The German news magazine Der Spiegel, in its issue of August, 29, 2015, had the unusual feature of having not one but two covers, one following the first. The first cover, titled “Bright Germany”, showed a cheerful picture of a festival organized for refugee children, balloons and all, staged by local people in a small town in Lower Saxony. The second cover, titled “Dark Germany”, showed a refugee home in flames in a small town in Baden-Wuerttemberg, after an arson attack by an anti-immigrant mob. Each cover had the same sentence under the title: “It is up to us how we shall live”.
There are several pictures in the issue similar to the ones that have flooded international media about the masses of desperate people, most of them from the Middle East and Africa, seeking to reach the wealthy countries of the European Union, some by boat across the Mediterranean, others on land across the Balkans. It does not include the photo which most recently has deeply disturbed people all over the world: that of a three-year old little boy lying dead on a beach on the Greek island of Kos, after the flimsy boat carrying him and his family capsized offshore. (His mother and a sibling also drowned, leaving only the father to survive; he said that nothing was left for him to live for and that he was returning to Syria.)
No matter where they first arrived on European soil, many of the refugees intend to reach Germany, where the asylum laws are very liberal. But the sheer numbers are putting this liberality under severe stress. About 800,000 refugees claiming asylum are expected in Germany in the next few months. The Spiegel issue shows the photo of a cute seven-months old little black girl from Ghana, whose mother gave birth to her in a refugee facility in Hannover. The caption under the photo says “Angela is happy here”. Her mother, out of gratitude to Germany for letting them in, gave her daughter two first names: “Angela Merkel”.
As in other European countries, there have been very different reactions to the flood of new migrants. There have been hostile demonstrations against the refugees, threats of violence, and a number of arson attacks on facilities housing them. But there have also been outbursts of sympathy and actions of support—welcoming demonstrations, organizing activities for children and German language lessons, assisting in contacts with German bureaucracy, inviting newcomers to the homes of local families. Much of this has been supported by both Protestant and Catholic churches, but much was spontaneous and locally organized.
The latter phenomenon is certainly evidence of a vital civil society—indeed a democratic society—that has developed in Germany since World War II. It is not just a political ideology at the foundation of the Federal Republic. It is that too. But it has seeped into ordinary everyday life. I first came to work in Germany as a young man in the mid-fifties. It was in the making then. One can assess the change that has occurred since then by recalling scenes (in themselves quite trivial) that would be inconceivable now. I was hanging around in a café in the university town of Tuebingen and became friendly with a young man from Turkey who was studying dentistry there. Mustafa told me the following story:
He had his first meeting with the professor who was supposed to be his advisor. On the door was the full title of this man, before his name: “Obermedizinalrat Professor”. Mustafa had knocked and, when invited to enter, had introduced himself, simply addressed the professor as “Mister”. This august person asked Mustafa whether he could read, then told him to recite the full title out loud. Mustafa was then instructed to go out again, close the door, knock again, and upon re-entering using the proper form of address.
This would be quite unimaginable today. Trivial? Of course. But the small rituals of everyday life often indicate much less trivial facts of social life. It seems to me that an interesting indicator of present-day German democratic culture is the rather amazing fact that, some seventy years after the Holocaust, there are now over 200,000 Jews living permanently in Germany, some 15,000 of them Israelis in Berlin. In interviews some Israelis have said that they like it in Germany, because they feel safe here and have no compunctions speaking Hebrew on the street. By law any persons forced to flee by the Nazis, or their descendants, have the right to German citizenship. There have been a good many applications from Israel.
But this is not the point I want to make here. Rather, I am impressed by an editorial dubbed “a manifesto”, written for the editors by Elke Schmitter (a journalist and novelist). She comments on the plan, now beginning to be pushed by the Merkel government, to distribute the refugees by spreading them across the country by a quota system, and to recommend a similar system for spreading the refugees throughout the EU (some members of which have already declared that they want to have nothing with such a scheme).
