Vol. 20 · No. 2 · Issue 63 · Summer 2002 · pp. 1-48 (48)
Multikulti or Schweinerei in the Year 2000John Borneman
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Vol. 20 · No. 2 · Issue 63 · Summer 2002 · pp. 1-48 (48)Multikulti or Schweinerei in the Year 2000John Borneman
AbstractIn 1995, as a Fulbright professor, I taught a seminar on "culture and international order" at Humboldt University in Berlin. There I reached the conclusion that, in order to analyze Kultur in Germany, one also had to take into consideration the work of Schweinerei. In the five years between the opening of the wall and my seminar, there had been an explosion of interest in the concept "Kultur"-defined quite concretely in public discourse as an element that united (or divided) East and West Berliners, or as a substance that had been damaged during the cold war and now needed restoration. Irrespective of the speaker, Kultur was always something good, a positive ordering. One never needed less Kultur. Either one argued, as a proponent of Multi-kulti, for more of them, more cultures, or, as a monoculturalist, for merely better (more refined, more pure) Kultur and the value of a distinct German culture. |