Idea Transcript
PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD
TEACHING MIGRANT CHILDREN IN WEST GERMANY AND EUROPE, 1949–1992 BRITTANY LEHMAN
Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood Series Editors George Rousseau University of Oxford, UK Laurence Brockliss University of Oxford, UK
Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood is the first of its kind to historicise childhood in the English-speaking world; at present no historical series on children/childhood exists, despite burgeoning areas within Child Studies. The series aims to act both as a forum for publishing works in the history of childhood and a mechanism for consolidating the identity and attraction of the new discipline. Editorial Board Matthew Grenby (Newcastle) Colin Heywood (Nottingham) Heather Montgomery (Open) Hugh Morrison (Otago) Anja Müller (Siegen, Germany) Sïan Pooley (Magdalen, Oxford) Patrick Joseph Ryan (King’s University College at Western University, Canada) Lucy Underwood (Warwick) Karen Vallgårda (Copenhagen) More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14586
Brittany Lehman
Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1949–1992
Brittany Lehman College of Charleston Charleston, SC, USA
Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood ISBN 978-3-319-97727-0 ISBN 978-3-319-97728-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97728-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018955399 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Fox Photos/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgments
Although individually authored, in the end, a work of scholarship in history involves an extensive support network. As such, I owe a debt of thanks to the many individuals and institutions across the United States and Europe, without whom I would never have reached this moment. First and foremost, I would like to express my appreciation to my department chair at the College of Charleston, Phyllis Jestice, for encouraging me through the process. I also owe a deep debt of gratitude to my dissertation advisors Karen Hagemann and Konrad Jarausch at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for their years of invaluable mentorship, oversight, and encouragement. Donald Reid and Susan Pennybacker also provided invaluable guidance, stretching my project in ways initially unimagined. Even with their guidance, I would never have been able to complete the project without generous institutional support. The research behind this book was only possible with funding from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the Central European History Society, the College of Charleston’s Department of History, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research (GEI). The Berlin Program’s support warrants particular note due to the phenomenal direction provided by Karin Goihl. These institutions enabled me to visit the many archives and libraries, whose collections are the backbone of this book and whose archivists and librarians have my ongoing gratitude. v
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have also benefitted tremendously from the many colleagues and friends who have aided this project’s evolution. Among my colleagues, I would like to thank my current writing partners Jennifer Cavalli and Victoria Garrett. In addition, Noah Lehman designed and created my graphs while Laura Brade, Jennifer Kosmin, Ryan Peeks, Alex Ruble, and Peter Starke have also each provided influential advice. Librarians Laura Bang and Yih Wie’s consistent assistance saw this project through to the end. Finally, my appreciation to Vanessa Robertson and Franzi Paetzold for their invaluable editing. My ongoing thanks to these many individuals and institutions for their generous time and support.
Contents
1 Introduction 1 2 Establishing the Right to Education for Children of Refugees (1949–1955) 15 Including Refugee Children Within a Universal Right to Education 18 West Germany and Schooling for Displaced Persons and Foreigners 24 Conclusion 34 3 Defining the Right to Education for European Citizens (1955–1966) 49 Legislating International Standards on the Right to Education for “Foreign Nationals” 51 Relative Foreignness and Mother Language Instruction in West Germany 55 Equalizing Foreign Children’s Access to Public Schools 61 Conclusion 67 4 Teaching National Identity to “Guest Worker Children” (1962–1971) 83 Distinguishing Between Minorities and Foreign Non-nationals 86
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Preparing for Return: Teaching Greekness and Degree Equivalency 90 The Politics of Teaching Foreign Identification and Loyalty During the Cold War 96 Conclusion 103 5 Equal Opportunities for West German Foreign Residents (1968–1977) 117 Secondary Schooling as Part of the Right to Education 119 Depicting Turkishness as the Quintessential West Germany Other 125 Piloting Successful Integration Through Preschool and Homework Help 134 Conclusion 139 6 More of a Right to Education for German Citizens (1976–1985) 159 Questioning Legal Connections Between Ethnicity and Citizenship 161 Un/Intentionally Segregating the West German Classroom 168 Teaching Foreignness to First-, Second-, and Third-Generation “Foreigners” 174 Conclusion 179 7 The Right to Education for Asylum Seekers and Ethnic Germans (1985–1992) 197 The Right to Mother Language Instruction for Kurdish Minority Groups 200 Redefining the Limits of Germanness Within a Multicultural Europe 206 Asylum and the Compulsory Nature of the Right to Education 212 Conclusion 219 8 Conclusion 231 Glossary 243 Index 247
List of Graphs
Chart 2.1 West German compulsory school system in the 1950s 27 Graph 3.1 Schoolchildren with Italian citizenship in West German general primary and secondary schools, 1965–1992 62 Graph 4.1 Schoolchildren with Greek citizenship in West German general primary and secondary schools, 1965–1992 95 Graph 5.1 Schoolchildren with Turkish citizenship in West German general primary and secondary schools, 1965–1992 129 Graph 7.1 Asylum applicants by geographic region of origin, 1980–1992215 Graph 7.2 Asylum applicants by largest countries of citizenship, 1980–1992216
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List of Tables
Table 6.1 Table 7.1
Total schoolchildren and schoolchildren with Italian citizenship in special schools for the disabled in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1976–1985 Ethnonational German (Aussiedler) migration to West Germany, 1968–1992
171 207
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
“Education is the key” announced the daily newspaper the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in discussing “success stories” about “guest worker children” in 2008.1 For decades, journalists and scholars have debated challenges of “integration” and “multiculturalism,” asking if people with different ethnic backgrounds can in fact live together peaceably. Georg Meck argued a strong yes. Referring to the millions of people who migrated to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) between 1955 and 1973, the article’s author implicitly defined migrants’ success as integration and participation in (West) German society. Meck’s examples were about people who climbed the social ladder and joined the ranks of skilled professionals. For each measure, completing compulsory schooling was the necessary step.2 Dozens of journalists, educators, and European governments have shared that opinion for decades.3 Public schools, particularly primary schools, serve as a place for migrant children and the children of migrants to come into contact with host-country nationals, learn the language of the state, and imbibe social norms.4 After all, in primary school citizens and migrants learn their basic three Rs of reading, writing, and arithmetic side by side, while in secondary school, students acquire advanced skills to prepare them for life in a technologically based, skilled labor market. Those 8 to 13 years of education, establishing a national narrative and teaching civic participation, also train children in behavioral norms as well as what it means to be good citizens in the future.5 © The Author(s) 2019 B. Lehman, Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1949–1992, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97728-7_1
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That emphasis on the future was part of the reason most western states began implementing compulsory schooling laws for their citizens in the nineteenth century.6 Initially, compulsory schooling was about teaching good subjecthood within an Empire or Kingdom and literacy in order to take advantage of a country’s human resources. A soldier and a factory worker were more capable of fulfilling their assigned tasks with a basic education. Adding to the importance of training human resources, as many states across western Europe became democracies, it became important for children to learn to read in order to act as an informed citizenry in a democratic state. Moving into the twentieth century, particularly after 1945, groups like the United Nations and Council of Europe redefined compulsory schooling to be about the individual as well as the state. Education was now “necessary for the fulfillment of any other … right” and vital for the individual’s quality of life.7 Schooling was necessary for an individual to be socially mobile and to access the multilayered labor market.8 Still true today, education was and is essential for children to have equal opportunities.9 In the post-1945 world, supranational communities like UNESCO (founded in 1945), the Council of Europe (founded in 1949), and later the European Community (EC, founded in 1958) reinforced international emphasis on human rights—including the right to education—for citizens and non-nationals alike.10 After the war, the Allied Powers and other state leaders believed that in order to avoid another global catastrophe like the Second World War, nation-states needed to communicate with one another and also include minority groups within the framework of the nation. As the authors of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) laid out in the preamble, “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family [was] the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”11 These rights needed to be elevated above the citizen and applied to the human. All people needed the right to personhood, the right to security, and the right to work, to name only a few.12 Education, as a foundational right, was necessary for the realization of the others. But, as among these supranational entities only the EC had any legislative powers, those international recommendations were largely trends individual states had to choose to implement and enforce. Furthermore, as Pierre Bourdieu pointed out in the 1970s, schools reproduced social divisions.13 That argument applied to the socio- economic divisions Bourdieu analyzed, but also between ethnic and
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national groups. Schools, after all, were where children learned to be citizens.14 Most nation-states wanted their citizens to have a clear loyalty to the state. The children of migrants, born to foreign nationals but educated in the host country, might feel connected to their parents’ countries of citizenship in addition to their current homes. That possibility of mixed identification raised concerns for the nation-state governments involved. As Abdelmalek Sayad pointed out in his book The Suffering of the Immigrant, most states wanted their residents to have a clear ethnonational affiliation corresponding with their citizenship status. If a child with Turkish citizenship lived in West Germany (or, for Sayad, children with Algerian ties in France), that child needed to be either Turkish or German, but not both. Instead, nation-state governments tried to teach a clear divide between those who were in and out. When learning in school who counted as “German,” children also learned who was not (i.e., the child with Turkish citizenship).15 In that process, children absorbed whether school, society, and jobs were for “them.” Children with Turkish citizenship in West Germany or Algerian citizenship in France often learned it was not.16 Inclusion and exclusion within a national group depended both on social and legal acceptance, for which there was no clear norm.17 States like France and the Netherlands acknowledged inherited national identity but emphasized the learned. Through the twentieth century, both states, colonial empires, combined some levels of access to citizenship based on both jus soli and jus sanguinis.18 Children born in and/or living for a minimum length of time in those countries could apply to naturalize. Culture was something you learned from your parents, but also absorbed from society and were taught in school.19 The Empire of Germany, in contrast, passed a 1913 citizenship law, claiming ethnonational Germanness was inherited through blood and not learned. Even before the Third Reich used that law to justify its brutality, that ethnic-based citizenship caused problems for the Polish-speaking populations in the Ruhr region and East Prussia as it provided legal justification for discrimination and explicit othering.20 It was that law the Federal Republic of Germany kept in 1949, instead of revising for inclusion.21 Despite those apparent legal differences, in the post-1945 world actual implementation of citizenship law bore some disturbing similarities between most western European states regarding inclusion and exclusion of different ethnic groups, including the diverse labor migrants moving across the European continent. In counties like France, despite a narrative of equality and theoretical access to civil rights, the children of French
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c itizens from the colonies often faced housing discrimination. Forced to live in shanty towns, the children’s school buildings, if existent, were frequently dilapidated and learning materials all but nonexistent. Despite a centralized system supposed to ensure equal education opportunities, schools often taught children—particularly from places like Algeria—that France was not in fact theirs. In West Germany, in contrast, children with non-German citizenship did not have access to citizenship and were not entitled to civil rights (defined as rights for citizens).22 Without that status, even as children reportedly possessed equal education opportunities, they did not have the same access to schools, in part because once again housing discrimination pushed the development of parallel societies, which often received fewer resources. Excluded from the nation, these migrant groups and their descendants did not have the same right to education, regardless of the law.23 Precisely who had rights and access to resources like education depended on a combination of explicit and implicit bias, influencing access to jobs and housing as well as schooling. The possibility of integration was based on a mess of contradictory factors, even as the Council of Europe declared that all humans had a right to dignity.24 In both France and West Germany, as well as the Netherlands and Italy, access to schools was dictated not only by citizenship status but shaped by the intersection of form of entry; specific national, religious, and ethnic affiliation; socio-economic background; and host-country perception of the migrant group. Children of wealthy parents moving for skilled labor from the United States to almost any eastern European state usually had education opportunities on par with the host community. A child migrating from Italy to the Federal Republic, France, or the Netherlands, however, faced bias against “southern” communities and were automatically treated as working class. Children from countries like Morocco or Turkey, in contrast, faced even more deeply ingrained bias from the host communities, who often cast them as “Oriental” Muslims, leading to even worse discrimination. In short, local treatment and access to rights like education depended on a complex web of interrelated and poorly understood stereotypes and contradictory policy, which meant the claim of equal education for all was usually a dream. Several scholars have explored the right to education for migrant children, but most of those studies have examined 1989 and onwards, focusing on either the theory of education or the schools themselves. Looking at the composition of the West German schools, Leonie Herwartz-Emden examined the impact of heterogeneity and gender in the classroom on
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schoolchildren with migrant backgrounds.25 Looking at the situation with an eye toward the present and an emphasis on the German schoolroom, this scholarship often overlooks special programs designed for foreign nationals. Scholars like Ingrid Gogolin, Ursula Neumann, and Lutz Reuter have also looked at the issue as a right, but focused on law and high politics; they have not explored the historical development of school programs.26 In order to understand the current debates in Europe and Germany regarding minority groups and their success in the education system, it is also necessary to consider the development of these school programs for “foreign” children both in regards to policy considerations and intention. By tracing the development of the right to education for foreign migrant citizens, this book explores the idea of equal human rights in Europe in the post-1945 era particularly in contrast with civil rights. The right to education had—imperfectly and unequally—been extended to citizens across western Europe for more than a century. Within a human rights era, however, theoretically all children were supposed to have a right to education. This book turns to public schooling to explore the idea of the human versus the citizen as well as state responsibility, and the perception of belonging within the framework of the nation. Because public schooling was supposed to be the key for children to access other rights— political and civil as well as economic and social—in the future, state education policy and practices serve as a window into the understanding of human rights and social inclusion in the post-1945 western world. To connect those points—ideology, policy, and practice—this book uses West Germany as a case study to argue that western European governments, in differentiating between access to public schooling for children based on citizenship and supposed national identity, in fact partially denied children with non-German citizenship their equal right to education. Furthermore, by making access to citizenship contingent on blood, which was supposed to somehow link to a clear ethnonational identity, the West German government effectively denied foreign citizens the equal opportunities for accessing those rights at all. That process of othering and differentiation in turn permitted the creation of a tiered residency, forming conceptual barriers between us (citizens) and them (non-citizens).27 That barrier justified legal restrictions on individual access to state infrastructure and tacitly encouraged discrimination, thus further exacerbating inequalities of access. The effect of limiting education was particularly severe as public schooling was not only where students were trained to accept one
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another (or not) but also because to limit education was to circumscribe access to other human rights, creating a hierarchy of human values.28 Neither the Federal Republic of Germany nor the other European state governments involved made that claim outright (with the exception of neo-fascist and other explicitly xenophobic groups). Instead, many of them agreed to the UN and Council of Europe’s declarations on human rights (UDHR and ECHR). Policy, however, began separating and categorizing while practice and unequal implementation often denied the very rights promised. In order to track international human rights discourse, analyze state policy, and consider local implementation, this book uses West Germany as a case study. Not only was West Germany the destination and eventual home of more refugees, labor migrants, and asylum seekers than any other western European state at the time but the country, attempting to rehabilitate its reputation after the atrocities of the Holocaust, was heavily invested in following European norms and supporting basic human rights.29 This was a country that did not want to fall behind. Yet part of the consideration within West Germany—at both the supranational and national level—was the extent and limits of state responsibility for ensuring human rights. The entire concept of citizenship is partly based on the assumed relationship between a state and its people. The state, particularly a welfare state, has responsibilities to its citizens and the citizens to the state. In order to explore the tension between the human and the civil right, this text focuses on non-citizens, particularly new migrants. These groups’ access to education and equality of educational opportunities demonstrates the willingness of a state to include and encourage belonging or, conversely, to shut out and Other. Who was responsible for ensuring a foreign migrant child’s rights demonstrated where the line often fell, highlighting the contest over identity, the rigidity of social inclusion and exclusion, as well as the idea of the local community. That uncertain balance of responsibility is part of the reason West Germany serves as an excellent study. As the country’s name—the Federal Republic of Germany—suggests, the state is federated, with responsibility for ensuring its citizens’ welfare—including education—divided between its Länder (West German states). With Länder jurisdiction over education, each of the 11 West German state governments had to determine how best to implement European aims. That system highlights how, despite claiming the same overarching goals, different states’ specific interpretations resulted in wildly different programmatic implementation. States
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have limited resources and cannot do all for everyone and here scholars can see them pick and choose. Looking particularly to Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, West Berlin, and North Rhine-Westphalia, this book highlights how divergent policies and implementation develop.30 Furthermore, these Länder were destinations for migrants from multiple countries of citizenship—including Italy, Greece, and Turkey—and those states’ governments took the education of their citizens seriously, even when those citizens lived abroad. If education sat within the scope of civil rights, then these countries of citizenship were responsible for ensuring those migrants’ education equality. If it was a human right, then, as host country, it was the Länder’s responsibility. As the opening discussion highlighted, developed states across the world debate the place of “foreigners” within a nation-state. Those labels, however, imply that all “foreigners” were “migrants” and “migrants” were “foreigners,” with identical, essentialized identities, bearing the same concerns, form of entry, and cultural traditions. As Stuart Hall pointed out, to identify a person—to label them—misidentifies them. Identification for Hall was contingent, an act never complete in part because of the political implications of the act.31 As language is constantly in a state of transition, a label can never be entirely accurate. Furthermore, the process of applying identity labels is frequently structured around the rejection of other labels, creating the ‘us/them’ mentality mentioned above. Many, for example, will look at the cover image of this book and see “German” or “Turkish” children, without considering that the children could be both. This study moves forward on the basic premise that “migrants” and “foreigners” are individual humans and, as such, unique. Yet, people are social beings, who usually live in communities and frequently use labels to describe themselves as part of specific communities. Furthermore, discussing millions of individual people is hardly feasible. We, as scholars, must collapse identity into groups in order to draw conclusions. In consequence, this book focuses on citizenship status to refer to different groups even as it acknowledges the harm done by that labeling. There is not a good way to flatten these diverse communities in order to study them, but for ease of reading, this book will often refer to “children with Italian citizenship,” occasionally shortening that phrase to “Italian children.” In focusing on citizenship within the age of the nation, this book interrogates the tie between national and ethnic labels. Labels like “German” and “Turkish” as ethnonational identities are hard to pin down as they reflect political projects, often defined by a state, which in turn insists that
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the nation is the essence of the ethnic majority. For a state to claim its citizens are all nationals often erases regional difference and imposes a false- normativity that excludes non-nationals, in part because culture evolves. National labels also cause problems, particularly when tied to citizenship, because they frequently obfuscate the existence of ethnic or national minorities within a majority community. Writing about “Germans” belonging in Germany hides the existence, for example, of the Danish communities in Schleswig-Holstein dating back to the seventh century (long before “Germany” existed as a nation) as well as the long history of Polish speakers in German-speaking territories like the Kingdom of Prussia.32 This book tracks each of these conceptual, legal, and programmatic layers across a more than four-decade period. It first looks to supranational definitions of and goals regarding the right to education, focused particularly on how the Council of Europe and European Community fit non- citizens into that right. Second, the book examines how individual state governments—here using the West German Länder—codified and regulated the right to education and school programs for non-German citizens. Third, this text analyzes the programs designed to implement ideological goals and law. In short, exploring how shifting ideology transformed into regulations to then be realized as school programs over four decades, this book examines the complex contest over belonging, identity, and permanent residency as well as the ability to make claims on the state. To examine these different, often intentionally contradictory, convoluted, yet interconnected issues, this book is organized chronologically, following the three major phases of European migration in six chapters. The second chapter—first body chapter—explores what the right to education meant for displaced persons in West Germany in the immediate post-1945 world as Europe rebuilt and the global human rights (as a legal construct) movements began. As a result of the atrocities of the Third Reich, West Germany was held morally responsible for the displacement of these heterogeneous groups. In part to accept that responsibility, the new Länder governments (with jurisdiction over education) attempted to include these specific non-Germans under the right to education even as they tried to acknowledge ethnic diversity within the groups. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters turn to the second migration period: labor and (de)colonial migration between 1955 and 1975. Chapter 3 explores the development of the European Community and the emphasis on the need to extend compulsory education to all EC member
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state nationals in order to fulfill the right to education. In the early 1960s, Italian citizens were the largest group of “guest workers” in the Federal Republic. The Italian government, protecting the civil rights of its citizens, pushed compulsory West German schooling and access to human rights in the Federal Republic, arguing that its citizens were permanent West German residents even as they were culturally Italian. Chapters 4 and 5 look at a brief period during which the West German states—at least their Ministries of Education—acknowledged the probable permanent (or at least long term) residence of most of its migrant populations. Adding to that acknowledgment, as Chap. 4 shows, the Greek government’s insistence that its citizens were Greek and would someday return to Greece underlined one of the concerns associated with viewing education as a country of citizenship’s responsibility: the host state needed to cede sovereignty. The Greeks state’s 1967 coup and subsequent fears of fascist or revolutionary influences ended up pushing the Länder toward claiming responsibility for education as a human right and focus on integration, which is where Chap. 5 takes up the story. The clearly growing migrant populations encouraged the European and Länder Ministries of Education to underline integration and equal opportunities for all. Yet, even at that moment the Turkish government began advocating the cultural maintenance for its citizens living across Europe. For many European and West German educators and politicians, knowing little about Islam and falling on Orientalist stereotypes, groups of Turkish citizens were depicted as too foreign to fully integrate. With western European states considering ethnicity as tied to citizenship, these children were cast as quintessential Others, encouraging diaspora development. Chapters 6 and 7 look at the 1980s and early 1990s upswing in both xenophobia and emphasis on multiculturalism. Chapter 6 examines the explosion of xenophobia directed primarily at “southern,” “Turkish,” and other “Muslim” residents. That xenophobia was associated with the idea that the German state should be for the Germans. Some politicians felt the state needed to privilege its citizens, arguing that Germans had more of a right to education and access to resources, but refrained from explicitly arguing that non-citizens had less of a right (though in practice, this of course means that they did have less of a right). Yet, as Chap. 7 demonstrates, the idea of Germanness was becoming increasingly nebulous as an ethnonational category, particularly with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and returning ethnic Germans at the end of the
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1980s and early 1990s. Nonetheless, even as the idea of the national identity was questioned, the tie between citizenship and rights became tighter. By looking at European trends across four decades through West Germany, this study demonstrates how the school was used to teach children belonging and otherness following convoluted and usually contradictory interpretations of human rights. The design and implementation of the different school programs may have been specifically German, but the philosophy and intent behind them as well as the framework shaping them reflected larger European patterns. The right to education may seem innocuous, but as a necessary precursor to other rights, its implementation highlights how western European states interpreted human value and the right to social participation. Added to that, with education central to the right to personhood—tied to ethnic and national identities—access to school was about inclusion in the nation as well as future social and economic rights. In short, this book is about teaching migrant children.
