Dr. Martin Hyun is the founder and CEO of the non-profit and international network “Hockey is Diversity” and a former German ice hockey player. The author of the following lines was born in Krefeld in 1979 as the son of Korean guest worker parents. Hyun was the first Korean-born professional in the DEL and a German junior national player. He studied politics, international business and international relations. “Hockey is Diversity” was founded by him and Peter Goldbach in 2010 and actively acts against racism, right-wing extremism and discrimination. Both passionately advocate for diversity as a foundation for respectful interaction with one another. Its goal is to draw attention to ethnic diversity in society and to promote integration in Germany. Hyun and Goldbach are also concerned with transferring the diversity in sport into society and raising people's intercultural awareness beyond sport.
By Martin Hyun
“When I look in the mirror, I see my deep black, naturally curly and thick hair, which I inherited from my father. I see the contours of my oval-shaped face and my dark brown Asian eyes, which are striking in this country. My migration background is clearly visible to everyone, as is my last name, which sounds foreign to locals. I am the product of German-Korean migration history, which began in 1963 with the program for the temporary employment of Korean miners in the West German coal mining industry. The recruitment of South Korean miners was regulated in 21 articles. The German mining industry desperately needed workers. After Max Frisch, people came to the country. People like my father. He came to Germany in 1970 as a miner and worked underground in the Oberhausen-Osterfeld colliery Nordrhein-Westfalen. My mother came to Krefeld in 1971 and worked as a nurse until she took early retirement. Even after 58 years in the country, this migration story is hardly noticed publicly. And yet it is deeply interwoven into German history.
I cannot shed my visible Korean migration background. It is a part of me - I go to sleep with it and wake up with it in the morning. And that has its price. I am regularly reminded that I do not belong here. I experience this not only in everyday life, but also at work and in the world of sport. Finding a professional and sporting home is not easy if the construction of your identity is not directly associated with sport or work. I remember an encounter with a German customs officer when we were on our way to Canada with the junior national team and he chose me as the only one to ask if I would travel to a table tennis tournament. This exchange occupied me for a very long time. The German customs officer certainly did not miss the team's uniform clothing with the logo of the German Ice Hockey Federation.
The verbal racist attacks I was subjected to at ice hockey games, especially after reunification, left scars. Later, when I played for Krefeld in the DEL, I remember spectators in Augsburg shouting Asian dishes at me and laughing heartily. Many thousands of spectators obviously found this quite amusing. The message was clear that I was not part of the game - their ice hockey world was not my home.
The experience of finding a professional home has still eluded me to this day. Because home means home and the feeling of having arrived. During a selection process for a position as German representative at the United Nations in the field of sport and development, the HR manager at the Foreign Office asked me about my loyalty to Germany. When I was working in the Bundestag, a secretary stopped me one day. The secretary asked me to stop. “You set off the alarm!” she accused me. The secretary, who did not want to accept my clearly visible ID card as proof of authorization, threatened to call the in-house Bundestag police. Then I understood why the secretary stopped me - because she couldn't imagine a person like me working in the hallowed halls of German politics in her professional homeland.
At a big conference in Berlin with celebrities from politics and business, the president of an employers' association asked me when I entered the room whether I was the interpreter. That is the perception in this country – despite 58 years of migration history.
Last year we celebrated 30 years of German unity. From my point of view, the right-wing extremist AFD party is now represented in all state parliaments and is the third strongest force in the Bundestag. Germany has not only moved to the right and is blind in the right eye, but has also become a country in which refugee shelters are again being set on fire and refugee migrants and people of color are being killed. The intellectual arsonists of the AFD were pioneers of the anti-Semitic and racist murders in Halle and Hanau. The boundaries of what can be said and acted have definitely shifted.
I was 13 years old when thousands of people in Rostock-Lichtenhagen set fire to the Sunflower House, which housed Vietnamese guest workers. The front door of the house was fitted with a heavy lock to prevent the Vietnamese from escaping. The Vietnamese were supposed to burn miserably in the house.
The images of the burning asylum seekers' home in Rostock, people throwing Molotov cocktails, applauding passers-by who became followers and accomplices, the inability of the police to act and the panicked Vietnamese pleading for their survival are burned into my memory forever.
I also felt this hate firsthand. After a street hockey game, a mob approached me and surrounded me, shouting at me: “Get the fuck out of our country!” I saw a teammate become a neo-Nazi overnight. I saw how the mood in the country changed. Even when I was eleven years old, I knew that racist attacks and right-wing terror repeat themselves biorhythmically. And with each subsequent climax, the inhibition threshold for violence decreases. I feel that racist terror has become socially acceptable thanks to the AFD's agitation. The equation that neo-Nazis wear combat boots, bald heads and bomber jackets is long a thing of the past. Today it is the neighbor or baker next door, the teacher, lecturer at the university, the lawyer, the banker, the computer scientist, the entrepreneur, the master painter, physicist, the pilot, sales manager, the police officer, the social worker, the trainer and sports director from the sports club, etc. Today's neo-Nazis and racists are no longer so easily identifiable by their external appearance.
The wall is in 1989 Berlin fallen, but there is still an invisible wall that runs between the locals and people of color. How do we manage to tear down the wall in people's minds that prevents real rapprochement and integration? A change of heart cannot occur without rapprochement. We cannot simply hope or assume that racism does not exist or that it will randomly disappear at some point. We have to be honest when we talk about racism. We can no longer treat racism as an isolated event, but as one that we must deal with consistently. Statements of solidarity, fairy lights, symbolic politics, hashtags and memorials have not ended racism. You can't force love. And no anti-discrimination law encourages anyone to respect another human being.
It is also not enough to raise a flag for diversity in front of the company premises or the authority if diversity is not reflected in your own ranks. It's not enough to put out a nice press release on Diversity Day. It is not enough to write recommendations for action written by people who have never experienced racism.
Ice hockey is not immune to racism. Anyone who knows the history of our sport knows that ice hockey has not always been about inclusion. We cannot misuse the saying that sport has a strong integrative power if our own structures are structured homogeneously and there is no sign of diversity in leadership positions. We have to break down the habitual boundaries. Due to demographic change, sport cannot close itself to people of color, migrants and refugees who are not anchored in sport. It must offer solutions that reflect a society that is becoming increasingly colorful and diverse. With my club 'Hockey is Diversity' I will fight to ensure that players of color find a home in ice hockey and that no one is asked by a customs officer whether he or she is flying to a table tennis tournament.”