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Birth of the Rebel Citizen in Germany

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Birth of the Rebel Citizen in Germany Season’s Greetings from Sarrazin In its 2010 Christmas Eve issue, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung had a special gift for its readers. The reputed conservative newspaper opened its cultural pages with an article penned by Thilo Sarrazin, a former German Federal Bank executive and member of the Social Democratic 01/06 Party (SPD) who seized the opportunity to muse on the incidents of the past months. His book Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Does Away With Itself) had been published in late August 2010, and was benefitting from massive support by high-circulation media such as the tabloid Bild and Der Spiegel, which had printed excerpts from the book in advance. The book sold about Tom Holert 1.2 million copies and became the best-selling non-fiction book on the politics of the past decade.1 In his article, Sarrazin boasts of having Birth of the almost caused a crisis in the German state. Certainly, his 464 page diatribe against the Rebel Citizen in failure of the welfare state, multiculturalism, and in particular against Muslim immigrants and Germany their alleged reluctance to “integrate,” spiced up with demographic statistics and eugenicist speculations on “race” and “intelligence” had made the man the most loved and hated voice (and face) of a populist vibe running rampant throughout the country. And these feelings are shared by millions of (largely middle-class) Germans who not only indulge in increasingly unfettered resentment against immigrants, the unemployed, and the working poor, but also unite around the collective blaming of the political class and the media for having failed to sort out the “problems” of demographic change and economic crisis. Lidwien van de Ven, Berlin, 02/10/2010 (Die Freiheit), 2010. ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe deprecating responses his book prompted among leading politicians, from Chancellor Angela Merkel to President Christian Wulff, but also among his fellow Social Democrats and the majority of media 01.20.11 / 01:03:13 UTC commentators, amounts – according to scholarship, postmodern media theory, and his Sarrazin’s Christmas Eve dispatch (full of self- “consumerist manifesto,” to current self- congratulatory “contempt”) – to the perceptions declared intellectual leadership (assisted by of a threatening “cartel of political correctness” fellow thinkers such as Peter Sloterdijk, Robert common among “citizens” who, thanks to the Spaeman, or Udo DiFabio) over a tremor of debate instigated by his blockbuster, are finally allegations about leftist hegemony, provides empowered to ask the very questions that “have valuable, if ultimately unsurprising, insight into been for a long time confined to political 02/06 the workings of the neoconservative mindset. As discourse.” Bolz has it: Freedom Fighters Our society that is incapable of an Sound familiar? Perhaps it does, because such a orientation provided by religion, bourgeois critique of “political discourse” is utterly familiar tradition, and common sense [gesunder populist discourse. Accusing a putative leftist Menschenverstand] becomes the limp hegemony of ruling by means of victim of a terror of virtue [Tugendterror] undemocratically-imposed “politically correct” bred in universities, editorial offices, and lawmaking has been populist stump speech for anti-discrimination offices.3 quite some time. However, things don’t stay the same even if they sound or look as if nothing has And he leaps even further back in history, that is, changed since the last time it seemed necessary back to Luther, who in his time preached spiritual to contest the right-wing idea of political freedom in political servitude, whereas “today correctness as the enemy of free speech. As odd we have spiritual servitude in political freedom.” as it may seem for Viennese art critics Matthias The phantasm of being governed by a specifically Dusini and Thomas Edlinger to have recently insidious leftist scheme that pretends to garner announced that they will work on a book on the ideas of justice and equality but actually political correctness, this announcement seems aims at limiting the freedom of individual self- to reflect a renewed desire to attack what is expression, is standard coinage of populist perceived as an overregulated and discourse. “Freedom” is invoked whenever disempowering discourse backed by freewheeling vox populi seems to be restrained unquestioned consensus. Dusini, a regular by a politics emphasizing the right to having contributor to Springerin and the art editor of the rights, particularly those of minorities, instead of leftist Vienna city newspaper Falter, already catering to the desires of an alleged majority. The made his stance on political correctness relative frequency of neo-right-wing parties that available in a commentary published in the Der have opted for “freedom” or “Freiheit” as their t Standard newspaper. Rhetorically, he asked why r moniker is telling in this respect, as we have e l a former Bundesbank