Notes 1. Georg Meck, “Erfolgsgeschichten: Der Aufstieg der Gastarbeiter-Kinder,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 8, 2008. 2. Bundesregierung, “Bildung ist Schlüssel für Integration,” June 16, 2016, https://www.bundesregierung.de/Content/DE/Artikel/2016/06/201606-16-bildungsbericht.html 3. Meck, “Erfolgsgeschichten”; Maurice Crul, “Early Education Is Key to Helping Migrant Children Thrive,” The Guardian, September 18, 2016, sec. Opinion, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/ sep/18/early-education-key-migrant-children-thrive-integration 4. “The children of migrants” includes second and third generation (and onward) born in the country. Because of complications in language, I am sad to say that I will usually include them in the phrase “migrant children” as well. The problems with that terminology are discussed at greater length in Chap. 6. 5. John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005); Jürgen Oelkers and Heinz Rhyn, eds., Dewey and European Education: General Problems and Case Studies (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000); UNESCO, “A Human Rights-Based Approach to Education for All: A Framework for the Realization of Children’s Right to Education and Rights Within Education” (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2007), 7. See also Fernando Reimers, “Citizenship, Identity
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and Education: Examining the Public Purposes of Schools in an Age of Globalization,” Prospects: Quarterly Review of Comparative Education 36, no. 3 (September 2006): 275–94. 6. V. Mallinson, The western European Idea in Education (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), 46–67. Several states began compulsory schooling earlier, including the Prussian state. See James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 7. UNESCO, “A Human Rights-Based Approach to Education for All,” 7. 8. T.H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” in The Welfare State Reader, ed. Christopher Pierson and Francis Geoffrey Castles (Malden, MA: Polity, 2006), 30–39. 9. Loveness Mapuva, The Dilemma of Children’s Right to Education in the Era of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme in Zimbabwe Re-Visited (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 38; Joel Spring, The Universal Right to Education: Justification, Definition, and Guidelines (New York: Routledge, 2000), 10–11. 10. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, “The Institutionalization of Cosmopolitan Morality: The Holocaust and Human Rights,” Journal of Human Rights 3, no. 2 (June 1, 2004): 143; Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 183. 11. General Assembly of the United Nations, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” December 10, 1948, http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/. For a discussion of some of the conceptual importance and legal design of human rights, see Lynn Avery Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007); Jean H. Quataert, Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010). 12. For a discussion of how the right to education fit within that need, see Gisella Gori, Towards an EU Right to Education (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2001); Klaus Dieter Beiter, The Protection of the Right to Education by International Law: Including a Systematic Analysis of Article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2006); Florentina Burlacu, “Children’s Right to Education,” Euromentor Journal 3, no. 4 (December 2012): 126–36. 13. Pierre Bourdieu, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, trans. Jean-Claude Passeron, 2nd ed. (London: Sage Publications, 1990). 14. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 115–16.
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15. Abdelmalek Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant, trans. David Macey (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004). 16. Paul A. Silverstein, Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Umut Erel, “Migrating Cultural Capital: Bourdieu in Migration Studies,” Sociology 44, no. 4 (2010): 642–60; Elaine R. Thomas, Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France: A Comparative Framework (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Sung-Eun Choi, Decolonization and the French of Algeria: Bringing the Settler Colony Home (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006). 18. Jus soli is usually translated as “birth right” and refers to the extension of citizenship based on location of birth—rights and obligations based on the soil on which a person was born. Jus sanguinis, in contrast, is the extension of citizenship based on descent. Between the nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, that citizenship was usually tied to the father’s blood, not the mother’s. See Patrick Weil, “Access to Citizenship: A Comparison of Twenty-Five Nationality Laws,” in Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices, ed. Thomas Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas B. Klusmeyer (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001), 17–35. 19. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Stephen Castles, Hein de Haas, and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 5th ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 110–11. 20. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, 129–34. 21. Dieter Gosewinkel, “Citizenship in Germany and France at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Some New Observations on an Old Comparison,” in Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 27–39; Douglas B. Klusmeyer and Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Immigration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany: Negotiating Membership and Remaking the Nation (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 53–76. 22. T. H. Marshall defined civil rights in terms of the “status of freedom” and argued that the most important institution for civil rights were the courts of justice (see “Citizenship and Social Class,” in The Welfare State Reader, ed. Christopher Pierson and Francis Geoffrey Castles (Malden, MA: Polity, 2006), 30–32). This book, in contrast, uses standard definitions for civil rights within human rights scholarship: the rights associated with
INTRODUCTION
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c itizenship. For a discussion of multiple sides of that definition, see Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir, eds., People Out of Place: Globalization, Human Rights and the Citizenship Gap (New York: Routledge, 2004). 23. Daniele Archibugi and Ali Emre Benli, eds., Claiming Citizenship Rights in Europe: Emerging Challenges and Political Agents (New York: Routledge, 2017). 24. Steven Greer, Janneke Gerards, and Rose Slowe, Human Rights in the Council of Europe and the European Union: Achievements, Trends and Challenges (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 328–30. 25. Leonie Herwartz-Emden, Aufwachsen in heterogenen Sozialisationskontexten: zur Bedeutung einer geschlechtergerechten interkulturellen Pädagogik (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010). 26. Ingrid Gogolin, Ursula Neumann, and Lutz Reuter, eds., Schulbildung für Kinder aus Minderheiten in Deutschland 1989–1999 (Waxmann, 2001). Other scholars have explored the European right to education and programs, including Cristina Allemann-Ghionda, Bildung für alle, Diversität und Inklusion: Internationale Perspektiven (Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh GmbH, 2013). 27. Bridget Anderson, Us and Them?: The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–11. 28. This book is based off archival work done at the European level in the Archives of the Commission of the European Union in Brussels, Council of Europe Archives in Strasbourg, and the OECD Archives in Paris. At the West German federal level, the primary archives used were the Bundesarchiv (BArch) in Koblenz and the Political Archive of the German Foreign Office (PA AA) in Berlin. The Länder archives I used included the BadenWürttemberg Landesarchiv, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, the Bayrisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (BayHStA) in Munich, the Landesarchiv Berlin, the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv—Standort Wolfenbüttel, and the NordrheinWestfälisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Düsseldorf. I also accessed the Archiv des Diakonischen Werkes der Evangelischen Kirche Deutschlands in Berlin, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung: Archiv der sozialen Demokratie in Bonn, and the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig. My thanks again to the phenomenal archivists and librarians who assisted me with my work. 29. Simon Bulmer and William Paterson, The Federal Republic of Germany and the European Community, Reprint (New York: Routledge, 2014), 6, 180–81. 30. The West German states (Länder) included Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Bremen, Hamburg, Hesse, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland, and Schleswig-Holstein as well as West
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Berlin. This book will refer to the collective as Länder for ease of reading. Each of the Länder had different versions of Ministries of Education with frequently changing titles as the states’ governments reorganized multiple times over the four decades of this study. In consequence, this book will refer simply to the Länder Ministries of Education for ease of reading. 31. Stuart Hall, “Who Needs Identity?,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 1–17. 32. Peter O’Brien, “German-Polish Migration: The Elusive Search for a German Nation-State,” International Migration Review 26, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 373–87.
CHAPTER 2
Establishing the Right to Education for Children of Refugees (1949–1955)
An undated photograph taken in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons (DPs) camp in the late 1940s captured a young girl with a stern expression. The child stood straight, facing the camera head on, while her hand pointed to the blackboard behind her. Her expression underlined the words carefully chalked across the board in Hebrew: “Today the first snow is falling. We demand shoes!!!”1 That single, undated photograph unintentionally emphasized the controversial connection between refugee identity and nation-state at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s. On the surface, it depicted the common schoolroom scene of a child writing lessons. What the child was learning and her message, however, were telling. In Bergen-Belsen, a German displaced persons camp colloquially named after the now-burned concentration camp, Jewish residents arranged classes for their children, explicitly intending to impart Jewishness (as an ethnonational identity). These parents and guardians—so recently freed from concentration camps or emerged from hiding—believed their children needed to embrace a Zionist identity before moving to the Palestinian Mandate (as of 1948, Israel). They were not to be Polish or German and hence did not need to learn those languages or embrace those identities. Without any other education, these children, mostly born in Poland, learned to be Jewish in a Germany under British control.2 For most parents, occupying powers, and involved host states, the question of teaching identity to refugees was not easily solved. First, by the © The Author(s) 2019 B. Lehman, Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1949–1992, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97728-7_2
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end of the decade most of the displaced persons in displaced persons camps were not Jewish, but different stateless groups with diverse ethnic backgrounds, raising questions over their national identities. Even within the diverse Jewish communities across Europe there were arguments about what it even meant to be part of the community. Many state governments set language as the primary—but not sole—representative marker of ethnonational identity. According to those arguments, ethnic Poles spoke Polish while ethnic Germans spoke German. Second, the state and international bodies trying to rebuild a war-torn continent had limited resources. In order to assign responsible parties, the victorious Allied Powers dictated that state governments take charge of their citizens’ basic welfare. Partly for that reason, the Allied Occupying Powers tried to place the two million displaced persons in central Europe in either their countries of citizenship or countries corresponding to their ethnic identities, which they often based on language. Italian speakers were sent back to Italy and Polish speakers to Poland, regardless of whether the individual wanted to leave. But these forced repatriations came to an end as Cold War boundaries solidified and new states formed. With the attendant Cold War political tensions, the British, French, and US governments hardly wanted to force refugees into Eastern bloc territories.3,4 By 1949, when the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was founded, the Allied Powers’ leaders and the new Länder (West German state) governments knew that the more than 100,000 refugees still in camps across the country were permanent residents. What remained unclear was who these hundred thousand individuals were supposed to be and what rights they were entitled to. These individuals did not necessarily have a clear national identity; nor were they culturally unified. They spoke Polish and Russian, Lithuanian and Romanian.5 Adults presumably would maintain their established ethnic identities, but also learn a little German and perhaps receive job training. For displaced children that answer did not suffice. Their identities were still unformed and skills undeveloped, raising concerns about how to handle them. Because the children were permanently displaced, the Allied Powers expected the children to remain in West Germany. According to many state governments and supranational bodies involved (from the Länder governments to the new Council of Europe) in the 1940s and 1950s, children learned ethnic identity from their parents, from social contact, and in their schools.6 The later points suggested displaced children would learn to be German through exposure. Yet most governments
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and educators involved found it unacceptable to force these children to learn to be German when the former Third Reich had been largely responsible for their plight to begin with because of nationalist ideas of Germanness and blood. But, providing the children a different education allowing them to maintain their parents’ ethnic identities would cut them off from university access and skilled employment in West Germany. Despite the convoluted complexity of these concerns, decisions regarding the children’s schooling needed to be addressed immediately as childhood was temporary. To delay a child’s education would be to deny them their rights. Complicating the question of what refugee children should learn in West Germany and across the rest of Europe was the issue of exiles and ethnic German returnees. The Allied Powers denied those forced ethnic German migrants refugee status on the grounds that they had citizenship (were not stateless). In response, the Federal Republic of Germany claimed them as “returnees.” Although similar in regards to language and culture, the legal differentiation between non-German displaced persons and ethnic German exiles meant that each group was entitled to different rights, from schools, to housing, to labor.7 The Allied Powers were disinclined to answer the question of how each of these groups should be treated and the new Länder governments wanted to be careful to follow new international norms in an effort to demonstrate their distance from the recent Nazi past. The Allied Powers foist its responsibility on the nascent United Nations, and the West German states looked both to that new supranational entity and the new Council of Europe to inform local policy. The two supranational bodies had limited to no legislative power but in establishing a place for communication they also created space for mutual observation. Wanting to reestablish its reputation, West Germany was not going to be seen falling behind. To avoid that humiliation, the Länder used international recommendations to shape local programs for the education of “homeless and stateless children” (heimatlose und staatslose Kinder). Yet, even as some Länder Ministries of Education tried to develop effective strategies, they faced parental pressures pushing for different policies.8 Looking at conflicting developments, this chapter argues that the expansion of the right to education from a civil to a human right began as an attempt to address care for refugee children. Yet, in states like West Germany, the assumption of blood-based, exclusive citizenship turned refugees into foreign others and schools into a site of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. Local state programs, careful to reflect international norms, would attempt to
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promote integration while establishing ethnic difference. The resulting complex and sometimes contradictory policy and programs would become the basis off which the Länder governments would educate children with foreign citizenship over the subsequent four and more decades.
Including Refugee Children Within a Universal Right to Education In the post-1945 world, philosophers like Hannah Arendt—herself a German Jewish former refugee—argued that the interwar conceptual links between citizenship, identity, and rights were precisely what had led to the horrific interwar armed conflicts in countries across the Balkans and then the Second World War’s atrocities. In her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt claimed that the development of the nation-state promoted the idea that only nationals could be citizens. That perception led many states, including the German Third Reich, to deny newly recognized minority groups’ citizenship and “the Rights of Man” previous generations had believed to be “inalienable.”9 It was this division between the national majority and minority groups into citizen and non-citizen, Arendt claimed, that lay behind the onset of the Second World War.10 In order to avoid similar atrocities, Arendt and scholars like her argued that world governments should not permit statelessness. To do so, they promoted the idea that any individual was entitled to human rights and citizenship, regardless of ethnicity. Arendt’s work voiced a widespread belief among political thinkers across the world in the 1940s and 1950s. It was partly to address questions of citizenship and global cooperation that 50 states agreed to create the United Nations in 1945. As the war tumbled toward its bloody conclusion, those countries’ governments tried to assess the causes of the war in order to prevent another outbreak. In meeting after meeting, those states’ representatives determined that the answer lay in establishing a supranational institution in order to promote global communication and cooperation.11 An attempt in that direction had already been made in the 1910s with the creation of the League of Nations.12 The League had, however, been weakened by its limited membership and emphasis on national and minority rights. That focus had enabled incursions into other state’s sovereignty, including Germany’s claims on the Sudetenland, its limitation of citizenship to the supposedly racially pure, and eventually genocide.13 To prevent a similar escalation, the new organization argued that ethnicity and citizenship needed to be decoupled.14
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Within the new international framework, every citizen was supposed to be equal, regardless of gender, socio-economic background, or ethnicity. To promote that end, in late 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a list of fundamental rights—including education—every member state was supposed to guarantee each of their individual citizens.15 The previous 1945 International Rights and Duties of Man formulated by the Inter-American Juridical Committee at the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace held in Mexico City included both an emphasis on the right to nationality and education (Articles IX and XVII, respectively). Eleanor Roosevelt, Pen-Chun Chang, and Charles Malik’s expansion of that document—the basis for the UDHR—stressed education access for all people regardless of legal status.16 To ensure that access, the final UDHR’s Article 26 stipulated that elementary and fundamental education was to be “free and compulsory.”17 Without literacy, after all, children—future citizens—would be unable to participate fully socially, economically, or politically and therefore not truly be equal.18 With member states unable to agree on specific parameters for inclusion, the UN’s discussion of education and identity did not stipulate who was responsible for ensuring those rights or how they were supposed to be realized, particularly in reference to non-citizens. Technically, merely not preventing children from receiving an education could be construed as supporting their right to education. Most states in the late 1940s assumed that a lack of prevention sufficed. As long as non-citizens could set up and run their own schools or potentially voluntarily attend host-country public schools, the host state’s obligation had been met. But, as was quickly evident, the lack of prevention meant the hundreds of thousands of stateless and homeless refugees without clear citizenship status fell through the cracks even as some governments across Europe acknowledged the universal right to education. Part of the UN’s failure to dictate specific parameters was a matter of jurisdiction. Legal status such as citizenship remained a matter of local law, as were school laws. Each UN member state extended citizenship using individual legal parameters, usually based on blood (jus sanguinis) or place of birth (jus soli). For example, in part because of its colonial history, French law dictated that anyone born in France or completing a French education was theoretically French.19 In contrast, the young West German state maintained Nazi principles, dictating that anyone with German heritage was German, but almost no one else.20 In each state, citizens were entitled to free primary school education. Neither the French nor West German governments, however, were perfectly clear on how non-citizens
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were supposed to fit into local schools designed to teach national identification and loyalty. Yet for France, most migrant children had the potential of becoming French citizens, meaning these children’s public schooling mattered regardless of their parents’ citizenship status (or lack).21 In West Germany, in contrast, non-ethnic Germans had limited options for naturalization, raising the question of whether it behooved them to attend West German schools at all.22 Non-German children could not become German but schools taught Germanness.23 Yet, based on the UDHR, all children needed a free and compulsory education and countries like West Germany did not want to be seen slacking. Part of that uncertainly was on account of the connection between education, identity, and labor. For most states, the intention behind compulsory education was to teach literacy with the goal of imparting citizenship and with the intention of creating good workers. In West Germany, basic literacy was a necessary step for both citizenship and employment but the demands of the 1940s and 1950s labor market meant one could find a job without much else. Consequently, although the Länder technically required eight or nine years of education, many students dropped out after completing primary school. Although completing secondary schooling opened more employment opportunities, it was not necessary for finding work. Furthermore, learning to speak and read German alongside German history, religion, and social studies conveyed Germanness. It was these later points that made public schooling for displaced persons questionable. Displaced children absolutely needed schooling in order to find jobs but compelling them to imbibe Germanness seemed potentially abusive. In order to address the issue and ensure refugees’ care, the Allied powers and local governments established the inter-governmental International Refugee Organization (IRO) in April 1946. The International Refugee Organization, which was eventually folded into the United Nations, organized the care and placement of those individuals—displaced persons— who ended up in camps.24 As different displaced persons groups’ stays extended from months to years, many groups in the camps set up schools and organized education programs. Teachers drawn from within the camps taught the children the language and curricula of the group and not of the country of residence.25 For example, in 1950 the DP camp in Backnang near Stuttgart in West Germany housed a significant number of refugees from Poland. There, with IRO funding, a Polish-speaking teacher began educating the camp’s children.26 While the children at least had
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access to some education, it was an education that would not assist them in West German society or with the job market. Instead, it kept the children apart from society and prepared them to operate in a country (Poland) most would never again see. The International Refugee Organization’s funding and assistance were vital for ensuring the displaced children received any education in the immediate post-war years. Yet, the IRO also effectively removed responsibility from the refugees’ countries of residence. Resources across Europe were scarce, as the opening photograph highlighted with the child’s demand for shoes. Most European state governments preferred to give their limited teaching materials to their citizens, rather than expend them on foreign non-citizens (including refugees), however deserving.27 As such, even with the work of the IRO, camps relied heavily on private fundraising initiatives. Private funding relied, in turn, on global interest, which was slowly waning as time passed.28 The international community had to develop a more permanent, stable solution to secure displaced children’s access to education. The issue was particularly pressing, as instead of depopulating, many refugee camps continued to receive new migrant groups, particularly from across eastern Europe. The mass expulsion of ethnic Germans in particular highlighted a need for a lasting solution.29 Part of the challenge was what to do with refugees who stayed. Learning Hebrew in occupied British Germany might be understandable for groups planning to move to the newly established Israel but did not address the question of those individuals without a state and with nowhere to go. To address questions of human rights and refugees as well as coordinate in cultural spheres such as education within a specifically European context, ten European states established the Council of Europe (Council, CoE) in May 1949.30 The Council was supposed to promote cooperation between the European states in the areas of social and economic development. The idea was that if the European states and peoples could understand each other better, then they would be able to communicate peacefully, thereby avoiding another World War and genocide. Toward that end, the new organization was particularly focused on ensuring the implementation of new human rights guidelines.31 Yet, without the authority to create law, the Council focused predominantly on the exchange of information and discussions of best practices, as well as on the creation of (small) programs to test and promote those practices.32 As with the United Nations, the Council of Europe could rarely force its members to follow
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recommendations but in providing a space for international communication and collaboration, it could highlight those who fell short. For states like the West German, which were trying to repair their international reputations, that moral pressure provided an important bar to measure against. Expanding on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Council of Europe’s European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), signed in November 1950 and effective in September 1953, affirmed each individual child’s entitlement to an education—particularly at primary school levels.33 According to the Council of Europe’s member states, all children needed to have access to state schools regardless of background. With its declaration, the Council of Europe’s members agreed that the state of residence needed to assume responsibly for schooling displaced persons, refugees, and exiles living within local borders instead of leaving their care to the IRO. Furthermore, alongside access to public primary schooling, that education was ideally to include cultural instruction in association with the child’s ethnic heritage. Instead of pushing homogeneity, the Council of Europe’s member states were supposed to accept difference at the states’ expense. Effectively, the Council was trying to balance the individual, human right to education with a group’s right to their own ethnic identities. Within the year, the members of the Council of Europe, now 14 (Greece, Turkey, and West Germany among them), agreed on two more measures to ensure that displaced persons like war refugees and Cold War exiles did not fall through the cracks. First, to watch over those European nationals not represented in the Council, the Council members assembled a Special Committee in 1951.34 Despite the spirit of the 1950 ECHR, the Council of Europe’s member states’ representatives (like the United Nations’ members) assumed countries of citizenship would keep a lookout for their own nationals. The host country was supposed to provide services like education but the countries of citizenship would step in or raise concerns if their citizens living abroad were mistreated or lacked access to basic human rights. The “Special Committee to watch over the interests of European nationals not represented in the Council of Europe” would do the same for stateless persons and exiles. Second, the Council of Europe member states, most of whom were also UN member states, agreed to supplement the UDHR with the UN’s 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (hereafter “1951 Refugee Convention”).35 The Convention stipulated that refugees who had fled before 1 January 1951 were entitled to state support in their country of residence. In short, the state governments that signed the convention
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agreed to expand their responsibilities beyond their own citizens to include refugees associated with the Second World War. For the Council of Europe’s member states, education was central to their commitment to diversity. In its role as an advocate for under- represented migrant groups, the Council of Europe pressed for the expansion of state responsibility for refugees beyond the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention. In particular, as the Council pushed its members to provide possibilities for cultural maintenance among their refugee and exile populations. For example, in 1952 the Council’s members decided that exiles (those from eastern Europe) needed additional support. In a move motivated by Cold War politics, the Council declared that it “consider[ed] it most important that its proposals preserve among the exiles now in western Europe their cultural inheritance and national civilizations.” The Council of Europe’s members agreed that measures encouraging the preservation of cultural inheritance for stateless persons, refugees, and exiles should be implemented “without delay.”36 Those measures included everything from supplemental cultural instruction to private schools, which either local groups or the state were supposed to fund. That emphasis on a connection between culture and citizenship featured heavily within the zeitgeist of the period. According to most of the European governments involved, school was, after all, the place where children learned to be citizens and thus a part of the local society. In almost every western and central European country, migrants who voluntarily relocated needed to go through the school system in order for the government to count them as locals, if they ever did at all. But refugees and exiles were “forced migrants,” people whose goal was not (supposedly) to integrate on the path to permanent residence, but to escape danger in their place of origin.37 Furthermore, documents like the ECHR stipulated a right to identity. As such, the Council of Europe’s members felt that host countries should not add to these migrants’ trauma by forcing them to assimilate into the local community. Hence, children from these groups did not necessarily need to attend local schools. Yet to promote understanding and accept exiles’ and refugees’ rights as minorities, the state government was supposed at least to support, if not outright offer, access to cultural and language instruction. Those declarations of state responsibility specifically for displaced persons, refugees, and exiles did not, however, include either foreign nationals who migrated voluntarily or asylum seekers. The international community continued to differentiate between those groups that had clear state
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governments to advocate on their behalf and those who—arguably—chose freely to leave their countries of citizenship and live abroad. Asylum seekers, in contrast, frequently fell through the cracks as a different other whose categorization was left ambiguous by the international community. Clearly, asylum seekers could not rely on their country of citizenship to advocate properly on their behalf, but in contrast with displaced persons, they had one. Making their position even more ambiguous, asylum seekers were often not expected to relocate permanently. At the local, national, and supranational level, a central concern regarding schooling for non-citizens was how to reconcile education as a human right with public schooling as a tool for teaching identity and citizenship. Children needed to learn to read and write in order to access the labor market and participate socially. Yet, public schools taught citizenship and belonging. Those multiple goals seemed at odds when applied to displaced persons, who the European Ministries involved believed should have access to skills like literacy, but not obliged to learn national identity or belonging.38 Despite those apparent problems, states like the new Federal Republic had to decide how to turn those international ideological guidelines into Länder policy and policy into local school programs.
