The Guest who Stayed
This very same view was even reflected in the conceptions of multiculturalism that emerged in the late 1980s in church and Green Party circles. Supposedly the “foreigners” first had to be secularized and had to give up their ties to pre-modern customs and traditions. This approach certainly overlooked the fact that, at least as regards religion, German society has by no means let go of its traditions to the extent that most people here believe. For example, in their book Heimat Babylon [Homeland: Babylon] (1993), Thomas Schmid and Daniel Cohn-Bendit* assumed that immigrants have to “learn” how to find their way in the “German value system.” But the two Green Party members could say as little about the nature of these “values” as Friedrich Merz** can today.
In reality, the concept of a “German lead culture” today is not maintained by native Germans’ specific ideas about their own cultural identity. Instead, it consists mainly in a differentiation from the image of the migrants qua its inversion: “we” can consider ourselves modern because “they” are traditional; “we” are tolerant, because “they” exhibit intolerance; in “our” society, women have long been emancipated, whereas “they” visibly oppress the women, etc.
In contrast to France or Great Britain, “we” in Germany always only refers to the community of native Germans. To the ears of all non-Germans, this “we” always sounds completely exclusionary. However, the immigrants often don’t seem very accommodating either. To most Germans, their communities appear closed and focused on their native culture. Cafes for Turkish men or women wearing headscarves seem to belong to a different world. Without a doubt, many first-generation Greek immigrants hardly know anything of the cities in which they live aside from their workplace, the Greek community, and the way to the airport. The recourse to an imaginary homeland or one’s own traditions is rooted not in a fundamental defensiveness on the part of the migrants, but rather in the conditions for acceptance in Germany. From the very beginning, immigrants were almost totally barred from access to German citizenship, thus making political participation more difficult for them. On top of that, membership in a political immigrant organization can still be grounds for denial of German citizenship. Thus, the only thing left for immigrants to do was to direct all their community activities into cultural associations.
German authorities thus definitely encouraged immigrants to take their country of origin as their ongoing point of cultural reference. After all, the “guests” were supposed to return home, so in the meantime they weren’t supposed to become too alienated from their “homeland.” Thus, both the real, existing “lead culture” and the culture of the migrants, which often seemed traditional, are products of the basic political conditions in the Federal Republic – which were exclusionary and also thoroughly chaotic from the start. Integration was never much more than a slogan; concrete measures were rarely taken. Even today, adequate language instruction isn’t available. And ultimately, adapting always meant adapting to a vague and hard-to-define German culture, while participatory rights were only supposed to come after integration. Assimilation was also called for in France, but there it meant assimilating to the republic as a citizen – ethnicity and culture are considered strictly private matters. Without a doubt, in reality, people in our neighboring country would like to treat the republic and French culture as one and the same, but there the immigrants are citizens and can protest this inaccurate conflation. The recent new regulations in Germany, such as the mini-reform of the citizenship law or the introduction of so-called Green Cards,*** have not brought movement to this static situation. The old immigrants are choosing to do without a citizenship that seems restrictive, and the new qualified immigrants never came at all. If the Union [CDU/CSU] now blusters about a “lead culture,” they are actually aiming to exclude immigrants.
[ . . . ]
* Schmid is a journalist and editor-in-chief of Die Welt. Cohn-Bendit is a Green deputy in the European Parliament. Both were active in the Frankfurt student protest movement in the late 1960s and 1970s.
** When this article was published, Merz was the deputy chairman of the CDU Bundestag caucus – eds.
*** Initiative by Gerhard Schröder to allow for the immigration of 20,000 tech specialists – eds.
Source: Mark Terkessidis, “The Culture and Origins Game” [“Das Spiel mit der Herkunft”], Tagesspiegel, November 4, 2000.
Translation: Allison Brown
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