Germany's Enemy Within
In this email, I will mostly be writing about my own photography. If you’re looking for links to articles instead, the next email will be back to “normal”.
With that said, the documentary above provides some of the background to what I want to address here. It’s about an hour long. It’s absolutely worth your time if you want to learn more about Germany’s vastly accelerated problem with Nazis and other far-right characters.
If you cannot access the video (maybe because if it’s not available in your region), try using a VPN. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know a work around.
You might know that in 2020, my first photobook was published. Entitled Vaterland, it centers on how I felt about watching a political far-right movement emerge in Germany and winning seats in parliaments.
This is not to say that before, there were no Nazis and/or far-right characters in Germany — quite on the contrary. But at least during my life time, there had effectively been a shared consensus that outright Nazis were to be shunned. Less extremist right-wing people had been bound to the conservative parties, the idea being that if those people were part of a moderate movement then they wouldn’t do any harm. That’s obviously a debatable approach. But at least, there was a general agreement that Nazis and far-right politicians were not to be tolerated.
That consensus shattered with the AfD, which emerged after a number of people started publishing racist and/or Islamophobic books in the 2000s. Initially the AfD was somewhat moderate (still pretty right wing). But over a very short time span it evolved into its current form, which basically is 50% outright Nazis and the other 50% people who’d be right at home in, say, Poland’s neofascist PiS party, Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party, or the US’ MAGA Republicans.
I never was under any illusion that my book would change anything. I don’t think that art can play a larger political role; and even where it can, whatever changes it might bring probably happen on much longer timescales. Furthermore, I was and still am a mostly unknown photographer. Still, I got two newspapers (one German, one American) to cover the book, and that meant a lot to me.
Before I published the book, I thought that in at least one sense it was incomplete. There now exists a sizeable population in Germany for which there is no good German term. They’re typically described as “Germans with a migratory background”, and they make up roughly a quarter of the German population.
You might be able to see how that term — “Germans with a migratory background” — is problematic: it implies that there are Germans, and then there are those other Germans, the ones with the little added modifier.
It’s just words, you might say (especially if you’re one of the Germans that don’t have that modifier added). But no, it’s not, because there is systemic discrimination in Germany, which might express itself in daily microaggressions (“so where are you from?”) or in plain old discrimination (you might not find housing quite as easily if your last name isn’t Meier or Müller).
I did not include any portraits of that quarter of the population in Vaterland because the history alluded to in the book has to do with the Germans whose grandparents or great grandparents called themselves “Aryans”. Instead, I thought, I would produce a later companion book to Vaterland that would look at contemporary Germany and its people — the ones with and without the disclaimer about being German.
That was the plan anyway.
Since Vaterland was published, for a short while it looked as if support for the far-right AfD party had crested. But then it grew massively. Now polls show that the party is the strongest party in a number of East German states. In fact, non-democratic parties now make up the majority in at least two Eastern states (there is another, relatively new, right-wing populist party that’s not quite as nationalistic but that’s solidly and openly pro-Putin).
I have been thinking about that a lot lately. Like I said, I did not expect that my book would change anything. I’m completely fine with that.
But I have been thinking that even though I am mostly a pessimist, when I made Vaterland I actually underestimated the threat far-right parties posed and still pose to democracy in Germany. The problem is a lot worse than I had thought.
Truth be told I am deeply disappointed — not about the book itself, but about myself. I’m disappointed that I was more hopeful about the country of my birth than was warranted.
In fact, I don’t even know whether I still want to commit to making the follow-up book. I think it’s time to move on to something completely unrelated.
Germany will never be the country I’d like it to be. For a while, I was hopeful that it had finally become a modern, open country that had learned how to deal with its demons. But that’s absolutely not the case.
Germany will always be Germany.
I forgot where I discovered this book, but I started reading it. In the early 1950s, Milton Mayer went to Germany for a year. He befriended ten Germans (the book is dedicated to them) who talked to him about their lives during the Nazi era. It’s an incredible book.
With that I’m concluding this email. I hope you didn’t mind its focus on my own introspection. I think that at some stage or another most photographers struggle with what they’re doing. I rarely see such struggles being discussed openly.
So even if your struggles might be very different, please know that you’re not alone in this. We all struggle.
Thank you for reading!
— Jörg