Schmitter begins her piece with a surprising analogy: In 1957, four years after the U.S. Supreme Court had declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, Orval Faubus, the governor of Arkansas, decided to defy the Supreme Court mandate and ordered the state national guard to bar entrance to the central high school in Little Rock to the nine black students who had been admitted in accordance with the Supreme Court mandate. Thereupon President Eisenhower ordered federal troops in full battle gear to escort the black students into the school. They were surrounded by a white mob who hurled insults and spat at the students. For a while it seemed possible that there would be a reiteration of the American Civil War, with federal troops and the militia of a Southern state firing on each other. That scenario was prevented by Eisenhower’s willingness to use the overwhelming power of the federal government to enforce desegregation. Arkansas backed down, the so-called “Little Rock Nine” could finish their high school education, and of course the public schools of Arkansas are now as desegretated as those in every other state.
But Schmitter stresses another point: The black students had a terrible time during their years at Central High, shunned and taunted and even physically threatened by angry white students. They prevailed and have justly been honored for their courage (recently by a memorial monument in front of the state capitol). Schmitter points to an interesting parallel with the campaign against the refugees in Germany today—mobs full of hatred and prone to violence ready to defy the will of the democratic government. Of course the mobs must not be allowed to prevail, by force if necessary. But she asks the following question: “Does it have to be the most vulnerable who have to bear this war on their backs and in their souls? Not for a few stressful weeks, but as a daily experience? Under police protection in their homes, unwanted and hated, as a living provocation of the local population?”
Schmitter suggests another approach: There are regions in the country in which resentment sits “like a toad bloated by feelings of disappointment” (nice image!). More optimistic people have already left these regions, already marked by economic decline. Let the toads stew in their resentment! And do not force the most traumatized people to live in toad-country. There are other regions, where the refugees are already being welcomed, and where there is an awareness of the very negative demographic situation into which Germany, along with most of Europe, is rapidly sinking—with a declining number of people in the labor force having to support a growing number of the aged. Unless indigenous German women have many more children (sociologically unlikely) or the generous German welfare state vastly expands (economically impossible with declining growth), Germany urgently needs large number of young, healthy immigrants willing to work. This suggests a policy of rewarding communities ready to welcome and integrate refugees—bureaucratically and financially. The local results, in addition to strengthening the demographic basis of economic growth, will be very visible—finally a new swimming pool, an expanding hospital, a center for seniors. Put simply: Reward the “bright Germany” and, apart from police measures against violence, let the “dark Germany” stay in its condition of economic disappointment. (Schmitter does not say this, but before long there would be intra-German migration from the “dark” to the “bright” regions of the country.)
The older one gets, the wider becomes one’s set of associations: One thinks of one thing, and immediately any number of other things pop into one’s mind. Just that happens to me just now. As the logic of Elke Schmitter’s argument becomes clear, it reminded me of something about the relation of compassion and interests that I learned (of all places) in South Africa. From 1985 to 1988 I chaired an international working group on the future of South Africa, financed by Harry Oppenheimer and a number of other business leaders. Oppenheimer, the head of the Anglo-American mining conglomerate and one of the richest men in the world, was passionately opposed to apartheid which he considered to be a moral outrage; he put his money where his mouth was, financially supporting much if not most of the non-violent part of the anti-apartheid movement. But something that was happening about the time that I first came to South Africa was that the majority of the business community had decided that apartheid had to go. This happened first among the English-speaking business leaders, who had been in matters other than race less identified with the Nationalist government’s agenda. But now it was also happening with their Afrikaans-speaking colleagues.
I’m sure that Oppenheimer was not the only businessman opposed to apartheid on moral grounds. But the general shift in elite business leaders, whether English or Afrikaans, was not due to mass conversions to racial liberalism resulting from the preachings of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other anti-apartheid advocates. I think it was due to something more vulgar: Business leaders saw that the country was becoming ungovernable and that this would wreck the economy, including their businesses. In the final period of the apartheid regime big business played a very positive role, mediating (then illegal) contacts between the government and the African National Congress (the umbrella resistance movement led by Nelson Mandela), and then financing the huge negotiating process that led to the collapse of the regime. As an anti-apartheid activist put it: “We talked ourselves through a revolution” (he might have added, “and Harry Oppenheimer picked up the tab”). I learned a very useful lesson from having closely observed this history: A moral vision is important, but it helps greatly if you can appeal to hard interests as well as to conscience.
I don’t know Elke Schmitter, but it seems to me that she is applying this lesson here. (If I were to give her unsolicited advice, I would say: Be sure to include the business community in a campaign to advocate your plan for “bright Germany”.)