You know, strange things happen when you start two world wars and lose both. When you fight to the last bullet for the craziest idea in history. And after that last bullet is fired, sends out 12-year-olds with guns without ammo, with broomsticks. And if that didn’t work either, you surrender and some then gradually adopt the feel-good narrative that you weren’t defeated but liberated, while others build a wall and claim that the perpetrators are on the other Page.
So if you were just a community of thieves and appropriators and suddenly you no longer want to know anything about your neighbors who have disappeared or about the crematoria and gas chambers.
If you then pat yourself on the back, you could have come to terms with the past in a solid way if you attested to a unique culture of remembrance and responsibility. And all this despite the fact that not a single synagogue, Jewish school or Jewish retirement home can do without police protection.
Strange things also happen when you gas, shoot, or exile almost all of your intelligentsia. And after the lost war needs simple workers. People who can be brought in to rebuild the piles of rubble that until yesterday were still Berlin, Dresden or Cologne. After first looking into their mouths. checked your dentition. As with livestock.
“Arabs are the revenge of the Jews on the Germans”
One of those weird things that happens is that these simple people might not quite trust you. And yes: who can blame them? That they are not so keen to identify with this society.
You may have guessed that this is about New Year’s Eve. To be more precise, around Neukölln, around Sonnenallee. That is, the street that we here in Kreuzberg and Neukölln call the Gaza Strip and about which one of my Israeli friends once said, jokingly and not entirely without glee: “The Arabs are the Jews’ revenge on the Germans.”
Berliner Zeitung/Markus Wachter
To person
Behzad Karim Khani, born in 1977, was born in Tehran, Iran. In 1986 his family emigrated to Germany, where he later studied art history and media sciences at the Ruhr University in Bochum. Today the writer lives in Berlin-Neukölln. Until recently, he ran the Lugosi Bar in Kreuzberg. In 2022 he was nominated for the renowned Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.
Yes, dear readers, it will be uncomfortable. Because if we really want to talk about Sonnenallee, we can’t avoid the Middle East either. But if you read this sentence, then it hasn’t been deleted by the editors – and even that is becoming increasingly rare. The German enthusiasm for and support for the state that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch describe as a state that practices apartheid in the territories it occupies is also taking on increasingly ideological traits in German editorial offices. Apparently in proportion to this, the more right-wing and extremist the state becomes, from which numerous people who now live in Sonnenallee have fled.
I think we’re at a point now where we should look things in the eye. Gladly together. Gladly sober. Let’s start with the simple statement that we – migrants, foreigners, people with … call us what you like – are not going to leave that easily. And neither do you, dear organic Germans. Though, demographically, you’re definitely going away. They’re dying out, and your country needs about 400,000 new workers over the next 15 years, that’s about a million immigrants a year. We migrants will probably inherit this land. So we could play for time here. For a time you don’t have. But that’s just a side note.
Perhaps we should realize that if you start a world war for the idea of racial purity, you may find yourself forced to become an immigration country after defeating it. After all, the victorious powers also shared our mistrust of this society. And maybe we should think about who owes whom what here. Who is talking to whom and how.
We ensure that the Aryan nightmare does not become reality
What is certain: we are here. Not only for your pension funds, but because we ensure that the Aryan nightmare never becomes a reality in this country. For the fact that this reality is so far away that even the Nazis apparently gave it up, just as we all gave up the idea of this social-democratic comprehensive school and middle-class coexistence. Without extreme violence, eclipsing that of Hitler’s Germany, that nightmare will not come true. This tooth is finally pulled.
What has remained is the base vulgarity of the individual, which always finds its way, always breaks new ground and thereby exposes the unwillingness of the Germans. In the fascist chats of the police, in the missing ammunition of the Bundeswehr, in the abysses of the state and its secret service, which first covers up the NSU deeds and then closes their files. In the 1,000 registered xenophobic attacks just in the year in which medals of the so-called welcoming culture were pinned to one’s chest at the same time.
In the lack of indignation on your part when your Minister of the Interior has posters put up nationwide on which we are to be urged in our mother tongues to pay to go back to where we came from. In the hundreds of thousands of copies of Thilo Sarrazin’s books that have been sold. In the disgustingly blunt gut feeling racism that a majority of his readers share with him. In support of American wars against our countries. In your Afghanistan war.
Racism on the street, in publishing houses, in commentaries
There, where an Ahmad Mansour, whom we call Uncle Mansur on the street – loosely after Uncle Tom – and for whom we have little more than ridicule, is awarded a Federal Cross of Merit for his commitment to “integration”. In the many publishers in this country that live from such open Islamophobia.
In the comment columns as well as in the classrooms, where one pretends that the colonial legacy is not German but African history. Wherever one refuses to take responsibility. You meet them everywhere, the meanness. And everywhere that indignation whispers the same thing. Whispers about the exclusivity, the closed nature and the lack of willingness to integrate in this country. Everywhere Germany tells us that it doesn’t want to live with us, but doesn’t want to be responsible for the failure. Because even more guilt is really not reasonable.
Do not get me wrong. None of this justifies anything. Not our rawness, which has become a breeding ground for the blunt excesses of violence of our children. Not the obscenity of our rejection. Not our lack of ideas, our lack of prospects, listlessness, our apathy. Not our crouched growls and not the clenched fists in our pockets. But maybe it helps to understand our healthy distrust and lack of respect for the state and its representatives.
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