Hypersexuality and Headscarves

Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany

Damani J. Partridge

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780253005311
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

In this compelling study, Damani J. Partridge explores citizenship and exclusion in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That event seemed to usher in a new era of universal freedom, but post-reunification transformations of German society have in fact produced noncitizens: non-white and "foreign" Germans who are simultaneously portrayed as part of the nation and excluded from full citizenship. Partridge considers the situation of Vietnamese guest workers "left behind" in the former East Germany; images of hypersexualized black bodies reproduced in popular culture and intimate relationships; and debates about the use of the headscarf by Muslim students and teachers. In these and other cases, which regularly provoke violence against those perceived to be different, he shows that German national and European projects are complicit in the production of distinctly European noncitizens.

ONE

Ethno-patriarchal Returns: The Fall of the Wall, Closed Factories, and Leftover Bodies

Although socialist ideology and its adherents would vehemently make claims to the contrary, under “actually existing socialism” (see Verdery 1996)—in spite of an international rhetoric that claimed understandings of universal rights and belonging—socialism in the national context revealed social differentiation as official policy. The production of noncitizen bodies in these cases was achieved through technologies including abortion and contraception, forced removal, and ghettoization. Socialism included national economies that differentiated labor power, as in the examples of temporary work and temporary workers in the postwar period in West Germany. What happened to East Germany’s foreign contract workers after the two Germanys’ unification is consistent with their status in other socialist, social democratic, and capitalist states. Indeed, as others have suggested, state capitalism may be the more helpful terminology for understanding the East German case and its noncitizen workers.

The differentiation between types of belonging can be seen in the care provided for the East and West German citizens compared to the production of noncitizen bodies. It can also be seen in the rush toward unification, which reemphasized national belonging and linked Germanness with social, political, and economic rights—undergirding on an official level what neo-Nazis were articulating with baseball bats on the reunified streets.

Backgrounds of “Temporary” Workers and Their East and West Contexts

Both Gastarbeiter (guest worker) and Vertragsarbeiter (contract worker) are terms that suggest foreignness in each of the two Germanys; these terms also suggest futures constructed in terms of limited stays. The invitation to both of these kinds of workers during the Cold War in West and East Germany, respectively, was also a response to the economic necessity for more laborers, beginning with the invitation to Italian workers in the late 1950s to come to West Germany, and in the 1960s with the state-to-state contracts that allowed Vertragsarbeiter (first from Poland, later from Vietnam, Mozambique, and Angola, among other socialist brothers/sisters) to come to East Germany.

What happens when the so-called temporary worker overstays his/her contract or his/her “guest” status? The relevant issues here are: What happens to the configuration of his/her rights, what happens to his/her body, and what are the possibilities for his/her political participation? In the initial East and West German formulations, he/she was never a citizen, and there was no plan for permanent immigration or naturalization. Furthermore, in almost all cases, the kind of labor for which the guest or contract worker was brought in was physical. In other words, not only the economy, but also their age would limit the utility of these workers. Here, I want to distinguish the politics of economic utility from those of rights, security, or care.

With the financial crisis of the 1970s, the guest worker jobs began to disappear from West Germany, but there was no political possibility (perhaps because of the background of the Holocaust) of forcing people to leave who wanted to stay, and eventually the federal government implemented a family unification policy, which allowed immigrants who had participated in the guest worker program to bring family members to West Germany, with some notable restrictions (see Chin 2007).¹

In East Germany, the fall of the Wall led to the disappearance of East German state-owned factory jobs; many were initially bought cheaply by West German entrepreneurs, but then ultimately closed—with the West Germans arguing that East German factories were too inefficient when compared to West German production. Legally (at least initially), however, the contracts of the foreign socialist workers had not run out. While the new unified German government was encouraging them to leave, they had a legal right to stay.

In the cases of both West German Gastarbeiter and East German Vertragsarbeiter, what will become apparent below is what happens to “visiting” bodies after they are no longer needed for the economy; what happens to the workers’ social and political mobility will also become apparent. With the implementation of family reunification policies in both East and West Germany, the further question emerges: What happens to their progeny?

East Berlin, 1995

Large sections on the outskirts of East Berlin were easily distinguishable from the outskirts of West Berlin even long after most of the Berlin Wall was in museums, on postcards, in living rooms, and in desk drawers. High-rise housing complexes and low-rise buildings from the 1970s shared the same prefabricated socialist East German architecture. The first time I saw it, I was reminded of the projects I used to see from the highway on the way out of New York City. But before the Wall fell, these portions of the East German capital were sites of privilege. They had telephone lines and gas (as opposed to coal) heating, they were relatively new, and there was easy access to shopping, youth centers, and schools.

