Race, Migration, and Fear

Fear, according to the historian Joanna Bourke, “is the most pervasive emotion of modern society.”Footnote ¹¹ As the history of emotions has grown as a field of inquiry in recent decades, historians have increasingly explored the history of fear in postwar West Germany.Footnote ¹² This scholarship has shown that beneath the veneer of a restrained, rational, and orderly postwar state and society, West Germans were plagued with anxiety and fear. For decades, Germans feared the revival of Nazism and the creation of a Fourth Reich.Footnote ¹³ They also feared nuclear war, the deployment of nuclear weapons on West German soil, radioactive fallout, and military rearmament.Footnote ¹⁴ In her examination of the West German reception of a messianic healer who was active in the country until his death in 1959, Monica Black has uncovered a surprisingly widespread strain of end-times thinking, which she calls an “apocalyptic sensibility.”Footnote ¹⁵ Finally, in his masterful book, Republik der Angst, Frank Biess describes a litany of fears that gripped the West German imagination throughout its long postwar history. These ranged from the fear of violent reprisals during the postwar military occupation to fears of moral destruction, the outbreak of war, the collapse of West German democracy, technological modernization, and environmental destruction. The prevalence of fear leads Biess to question the conventional narrative of success that has structured the historiography on West Germany: “How successful, in reality, was the history of the old West Germany if millions of people experienced apocalyptic fears and also expressed them in mass demonstrations?”Footnote ¹⁶

Much of this new scholarship emphasizes the positive valences of fear in postwar West Germany. Biess and Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, in particular, argue that fears of democratic collapse often mobilized Germans to defend and thus stabilize their democracy.Footnote ¹⁷ Although both make convincing arguments, fear has more generally been viewed as having a corrosive impact on democratic life. Already in the late seventeenth century, Baruch Spinoza, one of modern Europe's earliest and most important theorists of democracy, insisted that fear was a hallmark of unfree and undemocratic states. According to Spinoza, “A free multitude is guided by hope more than by fear, whereas a multitude which has been subjugated is guided more by fear than by hope. The first want to cultivate life; the second care only to avoid death. The first are eager to live for themselves; the second are forced to belong to the victor. So we say that the second are slaves, and the first free.”Footnote ¹⁸ More broadly, Spinoza believed that fear led to envy, hatred between individuals, and disdain for a state's laws and institutions, all of which threatened democracy.Footnote ¹⁹ Much more recently, Zygmunt Bauman claims that in the West, states have increasingly focused on stoking fear and promising safety, leading to expanding security states and the never-ending “war on terror,” both of which have eroded civil rights. He concludes that “fear is arguably the most sinister of the demons nesting in the open societies of our times.”Footnote ²⁰

This article contributes to the new history of fear in West Germany, but unlike most of the recent work on this subject, it emphasizes the destructive, violent, and antidemocratic impact of fear. Unlike the fears examined in recent works, Germans’ post-reunification fears identified foreigners on German soil as the agents of destruction.Footnote ²¹ Without wanting to propose a simplistic racist continuity spanning Germany's twentieth century, the apocalyptic fear of foreigners after reunification fits into a longer tradition of fears of racial destruction. During the Kaiserreich, Germans feared the impact of “race mixing” in its imperial territories on German national identity and German racial purity, but after World War I, these fears arrived with force in the metropole.Footnote ²² Tina Campt has shown that Germans responded to France's use of Black colonial troops in the occupation of the Rhineland after World War I—which Germans called the “Black Shame on the Rhine”—by portraying themselves as victims of a racial conspiracy meant to pollute and destroy the German race.Footnote ²³ Nazi antisemitism likewise described Jews as a racial threat, one that had to be annihilated before it could destroy the German race and nation.Footnote ²⁴ After World War II, in much more muted tones, one still heard whispers that the German people were being destroyed by Jewish Displaced Persons and African American occupation troops.Footnote ²⁵

This article makes three historiographical interventions. First, it builds upon a growing body of work that highlights the persistence of racism in Germany after 1945. Whereas most of this scholarship has emphasized the emergence of a new cultural racism after 1945, I show that, at the popular level, a biological understanding of race was more prevalent than is generally assumed as late as the early 1990s. Second, by highlighting fears of state collapse and racial destruction, I argue for a substantially more nuanced understanding of German reunification. Often interpreted teleologically as the end point of a long and successful process of Westernization or modernization after the horrors of the Third Reich, as the crowning accomplishment of postwar “recivilization,” the letters to Weizsäcker show that Germans experienced reunification as a deeply unsettling time.Footnote ²⁶ Far from representing “the end of history,” many Germans experienced the collapse of communism and the first years of the Berlin Republic as the beginning of a new and uncertain era in which nightmare visions just might come to pass.Footnote ²⁷ Third, I highlight the intersection of race thinking and memory by showing that racial fears of destruction were frequently shaped by memories of Germany's dark past, from the collapse of the Weimar Republic to the memory and experience of war and genocide.Footnote ²⁸ More broadly, I seek to integrate the history of migration—and the German response to foreigners and minorities—into the history of German reunification and postwar Germany more generally.Footnote ²⁹

Asylum Seekers and Antiforeigner Violence after Reunification

The explosion of violence against foreigners and increasing levels of antiforeigner sentiment in the early 1990s did not come from out of the blue. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, West German attitudes toward foreigners and asylum seekers hardened, both at the governmental and popular levels.Footnote ³⁰ Soon after taking office in 1982, and in the midst of rising popular hostility toward Turkish labor migrants and their families, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his government developed a plan that sought to dramatically reduce the number of Turks in Germany by paying them and their families to leave Germany forever. The plan, overwhelmingly supported by the German people, was put into law in 1983.Footnote ³¹ Kohl wanted to make clear very early on that the Federal Republic was not a country of immigration. At the same time, successive West German governments, first under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and then under Kohl, sought to limit the number of asylum seekers, who were now stigmatized as “economic refugees” (Wirtschaftsflüchtlinge). They did this by making it more difficult for asylum seekers to reach West Germany and by placing substantial restrictions on asylum seekers—including barring them from working—in order to make applying for asylum less desirable.Footnote ³² The 1980s also witnessed increasing far-right violence against foreigners and minorities, including arson attacks that killed two Vietnamese refugees in Hamburg in 1980 and three members of a Turkish family and a German roommate in Schwandorf in 1988.Footnote ³³ Fear of and hostility toward foreigners and minorities was not limited to a radical fringe. Indeed, in a 1982 survey, 43 percent of West Germans indicated that they felt “threatened by the high proportion of foreigners in their place of residence.”Footnote ³⁴

