Undeutsch. Die Konstruktion des Anderen in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft by Fatima El-Tayeb (review)

“Rassismus bracht keine Fremden, um zu existieren, er produziert sie” (14). This succinct phrase from Fatima El-Tayeb’s Undeutsch effectively summarizes the book’s fundamental premise. In setting out to prove the statement’s veracity, the author meticulously examines contributing factors and resulting conditions of an entrenched European racism. With a comprehensive and correspondingly dense study, El-Tayeb attacks the central and, as she demonstrates, well-accepted notion that racism does not exist on the continent.

The publication date of El-Tayeb’s book coincides chronologically with the height of the still largely unresolved refugee crisis, the critical questions about which the author presents from the refugees’ perspective. If one has the good fortune to survive the trip to Europe and gain the permission to remain, the host culture expects assimilation as quickly as possible. Failure or difficulty with that process results in an antagonism that the author attributes to a resolute and deep-seated historical ideal of what it means to be European more broadly and German more specifically. Many satirists, scholars, and social commentators regard the 2015 attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris as a significant turning point in the discussion of Europe’s changing identity and ethnic profile. El-Tayeb discusses the incident’s widespread reception as symbolic of the collective endangerment of a white Europe through Islamic terror. She also deploys the prominence of the Je suis Charlie movement, however, to point out the absence of European acceptance of responsibility for attacks on immigrants and Europeans of color (11). It is this constant and commanding investigative emphasis on the reverse sides of current race and identity issues that characterize Undeutsch.

The book is divided into three large sections representing three contexts within which European, especially German, identity, as well as German confrontation with memory, has developed: “Postcolonialer Kapitalismus,” “Postsozialistische Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” and “Postfaschistischer Multikulturalismus.” Claiming that the “Kultur der Mehrheit bleibt unhinterfragt” (16), El-Tayeb views developments in German history and German identity building from the perspective of dissociated (what she calls “rassifiziert” [racified]) others. In turn, these individuals are nonetheless perceived as threatening or dangerous not only to individual European and German citizens but also to the integrity of those traditions. With her characteristic style of fiercely reversing the terms of prevailing discussions, such as those surrounding government-supported integration programs, the author does not address the question concerning why certain groups fail to integrate. Instead she considers why and how certain groups have been and are made outsiders within the perceived neutral norm of northern Europe (39).

In addition to dissecting the—in El-Tayeb’s words—futility of current Western-oriented economic and political systems, such as trade agreements and international meetings such as the G20, the author also scrutinizes cultural initiatives like the Multaka project in Berlin. Hailed as a victory in bringing cultures together, the project features “muslimische Kunst” on display and refugees serve as tour guides for fellow immigrants. But the project represents one target of the author’s pointed criticism of ingrained colonial structures. Specifically, these ideological constructions allow for a type of amnesia regarding the illegal and unethical methods used for procuring the artwork. Aggressively interrogating the argument that the art is better preserved in a museum than in a war-torn country, El-Tayeb unrelentingly underscores the point that the holdings are nonetheless Raubkunst (81), the theft of which should ideally result in penalties.

A main theme in the second section is what El-Tayeb calls the “Festschreibung Europas als christlich” (99) and the “erfolgreiche deutsche Normalisierung” that accompanied the reunification in 1990. At the same time that the Germans rehabilitated their identity, which included separating from the Nazi past as well as the East German past, historical victims were being pitted against each other. A central example in this section is the continued poor and discriminatory treatment of the Rom_nja and Sint_ezze (El-Tayeb’s preferred inclusionary way...