Guest post: There is a narrative worth exploring here
Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Anne Frank wasn’t diverse enough.
This is the second time this specific article has crossed my radar in the last twenty-four hours, whereas none of my normal German sources have even mentioned it, which I think is somewhat telling. Let me trawl for an actual German article…ahh, yes, a bunch of highly-motivated right-of-centre rags…some respectable publications…no highly-motivated left-of-centre rags…
Ahh, there we are, something actually readable and vaguely objective that isn’t publicly-financed (which is nearly unnecessary to qualify, as publicly-financed media in Germany are often barely readable and quite rarely objective).
Firstly, let’s clarify a few points of confusion or misconceptions. “Kindergarten”, though it is a German word, means something different in Germany than it does to Anglophones — namely, it is a daycare centre for young children (from three years on) which can (but not must) serve as a sort of pre-school for its older wards, and is usually only open to lunchtime or early afternoon. This story doesn’t involve a Kindergarten, however, but rather a Kita (short for Kinderstätte), which takes children for the whole day and theoretically has no lower age limit and is even less likely to have a heavy emphasis on pedagogy (though it also can for its older wards). In East Germany there are relatively few Kindergärten and many more Kinderstätten, and while the difference may seem academic and opaque to foreigners, they are not the same thing. In short, the institution in question is much more like a daycare than a pre-school or the first cohort of a public school.
And the AfD, while admittedly stronger in East Germany and undeniably a right-wing nationalist party, are neither Nazis nor at all relevant to this discussion; the mayor of the town is an independent, and while he doubtless does not wish to anger AfD voters (or at least not attract their attention away from their anger at the Federal Republic), there is absolutely no evidence that he or his council have based their decisions with respect to the daycare upon the AfD or its voters in any way. And the new proposed name, Weltentdecker, translates to “world explorer”; this is hardly a name designed to appease a right-wing nationalist. In point of fact, according to Wikipedia, the AfD received just under 12 percent of the vote and only got 3 out of the 28 seats in the council. We can effectively rule out pleasing the AfD as a motivation for this change.
In further point of fact, the quotes about anti-Semitism growing “among the Far Right” and the implication that the AfD is dangerously antisemitic are doing a lot of work here; the AfD has Jewish wings in its federal and several state parties, though of course these are not uncontroversial in the broader Jewish community in Germany. But, as this is entirely a red herring to the current discussion, it bears no further investigation or exposition here.
To the point of the article, the proposed name change is just one of several progressive reforms to supposedly “modernise” the daycare, which has apparently been in progress for the last 14 months. Other reforms include no longer grouping the children by age and allowing children to follow their own interests and desires rather than having a more uniform, strictly-regimented day.
The mayor writes in an address to the town (probably as a result of the outcry):
Weit vor den aktuellen Diskussionen und Ereignissen ist bereits Anfang 2023 auch die Diskussion aufgekommen, diese grundlegende Konzeptionsänderung durch einen anderen Namen der Einrichtung auch nach außen hin sichtbar zu machen, um diesen fundamentalen Neuanfang sichtbar zu markieren
which translates to
Far removed from the current discussions and events, we have already been discussing since the beginning of 2023 how to make this foundational conceptual change externally apparent through changing the name of the facility, in order to visibly mark this fundamental new beginning
which is a fine example of a German politician covering his arse, but does put paid to the idea that the name change is in response to the recent flare-up of the interminable Levantine brawl. In fact, the Hamas attack has likely drawn far more attention and enhanced the outcry, including getting national reporters in England to sensationalise local news in East Germany.
It is unlikely the name will be changed at this point, but I am not sure what difference that will make in the long run. There is a narrative worth exploring here, of Germany’s continuing evolution and its reconstitution through migration, and what the ethnic Germans of yesterday and today owe the increasingly-non-ethnic-Germans of today and tomorrow (and vice-versa). In some of these Kitas in the major cities, the share of non-ethnic-German children can exceed 80 percent, and there are precious few where this proportion is far below 50; if this continues, there will be a demographic shift in this country within our lifetimes that is essentially unprecedented in the history of the world.