West Germany and Schooling for Displaced Persons and Foreigners International discussions did not immediately affect local state policy in the Federal Republic, much less school practice. The federal government committed to following international norms in its first years (here 1949 and 1950) but the Länder had jurisdiction over education and had to write their own policy. Before that could happen, in some states—including North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW)—hundreds of parents classified as displaced persons tried to enroll their children in public institutions.39 In NRW parents hit an immediate hurdle, however, as their children did not fall under the purview of local school laws. As those laws only covered German children, many schools turned non-German children away, on grounds of lingual or ethnic difference. School principals, unsure whether non-Germans were even allowed to attend public schools, wrote to local school administrations, which turned to the Länder Ministries of Education (hereafter “Länder Ministries”). With schools short-staffed and underfunded, the question on the table was whether to allow these non-nationals into public schools and, if so, what the children’s education was supposed to entail.40
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The ensuing discussions of both the right to education for non-Germans and what that education was to entail circled around three points: the right of the citizen versus the right of the human, the right to attend public schools, and minority rights. Woven within each of those points was the issue of lingual competency as marks of identity, success, and integration. Focused on primary schooling’s role in conveying Germanness, the NRW Ministry did not feel displaced children should attend public schools. As the Council of Europe emphasized, children had a right to maintain their parents’ cultures. Yet, to be successful in German society—to integrate—children needed that education. Somehow, the Länder needed to balance a child’s individual right to education and equality of opportunity against their right not to be German. And that balance needed to be achieved in the midst of competition for resources and teachers. Looking to resources, part of the issue was whether displaced children were as entitled to German resources as West German citizens. The Länder Ministries considered the right to education and state responsibility through the past, leading to a series of conclusions and guidelines designed to foster non-German identities. To start, the recent Nazi atrocities associated with cultural difference and the Third Reich’s insidious racial policies meant that the new West German successor governments needed to avoid clearly repressive policies and provide restitution.41 The Länder agreed that forcing the children of Nazi victims to learn German was not restitution. Furthermore, the UDHR and the Council of Europe’s ECHR stipulated, “parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”42 Taken together, those points suggested that displaced children needed access to education supporting their cultural backgrounds, which was not part of the standard curricula. The Länder Ministries began considering corresponding programs. For many parents living in the camps for years the possibility of having cultural classes in public schools was important. For various groups of ethnic Poles, Russians, Lithuanians, and later Hungarians fleeing various pressures in the East, the camps served as a central gathering point and camp schools provided a continued connection to “their” language and culture. Some of these groups were loath to lose that connection. So, as they were slowly removed from the camps, parents often petitioned to continue extra language and cultural classes on the weekend, in the afternoons, or even via private schooling.43 The NRW Ministry’s emphasis on that non-German cultural instruction rested on the imagined belief among most Länder government officials that different ethnic groups were entirely discrete. Unlike migrants arriving in
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countries like the United States or even migrants in West Germany in the late 1980s (see Chap. 7), 1950s West German society did not acknowledge dual, mixed, or hyphenated identities. Thus—despite centuries of intertwined histories of German and Polish speakers in both the Ruhr region and former East Prussia—the Länder governments believed that children could be German or Polish but not both. In consequence, the Länder interpreted the Council of Europe’s emphasis on diversity to mean that both Polish and German individuals could live side by side (mixed salad version of multiculturalism), not that their identities could intermix.44 In consequence, to Germanize a stateless, Polish-speaking child through a German education was to obliterate their Polishness. Yet, repression and inequality were also problems if the children did not attend German schools, which was why those parents applied to NRW public schools outside the refugee camps. Furthermore, the Länder Ministries actually wanted the children to integrate. Although those Ministries did not consider the children German, Ministry leaders assumed that the displaced and stateless children still in the country were permanent residents and would likely be granted citizenship. In order to avoid having thousands of youths without school certifications (and consequently only employable as unskilled laborers), the relevant Ministry officials felt that the displaced persons remaining in West Germany unquestionably needed to integrate into local society. According to the Länder Ministries, this necessitated attending West German schools. Yet, putting displaced children under compulsory schooling law appeared to violate the parents’ right to choose what their children should learn and did not solve the language concerns. To a degree, addressing education for migrants with German citizenship was easier. Through the 1950s, migrant ethnic Germans (Heimatvertriebene) were the largest migrant groups arriving in the British, American, or French zones and then the new Federal Republic. As of 1950, this included approximately 8 million individuals in a population of almost 48 million (16.6 percent). Because citizenship law in the post- Nazi state was based on paternity (jus sanguinis), these supposedly ethnic German individuals were immediately entitled to citizenship, regardless of their level of German language mastery.45 Once their heritage was acknowledged, they were eligible to the entire range of rights associated with West German citizenship including housing, free movement, and labor as well as the right to an education.46 As citizens, that right included coverage under compulsory schooling law and supposedly equal rights to equality of opportunity regardless of their lingual competency.
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The concept of equality of opportunity (Chancengleichheit) meant that not only did the Länder school laws require migrant ethnic Germans attend public school but also dictated that the Länder Ministries try to level the playing field. The Federal Republic’s Basic Law acknowledged “inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every community, of peace and of justice in the world.” The Basic Law further specified that citizens had the right to the free development of their personality and rejected discrimination on grounds of sex, ancestry, race, language, homeland and origin, faith, or religious and political views.47 Legally obligated, the Länder felt responsible for ensuring the ethnic German migrants’ ability to participate in public schools. That meant providing German language instruction for any “German” child without sufficient mastery.48 Their right to “equality of opportunity”, after all, was supposed to be on par with “German children” born in the country. Despite efforts to promote equality of opportunity for all “German children,” the Länder Ministries did not actually try to promote the children’s education beyond basic access and literacy. Instead, the Ministries assumed that migrant ethnic German children would attend Volksschule and not the middle or upper levels of the tripartite secondary system (i.e., Realschule and Gymnasium; see Chart 2.1). Each year, only a limited number of children were selected to attend the higher levels of secondary
Chart 2.1 West German compulsory school system in the 1950s (It should be noted that this is a simplification of the West German school system. Hans Döbert, “Germany,” in The Education Systems of Europe, ed. Wolfgang Hörner et al. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 299–300)
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school (as dictated in the Basic Law). This selection was supposed to be based on merit and skill without regard to background at the end of the fourth grade (or fifth, depending on location), yet migrant children (of any sort) entering the country after the age of ten were usually placed directly into Volksschule, regardless of their past academic achievements. Even those migrant children who were enrolled from a younger age often did not have the language fluency or home support system necessary for selection for the higher tracks. This meant that most forms of skilled employment and university training were rarely a viable option for migrant children regardless of their ethnicity.49 As the above chart illustrates, the Volksschule track of the tripartite structure through which children were pushed ran eight/nine years (usually from ages 6 to 14) of “full-time” schooling followed by vocational training. Full-time instruction included Schooling, primary school (which all children attended together) for the first four or five years and then what became the lowest level of secondary school (split into primary school and Hauptschule in the 1960s).50 After completing Volksschule, a school-age youth was (technically) obligated to participate in vocational training (Berufsschule) if they were under the age of 18.51 Yet, youths needed a “school-leaving certificate” to place in any sort of vocational training program and to obtain qualification for any form of semi-skilled labor. Older migrant children and youths—regardless of their citizenship status—often did not have time to complete the requirements or obtain sufficient German language mastery before they turned 18. As a result, many newly arriving youths finished school without receiving any certifications. This in turn meant that it was not uncommon for migrant children to be denied vocational training. But, at the last, they had access to the schools. In 1950 non-German migrants faced even more challenges than their German counterparts, in part because they were not citizens. The Länder Ministries considered putting them in the same integration and German language classes they planned for ethnic Germans, but decided non- Germans were not entitled to the same resources. Ethnic German children absolutely needed to assimilate, particularly in light of the denazification and reeducation programs underway. “Foreign” groups, in contrast, were not ethnically German. Therefore, according to NRW’s Ministry at the last, displaced children did not need to be in West German schools when there were other options—camp schools—available. These children, while entitled to free and compulsory education as humans, did not have the right to German schools as citizens. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulated that all children should be able to attend (at least) primary school and declared
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that schooling should be free and compulsory. Yet, West Germany, like many members of the United Nations, interpreted that declaration as explicitly applying to citizens.52 Under the Third Reich and previously under Prussian law, compulsory schooling only included “German” children.53 The Nazi laws had also, however, established a standardized school system across the Reich where none had previously existed. In order to maintain some equivalency between the Länder instead of returning to the varied school systems of the Weimar Republic, in the late 1940s the Ministries determined that it was “useful and practical” to continue implementing the Nazi laws.54 They did remove direct references to the Nazis, including the stated aim of public schooling being “to ensure the education and indoctrination of the German youth in the spirit of National Socialism.” Yet, the Ministries maintained stipulations that the school system was for Germans.55 Trying to de-Nazify and rebuild with limited resources, the West German education system was stretched almost to a breaking point. The school system had suffered from more than a decade of Nazi governance and total war. There were few teaching materials available and even fewer that did not espouse Nazi propaganda. For the first years after the war, the Allied High Command and new local governments had to teach the children who had grown up under Nazi leadership a new form of citizenship and educate them in what democracy was. Many principals and teachers did not want to try and work with multiple groups with new needs or find seats for more children in already overflowing classrooms.56 While the Länder Ministries of Education agreed to maintain the Nazi school law, education still fell under their local jurisdiction. In 1949 and 1950, approaching the question of education for displaced persons in accordance with their own political agendas, each Länder Ministry came up with its own solutions, of which Bavaria and NRW represented the extremes. As border states, both Länder were home to significant non- German populations. The Kingdom of Bavaria’s Ministry of Education (under a religiously conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) government) was one of the first to address the issue directly. In January 1949, a ministry representative acknowledged that, under the Third Reich’s school law, only German children were covered. “But we in Bavaria,” the representative announced, “base our policy on the old Bavarian law, which, in contrast to the Prussian, covered all children living in [the state].”57 Consequently, if the children of displaced persons registered with the local schools and knew sufficient German to follow instruction, they would be admitted.58 In contrast, the
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NRW Ministry (under Christian Democratic Union (CDU) control, the sister party to the CSU) explicitly did not cover non-Germans under their compulsory schooling law. NRW had exactly those Prussian laws in its background that the Bavarian Ministry representative decried. Prussian law had, like the Nazi school laws after them, stipulated that education was the provenance of the citizen. Building on that tradition at the end of the 1940s, the NRW Ministry of Education representatives announced that foreigners could attend school voluntarily, but compulsory schooling was for “Germans.”59 Although the political situation at hand lent importance to the right to schooling for non-Germans, the numbers of “homeless or stateless children” in the Federal Republic was actually relatively small. And, at the beginning of the decade, the largest concentrations were still in the refugee camps, as they did not have an automatic right to free movement. For example, as of 28 July 1950 in Baden-Württemberg (Württemberg-Baden at the time), there were 1573 homeless foreign children 0–6 years of age, 538 children 6–14, and only 272 youths 14–20. The majority of these individuals spoke little to no German and had, up to that point, been instructed by teachers of their own nationality and language who were paid by the International Refugee Organization.60 The children were also supposed to have German language instruction, but owing to teacher shortages across the country, those classes often did not exist despite policy. In order to provide their children with German language instruction and equal opportunities, many non-German refugee parents pushed for their children to enter local schools, including those parents turned away in NRW in 1950. These parents wanted their children to succeed and understood that a German education was imperative for later access to the job market. At the least, they hoped their children could become German enough to operate successfully in local society. Nonetheless, although most of the school-age displaced persons entered public schools in ones and twos, local school boards worried that children without German language mastery would disrupt German children’s education.61 Consequently, when parents from the camps tried to enroll their children in public schools, it was common for school administrators to tell the parents of non-German schoolchildren that enrollment was “pointless” and suggest they return instead to the camp schools. Policy dictated that those institutions were supposed to offer the necessary German language instruction to prepare for “German schools.” Consequently, despite lacking teachers, the theoretical availability of German language courses and semi-bilingual instruction in the
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camps gave an opening for public schools to deny “foreign children” admittance.62 The Länder Ministries of Education agreed they needed to come to a consensus regarding the displaced children’s education instead of turning continual conceptual circles. But even as the Ministries debated the rights of school-age displaced persons among themselves, on 9 February 1950, the Allied High Command (AHC) sent a letter to the West German federal government to announce that, as of 1 June, the approximately 100,000 DPs (“verschleppten Personen” in the official German translation) in the country would be the responsibility of the West German state.63 The Allied High Command further stipulated that these individuals would come under West German laws just like any West German citizen.64 For the individual Länder Ministries of Education, this meant that those “stateless and homeless children” already in the camps or West German villages and cities now fell under Länder compulsory schooling laws.65 The Allied High Command’s letter forced the Länder Ministries to seriously address what education school-age displaced persons should receive, particularly regarding access to German public schools or national private schools. Over the following months, the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany (Kultusministerkonferenz, KMK) held a series of meetings examining the issue of “foreign ethnic groups” and schooling.66 In the meetings, the Ministries’ representatives focused on DPs and other refugee groups that were in the country “as a consequence of West Germany’s past.”67 The resulting 1950 recommendations on the “Construction of Schools for Foreign Ethnic Groups” (Schulangelegen heiten; hier: Errichtung von Schulen für fremde Volksgruppen) followed international recommendations in three parts: First, the Länder Education Administrations felt that the schoolchildren decidedly needed more German instruction in order to enable the children to take “subject classes in German as soon as possible.” Second, the recommendations stipulated that “the children of displaced persons” should, “where the possibility exists,” receive instruction in their mother tongue as well as in the history and geography of their homeland by teachers of their nationality. Third, the Ministries stipulated that, under the Basic Law, the construction of private schools was permissible for the children of displaced persons.68 The Kultusministerkonferenz’s decision straddled the divide between assimilation and cultural acknowledgment. On the one hand, school-age
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displaced persons were now clearly subject to compulsory schooling laws. On the other hand, when convenient, the children were supposed to receive cultural instruction. In so doing, West German schools were going to acknowledge the children’s right to a free education while trying to respect difference. That respect was, however, also somewhat mercenary, allowing local schools to continue passing off some of their costs to private associations or other state ministries than the Ministries of Education. Nonetheless, the combination was supposed to address both the right to education in terms of equal opportunity and in terms of the right to personhood. By providing multiple options, the Länder hoped to fulfill their responsibility with as little symbolic violence as possible.69 Although the KMK recommendation’s title indicated coverage for “foreign ethnic groups” the actual wording of the text meant that it was only applicable to the displaced persons already subject to compulsory schooling law. That limitation left schooling for other “foreign” groups unaddressed, including the children of refugees and labor migrants, of which groups more children were arriving almost daily.70 The evident gap in coverage prompted the KMK’s School Committee under Eugen Löffler (teacher and politician) from Württemberg to point to the “pressing necessity” of the situation for non-Germans and recommend that the individual Länder alter their school laws to include all “foreign children” under compulsory education.71 Löffler was concerned that differentiating between groups would lead to inequality and consequently eventual social instability.72 Despite Löffler’s warnings, the Länder Ministries did not reach a consensus about compulsory schooling coverage in the 1950s, but rather each developed their own policy.73 As per the requirement of the Allied Powers, all 11 Länder passed new school laws including specifically DPs and homeless foreigners under compulsory schooling. Only 8 of the 11 states, however, complied with the full intent of the KMK’s recommendations and included all non-citizens under their school laws. Among them, Bavaria’s new 1952 law, as planned, required any child staying in the state for longer than two days outside of holidays to attend.74 The Ministry claimed that including not only citizens “but foreigners and the homeless” under general compulsory schooling “reflected the Bavarian spirit and constitution.”75 In contrast, North Rhine-Westphalia only extended the right to education. For NRW, the refusal stemmed partly from the Prussian tradition of connecting education to civil rights. But it also had to do with the high numbers of resident foreign citizens, including Dutch nationals, for whom
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the state government did not want responsibility. In 1953 the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Education did, however, declare “foreign children’s” voluntary school attendance should be “assisted in every way.”76 Children with foreign citizenship could attend school on a voluntary basis, but were in no way required to do so. Consequently, NRW had no legal obligation to provide support for entrance into the schools or for mother language and cultural instruction. That verbal support of the right to education without a legal component essentially meant that the schools did not actually have to accept or support students without West German citizenship. Regardless of their local school laws, each Länder Ministries was willing to encourage children to maintain non-German identities. For example, Länder Ministries approached the Polish Association about mother language and cultural classes. During the 1950s, the majority of the ethnic Polish children in Germany were either displaced persons or had fled Cold War Poland, meaning they fell under compulsory school law. Their legal status also meant they were included in KMK’s rubric of groups deserving cultural instruction.77 Hence, while the local Ministries did not have a legal obligation to provide cultural instruction, there was no legal bar preventing the establishment of Polish language classes. Providing such instruction was, in fact, advisable.78 For this group, the NRW Ministry of Education (as well as other Länder Education Administrations) consistently provided support.79 By 1953 in the former American and French zones, there were 1179 children taking part in Polish language instruction in 24 locations, of whom 790 were in extra classes and 389 in preschool.80 Although happy with these developments, the Polish Association continued pushing for additional cultural instruction and private schools.81 Yet, parents and children attending these private schools and extra lessons were often less interested in maintaining a Polish identity than either the NRW government or some Polish organizations recommended. Many of the parents, after all, had no intention of returning to a Poland under communist leadership. As such, many parents wanted their children to learn some Polish, but attend German school and become part of German life. The level of Polish indoctrination many Polish Clubs pushed simply went too far, in part as lessons used Polish materials often filled with anti-German sentiment.82 Even if they had specifically wanted their children to imbibe a fully Polish identity, parents saw how the children attending the Polish schools in NRW experienced difficulties transferring
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into local public schools as many possessed limited German abilities or faced challenges in other subjects.83 With the majority of non-German parents focused on integration and spread across West Germany, by the end of the 1950s only around 800 schoolchildren participated in extra language and cultural instruction, while the camp schools spread across several states closed down.84 Most of these parents were happy to maintain connections to their heritage but were more interested in their children’s futures in West Germany than in their ethnonational identities. And, unlike the states involved, they did not necessarily see their children’s integration into German society as separating them from their past. Yet, without a clear understanding of hybrid or diverse identities, the West German Länder could not conceive of these individuals comfortably straddling both.
Conclusion To an international audience, the idea of the refugee as a displaced individual forced to migrate, suffering a specialized trauma meant that in the post-Second World War world a displaced person was entitled to special consideration. Having undergone the trauma of war and then forced relocation, organizations like the United Nations and Council of Europe claimed that European refugees’, particularly Jewish survivors, cultural heritage deserved preservation. The Council argued that—in line with Arendt’s claims—to avoid another world war, member states needed to embrace cultural diversity. Further adding weight to that decision in the West, a perceived Soviet push for homogeneity lent significance to an image of idealized diversity. At the international level, the right to education came into immediate conflict with the right to identity. The growing emphasis on diversity among new groups like the UN and the Council of Europe combined with the refugee’s special needs meant displaced persons should be encouraged to maintain their cultural heritage. Yet, the school’s central role in communicating ethnicity and nationality to children meant that support for diversity could not be entirely passive if children had a right to attend public schools. To address that problem, organizations like UNESCO and the Council of Europe urged local state bodies to provide cultural courses specifically for refugee groups in addition to extending the right to attend local schools. For some Länder Ministries, the right to local schools was actually harder to accept than the right to maintain diverse ethnic identities. The
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Länder Ministries wanted to stay in line with new international guidelines, but with a 50-year history of ethnonational citizenship and the recent Nazi indoctrination stressing racial difference, the idea that these children might be entitled to equal access to German public schooling was inconceivable. With limited resources, West German citizens came first. Yet, those international guidelines and then the Allied High Command dictated that all displaced children should have the right to a free public education on the same basis as host-country nationals. The Länder Ministries were constrained to promote equality across citizenship lines, even when they did not have sufficient resources for the local citizenry. The Länder were not the only state institutions to take issue with who they were responsible for. Those supranational organizations dictated primary school education and the preservation of ethnic heritage were human rights but did not agree on who was responsible for ensuring access. Initially, most Council of Europe member states agreed that a host country needed to care for its own citizens’ rights. For non-citizens, in contrast, the host country was supposed to not prevent the right. For the Council and its member states, however, it became increasingly clear that to not actively provide the right to education was paramount to denying it. Initially, the Council of Europe tried to step in to fill the gap in coverage for refugee children but maintaining their schooling was not tenable. To actually ensure their education, the host-country government—including the West German—needed to take charge. Following Allied High Command demands and adhering to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the Länder Ministries needed to provide access to public schools but also enable refugees still in the country on account of the war to maintain their ethnic heritage. Ethnic German migrants, in contrast, were entitled to school but not any support for non-German languages as the Länder did not recognize any components to their ethnic identities than German. Partly in consequence, by 1952 refugee children were entitled to take language classes like Polish in order to maintain their heritage, while returning ethnic German Polish speakers were refused similar programs. Conversely, ethnic German children received more support for integration while stateless children often had to make due with whatever books and teachers remained. The interpretation of the right to education for refugee children combined with policies promoting the maintenance of ethnic heritage would do two things. First, these laws underlined the idea that non-Germans were somehow inherently different than ethnic Germans. By stressing that
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belief, schools became a site of clear othering, spaces in which schoolchildren were informed who was German and who supposedly never could be. Second, the law and policy in place established precedent for the ongoing treatment of non-German children in West Germany. Although technically directed at refugees associated with the Second World War, over the following decades, the Länder Ministries of Education would also take those policies and modify them for specific European groups of labor migrants.
