What Did Germans Do?
The migrant moment of 2015 and the relevance for today
I have never experienced ten years that were so long and so short, in which so much happened and so little. And I can remember a moment in 2016 when I thought things couldn't go on like this, that everything would soon come crashing down. And then it did go on, because history doesn't happen in such a way that something crashes down, noticeably, visibly, for everyone at the same time. History sometimes becomes clear as it happens, but mostly only in retrospect, and then also under the influence of ideological debates.
That is the lesson of the ten years since refugees came north across the Balkans, scenes of existential distress, a break in reality, even a collapse of reality. Since then, there has been debate about what happened then and, above all, afterwards. Was Angela Merkel's statement “Wir schaffen das” or “We can do it,” uttered exactly ten years ago, right or wrong? Like many debates, this one is overly self-centered and situated in a political-media sphere that still distorts every human question into party politics.
What was lost was the possibility of something new that was laid out in the summer of 2015. I recently reread a book I published in 2018, “Das andere Land” (The Other Country), which somehow didn't fit in with the times back then. In it, I found a description of the summer of 2015 that still seems relevant to me, perhaps even more relevant than it was then—because it describes, in what is the frenzied standstill of our time, everything that still concerns us today, especially the shift to the right and the impulses of inhumanity.
In the coming days, I will look back from today's perspective at what happened back then, in the hot summer of 2015, when the climate was out of control; today, here is the slightly longer text from back then:
"Something had built up. The heat that had built up over all those weeks, in July and also in August, especially in the south, but also in the plains of the east and the hills in the middle and in the rest of the country, and which had repeatedly discharged itself in violent storms, had still not subsided; it hung like an empty memory over the people, over the country, in the cities. it was like a premonition, but such things only become clear in retrospect; and perhaps this retrospective view is also wrong, shaped by today's knowledge, because in the summer of 2015, the heat was neither past nor future, it was a very simple reality, it was different for everyone and yet a shared experience, it was a moment that seemed to stretch on forever, a boundless present, a possibility, for now.
The newspapers reported on droughts in those days, on storms, on record temperatures. The summer of 2015 was the second warmest in Germany since people began scientifically measuring and recording weather, climate, and heat. An omega weather pattern had established itself, as meteorologists call it, and it did not budge throughout the summer, a high-pressure area that is so stable because it is flanked by two low-pressure areas. This creates a corridor; the heat that had engulfed Germany and the whole of Europe came from far away, it was directed northwards from the mid-Atlantic to the coast of West Africa, it engulfed the countries of the Maghreb and pumped hot air as far as northern Sweden. It had started in June, and by the end of July the heatwave seemed to have reached its first peak, with temperatures of 40 degrees and above being recorded. even in Germany. Temperatures subsided somewhat before the heat picked up again at the end of August, stubbornly, as if it simply did not want to stop, and under the vast European sky, summer seemed never-ending—not for those sitting in their gardens barbecuing, nor for those traveling with a few bags, a small child in their arms, a family on the run. And under the sun that shone mercilessly on them, the features of the people moving northward widened until they finally encountered cameras that brought them as images to where they wanted to go, to the countries of Western Europe, where they expected safety and suspected prosperity, and where their hope was at home.
Humanity is a story we tell ourselves
It shimmered over the continent, although this heat, like so many things, can be described in different ways, as an imposition or as a promise, as something that oppresses you or something that carries you, and the various explanations, the various narratives and interpretations of those days and weeks have been clashing violently ever since. I still find the simplest and most beautiful explanation to be what a woman in Munich said to me a few weeks later, in September 2015, when the heat was slowly subsiding and many of the refugees had already arrived. Like so many Munich residents, she was helping these people, providing them with the bare necessities, with the obvious: It was such a magical summer, said this young woman, who runs a few restaurants and has lots of tattoos. The nights glowed, the people glowed, they were by the river, which meandered through the city again and had returned to its natural bed, renaturalized, freed from rigid constraints. There was a sense of community in the city, she described it, it was like a big celebration, there was joy in oneself and in others, an all-encompassing euphoria and belief in goodness. Out of love for oneself, love for others, love for the city, a willingness to help grew, very immediately. It was a narrative about herself that this woman carried in her head, it was like a text she wrote to herself and extended into reality.