That cannot but have consequences. If the only parties anticipating and discussing those consequences get called Nazis for doing so, then either only Nazis will do the discussing or the term “Nazi” will so lose its meaning and potency that nobody will care when actual neo-Nazis do actual neo-Nazi shit.
In particular, what do these new peoples who have come to Germany owe to Anne Frank? These peoples, who have virtually no connection to the Holocaust or any other part of German history, who bear no collective guilt for the industrial massacre of European Jews in the middle part of the 20th Century? These peoples who tend to see Germany not so much as a land of opportunity but as a rich lifeboat whose byzantine bureaucracy they must navigate in order to get free accommodations and an allowance without having to (or in many cases even being legally allowed to) work?
These are very important questions with very important answers. And as Germany sacrifices its economy in order to punish Russia’s malfeasance, we are only going to see more and more ethnic Germans asking them, and, should those answers prove unsatisfactory, the next round of questions may be even less to our liking.
Thanks for this perspective, Durch.
One of the things your comment suggests to me is that the tension between ethnic Germans and the newcomers is greater, at least in scope, than that between far-right Germans and Jews. The presence of Jewish wings in the AfD hints that holding to historical elements of Judaism in Germany may play a part in a right-wing repudiation of the unassimilated.
At some point Europe and similar nations need to stop and think about mass migration. So far the dominant perspective has been that immigration is a good thing, that we owe it to people who want to immigrate, and that they will then assmiliate and be an asset. This may well be the case if we’re talking about immigration that adds up to a few percent of the population.
But migration is running at levels way above that. As one example, since we’re talking about Germany, Angela Merkel decided to accept a million Syrians in one year. As of now, 17% of people in Germany are first-generation immigrants. That number has been rising rapidly and is still rising. At those sorts of levels, the tendancy is that people don’t assimilate, instead they form enclaves that retain their previous culture.
Now, I don’t blame people for wanting to migrate to Europe or other Western countries. If I were them, that’s what I’d want to do. But such levels will add up, over only a few decades, into massive cultural change. And we can’t assume that Western enlightenment values will survive that. We can’t just assume that the foundational values on which Europe’s prosperity and freedoms rest will survive massive demographic shifts.
Already, ideals of free speech are under attack across the developed world, and mass migration is affecting that. As just one example, take a remark about the mainstream Islamic account that Mohammed consummated a marriage to Aisha when she was aged 9. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that remarking on this in a private conversation, a remark that was merely: “What do we call it, if it is not paedophilia?” amounted to denying Muslims their right to practice their religion (yes, really, that’s what they ruled), and so was properly criminalised.
Worse, few Europeans seem to care about this ongoing loss of free speech (on multiple issues, not just religion), and indeed way too many actually support prohibitions on any speech that anyone finds offensive. Too many Europeans have it so cushy these days that they’ve forgotten how historically rare today’s liberal democracies actually are.
Papito,
Indeed, the scope is greater because there are many, many more Muslims in Germany than there are Jews. The thing about the Holocaust is that it was pretty comprehensive; even once it was done, virtually all of Western Europe’s surviving Jews eventually resettled in Palestine/Israel. The Jewish people that are here now almost exclusively came from Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and according to these statistics, their numbers have been in slow but steady decline from a post-Iron-Curtain peak just over 100K for more than a decade. For context, the peak Jewish population in Germany before the war was about 500K.
By contrast, at the same source, the numbers of Muslims in Germany has been steadily increasing by tens to hundreds of thousands every year since the end of the war, with over a million added in the “migration wave” that hasn’t really abated all that much since 2015. Where there are less than a hundred thousand Jews, there are approaching six million registered Muslims, and an unknown number of unregistered ones (likely at least in the low hundred thousands, possibly more). To put a point on it, the United States has four times as many total people, but Germany has more mosques, as their Muslim populations are 1 and 7 percent, respectively. (And yet my final interaction before quitting Twitter for good was trying to convince people that Germany was comparable in its ethnic and religious diversity to the United States, to very little avail.)
