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by Russell A. Berman
The key episode in Finn Job’s 2022 novel Hinterher begins at Sophia’s drug-filled birthday party in a run-down apartment in the Berlin district Neukölln. A visiting Swedish woman declares in English that “the great thing about Berlin is that you can be whatever you want.” The unnamed first-person narrator and his gay lover, the Israeli Chaim, volunteer to go out to pick up more alcohol for the group. When the two step onto a side street off Sonnenallee, standing in public, the narrator confesses that “I was so happy and lost in myself, yes, I was so stupid that I gave Chaim a quick kiss on the cheek” (war ich so glücklich und selbstvergessen, ja, war ich so dumm, dass ich Chaim einen flüchtigen Kuss auf die Wange gab) (99).
Punishment follows happiness immediately. Young neighborhood men shout homophobic slurs at the couple: “Queers! [Schwuchteln!] Let’s go, they’re homos! . . . Allahu Akbar” (99). A gang starts to run after the couple—hinterher, the title of the novel, means “afterward” or “in pursuit”—but fortunately the two are fast enough to make their way back to the safety of the apartment. However instead of sympathy from their friends, they face condemnation. The same Swedish visitor who had just gushed over Berlin’s openness, where everyone can be whatever one wants, launched the opening salvo, again in English in the original: “Don’t you think it was a little bit insensitive to kiss each other? I mean this is Neukölln—their home. You probably hurt their feelings” (102). That mild scolding escalates quickly until their friends eventually denounce them as “Nazis” (103), “fascists” (18), and racists (147). For the identity-political progressives in Neukölln, Nazis are apparently people who kiss in public.
The scene stages the intersection of themes that define contemporary Germany. First, the denunciations that the couple face upon their return testify to the durability of an automatized anti-fascist discourse. Peter, in whose apartment this scene plays out, is a drug dealer and sports an “antifa” T-shirt, evidence that political affiliation has become a combination of virtue signaling and fashion statement (98). In part this disseminated anti-fascism is an understandable constant in German culture since 1945, but it has become particularly acute in response to the rise of the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Of course the inflationary use of the “fascist” epithet is familiar in the United States too: any politician we don’t like must be a “fascist,” regardless of the political contents at stake. Nor is the denunciation restricted to politicians: one can recall Seinfeld‘s notorious “Soup Nazi.” In Germany this rhetorical inflation is particularly pronounced, but it became a side-show in the American presidential campaign with the escalation of name-calling.
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