With Words on Muslims, Opening a Door Long Shut
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Published: November 12, 2010
BERLIN
THIS quiet, orderly man, who lives in a quiet, orderly house, in a very quiet tree-lined neighborhood has caused a huge public stir here with his volatile book arguing that Muslim immigrants in Germany are socially, culturally and intellectually inferior to most everyone else.
With the certainty of an accountant adding up rows of numbers, Thilo Sarrazin has delivered his conclusion in a book that has sold over one million copies, forced him to quit his job at the German central bank, may get him kicked out of his political party and for the first time since World War II made it socially acceptable in Germany to single out a particular minority for criticism.
“The facts I quoted and analyzed are undeniable and cannot be done away with,” he said without a hint of defensiveness in his quiet, understated manner.
Mr. Sarrazin, 65, is tall and trim, with a head of thick grayish hair, round tortoiseshell glasses and a right eye that is always squinting, as if looking into the sun. Friends of Mr. Sarrazin say they are not at all surprised that he has found himself in this position because while he is quiet and orderly, he also has a penchant for offending.
“I am not impolite,” he says.
He prefers blunt.
A few years ago, Mr. Sarrazin chastised the poor, saying they could easily survive — even thrive — on the approximately $5.50 a day they received for food from public assistance, and that they should stop complaining. He personally derailed a plan to privatize the German rail system, upsetting a political deal but winning praise for his fiscal acumen. He had to manage Berlin’s finances when the city was about $75 billion in debt and is credited with significantly reining in city spending.
“Bluntness,” Mr. Sarrazin said, “on the right subject at the right time is an element of success.”
MR. SARRAZIN’S latest blunt assessment came in the form of his book, “Germany Does Away With Itself,” which was released in August and provoked a heated national debate that has still not cooled. The government hosted a so-called integration conference last week, and a group of 650 citizens of Turkish origin issued a public letter saying, “We all feel discredited through the current debate.”
Mr. Sarrazin seems to be enjoying it all.
“As an author who had something to say and who wanted to influence the public debate, I could not be happier.”
What he does not enjoy is being shunned by the political elite, his longtime peers. He has put in writing what he says a lot of people here were thinking. Even Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested — indirectly — that she agreed with one of Mr. Sarrazin’s points, when she said that multiculturalism was dead.
Mrs. Merkel said integration into German society was necessary, echoing another of Mr. Sarrazin’s claims.
Mr. Sarrazin greeted a visitor to his home one morning, during a rare lull in his schedule of book readings and television and radio appearances. His living room has lots of books on shelves, a few paintings and prints on the wall and a large flat-screen television. There are no personal touches, no family photographs, though he says his hobby is photography.
“Some have said I argue that the achievements of immigrants from Muslim countries are lower because of genetic reasons; this is quite wrong,” Mr. Sarrazin explained, as if to cast off any taint of prejudice. “It has to be a matter of culture, and Islam is that culture.”
Mr. Sarrazin says his book can be boiled down to a few main ideas. To begin, ethnic Germans are having too few children, while Muslim immigrants are having too many. In a population of about 82 million, there are about four million Muslims (a number he said he calculated partly by looking at census figures for families with lots of children. Big families must be Muslim, he concluded). Within 80 years, he said, Muslims will make up a majority in Germany.
Second, Mr. Sarrazin believes that intelligence is inherited, not nurtured, and since Muslims are less intelligent (his conclusion) than ethnic Germans, the population will be dumbed down (his conclusion).
Third, to solve a growing demographic problem, Germany will require immigrants, but he says that bringing more Muslims into the country will only make matters worse. He says that after examining three indicators — success in education and employment, and welfare dependency — he concluded that Islam is by its nature a drag on individual success.
“I came to a very astonishing conclusion, and this is important,” Mr. Sarrazin said, his voice invoking a bit of drama. “Immigrants from non-Islamic countries show no statistical difference to the German population at all. On the other hand, immigrants from Muslim countries pose much greater problems. Their language skills, academic skills and professional skills are much below average.”
WHAT he did not discuss, his critics say, was how it has been well documented in Germany that prejudice and discrimination have made it difficult — nearly impossible — for Muslims to get jobs, find housing or advance in education. A government official in Berlin said recently that many immigrants and their children were given an inferior education that did not prepare them for the work force. Mr. Sarrazin dismisses those factors as secondary, or irrelevant.
Still, it seems that what has made Mr. Sarrazin so popular, or notorious, is not just his attack on Muslims, which is certainly not the first. What he seems to have accomplished is blasting open a door many thought was sealed shut by Germany’s Nazi past. As a lifelong Social Democrat, and not some fringe far right extremist, Mr. Sarrazin has made it acceptable for the German everyman to criticize a specific minority group, and to make sweeping statements about that group’s intellectual capacity.
His supporters say he is a defender of free speech, breaking taboos with passages like: “No other religion in Europe is so demanding, and no other migration group depends so much on the social welfare state and is so much connected to criminality.”
His critics say he has allowed hate speech to go mainstream.
“The fact that he scapegoats a religion and associates failure and inferiority with a faith, has ruined the integration discourse in Germany,” said Antje Scheidler, director of the Berlin office of the group Humanity in Action Deutschland. “We are hearing comments and a harshness and, I think, openly racist claims we haven’t seen before.”
Mr. Sarrazin said he was gratified by public support and a bit surprised by the degree to which his peer group — the political leadership — has shunned him. He was saying he recently took up golf and hoped to get back to photography, as his doorbell rang. He greeted a man who had come by with two copies of Mr. Sarrazin’s book.
He asked that they be signed.
“I don’t regret anything I did or wrote,” Mr. Sarrazin said after returning to his chair. “I think I am right.”
The Saturday Profile - Thilo Sarrazin - NYTimes.com
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