Lot's Wife Edition 1 2016

SOCIETY
Germans about the issue. The opinions are as
varied as they are numerous, but one aspect which
did strike me was that most of the voices seem to
become gradually more negative as time goes on.
Every day in the local newspaper or in the Spiegel-
Online news app, the coverage is relentless; a day
hasn’t gone by yet where a report on refugees, their
integration into German society, or the problems
arising from their arrival wasn’t front page or
inside cover. For the first time in a long time, many
Germans are beginning to question their leader
Angela Merkel, who until the refugee issue turned
sour had seemed to be as strong as ever. Thus, as
an Aussie who will live abroad for the next twelve
months on exchange I thought it would be fitting
to present an outsider’s perspective on a deeply
German issue.
The first important step in breaking down
this complex topic into understandable chunks is to
breakdown some of the stereotypes we might have
of the Germans. There is no doubt that Germany,
like so many other liberal western democracies,
has developed a reputation as a welcoming
nation for refugees. But aspects such as religion
and population distribution don’t always occur to
foreigners straight away, yet they are perhaps the
most important. The majority of Germans still live
in village communities, where religion plays a much
more significant role in day to day life. Every 15
minutes the church bells ring to remind you of the
time, an old but important tradition which becomes
even more important on Sunday when almost all
shops are closed. Moreover, the governing party
of which Angela Merkel is the leader is called
the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and many
members of the centre-left Social Democratic Party
(SPD) retain Judeo-Christian values like their centreright
counterparts in the CDU. For the most part this
has actually worked to the benefit of the refugees,
as values such as tolerance and generosity have
prevailed, but where it becomes less beneficial when
some refugees don’t integrate into society as much
as they could, or retain values incompatible with
modern day Germans.
Most Melbournians studying at Monash
would generally have two stereotypes of the German
people: either a Bavarian in Lederhosen drinking
beer with Aussies at the Oktoberfest, or hipster in
Doc Martens and leather jacket dancing to techno
in a Berlin nightclub. The image of a church-going
villager is not always in the forefront of our minds,
but it is crucial to consider this given that these
refugees hail from equally as strong religious
backgrounds, except that they are Muslim and not
Christian. Over the past few weeks these stereotypes
have dissolved before my own eyes to reveal a much
more complicated religious and cultural landscape.
It’s not as if Germany hasn’t experienced migration
from Muslim countries before. Many Turkish people
arrived here in the 50s and 60s as ‘guest workers’,
but never left and now form the base of what is
Germany’s Muslim community. But the wave of
migrants seen last year and which continues to
come is on a completely different scale. Moreover,
as the Germans have never considered themselves
as a country of immigrants like Australia, America or
Canada, it is harder for many of them to grasp such
a drastic demographic change in terms of people
and religion. In Melbourne one is just as likely to
hear Mandarin on the tram as English, but if you
heard a woman in traditional Muslim hijab and dress
talking to child in Arabic while walking in front of a
1000-year-old German church, it would be hard to
ignore the vast cultural difference.
And if there is one sentiment which all
Germans echo, it’s that Angela Merkel reacted
much too late to the crisis. For a while she was
portrayed as the heroine for refugees coming to
Europe, but once any country accepts 1.2 million
asylum seekers in a calendar year, it becomes
hard to keep up with the sheer scale of processing
every application. While this occurs, most of the
refugees are stuck waiting in limbo, and perhaps this
is maybe why some turn to illegal and despicable
activities as sexual assault. Xenophobia might be on
the rise here, but I think that’s a result of Germans’
frustration with policy makers rather than an innate
form of racism. In the end, I think Germany will catch
up with processing the backlog of applications,
toughen some rules to counter purely economic
migration, and will slowly learn how to integrate such
a vast number of refugees, but perhaps Merkel was
naïve in maintaining an open door policy for so long.
The consequences are felt above all by the German
people, and the refugees trying to escape war and
persecution, because both groups can’t get on with
their lives while so many barriers to integration
remain.
Lot’s Wife | 25