executive such as Sarrazin, o seen it in the case of the alarmingly successful H or, for that matter, Kadri Tezcan, the Turkish m Austrian FP (Freiheitliche Partei sterreichs) o T ambassador in Vienna who publicly criticized Ê and the recently founded, Berlin-based “Die 1 Austrian immigration policy, have become the 1 Freiheit,” assembled by former members of the 0 2 real taboo-breakers of our time, whereas CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and the y r y contemporary artists and curators, afraid to a libertarian “Piratenpartei” (and is quite n u r a violate the rules of politeness and political b ostensibly modeled after Geert Wilders’s “Partij m e r f e correctness, of “the language of anti-ziganism, – voor de Vrijheid”). At stake, however, is the y G r n a i anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-homophobia,” “freedom” of those who are united against an u n 2 n e don’t dare “to call a spade a spade.” Deploying a alleged “Islamification” of society (that is, the j z i t i the well-known discursive strategy of addressing — nation) as well as against the (Keynesian or C l 2 e contemporary art as some general and 2 other) revival of “the state” in times of economic b # e homogeneous whole that lacks the courage to l and ecological crisis. Hence, forces of R a n e r act according some idea of “art” that requires no h destruction and demise such as “immigrants,” u t o f j further explanation, Dusini willfully joins the o “Islam,” “welfare state,” “multiculturalism,” x h u l t f ranks of those populist critics who yearn for an r “political correctness,” and “politicians” are i - art that is wild and angry, non-conformist to the e B being identified in order to activate what can be core, and therefore automatically immune to the easily perceived as “resistance,” “disobedience,” temptations of a self-indulgent, presumably or even “rebellion.” As war is declared on leftist blindness to the real challenges society is “freedom,” freedom fighters are to be recruited facing. among the citizenry. This is populist, but also ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe reasons for this alleged blindness are neoliberal logic, since the fantasy of freedom is well known among the ideologues of the old new nurtured by ideologues of a nationalist- right. Norbert Bolz, a German philosopher who culturalist right wing, as well as by proponents of came a long way from Walter Benjamin economic deregulation and the liberty of 01.20.11 / 01:03:13 UTC consumption. Most predictable but always (though the media work overtime to turn it into effective, defending one’s own “freedom” is the one), but a motley bunch of local phenomena most justifiable way of curtailing that of others. engendering the social differences of an alleged “Dagegen-Republik” (Der Spiegel). Primarily “Wutbürger” or Active Citizen? instigated by the protests against the demolition An appropriate name has not been found for the and subsequent modernization of Stuttgart’s phantom majority this battle for “freedom” fights central train station (protests held by a for, but it may be a very familiar one in the end. A 03/06 heretofore unlikely rainbow-ish coalition of semantic shift probably as interesting as the seniors and youths, of middle and upper class, of appropriation of the liberalist idea of “freedom” environmentalists and commuters, who for by the New Right occurred around the figure of months demonstrated on the streets of a city the “citizen” (Bürger). Transcending (or that hasn’t undergone any significant public suppressing) the otherwise useful distinction display of civil unrest and disobedience for between citoyen and bourgeois, the German decades), the “Wutbürger” is an indication of “Bürger” always worked as an ideologically indignation and the (mainly middle class–driven) malleable signifyer. The current usages of the firm belief that the political and economical word oscillate between populist appropriations leaders have failed to do their jobs and have to of “bürgerlich,” as an attribute of anti-statist, be confronted with (if not complemented by) the anti-PC, anti-welfare positions of self-entitled knowledge and willpower of the citizenry. bourgeois top-performers (“Leistungstrger”) ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn his New York Times op-ed in identifying such as Bolz’s on the one hand, and the three main traits of the current German phenomenon only recently known as the populism, racism, rejection of professional “Wutbürger” (angry citizen) on the other. Not by politicians, and bottom-up mobilization, Jürgen chance, the very term “Wutbürger” won the Habermas pointed out that German Language Society’s award for the “word of the year” in 2010. It is the denomination The motivations underlying each of the chosen for a social figure said to constitute three phenomena – the fear of immigrants, something that is not yet a national movement attraction to charismatic nonpoliticians Lidwien van de Ven, New York, 11/09/2010 (Ground Zero), 2010. 01.20.11 / 01:03:13 UTC and the grass-roots rebellion in Stuttgart – that politicians use a language the “einfache are different.
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