In recent months, a new party has entered the German left. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), headed by two women with immigrant roots in the Middle East and North Africa (Sahra Wagenknecht and Amira Mohamed Ali), takes a hardline approach to immigration in service of protecting ostensibly progressive values — specifically social welfare.
Six years ago, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party launched a similar strategy on the radical right. Lead candidate Alice Weidel, an out lesbian banker, also took a punitive approach to migration in service of traditionally progressive values. Weidel claimed to be protecting gay and lesbian Germans from the alleged threat of homophobic Islam, despite her own party’s opposition to LGBTQ rights. And yet, the strategy worked. The party managed to become the first far-right party to enter German parliament since 1961.
What accounts for the consensus between two parties on opposite fringes of the political spectrum?
For the past 75 years, German policymakers have eschewed the very category of “race,” which they saw as a relic of the Nazi past. Steeped in accounts of biological hierarchy and genocide, “race” could play no function in building German democracy. And yet it did. The combination of racial and sexual anxieties proved especially potent in shoring up the bounds of the postwar West German nation that was the building block for today’s Germany, even as those who harnessed those anxieties — politicians, religious figures, media outlets, anti-immigration protesters — denied that they were thinking about race at all. Nevertheless, racism proved remarkably durable, on both sides of the country’s politics.
Consider the case of postwar migration. Between 1955 and 1973, the Federal Republic of Germany instituted a temporary work visa program to meet the labor needs of its growing industrial capitalist economy. Invited workers and their families — mostly from southern Europe and Turkey, but…
