The Opaque State: Surveillance and Deportation in the Bundesrepublik

In his study of deportation in contemporary Germany, Militiadis Oulios notes that one of the “un-words of the year” in 2002 was “Ausreisezentrum” (19). The euphemistic term refers to detention facilities where asylum seekers without passports are held until their identities are determined and their deportations completed. Because it is German policy not to deport anyone without a passport, the absence of an identity document leaves them in legal limbo, often for long periods of time. In regular deportation prison (Abschiebehaft), detainees are charged for their days of residence at the rate of a moderately priced hotel, have their biometric data recorded for identification, and are put on an airplane, either alone or accompanied, and sometimes wearing a so-called “bodycuff” restraining their limbs beneath their clothes. The biometric data is shared through Europe-wide databases to prevent reentry into the Schengen area, leaving what scholars call “data doubles” on government servers. Frozen in physical categories, this digital reduction of the person may inadvertently draw further attention to itself in the context of probabilistic models of “actuarial justice” and discriminatory practices of racial profiling.¹ Since 1993, select German airports also have facilities technically outside of sovereign territory where refugees can be held, and often deported, after expedited trials (298). Oulios refers to all of these sites as the “black boxes of deportation.” He presents them as the built refutation of the official German mythology as a “transparent state” expressed through the glass domes and curtain walls of its government buildings with their annual “Open Door Days.”²

Where do the black boxes of surveillance and deportation fit in the story of the Bundesrepublik? The Federal Republic has long profited from comparisons to the Unrechtstaaten of the German Democratic Republic and the Third Reich, whose surveillance and population policies freed West German police practices from scrutiny. The four books under review here reflect a recent change in the scholarship. They offer insight into what could be called the opaque state in the Bundesrepublik. Against Whig narratives of a West German state becoming ever more democratic since the high point of executive power under Konrad Adenauer’s Kanzlerdemokratie, these studies document new forms of routinized suspicion and asymmetrical observation in the overlapping ages of international terrorism and the computerized database since the 1970s. To be sure, these authors remain fixated on a state-society framework that often undersells the importance of surveillance within the sphere of the market and dwell on the punitive rather than pastoral aspects of surveillance. These books nonetheless offer an important counternarrative to overly sunny success stories of West German rehabilitation.³ They show how Big Data and terrorism were joined at the hip in the Bundesrepublik. They also point to a fear and a reality of involuntary observation, or what could be called visual abjection. The treatment of the “human as an object,” as it is often described, is suffered most keenly by those populations deemed to be different, especially those coded as racially nonwhite. Visibility and citizenship in the computer age are connected in ways that call into question demands made in the language of privacy and transparency.

Duden offers both a spatial and an individual definition for surveillance (Überwachung). One is “to ensure that everything in a specific area happens correctly”; the other is “to follow closely what someone (who is suspicious) does.” Both are reflected in the scholarship on surveillance. Josef Foschepoth’s timely book Überwachtes...