Antiforeigner sentiment increased significantly during the 1980s, a reality that shaped policy and social and political discourse on asylum and migration in the early 1990s. Nonetheless, the period from 1990 to 1993 represents a critical and distinctive moment in the history of migration in Germany's long postwar history. Those years witnessed the arrival of by far the largest number of asylum seekers and the highest level of antiforeigner violence—measured by attacks and deaths—in Germany's postwar history up to that point, as well as the passage of a controversial constitutional amendment to restrict the right to asylum, an act that was of such consequence that the historian Patrice G. Poutrus calls it “another founding act of the Berlin Republic.”Footnote ³⁵

During the Cold War, communist East Germany had accepted only small numbers of refugees, while the Federal Republic emerged as one of Europe's major receiving countries for asylum seekers.Footnote ³⁶ The collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia, however, led to an unprecedented numbers of foreign asylum seekers arriving in Germany in the early 1990s.Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, in the year 1992 alone, 438,191 people sought asylum in Germany, more than four times West Germany's peak year prior to the collapse of communism in 1989.Footnote ³⁸ The arrival of 1.4 million ethnic German Aussiedler (resettlers) between 1989 and 1993, mainly from the Soviet Union, only intensified the widespread sentiment that Germany was facing threatening levels of migration.Footnote ³⁹

In 1990, the ruling Union parties, the CDU and the CSU (Christian Social Union), pursuing one of their long-held goals, launched a concerted campaign to push for a constitutional reform to limit the right to asylum. According to Ulrich Herbert, between 1990 and 1993, “This developed into one of the sharpest, most polemical and most consequential domestic debates in postwar German history.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The core of the asylum campaign focused on convincing Germans that the overwhelming majority of asylum seekers were “economic refugees” and therefore “bogus asylum seekers” who did not face persecution in their homelands but simply wanted to live off of the generous German welfare system. At times, politicians and officials from the CDU/CSU went further and presented asylum seekers as dangerous criminals, such as when the head of the CDU fraction in Berlin complained about foreigners who “wander the streets begging, conning, and sometimes even stabbing people, are arrested and then, simply by shouting the word ‘asylum,’ enter a seven year long legal proceeding that taxpayers have to pay for.”Footnote ⁴¹

The press, especially but not only the conservative tabloid Bild-Zeitung, played a key role in portraying asylum seekers as “asylum swindlers” who represented a threat to the German nation.Footnote ⁴² Even the popular center-left magazine Der Spiegel featured a cover image in 1991 that depicted the German state as a boat that was overloaded with foreigners and about to go under, thereby pushing into the mainstream the notion that “the boat is full,” an idea that had previously been confined to the far right.Footnote ⁴³ The asylum debate inflamed passions in Germany, so much so that, looking back at the debate twenty years later, one German journalist likened it to a “religious war.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The political and media anti-asylum campaign made a powerful impression on the German people. Between June 1991 and July 1993, Germans considered the asylum issue to be the most pressing matter facing the country, more important even than dealing with reunification and soaring unemployment.Footnote ⁴⁵

The anti-asylum campaign culminated in the so-called asylum compromise, an agreement in December 1992 between the ruling CDU/CSU and the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) that called for a constitutional amendment that would severely restrict the right to asylum.Footnote ⁴⁶ The toxic asylum debate was propelled and punctuated by the greatest outburst of antiforeigner violence in Germany's long postwar history. In total, between 1990 and 1993, at least forty-nine non-Germans were killed in this wave of violence.Footnote ⁴⁷ Antiforeigner violence surged first in the former East Germany, where it took on terrifying form in Hoyerswerda in 1991 and Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992, when, over the course of days, thousands of onlookers cheered on right-wing youths who threw stones and Molotov cocktails at buildings housing foreigners. After the pogrom in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, Berlin's interior secretary Dieter Heckelmann (CDU) stated that “what the chorus of approval expressed was not right-wing radicalism, xenophobia or even racism, but the fully justified resentment of the massive abuse of the right to asylum.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The deadly attacks quickly spread to the West, with three Turkish Germans killed in an arson attack in Mölln in 1992. The single deadliest attack of this era, the murder of five Turkish Germans in Solingen that this article began with, took place in late May 1993, three days after the asylum compromise was passed into law.Footnote ⁴⁹ Although the campaign to limit the right to asylum targeted asylum seekers, many Germans did not make fine distinctions between asylum seekers and minorities who had lived in Germany for decades. It was thus not just asylum seekers, but a whole range of minority groups, especially Turkish guest workers and their descendants, who were demonized and targeted for violence. Germans’ racial fears must be understood against this triple backdrop: large-scale migration into the country, a vitriolic campaign to restrict the right to asylum, and explosive violence against foreigners.

