Insa Lee Koch, Chair of British Cultures at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland, author of Personalizing the State, and member of the editorial working committee of Race & Class, describes an encounter which makes her fear for Germany’s future.

I had just said good bye at Berlin Brandenburg Airport to my German father and my Korean mother. Today was the first time I was flying on my own with my two oldest children, aged four and two, back to Switzerland where I had recently moved with my family. I was nervous about how the travels would go and felt relieved when an airport staff member waved me into the family lane at the security. I laid the contents of my bags onto trays, including two water bottles, belonging to each of my children. I knew that in the family lane I would be allowed liquids. A milk bottle for the younger one; a thermos bottle for my older one with zoo animals printed on it – a snake, tiger and sloth.

As I went to collect our belongings after going through security, I noticed that the tray with my children’s bottles had been sent down a separate lane. I saw a security guard pick up the bottles and run them through a machine. Then suddenly, things moved very fast. Two armed police officers arrived on scene, two young men – one blond, the other dark-haired. The blond one picked up the thermos bottle with the zoo animals printed on it. ‘Whose is it?’ he shouted in German.

Terrorising infants

‘Mine’, my  four-year-old said. The officer stared at him, I in turn stared at his machine gun. ‘Come over’, he ordered. My son walked towards him. ‘What is in the bottle?’ the blond officer barked again. ‘Water’, my son replied. ‘Why so little?’ the officer asked him again. My son remained silent. ‘Is this your mother?’ My son nodded. The officers dropped my son’s bottle in the tray with the milk bottle. ‘Can I take them?’ I asked. The dark-haired officer replied this time, a sly smile on his face, ‘Well if you say it only contains water, then why do you even ask?’

I am a researcher of criminal justice and race. In the UK, where I have done most of my research, I have written about how law enforcement overpolices underprotected communities – Black, minoritised, migrant and working class communities who have historically constituted law’s unwanted ‘other’. As an academic lawyer, I have also sat in countless proceedings in the country’s Crown Courts, watching prosecutors build cases against Black defendants on account of their being so-called ‘gang’ members. And I have done advocacy work for the mothers of incarcerated children when the latter had even their most basic rights taken away from them inside prison.

State racism, then, is no stranger to me. And yet, it feels different when it is on your own skin. Or, rather, when they get at your own skin through your children. As I was walking away from security controls, I was holding my two children tight, wishing I could have done more to protect them from the violence that they had just been subjected to, at such a tender age. I don’t know what was worse for me: seeing the terror in my child’s eye as armed officers called him over, or not being able to say anything for fear of aggravating the situation. ‘On days like today I hate Germany’, I wrote to a friend who had recently moved from the UK to Germany. The next day, my son told his Korean grandmother on the phone how terrified he had been.

The new normal

The incident stayed with me for days. Around me some of my friends tried to make me feel better by expressing their surprise about what had happened to us. ‘Why you?’ one said. ‘Aren’t there more obvious cases to pick on if you’re racist?’ another one wondered. ‘Perhaps it was just a random check after all’, a third one said.

I can see why these friends were surprised. There are, of course, more likely suspects than a German-Korean mother and her children to pick on in a climate that is defined by heightened Islamophobia and anti-refugee sentiments. Nor do I want to detract from the very real forms of harm that are inflicted on the communities that are targeted, and that have ranged from race riots to neo-Nazi attacks and even killings. And yet, I also worry that surprise is not a helpful reaction: it risks exceptionalising what has become normal. Fascism has been on the rise in Europe, and it travels from the ‘obvious’ cases to the more mundane, less obvious and everyday, drawing with it what it can – including the animal-printed water bottle of a four-year-old child.

I am writing this in the lead up to the German elections to take place on 23 February this year, following  the collapse of Olaf Scholz’s three-party government in November last year. Germany’s far-right party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), is currently polling in second place at just over 20 per cent. Meanwhile the centre-right alliance has flirted with the hardline AfD, thus breaking Germany’s postwar convention of no political deals with the far Right. The AfD, in Germany, is no aberration; it benefits from a general shift to the extreme Right among mainstream politicians and journalists and a climate of intellectual helplessness and moral deformations, as revealed by its stance on Israel and Palestine.

Solidarity – and quiet resistance

It can be difficult to know what to do. I tried to make a complaint to the airport about what I had experienced. ‘Syntax error’ is the message I received each time I tried to send off my complaint on the designated complaints page. But there is also space for resistance and solidarity from the bottom up. The same friend who I had written to at the airport sent me pictures that same night. She had been on an anti-AfD rally in the south of Germany, joining thousands on the streets together with her two-year-old son and partner. ‘The resistance is strong’, she wrote as a caption.

A week later, the same friend was travelling back from the UK to Germany. She had been sitting on the train in Germany, when four border officials entered the carriage. They stopped in front of her, the only Brown person in the carriage. They asked for her passport. ‘I could see the disgust in their faces’, my friend said to me in a voice note, ‘looking at me like I was dirt, getting excited because they thought they had caught one’. She took her time, rummaging through her bags – she knew exactly where her legal documents were. But taking her time meant that they could not move on to someone else, catch someone who might be in a more legally precarious situation than her. Resistance is possible, indeed.