And these narratives are important, the stories in which we recognize ourselves, they provide the words and images for how we want to be and who we want to be, they create their own reality, because the things that are done or that are to happen must first be thought of. The positive in the mind creates the positive in the world. This is not hippie philosophy, but the foundation of democracy, which is based on the belief that people will do the right thing if given the opportunity. Of course, there are checks and balances to ensure that the rules are followed. But in principle, democracy's view of humanity is one that trusts in goodness. This is, if you will, the fine line, the tipping point of this form of government: this trust that stands in opposition to the experience of irrationality that has shaped history—in a sense, this is the utopian moment of democracy, that there is the possibility of freedom. The assumption is that individuals can do the right or the wrong thing, and there are criteria for right and wrong, some of which change with the times, some of which remain the same because they form the ethical foundation of a good and just life – but as a group, and this is something like a bet on collective reason, as a group, as a crowd, as a society, people will behave in such a way that, in Kant's words, they ultimately treat each other as well as they themselves want to be treated.
How does democracy come about?
This, too, is a narrative; it is the accepted truth on which democracy is based, perhaps even more so than on the institutions that stabilize and govern it. It is people who make it what it is, democracy as well as institutions, in a complex interplay; it is people, as individuals, as citizens, who decide in which direction a society wants to develop. They act as free individuals, they do what they think is right. And that is why what happened in Germany in the summer of 2015 was such a special and fundamental democratic awakening. Many of those who took action when refugees came to their village or town seemed surprised at themselves as they packed sleeping bags and shampoo and plastic razors and water bottles and searched their basements for clothes and because they suddenly knew where the collection points for the poor were, which they had not seen before in their lives, in their everyday lives, or they drove directly to the train station where the people arrived, in Munich, for example, where the trains from Vienna stopped, and the images of help overlapped with the images of flight and hardship they had seen in black-and-white films, as they knew them from television or their own families, and no one who was there will ever forget the energy, the openness, the curiosity, the humanity, the immediacy, the alertness, the matter-of-factness of helping.
What happened back then, in those days at the end of August and beginning of September 2015, was beautiful, moving, and inspiring in many ways. They were days like no other, and everything, as became apparent quite quickly, really everything, was set in motion, fueled by the persistent heat. It was a political uprising in the most fundamental sense of the word. Many people discovered for themselves what it means to be a citizen, to be active, to help people directly, not to wait until someone comes and tells you how to do it, to act on your own, to take responsibility, to define yourself as part of this society, which is open and humane, to understand yourself as part of this democracy, which consists of more than elections every four years and the theme music of the “Tagesschau” news program, where politicians say what they say and editors make what they make of it; and many discovered democracy for themselves for the first time.
Who am I, as a citizen and as a human being?
What they saw here was real, it was a break with the media routine of suffering that people had learned to accept, it was a hardship that could not be cushioned by irony, it was a question that also applied to their own lives, their own biographies, their own milieu. And all the arguments and suspicions that were later brought into the discussion, from the glorification of strangers to hatred of one's own, whatever that may be, to the accusation that help for the refugees could only be explained by the Holocaust, because those who helped still felt blackmailed, still felt guilty, and saw this as an opportunity to free themselves from this guilt—all of this and all the other absurdities seem artificial and distant and also malicious in relation to this moment, which was so different, so immediate and yet reflective: It showed how urgently the current form of democracy needs this energy, this initiative, this recognition of citizens as citizens, as the basic element of political order, the individual who establishes what the greater whole is, not because it was said so, enforced from outside or inside, but because they wanted to do it, as citizens and as human beings.
