Helping in Times of Crisis-The Normativity of Solidarity and Charity

Dr. Greta Wagner

Duration of the research project: 11/2017 – 09/2019

The project “Helping in times of crisis – the normativity of solidarity and charity” is based on an empirical study on the practices of helping and the normative orientations of helpers. Based on the finding that the proportion of people volunteering for refugees in rural areas has risen sharply since 2015, I began interviewing volunteers who supported refugees in their contact with authorities, offered language courses, organized transport services and helped to register children in sports clubs, kindergartens and schools. Part of the study also involved interviewing refugees and observing them during joint activities. Theoretically, the project focused firstly on the relationship between solidarity and charity as two modes of helping and secondly on the affective sources of helping, in particular the normative ambivalences associated with helping out of compassion.

Specific empirical questions of the project concerned the reciprocity contexts in which volunteers embed their help for refugees: What do they expect in return for their help? When do disappointments and misunderstandings occur? It also emerged that some understand their help in terms of generalized reciprocity as a return for help received as children. Volunteers who had fled to Germany in the post-war period or who had to leave their cities in the last years of the war and stayed with relatives in the countryside recalled their own experiences of needing help when they began to support the families arriving in 2015.

Another part of the project focused on the motivations, moral feelings and symbolic boundaries of the volunteers. Compassion initially got the commitment going and initiated many contacts and volunteer relationships. But this feeling soon lost its significance and it was the identification with the idea of Caritas, the identification with care – especially among the female volunteers – and the identification with the social integration of their own village community that made the volunteers’ commitment permanent.

With a few exceptions, the help provided to refugees can be more accurately described as charitable than as solidarity-based, as volunteers and refugees do not identify as a community that shares a common goal. However, even if the help for refugees is charitable, it is also part of a reciprocal relationship of solidarity: the help for refugees is often provided as a contribution to group solidarity with the village community. There is an emotional bond with this community, from which help is expected when needed. However, the charitable help provided by volunteers plays an important mediating role between refugees and the rest of the village community.
The topic of compassion for refugees was also part of the project in terms of contemporary history. There is a historical parallel between two phases of the reception of refugees in Germany – the reception of Vietnamese boat people between 1978 and 1982 and the reception of Syrian refugees between 2015 and 2018: Similar movements can be observed in both cases: A great willingness to accept refugees is replaced by a broad-based debate on migration policy. Both cases are characterized by great media and civil society engagement. CDU politicians in particular cite Christian and humanitarian arguments, thereby exerting their influence. In both cases, the attitude was exhausted after a few years and led to policies of isolation. In a joint essay, Isabell Trommer and I analyze the cases in the context of social-theoretical and philosophical critiques of compassion and humanitarianism.

In the first phase of the project, I analyzed data and collected more. I spent the second phase of the project as a member of the Class of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton at the invitation of Didier Fassin.

Publications:

Editorships:
Greta Wagner (ed.): Helfen zwischen Solidarität und Wohltätigkeit. Focus issue of WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 1.2019, Frankfurt am Main: Campus.

Essays:
Greta Wagner: “Helfen und Kritik. Das Verhältnis von Solidarität und Wohltätigkeit in der Hilfe für Geflüchtete”, forthcoming in WSI-Mitteilungen.
* Greta Wagner: “Helfen und Reziprozität. Freiwilliges Engagement für Geflüchtete im ländlichen Raum”, in: Zeitschrift für Soziologie 48(3), 2019, pp. 226-241.
Greta Wagner and Isabell Trommer: “Mitleid und Krise. On the reception of refugees in the Federal Republic of Germany”, in: WestEnd. New Journal for Social Research 1.2019, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, pp. 123-133.