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Reflections on Germany

JUDITH BUTLER

When I heard that Suhrkamp Verlag had decided to translate
Gender Trouble
in 1991, my first thought was that I might then be invited to give a lecture in Germany and, after twelve years, return to the country where I had lived in 1978–79. I’ve never been very clear why it was that I only returned once, in 1981, and that since that time I seemed only to go to France when I traveled to Europe. It was not “the country,” as some Americans will say, or “the peo- ple,” since I knew from having lived in Heidelberg and having traveled ex- tensively that year that there were no such monolithic concepts or, rather, that when and where such grand concepts were used they concealed much more than they illuminated. It seemed to me that the move from Germany to France was a shift in some ways from philosophy to literary theory. My dis- sertation was on the French reception of Hegel, and I sought to show that the French who believed they had made a decisive break with Hegel were closer to him than they thought. And then I myself began to take the thought of that utter break more seriously. Could there be a negation that did not always and only reinstall a greater unity? Could there be a thought of difference that did not return to the thought of identity?

But it is probably not believable that it was my thinking about Hegel that led to a shift in attention from German to French intellectual life. Except that I do remember the decisive moment at the age of twenty-four when I naively gave a paper in Dubrovnik criticizing what I took to be Habermas’s transcen- dental turn only to have a crew of loyal Habermasians turn their anger against me. I remember the cruel tone of that unwavering defense of universalism, and I began to wonder whether there was not a kind of smugness in that alarming cultural presumption that buried in
one’s own
speech act there was a universal link with every other. I resolved to find out whether thought might not turn out to be more affirming of difference elsewhere.

I come from a Jewish background, and when I went to study in Germany at the age of twenty-one my parents had a great deal of difficulty with the de- cision. But my grandmother, who was born in Hungary and who understood Germany to be a culture in which Jews once thrived, was very pleased that I was “returning,” that I would take up some German space, that I would show by my presence that the Jews still lived there. As if acting in the role of emis- sary, I went to (West) Germany and found all the old Jewish cemeteries, the remnants of the Jewish resistance; I befriended a small group of Pakistani ex- iles who called themselves the “new Jews,” and I went to Fassbinder films as a starving person might crawl toward food. I gleaned from the visual distor- tions of his camera a keen recognition of my own visual field. I made some good German friends with whom I had long and serious conversations about Germans, Jews, history, politics, and sexuality. I attended lectures at the uni- versity and learned a beautiful story about how philosophy developed in or- ganic and necessary ways from Kant to Hegel. I tried to keep breathing, but it became more difficult. I stayed away from the university. I read on my own. I waited to go home.

Fourteen years later,
Gender Trouble
had been published as
Das Unbeha- gen der Geschlechter
(The Discontent of Gender), and some invitations began to arrive: first, a group of students in Hamburg who did not have any money, but wouldn’t I like to come anyway; second, the Frankfurter Frauenschule, a center for women’s cultural and intellectual life in Frankfurt that did not sound like the kinds of women’s centers that I knew in either the United States or Europe; the Institut für Socialforschung (Institute for Social Re- search) in Frankfurt where I worried that I might suffer the same kind of treatment by the same Habermasians; finally, the Freie Universitat in Berlin, a lecture sponsored by both Soziologie and Germanistik.

What I found was that the students in Hamburg took the book seriously in ways that are very rare to find in the United States. With the advent of “queer theory” and with a new kind of “theory culture” in the USA, highly re- duced caricatures of complex intellectual positions are circulated as “read- ings,” and I was startled and grateful for the careful readings that the various students were willing to undertake. I was reminded how different the intel- lectual culture is in Germany, and the serious engagement with texts was very welcome to me. But when I tried to ask the students, who identified prima- rily as feminists, how and where feminism was engaged in antiracist organiz- ing, there seemed at first to be little comprehension that feminism and the struggle against racism might operate together. One woman who seemed to have connections with a feminist community in Berlin understood very well how they might work together, and later, when I was in Berlin, it seemed clear

to the women with whom I spoke that the connection was not only obvious but that feminists had been part of the original movement to organize against racist violence.

I read the newspapers to understand how the violence against the Turks was being reported, and I was astonished by the tendency of the press to psy- chologize the perpetrator. In one article, which reported on a Turkish family murdered in Stuttgart, the childhoods of the German men who had confessed to the crime were described in long compassionate detail. Their names and histories were given; they had bad mothers, bad fathers; they were alcoholic; their parents were abusive. All of these circumstances—indeed, these syn- dromes—led them to this fatal moment in which their
own
lives were ruined. What astonished me was that the Turks apparently had no names, no fami- lies, no childhood. Indeed, the narration managed to shift attention from that crime to the psychological “crimes” done to the perpetrators, and so seemed to work in the service of a deflection from the incident and its larger social and cultural imagination.