It was an act of political beauty, that was the revolutionary core of those days, a new formula for changing everyday life and the community. Those who helped recognized both: the challenge of humanity, that is, using the example of the poorest and most needy to define what society should be if it is to be just and humane and more than the accumulation of individual interests; and the energy for one's own life, that is, the power that comes from doing something one believes in, the right thing, the humane thing. Taken together, these two elements contained the essence of a concrete political utopia in which the perspective of responsibility and morality, which is so central to the question of a good, successful life, was reflected upon and defined in a new way. They distanced themselves from the role they had known until then and came closer to what they wanted to be. They saw themselves as if from a distance. And that, it turned out, is so important for change, so important for bringing something new into the world, for rethinking society, something that is missing in routine political discourse and also in the parties' addresses or demands on citizens. The prerequisite for changing reality is to see reality from a different perspective. And that is what happened with the refugees, who shattered a form of reality, the protected, filtered reality that had ignored the misery and drowning of children in the Mediterranean; the refugees brought a different form of reality, a challenge at first, in every respect, but it is these challenges that give rise to the reality of a society that is humane and open, not cold and harsh.
The Kennedy effect
In many ways, it was an American moment, that summer of 2015, the summer of flight, of questions, of fear, of humanity, of success and failure. it was an American moment in a very original and idealistic sense, because society appeared in such a clear way as something that is made directly by people, day after day, with decisions and actions for which one must take responsibility, not by politicians or other powers, but by every citizen, as a patchwork, as a grassroots movement, as a community project; because society is not something separate from people and existing beyond them, as a cultural form or community of memory or even a prophetic or nationalistic interpretation of destiny, as formulated by all the authoritarian or national conservative social fatalists who want to assign individuals a place and force them into an order that is greater than themselves. What became apparent here, and what many Germans understood for the first time in their lives, was the essence of what John F. Kennedy had so beautifully and clearly articulated: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country—a sentence that first and foremost expresses the directness of American democracy, an ideal-typical permeability that characterizes this country more than any other democracy in the world. In any case, that is the promise that always comes with an obligation: democracy is complicated and exhausting and a daily experience.
The essence of what happened in the summer of 2015, when refugees came to the country they longed for – without ignoring all the other issues that the refugees brought with them and that seemed to have been forgotten for so long, from the fundamentally unjust world economic order to climate change and the ignoring of migration movements to the arms build-up at Europe's borders, the coldness in accepting images of horror, the insensitivity to the deaths in the Mediterranean, a school of horror, in other words, where for many years the suffering of others was presented as a kind of normality and these others were branded with the ethical stigma that they were somehow responsible themselves for not being born in Germany, for example, and not being able to drive a BMW and live in a terraced house on the outskirts of the city, without forgetting the global political context and the turning point in history that we as a global community are currently experiencing. the core of what happened in the summer of 2015, when the refugees came to the country they longed for, was a social awakening and recognition, a civic epiphany, the nucleus of an emerging political philosophy that formulates the state and its citizens, responsibility and belonging, rights and duties differently than before, with different concepts and ideas and different terms. That was the radical nature of this rupture, which also explains the radical nature of the reaction that quickly set in and was so destructive: on the part of those helping, there was initially no practiced political experience in the sense that there was something to vote on, people or issues, i.e., the routine that is inherent in representative democracy and part of its crisis. It was a constructive way of questioning the existing order on so many levels, and the provocation was so fundamental and so great that the racism and resentment that followed initially seemed like an act of helplessness and overwhelm.
In fact, it was about something so fundamentally political that for many it was a first, it was about the direct experience of helping, it was about questioning the procedures one was accustomed to, experiencing the administration where it worked and where it didn't, understanding the dense network of regulations where it functioned like a shackle and where it was useful, it was about openness to innovation and the rigidity of institutions, it was therefore very much about seizing the opportunity and using the challenge posed by the refugees to begin a process of reflection on the fundamental questions of the political order in this country, which should be more direct, more experimental, more unfinished, more open, characterized by more trust and more possibilities.
