Introduction

In recent years, Germany has made considerable progress in how it deals with racism and right-wing extremism. Triggered by a series of deadly right-wing terrorist attacks and widespread racist violence in the wake of the 2015 migration management crisis, both issues are now more present in political debate, and governments have made available increased resources, financial and otherwise, to tackle them. The National Action Plan against Racism (June 2017),¹ the “set of measures for combatting right-wing extremism and hate crime” (October 2019),² the 89 measures “for combatting right-wing extremism and racism” (November 2020),³ and the 10-point Action Plan against Right-wing Extremism (March 2022)⁴ are but four of many important initiatives.

There has also been a qualitative shift. In January 2023, the Federal Commissioner for Migration, Refugees and Integration (as well as Anti-racism) presented the first-ever situation report on Racism in Germany to the public. Drawing on innovative survey data,⁵ the report concludes that “a clear majority of the population” perceives racism – i.e., the learned practice of devaluing and hierarchising people based on the social construction of homogeneous ethnic, cultural, or religious groups with innate, inheritable, unchangeable, and inferior traits, values, and behaviours – as “a problem that concerns society as a whole”.⁶

The report also acknowledges that racism against Black and Asian people, Muslims, Romani, and Jews (or those who are perceived as such) is not just a driver of political extremism. That is, it not only motivates efforts, both violent and non-violent, that are explicitly directed against the constitutional state and its liberal-democratic order, whose core is defined by human rights, popular sovereignty, political pluralism, and the rule of law.⁷ Rather, racism also guides social interaction in Germany more broadly and thereby affects the everyday lives of a large part of the German population – whether on the street or online, at the workplace, on the housing market, or in encounters with law enforcement. This structural racism is different from the kind of explicit racist worldviews espoused by right-wing extremists, but – as the report goes on to say – it nevertheless has negative effects on individuals’ life chances, their levels of trust in political institutions, and feelings of belonging. Ultimately, this makes for a less stable, less resourceful, and less cohesive society.[re]Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung, Rassismus in Deutschland, p. 10.[/ref] It also provides a permissive environment for right-wing extremism, which is now considered to be the “biggest extremist threat” in Germany.⁸ This vicious cycle is why the federal government and the sixteen states (Länder) need to counter right-wing extremism alongside structural racism.

That a more comprehensive approach to countering right-wing extremism and racism is gradually emerging at the highest levels of German politics is a welcome development. This paper aims to contribute to furthering the development of such an approach by focusing on the importance of stories – the ways in which we connect our present to the past in order to imagine a future – for perpetuating racism, as well as for combatting it.

Stories are key to our understanding of who we are as societies because they give us a collective sense of identity, solidarity, and purpose. We generally prefer to tell positive stories about ourselves – of national heroes, of our past achievements, of how we overcame difficult times, of our ambitions and desires. By telling such stories and defining who we are, we also identify “Othersˮ, those who are in some way different from “usˮ. This process of “Otheringˮ, as it is called in sociological circles, can take benign forms, for example the simple idea that what makes the Germans “German” is that they are not French or Spanish. But in other cases, the difference becomes more primordial, where “Othersˮ are defined as essentially different from “usˮ in terms of their ethnicity (or religion, culture) and can therefore never be (proper) members of society. Such exclusion mechanisms are a universal phenomenon in human history, but as a system of power, racism has its roots in the “age of discoveryˮ and later the Enlightenment from the 15^th to the early 19^th century. Defining the peoples in colonised lands as the opposite of European civilisation – as “brutesˮ and “barbariansˮ who did not only look different but were incapable of rational thought and behaviour – is what made their exploitation possible by making it justifiable before God and themselves as good Christians. Conquest in the name of progress came first, racism second.⁹

The legacies of this history are still felt today. To illustrate, in an essay published in 1897, the black intellectual and civil rights activist William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois (1868-1963) first posed the provocative question “How does it feel to be a problem?” concerning the place of black people in a white America. He had recently returned to the US from two years of studying in Berlin – at what was then the Friedrich Wilhelm University and today is Humboldt University. His thinking and language turned the Enlightenment ideals of freedom, cosmopolitanism, emancipation, and self-expression, as found in the texts of Goethe and Schiller, G.W.F. Hegel, Johann Gottfried Herder, J. G. Fichte, and Wilhelm Humboldt on their head; his intention was to make freedom and opportunity a reality for all Americans and thereby help “the great republic” live up to its ideals.¹⁰ As the killing of African American George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020 and the anti-racist “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) protests showed, the US has yet to achieve this goal.