Notes 1. Bergen-Belsen, Germany, a Lesson at the DP Camp Elementary School, 1940s, Photograph, 1940s, FA185/235, Yad Vashem, http://www.yadvashem.org 2. The British authorities attempted to name the camp Hohne, but the survivors continued using the name of the concentration camp. Hagit Lavsky, New Beginnings: Holocaust Survivors in Bergen-Belsen and the British Zone in Germany, 1945–1950 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 69–82, 147–49; Hagit Lavsky, “The Experience of the Displaced Persons in Bergen-Belsen: Unique or Typical Case?,” in “We Are Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, ed. Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 227–56. 3. Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 14. 4. Members of Jewish communities were often (finally) welcomed into England or the United States, particularly if they had a useful skill set. See Cohen, 115; Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 117–39. 5. For example, in Czechoslovakia and other eastern European states, the populations and governments forced the ethnic German population to leave the country regardless of longevity or personal guilt. See Benjamin Frommer, National Cleansing: Retribution Against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Klaus J. Bade, Migration in European History, trans. Allison Brown (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 204–16. 6. Jean S. Phinney et al., “The Role of Language, Parents, and Peers in Ethnic Identity Among Adolescents in Immigrant Families,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 30, no. 2 (April 1, 2001): 135–53. 7. Shelley Baranowski, “Legacies of Lebensraum: German Identity and MultiEthnicity,” in Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and France,
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ed. Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016), 41–42. 8. During their discussions of “foreign children” generally in the 1950s, the Länder Education Administrations almost always meant “displaced persons,” homeless or stateless individuals, and refugees. That approach to the question of schooling for “foreign children” had a direct impact on the kinds of school programs the Länder Education Administrations developed and what their rights to education and cultural maintenance meant in practice. 9. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1951), 268–69; Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, rev. ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 80–81. See also Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 77–105. 10. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 267–305. 11. Stanley Meisler, United Nations: A History, rev. ed. (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 1–20; Amy L. Sayward, The United Nations in International History (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 1–10. 12. Susan Pedersen, “Back to the League of Nations,” The American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (October 1, 2007): 1091–1117. 13. Carole Fink, “Defender of Minorities: Germany in the League of Nations, 1926–1933,” Central European History 5, no. 04 (December 1972): 330–357. 14. Christian Joppke, “Immigration, Citizenship, and the Need for Integration,” in Citizenship, Borders, and Human Needs, ed. Rogers M. Smith (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 174. 15. For a discussion of the United Nations and the development of a human rights regime, see Jean H. Quataert, Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010). 16. Francisco Camps et al., “Draft Declaration of the International Rights and Duties of Man Formulated by the Inter-American Juridical Committee in Accordance with Resolutions IX and XL of the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace Held at Mexico City, February 21–March 8, 1945, and Submitted by the Delegation of Chile to the Second Part of the First Session of the General Assembly (Cf. Document A/C.1/38),” December 31, 1945. 17. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, General Assembly, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948, http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/; Klaus Dieter Beiter, The Protection of the Right to Education by International Law:
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Including a Systematic Analysis of Article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2006), 93). 18. Beiter, The Protection of the Right to Education, 11–16; Michael Haas, International Human Rights: A Comprehensive Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 80; UNESCO, Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2006 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 135– 45, http://www.unesco.org/; Mashood A. Baderin and Manisuli Ssenyonjo, “Development of International Human Rights Law Before and After the UDHR,” in International Human Rights Law: Six Decades After the UDHR and Beyond, ed. Mashood A. Baderin and Manisuli Ssenyonjo (New York: Routledge, 2016), 3–30. 19. Christina Allemann-Ghionda, “Contrasting Policies of All-Day Education: Preschools and Primary Schools in France and Italy since 1945,” in Children, Families, and States: Time Policies of Childcare, Preschool, and Primary Education in Europe, ed. Karen Hagemann, Konrad Hugo Jarausch, and Cristina Allemann-Ghionda (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 196–219; Hugh Starkey, “Citizenship Education in France and Britain: Evolving Theories and Practices,” The Curriculum Journal 11, no. 1 (March 1, 2000): 39–54; Kathleen R. Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World (Albany: State University of New York, 2004), 27–29; Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity, trans. Geoffroy de Laforcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 20. Ulrike Popp, “Die sozialen Funktionen schulischer Bildung,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Christa Berg, Christoph Führ, and Carl-Ludwig Furck, vol. 6 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1998), 265–76. Rogers Brubaker claimed these two states demonstrated the extreme ends of the spectrum. Subsequent scholars of German citizenship law have demonstrated that the issue was not as cut and dried as Brubaker claimed. See Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Dieter Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschliessen: die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001). 21. Gill Allwood and Khursheed Wadia, Refugee Women in Britain and France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 96–128; Françoise S. Ouzan and Manfred Gerstenfeld, eds., “A Forgotten Postwar Jewish Migration: East European Jewish Refugees and Immigrants in France, 1946–1947,” in Postwar Jewish Displacement and Rebirth: 1945–1967 (Boston, MA: Brill, 2014), 137–49.
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22. James F. Hollifield, “France: Immigration and the Republican Tradition in France,” in Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, ed. James F. Hollifield, Philip Martin, and Pia Orrenius, 3rd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 157. 23. Neither France nor West Germany, or almost anyone else, was sure whether refugee groups would be permanent transplants (Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, 74–75). 24. The IRO was in charge of processing and repatriation. See Louise W. Holborn, “International Organizations for Migration of European Nationals and Refugees,” International Journal 20, no. 3 (1965): 331– 349; Cohen, In War’s Wake, 19; Corinne Lewis, UNHCR and International Refugee Law: From Treaties to Innovation (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1–13. For a discussion of the camps, including the treatment of youth, see Derek Holmgren, “‘Gateway to Freedom’ and Instrument of Order: The Friedland Transit Camp, 1945–1955” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2010). 25. “Beschulung der Kinder heimatloser Ausländer in Württemberg-Baden,” Aktenvermerk (Kultusministerkonferenz der Länder, October 4, 1950), B 304/2057/3, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 26. “Stoffverteilungsplan für die 3 ersten Jahrgänge der polnischen Lagerschulen 1952,” Abschrift (Munich, 1952), MK 62244, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv. 27. Rolf H. Dumke, “Reassessing the Wirtschaftswunder: Reconstruction and Postwar Growth in West Germany in an International Context,” Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 52, no. 4 (November 1, 1990): 451– 92; John Killick, The United States and European Reconstruction 1945– 1960 (New York: Routledge, 2014), 56–57. 28. Cohen, In War’s Wake, 71. 29. R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 229–53; Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945–1970 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 84–88; Ulrich Merten, Forgotten Voices: The Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2013), 283–87. 30. For an examination of the Council of Europe, see Stefanie Schmahl and Marten Breuer, eds., The Council of Europe: Its Law and Policies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 31. Established on 5 May 1949 by the Treaty of London. The original ten signatories included Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Turkey and Greece are both listed as founding members, but officially
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joined on 8 August 1949, while West Germany became a member almost a year later, on 30 July 1950. 32. Part of the Council of Europe’s early work (1951) included supervision of a European fund for exiles administered by a specialized agency placed under the CoE’s aegis (Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, “Creation of a European Cultural Fund for Exiles,” Recommendation 17, (December 8, 1951), http://assembly.coe.int/). 33. Jean-Jacques Friboulet et al., eds., Measuring the Right to Education, trans. Joanna Bourke-Martignoni (Hamburg: Schulthess, 2006), 10. In the European Convention on Human Rights, see Article 2 of the first Protocol of 20 March 1952 (Bernadette Rainey, Elizabeth Wicks, and Clare Ovey, Jacobs, White and Ovey: The European Convention on Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)). 34. Special Committee to watch over the interests of European nationals not represented in the Council of Europe, see Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly and Standing Committee, “Report on the Activity of the Standing Committee,” Progress Report, May 5, 1951, http://assembly. coe.int/; Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly and Etienne de la vallee Poussin, “Work Carried Out by the Special Committee to Watch Over the Interests of European Nations Not Represented in the Council of Europe,” Communication, August 7, 1953, http://assembly.coe.int/ 35. The Federal Republic ratified the Convention in 1953, and it came into force in 1954 (Germany, Grundgesetz: Mit Menschenrechtskonvention, Verfahrensordnung des Europäischen Gerichtshofs für Menschenrechte, Bundesverfassungsgerichtsgesetz, Parteiengesetz, Untersuchungsausschussgesetz, Gesetz über den Petitionsausschuss, Vertrag über die Europäische Union, Vertrag über die Arbeitsweise der Europäischen Union, Charta der Grundrechte der Europäischen Union: Textausgabe mit ausführlichem Sachverzeichnis und einer Einführung, 42nd ed. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2011), 71–73). The time limit and geographic limitations were removed in the 1967 Protocol Relating the Status of Refugees (United Nations Refugee Agency, “Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees,” 2010, http://www.unhcr.org/). For a discussion of the Convention, see Andreas Zimmermann, ed., The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and Its 1967 Protocol: A Commentary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 37–115. 36. Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, “Creation of a European Cultural Fund for Exiles,” Recommendation 40, September 27, 1952, http://assembly.coe.int/. Adopted by the Assembly during their the 24th Sitting, 27 September 1952 (Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, “Creation of a European Cultural Fund for Exiles,” Report, (May 22, 1954), http://assembly.coe.int/).
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37. Pertti Ahonen et al., eds., People on the Move: Forced Population Movements in Europe in the Second World War and Its Aftermath, English ed. (Oxford: Berg, 2008); Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 38. “Europe” as used in this study refers to the continent in its broader sense and includes those countries/states that either view themselves as “European” or have membership in an international European body (e.g. the Council of Europe). It is important to note that based on this definition, “Europe” includes the Republic of Turkey. This definition reflects the definition of “Europe” the West German federal government used in its official reports, statistics, etc. 39. “Schulpflicht für Kinder ausländischer Staatsangehörigkeit,” Vermerk (Düsseldorf: Kultusminister des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, August 25, 1950), NW 20-483, Landesarchiv NRW. 40. For discussing the legal status of the children without German citizenship, I use the phrasing from the various Länder Education Administrations. These government ministries did not necessarily adhere to international norms and standards regarding wording, but used the terms they viewed as legally relevant. Hence, displaced persons were usually referred to as “homeless or stateless” individuals. According to the Federal Ministry for Displaced Persons, Refugees and War Victims, “homeless foreigners” were “foreign citizens or stateless individuals who, as of 30 June 1950, came under the care of the High Commissioner for Refugees of the United Nations and had their residence in the Federal Republic or West Berlin.” See Bundesminister für Vertriebene, “Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge, Kriegsgefangene, heimatlose Ausländer: 1949–1952,” 1953, 9–19, http://digital.library. wisc.edu/1711.dl/History.Vertriebene; Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany, Statistisches Jahrbuch für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1952 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1953), 31. 41. For information on general post-war education reform, see Carl-Ludwig Furck, “Entwicklungstenzenen und Rahemnbedingungen,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Christa Berg, Christoph Führ, and Carl-Ludwig Furck, vol. 1, 6 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1998), 245–51; Brian M. Puaca, Learning Democracy: Education Reform in West Germany, 1945–1965 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 1945–65. 42. See Article 26(3) of the General Assembly of the United Nations, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights”; Beiter, The Protection of the Right to Education, 93. 43. The DP camps, for example, became a center of Jewish culture and education in West Germany. For a discussion of camp schools for Polish DPs, see Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, “Patriotism, Responsibility, and the
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Cold War: Polish Schools in DP Camps in Germany, 1945–1951,” The Polish Review 47, no. 1 (2002): 35–66. 44. Peter O’Brien, “German-Polish Migration: The Elusive Search for a German Nation-State,” International Migration Review 26, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 373–87; Ayhan Kaya, “Citizenship and the Hyphenated Germans: German-Turks,” in Citizenship in a Global World: European Questions and Turkish Experiences, ed. Emin Fuat Keyman and Ahmet ̇ Içduygu (New York: Routledge, 2005), 219–41. 45. For a discussion of different kinds of citizenship regimes based on either paternity or birth right, see Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. 46. Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany, “Gebiet und Bevölkerung,” in Statistisches Jahrbuch für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1953), 30. For a brief discussion of returning ethnic Germans as migrants and West German policy, see Daniel Levy, “Integrating Ethnic Germans in West Germany: The Early Postwar Period,” in Coming Home to Germany?: The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic, ed. David Rock and Stefan Wolff (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 19–37; Konrad H. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995, trans. Brandon Hunziker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 242; Douglas B. Klusmeyer and Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Immigration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany: Negotiating Membership and Remaking the Nation (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 53–75. For discussion of the requirements during the Kaiserreich and Third Reich, see Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschliessen. See also Dieter Gosewinkel, “Historical Reflections on Citizenship in Europe,” in The Making of Citizens in Europe: New Perspectives on Citizenship Education, ed. Viola B Georgi (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 2008), 31–36. Helen Williams discusses changes to German citizenship law in the 2000s (“Changing the National Narrative: Evolution in Citizenship and Integration in Germany, 2000–10,” Journal of Contemporary History 49, no. 1 (January 1, 2014): 54–74). 47. Articles 1, 2, and 3. My emphasis. The Bonn Basic Law was still regarded as a provisional constitution in the early 1950s. “Verhütung der Diskrimierung und Schutz der Minderheit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland” (Kultusministerkonferenz der Länder, 1954), B 304/2057/3, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. (Translation gesetze-im-internet. de) The Länder constitutions (some written before the Bonn Basic Law) repeated these assurances or expounded thereon. See, for example, the Article 128 from the Bavarian Constitution of 2 December 1946. 48. “Schulpflicht für Kinder ausländischer Staatsangehörigkeit.” For a comment on Austria, see also Kultusministerium Nordrhein-Westfalen and Tiebel to Regierungspräsidenten in Detmold, “Schulbesuch von Schülern,
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die nicht die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit besitzen,” January 15, 1963, NW 1223-296, Landesarchiv NRW. 49. As many Länder began to reform their school systems during this period, some states also developed a Mittelschule as a buffer between primary and secondary schools (see Graph 3.1). Eventually, comprehensive schools (Gesamtschule) would be developed in an effort to simplify the complex system of secondary (and to some degree vocational) education. To some extent, it would actually complicate matters, particularly as multiple different forms of comprehensive schools developed, some combining the different levels of secondary school, some simply housing lower secondary and Realschulen in the same building, not to mention other combinations. For a discussion of the development of Gesamtschulen, see Jürgen Oelkers, Gesamtschule in Deutschland: Eine historische Analyse und ein Ausweg aus dem Dilemma (Weinheim: Beltz, 2006). 50. Later separated into primary school (Grundschule), usually running between the first to fourth grades, followed by lower secondary (Hauptschule) with the fifth or either eighth or ninth grade. It should be noted that the documents from this period use the term “Vollzeitschule.” This is in comparison to the later possibility of attending part-time school while simultaneously working. It should be noted that the West German school system usually functions on a half-day system, particularly for the younger grades. See Karen Hagemann, Konrad Hugo Jarausch, and Cristina Allemann-Ghionda, eds., Children, Families, and States: Time Policies of Childcare, Preschool, and Primary Education in Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011); Karen Hagemann and Karin Gottschall, “Die Halbtagsschule in Deutschland: Ein Sonderfall in Europa?,” ed. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, PISA-Studie—Aus Politik Und Zeitgeschichte 41/2002 (October 12, 2002): 12–22. 51. “Verhütung der Diskrimierung.” 52. Lora Wildenthal, “Human Rights Advocacy and National Identity in West Germany,” Human Rights Quarterly 22, no. 4 (2000): 1051–59; Lora Wildenthal, The Language of Human Rights in West Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 17–34. 53. From Article 1 Paragraph 1 Line 2. See “Gesetz über die Schulpflicht im Deutschen Reich (Reichschulpflichtgesetz) vom 6. Juli 1938,” Reichgesetzblatt I, no. 105 (July 7, 1938): 799. The Reichschulpflichtgesetz was altered in “Erste Verordnung zur Durchführung des Reichschulpflichtgesetzes,” Reichgesetzblatt I (March 7, 1939): 438; Hitler, Göring, and Lammers, “Gesetz zur Änderung des Reichschulpflichtgesetzes v 16. Mai 1971,” Reichgesetzblatt I (1941): 282; Ruft, “Zweite Verordnung zur Durchführung des Reichschulpflichtgesetzes vom 16. Mai 1941,” Reichgesetzblatt I (1941): 238–39. For a discussion of Nazi education, see Lisa Pine, Education in Nazi Germany (New York: Berg, 2010).