Racism with Races

After the horrors of the Third Reich, race became a taboo subject throughout much of the Western world. According to David Theo Goldberg, Europeans adopted the following logic: “There is no racism because race was buried in the rubble of Auschwitz.”Footnote ⁵⁰ But racism had not gone away; it had simply changed. In 1988, the French philosopher Etienne Balibar identified the development of a new type of racism in the postwar world. According to Balibar, this was a “racism without races … a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences.”Footnote ⁵¹ In the last two decades, historians of postwar Germany and scholars in related fields have detailed both the persistence and transformation of racism after the defeat of the National Socialist “racial state.”Footnote ⁵² Whether they have examined West German attitudes toward African American occupation soldiers and their mixed-race offspring; fears of supposedly violent, temperamental, and backward “southerners,” as guest workers were often referred to in the 1950s and 1960s; the stigmatization of Turks and Muslims more generally; or East German attitudes toward foreigners, most scholars have pointed to the presence of cultural, rather than biological or scientific, racism.Footnote ⁵³ Rita Chin's comment on how the new racism shaped West German debates about the integration of Turkish guest workers more or less describes the conclusions reached by most scholars of race and migration in postwar Germany. She writes that “cultural difference, rather than racial purity in the older Nazi sense of blood and biology, became the new, more acceptable way of explaining who belonged to German society and who did not.”Footnote ⁵⁴

This type of cultural racism was evident in the letters that Germans wrote to Weizsäcker during the early 1990s. Shortly after the days-long assault on foreigners in Hoyerswerda, a man from Braunschweig condemned the attacks but said he could understand them. He noted that he had read enough “scientific papers on the peoples of Africa, Arabia, and Asia” to know that they were lazy and not inclined to work. “The asylum-people (Asylantenvölker),” as he called them, would have be taught how to learn, teach, and work, and even then, he maintained, “in twenty to twenty five years these peoples will only be as far along as we were around 1965.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Lumped together into an undifferentiated mass and described as being culturally backward, this writer was sure that non-Europeans could never truly belong in Germany. Jutta Schmidt from Frankfurt described herself as a “normal citizen” who was disturbed by the influx of foreigners. She called for all citizens from the former Eastern Bloc countries to return to their homelands and then, emphasizing the significance of culture, said that ethnic German Aussiedler should have been given priority over asylum seekers. She believed that it would have been better “to have more ethnic Germans from Russia enter the country instead of bogus asylum seekers from completely foreign cultures. Their children, well-educated and hardworking like their parents, would also be a piece of the future for us. In contrast, what use are Nigerians to us?”Footnote ⁵⁶

More surprising than these expressions of cultural racism, which reflected the sort of differentialist thinking that was common throughout the long German postwar era, was the frequency with which letter writers viewed race as a biological reality that should shape Germany's asylum and migration policies. Instead of Balibar's notion of “racism without races,” they adhered to a worldview that can better be described as racism with races. Some Germans believed that God or some sort of higher power had created distinct races and given each race its own part of the earth, which they were not to stray from. Erika Winter, a nurse from Frankfurt, asserted that Germany was struggling to come to grips with its “asylum and foreigner problem” because German foreigner policy ignored the “law of creation (Schöpfungsgesetz).” This law, she continued, says that “every race is meant for, indeed placed in or also provided with, its own country.” “Disregarding this law of creation,” she contended, “results in horrific chaos, as we now see every day, and leads our youth to instinctively go on a rampage against asylum seekers and foreigners.” For Winter, not only was the existence of distinct races a biological reality, but the influx of foreigners caused an instinctive violent response from German youths. She called for all foreigners to be removed from Germany, which she believed would cure or alleviate all of Germany's social problems and would have positive effects for the foreigners who would be back in their native environments.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the aftermath of the Solingen attack, a man from outside of Ludwigshafen shared a similar idea. He stated that foreigners were flowing into Germany only to take advantage of the German welfare state, and he also thought that even guest workers, many in the country for decades, should return to their homelands. According to him, “When God created the world, he also placed the human races into their respective countries. That is why everyone should stay in their country and not become a burden to others.”Footnote ⁵⁸

While some pointed to the supernatural to explain both the existence of races and their own antiforeigner politics, others explained their animus toward foreigners with reference to the sort of scientific racism that had deep roots in German history. Norbert Hartmann, from a small town near Hamburg, explained the science of race at the outset of his letter: “No scientifically informed person doubts the correctness of the finding that no specimen of a biological species can leave its phylogenetic basis. Many of us know, consequently, that man is also subject to this lack of freedom, whether he likes it or not.” Politicians, he continued, did not seem to recognize “that the increasing popular outrage at the flood of asylum seekers is based on a concrete phylogenetic fixation.” This was his way of saying that human races were real and biologically distinct and that any group that felt that its racial purity was being threatened would respond, again instinctively, with hostility against foreigners. Politicians’ efforts to warn the German people against racism, xenophobia, and right-wing politics, Hartmann concluded, were foolish because they conflicted with a hard biological reality. Trying to stamp out racism, to him, was “like trying to do away with bowel movements.” Both were biologically impossible.Footnote ⁵⁹

Other Germans shared Hartmann's scientific racism. In a letter published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Götz Baum, a doctor in Koblenz who was in his early seventies, objected to the influx of asylum seekers and pointed to the writing of the prominent Munich-based behavioral scientist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt to support his own racial worldview.Footnote ⁶⁰ Baum insisted that “humans are designed to form groups and to associate with those who are the same or at least similar. The more foreign other people are and the more they appear in large numbers, the stronger the emotional aversion in a previously homogeneous society.” He concluded that “this is a law of nature.” As in the previous letter, he viewed hostility toward foreigners as an inevitable, almost biologically driven response to rising immigration.Footnote ⁶¹ Along the same lines, a surgeon and head physician from southern Bavaria claimed that “it is a phenomenon required by natural law that all living creatures—in the interest of their own continued existence—reject those who are foreign to their habitat (lebensraum-fremde).”Footnote ⁶²

German racial thinking from the late nineteenth century through the fall of the Third Reich in 1945 had never been based purely on biology and science (or pseudoscience). Even Nazi racial thinking, often thought of as being obsessed with biological and scientific classification, was a composite of scientific and cultural racism.Footnote ⁶³ This blending of racist traditions is also evident in the letters that Germans wrote to Weizsäcker in the early 1990s. Gudrun Fischer, who identified herself as part of the “postwar generation,” pointed to the significance of culture when it came to immigration to Germany. According to her, “Europeans from the EC states (European Economic Community) are not foreigners for us. We come from the same culture. Already with Eastern Europeans there are difficulties. And especially with the Muslim Turks.” She thus had a finely calibrated mental geography of immigrant desirability, with Western Europeans acceptable, Eastern Europeans appearing to be problematic, and Turks—presumably because of their Islamic faith and culture—being especially undesirable. But in the same letter, she also gave voice to a much more rigidly biological conception of race. She insisted that “racism exists because there are races. It is necessary for the preservation of your own species and for the protection of your own territory.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Willy Busch, from West Berlin, likewise combined cultural and biological conceptions of difference. He first denounced Turks in more culturalist terms, stating that they “had already in the past proven themselves to be unable and unwilling to integrate” and had also “oppressed and exploited” the German people. But he closed his long letter with a vision of hereditary racial difference, based, in this case, on skin color. According to him, “Foreigners who are born here are not Germans! Or is a Negro who is born in Greenland an Eskimo?”Footnote ⁶⁵

