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The Bitter Paradox of German Racism

I left America in 2017 to flee an authoritarian government and the culture it facilitated. What I found in Berlin was not all that different.

People look at their phones as they travel on a U-Bahn train at Alexanderplatz station in the Mitte area of Berlin, Germany, on August 26, 2024.

I moved to Berlin in 2017, a few months after Donald Trump was inaugurated president of the United States. During the early days of Trump’s first term, when I was still living in Brooklyn, I was among the many who were repelled by his anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, which were not as bad then as they are now. Yet despair did not lead to paralysis: Protests erupted across the country even before he assumed office, including student-led demonstrations and walkouts in Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York City.

On January 21, 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration, women’s marches took place worldwide. An estimated 700,000 people protested his impending rule in Washington, DC, holding signs that read “Resistance Is Fertile” and “Not My President.” I was one of those dissidents. At first, I felt dubious about some of the demonstrators, specifically the middle-class white women sporting pink pussy hats: Their grievances, their politics, and their strategy had little in common with mine. As a Black feminist who oscillated between anarcho-syndicalists and socialists in my youth, I was often dismissed by upper-middle-class white Americans for being too idealistic, too left. When I openly identified as a Marxist during graduate school, I was derided by university peers and professors for being pedestrian, even anti-intellectual, for advocating an outmoded philosophy. And to an extent, their commentary wasn’t off—or rather, it was an indication that the radical left was small and siloed in the United States, and for decades, it had been disconnected from a broader America. One of the few moments when a loose and blurred coalition of liberals and radicals flounced in the nation’s capital, together, was during the initial sequence of Trump’s zealotry. Within a few days of entering the White House, Trump issued a series of decrees and policies that heightened political nationalism in the US and abroad. He vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), privatize Medicare, and cut funding for Planned Parenthood.

The protests left the president unperturbed. Just weeks after his inauguration, Trump reinstated a global gag rule that barred US funding for nongovernmental organizations that mentioned abortion as a medical option in their programs. No matter how much he revised his list of unspeakable decisions, the cornerstone of Trump’s antipathy was clear: He wanted to publicly chasten Muslims. Hate has a way of sprouting from the tiniest cracks in the sidewalk, and my friends and I felt we had to do something. So, on a frigid winter evening, we went to John F. Kennedy International Airport to show our contempt for Trump’s executive order. This spontaneous gathering was an example of why I loved New York City: the sense that if one of us is harmed, New Yorkers will stand up for all of us. For many people like me, these acts of defiance were a way to reclaim sovereignty amid a cloud of despair—an elixir to turn isolation, which felt like an apocalyptic nightmare, into public, coordinated acts of vehemence.

Over time, I realized my anger was incessant, and I knew that to function or preserve a tinge of tenderness, I had to escape the American inferno. So I found a way out. In 2017, after months of submitting job applications, I was offered a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. Germany seemed far more progressive to me because, since 2015, the country had welcomed 1 million refugees. Facing disaster from the Trump administration and the intensification of anti-Black state violence, my deliverance to an even-tempered life was the fellowship in Berlin.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud wrote about “the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction”—forces so great that it disposes a person to acute anguish. America rattled my core, and in order to reconstitute my spirit, I had to leave the inane heaviness. Like many Black Americans I admire, I fled.

In Berlin, I’d hoped for a city with regular protests, an eclectic art scene, and a squatter community. The city, I was told, was hospitable to artists. I went from attending daily pickets to a more reasonable pace of reading and organizing. Initially, my expectations were met. Having visited the city many times before, I was also drawn to a setting where my progressive friends could read Marx during the day and deejay at night. It felt like a good balance between having a revolutionary political home and making space and time to enjoy life’s pleasures.

But relocating had a fundamentally different dynamic from the short-term trips I........

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