Bring on the Jewish-Muslim dominant culture! Max Czollek's new book "Gegenwartsbewältigung"

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Max Czollek at a reading in Berlin 2019

Max Czollek's first non-fiction book in 2018, that was the really big pose: an unobjective non-fiction book, angry and angry and often unjust, a polemic. "Disintegrate!" it was said and brought its author to the "New York Times".

In it, Czollek, Jewish poet and political scientist, born and raised in East Berlin, is doing his doctorate at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the TU Berlin, an extreme criticism of Germany and the majority society. That was the right approach to closing your own left ranks. But for the debate about origin, homeland, identity, it was perhaps "not helpful", as Merkel would say, because the debate is polarized anyway. You don't need another polemicist, you need a rested voice.

Czollek, 33, has acquired one of these for large parts of his new book. The old book was witty, the new one has reason. It's grown up, more constructive. It means "coping with the present".

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Title: Coping with the Present

Publisher: Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG

Number of pages: 208

Author: Czollek, Max

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Initially, Czollek will pick up where he left off in 2018. "I'm not writing this for any rights," he adds, "but for my colleagues who have to change homes because of right-wing threats. I'm writing this for my family and friends. We hold on."

You can read that as a rejection of any dialogue, i.e. the idea that one can and must also speak with rights. But Czollek does not continue to write as controversially as 2018. There will be fans who won't like the new book as much as the old one. Czollek still has a feel for punchlines ("Write in such a way that the Nazis would forbid you!"), He just punches less often, he dances around his opponents more.

Mettigel, whipped cream and folk nationalism

In terms of content, however, Czollek is completely the old man, he fights for a radically diverse society and reinforces the idea of ​​a leading culture, i.e. the belief that a society needs a hierarchical order into which everyone must fit.

Around a quarter of the people in Germany today have a history of migration in one way or another. The greatest thing the Germans have in common, Czollek concludes, is probably their difference: "Germans listen to hip-hop or hits, go to the theater or to the Oktoberfest, visit Turkey or Australian sex parties with Studiosus trips, sometimes both." In such a diverse, radically diverse society, that is Czollek's thesis, the idea of ​​a leading culture no longer works. The dominant center is missing.

Czollek does not mourn afterwards, on the contrary. Which story is already available in Germany to create identity? And what culture? With the history of German culture, according to Czollek, it is "a bit like with German talk shows: a few good moments here and there, but overall you are looking into a gaping abyss."

In some moments the old joke flashes, the linguistic brilliance, the "Disintegrate yourselves!" distinguished. But the same problems usually arise with them as they did back then: too much provocation, too little accuracy. The lack of will to dialogue.

"Racist thinking and ethnic nationalism are as normal at family celebrations and village festivals as Mettigel and spray cream," writes Czollek. A tweet would have great potential: Euphoric applause from some, outrage from others. But is the sentence correct?

Unfortunately, we do not have an empirical survey on the catering situation at German village festivals at hand, but: Isn't Czollek confusing the present with the 1980s? Mettigel and spray cream are cliché images of German dietary preferences that can hardly withstand the reality check.

And if we have understood the sociologist Aladin El-Mafaalani correctly, to whom Czollek expressly thanks in the afterword for helpful comments and discussions, then Germany is now a far more open society than it was in the 1980s. Or to put it in the pointed Czollek style: In the past everything was worse in Germany, not just the food.

Jewish-Muslim dominant culture

As in "Disintegrate!" Czollek railed against the talk of a "Judeo-Christian dominant culture", which is currently so en vogue. The formula allows you to be intolerant but act tolerant. "Whoever protects Jews in Germany today is on the good side - right?" He is particularly bothered by comments such as that of the CDU youngster Philipp Amthor that anti-Semitism is now mainly represented in Muslim cultures, i.e. imported from outside. "By claiming that the dominant culture exists primarily to protect Jews from allegedly anti-Semitic Muslims, the demand for German cultural dominance for the present is finally gaining a supposed social justification."

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Philipp Amthor

Czollek admits that there are massive problems with anti-Semitism and sexism in some Muslim communities, but "they do not pose the central threat to the German present." The main threat is the political right: The AfD sits in the Bundestag, "but I look in vain for a fundamentalist Sharia party."

And so Czollek countered the idea of ​​a Judeo-Christian guiding culture provocatively with an alternative proposal: a Judeo-Muslim guiding culture. After the right-wing terrorist attacks of recent years it is clear that both sides are likely to share a fate. "Either both Jews and Muslims succeed in living in Germany. Or both of them fail." His vision: an alliance of the discriminated people across the boundaries of their respective discrimination.

Coping with the present: For Czollek, this is only possible with radical diversity and disintegration. "It is precisely the radical diversity of society that is an engine of democracy." In this sense, his longing for a Jewish-Muslim dominant culture counteracts the new German longing for home.

Czollek sings the Song of Songs of Difference.