While these protests have also spread to Germany, the situation there is different from the US, not least because the relationship between white and black Americans does not translate well into the German context.¹¹ Nevertheless, as an ethnically diverse country of immigration, Germany faces a similar challenge: how can the republic fully live up to its own ideals of freedom and opportunity for all Germans and people living in Germany? It is good news that the representative survey data on which the Racism in Germany report builds finds that most Germans acknowledge the existence of racism in their country and support government action against it. At the same time, many respondents associate racism primarily with either right-wing extremists at home or with society in the US. ¹² This indicates that more needs to be done to better understand the link between right-wing extremism and racism in German society more broadly.

Below I outline an approach for working towards such an understanding that focuses on the relationship between the grand stories that contemporary right-wing extremists and liberal democracy tell vis-à-vis each other.

Grand Stories: Right-wing Extremism and Liberal Democracy

Why is right-wing extremism a problem in a liberal democracy? To most, the answer will be self-evident: an ideology of fundamental inequality between human beings contravenes the key principles of human dignity, equality, and pluralism that liberal democracies build on. In Germany, these principles are enshrined in the constitution, the Basic Law, or Grundgesetz (GG), from 1949, which defines human dignity as inviolable (Art. 1 GG) and outlaws discrimination based on “raceˮ, origin, faith, gender, and so on (Art. 3 GG, “Equality before the Lawˮ). Since Germany is a democratic state, all state authority derives from the German people, whereby “Germanˮ refers to anyone who holds German citizenship (Art. 20(2) and Art. 116 GG).

In light of an increasingly transnational and agile far-right that has learned to couch its racist ideas into a language of freedom and (ethno-)pluralism, the detection of right-wing extremist networks within state institutions, and the many violent attacks against political representatives and (other) civilians that have occurred across the country in recent years, German governments have become increasingly conscious of the fact that rejection of liberal-democratic principles is not limited to a bunch of self-declared enemies of the constitution on the fringes of society. However, they have not generally gone as far as to question the existence of a clear dividing line between right-wing extremism and liberal democracy. At a time when liberal democracy is increasingly under threat, doing so seems counter-intuitive to say the least. Surely, it is imperative that we re-affirm our commitment to the norms and values of liberal democracy and stand up to those whose declared aim it is to abolish the liberal-democratic order. ¹³ This is undoubtedly the task before us. The question is: how we do this, given that in reality, substantial flaws accompany liberal-democratic practice(s)?

Specifically, the problem is that the way in which we talk about liberal democracy often undermines its status as the counter-model to right-wing extremism and thereby weakens it. To understand how and why this happens, and what to do about it, it is helpful to think of the relationship between (violent) right-wing extremism and liberal democracy in terms of opposing yet connected stories.

The grand story behind right-wing extremism

The contemporary extreme-right, in Germany and elsewhere, spans a range of ideologies, from identitarianism to neo-Nazism and anti-Islam factions such as the “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of Occident” or PEGIDA (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes). In spite of the differences between them (relating for instance to intellectual traditions and specific enemy images), they increasingly converge around a powerful, transnational story of loss, betrayal, revenge, and rebirth. They see (Christian) white people as superior to other “races” or cultures and therefore consider political, social, economic, and legal inequalities between whites and these allegedly inferior groups as natural, justified, and desirable. In an increasingly interconnected world, they consider this natural, white supremacist order under threat from not only these “inferior others” themselves, but also from the political and cultural elites – often defined as an all-controlling global Jewry – who enable and promote their migration to, and existence and prosperity within, white-majority countries.¹⁴ This combined belief in supremacy and victimisation motivates a call for retributive action against both “inferior others” and “internal traitors” in the name of defending or restoring a white supremacist order. ¹⁵ In recent years, this story has increasingly played out in violent attacks in everyday spaces, such as workplaces and private homes, in houses of worship, in shops, clubs, and bars – not just in Germany.

