The Deutschland of the Tribes

Two thousand years ago, Germania was a tinderbox full of competing warlords and clans. Today, in times of borderless mass migration, new “tribes” are fighting for identity and belonging.

In Germany today, a hyperinflation of emblems, signs and graffiti overwhelms the public space. They cover walls and lampposts, side by side and on top of each other, the newer ones rendering the older illegible. What are all these logos and grease pencil squiggles about? Diversity? Neglect? Colorfulness? Delirium? If you take a closer look, you can read something else from the words and neo-archaic runes: a longing for belonging, for a collective identity in a world without stability. “Uprooting is by far the most dangerous disease of human society,” wrote the philosopher and social revolutionary Simone Weil, who died in 1943. The signs, today, are meant to help alleviate the disease.

In the Deutschland of borderless mass migration, “crews” and “tribes” are fighting with stickers and “tags” to grab space and then defend their newly conquered ground. Look, say the colorful signs, this is us! These are our names, our mysteries, our credos. These are our streets. Here we rule. Here you have to pay tribute to us, or at least, respect. This is our trademark, not that of the enemies next door. We are the better ones, our warriors are more fearsome, our value is higher, our cohesion stronger, our appearance bolder, our sex more exciting. We. Were. Here. As a brotherhood of elementary particles for a period that equals the blink of an eye between the formation of the solar system and the cold death of the universe.

Small groups and larger associations, like nomads on eternal transit. Sleepless urban guerrillas, on the move under the cover of night or embedded in the crowd at a demonstration. Or solo, without a sense of guilt, tagging and messaging in broad daylight and in full view of everyone. Packs of young dogs pissing on the world to leave a scent mark of collective immortality.

There's a lot of colorfulness out there now, a lot of disoriented “I’s”, but hardly any “we” that could amount to a critical mass, a basis for the permanent consolidation of togetherness. Identity is stability, but stability is the past. And if you have no stable origins, you have no solid future. If this grown stability still existed, this old, deeply rooted tree that doesn't itch when a pig scratches its bark, then the facades of our buildings would probably be gray and free of graffiti.

But the times are not like that. There is a nervousness in the streets, heavy through traffic, so to speak. Million-strong caravans are on the move, social structures are disintegrating, family trees are felled by lightning and shake off an entire generation that is now roaming aimlessly, giving the world the finger and upsetting everything. Because all treaties have been declared null and void. Every refuge, every niche, no matter how small, is under threat. They are coming, they who challenge the old order. Those who were the quiet majority are going to be crowded out, shouted down. Dominated. Domesticated. Terminated. Let’s go for the jugular, roar the tribes.

Greetings, warriors! You think what you're doing here is original? Think again. This ground on which you are trying to stake out your territory is as old as the Neanderthals' urge to flock together. Here, generations before generations before generations have done the same as you. Mostly in times like these, times of transit, demolition and regrouping, and when were times not like these? Want Grandpa to tell you about the war? Here we go: Saddle up for a wild ride through two thousand years of history in our little corner of the world.

Germany has always been tribal territory. With two or three rather brief interludes of formal unification of the ethnic groups and deceptive pacification of the warlords who constantly threatened to break away. Even the ancient Germanic tribes north of the Alps were little more than a chimera, less than managable entities. Wedged between the western Celts and the eastern Scythians, even in Julius Caesar's time they were divided into small and tiny peoples and clans, from the Cherusci to the Lombards, from the Jutes to the Suebi.

As a transit area for Europe, what would become Germany was also a hub for peoples on the move. The military and trade routes of antiquity were always expanded and continued to shape migratory movements. Even the Carolingians were unable to permanently cool down the overheated settlement area by declaring it a God-given “empire”. For the millenium to come, peace, consensus and unity would remain a pious wish.

This was due not least to the Thirty Years' War, the great whisk in Europe's mishmash of peoples. From the outside, not only foreign armies streamed into the turmoil along the well-established routes, but also wave after wave of soldiers of fortune, punks and paupers, as well as persecuted ethnic groups such as Huguenots and Bohemians. All of them had to be distributed and settled, which only increased the jealousies and animosities.

Until we were finally incorporated into the Wilhelmian German Empire in 1871, in the patchwork of our statelets and tribal lands the Bavarians, Franconians, Swabians, Palatines, Prussians, Saxons, Frisians and Oldenburgers over and over again raised spears, pitchforks, shotguns or customs duties against their neighboring parcels. At the very least, they threw the dictionaries of the respective idioms at each other.

During the slow beginnings of industrialization - Germany was not yet standardized - the railroad gauge, the voltage of electricity or the units of measurement were often no longer valid even in the neighboring town, which happened to be located on the other side of a line drawn on maps. This complicated state of affairs delayed progress and infuriated the first capitalists, the great-grandfathers of the later globalizers. They quietly wrote a memo to themselves: Borders have no future, the dissolution of blockades has priority, human capital – like any stream of produce and money – must flow freely.

For the time being, however, Chancellor Bismarck had to grant the proud people of Hamburg a duty-free port and warehouse district in 1888, thus rewarding them for their renunciation of their customs sovereignty and other city-state privileges. The duty-free reserve, this fenced-off sovereignty theme park, would remain with them for over a hundred years.

