"Sharing our treasure" : How Imagining Asylum as a Gift Shaped Subjectivities of Hosts and Refugees throughout Germany's 'Welcome Culture'

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines the so-called 'welcome culture', which denotes a brief period of widespread euphoria regarding refugee reception in the Germany of 2015. Newspaper articles, political speeches, legal sources and testimonies from civil society are consulted to reconstruct how asylum and the social relations that arose from it were framed in the German public discourse at the time. Approached as an archival resource documenting how social relations between host society and refugee could be imagined in Germany, the 'welcome culture' is examined for the alternatives it offers to the open xenophobia dominating the contemporary national discourse on asylum. It is argued that throughout the 'welcome culture', refugee reception practices took the form of gift-exchange. Deploying scepticism against unidirectional acts of giving, the symbolic surplus that Germans acquired from gifting asylum is detailed. The thesis finds that the establishment of a gift-relation with refugees functioned as a vital strategy for the German hosts to work on crises that affect the personal, national and civilizational layers of their identity. Refugees, on the other hand, risk being humiliated and stripped of their selfhood through the obligations inscribed into this social relation. While the harm of the egocentric gift-practices that were prevalent throughout the welcome culture is made visible, the possibility of a 'pure gift' of asylum is affirmed. 'Rights' and 'Baseline communism' are introduced as revitalisable frameworks which allow the host society to welcome strangers in need without disciplining or dominating them.