The Interior Frontiers of Germany

Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar

doi:10.1163/22117954-bja10020

Abstract

Abstract In 2012, the regional court of the city of Cologne ruled that ritual male circumcision constituted unjustified bodily harm. This prompted a nationwide debate culminating in the enactment of legislation guaranteeing male circumcision without medical justification under certain preconditions. This article proposes to approach the ‘circumcision debate’ as a discursive strand of the systematic problematisation of Muslims as ‘Muslims’, which I analyse through the analytic of the ‘Muslim Question’. In addition, I refer to the concepts of recursive history and of the interior frontier to contextualise the 2012 circumcision debate and the political purpose it has served, namely, to establish racial distinctions and interior frontiers between Germans, Jews and Muslims.

Highlights

In her illuminating historical analysis of the German debates on ritual slaughter and ritual male circumcision during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Robin Judd (2007) narrates an episode in Baden that triggered waves of discussion and polemic, and mobilised various actors around the issue of ritual male circumcision
The physician referred the case to the state medical examiner, who subsequently launched a wider investigation on complications related to ritual male circumcision
The Jewish and Muslim ‘Questions’ can both be understood as contingent processes of drawing interior frontiers and of imagining the invisible bonds of the German nation as a set and sorts of sensibilities that distinguished the racially-characterised Jews and Muslims from the idealised figure of the German, and in this context the circumcision debates offer a window through which to interrogate the construction of those ‘invisible bonds’

Summary

Introduction

In her illuminating historical analysis of the German debates on ritual slaughter and ritual male circumcision during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Robin Judd (2007) narrates an episode in Baden that triggered waves of discussion and polemic, and mobilised various actors around the issue of ritual male circumcision.

Results

Conclusion