by Paul Mecheril
Guest speech at the New Year's reception of the City of Bremen, 13 January 2016
Dear Mayor Sieling,
Dear personalities,
Dear guests
I wish you, but even more so the people in this world who are on the run due to existential grade, the, as the well-known sociologist Zygmunt Bauman puts it, waste of the world order, I wish us a reasonably good year 2016.
Almost 60 million people are currently on the run and all the forecasts I know indicate that the number will rise in the future. Of these 60 million, more than half are under the age of 18. 86% of these 60 million are fleeing to so-called developing countries, where they live under existentially threatening conditions.
60 million people. I wish these people a reasonably bearable 2016 and believe that it is the responsibility of those who, like us, you and I, have the undeserved privilege of leading a reasonably comfortable life on a global scale to become more modest. To become more modest in our behaviour (and I'm not just saying this in the direction of CSU politicians' decent performance, but also in this direction) and to become more modest in our actions. That is my wish for 2016: that those like us, who are geopolitically privileged through no fault of our own on a global scale, seriously try to become more modest. Slogan: modesty instead of growth. I'll come back to that.
2016 will hardly be a bearable year for Mohamed's mother and father. Mohamed - as you probably remember and have not yet forgotten in the wake of the collective uproar following the events on New Year's Eve in Cologne, I'll come back to that night - is four years old. He fled Bosnia with his family. He was abducted from the premises of the Berlin State Office for Health and Social Affairs on 1 October, sexually abused several times and strangled. The perpetrator is a 32-year-old man from Brandenburg with a Northern European appearance, presumably from a Christian background, who has admitted to murdering six-year-old Elias in July last year. I will come back to this and also to my characterisation of the perpetrator as having a northern European appearance and presumably coming from a Christian culture. But here is the message: the labelling is not only inappropriate, but also dangerous.
So I wish you, and the people in this world who are on the run due to existential need, the waste of the world order from which not only a global elite benefits, but relatively clearly Europe too, and at the expense of others (We are here, is the motto of the refugee movement The Voice, because you are destroying our countries), I wish us a reasonably good 2016.
It is a great honour for me to be able to give this year's speech here at your New Year's reception as a guest from at least geographical proximity. Thank you very much for the invitation. I am very pleased and would like to speak, and am already doing so, about a topic that has rightly been talked about a lot for months because it is a very important issue: Flight.
However, I don't want to talk so much about the causes of refugee movements in the minutes I have planned, as we know that these are to be found, for example, in global inequality and a world order that distributes and localises hardship very differently around the world: around 45% of the world's population lives on less than 2 US dollars a day and the majority of these 45% do not live in Bremen, Hamburg or Paris, the majority, surprisingly, live in countries that are former colonies of Europe, in Africa and Asia. According to the UN, more than 200 million people south of the Sahara are affected by famine as a result of the world order, which is due in no small part to the actions of Western actors.
But now we have to say to Pegida, AfD and the many, many voices in Germany that have been making racist statements for days: don't worry. These people will not come to us or to you, they are too weak for that, both physically and financially. Fortunately, only the strong people in need will come to us, so that we can select the particularly strong ones, the sparkling human capital. The rest are, to put it sarcastically, demonised or kept in socio-educational care.
But today I didn't want to talk so much about the causes of refugee movements, as we know, these are to be found in the conditions of global inequality, these are to be found - and I hope I can say this here in Bremen, which is considered a stronghold of the arms industry - in the ever-increasing technological and strategic level of development of weapons and warfare, which represents an ever-increasing existential threat to more and more people worldwide.
But these causes can also be found in the fact that the shrinking of the world caused by the development of transport and communication technologies has, to a certain extent, compressed the world in terms of time and space, thus enabling increased migration of people who are now increasingly crossing the borders of political orders because they assume that they are entitled to do so. Migration can generally be understood as an attempt to influence one's own life in a very fundamental sense. Be courageous, use your intellect and free yourself from the position imposed on you by the geopolitical order - in a reference to Immanuel Kant, this is the credo of the new transnational modernity that migrants are shaping and formulating. They take their fate into their own hands, and through this act of sometimes desperate self-empowerment, they question the legitimacy of a post-colonial order spelt out in the unity of nation states, which forces them into pathetic, relatively pathetic and most pathetic positions.