So what might this coming order look like, what are its components, what can be planned, what must be allowed, how can change be institutionalized or made scalable, as they say today, how can we create institutions and processes that are open to change, porous and stable at the same time, what if we don't have or shouldn't have a plan because reality is changing too quickly and can no longer be planned, if instead of a plan we only have a kind of compass, an idea of what is good and right and morally necessary, a direction for change? Or, just as important, how can failure be established as a form of change? What would a policy look like that does not rely on success and thus often on promises that are broken, a policy that reveals the possibility of its own failure? And how, in all this, can the new come into the world and the old move in a way that is less frightening and more unifying—how, then, is change possible for institutions and regimes, through reform or revolution, in this case a new, different order? These are all questions that underlie much of what the refugees brought to the discussion, from the temporary use of gyms to the flexibility of school classes, from employment contracts and building regulations to digital solutions and apps for help, communication, and support for refugees—in other words, the change of processes and certainties that shaped the 20th century, which were analog, more mechanical than flexible, more linear than networked and open, oriented toward criteria of belonging and discipline and the pattern of the nation. The questions that the refugees brought with them were those of a fundamental changeability of society in the early 21st century, of reform, disruption, renewal, and energy. The resistance and aggression against refugees can thus be explained in part as purely racist or culturally racist, but in part it is also resistance to the new in general, to the uncertainty that defines the world, to a change in society that is inevitable and, from a universal perspective, desirable, beyond questions of economics, pensions, and the necessity of immigration for a country like Germany, which is heading for a demographic cliff because the social systems threaten to collapse if too few people live here and pay their contributions. It is a resistance that goes to the root of the fears of people who see a world disappearing and can only guess at the new one – and who often hear that it will be difficult for them to find a place in this new world, which will be determined by machines, algorithms and technology that few understand. Uncertainty is the tremor of time, and the refusal of many people is a retreat to the familiar, even if this familiar has never existed, even if the view back is always full of lies and distortions, because history is what remains in the sieve of the present, constantly being reordered. The truth lies in the future, because what is to come is pure and raw possibility. The abolition of the future, as has happened in Germany in recent years and, more broadly, in the West as a whole, thus also means, in a sense, the abolition of truth, i.e., seeing and naming what is good and right as opposed to what is rotten and wrong.
The media and its discontents
There was a veritable campaign against what was right in parts of the media and politics, driven by the claim to do what was right, to act realistically, whatever realism meant—in any case, in this speech, it was always the opposite of morality, that dirty word of the cold warriors of that time, who did not want to be told that they cried when they saw people die. No, no, they had long since left that behind. They might shudder when they saw images from the Nazi era. But the present could not shake them. They had immunized themselves against it with irony or cynicism or opportunism or some other contagious disposition in times of crisis. They were ready for the ultimate betrayal, that of human rights, and they were proud of it, because pride is the opposite of doubt, and only when you doubt, they thought, they told each other, are you vulnerable. If you are proud that people are dying in the Mediterranean, then you can dismiss it as moral hypocrisy when people say we must help. Death only becomes real when you allow it to, as an emotion, as an image, as something that affects you. If you close yourself off, join forces, and form a social basis for a campaign against morality, then you can hide in the crowd. Morality, as the glue that holds society together, was systematically discredited as something that could be attributed to a certain milieu, in a very German way, this tradition of contempt for morality, which can easily be linked to Friedrich Nietzsche. What remains unclear in this argument, if you want to call it that, is what exactly was meant by morality, apart from the cliché that it had something to do with Protestant church congresses. The opponents of morality could not or did not want to name it; they did not need to name it, it seemed to them, because they only wanted to stigmatize and not to convince or argue.
This campaign was destructive, and it was undemocratic because it denied the basis of a just coexistence of people. In fact, justice was not something that fit into this “realism” discourse from the right. It was a departure from justice or solidarity, socially formulated; it was an attempt to justify selfishness by creating an enemy image of the moralist. This movement, this way of distancing oneself from everything that could be called moral, could be observed even in circles that are considered bourgeois: Initially, it was about the original aid for refugees, which was suspected of being nothing more than a form of indulgence for the murder of the Jews, i.e., not genuine, because, according to the logic, how could helping be genuine in itself, what would motivate people to help others if it were not their own guilt.
What does the Holocaust mean?
