I sink in deep mire,

where there is no standing:

I am come into deep waters,

where the floods overflow me.

I am weary of my crying:

my throat is dried:

mine eyes fail

while I wait for my God.

They that hate me without a cause

are more than the hairs of mine head.

Psalm 69, 2–4

Sometimes I wonder whether I should envy them. Sometimes I wonder how they do it: how they hate the way they do. How they can be so sure of themselves. Because the haters have to be at least that: sure. Otherwise they would not talk the way they do, hurt the way they do, kill the way they do. Otherwise they could not insult others, humiliate others, attack others the way they do. They have to be sure of themselves. Beyond all doubt. You cannot hate and be unsure about hating at the same time. If they doubted, they could not be so beside themselves. Hating requires absolute certainty. Any ‘maybe’ would be a disruption. Any ‘possibly’ would undermine their hatred, sap the energy they are channelling into it.

Hate is fuzzy. It is difficult to hate with precision. Precision would bring delicate nuance, attentive looking and listening; precision would bring that discernment that perceives individual persons, with all their diverse, contradictory qualities and propensities, as human beings. But once the sharp edges have been ground down, once individuals have been blotted out as individuals, then all that is left are indistinct groups to serve as targets of hatred; then they can hate to their hearts’ content, and defame and disparage, rave and rage: the Jews, the women, the unbelievers, the Blacks, the lesbians, the refugees, the Muslims, or perhaps the United States, the politicians, the West, the police, the media, the intellectuals.¹ Hatred distorts the object of hatred to suit itself. It forms its object to fit.

Hatred is aimed upwards or downwards, but always along a vertical axis: against those ‘at the top’ or the ‘lowest of the low’. It is always the categorically ‘other’ who is oppressing or threatening the hater’s ‘self’; the ‘other’ is fantasized as a supposedly dangerous force or a supposedly inferior pest – and the subsequent mistreatment or annihilation of the ‘other’ is revalued accordingly, not just as an excusable act, but as a necessary one. The ‘other’ is the person who can be disregarded or denounced, injured or killed, without fear of punishment.²

Those who experience this hatred first-hand, who are subjected to it in the street or online, in the evening or in broad daylight, who have to endure words that carry a whole history of contempt and abuse, those who receive these messages wishing them death, wishing them sexual violence, threatening them with it, those whose rights are only partially conceded, whose bodies or headwear are despised, who have to disguise themselves for fear of attack, those who cannot leave the house because there is a brutalized, violent mob in front of it, those whose schools or synagogues need police protection – all those whom hatred takes as its object cannot and will not get used to it.

Of course, this subtle repulsion of people perceived as different or foreign has always existed. It was not necessarily tangible as hatred. In West Germany, it was usually expressed more as a rejection wrapped up in social conventions. In recent years there has also been an increasingly voiced uneasiness, a feeling that perhaps tolerance has gone a bit too far, that perhaps those with different beliefs or a different appearance or different desires ought to be satisfied by now. There was the discreet but unmistakable reproach that a little silent contentment might be expected of the Jews or the homosexuals or the women; they are permitted quite a lot now, after all. As if there were a limit on equality. As if women or gays were equal up to a certain point, but no further. Completely equal? That would be going a bit far. That would mean they were … equal.

This curious reproach of lacking humility went hand in hand, covertly, with self-praise for the tolerance shown so far. As if it were a special benefit to allow women to work at all – so why do they need equal pay to boot? As if it were praiseworthy that homosexuals are no longer locked up as criminals. A little gratitude for that would be in order about now. For homosexuals to love each other privately is all well and good, but why do they need to be publicly married?³

This two-faced tolerance has often been expressed towards Muslims in the notion that, while they are free to live here, they should avoid being religiously Muslim. Freedom of religion has been accepted primarily in regard to the Christian religion. And we have heard, more and more often over the years, that it is about time there was an end to the endless discussion of the Shoah. As if the remembrance of Auschwitz had a limited shelf life, like a pot of yogurt. As if reflecting on the crimes of Nazism was an item on an excursion programme, to be looked at once and then ticked off.

But something has changed in Germany. People now hate openly and without restraint. Sometimes with a smile on their faces, sometimes without, but, all too often, shamelessly. The threatening letters that used to be posted anonymously are now signed with the sender’s name and address. Violent fantasies and hateful comments are often expressed online without the cover of nicknames. If anyone had asked me a few years ago whether I could imagine that people would use that kind of language again in German society, I would have thought it impossible. For public discourse to become so brutal again, for people to stir up such unbounded hatred against other human beings – that was unimaginable. It almost seems as though the traditional conventions of conversation have been turned upside down. As if the standards of social behaviour have been reversed: as if a person should be ashamed of showing respect as a simple and natural form of politeness, and proud of refusing others respect and spewing vulgarities and prejudices at the top of one’s lungs.

I, in any case, do not think uninhibited shouting, slandering and insulting represents an advancement of civilization. I do not consider it a sign of progress that every inner baseness may be turned outwards just because exhibiting resentments is now supposed to have some public or even political relevance. Like many other people, I refuse to get used to it. I do not want to see the new, unbridled appetite for hatred becoming normal. Neither in Europe nor anywhere else.