Okay, but I don't want to talk about the causes of flight today, but rather about the media, political and everyday communicative treatment of the circumstances reported by refugees. This communication, this talking about refugees and migrants, has left me speechless recently. So much of what is happening and what is being said simply leaves me breathless. And it's not easy to speak without air. I'm sure you realise that. You have to speak particularly loudly and forcefully, otherwise it doesn't work. So please forgive me if I'm a little more pathetic today, i.e. more passionate and passionately clear than is my style. I simply have this technical problem with the air and I am dealing with it by speaking particularly clearly.
Let me give you an example of my shortness of breath.
The current cover of Focus: Here, 8 January 2016, we are dealing with a highly sexualised, pornographic depiction of a woman. We see the body of a naked white, rather young, perhaps 28-year-old, blonde-haired - I would say beautiful - woman, whose breasts are covered by a red bar running across her body, while her right hand covers her own right hand. Her mouth is slightly open. On her body, stamping the body, taking possession of it, are five paw-like imprints of men's hands, not blue, not green, but black in colour, oily and dirty at the same time. The front page asks: "After the sex attacks by migrants: are we still tolerant or already blind?"
This leaves me breathless: racist depictions and speech are socially acceptable in post-Nazi Germany in the 21st century. This depiction by Focus is racist because it uses sexualised images to demonise migrants in a lurid and intrusive manner that evokes emotions, while at the same time creating an "us" (Are we still tolerant or already blind?) that is white. The cover plays the black and white game. The others are: black, tangible, faceless, shameless, dangerous, dirty. We, on the other hand, are: white, pure, endangered, civilised, shameful, sublime. The we that asks itself whether it is tolerant or not already blind, and to which the Focus turns, consists of white women who are groped by black migrant hands and white men who have to protect "our women". Protecting "our women" from the sexuality of the other race has always been part of racist and at the same time racist-patriarchal traditions, including an important moment in the lynching of black men in North America.
Do I have to say the obvious? I think it's safer for me, even if the shitstorm can hardly be averted. So that no misunderstanding arises or is created: Criticising sexual violence against women, as it apparently happened in Cologne, criticising sexual violence against women and children and, more rarely, against men, criticising and rejecting it is an inevitable part of a desirable political way of life. The best-case scenario of the consequences of Cologne would be that we in Germany talk more about sexual and sexualised violence, especially against women and children, and do something about it. According to a recent study by the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, 58% of all women in Germany say that they have been sexually harassed since the age of 16. The first and most frequent place of sexual harassment and assault is within the home, the family and the men in the family. Sexual assaults and violence against women in Europe, in Germany and in Bremen, therefore mainly take place at home. Will we reject and discuss the sexual assault events in Cologne in such a way that sexism becomes clear as a general problem? I'm sceptical because I don't trust the "we" that is currently and once again forming with enormous force.
What did the white, somehow Christian-looking 32-year-old Brandenburger, who abducted the four-year-old refugee child Mohamed in Berlin in October, sexually abused and killed him several times, what did those who sexually assaulted women in Cologne, and the Christian priests and teachers of the Regensburg cathedral sparrows - the lawyer entrusted with the investigation, Ulrich Weber, estimated on 8 January 2016 that the number of people sexually assaulted by abusers was higher than in the past? On 8 January 2016, the lawyer in charge of the investigation estimated the number of people affected by abuse and sexually motivated violence at 600 to 700 (imagine what would have happened if this had happened in a Koranic school) - what do these aggressors and perpetrators have in common?
