Wolves at the Door

Migration, Dehumanization, Rewilding the World

Peter Arnds

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501366772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

In view of the current rhetoric surrounding the global migrant crisis – with politicians comparing refugees with animals and media reports warning of migrants swarming like insects or trespassing like wolves – this timely study explores the cultural origins of the language and imagery of dehumanization. Situated at the junction of literature, politics, and ecocriticism, Wolves at the Door traces the history of the wolf metaphor in discussions of race, gender, colonialism, fascism, and ecology. How have 'Gypsies', Jews, Native Americans but also 'wayward' women been 'wolfed' in literature and politics? How has the wolf myth been exploited by Hitler, Mussolini and Turkish ultra-nationalism? How do right-wing politicians today exploit the reappearance of wolves in Central Europe in the context of the migration discourse? And while their reintroduction in places like Yellowstone has fuelled heated debates, what is the wolf's role in ecological rewilding and for the restoration of biodiversity? In today's fraught political climate, Wolves at the Door alerts readers to the links between stereotypical images, their cultural history, and their political consequences. It raises awareness about xenophobia and the dangers of nationalist idolatry, but also highlights how literature and the visual arts employ the wolf myth for alternative messages of tolerance and cultural diversity.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

WOLF IN THE SANCTUARY: MYTH, LITERATURE, BIOPOLITICS

International migration is a complex phenomenon that touches on a multiplicity of economic, social and security aspects affecting our daily lives in an increasingly interconnected world. Migration is a term that encompasses a wide variety of movements and situations that involve people of all walks of life and backgrounds. More than ever before, migration touches all states and people in an era of deepening globalization. Migration is intertwined with geopolitics, trade and cultural exchange, and provides opportunities for states, businesses and communities to benefit enormously. Migration has helped improve people’s lives in both origin and destination countries and has offered opportunities for millions of people worldwide to forge safe and meaningful lives abroad. Not all migration occurs in positive circumstances, however. We have in recent years seen an increase in migration and displacement occurring due to conflict, persecution, environmental degradation and change, and a profound lack of human security and opportunity. (United Nation’s International Organization for Migration 2018 World Migration Report – https://www.iom.int/wmr/chapter-1)

In this era of deepening globalization migration impacts all nations, and research studies demonstrate the positive long-term socioeconomic benefits it provides (Maxmen 2018). Although the World Migration Report may instil a sense of hope in the success of global migration, the populist front has been increasingly eager to denigrate migrants and undocumented aliens as ‘animals’ breaking through borders and ‘infesting’ our Western nation states. The language and imagery used for migrants reinforce the perception of them as trespassers and criminals, implying fears of their appearance in large numbers or as lone crazed terrorists. This has, in particular, been the case in recent political rhetoric that casts migration as a criminal act, equating migrants with parasitic, predatory animals and warning against being ‘flooded’ or overrun by ‘hordes’ or ‘swarms’ of people. The current president of the United States regularly refers to migrants from the global South as ‘animals,’ labelling them as ‘invaders infesting America’, and ‘slicing and dicing young beautiful girls’ (Gupta 2017; Schanzer 2019), while David Cameron famously invoked images of biblical locust infestations by comparing migrants with ‘swarms of people coming across the Mediterranean’ (BBC News, 30 July 2015: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-33716501). It is a rhetoric that has become an integral part of what Fintan O’Toole (2018) has described as the ‘new pre- rather than old post-fascist’ political climate. According to the prominent Irish journalist, we live in a new era of preparation for widespread fascism and political violence towards minorities. He defines fascism as building ‘a sense of threat from a despised out-group’ in the context of claims such as the one that immigrants ‘infest’ our well-protected nation states, a strategy he views as a ‘test-marking’ of whether the voters of populist politicians are ready for the next step-up in language, which is to call undocumented aliens ‘vermin’. Once that has happened, O’Toole reminds us, anything is possible.

The animal that has a particularly close relationship with migration, homelessness, exile and crime is the wolf. What migrants and wolves share is the search for sanctuaries, and it is such sanctuaries which xenophobia and what I call lycophobia (fear and hatred of wolves) prevent and destroy. The root of both evils is territorialism, found in excess in right-wing politics and its populist rhetoric. Wolves, too, however, are fiercely territorial. Like humans they travel long distances in search of new territories, communicating their territoriality. Feared and demonized due to their long-standing cultural history they have become a global metaphor. The time-worn human fear of wolves, of their alleged hunger, greed and bloodlust, metaphorically of a predator attacking the nation’s body, seems to offer itself as a suitable image to reflect fears of foreigners invading our well-guarded nation states – migrants coming in from the wild, craving our food, even our children, as is suggested by ancient superstitions about ‘Gypsies’ and Jews as vagrant predators and child stealers. Ironically, in recent times it has been US policy that separated children from their families at detention camps along the US–Mexico border.