It was the 2015 version of the “Auschwitz club” that Martin Walser once spoke of, i.e., the specifically German version of using one's own monstrous crimes against others, the crimes, misfortunes, deaths in the present: a double instrumentalization of guilt and a relativization at the same time, because it was not real in this argument, German guilt, it was a deficit or a defect. And this defect had to be overcome, this self-humiliation of the Germans, that was the further logic, this moral servitude. The harshness and inhumanity of their own position was necessary; the destruction of moral impulses was a prerequisite for the political actions that were to follow. The isolation, the deals with dictatorships, the deportations to war zones. Any impulse of humanity seemed to be a threat to a frenzied status quo that wanted to block everything that the changes in the world wanted to bring into the country—at the price, and this was certainly seen as such, of abandoning the foundations of humanity and, ultimately, what constitutes the bourgeoisie in the political sense. The erosion of democracy, which could be observed from Hungary to the German interior minister and in the arts pages, did not begin with the reaction to the refugees – but it was accelerated by it and divided society into those who helped and those who condemned the helpers for being naive enough to believe in goodness and do the right thing.
In retrospect, this will be one of the great mysteries when it comes to understanding how people could allow terrible things to happen before their very eyes. The isolation of people, underpinned by legalistic arguments: Merkel's breach of the law, that was the right-wing slogan, was accompanied by a sealing off from ideas that, like the refugees, could have brought something new to this sleepwalking society. It was a combination of denial of reality and irresponsibility that hid behind the sham debate about what “conservative” meant in this country at this time. The answers to these hollow questions were just as hollow, because on the one hand, “conservative” was copied from the dictionary and defined as “preservation,” which in itself is not even an attempt at political analysis, and because, on the other hand, in the political apathy into which everyone had fallen, the line between conservative and right-wing extremist was becoming increasingly blurred, as the arguments that were penetrating the mainstream from the right were increasingly becoming the essence of the mainstream itself. It seemed as if certain circles had realized that they had to prepare themselves, that they had to practice something, to arm themselves for the cruelties that the extreme effects of climate change, for example, would bring upon the inhabitants of this planet, both rich and poor, with the rich in particular seeking to protect themselves with walls, both physical and psychological, and deliberate amorality to protect themselves from having to answer for the foundations of their wealth, i.e., global inequality.
What is the planetary order?
On a phenomenological level, refugees are thus only one component of a coming global order, directly linked, as Bruno Latour describes, to the consequences of capitalist inequality and a climate catastrophe whose consequences are difficult to estimate. For better or worse, it is difficult to see how to respond to the challenges of the future. Experimentation seems to be the best way to prepare for the unknown. Some retreat and shut themselves off, while others strive forward and dare to try something new, even if they don't know what it is. This is one of, perhaps the most decisive, contradictions of our time: this mixture of not knowing and having to act, because waiting is not an option on the one hand, and yet we do not know exactly what to do. This attitude, this openness, must be practiced, and the refugees themselves, in their courage, their despair, their optimism, and their energy, are in a sense a symbol of the new that they are facing without knowing what it ultimately means.
Hannah Arendt described this for her time and from her perspective in her 1943 text “We Refugees.” She refers to herself as a “newcomer” or “immigrant” because optimism is so important, which comes with the words used to describe people who set out on a journey, and the concept of flight is constantly readjusted and transformed, depending on the situation and the era. Arendt writes that “the greatest optimists among us usually went so far as to claim that they had spent their entire previous lives in a kind of unconscious exile and only learned from their new lives what it means to have a real home.” The refugee as a figure of strength, autonomy, change, and independence, not of hardship, threat, poverty, and misery—this image is real, it is the reality of many people who are fleeing, who are willing to leave everything behind and risk everything, something that those who remain, especially here in Germany, would never do, which reinforces their rejection. And so this image of the refugee as a strong individual is not wanted: the refugee is kept in a position of dependence and weakness, metaphorically, bureaucratically, concretely, because otherwise he would endanger the existing order. Refugees remain tolerable only if they are weak. If refugees were strong, autonomous, someone who changes reality through their actions, their mere presence, their movement through space and time, they would be an opportunity—and in our era, in our stagnant society, that seems like a warning sign."
In this sense: Start worrying, details to follow.
The text is taken from the book: “Das andere Land. Wie unsere Demokratie beschädigt wurde und was wir tun können, um sie zu reparieren” (The Other Country: How Our Democracy Was Damaged and What We Can Do to Repair It), published in 2018 by C. Bertelsmann. The book is based on my writings as a columnist for Der Spiegel. The column was discontinued shortly thereafter, without any real explanation; it was a sign of deliberate political shifts in a country that has always viewed difference as a problem.