Icky as it is, I’m going to have to touch the whole Pegida thing because I saw this BBC video yesterday, and it’s been bugging me ever since.
Unless you’ve been living in a vacuum for the last few months, you’ll know that Pegida, which stands for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (so wordy!), is a new movement that has been holding weekly marches in major German cities.
The group claims not to be racist or xenophobic, but like all “I’m not a racist but…” statements, there’s nothing not-racist about it.
Surprisingly, many people have turned out in support of Pegida. On Monday, about 18.000 supporters took to the streets of Dresden, while around 4,000 people gathered in a counter-demonstration. The group has not been as successful in other cities such as Berlin, where Pegida opponents outnumbered supporters.
The first guy in the video was predictable; “Germany for Germans” is a phrase you’d expect to hear at one of these things, along with all the ‘no mosques’ stuff. Of course, he neglected to tackle the question of how exactly one defines a German, which is what Hitler got his knickers in a twist over. Is it a race? What if you are of Vietnamese origin but have a German passport? What if you German but have converted to Islam? What if you are Turkish but support Germany in the World Cup? And what about that CDU politician who does a good job of pretending to be German, but with a name like David McAllister, has to be Scottish?
And what happens when all the non-Germans leave? The country would shrivel up and die – literally. Germany’s aging population means that the meagre working population would collapse trying to support all the pensioners. In fact, immigration is the only sensible way out of this problem. And what about Germans elsewhere? You can’t swing a cat in London without hitting one – should we gather them up and send them, kicking and screaming, back to the Fatherland?
I recently visited The British Museum’s Germany: Memories of a Nation exhibition (visited by Merkel today), which illustrates that defining Germany is a shifty business too. The German Nation was originally an idea, consisting of many different territories and peoples, ranging from Austria and the Czech Republic to parts of Romania. Clearly, the mapped boundaries of Germany were questionable to Hitler, who figured that Poland was part of German territory. By reverse logic, should Germany accept Polish, Czech and Romanian immigrants?
And about the mosques – should the constitution upon which modern Germany is founded, which guarantees freedom of religion and freedom from discrimination on religious grounds, be re-written? Anyway, I’m sure the nice man has thought it all through. He’s grand. What stunned me was the woman talking about her four daughters with long blonde hair.
It reminded me of a propaganda photograph I saw at the Topographie des Terror in which a Jewish man who had a Christian girlfriend was made to hold a sign saying he raped a Christian girl.
The idea of the purity of one’s women being polluted by outsiders is a primitive narrative. It is the oldest fear-mongering tactic in the book. It was used in the United States to justify lynchings in the South and now, in Germany, it is toppling out of an articulate woman’s mouth – without any shame or awareness of what she is actually saying.
So why is Pegida so popular? It could all be down to timing; Germany has recently taken in more immigrants than ever before coupled with be the fact that sufficient time has passed since the war that people feel that there is no longer a stigma attached to marching in the streets, waving German flags and expressing such views.
In theory, the Germany was supposed to be ‘de-Nazified’ after the war, but a look at Topographie des Terror exhibition demonstrates that this was not the case; judges, politicians, and civil servants remained in their positions for the most part, and there was a real (infuriating!) reluctance to dig up the past and prosecute with war criminals. The past as well as people’s views were simply bured.
Worryingly, Pegida seems to be attracting a real mix of people and ages, ranging from right-wing activists to ‘normal’ citizens, who join marches with their children; a recent poll of just over 1,000 people carried out by Stern magazine found that one in eight Germans would join an anti-Islam march if Pegida organised one near their home.
Filed under: Berlin, Germany, history, Life in Berlin, News, politics