Thinking of contemporary right-wing extremist violence in terms of this grand story –composed of loss and betrayal in the past, a call for revenge in the present, and the promise of a better future for the ethnic majority – raises an important question, especially given that their narrative resonates increasingly with parts of the population: what (counter-) story do liberal democracies like Germany tell about themselves? And how effective is this story?

The grand story of liberal democracy

Reducing individuals’ identities to their (real or assumed) membership in ethnic, cultural, or (and) religious groups, assigning immutable characteristics to and asserting the existence of a natural hierarchy between them is, as the Racism in Germany report puts it, “fundamentally at odds with the free democratic basic order and an open, pluralistic society guided by a model of equal opportunities.”¹⁶ This idea of Germany’s liberal-democratic order as inherently anti-racist finds its expression not only in the Basic Law. It also corresponds to the powerful story that Germany tells about itself.

This story is a story of success. Its main contours are defined by Western and European integration on the one hand and the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “working off the pastˮ,on the other hand. It goes something like this: following a long period of repression and a focus on German suffering after the end of the Second World War, (West) Germany eventually managed – owing to persistent efforts from below as well as favourable social, economic, and political conditions – to accept its dictatorial, nationalist, anti-Semitic, and genocidal past as central to its collective identity. Through this process, it came to acknowledge its historical guilt, embrace the duty to remember, and accept its responsibility to prevent such evil from ever happening again, in Germany and elsewhere in the world.¹⁷

After the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 that had separated the Federal Republic in the West from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East and reunification of the two Germanies less than a year later, Germany held on to its success story – in spite of the high levels of racist violence in the wake of this historical moment. The process reached its peak in the late 1990s when the first left-of-centre coalition came to power on the federal level after sixteen years of CDU/CSU-led governments under “chancellor of unity” (Einheitskanzler) Helmut Kohl, and the German capital was moved (back) from Bonn to Berlin, giving Germany the sense of a new beginning. As the historian Edgar Wolfrum concluded in 2006, the history of the Federal Republic is the history of a “successful democracyˮ (geglückte Demokratie). In 1945, and even decades later, this had not been a foregone conclusion.¹⁸

Since the turn of the millennium, Germany’s status as a “country of immigrationˮ has gradually become incorporated into this success story. The history of post-war immigration to the two Germanies is long and complex, shaped by their own political interests and economic needs as much as world events. The different groups of immigrants include ethnic German expellees in the immediate post-war years and late resettlers after the collapse of the Soviet Union, guest and contract workers, for example from Turkey, Greece, and Vietnam , as well as refugees and asylum seekers from within and outside the European continent.

In the early 2000s, the term “integrationˮ gradually found its way into German immigration debates to account for this reality, flanked by landmark changes to immigration and citizenship law. The first integration summit was held under the leadership of Chancellor Angela Merkel in July 2006 and a first National Action Plan for Integration was published a year later with the declared aim, as Merkel put it in her foreword, to make Germany a “common homeˮ and a “loveable and livable Heimatˮ for all.¹⁹ Paradoxically, it is precisely this effort to actively shape the process of growing together as a diverse society that has led to greater contestation of what it means to be German. This is because now more people from a wider range of personal and cultural backgrounds get to be part of the debate (the German sociologist Aladin El-Mafaalani calls this the “integration paradoxˮ). As Merkel’s foreword to the Action Plan makes clear, “integrationˮ also, rather unhelpfully, started out as a deficit-oriented concept, focused on the lack of German language skills, low levels of education, and high levels of unemployment among “people with a migration backgroundˮ²⁰ vis-a-vis “Germansˮ. Over time, this has led to a particular way of thinking about Germany as a country of immigration, as Afro Germans, Turkish Germans, Arab and Muslim Germans, in particular, have come to play a double role in the German success story:

On the one hand, their physical presence in Germany is often seen as proof that it is indeed the kind of open and pluralist country that right-wing extremists reject. This became particularly clear on 31 August 2015 when Chancellor Merkel opened her summer press conference by presenting the influx of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (many of whom were expected to settle long-term) as a vindication of Germany’s success story: “The world sees Germany as a land of hope and opportunity, and it really wasn’t always like that.ˮ²¹ On the other hand, there is still a sense that “immigrantsˮ, because they presumably arrived in the country later than “the Germansˮ, continue to be somehow “different fromˮ them. That is, they are not (fully) recognised as being of Germany, even if they were themselves born in the country, are German native speakers or hold German citizenship. The two sides – being key to Germany’s national identity and yet not belonging fully – are tied together through the liberal-democratic promise that “immigrantsˮ can become “like the Germansˮ through a process of integration. In this way, an idea is preserved that “fullˮ or “properˮ Germans exist as a neutral reference group around which society is organised and its problems of living together can be defined.