In late 1981, a group of conservative West German professors wrote and published the Heidelberg Manifesto, which presented foreigners, and especially Turks, as a racial threat to the German nation. The manifesto highlighted incommensurable cultural differences between Germans and foreigners, but it also presented race as a genetic and biological reality. According to Rita Chin, it represented the first time since the early postwar years that “the older language of race was invoked to describe a group of people as fundamentally incompatible with Germans.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Commentators at the time denounced the manifesto and its authors as being racist, and since then scholars have described it as representing an extreme position and having little influence beyond the far right.Footnote ⁶⁷ But the letters Germans wrote to Weizsäcker suggest that just a decade later, by the early 1990s, a biological understanding of race was more widespread than is generally assumed and was not found only on the far right.Footnote ⁶⁸

Apocalyptic Fears I: National and Racial Destruction

This outpouring of racial rhetoric, written without shame to the president of the republic, did not exhaust itself with explanations of the science of race or the significance of cultural difference. A substantial number of letter writers conjured up apocalyptic visions of destruction. For the sake of analysis, these visions can be grouped under two rubrics: fear of national and racial destruction and fear of state collapse and civil war. In the first, and smaller group, writers envisioned a not-so-distant future in which the German people—imagined to be a racially or nationally defined group—were overrun, destroyed, and, in some cases, actually replaced by alien newcomers. Under the second rubric, a larger number of Germans foresaw the rising foreign population in Germany leading to civil war conditions and ultimately the collapse of the state. Although useful analytically, these groupings have substantial overlap. Those who feared the destruction of the German people sometimes also feared or implied that civil war conditions or the collapse of the state might come about. Likewise, those who feared the emergence of civil war and the collapse of the state often described this catastrophic future in racialized terms. Above all, these two apocalyptic fears shared a fundamental characteristic: in both visions, Germans portrayed migrants as the agents of Germany's downfall and destruction.

In both of these apocalyptic visions, Germans frequently critiqued and rejected multiculturalism. As other scholars have shown, this was an era in which Germans engaged in a contentious debate about the future of Germany's identity: Would it become a multicultural state that embraced diversity, or would it continue to deny that it was a country of immigration and insist on an ethnically German national identity?Footnote ⁶⁹ The debate on multiculturalism is not the focus of this article, but the following material nonetheless provides rich evidence from below to support Sabine von Dirke's contention that opposition to multiculturalism in Germany was often driven by “a biologist-nationalist argument which cannot hide its racist underpinnings,” an argument that “serves first and foremost to assert the allegedly insurmountable differences between ethnic cultures and peoples.”Footnote ⁷⁰

In spring 1990, during the interregnum between the East German vote for reunification and the consummation of unification on October 3, 1990, two East Germans wrote anonymous letters to Almuth Berger, East Germany's newly appointed commissioner for foreigners’ affairs, in order to protest what they saw as the destruction of the German people through migration. Communist East Germany had only a small foreign population throughout its history, and only 191,000 foreigners resided in the country at the time of reunification. Most foreigners, moreover, had been placed in isolated locations and living quarters so that they would have little contact with East Germans.Footnote ⁷¹ The fall of the Iron Curtain opened up East Germany, for the first time, to the potential of large-scale immigration, particularly from former Eastern Bloc states. Although there was only a trickle of migration into the country at this time, the arrival of Roma asylum seekers in East Berlin in spring 1990 resulted in growing concerns about the possibility of an uncontrollable surge of migration from the East.Footnote ⁷² It was in this context that two East Germans wrote to the commissioner for foreigners’ affairs.

In May 1990, writing in the name of “the people of the GDR,” one East German expressed outrage—in strikingly völkisch-nationalist language—that Berger was supposedly letting foreigners into the country “without the vote of the Volk.” He then accused Berger of being part of a plot to destroy the German people. “Your goal,” he wrote, “is nothing less than to destroy our national body (Volkskörper). You want to bring in Gypsies and Jews in masses, and then a corrosive digging machine (zersetzende Wühlmaschine) will gnaw at the German Volk in order to hollow it out from the inside and demoralize it.” He concluded with a call for Berger to resign, “because the Volk is outraged at your ruinous scheme.”Footnote ⁷³ Berger received a similar letter less than a month later from an East German in south Thuringia. This writer wanted to know what the government was doing letting in foreigners. He asked Berger if she wanted to “totally undermine and pollute our country with foreigners in this difficult time? The people have been overcome with fear and terror.” He suggested that her job should be to protect the German Volk, “not to smuggle in foreigners through false propaganda,” and warned, apparently referring to the mixing of peoples, “that when everything is nice and mixed up, decomposition begins.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Both writers thus described foreigners as pollutants or invasive species that would weaken and destroy the German national body.

