Michael Meng

Silences about Sarrazin’s Racism in Contemporary Germany*

From late August to December 2010, Germans engaged in a curious debate about an anti-immigrant book. The discussion involved much talk about the putative failure of migrants to integrate into German society and silence about the book’s racism. The row was provoked by Thilo Sarrazin, a PhD-holding economist and bureaucrat whose bland suits, rounded spectacles, and placid demeanor belie his fierce pen. A Social Democrat and former board member of the Bundesbank, Sarrazin critiques the welfare state, the education system, migrants, and poorly educated lower-class Germans. While Sarrazin manifests many anxieties and develops many arguments, it was his central contention about migrants that kept the conversation flowing. Sarrazin claims that migrants are contributing toGermany’s ethnocultural and economic decline and possibly to its death. His book,Germany Abolishes Itself: How We Are Playing with Our Future, advances cultural and biological racism while stirring a national exchange about immigration the likes of which Germany has not seen since the early 1990s, when discussions about asylum and violence against foreigners erupted in the newly unified country. Yet, in

The amnesia of the Wirtschaftswunder: Essen’s ‘House of Industrial Design’

Abstract This article has two parts. The first part returns to Theodor Adorno’s seminal essay that seeks to understand the impulse to forget the past in terms of reification. Adorno characterizes late modern capitalist society as governed by the ‘law of exchange’ that reduces all things in the world to a commonality. This reductionist propensity in bourgeois society leads to forgetting insofar as any and all forms of particularity are effaced: any aspect that may make a thing distinct, such as its history, becomes forgotten by reification in the post-industrial consumerist society. The second part of the essay explores Adorno’s argument through the example of the transformation of Essen’s synagogue into an industrial exhibition of consumer goods. During the height of West Germany’s ‘economic miracle,’ city officials viewed the synagogue instrumentally as nothing other than a thing that could be repurposed to celebrate West Germany’s post-Nazi transformation into a society of consumerist wonder.

On Authoritarianism. A Review Essay

A product of the nineteenth-century age of “isms,” authoritarianism describes a worldview that promotes the establishment of a hierarchical relation whereby one person or group dominates and governs another without recourse to either physical force or persuasion. Authoritarianism is the advocacy of authority as a source or origin that compels voluntary obedience without question. A person has authority if he or she can command someone to do something without having to do anything other than issue a command; which is to say that the person who obeys recognizes the authority of the person who commands as legitimate or correct. The word authority comes from the Latin, auctoritas , which Cicero employs to characterize the distinctive influence of the Senate in ancient Rome: “Power is with the people, authority with the Senate.” Whereas power ( potestas ) is political and relies on force or persuasion to command obedience, authority enjoys unequivocal obedience as a source beyond the contested realm of politics.