hello from Berlin

Half a year ago, a bombshell exploded on bookshelves all over Germany. Thilo Sarrazin, a former finance senator of Berlin and at that time member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, published a book outlining his grim vision for Germany's future. The book was harshly titled Germany Does Away With Itself. It's based on the observation that while the German population is shrinking overall, there's one group that's increasing in numbers: immigrants of various Muslim origins, mostly Turkish and Arabic, and their descendants. Statistics show that this group of people is poorly integrated into society and educated below average. Sarrazin's fear is that their rise in numbers will have a detrimental impact on Germany, changing the country and the dominant culture to grave consequences.

When the book came out, a firestorm of controversy swept through newspapers and TV stations. Everyone had something to say. Initially, it was mostly politicians, traditional pundits and others accustomed to making public statements. For the most part, they rejected Sarazin's ideas and often attacked him, accusing him of stupidity, racism, even fascism. Over the following few weeks, however, the tone changed. Essays were written in his defense, emphasizing local contexts of many points he had made and splaying out some of the statistics' crueler points. Such essays would have been impossible to publish before the book. It was as if a little book had single-handedly shifted the political debate. But calling it a little book is distorting reality. Sold at over 1.2 million copies, it is currently the fourth-strongest selling book on Amazon.de and has become the biggest-selling non-fiction book in Germany since World War 2. That's what the papers report, and I doubt that more books sold before that.

My dad had quickly bought a copy. Over Christmas, my resourceful sister saw it on his shelf and took it with her, even before he could read it. But Sarazin keeps the book in the news; there's no avoiding it. A few weeks ago, my dad went to a reading in a capacity-packed hall of 2500, each happily paying €12.50 to hear to man tell them what they could read themselves. At the signing after the reading, my dad bought another copy. My sister is coming to London in a few weeks, and thus I'll be finally exposed to the book as well.

The other day, Thilo Sarrazin was at the center of the BBC World Service's World Have Your Say, which is available on the iPlayer. It worth the hour on the radio, if only to judge whether you'd like to read more about the subject. Once you get over the thick German accents that permeate the show, it's quite interesting. There are arguments supporting and attacking his theses and a level-headed moderator.

The problem with the radio debate, as with popular discourse in general, is that all too frequently people try to challenge statistics with examples. That won't work because it is in the nature of statistics that they are outliers. This dialectic fumbling didn't further the causes of those angry with the book. On the other hand, Sarrazin didn't exactly further his own cause by the pugnacious way in which he answered some of the questions (never mind his avuncular voice).

But the furthering of causes isn't what this discussion is about. It's about the freeing of ideas and the opening of minds. It's about exchanging opinions and about suggesting novel ways of thinking about facts and phenomena that have been left undisturbed for too long. Maybe solutions to some of the migration-related problems that Germany faces will arise from this discussions. Maybe everyone should read the book.