This article is part of our 14/2019 Eurozine review. Click here to subscribe to our reviews, and you also can subscribe to our newsletter and get the bi-weekly updates about latest publications and news on partner journals.
Blätter anticipates a far-right watershed; dérive deconstructs town and country; Vikerkaar finds fascination in Africa; Mittelweg 36 offers perspectives on the sociology of money; and Syn og Segn talks to dramatist Jon Fosse.
Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik
8/2019
(Germany)
Blätter anticipates a far-right watershed
The elections in the eastern German states of Saxony and Brandenburg on 1 September, and in Thuringia at the end of October, are expected to deliver a surge for the AfD and to place coalition arithmetic under major strain. Moreover, an internal power struggle has been going on within the AfD itself, with the Thuringia party leader Björn Höcke, head of the ‘rightwing’ faction, challenging the current ‘moderate’ leadership at the national level. Blätter co-editor Albrecht von Lücke speculates on the type of party that a Höcke-led AfD would become.
The current party chairmen Alexander Gauland and Georg Meuthen see the success of the AfD as lying in its avoidance of conventional far-right rhetoric. Occidentalism and Islamophobia, not neo-Nazi revisionism, have so far defined the official vocabulary of the party. In addition, the division of power in the leadership has been designed to give the impression of a democratic party structure. This would change with a Höcke takeover: ‘Above all in the East, though by no means not just there, the führer cult clearly no longer puts people off. On the contrary, with growing dissatisfaction with democracy, authoritarian leadership is becoming positively attractive, as is proven by the remarkable approval for Vladimir Putin.’
Blaming communism: Sociologist Wolfgang Engler vigorously refutes the theory that eastern Germany is incapable of democracy for historical reasons. To blame the far-right resurgence in the former GDR on forty years of communism is to commit a threefold error. First, it denigrates people’s experience of the last thirty years; second, it operates a one-dimensional view of the GDR as handicap or ‘baggage’; third, it justifies the injustices that went with the post-communist upheavals, which turned many people into ‘second-class citizens’. ‘The notorious blindness towards the history of the last thirty years when explaining the far-right tendencies of eastern Germans is crude ideology.’
Rightwing terrorism: The murder in June of the Hessian CDU politician Walter Lübcke by a (western German) neo-Nazi ‘sleeper’ prompted talk of a ‘new quality’ of rightwing violence. And yet, as the journalist Martín Steinhagen writes, politics ought to know better. Underground far-right networks did not cease to exist after the outing of the NSU terrorist cell in 2011. Nor is far-right violence limited to militant neo-Nazi groupings like Combat 18. Rather, as responses to the murder on social media showed, ‘elements of extreme rightwing ideology have an appeal way beyond the scene itself’. Approval of violence is an integral part of a ‘mosaic’ far-right movement in Germany that, most alarmingly, reaches deep into the security services themselves.
More articles from Blätter in Eurozine; Blätter’s website
dérive
76 (2019)
(Austria)
dérive deconstructs town and country
The re-politicized dichotomy between ‘town and country’ may, on closer inspection, be less rigid than we think, remark the editors of the urbanist magazine dérive. The observation is borne out by Maximilian Förtner, Bernd Belina and Matthias Naumann, who analyse support for the AfD in terms of Adorno’s definition of education (Bildung) as ‘de-provincialization’. Their comparison of three different constituencies in eastern and western Germany suggests that the dynamics of town and country are variously filtered through processes of urbanization, socio-economic transformation and peripheralization.
Like other parts of north-eastern Germany, the town of Greifswald in western Pomerania has suffered from the collapse of the agricultural sector since 1989. Here, the reaction to urbanization and the transformation to a service-sector economy has been one of right-wing ‘ruralism’, in which pre-urban structures are reproduced. In the Schönau district of Mannheim, in the opposite corner of Germany, a different effect can be observed. This is a disadvantaged area with high levels of social housing and a thirty-year history of rightwing violence. Here, ruralism replaces reflection on resentment towards ‘the other’. Finally, in the Heidach district of Pforzheim, also in south-west Germany, where the population is between 80 and 90 per cent Russian-speaking, support for the AfD is a ‘local reaction to global urbanization and social-spatial segregation’.
