THOUSANDS OF REFUGEES ARRIVE DAILY IN GERMANY
why
A very competent German social scientist wrote me a letter because she, I, and many others are puzzling about the current refugee and migrant arrivals in Germany as well as Germans’ political, social, and welcoming responses mixed with anxieties and ambivalence. Referring to her previous research, the sociologist reported a finding that is quite fascinating. While she discovered much more, it is this one finding that I reflect upon below.
Dear Colleague,
Your finding, that “younger Germans who reflected on their own explicit friendliness towards foreigners sometimes brought it together with the Nazi past of their parents: they did not want to repeat their racist attitudes,” is striking. At the same time it is somewhat terrifying for this reason. It is what I too thought when I first came to Canada and became conversant with the past of the country from which my mother removed us. But that was seventy years ago – and now you show that it is still there with the young today! - Come to think of it, the same attitude affected my sister’s children who were born in Canada and whom my sister – herself a refugee -- raised deliberately to be simply Canadian!
Many times now I have found myself thinking that my own personality is more the history of the country of my birth than it is the consequence of decades of experiences whether personal or professional. Perhaps, Chancellor Merkel’s action 2015 – let them come in -- will be, speaking metaphorically, like an axe trying to cut down the tree-of-a-fear-myth. Now in 2024, I know it is not.
Let me explain. If we understand the fate of the book, “the Protocols of Zion”, the myth on which it sits will never disappear nor ever be destroyed not even in the courts of law (Hdassa Ben-Itto 1998). – And of course the accused in the Protocols myth were/are innocent; the accused in the Fear-to-Repeat myth were/are guilty. It means then that German youths have not been taught, not learned, nor found a way to carry the past while yet handling current problems rationally and pragmatically. Yet this migrant/refugee problem needs rational practical action by people who know how to think and act independently of the German historical burden. Surely, such people will be found.
As well, research of the current phenomenon would require team work – including importantly people fluent in the language of the refugees and migrants. To find people who can exercise some distance from vested interests for the sake of a very big human issue will not be easy. But valuable research, done with integrity for the sake of the bigger picture that we need to understand, can only be done when the full dynamic of locals and newcomers, rhetoric and reality, demands and expectations, rules of law and illusions, among others, can be researched simultaneously. For this, we need the participation of the whole world.
Karla Poewe
10.04.2015
24.10.2024
Syrian Refugees arrive in Dresden, Germany