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54. Kultusministerkonferenz, “Schulpflicht der Ausländer,” Beschluß (Bonn, January 18, 1952), B 304/2057/3, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 55. See, for example, North Rhine-Westphalia’s “Ersten Gesetzes zur Ordnung des Schulwesens” from 8 April 1952. Compulsory schooling laws under the Weimar Republic had not guaranteed the right to a public education for “foreign children” either. However, the Weimar Republic’s school laws had dictated that the various minority and foreign groups to which the children belonged were entitled to educate their own children. Article 4 of the Weimar Constitution covers schooling. 56. Brian Puaca’s 2009 Learning Democracy discusses the condition of schools and education in post-1945 (West) Germany. 57. The Bavarian school laws to which the representative referred dated back to 1902. It was only with the Reichsschulpflichtgesetz of 1938 that foreign citizens and ethnic minorities were excluded (Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Unterricht und Kultus, “Schulpflicht von Ausländern” (Munich, January 5, 1949), MK 62243, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv). 58. Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Unterricht und Kultus. But the Ministry did not intend, however, to have the local school authorities force displaced persons to attend primary school. The Bavarian government would not officially change its laws until 1952, but with the Ministry’s 1949 statement, the government had effectively settled the legal side of the question. 59. Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen and Koch to Regierungspräsidenten in Münster, “Schulpflicht für Kinder ausländischer Staatsangehörigkeit sowie ihre Aufnahme in deutsche öffentliche Schulen,” April 12, 1951, NW 20-483, Landesarchiv NRW. 60. “Beschulung der Kinder heimatloser Ausländer in Württemberg-Baden.” 61. Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen and Koch to Regierungspräsidenten in Münster, “Schulpflicht für Kinder ausländischer Staatsangehörigkeit sowie ihre Aufnahme in deutsche öffentliche Schulen.” 62. Even when releasing rules in 1951 stating that all displaced persons should be allowed in West German schools, the Ministry of Education in North Rhine-Westphalia stipulated that they had to be able to speak German to do so (Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen and Koch, “II E 2035 – Tgb.Nr. 2207/51,” Vermerk, (April 12, 1951), 51, NW 1223296, Landesarchiv NRW). It is important to note that this decree was published when displaced persons and so on already legally came under West German school laws, just like children with German citizenship. 63. It should be noted that the term “verschleppten Personen” would later refer to the “German” expellees (Heimatvertriebene) and not to displaced persons. Nonetheless, the Ministries of Education and “The Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the
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Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany” (Kultusministerkonferenz, KMK) would consistently understand the group referred to here as to mean the children of homeless and stateless foreigners. National migrant/ minority groups were not technically included under this rubric, even if some of the supposed homeless and stateless foreigners came from the same national or ethnic backgrounds. 64. J.E. Slater to Kanzler der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, February 9, 1950; Lukaschek, “Entwurf eines Gesetzes über die Rechtsstellung heimatloser Ausländer im Bundesgebiet” (Bonn: Bundeskanzler, September 21, 1950); “Declaration of Rights of Displaced Persons,” Information Bulletin, September 1950, 10. 65. “Gesetz über die Angelegenheiten der Vertriebenen und Flüchtlinge (Bundesvertriebenengesetz—BVFG),” Bundesarbeitsblatt, Teil I, no. 22 (1953): 201–31. 66. Christoph Führ, “Zur Koordination der Bildungspolitik durch Bund und Länder,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Christa Berg, Christoph Führ, and Carl-Ludwig Furck, vol. 6 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1998), 71–74. 67. The first official discussion took place during the KMK’s 27/28 October 1950 meeting in Freiberg. See “Schulangelegenheiten; hier: Errichtung von Schulen für fremde Volksgruppen,” Beschluß der Kultusministerkonferenz (Freiburg: Kultusministerkonferenz, October 27, 1950), B 304/2057/3 Az. L1472, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 68. Article 7 of the Basic Law, see Germany, Grundgesetz, 2–3. 69. Pierre Bourdieu discussed the idea of education as symbolic violence in Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, trans. Jean-Claude Passeron, 2nd ed. (London: Sage Publications, 1990), 1–68. 70. Bade, Migration in European History, 227–39. While there were over 100,000 DPs and refugees in the country in 1950, that number was less than a quarter of the overall “foreigners,” who by 1951 included over 485,700 people. See Bundesminister für Vertriebene, “Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge, Kriegsgefangene, heimatlose Ausländer,” 9–11; and Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany, “Gebiet und Bevölkerung,” 1953, 31. According to the West German Federal Statistical Office, “Homeless foreigners” are “foreign citizens or stateless individuals, who had their residence in the Federal Republic or West Berlin and were under the custody of the United Nation’s High Commissioner for Refugees on 30. June 1950.” 71. “Schulpflicht der Ausländer,” Vermerk (Düsseldorf: Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, January 21, 1952), NW 20-483, Landesarchiv NRW. Dr. Eugen Löffler (1983–1979) taught in Gymnasien in Württemberg from 1907 to 1918, when he became part of Württemberg’s Ministry of Education (becoming Oberregierungsrat in 1922 and
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Ministerialrat in 1924) until 1951 with a short exceptions of 1927–1928 and 1930–1931 when he worked in the Ministry of the Interior and assisted in developing the Reichsvolkschulgesetzt. After his retirement, he continued to be active in education policy development. He was also a part of the Deutschen Ausschuß für das Erziehungs- und Bildungswesen (Bonn) and the KMK, where he was chair of the Committee for Auslandsschulwesen (1951–1956) and the Committee on Education (1950–1955). See “Bestand Q 1/20: Zur Person Löfflers,” Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg (Stuttgart), accessed November 15, 2013, https://www2.landesarchivbw.de 72. Even in this, however, it was acknowledged that an all-inclusive compulsory schooling law would not, in fact, be all-inclusive, as the children of foreigners with the right of exterritoriality and the children of the occupying powers would be exempted. Sekretariat and Burkart, “Schulpflicht der Ausländer,” Beschluß (Bonn: Kultusministerkonferenz, September 8, 1951), NW 20-483, Landesarchiv NRW. 73. Kultusministerkonferenz, “Schulpflicht der Ausländer.” 74. Hans Ehard and Bayerische Ministerpräsident, “Gesetzes über die Schulpflicht,” Bayerische Gesetz- und Verordnungsblatt, no. 2 (January 22, 1952): 11; Josef Schwalber, “Ausführungsbestimmungen zum Gesetz über die Schulpflicht (Schulpflichtgesetz, SchpflG) vom 15. 1. 1952,” Amtsblatt des Bayerischen Staatsministeriums für Unterricht und Kultus, no. 7 (April 15, 1952): 117–32. 75. Note that the compulsory schooling laws covered any child who was legally stateless or homeless (without a country of citizenship) at the time, not only displaced persons. Articles 128 and 129 of the Bavarian constitution (Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Unterricht und Kultus, “Begründung” (Munich, 1951), MK 62206, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv). See also Kultusministerkonferenz to Bundesminister für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kreigsgeschädigte, “Schulpflicht für heimatlose Ausländer,” December 19, 1960, B 304/2058/2, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 76. Teusch, “Aufnahme ausländischer Schüler,” Amtsblatt des Kultusministeriums NRW, June 3, 1953, 75. 77. Furthermore, there was already a history of providing Polish language and cultural instruction in some German—including North RhineWestphalian—schools. During the Wilhelmine period there had been a large ethnic Polish minority group with German citizenship in the Rhineland. After years of demands from the Polish minority, the predecessors of the North Rhine-Westphalian governments permitted Polish instruction in German public schools. See Richard Charles Murphy, Guestworkers in the German Reich: A Polish Community in Wilhelmian Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); O’Brien,
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“German-Polish Migration: The Elusive Search for a German Nation-State.” 78. Article 7 Paragraph 5 of the West German Basic Law. See also “3. Errichtung polnischer Schulen in der Bundesrepublik,” Auszug aus der Niederschrift üb.d. 32. Sitzg.d.Schulausschusses am 6./7.10.54 in München (Munich: Kultusministerkonferenz, October 7, 1954), Anlage, B 304/2057, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 79. “3. Forderungen des Verbandes polnischer Flüchtlingen Deutschland betreffend Errichtung polnischer Schulen in der Bundesrepublik,” Niederschrift (Wiesbaden: Kultusministerkonferenz, September 12, 1953), B 304/2057/3, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 80. In the British zone, there was a total of 2221 children in Polish language instruction, in Polish schools (407 in Lower Saxony and North RhineWestphalia), in extra classes, and in preschool (913). Another 1140 attended German schools, with 901 taking extra classes in the Polish language (Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, “Notiz: Der Stand der polnischen Schulwesens in der Bundesrepublik” (Bonn, March 4, 1954), B 304/2057, Bundesarchiv Koblenz). 81. Ministerium für Arbeit, Gesundheit und Soziales’ Landesbeauftragter für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge, Aussiedler. Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen and Koch to Regierungspräsidenten in Münster, “Schulpflicht für Kinder ausländischer Staatsangehörigkeit sowie ihre Aufnahme in deutsche öffentliche Schulen.” The DPs/minority groups wanted to continue mother-tongue and cultural classes alongside West German schooling. The Polish private schools in North Rhine-Westphalia were not legally private schools, but camp or supplementary schools. Partly in order to alleviate any burden on local German schools caused by having to teach children without German language skills, NRW hosted a handful of other non-public classes in association with the camps, including one near Münster and one in Augustdorf. The first was for children in first through third grade, taught by a Polish national. The second was for first through fifth grades (156 schoolchildren). Four Polish teachers taught in both Polish and German. The teachers for these classes, selected from within the groups, were then paid by the Ministry of Labor, Health, and Social Affair’s office for DPs, Refugees, and Aussiedler (resettler or returning “ethnic Germans”). 82. “3. Forderungen des Verbandes polnischer Flüchtlingen Deutschland betreffend Errichtung polnischer Schulen in der Bundesrepublik.” 83. Kultusminister des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen to Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Unterricht und Kultus, “Ihr Schreiben vom 18. 10. 1954 – IV 58 542 – betr. öffentliche Volksschule für Kinder der polnischen Minderheit,” II E 1/030/5-d Tgb.Nr. 4809/54, November 30, 1954,
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MK 62244, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv; Vorsitzender des Schulausschusses and Reimer to Zentralstelle für ausländisches Bildungswesen, “Anerkennung des ‘Reifezeugnisses’ des Lettischen Gymnasiums in Augustdorf,” July 23, 1956, B 304/2058, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 84. Even among those few hundred children, there were ethnic Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Estonian, and Hungarian schools. The primary focus of the language and cultural instruction was to impart the children’s mother language and the history of the country of origin, although BadenWürttemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia also offered religious instruction. In each of the Länder, a “foreign teacher” led the instruction. Schulausschuß, “18. Nationaler Ergänzungsunterricht für Kinder heimatloser Ausländer,” Auszug aus der Niederschrift die 73. Sitzung des Schulausschusses der KMK am 19./20. 10. 1961 in Berlin (Berlin: Kultusministerkonferenz, October 20, 1961), B 304/2058/2, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. The schools had been in Those few classes were in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony, and Schleswig-Holstein. Bremen, Hamburg, Hesse, Rhineland-Pfalz, and Saarland were not offering any Ergänzungsunterricht at that time. For information on the financing, see Schulausschuß, “17. Nationaler Ergänzungsunterricht für Kinder heimatloser Ausländer: Beteiligung der Länder an der Finanzierung,” Auszug aus der Niederschrift über die 75. Sitzung des Schulausschusses am 8./9. 2. 1962 in Bremen (Bremen: Kultusministerkonferenz, February 9, 1962), B 304/2058/2, Bundesarchiv Koblenz.
CHAPTER 3
Defining the Right to Education for European Citizens (1955–1966)
In 1964, the Cologne daily paper the Kölnische Rundschau declared that “bambini want to learn in German schools.”1 These “bambini” (Italian small children or babies) were by and large the children of the almost 300,000 workers with Italian citizenship living in West Germany (hereafter “Italian workers”).2 While spread across the country, the largest groups lived in Baden-Württemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia, neither of which had extended their compulsory schooling laws to cover foreign nationals (as opposed to stateless children) in the 1950s. Now, the Italian government and parents with Italian citizenship were pushing for inclusion under those very laws. As the Kölnische Rundschau pointed out, the children wanted to be able to attend North Rhine-Westphalian (NRW) public schools. The “bambini’s” parents were part of the second major wave of post- 1945 European migration.3 Between 1955 and 1975, some 15 million people migrated across the continent, mainly to find work. People from states across southern and southeastern Europe, including Italy and Greece, moved north and west to Belgium or West Germany (and other countries) in order to find economic opportunities and, quite simply, feed their families. States like the Italian (hereafter “Italy”) encouraged their citizens to leave for jobs, going as far as to negotiate bilateral labor agreements (guest worker agreements) for recruitment.4 In order to support their growing industries, West Germany and other host counties signed those agreements initially for agricultural workers and then for factory © The Author(s) 2019 B. Lehman, Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1949–1992, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97728-7_3
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labor (e.g., automotive and electronic).5 At first workers migrating to the Federal Republic and elsewhere were supposed to be temporary, arriving with one- and two-year contracts. As the 1960s progressed, however, those contracts become open-ended. Some workers, including thousands of Italian citizens, settled as permanent West German residents.6 That status as long-term and then permanent foreign residents reopened discussions over appropriate education for migrant children that had quieted in the mid-1950s. Schooling in the early 1960s was particularly focused on literacy and imparting good citizenship. As Italian citizens, the children of Italian workers needed to learn to be Italian. And, in order to participate in the West German society and workforce, they needed to be literate in German. To facilitate those goals, the Italian state wanted its citizens to be included under West German compulsory schooling laws and attend school alongside West German children. At the same time, to maintain their identities as Italian, Italy wanted them to study the Italian language and culture for a few hours a week.7 Taken together, the Italian government argued that Italian West German residents would encapsulate the multicultural inclusion the new European Community (EC) was advocating.8 The European Community developed as an economic community in contrast to the Council of Europe’s cultural and human rights emphasis.9 Over the course of the early and mid-1950s, six Council of Europe member states (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany) signed a series of treaties to facilitate resource coordination and economic cooperation. Among them, the Treaty of Rome (signed in 1957) establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) pulled those six closer together, in part because of its emphasis on human resources. Eventually, the six merged those treaties, forming the EC, which was succeeded by the European Union (EU).10 With its emphasis on resource coordination, the European Community was invested in human capital from its inception. The six founding members were each involved in mass labor migration, not only as formal sending (i.e., Italy) and host (i.e., Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and West Germany) countries, but also with spontaneous migration (e.g., from the Netherlands to West Germany). With the mandate to develop laws coordinating resources between the member states, the EC quickly became involved not only in the rules regarding the workers themselves (pushing toward freedom of movement between the states), but also in the treatment of their children. Each of the six members had a vested interest in
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the movement of workers for economic reasons, but also in order to ensure good treatment for their citizens abroad.11 Italy and West Germany’s relationship to the European Community shaped their discussions concerning the right to education for non- citizens. By the early 1960s, when the Italian government began to advocate for including its citizens under compulsory schooling law in West Germany, Italian citizens (hereafter “Italians”) had the right to permanent residence and employment. The EC, in contrast to the Council of Europe, had legislative powers and had already published some few directives about residency building off the Treaty of Rome. The EC had not, however, yet established jurisdiction over education. What Italy was then negotiating on a bilateral level with international support was for West Germany as a host country to ensure Italians’ right to education. As an EC member state with hundreds of thousands of citizens in West Germany, Italy had the leverage to force the issue. Using Italian children as its central example, this chapter explores non- citizens’ right to education in West Germany in the early 1960s. The chapter examines how, in an age of human rights, western Europeans began to reexamining how non-citizens fit into the existing civil framework of equal opportunity of all citizens to education. The first section explores the idea of the right to education, especially in terms of the state’s responsibility to compel participation in order to ensure the right—particularly in light of the relationship between schooling and economic rights. Yet, the compulsory aspect of education was, as the second section discusses, also contentious since the right to education was partly about the development of personhood.12 But, as the final section points out, if education was (and is) a human right then all children—as humans and not simply citizens—were (are) entitled to that equal opportunity. Looking at compulsion, identity, and equality, this chapter argues that despite rhetoric focused on the individuals the states and supranational entities involved—from the individual Länder to UNESCO—treated noncitizens specifically as ethnonational groups.
Legislating International Standards on the Right to Education for “Foreign Nationals” In 1960, 1961, and again in 1963, the Italian delegation to a West German-Italian Cultural Commission Meetings expressed the Italian government’s concern over its citizens’ access to education. All schoolchildren,
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the Italian government argued, needed to be included under compulsory schooling laws. Otherwise, parents and schools could—and did—deny children’s rights. Parents did not always send children to school because they needed assistance with younger siblings and housework as well as confusion as to how the local school system worked.13 Some school principals, in turn, “neglected school children with limited German language knowledge,” refusing them admittance.14 Compulsory schooling would ensure children’s right to education by forcing parents to enroll children and constraining schools to accept them.15 In 1960, the European Community member states were still debating what the right to education meant across Europe, particularly in terms of what education was supposed to teach and who was supposed to provide it. It was all well and good to say that all children had the right to education when the meaning was open to interpretation. The point of schooling was easier to define. At the start of the 1960s, education was predominantly about primary school with an emphasis on literacy and citizenship in order to convey a sense of national belonging.16 Yet, the right to education was also about future economic rights including the right to work.17 In short, sending an Italian child to school would teach them to be German and prepare them for the workforce. The conversations around appropriate schooling for non-citizens reflected the push and pull between those often opposing rights.18 One of the three Länder that had not changed its compulsory school laws in the 1950s to cover non-nationals, North Rhine-Westphalia continued arguing against compulsory schooling for non-citizens into the 1960s.19 The North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Education (hereafter “NRW Ministry”) argued that as the central purpose of primary schooling was the development of personhood, to require non-citizens to attend was to deny their right to their ethnonational identity.20 According to the Ministry’s reasoning, requiring non-German students to attend German schools would force them to imbibe “Germanness” instead of the cultural heritage appropriate to their country of citizenship.21 Instead of perpetrating that violation by compelling attendance, the NRW Ministry argued it was preferable not to deny school attendance. As the North RhineWestphalian Ministry was quick to point out, a child with Italian citizenship did not need to learn to be a good German citizen or to embrace Germanness. But, in order not to deny the right to education, the Ministry would permit attendance.22
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The issue of voluntary versus compulsory attendance has been a central question within discussions about the right to education for decades. Some theorists have claimed that the coercive nature of compulsory schooling negates the right to education.23 Most theorists, politicians, and education researchers, however, agreed that the right to education needed to be a positive right: it had to be coerced in order to ensure that no one could deny a child the right.24 As the Italian delegations pointed out while pushing for universal compulsory schooling laws in West Germany, NRW schools had for years been turning children away because of limited linguistic competence in accordance with state policy.25 The NRW Ministry might claim that children with Italian citizenship could attend school voluntarily but if no school would accept them, the argument was moot. The Italian government also advocated for the coercive components of education in order to protect children’s right to education from their parents. Uneducated parents were less likely to require their children attend school, a cycle that Italian state wanted to break as it fought high illiteracy and unemployment in Italy. As the children needed to be literate for vocational training, those two problems were interconnected. In order someday to have the right to work (and other economic rights), the children needed their right to education ensured now. Ergo, to combat both illiteracy and unemployment, over the 1950s and 1960s the Italian state invested heavily in schooling, which the state then c ompelled in order to overcome parental reluctance.26 Italy wanted the same for its citizens in West Germany. The international communities represented by UNESCO and the Council of Europe encouraged inclusive compulsory schooling laws for precisely the same reasons. In the mid-1950s, the Council of Europe recommended the admittance of “any national of school age” into “institutions for primary and secondary education and technical and vocational training.”27 In 1960 UNESCO endorsed that stance, arguing that the harm of excluding children from compulsory education outweighed concerns over forcing children to become acculturated with the values of the host country. UNESCO’s Convention against Discrimination in Education declared that in order to ensure “equality of educational opportunity,” “foreign nationals” needed the “same access” to schooling as host-country nationals. The right to education was about more than the right to personhood. To ensure future economic rights, primary schooling in particular needed to be “free and compulsory.”28 By 1960, most western European states had already moved or were moving in that direction, including Baden-Württemberg’s Ministry of Education
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(hereafter “BW Ministry”). Under Christian Democrat Gerhard Storz, the BW Ministry argued that a government’s role, as defined by the state’s legal code, included the maintenance of the social order and the requirement to uphold local law. Storz claimed that compulsory schooling was an essential part of that mandate. Without a school to attend, children would simply wander the streets as they were not legally allowed to work until the age of 14.29 To prevent that imagined possibility, the BW Ministry required state schools treat the children of non-citizens as if they were under compulsory schooling laws even before the revised law came into effect in 1964.30 The connection between the right to education and the right to work enabled the European Community to become involved. Neither the Council of Europe nor UNESCO could pass legislation to enforce recommendations, but the young European Community could within its limited jurisdiction. Originally, the EC was founded to coordinate the six member states’ trade and resources. But the EC’s inclusion of human resources enabled its member states to legislate their nationals’ access to vocational training within the Treaty of Rome.31 In 1961 the six, “inspired” by their desire to “confirm their spiritual values and political traditions,” determined “to strengthen their political, economic, social, and cultural ties,” including in the “field of education.”32 To actually step into education, however, the EC officially had to connect primary education and literacy as a necessary step to accessing vocational training in order to claim jurisdiction over schooling. The EC was able to do so and in its 1964 Council Regulation 38/64 on the free movement of workers, the six member states declared that the children of member state nationals who lived and worked in another member state fell under the same educational rules and conditions as the host-country nationals.33 The regulation further specified that the member states were responsible for enabling these children to receive instruction.34 Following along with those developing international standards, the NRW Ministry agreed to change compulsory schooling law and acknowledged that all children had a right to education.35 In contrast with its earlier stance, in 1963 the NRW Ministry informed the state parliament (Landtag) that the state’s continued use of the Nazi compulsory schooling law (Reichsschulpflichtgesetz, 1938) excluding non-Germans contravened basic human rights. As the National Socialists had not been concerned with the dignity of humans, they had not recognized general civil rights and had not seen any reason to align school laws therewith. Now to adhere to basic human rights treaties, agreements, and conven-
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tions (i.e., the CofE’s “European Convention on Establishment” from 13 December 1955), NRW needed to change the state’s school law.36 To do so, the North Rhine-Westphalian government passed a new school law in 1966 covering “all children with their established residence in the state” (including almost 13,000 foreign citizens in 1966).37 According to the law, the children’s compulsory education was to be fulfilled in “German primary and lower secondary as well as vocational schools.”38 After all, “for humanitarian, pedagogical, and political reasons,” the North Rhine- Westphalian state placed value on the schooling of “guest worker children.”39 Between the UN and Council of Europe’s recommendations as well as the European Community’s regulations, those supranational bodies effectively transformed education from a civil to a human right in the early 1960s. Emphasizing the inclusion of foreign nationals under local compulsory schooling laws shifted responsibility for ensuring the right to education from the country of citizenship to the country of residence. To include “foreign nationals” under compulsory schooling laws then effectively placed their education under local responsibility suggesting children had the right to education as humans rather than as citizens.
