generalspeaking

Germany ... at War With Itself

"Racism is a poison; hate is a poison."
"This poison exists in our society and it's to blame for too many tragic events."
"Everything will be done to investigate the circumstances of these terrible murders. [The government] and every state institution would] stand up with all our strength and decisiveness to those people who try to divide Germany." 
German Chancellor Angela Merkel

"If people are silent for long enough, then things like this will happen."
"You could have set the clock by this attack. People tell us they have learnt from Auschwitz, but this shows that sort of talk is just ‘blah, blah’."
Mehmet Daimagüler, lawyer for victims of far-right terrorism

A police officer outside the Midnight shisha bar in Hanau. Photograph: Ralph Orlowski/Reuters

A country divided. Where once it was united. But that was under the Third Reich of 'National Socialism', when everyone adored Hitler and was eager to do his bidding. Even the Protestant and Catholic Churches were silent and held their counsel at a time when their voices raised high in condemnation of a murderously racist public national agenda based on an Aryan ideal meticulously planned and carried out the mass murder and extermination of Jews, Roma, Gays, political dissenters and the occasional cleric who would not countenance that agenda.

German citizens have now, for the most part, turned their backs on that odiously shameful history. But within their psyches burns a social exclusionary devotion to heimat and all things Germanic. The mass presence of peoples from another heritage, religion, customs and values and legal system does not sit well with most people, anywhere in the world, when their own becomes degraded and a competition ensues between theirs and those who arrive who set no store by the indigenous laws and culture.

Fuelled in no small part by the stern unwillingness of a religious political system that spurns theirs and demands the foreign one be elevated to official status. Add to that the culture of oppression and repression that Islam represents, its hostility to other religions, politics, cultures and values along with the prevalence among Muslim youth of violent tendencies and the vulnerability of women in Islamic culture and there is a perfect storm brewing.

Two hostile sentiments in an arena where sparks of rage set off a firestorm of reaction. The German tendency to fascism is reborn within a society viewing itself as hard-pressed to maintain its culture and respect for its heritage. The left and the right, both of which tend in their extremes toward totalitarianism, yet despising one another, are in the process of clashing as they do periodically. Violence is always on the cusp of an explosion.

National Socialism demonstrated the extent that fascistic extremism could descend to in its mass extermination of European Jewry. That same population that devoured their Fuhrer's words of national superiority and scorn for all others, has now divided itself. Half driven by remorse and willing to accept migrants and refugees whatever their source, the other half resentful of the presence of strangers and reverting to the racist ideology that gave birth to the Holocaust.

Those killed in Hanau, by a white supremacist in two hookah bars were targeted because they were not German nationals, and the irony is that though some of the victims were Turkish in origin they were also Kurds, oppressed by Turks, seeking haven from that oppression in a Germany that declares itself open to refugees and migrants. There is injustice everywhere and anywhere. The tragedy is that human nature incessantly turns on itself, ravenous and hateful.

A woman leaves flowers at a makeshift memorial for the nine people killed in Hanau. Photograph: Armando Babani/EPA