Austria: Historical voting patterns in Austria still fall along a distinct town-country axis. As psephologist Günther Ogris explains, urban regions, above all Vienna and Linz, continue to vote predominantly social democratic, while the rural remainder of the country votes conservative. This picture has been complicated in the last decade by the rise of the far-right FPÖ in the formerly conservative states of Upper Austria and Styria: ‘What used to be said about the industrial cities, also known as the Austrian rust belt, i.e. that they vote FPÖ, suddenly happened among the rural population.’
Sebastian Kurz’s verbal attacks on Vienna — that the city is dangerous, that its residents are lazy and abuse state benefits — likewise belong to a long tradition of enmity between the provinces and the capital. Despite being kept in check by a succession of grand coalitions, the narrative is kept alive because the working class in Vienna has a large immigrant component. ‘The anti-proletarian reflexes of the rural middle class thereby acquire an additional xenophobic touch. That was also the case back in the days of the monarchy.’
More articles from dérive in Eurozine; dérive’s website
Mittelweg 36
3–4/2019
(Germany)
Mittelweg offers perspectives on the sociology of money
Despite auspicious beginnings with Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money(1900), twentieth-century sociology has tended to leave monetary questions to economists, write Philipp Degens and Aaron Sahr in their introduction to the current issue of Mittelweg 36 (‘Perspectives on the sociology of money’). When they did discuss money, sociologists relied on conventional economics, in which the ‘doctrine of neutrality’ dominated: i.e. money was seen merely as a means of transaction. Even in the late ’80s, when economy was rediscovered by sociology, the significance of money as such continued to be underestimated.
In recent years, however, there has been an explosion in the sociological research of money. According to Degens and Sahr, there are several reasons for this. First, the dematerialization of money and the emergence of a ‘cash-less society’. Second, the de-nationalization of monetary systems and the rise of private actors in the field. Third, the ascent of financial capitalism in the late-twentieth century, which heightened the significance of derivatives, capital and stock markets in thane increasingly globalized value production chain. Fourth, the politicization of money: the eurocrisis precipitated a re-evaluation of text-book economics and, with monetary institutions resorting to increasingly ‘unconventional’ solutions, a focus on the architecture of the monetary order as such.
Money, money, money: Klaus Kraemer on the social meaning of money as institution and the everyday distinction between trust and certainty; Nigel Dodd on the social practices, organizational structures and utopian ambitions of Bitcoin; Christine Desan on the legal, institutional and material conditions for money production and their impact on systemic roles and distribution of profits; Andreas Langenohl on publicly financialized money, debt derivatives and the transformation of money into a source of value production; and Supriya Singh on migrants’ remittances and the technical and logistic challenges this poses for governments in the global South.
Protest: Wolfgang Kraushaar on the demonstrations against Tito’s ‘red bourgeoisie’ at the University of Belgrade in the summer of 1968, including a cameo by the father of the artist Marina Abramović, a revered former partisan who threw his party card into the crowd of students — only to have it returned by a party official, who laconically warned him that without it he would be unable to draw his pension.
More articles from Mittelweg 36 in Eurozine; Mittelweg 36’s website
Vikerkaar
7–8/2019
(Estonia)
Vikerkaar finds fascination in Africa
From the environmental crisis to latest literary trends — Africa is at the heart ofVikerkaar’s summer issue. A selection of Damara and Nama trickster tales opens the issue, which surveys the writings of Yvonne Vera, Scholastique Mukasonga, Liyou Libsekal, and Alain Mabanckou, among others. The historian Gabrielle Hecht argues that the age of the Anthropocene looks remarkably different when seen from Africa, where local environments both enable forms of western wealth and shoulder the ecological costs — but not forever. Other essays echo similar themes.
