Migration: What went wrong in Germany

t-online Migration: What went wrong in Germany Article by Christoph Schwennicke • 7 hours • 6 minutes reading time Germany and migration When did something slip out of control here? And why? The Chancellor has lost control of the country, says opposition leader Friedrich Merz after the knife murders in Solingen. A far too simplistic explanation for a complex failure over a long period of time. Last Saturday evening, as the evidence of the Solingen perpetrator grew, my wife and I were sitting with good and close friends in the garden of their weekend house under gnarled old apple trees. And of course we talked about the matter, but in a larger context, especially in terms of time. He made his change five years ago, said my good friend, whose name is irrelevant, who occasionally deals with the SPD in his job and who is sympathetic to social democracy, albeit increasingly alienated. He did not understand at all why the SPD had not made this shift on the migration issue long ago, if it still had a last shred of feeling for its electorate. "You," he then added, "incidentally, in 2015/2016 you were the only one in my bubble who was critical of the matter from the very beginning." Pause. "The only one." The sentence from that wonderfully mild late summer evening in Brandenburg has stuck in my head ever since. It triggered an entire film of the past almost ten years. A film that tells a different story to the sentence by Friedrich Merz that the Chancellor was losing control of his own country. The sentence is not true. In fact, it is very wrong. The loss of control took place almost ten years ago. And this country has lost control collectively. A process that I am still stunned by today. A collective aberration, the consequences of which anyone with any sense could have foreseen immediately. Consequences that soon became apparent. But it was not until almost ten years later that a change in the climate of opinion took place. About the person Christoph Schwennicke is the head of politics and a member of the editorial board of t-online. For almost 30 years he has been following, observing and analyzing political events in Berlin, previously in Bonn. For the "Süddeutsche Zeitung", the "Spiegel" and the political magazine "Cicero", of which he was editor-in-chief and publisher for many years. His column "Objection!" appears every Thursday on t-online. At the time it was like this: Anyone who publicly expressed the view that opening the border, or rather leaving the border open (such hairs were split at the time!) was not a good thing, that it could not go well, was subjected to treatment that I could not have imagined in a stable pluralistic democracy. In Maybrit Illner's talk show, Daniel Cohn-Bendit literally attacked me, literally drawing Nazi parallels because I had said that there were not only financial and capacity limits, but also social limits that this self-intoxicated welcoming culture would foreseeably exceed. And that a physical border around a community and its preservation and respect is constitutive for this community. A state is a shared space surrounded by borders. With common rules, common laws, taxes. As I said: Dany Cohn-Bendit's fury knew no bounds in this show. The girl and the Chancellor But before the mess began on September 4, 2015, the then Chancellor Angela Merkel had explained exactly that to a Palestinian refugee girl named Reem in a heartbreaking scene during a public discussion, in a somewhat awkward but touching and motherly way. With tears in her eyes, the girl asked the Chancellor to let all her relatives into the country. She understood that, said Merkel, but Germany could not simply take in everyone who wanted to come here. You could see how the girl's tears touched her, until she finally put her hand on her shoulder to comfort her and was about to hug her. Up until then, everyone, or most people, were still in their right mind. But then it started. The "Stern" newspaper headlined with a steely, bluish photo in ultra-close-up of the Chancellor, with the line below: "The Ice Queen". Then the Chancellor changed her mind, and at the train station in Munich, stuffed animals flew towards the arriving refugees. And Merkel said a little later on Anne Will that it was not in our power how many more would come to us. Hardly anyone contradicted her in public discourse at the time. Anyone who did so became a pariah. Schwennicke once worked for the "Süddeutsche" and for the "Spiegel", Jakob Augstein wrote in a column at the time. Today he publishes "ethnic propaganda". The quote is still in my Wikipedia entry today. It's all almost unbelievable In retrospect, it's all almost unbelievable. For statements like those made by Olaf Scholz, that we now have to deport people on a large scale, you would have been slammed into the ground by all the other participants in the discussion in front of the cameras. The bubble that my good friend spoke about under the apple trees on Saturday was almost all-encompassing. The rest were declared lepers and largely driven into the arms of the AfD, which had just been standing at the edge of its own grave and could now hardly believe its luck. The signals of what would accompany this unconditional welcome policy were soon visible. The Cologne Cathedral Square, the Berlin Breitscheidplatz, the list up to Solingen is endless. But the prevailing opinion crushed everything that dared to come out of hiding with doubts and warnings. That's why it's not just a chancellor who lost control here. It has to be said clearly: the majority of the media played a key role in this slippage. Or did it even trigger this slippage, as with the "Stern" title. The media have not fulfilled their role as a critical regulator. The editor-in-chief of "Bild" became an activist with a button that his newspaper invented and that even Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel ended up wearing on his lapel on the government bench: "Refugees welcome". Kai Diekmann had already correctly picked up on the mood of the time with the button. He just completely failed in his role as a critical observer. With Corona, there is talk of setting up an inquiry commission to work through the mistakes. Perhaps that would also be a good idea for dealing with this multiple political and media organ failure in migration. There is an author at "taz" that I have always greatly respected. An enlightened left-liberal with a sharp mind and an equally sharp, pointed pen. A few weeks ago, before Solingen, Jan Feddersen wrote a kind of indictment of his own bubble. There is nothing in which "the left-wing, alternative, green scene is so good, so adept, so rhetorically confident as in downplaying real, everyday problems," he noted in his essay: those things that affect the majority of people living in Germany. "The majority of voters, in fact. And also those who vote for the AfD. Or for the BSW, Sahra Wagenknecht's alliance. This also applies to all questions that revolve around the topic of migration. For example, for a gay couple who were attacked in Dresden by a Muslim refugee known to be a criminal; for one of the two men, the attack ended fatally. An occasion to think about homophobia, but not about Islamism and the aggressive inability of young men to deal with the circumstances of freedom in liberal societies? Or a knife attack on a police officer in Mannheim. Or one on passengers on a regional train near Hamburg." Yes, bad, they say in the left-wing scene after such events, "but isolated cases." One should not talk about refugees and certainly not about Islam and Islamism, that would be demonizing, inhumane and would only benefit the right-wing - this is the main argumentative weapon in this discourse. And should they be deported? But no, how inhumane is that! And besides: what aren't they threatened with in their countries of origin! Islamists, notoriously caught doing propaganda, should also be allowed to stay. Feddersen apodictically said: "Anyone who has become a criminal has no place here, not even in a prison." Why, he asks, is the left so afraid of "even addressing the real fears in society in a small way? Why is Islam never part of the debate? It is of course part of Germany and its cultures - but under all conditions? Why don't leftists say: immigration, even if it is by fleeing, is the chance to participate in a rich, European society, but not a guarantee. Anyone who disregards the rules cannot have a place here." But what serves the right most is not public speaking about attacks in everyday life, but placating silence about them. In fact, people from Muslim societies are not the problem per se. But the perpetrators who destroyed "the idea of ​​being welcome" in Germany come from their milieus. "It is time that the left (alternative, green) attitude to uncontrolled immigration is questioned - for reasons of humanity." This, as Feddersen puts it, left-wing alternative green attitude has had hegemony, air supremacy on the issue of migration for the past ten years. Only now is something that has long been happening in countries like Sweden and Denmark beginning to happen. That is good and right. But no one should fool themselves: what has been going wrong for ten years cannot be fixed in three weeks.