The political rhetoric likening migrants to trespassing wolves has been on the rise especially in areas where wolves have produced long-standing negative associations, as in Central Europe, where they have now reappeared, coinciding with the arrival of large numbers of refugees and immigrants. As wolf debates loom large in the United States and Central Europe, with wolves entering new territories that had so far been wolf-free, the metaphor has experienced increasing media coverage. This is particularly true in the context of fears relating to immigration and terrorism, from attention-grabbing headlines such as ‘Donald Trump Supporters Tell Immigrants “The Wolves Are Coming, You Are the Hunted” as Race Hate Fears Rise’ (Adam Lusher, The Independent, 9 Nov 2016) to commentaries on rogue politicians and world leaders such as ‘The Wolf of Pyongyang’ (David Kang, Foreign Affairs, 9 Aug 2017), to articles discussing ‘lone-wolf’ attacks: ‘We Must Track and Trap Lone Wolf Terrorists’ (Micah Halpern, The Observer, 25 Nov 2014).

At the same time, however, wolves stand in as a metaphor for those who are adamantly opposed to welcoming refugees and other migrants. Wolves are thus appropriated as a metaphor either for humans debased as trespassers and criminals or for those in power trying to fend migrants off from our gates. The image of the wolf has been usurped for a politics of excessive nationalism and at times of war as a positive symbol standing in for strength, courage, aggressive invasion of new territories, pack organization and even berserk movements such as the desperate ‘total war’ scenario carried out by the Nazis at the end of the Second World War.

Hitler identified very closely with wolves, Turkish nationalists call themselves ‘Grey Wolves’, their greeting, the so-called Wolfsgruß, which was recently banned in Austria, and for the invasion of Ukraine Putin allegedly recruited members from what has been described as his ‘shadow army’, the Night Wolves, an ultranationalist paramilitary biker gang. The wolf has been appropriated for ideological purposes since the dawn of humanity, in legal and political discourse, folklore, and in artistic representations in myth, literature, the visual arts and film. In the visual arts, for example, it has recently had a comeback in the anti-fascist messages of German artist Rainer Opolka, who has warned against racism against refugees with his highly successful art installation entitled ‘The Wolves Are Back’, featuring a series of metal wolf statues, some giving a Nazi salute, others blindfolded to represent blind hate.

Figure 1.1 Rainer Opolka’s Wolf Statue ‘NSA Man’. Courtesy of Rainer Opolka.

The wolf metaphor is consequently ambivalent in its tension between reverence and hatred for wolves. Populist discourse seems to link the time-worn fear and hatred of wolves especially to acts of trespassing. As wolves are once again entering Central Europe, sparking heated debates as to whether they should be protected or hunted down and driven away, some right-wing groups and political parties – the AfD (Alternative for Germany) or the Danish People’s Party – have likened them to the new surge of migrants, labelling them as trespassers, parasites, and un-reformable and blaming the EU for its open borders to wolves and migrants (Bennhold 2019). While the loudest voices in the Danish wolf debate speak of outlawing ‘burqas and wolves’ (Nors 2018), in a profoundly xenophobic article on the website bürgerstimme.com Marko Wild (2015) mentioned in particular Muslim migrants whom he compared with marauding wolves, emphasizing the need for both foreigners and wolves to be hunted down and removed from German soil.

If we compare these populist uses of the metaphor, we notice that in the headline ‘Donald Trump Supporters Tell Immigrants “The Wolves Are Coming, You Are the Hunted” as Race Hate Fears Rise’ (Lusher 2016) the wolf features as a hunter of immigrants, a stereotypically aggressive beast of the Western frontier and American patriotism, while European populism taps into people’s phobias about the new presence of wolves as a symbol of open borders, advocating that they be hunted down, that Europe be made wolf-free as a model for it becoming immigrant-free. This duality of the wolf as hunter and being hunted reflects the ways in which this particular metaphor has been used over millennia, the wolf in its biopolitical ambivalence on the one hand as sovereign aggressor, despot and invader, and on the other hand the wolf as vermin, and the lycanthrope as a human being without peace and outlawed by the community.

