Letter from Germany on Sarrazin

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Letter from Germany on Sarrazin

Monday, September 6th, 2010 | blogging

I received the following email from a German friend of mine, whom I met and hung around with in Salamanca, Spain, in the summer of 2000, when we were both studying there. He’s now in his late 20s and studying for a Ph.D. in a social science field in Britain. Although the email isn’t as radical as many of the things I’ve written here, I think it noteworthy because until fairly recently, my friend seemed fairly middle-of-the-road politically. He now shows that he’s become deeply worried about Germany’s future.

I read your blog post on Sarrazin and the replies by readers as well.

I don’t want to go into this subject because the whole affair makes me very angry (what about freedom of speech for someone like Sarrazin who doesn’t share the opinion of all these tree huggers and who finally speaks out publicly about issues that threaten the very survival of our society and welfare state, for instance?). His party, the German Social Democrats, have already started a legal procedure trying to kick him out of the party. So a party that has the term democratic in its name, tries to rid itself of someone who speaks his mind. Very weird indeed.

On your blog you raised the issue of Sarrazin’s ancestry. [In the older post, here.] Please see page five of the pdf attached. In his reply starting with “Grober Unfug. Unter den Nazis…”, Sarrazin states that his father’s side of the family is Huguenot from Lyon, he also has an English grandmother, Italian great-grandmother and his mother is from West Prussia, hence his Slavic cheekbone (the cheekbone bit is somewhat entertaining). Sarrazin further states that the name Sarrazin is fairly common in Southern France and that its origin lies with the Arabic pirates of the Mediterranean.

Trying not to think about the future of my fatherland (as if Britain was in any better shape!) and focus on this PhD of mine instead.

Maybe if people like my friend are starting to question the zeitgeist, things are looking up.

Update: My friend writes:

The Bundesbank just asked the German president to sack Sarrazin; it’s a fairly complicated process involving a number of institutions, but basically the message is that Sarrazin’s colleague′s in the Bundesbank kicked him out and now need the president and whoever else to make this dismissal official. An interesting twist is that the whole Sarrazin book launch and what the mainstream media and the German political class have made out of this by blowing the case out of proportion and by denouncing Sarrazin, has cast a negative light on the Bundesbank′s head, Axel Weber. It so happens that Mr Weber is very eager to become head of the ECB succeeding Mr Trichet.

One can hope that the powers that be in Germany have shot themselves in the foot. In any case, has anyone opposed to Sarrazin made any sort of case as to what he said wrong? Not as far as I can tell. The entire response has been nothing but point and sputter.