lever in the toilet.
The preconditions for this madness, namely the emptying of the concept of culture of any specific content, were created in the Federal Republic at the very time when the media, prominent politicians and, of course, the alternatives themselves used the term to characterize two groups, neither of which possessed anything of what culture once meant. The consequence of the fact that culture could now mean anything and everything and that individuals were free to adorn themselves with the label was a sensational proliferation of culture. Long before the multicultural society was demanded, it already existed in such a way that, in addition to the cultures already mentioned in the quote, there was also the corporate culture, the culture of debate, the culture of discussion, presumably also the culture of poverty and God knows how many other cultures.
So the central lie of the talk of different cultures is that it declares immigrants to be members of a different culture, although these immigrants need not differ at all from the natives in all things that matter. If they do, it is not because of their origin, but because of the conditions in the country of immigration, namely the expectations placed on immigrants in the Federal Republic. Because they are not accepted as immigrants but are supposed to remain foreigners, they have to play the exotic here. If they want the Germans to like them, Spaniards have to dance flamenco, which they, like most Spaniards, did not do in their country of origin, any more than anyone among you probably yodels, even though we are here in Bavaria. If the Germans are to understand the foreigners, the latter have to serve up a folklore show and specialties from the grill, because the Germans want to have their prejudice confirmed that the foreigners are different from them. It is only understandable that immigrants in the Federal Republic sometimes become as Turkish as they never were in Turkey and the ultra-modern Turkish upper class is not at all.
For in none of the countries of origin of immigrants does a closed way of life based on tradition with fixed customs, traditions, costumes and festivals still dominate unchallenged, as is evident from the fact that these countries have become countries of emigration. If a society can no longer retain, employ and feed its members, it is itself in a crisis-like upheaval which affects all spheres from material production to lifestyle. While immigrants are encouraged to cling to a fictitious tradition under the pretext that they should keep in touch with their homeland, conditions there are changing faster than here. People will have problems adapting in any case, whether they emigrate or remain in the country, which will be subject to enormous upheaval. Nowhere, and certainly not in their country of origin, will they find the conditions under which they grew up and with which they may have become familiar. Today, foreignness is not a geographical category, but a social one. Everywhere it does not break in from outside, but from within.
Socially marginalized groups such as the homeless, people who go out on the street, drug addicts, strange youth sects, esoterics and other weirdos are not imported by society, but produced by it. As far as the appearance and customs of immigrants are concerned, which, depending on taste, either disturb the locals or enrich their culture, the appearance and rites of purely German-born Hare Krishna disciples, Palatinate punks or Baden skinheads must either be more disturbing to the average consumer, or they are the greater cultural gain. If you are looking for the strange, you can find it close by. Often your own son or daughter with the purple tuft on their shaved head looks more droll than the savage in war paint from the picture book. It’s even easier if you just look in the mirror. You may be in for a surprise, especially in the morning.
It is only because every national characteristic is now folklore and folklore is a consumer product that immigrants can be promoted with the unsavoury argument that their culture will enrich the local one. Otherwise this promise would have to be perceived as a threat by everyone without exception, namely because everyone is already hopelessly overwhelmed by the culture of their own country and can hardly attach any importance to the fact that in addition to the unread German classics, the unread Turkish classics are now also weighing on their conscience. And it’s only because we don’t want culture, but undemanding entertainment, that the normal immigrant from Anatolia can be taken for a cultural ambassador, which he is no more than we would be if the locals in Melbourne asked us to do a Schuhplattler in traditional costume, then play Beethoven on the piano and finish off by reciting a few Goethe poems. Everyone also knows that the supposed culinary specialties of the immigrants, from paella to pizza, are now international fast food because they used to be the food of the poor, i.e. they are quick and cheap to produce.
Because the hypocrisy of cultural talk is so obvious that one almost feels a little stupid when this hypocrisy is uncovered and unraveled – also because one is probably only telling others what they already know; because error is therefore pretty much ruled out, one inevitably comes back to the question of what purpose was behind the intention.
One motive has already been mentioned, namely the common intention of supporters and opponents of the multicultural society, i.e. “Republicans” and “Greens”, to regard immigrants living in the Federal Republic as members of a foreign culture, which must logically lead to the demand “foreigners out”. If immigrants are granted the right to defend traditional customs and traditions in groups against new influences, it is hard to see why Germans should be denied this right in their own country and Oberammergau residents should have to tolerate an Islamic community. Furthermore, launching a debate about a multicultural society naturally serves the purpose of distracting attention from the really crucial economic and political problems. Promoting understanding between Germans and foreigners or shooing the latter out is cheaper than promoting social housing.
A number of similar explanations could be found, but they seem a little far-fetched and superficial. One does not quite understand why the compatriots got involved in the game with the foreigners in the first place; after all, nobody asked them to do so, and the economy would have survived periodic labor shortages. One could almost believe that the whole effort to bring foreigners into the country in order to treat them as unwanted aliens was merely a preparation for the current situation. Who this is supposed to benefit, however, remains a mystery.
PS: On October 7, 1992, the “FAZ” reported that Federal Family Minister Merkel had spoken out in favor of “making ethnology a regular subject in schools. In this way, other cultures should be made tangible for young people.” The objection that ethnology is just another name for racial studies does not hold water because Minister Merkel’s appearance, facial expressions, birth and clothing deny the enlightened idea that equating racial studies and ethnology is a criticism of the latter. Every public appearance of the Minister proves that the “German woman” is not an invention of anti-German propaganda.
Lecture by W. Pohrt, given at the conference “Xenophobia, right-wing extremism and the Europe of tomorrow”, which took place on October 3, 1992 at the Munich Adult Education Centre, from: konkret 11/92