And, though people are quick to point out that there are far more refugees settled in West Germany, there are far from zero in East Germany. So there is simply far more opportunity for contact with Muslims than with Jews, especially in places where there are comparitively more right-wing extremists such as Saxony or the Harz Mountains, where few if any Jews actually live. That contact is often perfectly convivial, but when it isn’t, it isn’t usually (or even often) a story of a poor Muslim migrant being victimised by right-wing hooligans in a hate crime.
In fact, it may not be a coincidence that the rate of Jewish emigration seems to have an inflection point with the migration crisis. Antisemitic, homophobic, and sexual assaults (along with the murder of women and girls) have also had marked upticks since then, though the best arguments against the implication that this increase lay at the feet of Muslim migrants read like this article, which asserts that well-integrated foreigners with good job prospects have a lower-than-average incidence of criminality while young men with no prospects have a higher-than-average incidence. That the migration crisis has seen an enormous number of unattached young men with no prospects enter the country is left as an exercise for the reader.
There is also a sharp increase of what Germany calls “clan criminality”, organised crime through ethnically-closed networks akin to mobs and mafias, both of various Muslim ethnicities and Balkan ones who are also involved in smuggling Muslims (and other things) from the Middle East. There are also semi-regular instances of Muslims gathering in opposing groups to exercise their own internal justice in the form of street brawls, and the growing phenomenon of Muslim students ganging up on ethnic German classmates, calling them “potatoes”, and generally treating them like garbage.
All of this while refugees, of which there are more than a million already and more every day, receive free living accomodations and enough money to survive, as well as integration and language courses provided by the state, as well as a number of other procedures and institutions to make their settlement as easy as possible.
All of that is not to say that it is easy to be a refugee, or that there aren’t incidences of racism or discrimination, but Germany has done just about everything conceivable short of declaring Islam the official state religion and literally criminalising dhimmitude to make Muslims feel welcome and safe. (Note that Islam is *an* officially-recognised religion here, since there is no religion of church and state, and we have much harsher speech restrictions against “hate speech” and the like, so people have been arrested and charged for things Anglophones would normally consider protected expression.)
To return to the contrast with Jews in Germany, every single synagogue in Germany has armed guards, and many have a semi-regular uniformed police presence on the street in front of them explicitly to dissuade angry young men from running amok. Neither of these things are true (nor are they needed) for the thousands of mosques here. This was not the case ten years ago. And while there are still some few thousand neo-Nazis and fellow travellers who truck in Jewish conspiracy theories (and doubtless some of these are indeed members of the AfD), these are hardly to blame for that state of affairs.
Couple this with the genuinely conservative and religious elements of the AfD’s platform (which are only really conservative and religious by European standards), and it is no wonder that at least some Jews find comity and respect and hope for a better future within their ranks, even as many young left-wing Germans decry them as antisemitic genocidal Nazis.
And this is why more and more lately I say to myself, “I want your genetics, not your culture.” Immigration is a net good, if you’re not importing religious conservatives, because those are just evil.
Coel #2
Migration (rather than immigration in a cultural or social context) may become an adaptation.
Graham Lawton “Too hot to handle”
The Human Adaptation Institute (France, Christian Clot)
Marten Scheffer (Wegening U Netherlands)
As temperature rises it would be a very natural adaptation to consider migration of tens of millions of people.
New Scientist Aug. 19 2023 p. 31
@John Wasson:
Indeed. Mass migration is only going to increase, owing to increased ease of transport, globalisation of information, and indeed climate change.
Which presents a real problem for Europe and the West. Mass migration from less-functional “problem” countries such as Syria tends to import those problems. After all, whether societies are functional with democracy, protection of liberties and a high standard of living is mostly due to the attitudes of the populace (what else? it’s not something in the water or the weather or an act of god) and while small-numbers migrants tend to assimilate, mass-numbers migrants usually don’t.
Migration has been part of the human story from the beginning, as with pretty much any other living organism. Owing to the unusually-stable climate in which our civilisation sprang up and the long peace the West had enjoyed between 1945 and 2015, we have a deeply-rooted idea that climate and populations are both fundamentally stable — that any deviation from this is a “crisis” or an exceptional circumstance. But this is wrong, deeply wrong, as one can understand when one considers that anatomically-modern humans have been around for something like 300,000 years (the number keeps stretching back the more data we get), and yet only had the requisite conditions for building a civilisation on our scale in the last ten thousand or so.
