How did the fall of the Berlin Wall impact
non-white Germans?
Non-white Germans say their euphoria over unification was
short lived as racist dynamic unfolded after historic event.
Joshua Kwesi Aikins was nine when the Berlin Wall
came down on November 9, 1989.
Living in a housing block in the north of the city a few
hundred metres away, he was excited as the physical structure started to
crumble.
"I knew it was Germany on the other side, but it looked
different, had a different system and people who tried to come over were
prevented from doing so. There was this feeling of - it is good that this
ends," he told Al Jazeera.
In the years that followed, many Germans across the country
embraced the new-found freedoms and family reunions.
The fall came as protests calling for reform across the
communist bloc eventually arrived in East Germany, adding pressure
on authorities to act.
On November 9, 1989, a spokesman for East Berlin’s Communist
Party announced that from midnight, GDR citizens would be free to cross the
border. His surprise announcement led to thousands of East Germans flocking to
the Wall and guards were forced to open barriers.
It marked the beginning of the end for the physical
structure that had divided the city from 1961. The fall of the wall, which had
come to symbolise the Cold War, led to the reunification of Germany and
heralded a new chapter in European history.
But for Aikins, a German Ghanaian, and other people of
colour living in the country, the reality of reunification was different.
"The patriotism that followed reunification centred
around Germany being one again, but unfortunately, what surfaced soon after
that was a seriously racist dynamic," Aikins said.
"There was a surge in far-right youth movements and
activism, which led to an increase in outwardly and aggressively racist
violence. Slogans like 'Wir sind ein Volk' (We are one people) and 'Wir sind
das Volk' (we are the people') which had been used in the peaceful revolution
and reunification movement were now appropriated by the far right.
"Nazi ideas of the German Volk as a project of
homogeneity and superiority were evoked. Such talk was laced with threats of
racist violence.
"We were witnessing this and I began to question what
this meant for the country I was born in."
At some point during reunification, Germany stopped
addressing its Nazi past and following generations have continued to perpetuate
the racist and colonialist ideology of the white 'Ubermensch' as the dominant
race.
Some of the
worst cases of far-right violence included the 1992 xenophobic riots
in
Rostock-Lichtenhagen, where thousands threw molotov cocktails at an asylum
seeker's home amid racist chants while locals applauded.
That followed two arson attacks on Turkish homes - first in
Molln in 1992 and a year later in Solingen - in which eight people lost
their lives and many more were injured.
'I used to be beaten up every morning'
Mai Thu Bui's parents were among thousands of
Vietnamese who came to the GDR after the Vietnam war.
As contract workers, they were not afforded the same rights
as German citizens.
"My parents told me there was a contractual clause that
prevented workers from having children," she told Al Jazeera.
"So abortions among Vietnamese women became
normalised."
Bui as a child pictured with her family [Courtesy: Mai
Thu Bui]
After reunification, her father - a translator, and her
factory worker mother - chose to stay in Germany unemployed,
rather than returning to Vietnam with a three-month wage packet.
Bui, 28, said her early years in Plauen, a city near the
Bavarian border in former East Germany, were tainted by racist violence.
"I used to be beaten up every morning during first
grade and was called racial slurs like 'slit eyes'," she said.
"There was an ongoing threat of neo-Nazis and every-day
racism. After reunification, a doctor in the West said to my father, 'Why did
you leave East Germany and come here?' It was these kinds of experiences that
made him more shy and pushed him to retreat from society."
In 1963,
when she was seven, she moved to the GDR from Ecuador. Her mother,
who was involved in left-wing politics, was one of many Latin Americans who
found in the GDR a place of solidarity and acceptance.
But Muriel's daily life in Leipzig, a city around 150km from
Berlin, didn't always live up to the GDR's self-defined anti-fascist image.
"People would often stop me and say, 'Why don't you
wash yourself? Look at your skin, it's so filthy.' Sometimes they would throw
stones or rubbish at me, it was very violent," she said.
She went to
study in West Germany in 1976. Racism and a new sense of exclusion
grew after 1989.
"We were made to feel invisible and many people lost
their jobs. Nobody was interested in the social or financial problems we were
facing and there was no psychological support."
Muriel - by then a mother-of-two - returned to Ecuador five
years later.
Impact of reunification racism
Within a few years, the extreme racist violence that had
characterised the early post-wall years subsided. But for Aikins and Bui, the
mental and physical impact left a mark.
Aikins, a political scientist and human rights activist,
said: "The violence died down but once you have seen that kind of violence
it never goes back to this notion of innocence, because now there is this
looming threat. People I knew, including my dad, were chased in the
street. I felt claustrophobic.
"I had to learn how to read far right visual codes like
shoe laces, or a certain brand to know if I was at risk. We experienced the
consequences of far-right strategies such as the creation of so-called
Nationally Liberated Zones - deprived areas the far right would go into and
help people out with things like shopping, while also spreading their racist
ideas.
"I had to create a mental map of the city, and even
today there are parts of my hometown that I can’t go to. That’s a state failure."
Joshua
Kwesi Aikins was nine when the wall came down [Courtesy of Tania Castellvi]
Bui's parents have since divorced - a decision she says more
Vietnamese parents would have made if diaspora life wasn't so lonely.
"For me, the internalised racism has been problematic,"
said Bui, today a Berlin-based community artist and activist.
"You grow up with it and then get used to it. During
my teen years, I internalised in a way that I would laugh louder at jokes about
me than white people."
30 years on
The anniversary
comes a month after two people were killed in an anti-Semitic, far-right attack at
a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle.
Commentators say the nation's troubled racist history is
ever-present.
Muriel, 63, has since returned to Germany and founded
several migrant organisations alongside working as a psychologist and
psychotherapist.
Eastern
German city Dresden declares “Nazi emergency”
Similar
experiences of racism, exclusion and isolation are taking a toll on the mental
health of her clients - 80 percent of whom are young German people of colour.
"They say that their problems lie with society,"
she said. "They tell me, 'My pain is unseen, we don't have our own space,
we hide, we are unseen.' They feel very weighed down by these experiences.
"At some point during reunification, Germany stopped
addressing its Nazi past and following generations have continued to perpetuate
the racist and colonialist ideology of the white 'Ubermensch', (superior race)
as the dominant race. This is the reference point for groups like the AfD.
"We don't want to be afraid, but we are returning to
this state of fear."
Weeks ago,
the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party advanced their
presence in the east with another good election result.
Lucia Muriel, 63, says racism is on the rise again in
Germany [Courtesy of Lucia Muriel]
"The far right are on the ascendency and it is shifting
the limits of what can be said in political and media discourse," said Aikins,
the German Ghanaian political scientist. "Things that used
to be clearly seen as racist are now matters of debate on prime time TV talk
shows - it's quite similar to what was happening in the 1990s.
"I was an expert member of a parliamentary commission
of inquiry on racism and discrimination in the German state of Thuringia. In
the course of the proceedings, two members of the AfD were discussing 'black
genes' and 'Jewish genes'. Given Germany's colonial and Nazi history, I never
thought a discussion like this could happen in a contemporary German
parliament. But it did happen as a matter of procedure, and this creeping
normalisation is the real problem now.
"My hope is that enough people will be drawn to the
dynamics of the reunification era to help the country come out of this moment
of deja-vu."
Gouri
Sharma
Reference:
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/fall-berlin-wall-impact-germans-colour-191106181738765.html
