Migrants: The End of Europe? Is It True That Multiculturalism Has Failed in Germany

The previous article in the “Migrants: The End of Europe?” series can be read here

Imagine a scene from life in Germany in the mid-1990s. A quiet provincial town. School break. German teenagers eyeing warily and uneasily the place where their peers, the eastern barbarians, are hanging out. The latter barely speak German, but brazenly smoke. They stick together in a pack, and at the slightest provocation, use their fists. In the evening, the wolf cubs gather in the supermarket parking lot. There they drink vodka from plastic cups and blast their wild music from boom boxes at full volume. There is no doubt that when they grow up, they will impose their way of life on Europe—and will rob, rape, and kill the foolish Germans who let these beasts in...

As you may have guessed, the barbarians from the East are Soviet Jews and Soviet Germans—in other words, all those whom Germans call die Russen, “the Russians.” Were they barbarians compared to Europeans? Of course, if by barbarism you mean not knowing the local cultural code.

For my book “Germany, Where I Now Live”, I interviewed emigrants from those years about their first impressions of their new life. A woman from Moscow recounted how she nearly cried, not knowing how to detach a shopping cart in front of the supermarket. A man from Kazakhstan recalled his despair at a traffic light that was always red: he didn't know you had to press a button to cross.

But in time, everyone learned everything: how to pass exams to get a fishing license, and how to observe Ruhezeit—“quiet time” from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. And the Russian wolf cubs, who once scared their peers, mastered the language and became respectable Germans. I know the whole story about vodka in cups in the parking lot, school fights, and the thrill of blasting Vasya Pryanikov's hit “The Autobahn isn't space, Deutschland isn't Russia” at full volume, from former wolf cubs themselves. One of them is Dima Vachedin, the editor-in-chief of the Berlin-based Russian-language site Genau. Another is Alex Yusupov: a political scientist, social democrat, and an important figure at the Ebert Foundation. If you're in Germany, I highly recommend subscribing to their podcast “Kanzler und Berghain,” which offers cultural-political education in Russian. It's among the top 10 German political podcasts, where the other nine are in German.

However, the problem of “barbarians and Rome” doesn't arise out of nowhere. It usually appears when the integration process stalls—at least in the eyes of long-time residents. I emphasize: not assimilation, not becoming German, but integration, meaning understanding the local rules and living by them. And changing those rules as well, though, again—according to the rules. That's how immigrants once changed the German gastronomic code, enriching it with Italian, Turkish, Indian, Vietnamese, Thai, and Chinese cuisines. And thank goodness: otherwise, one could go mad from endless potato and sausage salads, sausages, sauerkraut, and dumplings from boiled rolls. Immigrants have greatly diversified German music, theater, fashion, film, and literature. (“Have you read Olga Grjasnowa's book 'Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt' ['A Russian is Someone Who Loves Birches']?” a German woman kindly asked me during a small talk, a typical German “little conversation.”—No, I haven't read it, but I watched the movie based on Grjasnowa's book (she's of Russian-Jewish-Azerbaijani origin). On screen, the characters spoke German, Russian, Hebrew, and English.)

The fear that emigrants with their culture will destroy “the good old Europe” is characteristic, above all, of those who feel insecure in the modern world, who themselves are not fully integrated into it.

The modern world is always about change. That's why migrants are much more feared in the former East Germany than in the West, even though there are fewer migrants in the East. That's also why Soviet migrants fear and hate new migrants much more than the locals do.

Having purged themselves of indigestible Marxism, the post-Soviet person, in search of something to hold onto, clung to familiar everyday barbarism, a component of which is xenophobia. Having learned to detach shopping carts at the supermarket, not all Soviet migrants adopted European ideas, starting with the idea of equality.

Russians fear Muslims in Europe, with their unfamiliar language, faith, and supposed large families, not only because they know nothing about Islam or the East. But also thanks to the naive belief that culture is transmitted sexually. That is, “apples don't fall far from the tree,” as if a person were a tree. They're like Tabakov's character in “An Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano,” who, seeing a black servant at the piano, exclaimed: “A darkie can't play!” And social networks, where any fool can say their nonsense to the world, embolden them. They, lamenting the demise of European culture, don't understand that its bearer can be a person of any race (and, I think, even any faith: Protestants were also once completely alien to Europe). They dream that the world would stop and freeze. Their ideal is a white Europe, that is, Europe as it was a century ago. If you like—the Europe of Hitler's time. For them, Hitler simply “killed the wrong people,” as one emigrant ingenuously told me, fully convinced that I automatically shared her beliefs.