Relative Foreignness and Mother Language Instruction in West Germany Among the hundreds of pictures in the Federal Republic of Germany’s archive in Koblenz is a series of photographs of “Italian guest worker children in the school and at home in Walsum” (in North Rhine-Westphalia).40 Some of those images depicted children in a living room with their parents. The children’s hair was carefully combed, socks pulled knee-high while their mother knits in the corner and their father reads the paper. Other photographs captured the classroom, with children crammed behind the two-person, heavy desks so common in the period. With the children’s bobbed haircuts and buttoned sweaters, the photographs could have depicted almost any living room or classroom in West Germany. Except, according to the image captions, these were specifically Italian families’ living rooms and Italian schoolchildren.41 The governments involved in those children’s schooling agreed with that ethnonational labeling. According to supranational entities (i.e., UNESCO, the Council of Europe, and the EC) as well as the West German
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and Italian states, children with Italian citizenship (hereafter “Italian children”) were Italian nationals. For children with that legal and ethnonational label to live in West Germany meant they were national minorities. That recognition further implied the children were entitled to maintain their national heritage. But that entitlement was two-faced. On the one hand, the acknowledgment of difference kicked off discussions about Italian language classes. On the other hand, that identification promoted the idea that the children of migrant workers were foreign “Others” (i.e., explicitly not German). Technically, the Council of Europe and European Community (including Italy and the Netherlands) agreed with the NRW’s stance regarding the right to maintain ethnic identity (and not to assimilate). The other European states almost all had citizenship laws balancing between jus soli and jus sanguinis, but they too felt that migrant children should theoretically be allowed to maintain their “national” identities even when becoming citizens of the host country.42 Indeed, the 1960 UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education stipulated that education was for the “full development of the human personality” and should “promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups.” Both in order to promote that friendship and for the child’s benefit, the development of ethnocultural identification was a fundamental right to be protected.43 Part of that understanding included acknowledging that “national minorities” had the right (depending on local law) “to carry on their own educational activities,” including private language instruction and cultural clubs.44 For groups like UNESCO—as well as the Council of Europe and the European Community—children needed to integrate but also maintain their ethnonational identities. Following that belief, in 1960 the Italian government suggested programs designed—as the NRW government wanted—to maintain an Italian connection. Having already gone through a similar process in Belgium in the 1950s, the Italian government now hoped to establish Italian “consular courses” (Konsularunterricht, later “extra mother language and cultural classes”) in West Germany. In Belgium, those classes included five weekly hours of instruction in Italian language, religion, and geography in addition to standard compulsory schooling. The local Italian consulates worked with the Belgian government to bring instructors trained in Italy to teach using textbooks from Italy (thus the name “consular courses”). If opened in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Italian government hoped the Länder Ministries of Education (hereafter Länder Ministries) could provide rooms and occasionally some financial
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support.45 Promoting an Italian state-approved version of Italianness, these classes would allow migrant children to maintain their cultural heritage precisely as NRW hoped. The subjects taught in those consular courses—language, history, geography, and religion—reflected Italy’s (and West Germany’s) idea of the information necessary to develop a shared national, political community.46 But that community did not necessarily reflect Italian citizens’ self- perception in the early 1960s. Most people in Italy did not identify as Italian nationals or speak Dante’s Italian, but rather by region (e.g., Naples) and dialect (e.g., Neapolitan).47 Yet, as with many diasporas, those emigrating often came to identify by nationality instead of region once abroad. That change frequently took place due to the juxtaposition of their identities against the host-country majority. In other words, the children in the photographs of Walsum’s “Italian” community became “Italian” in West Germany because they were not German. Promoting that identification, the Italian government and Catholic Church supported clubs and classes like consular instruction.48 In short, consular instruction was about teaching about the nation, thereby training children to be nationals. Because their goals aligned, the Länder supported the development of Italian consular classes, officially recommending country-wide implementation in 1964.49 The Standing Conference of West German Ministers of Education’s (Kultusministerkonferenz, KMK) recommendations on the “education of the children of foreigners” (Unterricht für Kinder von Ausländern) officially advocated the dual goals of social integration and cultural maintenance. Guest worker children could attend compulsory primary school during the day, taking math, sciences, German language and history, as well as religion (the breakdown depending on local law). In the afternoon (again depending on specific state), those children could take voluntary classes in the relevant country of citizenship’s state language, history, and geography. Taken together, that instruction would allow children simultaneously to integrate while also maintaining (or creating) a connection to their country of citizenship. The courses would thereby fulfill the children’s right to equal education opportunity while also permitting the children to develop their personhood as ethnonational foreigners.50 Although the KMK’s recommendations were technically for the “children of foreigners,” the proscribed programs were actually only for specific groups. Instead of encouraging all children to maintain connections to their “home countries,” the Länder Ministries of Education determined the propriety of and entitlement to the programs based on forms of entry
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(i.e., refugee, stateless, or migrant worker), size of group, level of Europeanness, as well as perceived cultural distance (from Germanness). Form of entry mattered in part because the Länder technically had legal and moral obligations to guest workers’ children on account of the bilateral labor agreements between West Germany and (eventually) eight guest worker countries.51 Those agreements stipulated certain levels of care and access to services, prompting West German willingness to fund voluntary programs like consular courses. Furthermore, these students were possibly—despite Italy’s claims—only temporary West German residents. Adding to that, Italian schoolchildren were European Community member state nationals, which by 1964 legally entitled them to the same school access as host-country nationals. Italy’s desires were particularly important as the Länder Ministries viewed children with Italian citizenship as culturally distant from German children of the same age. In West Germany (and much of western Europe) “cultural distance” often implied “cultural inferiority.” Many people in Germany loved Italy and still do. Writing particularly about travel in the Italian peninsula in the eighteenth century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe celebrated its beauty and the people’s welcoming atmosphere.52 That image lingered, prompting many West German citizens to view “Southerns” as relaxed and gentle. But, tied in part to the German Cultural Wars of the nineteenth century, written into that image was a Protestant perception of an Orientalized, Catholic south, leading to stereotypes of Italians as uneducated and lazy, possibly on account of innate stupidity.53 In the twentieth century, many West German citizens regarded Italian nationals were insincere, overly emotional huggers who ate excessive garlic.54 In the post-1945 world those stereotypes did not vanish. Instead, the very reasons the Italian state had wanted the 1955 bilateral labor agreement—high unemployment and illiteracy—became supposedly symptomatic of those “Italian” tendencies in the West German imagination.55 The NRW Ministry enthusiastically supported the development of Italian consular courses specifically because the Ministry viewed the participants as legally foreign and culturally distant, but also entitled to some state support as guest worker children.56 Because the NRW Ministry considered these children inherently non-German, it believed the children’s attendance in West Germany would distance them from their heritage. Believing the children would never be German, to Germanize them would have been inappropriate. Because the children were guest worker children, they were legally entitled to some state support as West Germany
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(government and business) had invited their parents. In other words, NRW viewed itself as responsible for enabling the children to maintain an Italian ethnonational identity. In contrast, the same NRW Ministry denied Dutch children similar instruction. When in 1962 the Dutch government requested permission to establish consular instruction based on the Italian model, the NRW Ministry gave a resounding “no” as the “maintenance of the Dutch language was not a priority.”57 According to the Ministry, there were already a “considerable” number of Dutch children in North Rhine-Westphalian schools who mastered the German language quickly and consequently did not need special training.58 Furthermore, the Ministry specified that consular courses were only for those with a supposedly significant degree of cultural difference.59 In contrast to Italian children, according to long- standing German viewpoints (including Nazi), children with Dutch citizenship were Germanic.60 As such, learning Germaneness did not separate them from their national heritage, regardless of the Dutch government’s or parental preference. Because these children fit within a German conception of Germanness, they were not entitled to maintain their ethnonational identity in public schools. Furthermore, the West German Ministries of the Interior did not view most individuals with Dutch citizenship in West Germany as labor migrants, despite the fact they migrated to work. Instead, those 60,000 workers (in 1964) were simply foreign residents.61 That distinction stemmed in part from the Dutch right to “spontaneously migrate” (mostly to North Rhine-Westphalia directly across the border), which had meant that through the 1950s the size of Dutch migrant groups outstripped Italian groups significantly.62 Only with the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and increase in labor recruitment from Italy did that balance change. As spontaneous migrants, Dutch citizens had not been invited enmasse and consequently the state did not have a special obligation to support them culturally. The apparent contradiction between the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Education’s response to Italy and the Netherlands’ requests reflected NRW’s understanding of “foreignness,” “minorities,” and “nationality.” Italian and Dutch citizen groups both were national minorities, both acknowledged as European and European Community member state nationals, and both identified as legally foreign. Most adults in both groups migrated for employment. Despite those similarities, the West German imagination of who these groups were and their relationship to
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West Germany differed. For many West Germans, Dutch citizens spoke a Germanic language and many West Germans regarded their culture as similar, despite being an acknowledged national minority. Italian children, in contrast, were too different ever to be German. Their language was more distinct and Italian children participated in supposedly different cultural practices. Despite consular courses association with cultural distance, by the end of 1962, the Italian consular courses received general acclaim. Reports from the district presidents and notes from the Italian Consulate in Cologne declared that the children’s guardians were happy about the Italian language classes.63 The various West German entities involved— from the Foreign Office to the Ministries of Education—viewed these courses as a positive acknowledgment of small national minorities and a demonstration of “friendliness” to foreign states.64 The Italian consulates, in turn, praised the courses, claiming that they had met with success.65 Nonetheless, practical concerns gave rise to frustrations, with long lag times between requesting courses and actual implementation, among other issues. One of the larger issues was limited parental interest, which was visible in the small (one in four) number of children enrolling.66 These were classes for some, but decidedly not all. The concept of the “foreign child” in West Germany was never straightforward and never all-encompassing. Rather, even as the Länder Ministries used the phrase “foreign children” to refer to legal status, they also emphasized cultural difference. Cutting groups like the Dutch out, the Länder Ministries unintentionally attached the idea of “foreignness” to cultural distance. That association effectively promoted the idea that foreigners were inherently non-German, their national identities antithetical to Germanness. Instead of reflecting acceptable difference, the idea of the “foreign” reflected conceptions of cultural inferiority and difference even as it celebrated national identification. Despite the concept behind human rights emphasizing the right of the individual, the implementation of rights including the right to education was usually about group rights. Even discussing the right to personhood, the Länder interpreted that right as about ethnonational and not personal identity. Italian children had the right to be Italian nationals even if they had never identified as such before. According to the Länder Ministries Dutch children, in contrast, were simply Germanic and not permitted to distance themselves from the German nation even as the Italian children were denied that option. The voluntary nature of some of the programs
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did permit for some individual choice. Yet what choices the children had depended on assumptions about the group—particularly around perceived foreignness.
Equalizing Foreign Children’s Access to Public Schools By 1964, each of the children in the photographs of “Italian guest workers at school and at home in Walsum” was required to attend West German schools and entitled to Italian consular instruction (as long as they lived in NRW).67 But right to attend and access to extra instruction did mean equality. Aware of possible disadvantage, EC law further stipulated that member state nationals be subjected to compulsory schooling on the same basis as host-country nationals. In West Germany, the Länder Ministries interpreted that to mean European Community member state nationals were entitled to equal opportunities (Chancengleichheit), which the state was supposed to ensure. That chain of logic meant—and popular opinion agreed—that the Länder Ministries were responsible for ensuring Italian children’s ability to not only enroll in school but also participate in daily lessons on the same level as West German citizens. In the early 1960s, for the local West German school administrations, including one or two such children per class was easily doable. The children usually learned German quickly through exposure to their classmates. Some school administers even argued those “children of foreign workers” added color, contributing to the German children’s education.68 But, as Graph 3.1 illustrates, the number of schoolchildren with Italian citizenship in West German primary, special, and secondary schools (including lower, middle, and upper) increased quickly. Between 1962 and 1965, the number of children with Italian citizenship living in different cities across West Germany reached almost 10,000. Furthermore, many families opted to live near one another, meaning that spread was not even, but often concentrated in specific cities like Stuttgart in Baden-Württemberg. Most of those children were themselves migrants, often arriving after they had started school in Italy. The majority could not speak German. One or two children could learn German through contact but five or more schoolchildren in an approximately 30-person classroom usually did not. Instead, they changed the entire dynamic of the room. That dynamic mattered in part because of international expectations stipulating host-country responsibility for enabling “foreign nationals …
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Graph 3.1 Schoolchildren with Italian citizenship in West German general primary and secondary schools, 1965–1992. (Kultusministerkonferenz, “Der Schulbesuch ausländischer Schüler in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1965/66–1978/79: Allgemeinbildende Schulen” (Bundeseinheitlichen Schulstatistik, August 10, 1979), 15, 28, 41, 53, 67, B 93, Bd. 745, PA AA; Kultusministerkonferenz, Ausländische Schüler und Schulabsolventen 1970 bis 1986, vol. 102, Statistische Veröffentlichungen der Kultusministerkonferenz (Bonn: Sekretariat der Kultusministerkonferenz, 1987), 4, 14, 18, 69, 82, 95, 109; Kultusministerkonferenz, Ausländische Schüler und Schulabsolventen 1984 bis 1993, Statistische Veröffentlichungen der Kultusministerkonferenz (Bonn: Sekretariat der Kultusministerkonferenz, 1994), 37, 40, 45, 49, 53, 59, 63, 68, 74, 79, 83, 87).
equality of education opportunities.”69 According to updated UNESCO and EC standards, by the mid-1960s it was unacceptable for public school principals simply to deny access to non-citizens due to lingual difference. Instead, those international bodies’ member states determined that host-country governments (including those in BW and NRW) were responsible for
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both enabling and easing the enrollment and attendance of schoolchildren with “foreign nationalities” in public schools.70 That realignment necessitated consideration of both what the point of compulsory e ducation was and how to achieve those aims. In the 1960s, host-country responsibility predominantly meant ensuring access to public schools. Access, in turn, had three primary components: enrollment, attendance, and ability to participate. In other words, children needed to have the right to enroll, but also the ability to go to school—which was what the compulsory components were about. Access also, however, meant the ability actually to understand and participate in what was going on in the classroom. Simply sitting children in a schoolroom did not serve either the child or the state. Therefore, in West Germany, access meant children needed to be able to speak—and older children read—German.71 The main point of primary school in the 1960s was to teach literacy and provide equal opportunities from which to build. In order to push global literacy beyond the basic ability to read numbers and sign one’s name, the General Conference of UNESCO suggested redefining literacy as the student’s ability to “both read and write a short simple statement on his everyday life.”72 The Länder Ministries wanted to carry equality of education farther beyond basic literacy, starting with primary schooling. After all, the state was supposed to “proscribe any form of discrimination in education.”73 To ensure equality (and building on more than a century of practice), all children were supposed to attend the same primary schools, regardless of their social, religious, or economic background. Together, children learned their three Rs and achieved basic literacy. To provide different institutions and access would mean that the children did not have equal chances. By receiving the same first four years of schooling, children were supposed to have the same basic education, allowing the best to rise to the top. In West Germany, equality of educational opportunity did not end with primary school, but also emphasized access to secondary schooling. Increasingly, UNESCO and the Council of Europe were also focused on access to secondary school in addition to primary in order to open up economic rights.74 With the playing field leveled in primary school, a child was supposed to advance into appropriate secondary schools or vocational training depending on their own merit. In short, all children were to have access to every level of secondary school regardless of their social, religious, gender, or ethnic backgrounds.75 Theoretically, any child should have been able to rise to the top based on innate skill and hard work.
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In West Germany, equality of opportunity (Chancengleichheit) became a major point of concern in the 1960s as the supposedly meritocracy’s inequalities became increasingly blatant, necessitating institutional reform. Since the eighteenth century, the German states had made public primary schooling free and compulsory for citizens with an emphasis on merit as a driving force for transition into higher levels of secondary schooling.76 Yet, higher levels (middle and upper) of secondary schooling often carried associated costs, making them inaccessible for many meritorious students. As a result, the majority of upper-secondary school (Gymnasium) students were male, Protestant, urban elites. In the 1950s, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and its youth organizations, the German Federation of Trade Unions, and West German church groups were aware that there were issues with access, and many Länder Ministries of Education started attempting change. In 1964, however, the issue became a widespread, public concern when the theologian and educationalist Georg Picht ignited alarm with his book on the Deutsche Bildungskatastrophe (German Educational Catastrophe).77 Picht claimed that the West German school system was inherently discriminatory and argued that the limited number of schoolchildren entering the higher levels of secondary school left the country without enough trained workers.78 In order to sustain its own economic development, West Germany needed to reform its public education system and overcome some of the ingrained institutional discrimination against female, working-class, rural, and Catholic children.79 The West German public, at least as represented by mass media, would not consider the issue of schooling for migrant children until the 1970s. But during the 1950s and 1960s those same church groups (Catholic and Protestant) and charities pushing equality of opportunity also advocated for non-German children. The Evangelical Church’s (Protestant) Inner Mission decried unequal treatment in the schools for children with foreign citizenship in contrast to the children and youths of “Spätaussiedler” (ethnic Germans from eastern Europe) who immediately received West German citizenship. Pointing out that, technically, the state claimed “everyone” was supposed to have those equal opportunities, the churches lobbied about the issue and even started providing some preschool and other programs to try and equalize access.80 According to the Protestant welfare organization, differentiating between children based on citizenship was insupportable.81 Education was supposed to be a human right. As the North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry hesitated over extending compulsory schooling at all, the Baden-Württemberg Ministry took the lead
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in the push for integration. Minister of Education Storz agreed with those church groups regarding the necessity of access and state responsibility. In 1961, he argued that the impending sharp increase in foreign schoolchildren due to recruited labor migration would threaten Baden-Württemberg’s social order unless the children attended school. To address the issue, he had the Ministry prepare and in 1963 implement two different kinds of programs to facilitate the public school attendance of schoolchildren with non-German citizenship “due to new migration.”82 The two measures—extra instruction in German and preparatory classes—would become standard across West Germany following the KMK’s 1964 Recommendations.83 The first measure, “Extra Instruction in German,” was intended for “foreign children” who needed to master the German language in order to follow classroom instruction and eventually “earn a diploma in secondary schools.” This supplemental German language instruction was supposed to be for smaller groups (less than 20) of newly arrived, older children or for children who needed language support after enrollment in “German schools.” Based on past experience, Baden-Württemberg’s Ministry took the stance that non-German citizens born in the country or starting in the first or second grade did not need extra support and should enroll directly in West German schools. These children were supposed to learn their German with “German schoolchildren” of their own age group.84 The second program type was supposed to serve large groups of children newly migrating to West Germany after the age of six, when they would have started public schooling had they arrived earlier or been born in country. In these classes, groups of 20 or more schoolchildren from a single language group (e.g., Italian) living in a single (or a few) school district(s) were supposed to be gathered into their own classes. Two-thirds of the instruction was supposed to be in the children’s mother tongue (e.g., Italian) and one-third in German. Drawing on the agreements for consular instruction already in place, the BW Ministry worked with the Italian government to bring in teachers from Italy with the argument that Italian instruction would enable the children not to fall behind while they prepared to attend German schools. The Baden-Württemberg Ministry was then supposed to provide a German teacher to give one-third of the children’s lessons in German in order to enable children to participate in West German classrooms.85 After the single year, the children were supposed to transfer into a regular German classroom.
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Through those two programs, Storz hoped to fulfill state obligation to ensure the right of non-German children to equal education opportunities. According to Storz, the goal with the two programs was to facilitate the children’s equal opportunities in terms of general access and to “earn a diploma in secondary schools.”86 Yet, the degree envisioned was specifically a lower-secondary school degree. For children with West German citizenship, equality of opportunity was about general access, but also the chance of attending any level of secondary schooling regardless of background. Hence, even as Storz worked to facilitate attendance and participation in primary and secondary schools, the conversation did not actually set these schoolchildren on par with German citizens. When NRW finally passed its updated school law, it underlined that difference, specifying non-Germans were to attend primary and lower-secondary schools.87 In the early and mid-1960s, there was otherwise almost a complete silence on the issue of secondary schooling and, as Graph 3.1 illustrates, few children with Italian citizenship would enroll in middle- or upper-secondary school until the 1970s. The West German school administrators simply failed to imagine the possibility. Even if there had been a discussion about higher levels of secondary schooling, a lack of equivalency between the West German and Italian (or other countries’) school degrees would have caused challenges for migrant children. Groups like UNESCO could create comparable definitions for literacy, but schooling was not solely about literacy. Primary (and secondary) education was also about other subjects including mathematics and sciences as well as civics and history, the curricula for which often differed significantly. There were some similarities between the West German and Italian systems. Both school systems were decentralized and required a minimum of eight or nine (later nine or ten as the two systems underwent reform) years of compulsory schooling, usually with a half-day construction.88 But the Länder felt their curricula were divergent to the point of incompatibility. The Länder Ministries argued that the Italian system simply did not measure up and refused to recognize an Italian secondary education. Schoolchildren migrating to West Germany after the age of six faced a situation in which their accomplishments went unacknowledged as the West German system did not legally recognize Italian transcripts.89 By the mid-1960s, most education researchers, school administrators, and even the general public assumed that schooling was supposed to be for all children and that the host government was to ensure that access. In and through that schooling, children were supposed to have equal
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e ducational opportunities. Despite that ideological claim, however, the implementation demonstrated government and schools’ continued emphasis on local nationals over children with foreign citizenship. Where the West German conception of equality of opportunity focused increasingly on access to higher levels of secondary school, turning to nonGerman children, those same administrators changed the definition. For foreign citizens, equality of opportunity shifted back to basic entry and access as well as promoting literacy.
Conclusion Over the early and mid-1960s, the Länder tried to implement international standards of equality of opportunity ensuring the right to education for children with non-German citizenship. That emphasis on universal access was new, highlighting the idea that a state was now supposed to be responsible for ensuring human rights, which meant implementation for all people and not only citizens. Yet, even as the European and Länder governments emphasized equality of opportunity, they distinguished between citizenship groups. Part of that treatment stemmed from the fact that these children had distinctive needs and preferences, including divergent requests for language support or cultural maintenance. That differentiated treatment also stemmed from assumptions about the meaning of difference resulting in ongoing othering. Part of the issue on the table was how to balance the children’s rights within the multiple goals of compulsory schooling. The obvious goal of compulsory schooling was to educate children in preparation for their futures as workers and social participants. Public education was about teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, usually with an eye toward preparing children for the labor market. Those children needed equal education so that they could move through society and train for the jobs corresponding with their skills and interests. Following that argument, all children—regardless of citizenship—needed access to the schools. To limit access would be to deny future economic and social rights. It was for these reasons that international organizations like UNESCO, the Council of Europe, and the European Community each pushed education as a human right and the Länder Ministries of Education tried to develop programs to equalize access. Agreeing that the need for education superseded citizenship status, the Länder Ministries set up integration classes and provided extra German language instruction to enable children to participate in the
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German classroom. Yet, even as the Ministries did so, they also assumed difference. Foreign children—here Italian children—might have the right to education, but it was a right to a basic education in lower-secondary school. Access to middle- and upper-secondary schooling was barely even imagined as a possibility. Leading to further differentiation between West German foreign residents and German citizens, primary schooling was as much about ethnic and national identity construction and the right to the free development of personhood. In those first four or five school years, children learned local social organization and norms, from what a family was supposed to be to how lunch should look. It was here that children started learning about government organization, to celebrate democracy as well as about the major political parties and voting. In short, primary schools instructed children in what it meant to be German and how to behave as a good German citizen. Thus, to fit Italian children into that structure imparted not only German literacy, but also German cultural norms, potentially Germanizing them. To mitigate that cultural violence and ensure Italian children’s right to personhood, the Länder Ministries worked with the Italian government to provide extra language and cultural instruction. That instruction non- coincidentally provided lessons in the state language (Florentine as Italian), history, and geography (later social studies as well). Religion was not permitted as German public schools already provided Christian religious indoctrination (usually Protestant or Catholic). Taken together, those subjects were precisely the information needed to teach nationality. In imparting ethnonational identity, however, those classes did not actually reflect the child’s right to personhood, which theoretically meant the right to develop their own individual and ethnic identities. Instead, the classes reflected the child’s right to be a foreign state national, an identity which was often learned abroad and had little to do with family culture, language, or traditions. According to the Länder Ministry policy, those extra mother language and cultural instruction classes were supposed to be available to the children of foreigners, but in practice those classes were only ever supported for select groups. The decision of which groups were included reflected form of entry into West Germany and perceived cultural distance from the ethnic majority. Because children with Italian citizenship were usually the children of guest workers and supposedly culturally distant from Germanness, they were entitled to the classes. In contrast, children with Dutch citizenship were supposedly culturally similar,
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which for the Länder meant they did not need to be Dutch at all. Instead, the Länder Ministries felt groups like these were already sufficiently German to integrate without a problem, regardless of foreign state and parental preference. In consequence, while the Länder argued that Italian children had the right not to be German, they did not possess the right to be German either (legally or ethnically). In contrast, Dutch children had the right to be German (ethnically), but not the right to be Dutch (except on their own time). Extra mother language and cultural instruction attendance might have been voluntary, but according to the Länder Ministries, national identity was not. Although education was supposed to be an individual right, the Länder emphasis on national identity reflected the Ministries’ tendency to treat foreign children as homogenous groups rather than as individuals. Reflecting European-wide trends, the Länder categorized and labeled the schoolchildren, making assumptions about their ethnic, national, and religious identities based on their citizenship status. In consequence, even as the right to education became a human right, in implementation it was still about citizenship.
