You can’t say that here!

15 January 2011

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Thilo Sarrazin is breaking Germany’s taboos on welfare and immigration – and selling over a million books in the process

In Berlin in September, I noticed that Deutschland schafft sich ab (‘The Abolition of Germany’), a taboo-breaking blockbuster by Bundesbank governor Thilo Sarrazin, had just come through a new printing after having been sold out for a week. In the morning, as I walked off to work, there would always be a large table near the front of the Hugendubel bookstore on Tauntzienstrasse stacked two feet high with bright red copies. In the evening, as I returned to my hotel, the table would be denuded, or have just a few scattered copies, like the bar after an undergraduate drinks party.

Sarrazin had at that point given a few interviews, and the wildest nonsense was being said about him in the feuilletons. He was making eugenics respectable. He was a racist. He was rallying native Germans to xeno- (or Islamo- or some other kind o-) phobia. In short, he had written a Mein Kampf for our times. The Bundesbank and chancellor Angela Merkel bullied him into leaving his post. The Social Democratic Party moved to expel him. And although the Pope’s book of interviews managed to dislodge Sarrazin for a few days in November and a crime thriller called Snow White Must Die bumped him this week, his book is still near the top of the bestseller lists, having sold 1.2 million copies. It is the most important publishing event in Germany since the war.

Sarrazin’s book is no tract. It is a subtle, well-documented, almost literary argument about the failings of the German welfare state by a top-rank labour economist. Inevitably, though, it is also an attack on the political correctness that has constrained German political discourse for decades. Half a century ago Germany’s citizens — with good reason — came to a consensus that they could not soon afford another freewheeling Teutonic discussion on the matter of, let’s say, Lebensraum.

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A. MacAulay

January 22nd, 2011 1:09pm Report this comment

Thank you for drawing attention to Thilo Sarrazin's work and the ensuing debate to English speaking readers. Apart from a petulant blog by Rod Liddle, hardly anything has been said about this man and the actually dramatic demonstration within Germany of the distance between the political class, which finds itself in a process of disintegration and the interests and concerns of the electorate. Of course, those who have tried to shout Sarrazin down, and they were very unpleasant about it, represent the political status quo and those vested PC interests for whom the administration of squalor is their bread and butter.

Curiously too, the SPD/CDU divide which together courted mass immigration from backwoods Anatolia and then, on the one side accepted the patriarchal structures, the arranged marriages and even "honour" feuds and murders as being cultural and ethnic categories beyond investigation or criticism and the business friendly, conservatives who never wanted to accept that the immigrants were anything more than a peripheral, short term problem that would solve itself when they all went home, and therefore their private lives were a matter of disdain and indifference have together introduced a very real "foreign body" into German life and culture.

Sounds remarkably like Britain doesn't it? And France too for that matter.

outonalamb

January 26th, 2011 10:06am Report this comment

I've long suspected that Germans deep down really do want to 'sich abschaffen,' or least half of them. A middle-aged German woman of no strong political views once told me she wished "the entire generation of Germans born before 1940 would just disappear." That way, she figured, the national guilt trip that has distorted German attitudes to just about everything for the last 50 years would end.
Germans are now the most indoctrinated people in Europe, dutifully taught to hate themselves from from their schooldays, to avoid talking about history and to simply ignore the sacrifice of the millions of decent Germans who died in both wars (they don�ft even have WW1 memorials in Germany) and the other millions who were ethnically cleansed from their homelands (Breslau, etc). And of course always defer to foreigners, whatever they demand. Sarrazin is a menace to all this. Good luck to him.