For those shouting about the demise of European culture, culture means only culture that is preserved, not culture that is created. Is culture dying? Yes—death is the only possible state of culture, as with people. Culture is not a warehouse, but a flow. Old European culture is dying, replaced by a new one, which will be created and carried not only by blue-eyed blondes. But this doesn't shock me any more than the African roots of the sun of Russian poetry, Pushkin.

That leaves us with a common question: If everything is so great in Europe with emigrants, then why did Merkel declare that the policy of multiculturalism had “completely failed”?

The problem is that in Russia and in Europe, the same words often mean different things. For example, “bürger” in Russian means a petty bourgeois, a philistine and conformist, while in German Bürger means a city dweller and citizen. The same goes for German multiculturalism, Multikulturalismus (the word is often shortened to the funny “Multikulti”). For someone who grew up in Russia, “the failure of multiculturalism” means that the idea of parallel existence of many cultures has failed. But for Germans, the failure of multiculturalism means that, although there are many cultures (whose right to exist no one denies), they are poorly integrated into the economic, social, and political life of Germany.

And even here, I think Merkel was wrong to consider integration the only possible norm. When I worked in London, I wandered quite a bit through neighborhoods that lived their own separate lives: Indian, Jewish, Chinese. Sometimes even the road signs weren't in English. So what? London is proud of these national enclaves, and doesn't fight them at all.

But the main thing is, Merkel made her statement about the failure of multiculturalism (“der Ansatz für Multikulti ist gescheitert, absolut gescheitert”) in 2010. By then, the last million-strong Russian emigration wave had already ebbed. But what frightened Angela Merkel was that the previous wave, the Turkish one, wasn't integrating into German society as quickly as she would have liked. However, just a year later she changed her thesis about the failure of multiculturalism to the opposite. Then Merkel stated: “We don't have that much Islam, but perhaps too little understanding of Christianity.” And in 2015, when she opened Germany's borders to a million “Syrian” refugees, she famously said: “We can handle this!”—“Wir schaffen das!” And when good Christians blame her for this, they somehow forget that Merkel saved tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of lives…

I put “Syrian” in quotes because in 2015, Syrians were the largest group (420,000 out of 890,000 registered that year), but not the only group of migrants. That same wave brought to Germany an Afghan acquaintance of mine, who once almost fell victim to decimation: Taliban who stormed his town shot every tenth person. But he, the ninth, was lucky. In Germany, he does what he studied in Afghanistan: he's an orchestral violinist.

So for me, migrants are a civilizational benefit, though they also bring problems. Emigrants are fresh perspectives, fresh ideas, and also raise questions that locals aren't ready to ask head-on.

Why is every second train in Germany late? Why are shops forbidden to open on Sundays? Why can't you figure out your tax declaration without a consultant? That's why, I repeat, I'm not worried about emigration to Europe, but about integration into Europe—including my own.

I'm by no means an idealist, and I understand that the speed of integration is inversely proportional to the number of emigrants and directly proportional to the time spent in the new country. But constant effort wears away the stone. And for me, Turks in Germany (with their holidays, honking wedding processions) are just fish of a different breed in the common river. But by no means an oil spill that kills the river. And in time, Syrians, Afghans, Croats, Serbs, and new Russians will also become such fish. Old Russian emigrants, who are thrilled by the AfD's ideas of remigration and the expulsion of those who look or believe differently, who think that a “normal” person must be an everyday white racist—these are a much greater threat to our European river.

And when it comes to discussing integration problems (and they certainly exist), I prefer to talk with sociologists, anthropologists, teachers of integration courses—that is, with those who have both information and the tools to analyze it. Not with those who, having understood nothing and seen nothing outside their habitual bubble, seethe with rage at the inevitability of change.

In the next and final article, I will discuss the claim that emigrants are a burden on European economies, becoming the main brake on the development of the countries that took them in. The first is partly true, just as small children are a burden on their parents. But the second is too much like saying that it's the children who are to blame when their parents' careers don't work out.