Notes 1. “Bambini möchten in den deutschen Schulen lernen: Italiens Generalkonsul Dr. Bocchetto über seine Pläne,” Kölnische Rundschau, February 25, 1964, NW 141-111, Landesarchiv NRW. 2. Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany, Statistisches Jahrbuch für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1966), 161. 3. Christof Van Mol and Helga de Valk, “Migration and Immigrants in Europe: A Historical and Demographic Perspective,” in Integration Processes and Policies in Europe, ed. Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas and Rinus Penninx (New York: Springer, 2016), 32–37. 4. For a discussion of some of Italy’s non-German diasporas (including French and Belgium), see Philip Martin, Manolo Abella, and Christiane Kuptsch, Managing Labor Migration in the Twenty-First Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 91; Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (New York: Routledge, 2013), 166–73; Jozefien De Bock, Parallel Lives Revisited: Mediterranean Guest Workers and Their Families at Work and in the Neighbourhood, 1960–1980 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018). 5. Robert Sala, “Vom ‘Fremdarbeiter’ zum ‘Gastarbeiter’: Die Anwerbung italienischer Arbeitskräfte für die deutsche Wirtschaft (1938–1973),”
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Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 55, no. 1 (January 2007): 93–120; Marc Schmid, “Die italienische Einwanderung nach Deutschland,” in Italienische Migration nach Deutschland (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2014), 249–95. 6. Klaus J. Bade, Migration in European History, trans. Allison Brown (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 227; Nermin Abadan-Unat, Turks in Europe: From Guest Worker to Transnational Citizen (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 5–11. 7. “Protokoll über die erste Sitzung der deutsch-italienischen Gemischten Kommission zur Durchführung des am 8. Februar 1956 in Bonn unterzeichneten Kulturabkommens zwischen Italien und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Rom, 9. bis 11. Dezember 1958,” Protokoll (Unkel/am Rhein, December 11, 1958), B 90, Bd. 815, PA AA; “Protokoll über die zweite Sitzung der deutsch-italienischen Gemischten Kommission zur Durchführung des am 8. Februar 1956 in Bonn unterzeichneten Kulturabkommens zwischen Italien und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Unkel am Rhein von 4. bis 6. Oktober 1960,” Protokoll (Unkel/am Rhein, October 6, 1960), B 90, Bd. 732, PA AA. 8. Maryon McDonald, “‘Unity in Diversity’: Some Tensions in the Construction of Europe,” Social Anthropology 4, no. 1 (1996): 47–60; John L.M. Trim, “Modern Languages in the Council of Europe 1954– 1997” (Council of Europe Language Policy Division, 2007), https:// www.coe.int/ 9. As discussed in Chap. 2, in the post-1945 world, ten western and northern European states founded the Council of Europe in order to promote human rights and facilitate communication (predominantly cultural) between the European states. Founding states included Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Greece and Turkey joined months later, with Iceland and West Germany joining in 1950. 10. Including the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or Euratom). See Iris Glockner and Berthold Rittberger, “The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and European Defence Community (EDC),” in Designing the European Union: From Paris to Lisbon, ed. Finn Laursen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 16–47; Joaquín Roy, “All Roads Lead to Rome: Background, Content and Legacy of the Treaties on the European Economic and European Atomic Energy Communities,” in Designing the European Union: From Paris to Lisbon, ed. Finn Laursen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 48–76. Often referred to in the plural as the European Communities precisely because of the combination of the three major communities.
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11. Jürgen Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe,” in Citizenship: Critical Concepts, ed. Bryan S. Turner and Peter Hamilton, vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 1994), 355. 12. Eilionoir Flynn and Anna Arstein-Kerslake, “Legislating Personhood: Realising the Right to Support in Exercising Legal Capacity,” International Journal of Law in Context 10, no. 1 (March 2014): 81–104. 13. No one was certain how many children might be skipping school (Bundesministerium für Familie und Jugend, “1. Jugendbericht: Bericht der Bundesregierung über die Lage der Jugend und über die Bestregungen auf dem Gebiet der Jugendhilfe,” Unterrichtung (Bonn: Bonner Universitäts-Buckdruckerei, 1965); Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin, “Nr. 1456 des Abgeordneten Diepgen (CDU) über Schulbesuch ausländischer Jugendlicher” (Berlin, October 18, 1973)). 14. Kultusministerium NRW to Regierungspräsidenten, “Bildung von eigenen Schulklassen für Italienische Kinder,” October 10, 1963, 83, NW 141111, Landesarchiv NRW. For the stance of the Italian consulate, see Consolato d’Italia, Colonia and Roberto Cerchione to Paul Mikat and Kultusminister Nordrhein-Westfalen, “14768,” September 27, 1963, NW 141-111, Landesarchiv NRW. 15. “3. Sitzung Deutsch-Italienisch Gemischte Kommission: hier: IV. Unterricht der deuschen Sprache in italienischen schulen und der italienischen sprache an deutschen Schulen,” Protokoll, January 23, 1963, B 90, Bd. 815, PA AA; Consolato Generale d’Italia, Colonia to Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen and Werner Schültz, “No. 04618, Pos. F-12/19,” March 26, 1962, 19, NW 141-111, Landesarchiv NRW. The Dutch Consulate in Cologne agreed, explicitly adding its voice to the Italian Government’s in 1962 with a letter stating that it was aware of and agreed with Italian efforts regarding the inclusion of foreign nationals under compulsory schooling. 16. Andreas J. Wiesand, Kalliopi Chainoglou, and Anna Sledzinska-Simon, eds., Culture and Human Rights: The Wroclaw Commentaries (Amsterdam: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), 61–73. 17. V. Mallinson, The Western European Idea in Education (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), 44–45; Klaus Dieter Beiter, The Protection of the Right to Education by International Law: Including a Systematic Analysis of Article 13 of the International Convenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2006), 34. 18. Graham Haydon, “The ‘Right to Education’ and Compulsory Schooling*,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 9, no. 1 (January 1, 1977): 1–15; Colin Wringe, “The Human Right to Education,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 18, no. 2 (January 1, 1986): 23–33.
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19. Saarland, the final holdout, claimed it did not have enough people with foreign citizenship to make the question relevant. It only changed its compulsory schooling laws in the early 1970s (Lutz Reuter, “Länderbericht: Saarland,” in Schulbildung für Kinder aus Minderheiten in Deutschland 1989–1999, ed. Ingrid Gogolin, Ursula Neumann, and Lutz Reuter (New York: Waxmann, 2001), 334–35). For scholarly engagement with the issue, see Paul Blokker, “Rights, Identities and Democracy in an Enlarged European Union,” Perspectives on European Politics & Society 9, no. 3 (September 2008): 357–74; Karen Schönwälder, “Integration Policy and Pluralism in a Self-Conscious Country of Immigration,” in Multiculturalism Backlash: European Discourses, Policies and Practices, eds. Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf (New York: Routledge, 2010), 160; Guus Extra and Kutlay Yaǧmur, eds., Urban Multilingualism in Europe: Immigrant Minority Languages at Home and School (Tonawanda, NY: Multilingual Matters, 2004), 93–99. 20. Kultusministerium Nordrhein-Westfalen and II B 2, “Entwurf eines Landesschulpflichtgesetzes; hier: Schulflicht für Ausländer und Saatenlose,” Vermerk (Düsseldorf: Kultusminister des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, August 8, 1963), NW 1223-296, Landesarchiv NRW. 21. Kultusministerium Nordrhein-Westfalen and II B 2. For an academic discussion of the issue, see Blokker, “Rights, Identities and Democracy in an Enlarged European Union”; Schönwälder, “Integration Policy and Pluralism in a Self-Conscious Country of Immigration,” 160; Extra and Yaǧmur, Urban Multilingualism in Europe, 93–99; Daniel Faas, Negotiating Political Identities: Multiethnic Schools and Youth in Europe (New York: Routledge, 2016). 22. Sekretariat and Schermuly to Kultusministerium des Landes BadenWürttemberg and Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, “Deutsch-italienisches Kulturabkommen: Italienischunterricht für Kinder italienischer Arbeitskräfte in der Bundesrepublik,” November 25, 1960, NW 141-111, Landesarchiv NRW; Kultusminister des Landes NordrheinWestfalen, “Deutsch-italienisches Kulturabkommen; hier: Italienischunterricht für Kinder italienischer Arbeitskräfte in der Bundesrepublik,” July 26, 1961, B 304/3245/1, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. Sekretariat and Schermuly to Kultusministerium des Landes BadenWürttemberg and Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, “Italienischunterricht.” 23. Naoko Saito, “Compulsion without Coersion: Liberal Education through Uncommon Schooling,” in Philosophical Perspectives on Compulsory Education, ed. Marianna Papastephanou (New York: Springer, 2013), 71; John Kleinig, Philosophical Issues in Education (New York: Routledge, 2016).
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24. Beiter, The Protection of the Right to Education, 31. 25. Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen and Koch to Regierungspräsidenten in Münster, “Schulpflicht für Kinder ausländischer Staatsangehörigkeit sowie ihre Aufnahme in deutsche öffentliche Schulen,” April 12, 1951, NW 20-483, Landesarchiv NRW. See also Sekretariat der Ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland to Mitglieder der KMK, “Schulunterricht für Kinder ausländischen Arbeitnehmer in der Bundesrepublik (Rundschreiben Nr. 545/63),” June 7, 1963, B 304/3244/1, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 26. UNESCO, World Illiteracy at Mid-Century: A Statistical Study (Paris: Buchdruckerei Winterthur AG, 1957), 42, 70; Yossi Shavit and Karin Westerbeek, “Reforms, Expansion, and Equality of Opportunity,” European Sociological Review 14, no. 1 (March 1, 1998): 33–47; Adriana di Liberto, “Education and Italian Regional Development,” Economics of Education Review 27, no. 1 (2008): 94–107. 27. Council of Europe, “European Convention on Establishment” (1955), http://conventions.coe.int/ 28. General Assembly of the United Nations, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” December 10, 1948, http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/; UNESCO, “Convention against Discrimination in Education 1960,” December 14, 1960. 29. Toward that end, in 1963 even as Storz took a revised school law to the state parliament (Landtag), he directed his staff and public schools to treat all foreign nationals as if they were already under the compulsory schooling law. The exception was that the schools were not to dispatch truancy officers or compel the attendance of schoolchildren with foreign citizenship (Gerhard Storz and Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg, “Schulische Betreuung ausländischer Kinder und Jugendlicher,” Beilage (Stuttgart: Landtag von Baden-Württemberg, October 29, 1962)). 30. See also Erbstösser, “Probleme des Unterrichts für Kinder von ausländischen Gastarbeitern,” Vermerk (Düsseldorf: Kultusminister des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, April 7, 1964), NW 141-111, Landesarchiv NRW; Kultusministerium BW to Späth, “Schulpflicht und Schulbesuch von ausländischer Kinder, insbesondere von Kindern ausländischer Gastarbeiter,” January 21, 1969, EA 3/609 Bü 70, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. 31. Gisella Gori, Towards an EU Right to Education (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2001), 320–24. The Treaty of Rome’s Article 128 stipulated that the European Community member states work toward the development of a common vocational training policy. 32. Underlining in original text. Declaration released after their 18 July 1961 meeting in Bonn. See Committee of Senior Officials, Declaration by the
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Heads of State or Government of the EEC Countries Issued after Their Meeting in Bonn on 18th July 1961, Information Document, Third Conference of Ministers of Education (Strasbourg, France: Council of Europe, September 27, 1961), Box 2428, Council of Europe. 33. Storz and Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg, “Schulische Betreuung ausländischer Kinder und Jugendlicher,” 4830; Council of the European Communities, “63/266/EEC: Council Decision of 2 April 1963 Laying down General Principles for Implementing a Common Vocational Training Policy,” Official Journal P 63 (April 20, 1963): 1338–41; Kozlowicz, “Schulische Betreuung für Kinder ausländische Arbeitnehmer in der Bundesrepublik” (Bonn: Bundesminister für Arbeit und Sozialordnung, April 23, 1965), B 304/3244/1, Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Euan Reid and Hans H. Reich, eds., Breaking the Boundaries: Migrant Workers’ Children in the EC (Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 1991), 182. Article 21 signed 25 March 1964, took effect 1 May 1964. European Commission and Luce Pépin, The History of European Cooperation in Education and Training: Europe in the Making—an Example (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publication of the European Communities, 2006), 22–23, 56–58. 34. European Economic Community, “Règlement n° 38/64/CEE du Conseil du 25 mars 1964 relatif à la libre circulation des travailleurs à l’intérieur de la Communauté,” Official Journal P 62 (April 17, 1962): 965–80. As an example of ‘freedom of movement’ influencing member state policies, see Kultusministerium Schleswig-Holstein to Kultusministerium BadenWürttemberg, Kultusministerium Nordrhein-Westfalen, and Kultusministerium Niedersachsen, “Liberalisierung des Arbeitereinsatzes in der EWG,” March 13, 1963, NW 1223-296, Landesarchiv NRW. 35. As defined by the Rome Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms from 4 November 1950, which was amended by Protocol to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms signed in Paris on 20 March 1952. 36. Kultusministerium Nordrhein-Westfalen and II B 2, “Entwurf eines Landesschulpflichtgesetzes.” They also mentioned Kindergarten at the meeting. Kultusministerium Nordrhein-Westfalen, “Schulische Betreuung der GastarbeiterKinder im Landes NW,” Vermerk (Düsseldorf: Kultusminister des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, July 1, 1963), NW 141114, Landesarchiv NRW. 37. Landesregierung des Landes Nortdrhein-Westfalen et al., “Gesetz über die Schulpflicht im Lande Nordrhein-Westfalen (Schulpflichtgesetz-SchpflG),” Gesetz- und Verordnungsblatt für das Land Nordrhein-Westfalen 20, no. 50 (June 14, 1966): 365–68. 38. III A 2 to IV A, “Beschulung der Gastarbeiterkinder,” May 11, 1965, NW 141-109, Landesarchiv NRW.
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39. Bergmann and Kultusminister Nordrhein-Westfalen, “Vorbereitung: 107 Plenarsitzung of the KMK (28/29 April 1965 in Berlin, for TOP 16: Betreuung von Kinder ausländischer Gastarbeiter),” April 15, 1965, NW 141-115, Landesarchiv NRW. 40. Ludwig Wegmann, Italienische Gastarbeiter-Kinder in Walsum in der Schule und Zuhause, Mai 1962, Photograph, 6 × 6 cm, Mai 1962, B 145 Bild-F013072-0003, Bundesarchiv. 41. Rike Römhild, “Italiener in Deutschland,” Italienreport (blog), September 13, 2015, http://italienreport.de/2015/09/giornale-poetico-quadri-9/ 42. Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity”; Dieter Gosewinkel, “Historical Reflections on Citizenship in Europe,” in The Making of Citizens in Europe: New Perspectives on Citizenship Education, ed. Viola B Georgi (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 2008), 31–36. 43. Blokker, “Rights, Identities and Democracy in an Enlarged European Union,” 357–74; Schönwälder, “Integration Policy and Pluralism in a Self-Conscious Country of Immigration,” 160. 44. Article 5.1a-c. UNESCO, “Convention against Discrimination in Education 1960”; Kishore Singh, “UNESCO’s Convention against Discrimination in Education (1960): Key Pillar of the Education for All,” International Journal for Education Law and Policy 4, no. 1/2 (2008): 67–81. 45. See Regierungspäsident Düsseldorf to Schulämter der Stadt- und Landkreise des Bezirks, “Italienische Kinder in den Volksschulen des Regierungsbezirks Düsseldorfs,” December 5, 1961, NW 141-111, Landesarchiv NRW; “Besprechung am 27. Sept 1961 with MR. Prof. Dr. Magliulo and Mr. Finocchi,” Vermerk (Düsseldorf: Kultusminister des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, September 28, 1961), NW 141-111, Landesarchiv NRW. This general set up was still in place in 1965 under the decree from 13 October 1964 (II C 36-6/1 Nr. 2995/65), see Kultusminister NRW, II C 3 and Bermann to II A, “Unterricht für Kinder von Ausländern,” March 25, 1965. It had changed, however, to state that there would be “5 hours weekly with another 2 possible.” In addition, the courses were supposed to be set up during normal class hours, although without specification of what they were to replace. 46. Yasemin Nuhoğlu Soysal, “Changing Citizenship in Europe: Remarks on Postnational Membership and the National State,” in Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe, ed. David Cesarani and Mary Fulbrook (New York: Routledge, 2002), 17–30. 47. Dante used the Florentine dialect (John Trumper, “Italian and Italian Dialects: An Overview of Recent Studies,” in Trends in Romance Linguistics and Philology, ed. Rebecca Posner and John N. Green (New York: De Gruyter, 1993), 295–326; Giulio C. Lepschy, Mother Tongues and Other
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Reflections on the Italian Language (Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2002)). 48. The Italian state had been a country of emigration almost since its establishment in 1861. After a brief moment of attempted prevention, the Italian state instead invested in teaching Italian emigrants to be Italian. For discussions of those efforts, see Mark I. Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Harvard University Press, 2008); Roberto Sala, Fremde Worte: Medien für “Gastarbeiter” in der Bundesrepublik im Spannungsfeld von Außen- und Sozialpolitik (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2011). 49. Ray C. Rist, Guestworkers in Germany: The Prospects for Pluralism (New York: Praeger, 1978), 187–90. 50. Schulausschuß der Kultusministerkonferenz, “Unterricht für Kinder von Ausländern,” Arbeitsvorlage für die 88. Sitzung des Schulausschusses am 6./7. 02. 1964 in Rendsburg, Punkt 12 (Rendsburg, February 7, 1964), B 304/2058, Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Rist, Guestworkers in Germany, 187–90. 51. The eight official guest worker states included Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. See Jürgen Gerdes, Eveline Reisenauer, and Deniz Sert, “Varying Transnational and Multicultural Activities in the Turkish-German Migration Context,” in Migration and Transformation: Multi-Level Analysis of Migrant Transnationalism, ed. Pirkko Pitkänen, Ahmet Içduygu, and Deniz Sert (New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2012), 110; Jennifer A. Miller, Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s to 1980s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 34. 52. Gretchen L. Hachmeister, Italy in the German Literary Imagination: Goethe’s “Italian Journey” and Its Reception by Eichendorff, Platen, and Heine (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), 3, 14. 53. Manuel Borutta, Antikatholizismus: Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 49; Patrick Bernhard, “Borrowing from Mussolini: Nazi Germany’s Colonial Aspirations in the Shadow of Italian Expansionism,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, no. 4 (November 1, 2013): 617–43. The Nazi government exacerbated those stereotypes and, viewing foreign workers from places like Italy as racially inferior, brutally abused those workers during the Second World War (Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany Under the Third Reich, trans. William Templer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 101–6; Edward L. Homze, Foreign Labor in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 58–63).