Development: Rein Kuresoo surveys the impact of Chinese investment in Africa. China currently holds over twenty per cent of the debt of African nations, and that’s without counting private investment. However, the environmental costs of Chinese interests have been heavy: dramatic drops in elephant and rhinoceros populations; depletion of fisheries and the introduction of new invasive species; deforestation and unsustainable mining. The social consequences of Chinese investment — displacement of local businesses, acquisition of strategic industries such as airports and power plants in Zambia — are also becoming increasingly apparent, although the profits remain appealing as well.
Tricksters: Hasso Krull surveys recent works in anthropology and philosophy, arguing that the culture of the bushman in South Africa appears to us today as an ‘anarchist utopia’. These ancient, resilient civilizations offer a way of understanding history and human society as being bound with the non-human in ways we can barely understand.
Krull concludes: ‘History is a trickster. The trickster is a hunter-gatherer, a wild and primordial self/reflection, expressing our constant vibration on the boundary between the human and the non-human, whether we admit to it or not. The last few thousand years have been a consistent motion towards ever increasing denial … After the explosive spread of the term ‘Anthropocene’, it has become clear that the days of this denial are numbered. We live in a wild cosmos and it would be smart to accept this fact as soon as possible. This is where the Bushmen, our kind siblings, ancestors of our ancestors can help us out.’
Also: Sigrid Solnik points out the distance between Estonia’s rhetoric of development and its haphazard and inconsistent actions; and Andrei Liimets inspects the hauntings of colonialism on film, from the works of Rachid Bouchareb to Marvel’s Black Panther.
More articles from Vikerkaar in Eurozine; Vikerkaar’s website
Syn og Segn
2/2019
(Norway)
Syn og Segn talks to dramatist Jon Fosse
The Nobel Prize-tipped Jon Fosse began his literary career as a poet and novelist, but from the 1990s became famous abroad as a prolific dramatist. His work has since been translated into some fifty languages. In Syn og Segn, Fosse talks his editor and literary biographer Cecilie Seiness about growing older and returning to novel writing.
Seiness reflects on Fosse’s ‘strange history … [he] almost became a dramatist against his will’. Fosse admits that his first play ‘was the greatest revelation in my life’ but, after almost twenty years of ‘writing plays like a madman’, he began a novel about a man and his reflected self — ‘they are the same and yet not the same. That’s the core idea.’ This autumn sees the publication of the first instalments of this recently completed novel in seven parts: Septology. Fosse’s long-standing German translator Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel describes Septologyas ‘masterly … a mountain of a text’ and writes about his admiration for Fosse’s ‘slow prose’ and ‘very plain but at the same time very difficult and demanding language.’
Climate activism: For the eighteen-year-old climate activist Vilja Helle Bøyum, the trigger to militancy was her participation in a campaign against off-shore oil exploration near the Lofoten archipelago. In the spring, her role in a Norway-wide school strike ‘for more active climate policies’ attracted public attention, some of it critical. But ‘young people are not playing truant, it’s the politicians who have skipped the climate lessons’, she says in interview. Recent plans for a ‘summit meeting’ between young campaigners and politicians have not mellowed her: ‘Nice idea but … [talking and writing] has been going on for ages. We’re fed up with chats about solutions. Action is what we’re after.’
Energy: Erling Holden reviews aspects of Norway’s energy policy. ‘In 2020, Trøndelag [county] will be the proud owner of Europe’s largest land-based windfarm.’ The case for expansion is widely contested, though, on grounds of economy as well as nature conservation — some feel that sustainability is ‘a foggy concept’. Holden thinks that a possible solution is to find energy at sea is by relying on floating wind turbines.
Also: On a tourist trip to Chernobyl, Hilde Kvelvaag is reassured by nature’s capacity of recovery. And concerned about the ‘now-ness’ on online culture, Magni Westgård argues that a school syllabus including more of the canon of classical fiction would ‘burst the bubble of internet communication’.
More articles from Syn og Segn in Eurozine; Syn og Segn’s website
