After the Nazi Racial State

Volunteering, social cohesion and race: the German Technical Relief Service

“…However, recent research has argued that discrimination on the grounds of race is endemic in Germany as in other western nations and the German state defines itself in racialised ways (Chin et al, 2009;Linke, 1999). For example, despite recent changes, racial notions are explicitly tied to national identity through 'jus sanguinis' (the principle of descent), which is used to determine citizenship rights as opposed to the territorial principle of 'jus soli' (Federal Ministry of the Interior, 2011;Honohan, 2012).…”

“…Firstly, due to the impact of the racial politics of the Nazis there is a reluctance to see the racial aspects of current discourses and policies around immigration (Chin et al, 2009;Hund, 2006). In addition, politicians and the media have, until recently, denied that Germany is a country of immigration (Terkessidis, 2004).…”

“…In Germany, discussions of race tend to remain taboo and racism viewed as aberrant, violent acts associated with extreme groups such as Neo-Nazis (Chin et al, 2009). Equally, most research which links race and volunteering considers race as a variable, but does not consider the impact of racial structures on volunteers and organisations (Craig, 2011).…”

Diversity in Germany: A Historical Perspective

“…5 While the German initiators of this work migration in the 1950s and 1960s had consciously sought to depart from older models of forced labor, underscored the mutually beneficial nature of the enterprise, and envisioned a role model that was somewhat internationalist, the immigrants ended up socially isolated in German society. 6 While immigrants from European Union countries were more speedily absorbed, it was particularly the Turkish immigrants who became a scapegoat for an unwanted and growing sense of cultural difference. According to Rita Chin and Heide Fehrenbach many Germans now defined "difference as an import" that was portrayed as inassimilable and separate, but that triggered a discussion over diversity that challenged West German society and polity in an unprecedented way: 7 Immigrants' ethnic identities coupled with a desire to lastingly define their role in German society launched irrational fear, social envy, and a fiercely disputed debate over how to handle this supposed sudden and unexpected "threat of cultural difference"-politically, socially, as well as economically.…”

Wii Are Family: Performing Race in Neo-liberal Europe

“…Many anthologies and monographs that first mapped postcolonial and critical race studies in the European context sought to dispel ideologies of national exceptionalism; uncover continuities and changes in post-war practices and policies of racialization; compare and contrast the racializing regimes that attended colonialism, orientalism, fascism and globalization; and historicize and theorize race out from under the dominant Anglo-American paradigm. 32 The latter includes peripheral European countries like Denmark, Italy and Portugal, whose erstwhile colonial enterprises have received much less scholarly attention than the better-researched British, French, Spanish, Belgian, Dutch and German empires. Scholars in the Nordic countries have begun to examine their region's own direct or indirect relationship with colonialism and the Eurocentric world view, and pierce the exceptionalist fiction that, because they 'have no colonial past', they therefore do not suffer from the 'colonial hangover of cultural oppression, economic exploitation, and political repression'.…”