New film exposes racism in Germany
A new documentary, Black on White, set to find out whether Germany is a racist country.
For more than a year, journalist Gunter Wallraff travelled undercover across Germany wearing a dark-haired curly wig and with his white skin painted black in order to expose racism in daily life.
Wearing an Afro wig, dark contact lenses and face paint, he travelled to 120 towns and cities across Germany equipped with a hidden camera. He called himself Kwami Ogonno and he headed to predominantly white areas to see how a black man with a foreign accent is treated.
“I have many black friends here who, time and again, are harassed solely because of their skin colour but who, to avoid further trouble, don’t talk about it,” said Wallraff. “I wanted to experience this first hand, so I disappeared into this role.”
He said the experience was more depressing that he had expected. ”I hadn’t known what we would discover, and had thought maybe the story will be, what a tolerant and accepting country we have become,” said Mr Wallraff after a film’s screening of Black on White in Berlin. “Unfortunately I was wrong.”
He tried to join the local allotment comunity, rent an apartment, stay the night at a campsite and apply for a hunter’s licence, a reasonable introduction to mainstream German society. But he was always blocked and often rudely rejected.
He was nearly beaten up by neo-Nazis after a football match in eastern Germany. And outside a small-town nightclub a skinhead told him: “Europe for whites, Africa for apes.”
What’s most disturbing about the film isn’t the well-known racism of right-wing extremists, but the secretly filmed reactions of every day people – the shop owner who would not let “Kwami” try on an expensive watch, or the landlady who says she could not possibly rent out a flat to a black person.
Mr Gunter Wallraff is in fact one of Germany’s top investigative reporters. He has now made the film Black on White, and he’s written a book about his expeditions into the country’s racially prejudiced undergrowth.
One of Kwami’s first destinations was a guard-dog training centre in Cologne. Kwami explained that he would like to train his dog to defend him from skinheads, but the centre’s owner took one look at the pseudo-Somali before saying: “Sorry, no places left on the course.” As Kwami insisted, the owner cited a ridiculous high sign-up fee of 250 euros.
Kwami gave up but Mr Wallraff’s team stayed in the place long enough to film a white German trying to enrol shortly afterwards, for which he was charged the usual fee of 60 euros.
But the movie has devided opinions and critics. The Die Welt newspaper commented: “In every scene, Kwami plays naive, a dummy that’s put through every crash test.” “Kwami isn’t real. He is a golliwog with which Wallraff plays the great englightener”.
“A painted white person is not a black person and cannot have the same experiences even if he thinks he can,” said Noah Sow, author of Everyday Racism in Germany . “Wallraff is earning money and respect on the backs of oppressed minorities.”
German anti-racism groups have attacked the legendary investigative journalist as well. Annette Kahane of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, an organisation named after an Agolan man killed by skinheads in easter Germany in 1990, said: “All Wallraff found out with his showmanship is that Germany is more or less an openly racist society, a totally uninteresting conclusion that anyone who cares already knows.” “The fact that his disguise is considered acceptable,” she said, “just goes to show that, on race issues, this country is still in the middle ages.”
The movie will be released in Germany on Thursday. The film reveals the frightening degree of both latent and blatant racism in Germany.
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