The recent populist rhetoric shows that metaphors do indeed matter if they become a form of hate speech that helps to inspire violence. The wolf metaphor has done extreme damage to wolves and humans alike, with both being demonized and, in the case of humans, being dehumanized to a level that aims to make violent reactions justifiable. By tracing the history of this metaphor via myth, literary texts, political rhetoric, film and visual culture this book aims to raise awareness about xenophobia, racism and the damage the wolf myth perpetuates for these animals and humans alike. The following pages offer an interspecies comparison which examines and warns against the twofold practice of anthropomorphization of the wolf going hand in hand with the dehumanization of individuals or ethnic groups and the destruction of their cultures. Straddling the boundaries between the humanities and the natural sciences this book will add to existing discourses on racism and other forms of political violence (e.g. Hannah Arendt, Étienne Balibar, Seyla Benhabib). It comes at a critical time in view of ongoing debates over migration in Europe, the racially charged political climate in the United States and the global spread of neo-fascist groups promoting racial divides. In order to destabilize the use of such volatile metaphors in the politics of exclusion, neo-fascism and the mythologization and demonization of wolves, this study takes a novel approach by comparing European with indigenous cultures, keeping in mind environmental, cultural and psychological modes of destruction under not only colonial, totalitarian, but also current forms of governance.

Thinking about wolves and migrants produces a range of questions: How are time-worn fears of the wolf linked to the migrant as alien Other over time and cultural space, and in contemporary political rhetoric? How does the metaphor of the wolf shape the way we treat it and humans associated with it? What are the psychological and actual effects of dehumanizing metaphors? How does the wolf metaphor itself migrate over time and through space and what happens interculturally, inter-ethnically during that process? How do colonial power structures and wolf fears imported from Europe compare with indigenous perceptions of the wolf in North America? Can indigenous and environmentalist wolf politics positively affect the migrant integration processes? Can biodiversity be redefined to include humans and multiculturalism? Can the idea of finding sanctuaries be applied to both animals and humans? This notion of sanctuary is key to this project. The wolf metaphor reflects a persistence over time and space in biopolitics that strips both migrants and wolves as well as migrants seen as wolves of their right to obtain sanctuaries.

Jon Mooallem has argued very persuasively in his 2014 Ted Talk that the stories we tell about animals are shaped by the times and places in which they are told, and affect extermination and preservation of various species tremendously. In examining the cultural history of the wolf this book will heed his words while proceeding both diachronically through the ages and across different cultural spaces. It will follow the history of this metaphor from its beginnings in Greek myth via its significance as a legal concept in the Middle Ages, to texts in which wolves appear in the context of race, gender and colonialism in North America, to its uses in National Socialism, to immigration, environmental politics and ecocritical literary responses today.

Keeping in mind that there is extensive literature on both cultural diversity and biodiversity but very little on the relations between the two (Heyd 2010), this book is an experiment in deconstructing the boundaries between human and non-human animal as well as between biodiversity and cultural diversity. We have seen that sanctuary cities for migrants, in which local politics may stray from federal politics, and places like Yellowstone offer some alternatives to the grim history of persecution and extermination that characterizes both wolves and humans seen as wolf-like predators. They are parallel models holding hopes for a regeneration of the planet, for what as early as 1795 the philosopher Immanuel Kant called Weltfrieden, the idea of world peace based on his understanding of hospitality: ‘Hospitality means the right of a stranger and as long as he behaves peaceably not to be treated as an enemy upon arrival in another country. This right of a visitor is common to all people due to their shared ownership of the surface of the planet, upon which, owing to its spherical shape they cannot disperse ad infinitum, so that they are forced to tolerate each other’s presence’ (Kant 1923 [1795]: 21; my translation).

World peace has of course always been utopian. It is threatened in many ways and yet, as important as they are, our imagination, our story telling and metaphors may perpetuate certain myths that are responsible for destroying peace among humans, between humans and animals, and lead to the extermination of species. Our imaginary projections of nature onto culture affect nature and its creatures, as the way we see a species, the way we feel about an animal, can impact its standing on the planet more than anything covered in ecology textbooks (Mooallem 2014). The current ‘wolf wars’ in Europe and the United States are for the most part a product of the mythification of an animal, having produced a great deal of tension between farmers, environmentalists and, in the United States, Native Americans. Although the reintroduction of wolves has shown certain benefits such as an increase of biodiversity, the time-worn fear and hatred of wolves are very much alive in the United States as much as in Germany, France and other countries in Western Europe, where the animal has reappeared since the 1990s and been killing livestock.

