“The bullet is for you, Mo Asumang.” With this line from a song by the neo-Nazi band “White Aryan Rebels,” Monika Asumang, daughter of a German mother and a Ghanaian father, began her search for the reasons behind racist thinking. The black presenter, actress, and filmmaker gradually approaches the increasingly absurd members of a scene that is reluctant to disclose their true thought patterns in public.
The book is divided into 19 chapters, in which Mo first encounters the unknown Nazi who still tries to hide his opinion, imagining that as a dark-skinned woman, hormones might even allow her to be seen as a partner. Later, she finds herself among well-known representatives of the scene, at Nazi demonstrations, but she also travels far to the Ku Klux Klan and to the “real” Aryans in Iran, who have nothing to do with fascist ideology.
There are certainly good approaches, and the topic fits perfectly into today’s time, where dull nationalism is back in vogue. Unfortunately, the author cannot quite decide what exactly she wants to write. Should it be a non-fiction book about the background of fascist thinking or a detailed description of the feelings of someone affected by aggressive Nazi hate? She describes at length the fears she has when attending a demonstration of “good Germans,” what could happen, and in the end, she merely stands lost in thought at the edge until the whole spectacle eventually passes without further incidents. Quote: “Strange, the Nazis around me don’t say anything to me. I expected them to shout at me. Now, here they stand in a crowd, thousands of them. They should dare to do something. I’m just one. But nothing happens. Hm? I stand here. I watch. I turn my body to the right and left. I put one foot in front of the other. I want to shout: Hello, here I am, your enemy image. Hello! I am 1.76 m tall. I have little curls. My skin color is brown.”
The purpose of her journey to the real Aryans is also not quite clear. It is quickly established that they have as much in common with the Nazi scum as a slug has with Parisian spring fashion 2016. Nevertheless, there is a long philosophical discussion about the landscape, only to quickly show a few uninvolved locals some photos of Nazis. This may fit for a travel report, but it contributes nothing to the topic.
Since the book does not claim to be great literary art, some may not have a problem with it; however, I found Mo Asumang's writing style (“a baby face with a North Front sticker on it gawking around”) quite annoying at times. She often begins her sentences with “I say,” “I have,” or “I think to myself.” Frequently, short sentences in the style of Bildzeitung are used, but then there are true comma battles over the reader. Want an example?
“I had imagined that every room I pass would be filled with people whose life mission is to dismantle the Nazis.”
“As two fighters from different generations, who approach the Nazi issue very differently, we never spare ourselves; life is too short to lose sight of the goal, and so I pull out the Nazi pamphlet that my Antifa informant slipped to me.”
And then there’s the hilly-flat land...
“Half a century later, I too drive hundreds of kilometers through vast, flat land. Miles of mountains, on the right and left.”
Well, one could actually overlook the linguistic shortcomings if only the content matched. Since I found this so boring, I preferred to spend my time searching for linguistic curiosities. Overall, the book is readable, especially if you have not yet engaged with the twisted views of the far right in our society. However, it would not be a great loss of knowledge to leave this on the shelf of the bookstore.
