THE BOOK carries the provocative title Germany is Abolishing Itselfand, though it only goes on sale this morning, it is already in its third reprint.
Its author, as one German newspaper noted last week, “loves provocation the way a bear loves honey”. At the top of the book charts and on the front page of every newspaper, left-wing politician Thilo Sarrazin has sparked a fresh round in Germany’s most complicated and emotive social debate: the consequences of mass immigration from Turkey four decades ago.
Mr Sarrazin describes his new book as a general polemic about Germany’s terminal decline, but he has come under fire for suggesting Germany’s Muslim immigrants are contributing to this supposed decline.
He says that large Muslim immigrant families living in Germany have an above-average welfare dependency and a below-average interest in education and integration, something he says will eventually trigger Germany’s financial and intellectual bankruptcy.
As finance minister of Berlin, the 65-year-old Social Democrat (SPD) politician was known for his regular attacks on the city’s unemployed; after joining the board of the Bundesbank last year he attacked Arab and Turkish immigrants in Germany for being “unable to integrate” but “continually able to produce new little headscarf babies”.
Now his critics say he’s topped that in his new book with arguments they say echo Nazi claims that race is linked to intelligence.
Mr Sarrazin has suggested his critics haven’t read the book, which in its early chapters looks at Germany’s post-war development and a tendency “to push everything on to the shoulders of society and relieve the individual of the moral responsibility for themselves and their lives”.
In Mr Sarrazin’s view this has had a stultifying effect on Germany’s education standards, work ethic and the culture of innovation that, combined with a strong birthrate, put post-war Germany back on its feet. “We seem to have accepted that Germany will become smaller and stupider,” he writes.
Mr Sarrazin claims that the Germany of the future will “lose average intelligence if intelligent women have fewer or no children”, an apparent nod to the 0.7 birthrate among German women and the higher birthrate among families of non-German background.
Germany’s Turkish community is livid at this, and what they see as a running insinuation throughout the book that Muslim immigrants are less intelligent than Germans.
Kenan Kolat, head of a leading Turkish-German organisation, has accused Mr Sarrazin of “intellectual racism” and called for him to be charged with incitement.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has described Mr Sarrazin’s remarks as “very, very intolerant and defamatory” while SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel has suggested Mr Sarrazin should leave the party.
Aygül Özkan, the Lower Saxon social affairs minister and Germany’s first female Muslim minister, said Mr Sarrazin’s blanket generalisations were damaging.
“The vast number of hard-working immigrants in Germany deserve respect, not malice,” she said. The Bundesbank has distanced itself from the book and its author, describing it as a “private matter”.
Mr Sarrazin insists his book is not a tirade against immigrants – raised in the final three of nine chapters – but it is here that his arguments about immigrants have raised the most hackles.
"I don't talk in my book about Turks or Arabs but of Muslim migrants who, everywhere in Europe, integrate considerably less well than other migrant groups," he told the Welt am Sonntagnewspaper yesterday. "The reasons for this are not ethnic but clearly lie in the culture of Islam."
Challenged about arguments about genetics in his book, and whether he thought people had a “genetic identity”, Mr Sarrazin added: “All Jews have a particular gene, Basques have particular genes that differentiate them from others.” That prompted a fresh storm of protest, led by Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Committee of Jews in Germany. “Whoever tries to define the Jews through their genetic make-up has succumbed to the kind of race megalomania that Judaism doesn’t share,” he said.
Experts have lined up to take apart many of Mr Sarrazin’s arguments about immigrants in Germany. Sociologists have raised questions about his claim Germany is “losing average intelligence” by pointing out that intelligent parents do not automatically have intelligent children.
Statisticians have dismissed as unsound Sarrazin’s population projections, such as that “in 90 years at most, just half of those living in Germany will be descendants of those who lived here in 1965”.
Official figures show German-Turkish women are already having far fewer children in the second and third generation than their mothers and grandmothers.
This morning's book launch is likely to be a controversial affair, but as the Stuttgarter Nachrichtennewspaper suggested yesterday: "He is only getting so much attention because he is saying what many people feel and experience every day."