Some Germans asserted that the government's migration policies would lead to the destruction and ultimately the replacement of the German people. In doing so, two letter writers referenced a far-right conspiracy—stoked relentlessly by the Nazis from 1941 until the end of World War II—that if the United States won the war, its leaders, who were supposedly controlled by Jews, planned to exterminate the German people.Footnote ⁷⁵ Günther Pohl, from West Berlin, condemned the CDU's migration and asylum policies, claiming that some of its leaders wanted to transform the German Volk into a “super-multicultural and super-multinational society.” In allowing foreigners to pour into the country, he warned that “they are not only creating a new people (Staatsvolk) that is not at all identical with the traditional German people, but that their diabolically pursued politics of over-foreignization (Überfremdungspolitik)” would also achieve what the United States had sought but failed to realize during its postwar occupation of Germany: “the greatest possible integration of foreign cultures into Germany and the most complete mixing of the German people with completely alien tribes.” For him, the end result of this process would be “the annihilation of Germany and the extermination of the Germans!”Footnote ⁷⁶ Another man from West Berlin held similar beliefs. In a letter that focused on Turkish criminality, he insisted that “multiculturalism, as history shows, always means the ultimate cultural disintegration and downfall (of the established culture) of a people.” He concluded that “whoever demands multiculturalism from us demands the destruction of the German people” and then noted that that had also been the plan in 1944–1945.Footnote ⁷⁷ Conspiratorial fears of racial destruction, sown by the Nazis nearly a half-century earlier, still shaped at least some Germans’ responses to the state's migration, asylum, and foreigner policies.

While only a small number of Germans referred to Nazi conspiracies of racial destruction in order to buttress their antiforeigner politics, others employed language that echoed the Nazi view of the world as a Darwinian struggle of nation against nation, race against race. Rolf Huber, a middle-aged man from a long-time CDU family, emphasized foreigners’ criminality and called for a complete halt to immigration. “A Volk dies,” he insisted, “if it is continually corroded nationally, culturally and religiously, as is happening with our people now!”Footnote ⁷⁸ Dieter Koch, from Munich, stated that he had nothing against foreigners who worked in Germany, but that he objected strongly to the influx of “freeloading asylum seekers.” Despite making this distinction, his letter went on to denigrate foreigners in general, who he accused of bringing in “AIDS, drugs, theft, break-ins, murder, and more.” He then raised the specter of the demographic destruction of the German people, linking his fears to both abortion and migration. “It can't be,” he wrote, “that German women take nascent life out of their stomach and foreign women get over ten in their stomach. Does one want to exterminate us in that way?” He closed by claiming that distinct racial and national groups should not mix because “God created the races, and it should stay that way.”Footnote ⁷⁹

As the deadly attacks in Mölln and Solingen made abundantly clear, the CDU/CSU's campaign to restrict the right to asylum unleashed antiforeigner sentiments that ended up targeting not just asylum seekers, but also other foreigners, especially Turks, who had been a stigmatized group in Germany for more than a decade prior to reunification.Footnote ⁸⁰ A substantial number of Germans, as should already be apparent, wrote to Weizsäcker to make clear their hostility toward Turks. But some took this a step further and envisioned a Turkish invasion that would destroy the German people, giving an apocalyptic gloss to a trope that had long been present even in mainstream West German society.Footnote ⁸¹ Shortly after the attack in Solingen, Georg Meier, a septuagenarian mechanical engineer from Lower Saxony who stated that he had never been a member of any political party, portrayed Turkish labor migration into West Germany as an invasion that, just like the Ottoman Turks who were turned back at the gates of Vienna in 1683, aimed to conquer Europe for Islam. He could not understand why German politicians would consider dual citizenship for Turks, especially in light of contemporary conflicts in Lebanon, Sudan, and Yugoslavia, which he understood to be the result of the mixing of peoples with different religions. He claimed that in these places “Christians and others were exterminated by Muslims” and asked if German politicians “want to deliver us and our children to the same misfortune.” Raising the specter of an impending holy war on German soil, Meier warned politicians that “if you help destroy our German identity, then you destroy the German people.”Footnote ⁸²

In spring 1990, an East German man wrote to Lothar de Maizière, the first and only democratically elected leader of East Germany, to congratulate him on his electoral victory and to raise his concerns about Turks settling in the state. Like Meier, he noted that the Turks had been defeated in Vienna in 1683 but that they seemed to be in the midst of another invasion of central Europe. “I have heard,” he wrote, “that very many Turks live in West Germany… these Turks mostly establish large families, so that this Turkish population spreads quickly.” With Turks heading to East Germany to establish businesses, he feared that “German reunification means a Turkish invasion for our GDR.” He insisted that every Volk and nation needed to stay within its own borders, and, more ominously, contended that “the Turkish problem requires a solution, otherwise Germany will no longer belong to us Germans.”Footnote ⁸³ It did not take long for hostility toward Turks, long prevalent in West Germany, to spread to the East.

Apocalyptic Fears II: State Collapse and Civil War

Although a substantial number of letter writers harbored apocalyptic fears of racial or national destruction, brought about by an influx of foreigners, many more feared the outbreak of civil war in Germany and the collapse of the state. These nightmare visions, too, were often expressed in racialized terms. In order to understand these fears of civil war and state collapse, we need to conceive of the momentous transformations of 1989–1991, in the German and European contexts, less as an end point, whether the “end of history” or the end of divided Germany, and more as the beginning of a new epoch, linked in countless ways, of course, to the deeper German and European past.Footnote ⁸⁴ For Germans living through the dawn of this new epoch, old Cold War era certainties no longer seemed to hold and the world appeared to be full of new possibilities, both hopeful and frightening.

As a starting point, it is useful to remember just how unlikely and unexpected the events of 1989–1991 were. In her memoir, After the Wall, Jana Hensel recalls her mother taking her as a thirteen-year-old to one of the large peace demonstrations in 1989 at Leipzig's St. Nicholas Church. Looking back on that demonstration thirteen years later, she wrote that if someone at that moment had told her that the communist East German state would soon come crashing down, she would have thought, “fat chance. The GDR couldn't disappear. Not in a million years.”Footnote ⁸⁵ As late as the summer of 1989, this basic sentiment was shared by nearly all Western Sovietologists, who, according to Philipp Ther, “were convinced of the permanence of the Cold War constellation and the Soviet Union.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, was itself an accident, one that was followed by other unforeseen developments, including East Germans—against all expectations—voting for the CDU in the state's first free elections in March, 1990, a vote that paved the way for Chancellor Helmut Kohl's push to rapidly achieve German reunification.Footnote ⁸⁷ Martin Sabrow emphasizes the shock and disorientation of the events of 1989–1990 when he writes that during those years, “Germans were ripped out of their familiar mental landscape in a way they had not anticipated.”Footnote ⁸⁸ At the same time, of course, communist regimes in state after state throughout eastern Europe collapsed, a development Padraic Kenney refers to as “a world turned upside down in the space of a few short years.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Most shockingly, in late 1991, the Soviet Union, a nuclear superpower, came crashing down under its own weight. In that same year, socialist Yugoslavia descended into a brutal and eventually genocidal civil war that pitted nation against nation. This was a televised war, beamed into living rooms throughout Germany, and it made a strong impression.Footnote ⁹⁰ Some letter writers, as will become clear, gleaned a lesson from the civil war in Yugoslavia that shaped their views on the arrival of record-setting numbers of asylum seekers.

