Building a new nation: anti-Muslim racism in post-unification Germany

Abstract

Research has provided insight into ideas, agents and patterns of inequality associated with Islamophobia. Yet, we know less about why anti-Muslim racism is so virulent and persistent today. Focusing on post-unification Germany, we explore the broader function Islamophobia fulfils for society. We draw on a discourse analysis of statements by four public figures, the publicists Monika Maron and Alice Schwarzer, and the politicians Vera Lengsfeld and Beatrix von Storch; two of them are from Germany's former East, and the other two from the former West. We found little evidence of specific regional 'flavours' of anti-Muslim racism, but noted that the speakers' diverging positionality in re-unified Germany shapes their Islamophobic agitation. Our analysis shows how 'old' and 'new' Germans distinctly participate in recreating western identities as the unmarked norm. Anti-Muslim racism, we argue, plays an important role in everyday discursive acts of nation-building, and assists in justifying multi-layered patterns of stratification. Outward projections onto an 'Other', the 'enemy within', fulfil a key function: the integration of a highly polarized society, at least on the symbolic level. The collective in need of integration, our analysis suggests, may therefore not necessarily be the one that is the main target of such efforts.

Hitler, for Example: Registers of National Socialist Exemplarity in Contemporary Germany

“…Since as early as the turn of the millennium, German neo-Nazis have adopted the aesthetic style of their opponents, the Antifa, in their public performances of nationalism (Zuev and Virchow 2014). Given the centrality of a biological concept of race under National Socialism, contemporary far-right nationalists have sought to distance themselves from this past and legitimate their political discourse by repackaging racism in the form of essentialized cultural categories, articulating for example concepts of the Volk putatively grounded in Heideggerian notions of shared history (Göpffarth 2020) or attributing incommensurable cultural difference to Muslims (Lewicki and Shooman 2020).…”

“…Contemporary far-right currents in the East are therefore deployed discursively to construct equivalences between the two dictatorships, using the first to delegitimize positive references to the second. Meanwhile, far-right activists and intellectuals have effectively mobilized the memory of the resistance under the GDR state to cast themselves as defiant fighters against the dominant political system and to delegitimize their leftist adversaries (Lewicki and Shooman 2020;Göpffarth 2021). At the same time, while often frowned upon especially by West Germans, positive recollections of the GDR period and of the values attributed to socialist society nevertheless circulate widely and publicly in ways that remain unavailable for similar valuations of the Third Reich period (Bach 2002;Boyer 2006).…”

“…in Germany, such as AfD party leaders, can deploy the National Socialist past as a backdrop against which to distinguish themselves as expressing political positions that might seem relatively reasonable, often by disguising racism in the language of cultural difference. AfD leaders have similarly sought to associate themselves with the resistance to the Nazis as a strategy for gaining legitimacy and casting their opponents in the role of the absolute villain (Lewicki and Shooman 2020). 13 In this way, the memory of National Socialism, and especially of the Holocaust, as pure evil has at times forestalled rather than advanced a critical confrontation with racism in the present (Partridge 2010).…”

Spiritualizing reason, rationalizing spirit: Muslim public intellectuals in the German far right

“…More recently, both East and West German intellectuals have been drawing on anti-Muslim racist repertoires to discursively build a new, sanitised, post-reunification notion of Germanness. Based on the self-image of a progressive, enlightened and secular nation, this nation building has been aiming at redeeming and overcoming past guilt linked to the Holocaust as well as polarisations between an East and West German identity (Lewicki and Shooman, 2019).…”

Power and force: Rethinking Kojève, Arendt and Camus in the populist era

“…Some radical right -wing organizations raised concern as to the safety of Polish women, which would be threatened by immigrants (Kościańska, 2015). The German political party, AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) openly confessed, that their goal is to protect the LGBT population in Germany against the anti -Semitic and homophobic attitudes of refugees who seek asylum in their land (Lewicki & Shooman, 2019). The patriarchs of the Catholic Church in Poland instead of dealing with the growing evidence of sexual harassment by priests, launched a campaign, in which they voiced concern about the rise of "LGBT ideology", which they claim threatens and harms Polish children (Makarewicz, 2019) -apparently this is more serious than the reported cases of sexual abuse perpetrated by priests.…”