Germany’s consensus culture
Some years ago I was in a bookshop in Rostock as part of a reading tour. I like the rawness of the town, its energy, its rough humour, its dourness. So I wasn’t really bothered when only eleven people – immerhin enough to make a football or cricket team– turned up to listen to me read. The atmosphere could almost have been cosy if it hadn’t been for the shouting in the street below. Somebody down there seemed to be yelling that I should leave town: Raus, raus, raus! I got the manager to shut the window. Thirty minutes into the reading – about the time I usually start to relax the audience began to fiddle with their watches or secretly look at their handies. Soon my cricket team had become five-a-side handball. Eventually I gave up and I have rarely seen such relief sweep over a room.
Later, after shaking the hand of the embarrassed shop manager (it was January, it was cold, Jauch was on TV, unemployment was high, don’t forget us when the next book comes out), I strolled down the street in search of a stiff drink and solved the riddle of my sudden unpopularity. Around the corner was a second bookshop – and Eva Herman was reading. Tagesschau Eva, das Eve-Prinzip Eva. She had a completely full house. My audience, perhaps not at the higher end of the intelligence spectrum, had come to the wrong place And the demonstrators outside had been chanting outside the wrong bookshop. Well, this was Meckpom; kann vorkommen.
This experience came back to me the other day after attending a THilo Sarrazin reading. Like Eva Herman’s readings the room was full to bursting point; it was like those stunts undertaken by students to get into the Guinness Book of Records. You know: how many people can squeeze into a Käfer? You almost needed an oxygen tank to survive. It was not so much a book reading, as a rally of like-minded people. Thilo, like Eva before him, has become a guru.
I have not encountered this anywhere else in the world. In Britain, rock stars fill rooms, not authors unless they are called J.K. Rowling. In communist Russia I remember people cramming into the apartment of the poet Yevgeny Yevtschenko, and perhaps that is the best analogy: the audience ahs come to hear words and ideas that they think have been denied then by the official media.
It seems to me that Germany has become a country of silent majorities, alienated from the consensus view peddled by over-cautious state television and a political class that doesn’t quite trust or understand ordinary people.
So I rang up Eva Herman to see what she is doing nowadays- and found her about to go to another court hearing in her case against NDR for wrongful dismissal. Four years after the Eva Herman affair this is still dragging on! After our chat I went on to YouTube to watch again the notorious talk show with Joseph B. Kerner. Eva H. expelled from paradise. And it all came back to me: surely this was the most disgraceful episode in the history of modern German talk shows. The airbrushed version of this event, as presented by the managers of öffentlich-rechtliche Fernsehen, is that Kerner fulfilled his social role by setting firm limits to how much sympathy one could express in public for Nazi thinking. But viewers will have a different recall of the Kerner show in October 2007; I certainly do. My memory, thankfully refreshed by YouTube, is that of Kerner repeatedly trying to push Eva Herman to withdraw comments that she never made in the first place. It was like something out of Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon”, Orwell, Kafka; an attempt to force her to confess to thought crimes and then seek forgiveness and redemption. As such it represented a complete failure of the talk show concept which should be about the exchange of views, the public testing of arguments, an attempt to crystallize differences so that viewers at home can make up their own minds.
Now it is true that Eva Herman’s original sin emerged out of a somewhat unclear sentence. But her message was lucid enough: she wants to rehabilitate full-time motherhood, make it an acceptable option again for women since, she argues, studies show this to be the best way of bringing up children. Obviously this was a deliberate challenge to most feminist beliefs. And it put many women, trying to juggle career and children on the defensive. There is plenty to disagree with in Eva Herman’s texts but the wrong way to counter her arguments is surely to brand her a Nazi when she quite plainly is not. Herman’s expulsion comes after she says “Es sind auch Autobahnen gebaut worden damals, und wir fahren heute drauf!” When I tried to explain to my British colleagues that this sentence violated a German taboo, they simply gasped. Die spinnen die Deutschen.
Mobbing is of course part of television entertainment culture, from Big Brother to Dschungel Camp. And Herman was both a TV-Profi and someone who was trying to sell a book. So she shouldn’t have been quite as stunned as she was. But this was a Kerner affair not a Herman affair. Thilo Sarrazin has had it easy by comparison – the huge sales of his book make it more difficult to dismiss – but still there are attempts to make him a pariah. It is easier and safer than engaging with his arguments or indeed reading his book. Germany’s consensus culture has its strengths but it also has a vicious streak, an over-readiness to declare non-conformists outsiders and to banish them into the darkness.