It seemed clear to me that this psychological discourse had emerged as an alternative to a discourse of blame, and that a discourse of blame appeared im- portant to resist precisely because its only possible consequence appeared to be a paralyzing guilt. The discourse of psychology established nonmoral and nonpolitical accounts of xenophobic violence and seemed linked to a certain Christian practice of forgiveness. In a sense the newspaper allegorically enact- ed both the confessional and its reception. Similarly, there seemed to be an ef- fort to counter racism through recourse to a notion of
nachbarschaft
, or neigh- borliness, as if the problem was that people were simply not treating their neighbors as they themselves would like to be treated. The task seemed to be the moral and Christian edification of the individual. But what struck me about the twin uses of therapeutic and Christian ethics was the way in which they worked in tandem both to individualize the problem and to extend the hegemony of Christianity.

Before traveling to Germany in 1994, I read about the upsurge in neo- Nazi attacks on refugees, but what I didn’t read, but only came to see when I arrived in Germany, was that this reaction is but one aspect of a radically al- tered cultural landscape. The population had become more diverse, and in some ways the atmosphere seemed to be much better even as the rise in pover- ty was dismaying, and the train stations in Frankfurt and Berlin were filled with poor refugees from various places. But the profound questions of what it might mean, postwall, to conceive of Germany as a people or as a nation, especially considering the increased presence of Muslims from Turkey and elsewhere, seemed to produce a conservative retreat to Christian discourse.

And this struck me as precisely counter to the task at hand, for what does it mean to confront ethnic and religious difference through invoking and strengthening a Christian ethic? Is that not to continue to impose Chris- tianity as an anxious and conservative response to its loss of hegemony, to domesticate the cultural challenge of religious difference under the sign of the same?

Clearly, the politically conservative effects of therapeutic and heightened Christian discourse were well-known by the various women with whom I spoke. And yet their condemnation of all psychological language, including psychoanalysis, seemed also suspect to me in a different way. In Hamburg the local feminist newspapers were running debates on how to think about sexu- al harassment and sexual injury. The women who invited me were against “victim discourse” and were in favor of reconceiving power relations in a way that preserved a place for women’s agency. They tended to base themselves on Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis in
The History of Sexuality,
volume 1. Even among feminists who tended to derive all social ills from an abstract conception of “patriarchy,” there were some who claimed that women, though not often the direct perpetrators of racist violence, were nevertheless accomplices (
Mittäterinen
). This thesis seemed to repel other women, fearing that to be in any position of responsibility would be to take on paralyzing guilt. The Frankfurter Frauenschule prided itself on sponsoring intellectual exchanges that were not part of “therapeutic discourse.” And one fairly criti- cal member of my audience there asked me whether I was interested in the psychic
or
the social consequences of misogyny and homophobia. I was slight- ly taken aback by the presumption that there had to be a choice.

Upon reflection it seemed to me indicative of the polarization of dis- courses in which both sides of the encounter appeared traumatically con- cerned with the displacement of individual guilt. And the debates within fem- inism seemed to me not only a displacement of the larger questions of national responsibility but a displacement and traumatic repetition of the problem of social guilt as it continues to haunt Germany almost fifty years after the demise of National Socialism. The therapeutic discourse sought to avoid blame and responsibility by establishing the individual as the broken ef- fect of a dysfunctional family. The narrative of putatively painful childhood circumstances constitutes a kind of sociological/psychological
cause
of racist violence and so relieves the agent of all individual responsibility. This kind of narrative is familiar to me from relatively bad films made after World War II in West Germany. But it also seemed clear to me that the “breakdown of the family,” and, hence, the “injurious effects of feminism” were being blamed for racist violence against Turkish citizens and refugees.

On the other hand, those who want to deny “victimization” in cases of “sexual injury” seemed to be involved in the same kind of business: fighting off the specter of a fully responsible and fully unforgivable act of violence, in- sisting that the one to whom such an action was done is also part of that ac- tion. Is this refusal of the status of victimization a discourse restricted to the feminist problem of agency, or is it also motivated by a fear of occupying a position of paralyzing guilt as a German feminist in relation to the racist vio- lence done by other Germans? What national anguish has become condensed and displaced in the discourse on sexual injury within feminism? The
Mittä- terin
thesis developed by feminists in relation to the problem of German racism appears to be more directly engaged with this problem, but it is still overdetermined; indeed, the very term explicitly recalls the language of col- laboration from World War II; it doesn’t target the object of violence, howev- er, but rather the passive bystander who appears to have nothing to do with the racist action that it witnesses. Who is paying for whose sins?