The answer and the solution to the riddle is: they are men. So if you want to look for a common characteristic of most perpetrators of sexual violence, the first thing you will find is that they are men (Alice Schwarzer, for example, and incidentally, seems to have forgotten this at times in her anti-Muslim frenzy). What does that mean? Well, I don't immediately think it makes sense to put shackles on all men or to expel and deport all men, not just out of self-interest - some of my best friends are men - but simply because, like any general suspicion, a general suspicion against men is absurd. Nevertheless, and this could be a sensible and moderate consequence, we need studies that clarify in which contexts (such as a specific migrant milieu, a Christian celibate milieu or a Brandenburg milieu, whereby migrant, Christian celibate and Brandenburg do not have to be mutually exclusive), in which contexts men resort to the option of male violence, when and how, and we need a pedagogy that makes it possible for the form of identity and relationship that the Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell calls hegemonic masculinity, masculinity with a claim to dominance, so to speak, to be less attractive - for both men and women.
All right, but why this racist affect in recent days? Why are older white and politically conservative men, who have railed and campaigned for years against marital rape being recognised as a criminal offence in Germany (as you know, this was only achieved in Germany in 1997 after a long struggle), so why are these men outraged to this extent and are engaging in merciless collective condemnation without, incidentally, any legally assessed facts being known with regard to the events in Cologne? Why, as Heribert Prantl writes in the SZ of 11 January, is racism triumphing on the Internet like the Federal Republic of Germany has never seen before?
I would like to end my speech with what are certainly only sketchy and non-exhaustive reflections on this question and a consequence of these reflections.
These considerations revolve around two themes that I call the imagination of others and the safeguarding of claims to resources and power. The affect we are currently experiencing, the intensity with which an entire group is being judged, can only be explained if we realise that it is about the struggle for domination and privileges and that images and ideas and imaginations of others are necessary in this struggle.
In psychoanalytical terms, it is not only the case that these imagined others ("Arab", "North African", "Muslim") are often imagined, not least through media images, but that these imagined others are also used to fight against what I must not allow in myself, (As a man, I rant so excessively about the chauvinism of the supposedly Muslim man because I think I recognise something in him that I cannot and must not allow in myself), but rather the affect is currently so intense because it is about exaggerating and even sacralising one's own, especially in the figure of Europe. Once again, we are currently witnessing Europe's violent self-sacralisation (which is not coincidentally taking place against the backdrop of the euro crisis, which has been pushed into the background by the media). Europe is in a fundamental crisis for several reasons and is staging itself as a place of the chosen good, of values, as a refuge of gender equality, cynically of human rights and, in the light and mirror of pronounced and increasing social inequality, duplicitously as an area of justice, ignoring or rather reflecting the 30,000 people who have lost their lives in the Mediterranean as a direct result of European border policy. For this staging, we need the others, their ugliness, their dangerousness, their savagery.
The British cultural scientist Stuart Hall once said in an interview that white English people are not racist because they hate black people, but because they don't know who they are without black people. The fantastic image of the Muslim Other, which has been constructed in Europe and the West not only since 11 September 2001, confirms Europe's advantage.
My second consideration as to why people in Germany and Europe talk so disparagingly about refugees, about North African men, about Muslims, also has something to do with imagination and domination. In the Syrian city of Madaya, which has been besieged and sealed off by government troops since October, people have died and are still dying of starvation and, although fortunately the first aid convoy has now arrived, there is the threat of thousands of deaths from starvation. Children, women, men.
Given that the presence of refugees not only makes us aware of the geopolitical conditions and thus the grade and suffering of geopolitical others on a daily basis, but also highlights our own privileged status through no fault of our own, how do we deal with this situation? Perhaps there are three empirically observable ways of reacting. Firstly: giving up and sharing privileges, secondly: indifference and thirdly: a specific anger. This anger currently seems to me to be inscribed in many people's voices, mail behaviour and faces. It is the paradoxical anger at the suffering others. You can visualise this with reference to the type of anti-Semitism that was particularly significant for Germany in the second half of the 20th century and which is called "secondary anti-Semitism", i.e. a hatred of Jews not despite, but because of Auschwitz. The Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex summarised this sarcastically as follows: "The Germans will not forgive the Jews for Auschwitz." Following on from this, I would like to offer this thought: We, who are geopolitically privileged, do not forgive the refugees, the apostasy of the world order, an order that was not insignificantly established by Western actors and authorities and from which the West benefits immeasurably, we do not forgive refugees for suffering and for literally assaulting us with their suffering in the well-established neighbourhoods of our prosperity. This is why they must be demonised, degraded and ultimately dehumanised.
