I Yell Because I Care, Part 2: Lines in the Sand

"I guess it's like my mama says, I yell because I care." - Ariana Waynes

This is the second part of a three-part reflection on the subject of foreigners, and being a foreigner, in Austria. In Part 1, I discussed my own positionality regarding this issue, and whether I am qualified to speak up on this subject. Part 2 describes the current situation with immigrant incorporation in Austria, using examples from my personal experience. In Part 3, I turn once again to my own position, questioning how I can best show solidarity with other Ausländer in Austria and, in some small way, contribute to a solution. 

I had always known, on some level, that discrimination against people with "migration backgrounds"* was a problem in Austria. But I had always considered it to be something that happens "out there" -- in villages, among older people. Not in the city I love, and coming from my friends and colleagues, from people who have been nothing but hospitable towards me. Not in my school, my ostensibly progressive, weltoffene (cosmopolitan) school, "wo Vielfalt Schule macht." 

But then I sit in the staff room, and a biology teacher across the table from me is complaining that she had to explain the meaning of the words "pizza with olive pits" to her students on a recent exam. Another teacher commiserates with, "This just isn't AHS (college prep level) anymore" -- because there are so many Ausländer who've just arrived from other countries and haven't mastered German yet. And one of the students I tutor tells me that one class, mainly consisting of Austrian students, asked their homeroom teacher to be let out of school five minutes early, "so that they don't have to wait for the streetcar with all of the Ausländer." Another student tells me that he doesn't feel likes he fits in in this school. "Why not?" I ask, expecting typical teenage angst about how "no one understands me." "Oh, it's pretty obvious why not," he says, looking at the darker-complexioned students sitting with us. It's only then that I look down at the class roster and realize that his name is Johannes -- not Valon, not Mustafa, not Arun.**

And these attitudes, understandably, breed resentment on the side of the new ethnic groups in Austria. I spend a substantial amount of time in foreign circles -- not among American or Western expats, but among the Balkan students from my dorm who have come to Vienna to study and the second-generation students from my school who come to the youth center where I volunteer. And over and over again, I hear "Austrian" used as a dirty word. "Don't move to that dorm," they say, "It's all Austrians." "At my old school, it was all Austrians." There's a real sense that life with Austrians is dangerous, miserable, full of sidelong glances and discriminatory comments. And so contact with Austrians on their home turf is avoided, in the way soccer stadiums separate fans of each team so that there are no brawls.

Part of the issue, at least in my school, is that you attend all of your classes with the same group of 20 people from sixth grade onwards. There's no mixing up of people, so that you get to at least sort of know almost everyone in your grade. My school is incredibly diverse -- I expected lots of Turkish kids and kids from the former Yugoslavia, but I also have students who are Congolese, Nigerian, Bangladeshi, Afghan, Azeri, Brazilian, Chinese, Polish, Filipino, Czech, Roma, Belarusian, etc. But that diversity isn't distributed equally throughout the school. In some classes, more than 90% of my students have "migration backgrounds." In other classes, all or almost all of the students have the surnames you would expect from Austrians. Students thinking of attending this school know that if they sign up for an audio class (where you learn to record music) or a sports class (for top-tier athletes who attend school part-time), they will be with other "Austrians."

So, even though all of my kids go to the same school, they never have classes together, which means there's no real opportunity for them to meet each other. Instead, they build up ideas of each other - founded on reality or not. It's a markedly different situation that my own high school, which also had a sizable refugee population from all over the world. Tracking was still a problem, but there were at least some opportunities to meet students from other backgrounds -- in homeroom; in untracked classes like civics, health, and physical education; in extracurricular activities like sports and the musical.

Currents in the larger society have an impact as well. One of the largest indictments of American popular culture I have ever witnessed is that my students, whose knowledge of the United States comes from TV and from movies, do not think we have many people of color -- because they never see any. When I tell them that the United States is actually a pretty diverse place and has a higher percentage of first- and second-generation immigrants than Austria, they are for the most part surprised. One of my students, though, responded with an incredibly telling question: "Do you have HC Strache?"

Oh, HC Strache, you blue-eyed devil, the root of so much social tension. Leader of the right-wing FPÖ (Freedom Party of Austria), and the man responsible for election slogans like this:

Translation:
German instead of "No Understand."
WE are for YOU.

That's not even the most offensive sign from the FPÖ -- my personal favorite in terms of straight-up yuck factor is this one, which I won't dignify by coming up with a fitting translation for -- but it's the one that hurts the most. There are still times when the waves of German rushing over me feel overwhelming, and all I want to do is bury my head in the sand and shout "Nix verstehen!" (Or "versteh'n," because my lack of Deutsch apparently doesn't stop me from speaking in an Austrian accent.) What gives me the confidence to live here, despite my linguistic challenges, is the belief that the Austrians I interact with really don't care about my grammatical mistakes, stilted pronunciation, and explaining around concepts I don't have the vocabulary to name. To hear the FPÖ, though, these are major irritations -- grating at the ears of everyone I interact with, making them wish their Wiener Blut had the Mut to slap me in the face and tell me to stop butchering their language. And that's just one pretty general Plakat -- were I black or a Muslim, I would get to contend with posters attacking me in highly specific, and highly offensive, language.

I know that most political scientists agree that many Austrian voters only voted for the FPÖ during the last elections as a form of protest against the perceived inaction of the two major parties. But the fact that the FPÖ consistently polls at around 20% of the population does hurt -- and it makes you wonder how many people really do wish that you as an Ausländer would just hau ab, leave the country immediately.

In this climate, where one major party is very clear about its wish that there be no (more) foreigners in Austria, every bureaucratic hurdle that comes with living in another country can start to seem like a personal attack. Samra, a Bosnian friend of mine from the dorm, for example, was livid about having to resubmit a bunch of documents for her student visa when she decided to change her course of studies. In actuality, this requirement makes a lot of sense -- if you're no longer enrolled in a program, you should need to indicate that you've enrolled in a new one in order to maintain your student status. But to Samra, this was yet another example of Austria trying to push her out, yet another reason to lash out at the country for its Ausländerfeindlichkeit. Because an EU citizen, of course, wouldn't need to jump through any of these hoops, erected just to make life more difficult for Drittstaatsbürger (citizens of third -- non-EU -- states).



* I'm not a huge fan of this formulation. For one, there has always been migration to Austria (from other parts of the Kaiserreich, from Germany, from Salzburg when it was its own country, from Eastern Europe, etc), but that migration gets ignored when the only migration labelled as such is post-World War II migration. And that's fine now -- it is the most recent form of migration, and most of those subsumed under the label, members of the first and second generation, retain some identification with the point of migration. But what's going to happen when you get three and four generations out? When will a "migration background" fade into the background? Or will it be a permanent designation, a label that never goes away, an instance of reproducing something through naming it? Because "migration background" is an identity ascribed externally by society, not bubbling up from some internal wellspring of ethnicity, culture, of something you have an emotional connection to. It's not who you are -- it's how others see you. And maybe that will, in time, create a new pan-ethnic identity in Austria, Migrationshintergrund as a culture born out of shared discrimination and struggle. Kind of like African-American identity in the United States. But I really don't think that anyone wants that.

** I think Austrians are somewhat surprised that I honestly cannot tell the difference between Austrians and many immigrant groups, such as people from the Balkans; Eastern Europeans like Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians; and even more "European-looking" Turkish people. Because the relevant dividing lines in the United States are "white" and "non-white," my natural reaction is to read members of all of these groups as simply white. It's a fascinating example of how our perceptions of race / ethnicity are rooted not in any biological reality but in the social parameters of the society in which we live in.