German Literature

Sarrazin

Thilo Sarrazin

Germany’s best-selling non-fiction author and leading Islamophobe is Thilo Sarrazin (born 1945). He was described in The Independent newspaper as a ‘flag-bearer for Germany’s far-right’.

Sarrazin admires and quotes Britain’s racist politician Enoch Powell (1912-1998).

Sarrazin was a member of the SPD (Social Democratic Party) from 1973 to 2020, and Finance Senator for Berlin from 2002-2009.

Although Sarrazin has never been a member of the far-right political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), his books have helped to legitimise the AfD; they have paved the way for the rise of the AfD.

Sarrazin is a conservative cultural pessimist in the tradition of Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn and Oswald Spengler, as analysed by Fritz Stern in The Politics of Cultural Despair (see reading list below). While Paul de Lagarde used German Jews as a scapegoat for Germany’s problems, Sarrazin uses German Turks.

Sarrazin is an ex-banker who seeks to blame others for economic problems in order to distract from the failures of the banking system itself. Targeting migrants is a convenient distraction from problems with the financial system. Sarrazin’s pseudoscientific racist arguments have helped to shift Germany’s political centre towards the far right. He is a neoliberal and an admirer of the neoliberal thinker Friedrich Hayek (see reading list below, Rosselini and Slobodian).

Sarrazin’s most famous (and notorious) work is:

Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (2010)

(Germany abolishes itself: how we are putting our country at risk)

Chapter 1, ‘State and Society: a historical outline’, contains some brief examples from world history: ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, the middle ages in Europe, the Reformation, Enlightenment and absolutism, modernity. This crude, reductive history completely ignores the fact that European science and medicine in the middle ages was hugely influenced by Islamic science and medicine, which was far more advanced at this time.

Chapter 2, ‘A look at the future’, worries about the declining birth rate in Germany.

Chapter 3, ‘Signs of Decline’, presents the changing demographics in Germany as a sign of ‘Verfall’ (decline) – a loaded word which was frequently used in Germany around 1900 by right-wing thinkers such as Paul de Lagarde, Max Nordau and Oswald Spengler (right-wing Germans have been worrying about cultural decline since at least the 1880s).

Chapter 4 on ‘Poverty and Inequality’, argues that the true cause of poverty is not due to politics or economics, but to individual shortcomings: ‘Nicht die materielle, sondern die geistige und moralische Armut ist das Problem’ (p. 123). (‘The problem is not material poverty, but intellectual poverty and moral poverty’). This is ironic because of Sarrazin’s own intellectual poverty - as evidenced in the clumsy historical outline in chapter 1. He thinks that discussions of poverty should focus on individuals, not structural problems.

Chapter 5 recommends re-modelling the social security system in Germany so that it resembles the US ‘Workfare’ system.

Chapter 6 on ‘Education and Justice’ makes suggestions for educational reforms including nationwide IQ tests and demographic profiling.

Chapter 7 on ‘Immigration and Integration’ is a critique of multiculturalism and minority cultures. Sarrazin wants immigrants to integrate into mainstream German society as quickly as possible. The idea that Germany benefits from its own cultural, federal and regional diversity has not occurred to him.

Chapter 8 on ‘Demographics’ calls for incentives to boost the birth rate. This obsession with breeding is typical of the far right.

Chapter 9 ‘Ein Traum und ein Alptraum: Deutschland in 100 Jahren’ (A Dream and a Nightmare: Germany in 100 Years) is a delusional, xenophobic rant. It rehearses the Great Replacement conspiracy theory (described by Wikipedia as ‘a debunked white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory’).

According to Alex Street and Randall Hansen (2015, see reading list below), three factors explain the success of this book:

‘First, it had a populist, scapegoating message: Sarrazin suggests that his readers simply blame Muslims for the complex problems facing German society. Second, Sarrazin tapped into a widespread impression that concerns about migration [...] were insufficiently expressed by a political elite; in this narrow sense, Sarrazin was something of a German Enoch Powell [...]. Third, the book benefited from Sarrazin’s reputation as a competent finance minister in the Berlin Senate, which, along with the book’s use of statistics, gave it an aura of credibility. The fact that these statistics were used selectively would not be picked up by a lay reader. One noteworthy inaccuracy in the book is the claim that fertility rates among immigrants and their children are much higher than among native Germans. In fact, birth rates have converged surprisingly quickly over recent years [...] by 2010 the number of children per non-citizen woman had fallen to 1.6 [...] the average number of children for female German citizens remained steady at around 1.4’ (see reading list below, Street and Hansen, p. 194).