Europe is contradictory, Europe is a place and project of barbarism, of Shoa, of ecological and economic exploitation of the world, of colonialism, and Europe is a place and project of enlightenment, of human rights and of the pursuit of a good life for all. Europe is therefore contradictory and antagonistic. We are witnesses to this struggle and also actors in this struggle, which is currently being carried out symbolically and very materially and physically on the backs of people who have fled. What can a commitment to a Europe that is a place and project of striving for a good life for all look like?
Two points, briefly and in a nutshell:
- We have to talk about relations of violence. If we understand violence as an attempt to create and restore, preserve and establish a social order, we are dealing with violence all the more in times of fragility and the struggle for order. Under conditions of increasing violence, it makes sense to talk more about violence. About male violence, about violence in the name of a religion, about racist violence. But we have to talk about violence without this talking and acting itself becoming a self-aggrandisingly inappropriate violence. Those who, like the NPD, AfD and some politicians from parties that are considered more respectable, not just the CSU, place religious, ethnic and migrant groups under general suspicion are not acting against violence, but are part of and driving the violent conditions that need to be changed.
- How is it possible for people to live well and not at the expense of others, especially not at the expense of those who are distant neighbours? In my opinion, this is the ethical question of the 21st century. How can we live well here in Bremen without children and women in Bangladesh having to work in the most miserable conditions? Addressing this question is first and foremost a political task. But it is also a pedagogical task, in my opinion, I speak as an educationalist and pathetically, the pedagogical task of the 21st century. So the first maxim of 21st century pedagogy is not: How can we train human capital? How can we contribute to creating subjects that serve the increasingly totalising economic logic? The first maxim of 21st century pedagogy is also not: What contribution can we make to the preservation of a particular we, such as the nation or the people?
The first guideline is rather: How can we contribute to what I would like to call solidarity in the global society, solidarity that relates to others with whom I am in a practical relationship (the seamstress in Bangladesh) but who are distant, how can we contribute to this model of solidarity that is no longer spelt out in the model of the community (nation), this solidarity between people who are not related to each other, becoming more meaningful and possible. Solidarity means recognising and enabling the other as a subject. This is more and different than the compassion that was celebrated in Germany over the summer as a kind of national self-indulgence; solidarity is more and different because it also recognises the other as a political subject that can and may speak for itself.
And this recognition is probably the greatest difficulty that we are experiencing in global society and, more specifically, here in Bremen, because it goes hand in hand with the need to distance oneself from oneself and to be able to do so in a very fundamental sense. Anyone who hears the others must first of all be quiet. Modesty instead of growth, not being so dependent on one's own identity, not being committed to one's own identity and material interests in this way and with this intensity. It seems worthwhile to me to take this educational perspective seriously for those who are geopolitically privileged.
Therefore, at the end of my speech, I wish you and I - I am explicitly including myself in this educational project - the strength, opportunities and courage to take our own identitary and material interests a little less seriously in 2016 and beyond.
Thank you.
An elaboration of the speech can be found here:
Paul Mecheril/Monica van der Hagen-Wulff: "Threatened, fearful, angry. Affect Logic of the Migration Society". Appears in: The Demonisation of the Other. Rassismuskritik der Gegenwart (ed. by María do Mar Castro Varela & Paul Mecheril; 2016), Bielefeld: transcript.
Paul Mecheril, Dr phil. habil., is Professor of Educational Science specialising in migration at the School of Educational Science at Bielefeld University.
Contact: