BER_F_04 Racism since 1945 and the Transformation of Germany into an Immigration Society: The FRG, GDR, and Federal Republic of Germany (1945–1999)

Objective / Research Questions

Despite Germany’s unmistakably racist policies – especially towards Eastern and South-eastern Europe and especially during the Second World War, which claimed millions of lives – the topic of racism has remained a blind spot in German contemporary history, which, surprisingly, has also led to the idea that it suddenly disappeared after 1945, in contrast to anti-Semitism. Concepts such as Ausländerfeindlichkeit (hostility against foreigners) or xenophobia, which barely address institutional and structural aspects, merely serve the idea of anthropological constants. Moreover, they reproduce the questionable opposition of “us” and the “others” in a society shaped by various migration flows immediately after the end of the war. To what extent did these concepts obstruct the insight into the meaning of racism as a mode of socialization in Germany even after 1945? Which social groups were affected by racism, and when and in what way? How were racist knowledge formations transferred, reproduced, and transformed after the Stunde Null (zero hour) of 1945? Which cycles of racism and anti-racism are emerging?

It is precisely the combination of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) that can reveal the significance of institutional, structural, discursive, and ideological differences between the two regimes on the prevalence of racism and racist knowledge. In addition, the synopsis provides an insight into the different ways in which the National Socialist and colonial past was dealt with in both German states, as well as into the intertwined history of the two societies with regard to the “migrant others” constructed there.

Thematic reference to social cohesion

The so-called refugee crisis in 2015 has thrown the division of the German immigration society into sharp relief: the realities of a society with diverse origins, in parts “post-migrant”, met with ideas of a homogenous collective whose existence was threatened by “others”. German contemporary history reacted to these developments, for the most part, with perplexity. Thus, the question of how to deal with differences of origin since 1945, which considers the colonial and Nazi past as well as the associated folk knowledge, devaluing “migrant others”, in its possible continuities, has barely been seriously posed or dealt with up until now. Only the recent rise of openly racist positions in recent years has opened up contemporary historical research to approaches critical of racism that have been being developed for years in other disciplines and that also identify institutional, structural, and everyday racism in Germany.

To illuminate the history of the FRG and GDR from the perspective of these approaches is not only a desideratum of research but also a sociopolitical necessity. This refers both to the reflection of concepts such as racism and racist knowledge, Deutsche*r (Germans) and Ausländer*in (foreigners, or the “others”), and so on as well as to the analysis of the transmission paths, productions, reproductions, and praxeological implementations of racist knowledge in societies that understand themselves as pluralistic-democratic or even explicitly anti-racist. Accordingly, not only the differences between exclusive and inclusive notions of social cohesion are under discussion, but also the structural and everyday racist mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in the two German societies after 1945, which were to a certain extent hidden or at least hardly reflected upon for many decades.

The project makes an equally empirical-analytical and comparative-contextualized contribution. It investigates the significance of racist dynamics of inclusion and exclusion as factors for the emergence of and threats to social cohesion. Accordingly, the discursive frameworks of political culture and the affective dimension of cohesion as well as relationships and practices at the micro-level (housing, migrant networking, and knowledge production) are the focal points of the discussions encouraged by this project.