In short, in the early 1990s, in the midst of a rapidly changing European territorial and political landscape, skyrocketing unemployment in the East and later in the West, and the massive movement of people from eastern to western Europe, it was not completely far-fetched for Germans to fear the outbreak of a civil war in Germany or to foresee the collapse of the German state.Footnote ⁹¹ Indeed, in a November 1991 survey, more than 30 percent of German respondents feared that war might break out in Germany.Footnote ⁹² These fears of war and collapse are even less surprising when one considers that throughout the long postwar era, West Germans consistently feared that their democracy would go under and perhaps be replaced by a Fourth Reich.Footnote ⁹³ What does seem much more far-fetched, however, is the suggestion that war and social collapse would result from the arrival of asylum seekers and other foreigners. For some Germans, foreigners and minorities seem to have been a convenient target upon which they could focus their anxiety and fears about the future.

Those who predicted or implied that the arrival of large numbers of foreigners would lead to the collapse of the state often displayed a deeply racialized worldview in which foreigners appeared as violent, criminal invaders. Ingo Koch, from Bonn, denounced Weizsäcker's displays of support for asylum seekers and stated that German leaders should instead focus on German victimization at the hands of asylum seekers, alleging that asylum seekers had raped and violently threatened German women and that “on multiple occasions defenseless older women were attacked and robbed by dark-skinned criminals.” He asked if German politicians and the press were “traitors to the nation (Volksverräter) or representatives of the people” and suggested that they had made a deal with “criminal invaders.” German politicians, he continued, were also criminals, as they were leading Germany into “irreversible decline” and destruction and then “stabbed in the back the few who are still able to defend themselves.”Footnote ⁹⁴

In the aftermath of the far-right attack in Mölln that killed three Turkish Germans, Uwe Böhm from Hamburg likewise emphasized the dangers of foreigner criminality, including “Kurdish dealers, freeloading Gypsies, pimps, fraudsters, and pickpockets from all over the world.” He believed that the purposeful “over-foreignization (Überfremdung)” of the country had come at an “incalculable price” and that Germany's “future is uncertain.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Days after the deadly attack in Solingen, Böhm again picked up his pen, and this time he gave a much fuller airing of his apocalyptic fears of destruction. He admitted that Germany had previously needed foreign laborers, but rejected all talk of providing them dual citizenship or voting rights. According to him, anyone who supported those ideas wanted to “inconspicuously and smoothly liquidate the German nation state and transform it into a multicultural conglomerate.” He warned that, in contrast to multiethnic states, in Germany “the most diverse ingredients are compressed into a highly explosive mixture in a confined space. Germany is a powder keg!” He provided the following bleak assessment of Germany's health and its likelihood of survival: “The medical report on patient D (D for Deutschland) is concerning: metastasizing cell disease. Questionable whether the self-healing powers are sufficient.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Women also vented their rage against foreigners and German politicians. They too foresaw the death and destruction of Germany. Emmi Schwartz, born in the early Weimar era, claimed that crime and filth were taking over Frankfurt and that most criminals were foreigners. Ordinary Germans, she claimed, were suffering from the “flood of foreigners” while politicians were carefully protected from the impact of the surge of refugees. Continuing with the proposition that political elites did not know what Germans were facing, she asked Weizsäcker if he would be comfortable lying next to “Gypsies, Turks, or Africans,” as ordinary Germans have to, if he was sick in a hospital. Turning to her fears, she contended that even young people could no longer defend themselves from the onslaught of foreigners. For Schwartz, “one can only watch as Germany dies.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Ingeborg Hartmann, a woman from Augsburg who lived through World War II, expressed similar sentiments. “Fifteen thousand asylum seekers arrive every month,” she exclaimed. “We are afraid!” She called for Russian Germans to be allowed into the country in massive numbers because she considered them to be “hard-working and respectable.” She believed, however, that “Africans, Asians, and Muslims should remain where they were placed in the world.” The influx of asylum seekers also led Hartmann to envision a dark future. “Europe,” she wrote, “is an egotistical, chaotic mess, and one day it will be destroyed by an invisible hand.”Footnote ⁹⁸

The large-scale arrival of asylum seekers, combined with the already substantial foreign population, led some Germans to foresee the emergence of civil war conditions or the imminent outbreak of civil war on German soil. Almost without exception, these letter writers objected to what they saw as Germany's disastrous transformation into a multicultural state and society. A married couple from Stuttgart that referred to themselves as “normal citizens,” and hence not part of the far right, portrayed asylum seekers as criminals and claimed that most Germans wanted the “containment of the flood of bogus asylum seekers.” To them it appeared that German politicians “no longer needed the German Volk, except for paying taxes; its culture and identity is being dissolved as quickly as possible into a multicultural society,” which could lead only “to wars and civil wars.” If Germany did not quickly change course and stop the “flood” of “bogus asylum seekers,” they feared that the state would “face a huge catastrophe” and that it would “go under in the maelstrom of events.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Dirk Wolf, from a small town near Aachen, held that asylum seekers who had really been persecuted should be granted protection, and he recognized that Germany's declining birthrate required the importation of laborers, but he nonetheless strongly opposed the influx of “economic refugees, bogus asylum seekers, and other threats.” He also warned that turning Germany into a multicultural society “would bring us civil wars or religious wars in a few years, as the current experience in other countries teaches us.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Whereas Wolf only indirectly alluded to contemporary conflicts in multiethnic societies, others pointed to specific conflicts, especially the war in Yugoslavia, in order to explain their antiforeigner sentiments and visions of doom. In doing so, they relied upon and gave voice to what Rogers Brubaker calls “ethnic common sense,” that is, “the tendency to partition the social world into putatively deeply constituted, intrinsic kinds.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Equipped with this “ethnic common sense,” for many letter writers, the origins of ethnic or racial conflict in places like Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, and South Africa required no actual analysis. The explanation was always simple: multiethnic societies, by their very nature, will eventually all devolve into ethnic violence, likely ending in civil war and state collapse. Some Germans of a historical bent even extended this lesson to the remote past, insisting—as the Nazis had—that the Roman Empire and other ancient civilizations had collapsed as a result of the mixing together of distinct peoples.Footnote ¹⁰² Most, however, focused on contemporary conflicts.