The Federal Expert Commission on Integration has recently acknowledged the problematic legacy of this dominant integration discourse and demanded a more comprehensive approach to integration as an “ongoing” and “unending” task for all of German society that is not limited to managing immigration.²² This is indeed crucial because the formula “in, but not yet of Germany” comes dangerously close to identifying “immigrants” as a “problem people”, which Du Bois warned against more than a century ago. The consequences of this are particularly apparent in the context of right-wing extremist violence.

Responding to right-wing extremist violence

After major right-wing extremist attacks, democratic leaders often invoke Germany’s post-war success story because they consider it a natural antidote to the extremist worldview expressed through such violence. As then-Chancellor Merkel said in her speech honouring the victims of the Neo-Nazi terrorist cell National Socialist Underground (NSU) on 23 February 2012:

“Human dignity is inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.” – These are the first words of our constitution [Grundgesetz]. It was the answer to twelve years of National Socialism in Germany, to unspeakable contempt for human beings and barbarism, to the breach of civilisation [Zivilisationsbruch] that was the Shoa. “Human dignity is inviolable.” That is the foundation for our living together in our country, of the free democratic basic order of the Federal Republic of Germany. Whenever people in our country are excluded, threatened, persecuted, it violates the foundation of this free and democratic basic order, and the values of our constitution. This is why the murders by the Thuringian terror cell were also an attack on our country. They are a disgrace to our country.²³

Between 1998 and 2011, the NSU, supported by an extensive right-wing extremist network, committed 10 murders, most of them targeting people with personal or family histories of migration to Germany from Turkey and Greece,²⁴ and attempted to murder dozens more in three bombings in cities across Germany, accompanied by a series of armed robberies. Its terrorist campaign was recognised as such only when their cover was blown in early November 2011.²⁵

            In some ways, Merkel’s speech laid the groundwork for what would subsequently emerge as official government policy: intolerance and racism, she said, were not limited to right-wing extremists, but manifested themselves in everyday practices and expressions of contempt for and exclusion of others. This had clearly been shown by the racist media coverage of and criminal investigations into the targeted killings (labelled “Kebab murders” in 2005) and bombings before the discovery of the NSU’s existence. Over a period of several years, journalists and investigators had homogenised and devalued the victims as “Turkish immigrants” who had “not yet properly arrived” in Germany, regardless of their factual Germanness as indicated by Germany being their country of birth or place of long-term residence,, German citizenship, or (native) German language skills. Their “lifeworld” allegedly deviated from that of “the Germans” and remained difficult to penetrate: they were in, but not (yet) of Germany. In consequence, the victims, their families and communities were widely treated as part of the problem and as an obstacle to solving the crimes.²⁶

In light of these facts, “good democrats”, Merkel insisted, had to prove their commitment to human dignity, freedom, and pluralism by actively defending these values – including the “diversity” brought to Germany through immigration – on an everyday basis. “Germany”, she said, included anyone who lived in the country, regardless of origin, appearance, beliefs, age, or disability.

How did this radically inclusive vision of Germany, an important lesson from the many scandals surrounding the NSU, compare to reality after November 2011? As Merkel’s speech illustrates, once the perpetrators had been identified as Neo-Nazis, the victims and their families became central to positioning a successful, diverse, and liberal democracy against the right-wing extremists and their misanthropic ideology. The importance of them being in Germany was recognised. However, this still did not result in the victims being recognized as full members of German society.