Now they stand as a reminder of a past era of socialist modernity. These high-rise buildings not only allowed for convenient worker housing, but also made it possible for East German officials to concentrate foreign contract workers into segregated complexes. When the Wall fell, West German Christian Democratic politicians said that these buildings were an eyesore and should be removed. At the very least, they wanted to remove the monuments to socialist leaders and activists and to change the street names. Many East Germans saw this as an erasure of their history. The scents of socialism were gone: the familiar smells of cleaning chemicals that are no longer produced, the outside smells of factories that are now closed, and the smells of East German cars that are now in rare supply (see Berdahl 1999). But in addition to the changes in the physical landscapes, which still for the most part remain on the edges of the eastern German cities, there are living bodies left over with no clear sense of future purpose. These are the bodies of former factory workers who came from Mozambique, Angola, China, North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam.²

In the post-socialist context, even former Eastern European citizens’ bodies got reimagined and reconceived. Eastern European women, who used to be seen as equally contributing members of the nation, at least ideologically, were remade in new national images. Now there is a traffic in women’s bodies from Russia to Germany. The German-Czech border is lined with young recruits to prostitution. In the unified Germany, East German women’s bodies are thought of more explicitly in terms of family duties and childbirth, particularly in the projections of West German political rhetoric from the Christian Democratic Party. Unlike the White German women, the former foreign contract workers’ bodies are no longer useful to the nation, since the factories are now closed, so these subjects of exclusion are forced to become entrepreneurs. The press represents Vietnamese former workers largely as part of what they call a “cigarette mafia”—people at urban express train stations (e.g., the S-Bahn in Berlin) covertly selling cigarettes without collecting the mandatory state sales tax (see Bui 2004).

Politicians use these representations as justification for the removal of those who did not “go back” after the initial moment of euphoria when the two Germanys unified. In 1992, youths attacked asylum homes and former contract worker housing complexes in East and West Germany. In a number of cases, local German residents applauded as Molotov cocktails shattered glass windows. Young people stood below and repeatedly shouted, “Foreigners get out!” The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) wrote, “At the end of 1989, there were 170,000 foreigners of whom 90,000 were factory workers living in the German Democratic Republic” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 1993), and “foreign students, trainees, and workers had come from the other countries in the 1970s.” At the time the Wall fell, the paper estimated that there were 60,000 Vietnamese, 15,000 Mozambican, and about 1,300 Angolan contract workers (ibid.: 6). The paper also estimated that there were 8,500 Cubans, although the Cuban government did not allow these workers to stay.

For the foreign contract workers, the Maizière government [GDR] decided on June 13, 1990, to give these workers an equal status to the German workers. After the business and currency union and the unification with the Federal Republic of Germany [West Germany], the contract workers were offered state aid. If they agreed to return [to their country of origin], they would receive 3,000 German marks [approximately US$1,700] and a return airline ticket. (ibid.)

According to the FAZ, most took the 3,000 German marks and the prepaid flight. Others, however, claimed asylum in the new Germany. “At present [May 17, 1993] there are still about 12,000 former contract workers in Germany almost all of whom are Vietnamese. They want to stay here” (ibid.). Anthropologist Pipo Bui has described the return of Vietnamese migrants in terms of mass deportations via airplanes.³

In 1995, over a year and a half after this FAZ account and several months after I returned to Germany to begin a project on the daily life and politicization of Afro-Germans, another widely read West German publication reported, “Actually, the federal republic wanted to send 20,000 rejected asylum seekers, 10,000 illegal migrants and 10,000 former contract workers from the German Democratic Republic back to their homeland. . . . ‘We are of course making sure that refugees won’t be exposed to any repression in their homeland,’ the Free Democratic politician reassures” (Focus 1995: 26–27). As former contract workers also pointed out, those who did not immediately agree to take the 3,000 German marks on the condition that they leave Germany could not count on getting that money later. Focus magazine, however, following the public policy lead, concluded positively about the politics of return: “The employment prospects for the return don’t look that bad. Siemens and BMW are showing lots of interest in Vietnam. Edward Reuter [Daimler-Benz] will deliver trailer trucks and buses to Asia. [Werner] Hoyer [state minister of the German Foreign Office] says: ‘The entrepreneurs need well-trained labor with a knowledge of the German language right away’” (ibid.). The politicians’ perspective reflected global trends in regionalizing cheaper factory work (see Beck 2000). Since the cost of living is lower in Vietnam, German factories could pay Vietnamese workers much less there, and the German social welfare system would not have to pay for workers who had contracts for jobs that no longer existed in now closed East German factories or in Eastern Europe more broadly. The national thought process was, “Now they can be contract workers back in Vietnam, where they belong.” But many did not go back, and they fought for the right to stay in Germany, in spite of their confrontations with German labor and immigration policies and violence on the street. Ironically, due to the lack of language training during the socialist period, those workers who did return had little knowledge of the German language.