Paul Ludwig, a doctor from a small town in Baden-Württemberg, made the connection between multiethnic societies, the war in Yugoslavia, and Germany's future most concisely. Complaining about the crime rate among asylum seekers and the development of a multicultural society in Germany, he stated that “what was already known and is now being demonstrated to us in Yugoslavia ad oculus is the fact that the intermixing of peoples (Völkervermischung) must inevitably lead to civil war.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Another man from a small town near Hamburg saw Germany as essentially importing civil war into the country through its asylum policy. He claimed that 80 percent of Germans objected to the state's liberal asylum law and were concerned that with the coming “Völkerwanderung,”—a word that can be translated as migration but which also immediately calls to mind the “barbarian invasions” that supposedly destroyed the Roman Empire—“we in the smallest overpopulated country are laying the foundations for Yugoslav conditions that will bring civil war into the country, which our children will have to pay for if we do not change our asylum policy.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Along the same lines, an older woman from near Bonn demanded that all those who had been denied asylum be thrown out of the country and then raised the specter of civil war in Germany: “Civil war in Yugoslavia—soon also here in Germany?”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Racial Fear and Memory of the Nazi Past

In his study of fear in the Federal Republic of Germany, Frank Biess argues that German angst “resulted from an ever present, constantly changing and dynamic memory of a catastrophic past, which resulted in fearful and sometimes apocalyptic anticipation of the future.” The memory of the “collapse of Weimar, of National Socialism, of total war and total defeat, as well as the Holocaust,” passed down through the generations, created mental templates and language through which Germans expressed their fears.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ As we have seen, German fears of racial or national destruction and of war and civil war, brought about by uncontrolled migration, were shaped or at least heightened by the outbreak of violent ethnic conflicts in Yugoslavia and other parts of the world. But like the fears that Biess examines, they were also informed by Germany's catastrophic past. In the 1940s and 1950s, German expellees described their expulsion from eastern Europe in terms that echoed, often purposely, the Nazi persecution and murder of European Jews, in order to portray themselves as victims of the war. Robert G. Moeller writes that, in postwar expellee testimonies, “Jews were an absent presence, providing the language with which Germans could describe their own experiences.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In a similar manner, after reunification some Germans used the language and memory of racial war and genocide in order to depict Germany again as a nation of victims, with the perpetrators now being migrants and the German officials who supposedly enabled their arrival. Much of this is evident in what has previously been described. Many letter writers, as we have seen, envisioned a future in which migration would lead to the death and destruction of the German people and the German state, variously described as the liquidation, destruction, annihilation, or extermination of the German people, language that recalled the Nazi past and the Holocaust.

In a substantial number of letters, Germans made more explicit reference to the country's dark past. Viktor Schulte, a resident of Munich who lived through World War II as a young adult, stated that, like other “respectable citizens,” he had been called a “Hitler-hater” during the Third Reich and now was accused of hating foreigners. He saw clear parallels between Hitler's destruction of Germany and the actions of German politicians after reunification. He wrote that “Hitler wanted to conquer the whole world—at the expense of the Germans—and our democrats up there also want to conquer the world and make them happy—at the expense of the Germans.” When Germany's ruin was complete, the German people would have to “hide themselves safely from the many foreigners—as was the case during the occupation back then—and could only look on, now the inferiors in our own land, as our hard-won belongings are distributed under foreign domination.” In Schulte's vision, Germany, once again occupied and ruled by foreigners, would not be revived as it was after World War II. The study of history, he concluded, showed that “our German fatherland would not be the first country to be destroyed by refugees and to have its people completely exterminated.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The historical reference point for Schulte's apocalyptic vision was the defeat of Germany during World War II and the postwar occupation. More commonly, Germans identified the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the attendant rise of the Nazis as their historical touchstone. For them, the collapse of the state or emergence of a Fourth Reich would be the result, ultimately, of the chaos and suffering caused by the influx of foreigners. Rudolf Krämer, an expellee who lived in Hamburg, wanted to live his life in a peaceful Germany, not one that “will dismember itself from the inside through the STREET FIGHTING of different RACES,” as he thought would happen in a German state that was now home to “more than seventy different RACES!” Complaining about “bogus asylum seekers,” Turks, and Poles, he predicted that the German state would collapse within ten years. In doing so, he turned to the German past: “I prophesy that, just as in the Weimar Republic, today's young GENERATION, who by then will have lived for forty years with this RACIAL MISH-MASH, and will face the foreigners’ ever-increasing SOCIAL DEMANDS, will, from the date of the FALL OF THE WALL, in exactly the same time as the WEIMAR ERA, terminate this government!!!!!!!!!” The Weimar Republic lasted fourteen years, from late 1918 to early 1933; Krämer thus thought the new Germany would last only that long, from 1989 until 2003. From the tone of his letter, including his praise for the “impatient young people,” it is clear that he did not envision the government being removed through democratic means.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Other Germans used “Weimar” as a sort of shorthand, as a word full of foreboding that could call to mind visions from the past of crisis, collapse, and the rise of authoritarian rule. Karin Huber, from a town in North Rhine-Westphalia, implored Weizsäcker to listen to the lower-level municipal bureaucrats and officials who were overburdened with and threatened by “the black people who are pouring in in massive numbers.” She complained that the government was neglecting Germans while providing lavish benefits for asylum seekers and ended by stating that “enough is enough. If it keeps going like this, we will soon have what came after Weimar.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Along the same lines, a retiree from a small town in Baden-Württemberg held that no German would reject a “real refugee,” but that “99.9% of those who come to us are bogus asylum seekers.” He asserted that Germans were disturbed by the “rapidly increasing over-foreignization” and warned that “the people are becoming increasingly restless, and when they take to the streets for the first time, it is already too late, as it was with the Weimar Republic.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Christian Walter, from Bielefeld, condemned the violence against foreigners, but he blamed it on German politicians, and especially Weizsäcker, who he believed had not taken sufficient steps to stem the tide of asylum seekers. Like many other Germans, he emphasized the criminality of foreigners and rejected multiculturalism. He worried, moreover, that Weizsäcker's lack of action was destroying Germany's democracy and feared that “Weimar could indeed come again.”Footnote ¹¹² Each of these people feared that uncontrolled migration could lead to the demise of Germany's democracy, a vision of the future that was shaped by Germany's dark past.