The best illustration of this is the five-year NSU trial (2013-2018) at the Regional High Court in Munich. The task of the prosecution (which in Germany is part of the executive branch of government) was to translate the late realisation that the NSU’s terrorist attacks were, as Merkel had put it, “also an attack on our country” into a legally viable story. The story that the prosecution presented, both in the indictment in 2012 and in the final plea in 2017, made clear that the perpetrators had violated the core principles of the relationship between the liberal-democratic state and its citizens. While the German population “with a migration background” had been the immediate target of terrorist violence, the state had been its ultimate target because the perpetrators had aimed to replace it with a national-socialist order and thereby return the country to the darkest period in its history. In the end, however, the state had prevailed.

On the face of it, this seems like a powerful way of extolling Germany’s liberal-democratic achievements against enemies of the constitution. But the story had one major flaw: it subsumed the experiences of violence and terrorisation of the individuals and communities targeted by the NSU under the “liberal-democratic order” that had to be defended against the terrorists. As a result, the trial gave little space to victims’ critique of state institutions and their demeaning and racist practices as this would have weakened the success story that the prosecution wanted to tell. Paradoxically though, that was exactly what the victims were trying to do: share their years of suffering with the wider German public so something like the NSU would never happen again and the German success story would be allowed to continue.²⁷

Tragically, only a few years later, something like the NSU murders did happen again when, in the late evening on 19 February 2020, a local resident shot dead nine people in bars and kiosks in Hanau, a medium-sized city just outside Frankfurt/Main (Hesse).²⁸ In her press statement the next morning, Chancellor Merkel said that following the NSU’s violent campaign, the murder of district president Walter Lübcke at his private home near Kassel (Hesse) by a right-wing extremist on the night of 1 June 2019, and the anti-Semitic and racist attack in Halle on 9 October 2019 that had left two people dead, the attacks in Hanau were yet another crime caused by the “poison of racismˮ in German society. Echoing her own words from the official state ceremony for the NSU victims eight years earlier, she reiterated that “the federal government and government institutions stand for the rights and dignity of every person in our country. We do not distinguish between citizens based on origin or religion. With all our strength and determination, we oppose those who try to divide Germany.”²⁹

Local politicians, members of parliament, and other officials were also quick to emphasise that “the victims were no aliens [Fremde]”, but locals from Hanau and the wider region whose murder had been motivated by racist hatred. The attack, the then-president of the Bundesrat, the upper house of the German parliament, Dietmar Woidke said, was “directed against [all of] us. […] All this has happened before in this country! It must not happen again.”³⁰

In some important ways, then, Germany seems to have learned from previous mistakes. At the same time, and in striking parallels to institutional responses to the NSU, the families of the victims in Hanau have struggled to access information about the police investigations and receive adequate compensation from the state. They also continue to struggle for the right to publicly commemorate the victims in a way that marks their lives and deaths as much of an intrinsic part of German history as for example the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, to whom Hanau dedicates a national monument on its market square.³¹

Conclusion

Thinking of racism, right-wing extremism and violence not only as threats from the fringes but also as problems that exist within liberal democracy itself challenges Germany’s positive self-image in a fundamental sense. To be sure, these problems manifest themselves differently in Germany than they do in other Western countries, including in the US, which continues to see itself as an “exceptional nation” and has only just begun to critically examine its own violent past in a serious manner, with predictable (and consequential) backlash effects. For Germany, ironically, despite its success story, sincere defences of liberal democracy can go hand in hand with maintaining racist attitudes and practices, including through (but not limited to) the seemingly benign formula “in, but not yet of Germany”.

            In light of a reinvigorated extreme right, anyone expressively committed to liberal democracy, can no longer afford to tell a story of Germany that has an essential distinction between “the Germansˮ and “immigrantsˮ at its core. Instead, to safeguard its historical achievements and move forward amidst a tense political climate, Germany needs to develop new ways of thinking about itself. This means devoting greater attention to violent histories and racist phenomena that have been marginalised in the past.³² It also requires an honest confrontation with the national self-understanding behind its success story as a liberal-democratic country of immigration. This is not to say that crime and (other) social problems in an increasingly complex society should be left unaddressed, on the contrary. It simply means to address these problems without singling out and homogenising some of society’s members as “problem people” – regardless of intention – and instead accept that German society, like any other, is made up of “people with problems”.