The hatred that I will talk about in this book is neither individual nor random. It is not just some vague feeling that happens to burst out by accident or out of ostensible distress. This hatred is collective, and it is ideologically moulded. Hatred requires ready-made patterns into which it can be poured. The concepts in which humiliation is doled out, the chains of association and the images that organize hateful thinking and sorting, the filters of perception that categorize and condemn – all these need preparation. Hatred does not break out suddenly; it is cultivated. And all those who interpret it as a spontaneous or individual phenomenon are unwittingly helping to keep it fed.⁴

Yet the rise of aggressive populist parties and movements in Germany, and across Europe, is not the most disturbing development. There is still reason to hope that they will decay in time of their own accord, through individual hubris and reciprocal animosities, or simply through the shortage of personnel able to carry out professional political work. To say nothing of the doubtful viability of an anti-modernistic platform which rejects the social, economic and cultural reality of a globalized world. They will probably lose their appeal when they are compelled to engage in public debates in which they have to present their reasoning and respond to that of others, when they are called upon to give factual arguments on complex issues. They will probably also lose their special, ostensibly dissident aura when they are met with occasional agreement – where appropriate – on individual points. That will make criticism all the more effective on other points. And, not least, far-reaching economic programmes will probably be necessary to address the social discontent over growing inequality and the fear of poverty in old age in disadvantaged regions and cities.

What is much more threatening is the climate of fanaticism, at home and abroad. The vicious circle of increasingly fundamental rejection of people who believe in a different faith, or in none, or whose looks or whose loves are different from some supposed norm. The contempt for everything different, spreading and growing and ultimately harming everyone. Because we who are the targets of this hatred, or who bear witness against it, are all too often dismayed into silence: we allow ourselves to be intimidated; we don’t know how we are supposed to confront this rage and terror; we feel defenceless and paralysed; we are speechless with horror. Because that, sadly, is one of the effects of hatred: it first upsets those who are subjected to it, robs them of their orientation and their confidence.

The only way to confront hatred is to refuse its invitation to adopt it ourselves. Those who answer hate with hate have already allowed it to deform them, already come closer to what the haters want them to be. Because hatred can only be contested with what the haters lack: careful observations, unstinting precise distinctions, and self-doubt. That means slowly breaking hatred down into its component parts, separating the momentary feeling of hatred from its ideological prerequisites, and observing how it arises and operates in a specific historical, regional, cultural context. That may seem meagre; the project may appear overly modest. It might be objected that that is no way to reach the real fanatics. And that may be so. But it would be a step forward if the sources that feed hatred, the structures that enable it, the mechanisms it obeys, were more clearly visible. It would be a step forward if the self-assurance of those who approve and applaud hatred were taken away. If those who prepare hatred by shaping its patterns of thought and perception had their negligent naiveté or their cynicism taken away. If the burden of justification were lifted from those who quietly and peacefully work where they are needed, and were placed instead on the people who despise them. If the people who spontaneously reach out to those in distress were no longer called upon to give their reasons, but rather the people who refuse to give that indispensable aid. If it were not the people who want open, humane coexistence who had to defend themselves, but those who want to undermine it.

Examining hatred and violence together with the structures that enable them also means making visible the justification that precedes them and the approval that comes after: hatred and violence cannot thrive without this contextual support. Examining the different sources from which hatred or violence is fed in a specific case means disproving the popular myth that hatred is something natural, something given. As if hatred were more authentic than respect. But hatred doesn’t come out of nowhere: people make it. And violence doesn’t come out of nowhere: people prepare it. The direction in which hatred and violence are discharged, whom they are aimed at, what inhibitions and restraints must first be broken down – all this is not a matter of chance, not simply given; it is channelled. And examining how hatred and violence function, instead of just condemning them, necessarily involves showing where something could have been otherwise, where someone could have made a different decision, where someone could have intervened, where someone could have backed out. Describing the exact processes of hatred and violence necessarily involves showing where they can be interrupted or undermined.

Examining hatred in all its phases, not just from the moment it bursts out in blind rage, opens up other options. Certain forms of hatred fall under the responsibility of police and prosecutors. But the forms of exclusion and inclusion, the nasty little techniques of discrimination in gestures and habits, practices and beliefs – these are the responsibility of everyone in a society. As a civil society, we are all responsible for taking away the haters’ space to distort their object to fit. We cannot delegate that responsibility. To assist those who are threatened because of their different appearance, different beliefs or different loves is not much to ask. It is little things that can make the difference and open the social or discursive space to those who are being driven out of it. Perhaps the most important gesture in opposing hatred is not letting it isolate us. Not letting ourselves be pushed into silence, into the private sphere, into the protected space of our own safe zones or milieus. Perhaps the most important movement is the movement outwards from ourselves. Towards the others. To reopen the social and public spaces together with them.

Those who are left alone in their exposure to hatred feel what the lamenting voice expresses in the psalm quoted above: ‘I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing.’ They have no ground under their feet; they feel as if they are out of their depth and the water is welling up over them. We must not leave them alone; we must listen when they cry out. Not allow the flood of hatred to well up higher. Build a solid footing on which everyone can stand: that is what is necessary.