Let's just not talk about Adolf. The thousand years of his grandiloquently monstrous work of unification only lasted twelve, after which the nation was a heap of rubble all over again and the splendor of the Nazi “Gaue” (districts) in East and West was ruined. The surviving Germans, many of whom had been forced to immigrate to one of the two remaining and now antagonist rump-territories, were fascinated by the new experience of being hostile to each other in only two blocks for the first time. Paradoxically, in the shadow of the Wall and barbed wire they became closer than ever to each other: The western faction even sent Christmas parcels to their eastern “brothers and sisters”, who reciprocated by sending dissidents back. And on November 9, 1989, they lay in each other's arms amidst swathes of two-stroke “Trabbi” engines.

But even in the most glamorous black-red-golden times – between the reunification of 1990 and Merkel's “Wir schaffen das” (“We can manage that”) of 2015 – there was still something to rain on our national unity parade: federalism. With its help, the modernized German tribal chiefs reliably drove the Bundespolitiker mad. And for each fiery, bubbling crack somewhere in the thin crust of 16 federal states that was somehow occluded, two new rifts immediately opened up in other provincial capitals.

The drifting and shifting tectonic plates called Germany have always been able to compete with the San Andreas Fault in terms of crunching friction. Historically speaking, the seismic tension zone along the US west coast appears even calmer in comparison – despite the great San Francisco quake of 1906.

While the formally united Germans were already busy de-unifying once more and falling apart into the new tribal associations of “whining Ossis” and “better-Wessis”, a much larger project had long since gained momentum. It was the most dazzling mirage of multi-ethnic pacification to date: Europe. From the coal and steel union of the post-war years to the EEC and the EC to the Maastricht Treaties of the European Union in 1992, the dream or rather the threat of “ever more irrevocable integration”, especially for Germany, seemed to be becoming reality step by step.

“In varietate concordia” - “united in diversity” – is the official motto of the EU. “Dissolved in diversity” is not. However, 2015 brought the accelerated dissolution of peoples, cultures and peculiarities, to a degree and at a speed which the proto-capitalists could only have dreamed of. It immediately started not only to dissolve Germany’s common ground but to disintegrate the whole concrete of Western Europe’s cultural foundation. The unbounded tribe of globalized anywheres had gambled too high. They had, after all, convinced themselves that the EU with Germany at its center had easily survived everything they had ever thrown at her: the bankruptcy of entire member states, the crises surrounding the euro and spiraling debt, social disparities and the global economic crisis of 2008, the temporary abolition of interest rates and even the dispute over the question of what exactly constitutes a Nuremberg gingerbread.

But then, in September 2015, Angela Merkel almost single-handedly opened the floodgates, and the diversity that now streamed into Europe changed everything. Things started to happen that were even more gigantic and stunning than what had originally been planned for the Old Continent, just not in a good way. The new momentum shook the ancient tribal areas. The British Brexit vote, for example, was largely influenced by the images of migrant caravans entering EU soil at the end of the Balkan route or via the Mediterranean ferry ports - all on their way north, where Europe is colder but also more prosperous.

And it was not only in Britain that the “populist” movements subsequently rose like the proverbial yeast dough. Since then, nine years have passed, the influx has hardly been slowed down and has not been steered into a regulated course. No problem has been solved, no conflict over the new arrivals has been pacified. Instead, Europe with Germany at its center has become deeply divided, paralysed and polarized. This hardly irritates the globalizers; collateral damage on the way to borderless free trade zones and unlimited human material was to be expected and acceptable to them.

Their mad move had come at a time when the unifying seeds within Europe's cultural and ethnic diversity had almost, almost borne fruit. But then this bold project was suddenly overshadowed by the most foolhardy agenda: allowing and even encouraging uncontrolled mass immigration from religiously and culturally antagonistic regions of the world. It washed away everything unifying and pacifying, even the “European idea” itself, and left behind only chaos and overload at all levels. Mass migration is truly devastating European societies, far more virulent and destructive than the dreaded coronavirus which has meanwhile come and gone.

This is where the stories from the long history of our tribal region end for the time being. The fluid tribes and crews in the streets of Hamburg, Berlin or Stuttgart would never have heard the end of it anyway, if only because of the attention spans that are common today. But also because of taboo words like “mass migration”, or because an old white man is telling these tales.

Tomorrow morning, when daylight returns, new tags and stickers will be emblazoned on walls and lampposts. Because there are always new demands to be made, new demonstrations to be announced and new coalitions to be forged against new enemies. However, the more exotic new clans appear on the scene, the shorter the half-life of these alliances and the shorter their time in the spotlight. Conversely, where there is no more protection by borders, there is an intense need for demarcation. And the more boundaries of faith or ideology are drawn in the process, the smaller the wings and factions into which the new tribes break up in their search for identity.

The pattern is paradoxical: All these groups, which promise meaning and cohesion, become increasingly hostile to each other the closer they are pushed together in this broken pressure cooker of a society. The Cheruscans and Lombards would have felt the same way 2,000 years ago. Take a closer look at the stickers again: Today, the “Antifascist Action” from Pinneberg would probably be fighting bitterly with “Antira” from Hamburg and both would be arguing just as heatedly with “Coronifa”, the latter of which they would possibly accuse of ironically belittling their deadly serious cause. Or the “Hamburg Women” would have a problem with the overly cheeky “Hurray-I'm-gay” faction, because they seem to resonate with an anti-feminist undertone. Or the “Cyclepunks Collective” would clash with the “Segeberg Scum” over the use of the anarchy symbol.

It has not become any easier to define the “we”, this fleeting flotsam in the sea of confusion. Finding the formula for a common identity lasting more than seven days is hotter shit in the land of the new tribes than anything else that keeps the crews and tribes, the clans and collectives in motion.

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This post is an updated and edited version of an article originally published in German in TWASBO Magazine, September 2020.