Maxim Biller, “The Turkicized Germans” (1991)

Abstract

The Jewish writer and columnist Maxim Biller (b. 1960, Prague) has lived in Germany since 1970. He published his satirical texts in journals like Tempo, Spiegel, the weekly Die Zeit, and in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. Biller uses the German verb türken (colloquial for: to fake) in his essay’s title, playing on the ambiguity between two meanings: the “fake” Germans and the “Turkicized Germans.” In this text excerpt from 1991, he sharply attacks the advocates of the "multicultural society" such as the CDU politician Heiner Geißler.

Source

We will force the subhumans to enjoy their multicultural fortune; we will bend these four and a half million foreigners into shape. Indeed, one day they will understand that one does not grab at women, that one neither laughs nor talks on the subway, that only a heathen does not have coffee and cake on a Sunday, and that Khomeini, Ceauşescu, and Idi Amin were all big-time criminals. Hitler, however, was a historical mistake.

It’s a given, of course, that we will continue to entrust the blacks and the Turks with hauling away our garbage and living in our slums. Certainly, that is somewhat unfair, but, as a result, we can continue to shop for exotic products in their exotic shops and lead civilized discussions with them in pidgin German about their primeval homeland (out of respect for their folkloristic marginal culture) – communication of a high caliber, similar to that of guest-worker programs on ZDF.

We will teach our inferiors how to speak Hessian, to cook Swabian, and to laugh in Low German. We will satisfy their youth with German heavy-metal culture, elate the elderly with German economic chauvinism, and bribe them with that placebo of emancipation: “voting rights for foreigners.” They should become Germans – of a certain category, let’s say, second class with an expiration date monitored by immigration. And, naturally, we won’t give them German citizenship anyway. We must have order. And obviously we will label the whole thing as the charmingly enigmatic multicultural society. And for precisely this reason, we will not tell the blacks and Turks (one must not frighten them unnecessarily) which devil’s advocate – from the taz to faz, from Daniel Cohn-Bendit to Manfred Rommel – is behind the words of the thoroughly debated multicultural society. This is a man whom we call, not without pride, the Auschwitz-pacifist Geißler. It is no coincidence that he was the one who succeeded in addressing the increasingly urgent foreigner question for our reunified, strengthened Volk – hidden, of course, behind a pseudoliberal mask of racial tolerance and economic magnanimity.

Hence, fellow German citizens, there is no need to panic: Heiner Geißler is not advocating for the (ha ha) multicultural society, because he really wishes for a cosmopolitization and loosening of our republic. No, the Auschwitz-pacifist Geißler simply realized, with a visionary pragmatic awareness, that blacks and Turks are already here and that one can hardly throw them out now, and second, that they – quotation! – as “scavengers” taking bad jobs and miserable housing beautifully complement the socioeconomic equilibrium of our affluent society. The fact that in his book Zugluft [Draft], he simultaneously advocates something that has long existed – namely Germans and non-Germans living side by side – will at best occur to some smart-alecky, Tamil bogus asylum seekers and nit-picking Jewish Talmudists.

We Germans, in contrast, know that in this way, he has found a particularly clever, diplomatic method for the segregation and – watch out, no euphemism! – gentle enslavement of our foreign fellow citizens and so wants to accompany us along a promising path: the creation of a society of grandly tolerant German leaders and nameless Helots, who may work off their national and cultural frustration as minor characters on Lindenstrasse.

The principal is clear: The Black Turks, Islamic gypsies, and Yugoslavian Jews must never find out that the multicultural society is just a trick, a new catchword for our long-standing “We single out the foreign” game. If they do, then they might not play along. And if that happens, then God help us. Then Germany will soon be a racial hotbed of vice worse than New York and Singapore, Tel Aviv and Paris combined. Then there will no longer be a single real German.

Would that really be such a catastrophe?

Source of the original German text: Maxim Biller, „Die getürkten Deutschen“, in Transit Deutschland. Debatten zu Nation und Migration, Hrsg. Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, Anton Kaes und Andreas Langenohl, München: Konstanz University Press, 2011, pp. 577-578.

Source of English translation: Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes, eds., Germany in Transit. Nation and Migration 1955-2005. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 394-395.

Translation: Tes Howell
Maxim Biller, “The Turkicized Germans” (1991), published in: German History Intersections, <https://germanhistory-intersections.org/en/migration/ghis:document-101> [December 06, 2024].