Migration, colonisation, competition, cooperation, evolution, and extinction all operate at the level of peoples and cultures as well as organisms and species.
The European “Migration Period” which portended the end of the Western Roman Empire wasn’t a singular phenomenon; Europe itself was ravaged many times over by waves of human colonists and invaders over tens of thousands of years. The Proto-Indo-Europeans invaded, displaced, exterminated, and assimmilated virtually the entirety of the existing population.
That existing population had already undergone at two waves of such tumult, as Anatolian farmers encroached and displaced and absorbed the hunter-gatherers who had, in their turn, done the same to the Neanderthals that had called the unfrozen parts of Europe home for nearly half a million years. The Proto-Indo-European population quite rapidly diverged into a number of different cultures who vied for dominance, with several branches likely rising and falling before the advent of the written word and the commencement of history.
Our earliest records show, for example, that celtic peoples once ranged from the Atlantic coasts of Portugal and Ireland all the way to the Caucasus, with cultural dominance across the whole of the continent (possibly excepting Scandinavia). Galicia in Spain, Galicja in modern-day Ukraine and Poland, the Gauls in France, the Keltoi of the Balkans whom Alexander the Great dared not face in battle, and the biblical Galatians in Anatolia are all references to this culture. And yet, except for echoes in a few place names across the continent, these peoples have essentially vanished and most of their descendants do not even consider themselves a little bit Celtic; what remains is a liminal echo on the very edge of the most westward isles. The Celts and Gauls and their close cousins were overrun and absorbed and destroyed, by the Romans and the Saxons and the Slavs, by the Persians and the Arabs and the Turks.
The Romans evolved into the Latinate peoples, though not everywhere; they were able to syncretically absorb most of the Germanic influences in their western regions, to the point that hardly anyone recalls that the Franks and the Visigoths and the Lombards who went a long way to establishing France and Spain and Italy were Germanic peoples whose migrations heped give the “Migration Period” its very name. Other peoples, such as the Huns and the Turks and the Arabs and the Slavs, were much more successful at resisting assimilation into the Roman family, and so their only connection to their Roman past is a few scattered ruins and some dusty history books.
But these migrations were, as here demonstrated, hardly a new phenomenon, and the migrations hardly stopped with the end of the “Migration Period” — Vikings and Mongols did plenty of migrating during the Dark and Middle Ages, and the ever-fluctuating domains of the regal powers which gave way to empires and, eventually, to nation-states saw people move in their millions, including great waves of emigration to the New World.
The story is much the same on every other inhabited continent; or, if not the same, it certainly rhymes. And all of it, every movement of people from the Neanderthals spreading across Eurasia to the Arabisation and Islamisation of Europe, was fueled by people fleeing desperate circumstances in the hopes of securing a better future. Climatic upheaval, famine, war, disease, poverty, tyranny; these phenomena are written across all of our records and evident in all of our archaeology to the very beginning of our species. In other words, the phase of history we are now entering is not exceptional; it was stasis which was exceptional, the illusion of peace, the balm of prosperity.
We have yet a bit of time to figure out how to maintain our Western values, integrate and assimmilate at least some of the people desperate to settle here, and maintain our technological civilisation in the face of an unstable climate. But it will require a deep understanding of the rhythm of reality, an openness to ask and answer difficult questions, and a steadfastness to make some very difficult decisions. Europe is currently gripped by a malaise of self-doubt, guilt, and a fatalistic sense of inevitable decline; this is only temporary, but if it does not resolve itself soon, there may be far fewer options for moving forward that do not involve sacrificing our values upon one altar or the other.
Based on the naming of public schools I have encountered, it’s difficult to imagine *any* of the names that refer to persons as being easy to explain to kids of the age that Der Durchwanderer refers to. But (as any parent, caregiver, or teacher knows), pre-school age kids encounter lots of things they don’t understand, and need their parents, teachers, and caregivers to provide age-appropriate explanations for. For Ann Frank, what would be wrong with saying something like, “She was a brave young girl who had to hide from bad people”. (And what would be wrong with the newcomers to the country learning about this from their kids?)