Leftover Bodies: East Berlin Neubauviertel⁴ after the Wall

1995

As I walk home at night to my dorm in Berlin-Lichtenberg, I carry with me the weight of my color and see no escape. This is supposed to be one of the most dangerous sections of Berlin, notorious for skinhead attacks. When I tell an African German woman that I haven’t had any problems yet, she tells me that I could live here for a whole year without running into trouble, or I could get thrown off the train on my way home. Another woman tells me the story of an African man whom skinheads tried to throw off a packed train in the middle of the day, “und niemand hat was dagegen getan.” And no one did anything to stop it. That was just two years earlier.

After reading my graduate school application, a prominent anthropologist at New York University writes back saying that she is worried about my safety and refers me to a recent New Yorker article by a former leader of East German neo-Nazis. The train station in Berlin-Lichtenberg was the headquarters for his group and their activities.

When I return home from the university, or visit with friends, or go out in the morning, I regularly see young men with closely cropped hair and wonder about their political allegiances, trying not to look too closely and also trying not to look scared. At night, I sometimes wait for the bus, instead of taking the earlier subway, calculating that this mode of transportation will somehow be safer in the dark, because more people are concentrated in the same compartment and I have direct access to the driver should a group of young skinheads get on.

One friend from Cameroon, who is a student advisor at the Technical University and who has lived in Berlin through the period of Germany’s reunification, tells me stories every day about people who have been attacked. From his perspective, and from the perspective of many other people of color I meet in Berlin, post-socialist East Germany and East Berlin are the locus for attacks. Having lived with a family from East Germany for three months, I am aware of the stigmatization of East Germans and East Germany. I continually ask them if I am safe and I negotiate my fear of skinheads with my identification with East Germans as another marginalized group, seen by West Germans, Western Europeans, and Americans as backward.

1999–2000

I begin doing research with former Vietnamese contract workers and their children on the edge of Berlin-Lichtenberg and Marzahn, another notoriously dangerous district. This time, as a form of protection, I take taxis, which I can only afford as a result of a generous fellowship. It wouldn’t have been possible during my Fulbright year (1995–1996). It hadn’t even occurred to me then. I got used to living in fear. Now, five years later, when I get to the western edge of Lichtenberg on the streetcar (which, unlike the U-Bahn, allows me to see who is waiting at the next stop), I get off and go to a nearby stand where taxis are always waiting. One day, however, I don’t want to pay for a taxi. I think, “Why should I?” and decide to continue on the streetcar. And then, along the way, a number of youths get on. They don’t look exactly like skinheads, but they also don’t show any outward signs of friendliness toward me, and I am scared. I am the only person of color, the only person with black hair. After surviving this trip, I decide that this fear is not worth it. That is the last time I save money by not taking a taxi.

The Center

After the fall of the Wall, the possibility of movement in public space is dramatically transformed. Who can move and how they move are at issue. Official and unofficial discourses and acts (two t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction: Becoming Noncitizens
• 1. Ethno-patriarchal Returns: The Fall of the Wall, Closed Factories, and Leftover Bodies
• 2. Travel as an Analytic of Exclusion: The Politics of Mobility after the Wall
• 3. We Were Dancing in the Club, Not on the Berlin Wall: Black Bodies, Street Bureaucrats, and Hypersexual Returns
• 4. The Progeny of Guest Workers as Leftover Bodies: Post-Wall West German Schools and the Administration of Failure
• 5. Why Can’t You Just Remove Your Headscarf So We Can See You? Reappropriating “Foreign” Bodies in the New Germany
• Conclusion: Intervening at the Sites of Exclusionary Production
• Epilogue: Triangulated (Non)Citizenship: Memories and Futures of Racialized Production
• Notes
• References
• Index