Historically, the strife between humans and wolves has largely been territorial and over natural resources, a competition for food, especially in times of war when food is scarce. As the current wolf debates are also about land use and ownership it may therefore not surprise that xenophobia towards immigrants wishing to share territory with those who have held it for generations is in the mentality of a faction of people in places like the Western United States, as opposed to many countries in Northern and Central Europe where there is a ‘right to roam’ providing public access to natural areas even when the land is privately owned. In areas where nearly all trespassing is a crime and individualism is the rule, a greater eagerness to see the wolf removed from the endangered species list is also often seen, leading to policies that entail their widespread extermination as ‘varmints’. The current aggressive immigration politics in the United States parallels the equally aggressive turn in environmental politics under the current regime (in 2019), which considers ending the endangered species status for the American grey wolf.

A place like Yellowstone National Park has demonstrated, however, that wolves can be ecologically curative when re-introduced in locations from which they had disappeared. Moreover, the extermination of wolves in an area resulting from its removal from the endangered species list causes tremendous damage to indigenous cultural identities that are traditionally closely linked to its presence. To what extent indigenous self-understanding may depend on the presence of wolves is evidenced, for example, by the rehabilitation of the grey wolf in Idaho where it has significantly reshaped the cultural identity of the Nez Perce tribe. The neo-colonial implications of a headline such as the one appearing in the UK’s Independent newspaper on 9 November 2016 ‘Donald Trump Supporters Tell Immigrants “The Wolves Are Coming, You Are the Hunted” as Race Hate Fears Rise’ cannot be fully understood unless we keep in mind the plight of the traditionally nomadic native population, their genocide and the reduction of their land rights to mere pockets of the land they used to populate.

The discussion of divergent attitudes between migratory, nomadic cultures towards their environment in general (and wolves in particular) and sedentary farming cultures forms a part of this project, as the wolf’s persistently negative image as a parasitic trespasser results largely from the experiences of agrarian cultures and settlers claiming land as property. One of the main problems about wolves reappearing in places like Germany is that they are entering what Germans call a Kulturlandschaft, land transformed from nature into culture and no longer owned by all living creatures. Transforming wilderness into culture is a quintessentially colonial experience in which animal politics and human politics converge.

From the perspective of the early colonizers arriving in North America, who took possession of the land they found, indigenous tribes and wolves were almost-identical enemies in this land quest, so that, according to Jason Mark, the ‘war against wolves and the wars against the Indians overlapped and were all but undistinguishable’. At the start of an 1865 campaign against the Northern Plains tribes, a US Army general told his troops that the Cheyenne and Lakota ‘must be hunted like wolves’ (Jason Mark 2015). If we compare this statement with the headline quoted above about Trump supporters featuring as hungry wolves hunting immigrants, we recognize how easily the metaphor can switch between wolf reverence and wolf hatred, in colonial and post-colonial power structures, and in different contexts of dehumanization.

The current trend in populism of employing metaphors for the purpose of dehumanizing its targeted groups is of course not a new phenomenon. We do not need to go all that far back in the history of persecution of undesirables to see how such metaphors contributed to genocide, if we think of Nazi ideology labelling Jews and other undesirables as typhoid-spreading rats. While wolves were revered in the Third Reich for their strength, organization and purported aggression, yet another animal metaphor was reserved for those the Reich deemed undesirable and lebensunwert, life not worth living: the metaphor of the insect, the louse in particular. In the final solution, various practices of dehumanization and killing, above all the gas chambers, point to this conceptual eradication of humans as lice. It is what in the first sentence of Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis 1915) Franz Kafka calls the Ungeziefer – the animal that in its etymology implies that it is not clean enough to be sacrificed but which can be killed by anyone with impunity – that forms the basis of this ideology of hatred in Nazi Germany towards traditionally migratory groups such as the Jew...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION: WOLF IN THE SANCTUARY: MYTH, LITERATURE, BIOPOLITICS
• Chapter 2 FEAR OF THE PACK: JEWS AND GYPSIES AS WOLVES
• Chapter 3 WOLVES AND INDIGENOUS CULTURE: MIGRATION OF A METAPHOR TO THE COLONIES
• Chapter 4 WOLVES AND WAYWARD WOMEN: BETWEEN CONDEMNATION AND EMPOWERMENT
• Chapter 5 THE WOLVES OF WAR: FASCISM, TERRORISM, RESISTANCE
• Chapter 6 NO TRESPASSING: WOLVES, BORDERS AND IMMIGRANTS
• Chapter 7 WOLF TRAILS: REWILDING THE WORLD IN THE AGE OF MIGRATION
• Chapter 8 EPILOGUE: DREAMING OF WOLVES: THE CHILDREN OF LYCAON IN THE AGE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
• References
• Index
• Imprint