What We Agree to Call Them

The German language has a talent for making things sound reasonable. With the right compound noun, almost any behavior can be repackaged as civic engagement. A mob setting fire to refugee housing becomes a gathering of "concerned citizens" expressing Asylkritik—asylum criticism. The fire doesn’t change. The vocabulary does.

Jan Böhmermann—German satirist, host of Neo Magazin Royale, the kind of television comedian who reads the temperature of an entire country and then says the uncomfortable thing into a microphone—ran a segment in 2015 about exactly this. His point was simple and needed making directly: calling someone an "asylum critic" implies they’ve done the reading. It implies a position arrived at through study and careful disagreement, years of considered reflection. It launders something much uglier into language that sounds like it belongs in a policy seminar.

He also noted that the German word Heimatvertriebene—historically applied to the millions of ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe after World War II—describes refugees with technical precision. People displaced from their homeland by forces beyond their control. The loudest voices in 2015 about protecting German identity were also the least interested in applying their grandparents’ vocabulary to the people arriving at the border. The observation wasn’t a cheap gotcha. It was a mirror held up very steadily.

Language doesn’t start fires. But it determines who qualifies as a human being in the sentence describing the fire. That distinction matters more than most people want to admit.