Fear, Migration, and Reunification

The history of fear in postwar Germany is a relatively new field of inquiry. But scholars working in this area agree that, rather than dismissing Germans’ fears as being simply irrational or hysterical, we must take them seriously.Footnote ¹¹³ This is the case for two reasons. First, fear has been consistently present and widespread in the Federal Republic of Germany and thus needs to be historicized. Second, the history of fear provides a powerful vehicle for complicating and critiquing the historiographical master narrative of the Federal Republic, which for decades tended to focus, often teleologically, on its success, especially in establishing a stable democracy and a robust economy and civil society.

If we take German fears of migration seriously—which does not mean finding them rational or turning a blind eye to their racist form—German reunification also begins to look different. Over and over again, Germans insisted, in often apocalyptic terms, that the arrival of foreigners in large numbers would lead to death, war, and perhaps the destruction of the German state and people. Apocalyptic and millenarian thinking tends to emerge during periods of rapid, disorienting change. That has certainly been the case in twentieth-century German history, with apocalyptic fears flourishing during and after both world wars.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Although the chaos and disorder that accompanied German reunification cannot compare to what Germans experienced during the Weimar Republic or the early years after World War II, the letters Germans wrote to Weizsäcker suggest that many experienced reunification as a terrifying new reality, a moment when the future seemed too wide open. We know, of course, that reunified Germany has become a stable democracy, but that outcome seemed anything but certain for Germans living through those tumultuous years. Perhaps it is time to begin taking more seriously the notion that Germany was, in some respects, living through yet another destabilizing postwar period during the early 1990s.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Seen in that light, reunification appears less as a redemptive end point and more as a foreboding new beginning. Martin Sabrow captured this sentiment when he wrote, in the shadow of the 2015–2016 refugee drama, that “every day it becomes more apparent that German reunification has not been the crowning finale but rather the sinister beginning of a story that is still unfolding.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

There is analytical value in conceiving of German reunification as a new beginning, but by no means does this mean that it represented a rupture or a fundamental break with the German past. This is obvious in two areas: racism and memory. In their letters, Germans often laid bare their deeply racialized worldviews. Many employed the cultural or “new” racism that had flourished in Germany throughout the long postwar era. They described asylum seekers or Turks as peoples who were either perpetually backward or adherents of a different culture that made it impossible for them to ever adapt to German culture and society. But a substantial number of Germans also held views that can only be described as biological racism; they took the existence of biologically distinct races as a given and warned against the dangers of “race mixing.” This form of racism links reunified Germany, in most disturbing fashion, with the Nazi past. Germans employed both varieties of racism, moreover, to argue that the influx of foreigners threatened to destroy the German state and people, visions of annihilation and collapse that echoed earlier fears of racial destruction, from the age of imperialism to the “Black Horror on the Rhine” and National Socialism. Although global ethnic conflicts, especially the war in Yugoslavia, informed Germans’ apocalyptic fears of civil war, collapse, and destruction, they were also shaped in important ways by the memory of Germany's dark past, from the collapse of the Weimar Republic to the experience and memory of war and genocide. Some, for example, feared that the arrival of foreigners in large numbers would lead to the “extermination” of the German people, whereas others foresaw the rise of a Fourth Reich.

Historians of fear in postwar Germany often argue that fear played a positive role in the Federal Republic's long postwar history. In this reading, fears of the collapse of democracy or the emergence of a Fourth Reich, even if exaggerated or irrational, made Germans come together to fight against such a possibility.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Likewise, fear of nuclear radiation led to important changes in public health policy and to a better understanding of radiation.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Fears that the United States was using memory of the Holocaust to tarnish the Federal Republic's reputation led to a more open and public engagement with the history and memory of the Holocaust.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Fear, apparently, has been good for postwar Germany. But the apocalyptic fears Germans expressed about the influx of foreigners belie such an interpretation. A Panglossian history of this episode would surely point to the millions of Germans who gathered at candlelight vigils to reject racist violence, to increased antiracism organizing, and to the liberalization of German citizenship law at the end of the decade. But such a history would be deeply unsatisfying. For these fears, unlike so many others in postwar Germany, targeted vulnerable populations for violence and expulsion. Even if most letter writers did not advocate violence, they helped to foster an environment that emboldened the far right and others who took to the streets to rage against asylum seekers and minorities. Finally, their fears of racial destruction, civil war, and state collapse helped to create a terrifying new reality for foreigners and minorities in reunified Germany.Footnote ¹²⁰ Shortly after three Turkish Germans were killed in an attack by right-wing youths in Mölln in late 1992, a young Turkish boy, probably seven or eight years old, climbed onto his father's shoulders at a demonstration against the attack. The boy held up an unadorned, homemade sign with only the following words: “I'm afraid!”Footnote ¹²¹ That sentiment was ever-present for foreigners and minorities during the early 1990s, and it is very much alive in Germany today. This fear also needs a history.