A city in northern Germany has become the first to issue an all-out ban on the use of a hand gesture used to encourage silence in the classroom because of its close resemblance to a far-right Turkish gesture.
The “silent fox” gesture – where the hand is posed to resemble an animal with upright ears (the little and forefinger) and a closed mouth (the middle fingers pressed against the thumb) – has long been seen as a useful teaching tool by educators in Germany and elsewhere. It signals to children that they should stop talking and listen to their teacher.
But authorities in the port city of Bremen say the symbol is “in danger of being mistaken” for the right-wing extremist “wolf salute”, from which it is indistinguishable.
The salute was recently the focus of a diplomatic and sporting row, when the Turkish national football player Merih Demiral used it to celebrate scoring a goal in Turkey’s round of 16 match against Austria at the Euros earlier this month.
While the symbol not banned in Germany as it is in neighbouring Austria and France, its use was condemned by interior minister Nancy Faeser, who said “to use the football championships as a platform for racism” was “completely unacceptable.”
After the summoning of Turkey’s ambassador to Berlin and Germany’s ambassador to Ankara, the European football governing body Uefa issued Demiral with a two-match ban.
Protests over his ban led to calls among Turkish fans for the symbol to be used even more widely as an expression of their anger at what the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, called an “unfair and biased” reaction. “Does anybody ask why the German national jersey has an eagle, or the French jersey a rooster?” he asked reporters ahead of Turkey’s quarter-final encounter with the Netherlands in Berlin.
Erdoğan said the ban was politically motivated, and that Demiral had merely used the gesture to show his excitement.
Germany is home to an estimated 3 million ethnic Turks, who make up the country’s largest single ethnic minority and form the largest Turkish diaspora globally.
Patricia Brandt, a spokesperson for Bremen’s education authority, said the topic of the silent fox gesture and whether to ban it had long been under discussion but the city felt it now had no choice. “The political meaning of the hand gesture is absolutely incompatible with the values of the city of Bremen,” she said.
But she added that increasingly teachers had anyway considered the gesture to be “pedagogically outdated”, and its “regulatory style” to be too dogmatic and condescending.
The wolf salute is the symbol and identifying logo of the Grey Wolves, which is classified as a rightwing extremist group and has an estimated 20,000 members in Germany and many more outside the country. Grey Wolves is described by extremism experts as hardline nationalist and Islamist, with hatred shown to Kurds, Jews, Christians, Armenians, Greeks, the EU and the US. The group, which has a long history of terrorism dating back to the 1970s, has been blamed for bomb attacks in Paris and Bangkok, and the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II in 1981.
The silent fox symbol is used not just in Germany but by teachers around the world, and is known variously as the whispering fox, the listening fox, and as the quiet coyote in the US.
The Bremen ban follows a wider debate in Germany. The president of the German Teachers’ Association, Stefan Düll, called last week for teachers to show greater sensitivity in its use at primary schools and kindergartens. He said there were other ways of encouraging children to be quiet.
Some schools have reportedly started using gongs and other sign language or picture symbols instead.