In other words, Sarrazin is skilled at selective (and sometimes inaccurate) use of statistics in order to justify his own prejudices.

As for Sarrazin’s claim that Turkish immigrants are under-achievers, this ignores the fact that many of the best authors in Germany today are of Turkish descent, for example Zafer Şenocak, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Fatma Aydemir.

Sarrazin does not understand that his ideas have a long prehistory. Many European political philosophers were fascinated by Islamic civilization, for example the French political theorist Montesquieu (Lettres persanes / Persian Letters, 1721). For many centuries, European writers were particularly interested in the Ottoman Empire which provided a useful foil for their ideas (see reading list below, Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies). But Sarrazin is neither a philosopher nor a historian, he is merely an ex-banker with some misinformed xenophobic opinions.

Has Sarrazin ever read Orientalism by Edward Said? He should. It is a book about him and his kind.

Sarrazin has developed his racist views in further books, including:

Der neue Tugendterror. Über die Grenzen der Meinungsfreiheit in Deutschland (2014) (The New Terror of Virtue: On the Limits of Free Speech in Germany)

Wunschdenken. Europa, Währung, Bildung, Einwanderung – warum Politik so häufig scheitert (2016) (Wishful Thinking: Europe, currency, education, immigration – why politics so often fails)

Feindliche Übernahme (2018) (Hostile Takeover)

What Sarrazin (who claims to be an economist) fails to understand is that migrant labour is good for the economy.

The West German ‘economic miracle’ of the 1950s and 1960s was reliant on so-called Gastarbeiter (‘guest workers’) from Mediterranean countries including Turkey. Sarrazin experienced the ‘economic miracle’ but he seems to have forgotten that it was predicated on migrant labour. Many West German cars, buildings and Autobahns were built by Turkish workers (on this point, see the work of the investigative journalist Günter Wallraff).

Will Germany ever thank its migrant workers for their contribution to its post-war reconstruction?

According to the Germany Institute for Human Rights:

In Sarrazins rassistischen Ausführungen und Grundaussagen werden fundamentale Prinzipien des nach 1945 geschaffenen Deutschen Grundgesetzes und der universell gültigen Menschenrechte negiert.

Sarrazin's racist remarks and basic statements negate fundamental principles of the German Basic Law, which was created after 1945, and of universally valid human rights.

Source: https://www.institut-fuer-menschenrechte.de/publikationen/detail/stellungnahme-zu-aussagen-von-thilo-sarrazin-mitglied-im-vorstand-der-deutschen-bundesbank

As Dr Hendrik Cremer, a human rights expert, points out:

Die Meinungsfreiheit ist ein zentrales Menschenrecht, das - so formuliert es das Bundesverfassungsgericht - für die freiheitlich-demokratische Staatsordnung „schlechthin konstituierend“ ist. Die Meinungsfreiheit ist jedoch kein Freifahrtschein für rassistische Diffamierungen und Parolen. So verpflichtet etwa das UN-Übereinkommen zur Beseitigung jeder Form rassistischer Diskriminierung (ICERD) Vertragsstaaten wie Deutschland, die Verbreitung rassistischen Gedankenguts gemäß Art. 4 a) ICERD unter Strafe zu stellen.

Freedom of speech is a central human right that - as the Federal Constitutional Court puts it - is ‘absolutely essential’ to the free and democratic state order. However, freedom of speech is not a free pass for racist defamation and slogans. For example, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) obliges state signatories such as Germany to criminalise the dissemination of racist ideas in accordance with Article 4 a) ICERD.

Source: Hendrik Cremer, ‘Verbreitung rassistischen Gedankenguts - Die Meinungsfreiheit hat Grenzen’, in: Grenzen im politischen Meinungskampf. Zum Verbot rassistisch-diskriminierender Wahlkampagnen, ed. by Zentralrat Deutscher Sinti und Roma, Schriftenreihe Band 11, Heidelberg 2017, pp. 89-107.

Sarrazin is a swindler and his books are a blatant example of pseudoscientific white-collar racism.

His popularity in Germany is a disgrace.