The French Colonial Mind, Volume 2: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism

12 Exposing the “Paradoxical Citizenship”:French Authorities’ Responses to the Algerian Presence in Federal Germany during the Algerian War, 1954–1962

304 12 Exposing the “Paradoxical Citizenship” French Authorities’ Responses to the Algerian Presence in Federal Germany during the Algerian War, 1954–1962 mathilde von bülow Throughout 1958 German newspapers large and small reported on the development of a new and worrisome refugee problem in the Federal Republic of Germany.1 Refugees were hardly a recent phenomenon in the country, which had absorbed millions of ethnic Germans and Slavs displaced from their Eastern European homelands first by the Nazi terror of World War II and then by the Communist regimes that followed it. Yet there was something altogether unusual about the refugees who had begun to arrive in 1958. For one thing, they were not coming to Germany from the totalitarian and Communist East but from the liberal and democratic West. For another, these refugees were from an entirely distinctive ethnic group, since they were neither German nor Slavic in origin, but Arab and Berber. The incoming refugees were, in fact, all Algerians fleeing from an ever-intensifying “civil war” in France, where they were being subjected to tough “coercive measures” on the part of the French authorities, including “concentration camps.”2 German newspapers were thus perfectly aware that the new influx of refugees in 1958 was closely related to Algeria’s ongoing and increasingly brutal war of national liberation from France. Initially they treated this phenomenon purely from a socioeconomic and administrative perspective , expressing a strong humanitarian concern for the plight of the Exposing the “Paradoxical Citizenship” 305 desperate and largely destitute individuals arriving in Germany.3 Yet in the aftermath first of the May crisis that brought down the Fourth French Republic and then of the launch by the Front de Libération Nationale (fln) of its “second” armed front in metropolitan France on 25 August, the tone of reporting gradually began to change. By October the influential Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (faz) reported that a veritable “Algerian psychosis” had come to grip some of the smaller communities along the Franco-German border, with locals fearing an “invasion of Algerians from France.”4 One month later, the popular national tabloid Bild began to wonder “whether the dirty war” between France and the fln was about to come to Germany, and Bonn’s Rheinischer Merkur warned that if federal authorities failed to stem the surging tide of Algerian refugees, the country would soon face an “Algerian plague à la Paris and Marseille.” In other words, unless the Bonn government reacted quickly, the “civil war” afflicting France would spread across the border into Germany itself.5 In 1958 sinister scenarios such as those depicted by the Bild or the Rheinischer Merkur appeared very real and imminent, and yet they have only received scant attention in historical research.6 The rising influx of Algerians into Germany can nonetheless help to shed fresh light on France’s last, longest, and most brutal war of decolonization. For one thing, it demonstrates that the Algerian War cannot be understood solely within a geographically confined, “colonial” or even “national” space. This was a colonial conflict, whose course, impact, and consequences extended not merely beyond the colony (although Algeria, of course, was officially classified as an integral part of France), but even beyond the imperial metropole.7 The influx of Algerians into Germany at the height of that war can also offer valuable new insights into the colonialist attitudes that continued to shape and influence French policy during the era of decolonization. Indeed, the topic of transnational migration can help to elucidate further the “colonial mind” of French officialdom. By focusing on French reactions to the growing Algerian presence in Germany during the Algerian War, this chapter seeks to illuminate the manner in which French diplomats and security officers, as well as their German counterparts, conceived not merely of the fln but of Algerians generally. The chapter’s fundamental argument is that official reactions Colonial Minds and Empire Soldiers 306 to Algerian migration—whether in France or in Germany—came to highlight the inconsistencies and distortions that so characterized what French historian Alexis Spire has called the “paradoxical citizenship” of so-called Français Musulmans d’Algérie (fma). This “paradoxical citizenship” was characterized by a gross divergence between legal categories and democratic principles stipulating that Algerians were full- fledged French citizens on the one hand and administrative practices and general mind-sets...