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54. Richard A. Block, The Spell of Italy: Vacation, Magic, and the Attraction of Goethe (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 113–14; Hilal Sezgin, “Wir sind längst angekommen!,” Die Zeit, July 13, 2006, https:// www.zeit.de/2006/29/Einwanderung-neu. The idea of the “Knoblauchfresser” (garlic eater) would also be applied to other southern migrant groups, including the Turkish. See Joti Bhatnagar and Schole Raoufi, eds., “The Children of Guest-Workers in the Federal Republic of Germany: Maladjustment and Its Effects on Academic Performance,” in Educating Immigrants (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 113–36; Manuel Trummer, Pizza, Döner, McKropolis: Entwicklungen, Erscheinungsformen und Wertewandel internationaler Gastronomie; am Beispiel der Stadt Regensburg (Münster: Waxmann Verlag, 2009), 7. 55. According to a 1957 UNESCO report, the Italian government was battling illiteracy in an estimated 10 to 15 percent of the adult population: 3.4 to 5.2 million adults. UNESCO, World Illiteracy at Mid-Century, 42, 70. See also Gabriele d’Ottavio, “Germany and Italy: The ‘Odd Couple’ at the Heart of Europe,” Contemporary Italian Politics 10, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 14–35; Simona Piattoni, Luca Verzichelli, and Claudius Wagemann, “Amici Come Prima? Italy and Germany in Times of Crisis,” Contemporary Italian Politics 10, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 4–13. 56. Kultusministerium Nordrhein-Westfalen, “Schulische Betreuung der GastarbeiterKinder im Landes NW.” 57. Kultusminister NRW II A to Referat II B 2 (im Haus), “II A 36.0/0 Nr. 1090/62,” June 27, 1962, NW 1223-269, Landesarchiv NRW. The Dutch Consulate began this discussion in house by requesting information on compulsory schooling for Dutch citizens in NRW (Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen and Referat II B 2 to Referat II A 4 im Hause and Referat II C 6 im Hause, “II B 2 – 36 – 0/0 Nr. 67/62,” June 12, 1962, NW 1223-269, Landesarchiv NRW). Yet, In North RhineWestphalia, for example, the government used its 1963 regulations to argue that the government only needed to act when there was a necessity (Kultusministerium Nordrhein-Westfalen and Tiebel to Regierungspräsidenten in Detmold, “Schulbesuch von Schülern, die nicht die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit besitzen”). 58. Kultusminister NRW II A to Referat II B 2 (im Haus), “II A 36.0/0 Nr. 1090/62”; Kultusministerium NRW, Referat II B 2 to Referat II A 4 and II C 6 im Hause, “36 – 0/0 Nr. 67/62,” June 12, 1962, NW 1223-296, Landesarchiv NRW. They did, however, restate that should the Dutch national schoolchildren wish to attend West German public schools, then NRW’s Ministry of Education would foot that bill. 59. Fredrik Barth, “Introduction,” in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, ed. Fredrik Barth (Long Grove,
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IL: Waveland Press, 1998), 9–38; Carol Weisbrod, “The Debate over Education: Truth, Peace, Citizenship,” in Emblems of Pluralism: Cultural Differences and the State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 138–56; Cornelia Wilhelm, “Diversity in Germany: A Historical Perspective,” German Politics and Society 31, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 13–29; David Bartram, Maritsa Poros, and Pierre Monforte, Key Concepts in Migration (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2014), 84. 60. The Nazi government viewed most (not all) Dutch individuals as Aryan. See Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin Press, 2009); Jennifer L. Foray, Visions of Empire in the Nazi-Occupied Netherlands (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 59. 61. Statistisches Bundesamt, Statistisches Jahrbuch für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1965), 161. 62. According to the same 1957 study as above, UNESCO estimated that 1 to 2 percent of the population—some 70–140,000 adults—could not read and write (UNESCO, World Illiteracy at Mid-Century, 42, 70). 63. Stolze to Piazollo, “Schulische Betreuung der Kinder italienischer Gastarbeiter,” November 30, 1962, NW 1223-296, Landesarchiv NRW. 64. “IV. Die Betreuung der italienischen Arbeitnehmer in der Bundesrepublik,” Gemeinsame Niederschrift, January 27, 1962, B 304/3245/1, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. It was actually not infrequent that the federal government had only limited knowledge of what was actually happening with the schooling of “foreign children.” See, for example, Ständige Konferenz der Kultusminsiters der Länder to Vortizender des Schulausschusses, “Unterrichtskurse für Kinder italienischer Arbeitnehmer,” February 7, 1963, B 304/3245/1, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 65. “IV. Die Betreuung der italienischen Arbeitnehmer in der Bundesrepublik.” 66. Hans Reimers to Vizepräsidenten des Kirchlichen Außenamtes der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland, “Sch. 152,” March 19, 1963, B 304/2058, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 67. See the Wegmann photograph Italienische Gastarbeiter-Kinder in Walsum in der Schule und Zuhause. 68. Kultusministerium NRW, “Intalienischunterricht für Kinder italienischer Arbeitskräfte in der Bundesrepublik,” II E 1. 02-26 Nr. 3493/60, (January 5, 1961), NW 141-111, Landesarchiv NRW; “IV. Die Betreuung der italienischen Arbeitnehmer in der Bundesrepublik,” Gemeinsame Niederschrift, (January 27, 1962), B 304/3245/1, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 69. Preamble in the UNESCO “Convention against Discrimination in Education 1960,” December 14, 1960. 70. Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg, “Schulische und kulturelle Betreuung der Kinder der ausländischen Arbeitnehmer” (Stuttgart, March 12, 1963), EA 3/609 Bü 67, Baden-Württemberg Landesarchiv,
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Haupstaatsarchiv Stuttgart; Krause et al., “Schulische Betreuung ausländischer Kinder und Jugendlicher,” Beilage (Stuttgart: Landtag von BadenWürttemberg, September 19, 1962). Baden-Württemberg had, as discussed below, actually already passed the law, although it would not come into force until the following school year. 71. “Arbeitsvorlage für die 88. Sitzung des Schulausschusses am 6./7. 02. 1964 in Rendsburg, Punkt 12: Unterricht für Kinder von Ausländern” (Kultusministerkonferenz, February 6, 1964), B 304/3244/1, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 72. “Manual of Educational Statistics” (Paris: UNESCO, 1961), 39–40, http://unesdoc.unesco.org. Note the use of the male gender pronoun in connection with the supposedly gender-neutral “person.” 73. Preamble in the UNESCO “Convention against Discrimination in Education 1960,” December 14, 1960. 74. Reid and Reich, Breaking the Boundaries, 182. For a discussion of socioeconomic rights, see Mario Gomez, “Social Economic Rights and Human Rights Commissions,” Human Rights Quarterly 17, no. 1 (February 1, 1995): 155–69. 75. Evelyn Ellis and Philippa Watson, EU Anti-Discrimination Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 104–10. 76. Franz Rodehüser, Epochen der Grundschulgeschichte: Darstellung und Analyse der historischen Entwicklung einer Schulstufe unter Berücksichtigung ihrer Entstehungszusammenhänge und möglicher Perspektiven für die Zukunft: mit einem Historiogramm (Bochum: D. Winkler, 1987); Elisabeth Neuhaus, Die Reform der Grundschule: Darstellung und Analyse auf dem Hintergrund erziehungswissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse, 6th ed. (Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt, 1994); Anthony J. La Vopa, Grace, Talent, and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 77. Georg Picht, Die deutsche Bildungskatastrophe: Analyse und Dokumentation. (Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1964). 78. The Greek Ambassador wrote about the “therewith associated national structure” (Ambassade Royale de Grèce en Allemagne and Alexis Kyrou to Kultusminister NRW, “Schulung der Kinder der griechischen Gastarbeiter,” July 30, 1964, NW 388-14, Landesarchiv NRW). 79. Ralf Dahrendorf, Bildung ist Bürgerrecht: Plädoyer für eine aktive Bildungspolitik (Bramsche: Nannen-Verlag, 1965), 48; Rolf Becker, “‘Das katholische Arbeitermädchen vom Lande’–Ist die Bildungspolitik ein Opfer einer bildungssoziologischen Legende geworden,” in Pädagogik und Politik, ed. Claudia Crotti, Philipp Gonon, and Walter Herzog, vol. 6 (Stuttgart: Haupt, 2007), 177–204; Hartmut Wenzel, “Chancengleichheit
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in der Schule – eine nicht abgegoltene Forderung,” in Bildungsungleichheit revisited (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011), 58. 80. The Catholic Church advocated for its parishioners’ children (from Italy, Spain, and Portugal), providing some language classes and cultural instruction, as well as some extra religious training. The Protestant Church chose to support Greek Orthodox and Turkish Muslim youths specifically because the Catholic Church worked with Catholic youths. Ulrike Schoeneberg, “Participation in Ethnic Associations: The Case of Immigrants in West Germany,” International Migration Review 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1985): 425; Roberto Sala, “Die Nation in der Fremde: Zuwanderer in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und nationale Herkunft aus Italien,” IMIS-Beiträge 29 (2006): 108–11. 81. Welsch, “Unterricht für griechische Kinder,” Vermerk (Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, September 25, 1961), NW 141-106, Landesarchiv NRW. 82. “Förderlehrgänge für spätausgesiedelte deutsche Jugendliche.” Storz, “Ausländerkinder in deutschen Schulklassen,” Schriftliche Antwort des Kultusministeriums (Stuttgart: Landtag von Baden-Württemberg, February 6, 1961), 1141, EA 3/609 Bü 66, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. Initially, the Ministry considered pushing the costs onto the parents, their employers, or the Youth Office, but international norms dictated state responsibility. Storz, 1411; Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg, “Schulische und kulturelle Betreuung der Kinder der ausländischen Arbeitnehmer.” See also Krause et al., “Schulische Betreuung ausländischer Kinder und Jugendlicher.” 83. Schulausschuß and Reimer, “88. Sitzung des Schulauschusses am 6./7. 02. 1964 in Rendsburg; hier: 12. Unterricht für Kinder ausländischer Gastarbeiter: Beratung über eine Empfehlung,” Niederschrift (Rendsburg: Kultusministerkonferenz, February 7, 1964), B 304/2058, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 84. Zusätzlicher Unterricht in Deutsch. Nothardt and Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg, “Schulpflicht und Schulbesuch von Ausländer kindern, insbesondere von Kindern ausländischer Gastarbeiter,” Kultusund Unterricht, April 14, 1965, 176. 85. Storz, “Ausländerkinder in deutschen Schulklassen,” 1141; Dr. Hahn, “Schulunterricht für Gastarbeiterkinder,” Schriftliche Antwort des Kultusministeriums (Stuttgart: Landtag von Baden-Württemberg, October 26, 1965), EA 3/609 Bü 67, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart; Nothardt and Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg, “Schulpflicht und Schulbesuch 1965.” See also Dr. Hahn and Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg, “Schulpflicht der Gastarbeiterkinder,” Schriftliche Antwort des
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Kultusministeriums (Stuttgart: Landtag von Baden-Württemberg, November 14, 1966). 86. Nothardt and Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg, “Schulpflicht und Schulbesuch 1965.” 87. Paul Mikat to Elmar Ulrich, “Schulpflicht für Kinder ausländischer Gastarbeiter,” August 20, 1966, NW 141-110, Landesarchiv NRW; Kultusministerium NRW, “Schulbesuch der Gastarbeiterkinder,” Erlaß (Düsseldorf: Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, December 16, 1966), NW 388-13, Landesarchiv NRW. 88. “3. Sitzung Deutsch-Italienisch Gemischte Kommission; hier: IV. Unterricht der deutschen Sprache in italienischen Schulen und der italienischen Sprache an deutschen Schulen,” Protokoll, (January 23, 1963), 8, B 90, Bd. 815, PA AA; “6. Sitzung der deutsch-italienischen Gemischten Kommission zur Durchführung des zwischen Italien und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland abgeschlossenen Kulturabkommens, Bonn, 3.-5. April 1968,” Protokoll (Bonn, April 5, 1968), 9, B 97, Bd. 270, PA AA; Wohlgemuth, “Supplementary General Education, Preliminary Comparative Study, Third Conference of European Ministers of Education,” 8. The Italian Ministry of Education was, however, implementing widespread reform, among other things expanding compulsory schooling to the age of 14 and establishing a unified middle school in 1963 (Yossi Shavit and Karin Westerbeek, “Reforms, Expansion, and Equality of Opportunity,” European Sociological Review 14, no. 1 (March 1, 1998): 33–47; Gabriele Ballarino et al., “Persistent Inequalities? Expansion of Education and Class Inequality in Italy and Spain,” European Sociological Review 25, no. 1 (February 1, 2009): 123–38). In fact, the Italian consulate in Cologne informed the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Education that as long as the school transcript included a note verifying participation in Italian instruction in West Germany then the West German school certificate would be considered valid without a test in Italy. 89. In contrast, in order to support those Italian citizens who did return in the mid-1960s, the Italian government officially recognized the West German secondary school certificate (Auswärtiges Amt to Deutsche Botschaft Rom, “Anerkennung der von italienischen Schülern deutscher Schulen in Italien erworbenen Reifezeugnisse durch die Italienischen Behörden,” November 14, 1967, PA AA). The Italian delegation requested an inquiry in 1972 (“8. Siztung des Ständigen Gemischten Ausschusses zur Durchfürhung des Kulturabkommens zwischen der Bundespurelibk Deutschland und der Italienischen Republik, Berlin, 5.-7. Juni 1972,” Protokoll, (June 7, 1972), 12, B 304/3245/2, Bundesarchiv Koblenz). West Germany, in contrast, did not recognize the Italian secondary certificate until the early
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1980s. Even then, the agreement disappointed the Italian government as the West German only recognized the Italian school certificate at a lowersecondary school level. The Italian government felt that it should be valued at least at the level of the Realschule (lower level of higher secondary, below the Gymnasium).
CHAPTER 4
Teaching National Identity to “Guest Worker Children” (1962–1971)
In 1966, several Greek parents living in Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt asked the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Education (hereafter “BW Ministry”) to exempt their children from the state’s new compulsory schooling laws. Instead of sending their children to local German public schools as the law demanded, they wanted their children to continue attending classes in an unofficial Greek primary school (grades one to six). The request focused on the fates of 400 students (about one-third of the children with Greek citizenship in Stuttgart) attending a Greek school.1 In those classes, teachers from Greece taught the Greek state’s (hereafter “Greece”) curriculum for reading, writing, and mathematics, as well as the sciences and religious instruction. This Greek education, the parents argued, imparted the information necessary for their children to have equal opportunities for their futures in Greece—not in West Germany. The Greek parents’ request and others like it forced the Länder Ministries of Education (hereafter “Länder Ministries”) to address the issue of schooling for “foreign children” in terms of return migration. The Italian and Dutch governments’ wishes (discussed in Chap. 3) underlined international norms regarding minority inclusion in local schools and the right to education on the same basis as host-country nationals. The two European Community (EC) member states could focus on those goals, however, in part because Italy and the Netherlands knew their citizens could remain in West Germany permanently. Consequently, they wanted their citizens to integrate. For those governments, education in West © The Author(s) 2019 B. Lehman, Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1949–1992, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97728-7_4
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German schools and supplemental cultural instruction satisfied their goals. In contrast, labor migrants from Greece knew they did not have a right to permanent residence as they were not EC residents and had only temporary visas.2 The Greek government, in turn, argued that all its citizens abroad would return. When (not if) they re-migrated, they needed to be able to speak and read Greek as well as possess the necessary qualifications for participation in Greek vocational training and entry into the labor market. The only open path leading to those qualifications was Greek state schools. Consequently, Greece wanted its citizens to maintain more than a connection to Greece. Instead, those children needed to be Greek and, as such, required equal education opportunities based on the Greek model. Otherwise they would be condemned in the future to illiteracy and unskilled labor. The Länder Ministries had to take those concerns about Greek children’s futures seriously. Because the West German federal and Länder governments rejected the possibility that children with Greek citizenship could ever be German children (ethnically or legally), the West German bureaucracy interpreted that to mean that Greece was entitled to have a say in its citizens’ education. After all, public schooling and the right to education was supposed to be about the future. States invested in children in order to produce politically competent, hardworking citizens. If a child was going to live and work in another state, said child theoretically needed an education corresponding to their planned future place of residence. And, following the late 1950s and 1960s push to include the right to education as a human rather than merely civil right, the Länder were then responsible for ensuring equal opportunities. Following that reasoning, the Länder Ministries needed to enable Greek children’s future chances in Greece. Yet, enabling the children’s futures in Greece effectively meant the Länder should cede sovereignty over several thousand West German residents to a foreign state. The Länder Ministries could not provide the necessary schooling to transform children with Greek parents into Greek citizens. Not knowing what it meant to be Greek, the Länder Ministries could hardly provide the requisite instruction. Yet relinquishing control over children’s education in West Germany was concerning particularly after 1967 when a military government took control of Greece. Ceding control over the children’s education meant permitting and encouraging a military state’s ideological indoctrination. As the number of children with non-German citizenship grew, the Länder governments realized for-
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eign national education could amount to multiple enclaves of children spread across the country potentially learning messages of which the West German state did not approve. The Länder Ministries were additionally aware that future plans easily fell apart and no parental group was actually a single block. The Greek government might claim all Greek citizens would return to Greece and the Italian government say its citizens would remain but many parents had other intentions. After all, only one-third of the Greek children in the Stuttgart metropolitan region attended the ersatz Greek school. And Italy and Greece were not the only states involved in labor migration. Over the early 1960s, along with Greece, Spain signed bilateral labor agreements in 1960, followed by Turkey (1961), Morocco (1963), Portugal (1964), Tunisia (1965), and finally Yugoslavia (1968). Each government and every individual guest worker had their own, specific plan and political agenda. As Karin Hunn’s 2005 book pointed out, many families with Turkish citizenship tentatively planned to “return next year.”3 In following, the West German state governments needed simultaneously to prepare their foreign residents for return and permanent residency. The argument for this chapter lies in the comparison with Chap. 3. While the Italian government unintentionally established the initial parameters for the treatment of the children of guest workers in West German public schools regarding integration and cultural maintenance, Greece stretched those boundaries. All the sending countries advocated their political agendas regarding their citizens in West Germany, but Greece went farther than the rest, testing the limits of West Germany’s willingness to promote foreign citizenship particularly in the interest of return migration. Where the Italian government wanted its citizens to integrate while maintaining a connection to Italy, Greece planned for its temporarily absent children to stay Greek (Part I). That stance prompted Greece to downplay integration in favor of extended Greek lessons and Greek private schools, which could offer Greek school degrees (Part II). Yet, what those classes theoretically did was teach foreign citizenship in West Germany, which the Länder governments were not prepared to fully countenance, particularly after the 1967 military coup. But without offering naturalization to Greek citizens and claiming the children’s futures lay elsewhere, to deny the children access to Greek schools was to effectively obstruct their right to education.
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Distinguishing Between Minorities and Foreign Non-nationals The Greek parents in the opening vignette explicitly planned on returning to Greece with their children at some future date. As such, they needed to prepare for their children’s lives in Greece, not in West Germany. Those parents were very aware that their government did not have equivalency agreements with West Germany for schooling meaning a year of school in a West German public school did not count in Greece. Instead, in Greece a West German diploma represented illiteracy in Greek. That meant children with Greek citizenship needed Greek certifications and qualifications in order to ensure social inclusion or vocational training back home. Unless the families intended their children to hold positions as unskilled labors, parents planning on return needed their children to learn to speak and read Greek as well as acquire clear Greek qualifications from an institution with Greek government approval. In short, those children needed to learn to be Greek ethnonationals while in West Germany. At its core, the issue of schooling for migrants (usually understood as migrant workers in the 1960s) was an international concern, involving debates over primary and secondary school equivalency and national identification for international migrants. With hundreds of thousands of people crossing the European continent in the 1960s, host-country governments were well aware that those migrants would bring their children with them and/or have children in their new homes. Migrating children did not have the luxury of postponing their education indefinitely. If one state did not recognize another state’s school certifications or diplomas, that could set a child’s education back. Furthermore, the continued educational goal to teach citizenship threw the entire idea of ethnonational identity into question and raised the issue of state loyalty. In a Cold War context, loyalty mattered. With such an important concern on the table, to decide a best course of action, international, state, and local institutions needed to determine not only what national identity and citizenship meant, but also how to teach it. The answers hinged on the imagined position of non-nationals in a national community.4 As discussed in the second chapter, after the Second World War, political theorists like Hannah Arendt argued that the very idea of the nation as a homogeneous community was part of what led to the horrors of the Holocaust.5 Nonetheless, the idea of the nation lingered. Through the 1960s, many individuals across western Europe
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c ontinued to believe that nationals “‘shared’ values, language, blood, [as well as] history or culture.”6 Many governments—particularly new ones—continued to use the concept of nationhood to underline claims for self-determination.7 The West German federal government, for example, embraced the idea that the German national community shared a single, German ethnicity inherited from parents. That claim was part of what lay behind the West German decision to maintain citizenship laws tied to paternity.8 Yet, the post-1945 international emphasis on human rights also dictated that individuals not part of the ethnonational majority be accepted in some way into the national community.9 Neither local nor international politicians found ethnonational identity easy to discuss in the 1960s (or now), as the term “national” had both legal and ethnic connotations, creating a split in how different states understood the concept of the “non-national.”10 The main divide fell between minority group members (hereafter “minorities”) on the one hand and members of foreign ethnonational groups (hereafter “foreigners”) on the other.11 In the former case, an individual was a permanent resident or citizen, but did not identify as (or was denied membership to) part of a country’s ethnic majority. The later, in contrast, included individuals who, either by choice or law, held foreign citizenship and were supposedly only temporary transplants.12 In the 1960s internal scholastic goals established by UNESCO and the Council of Europe for minority group members stipulated that children be able to participate actively in local societies and communities while also maintaining their own ethnic affiliations (both religious or cultural).13 Based on the assumption that they would spend their lives in their countries of residence, these children unquestionably needed to be able to attend local public schools. For example, the Danish minority group(s) in West Germany (mostly in Schleswig-Holstein) were German citizens and fell under compulsory school laws. They were, however, also allowed some extra instruction and/or exemptions in order to maintain their specific identity as ethnic minorities. As citizens, however, they were also expected to fulfill the duties of a citizen to vote and, if male, serve in the military.14 Similarly, in the 1960s, the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Education (hereafter “NRW Ministry”) began permitting children with Dutch citizenship to study Dutch as a first foreign language in place of English or French.15 A member of a foreign ethnonational minority group, in contrast, was explicitly not a local citizen or viewed as part of the national majority. In
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some cases, an individual opted not to become a citizen, but in West Germany naturalization was rarely a possibility.16 In following, a foreign individual was supposed to remain loyal to a nation-state in which they did not reside. As with West German citizens, foreign ethnonationals had legal obligations to their countries of citizenship. For example, male children with Greek citizenship raised in West Germany were supposed to return to Greece for their military service and all adults reaching their majority were supposed to vote.17 In turn, they did not have responsibilities as German citizens and were precluded from certain political rights (e.g., voting in federal elections). In theory, then, the schools did not need to teach these children to be good German citizens even though they lived in West Germany. Concern over the children of migrants’s indentities contributed to international discussion about the possibility of dual or multiple nationalities. Some asked why a child of Italian parents in France should have to choose to be either Italian or French instead of both.18 Many politicians from across Europe, however, focused on the connection between citizenship and loyalty (inspired in part by the ). In a state of (impending) war, many politicians argued that loyalty needed to be clear, even calling for loyalty oaths.19 Reflecting that widespread outlook, in 1963 the Council of Europe released its Convention on the Reduction of Cases of Multiple Nationality and on Military Obligations in Cases of Multiple Nationality.20 In the text, the signatories (including West Germany and Greece) agreed that “multiple nationalities [were] liable to cause difficulties.” In the interest of “greater unity between … members” those signatories sought to limit such instances, particularly with an eye toward military service.21 Denying legal access to dual citizenship was supposed to clarify who should be loyal to which state. It would hardly do, after all, to have a male child with West German and Greek citizenship owe both states compulsory military service. Preventing dual citizenship solved the legal issue, but it did not address the lived reality of the many children crossing national borders. Political emphasis on loyalty and single-citizenship status reflected the idea that all children were supposed to maintain a single national identity. Most European states involved in the inter-European debates on the issue viewed member state nationals as either French or German, Italian or Greek. For many of the politicans involved, the idea that a child could be Greco-German implied an impossible contradiction as most states defined their own national identities against one another. A German national was German partly because they were not Greek (or French, etc.).22 However, both “Italian” and “German” children could be “European,” implying
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some commonality despite difference. To emphasize a child’s Europeanness suggested that Germanness was not entirely antithetical to Italianness. For the Italian and West German states, that commonality in turn enabled a connection to heritage to suffice for maintaining Italian nationality. A hyphenated identity, in contrast, simply did not exist in the 1960s West German political imagination.23 UNESCO and the Council of Europe declared that a child’s right to equal economic opportunities trumped the right to personhood (as discussed in Chap. 3), but that component did not vanish in part because of the utility of teaching migrant children to be foreign. As they considered best practices for teaching migrant children, the European Ministers of Education pointed out that the Council of Europe’s member states were promoting inter-continental communication. Children of migrant workers were almost perfectly positioned for bilingualism, which could naturally support contact between the European states. Partly for that reason, representatives in the Standing Conference of European Ministers of Education (which included the six EC member states) agreed that schoolchildren should learn their national language (as opposed to dialects) as well as shared national history in order to promote future political equality and access.24 Those international recommendations combined with local, West German politics regarding so-called guest workers meant that the Greek parents in Bad Cannstatt’s request to keep their ersatz national school were in fact reasonable, if problematic. According to international consensus, Greek parents as members of a foreign ethnonational group had the right to teach their heritage to their children and prepare their children for return to Greece meaning Greek schools in West Germany should be permissable. And, within an international framework, it was advisable to encourage the children of migrants to learn multiple languages in order to promote Europe’s emphasis on multilingualism. A Greek-speaking Greek citizen learning German in West Germany could promote good will, particularly if said child took positive tales back to Greece, which meant those Greek schools should provide German instruction. Yet, the Bad Cannstatt request raised two significant concerns: first, how to impart Greekness in West Germany and, second, what was supposed to happen if those children defied expectations and stayed in West Germany.
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Preparing for Return: Teaching Greekness and Degree Equivalency The ersatz Greek school in Bad Cannstatt began its existence as a series of classes designed to prepare Greek children for entry into the West German classroom after a year. The BW Ministry worked with the Greek Ministry of Education to import teachers and schoolbooks for the two- thirds of the instruction held in Greek. Holding its end of the agreement, the BW Ministry provided rooms in Stuttgart’s public schools for the Greek children’s use. The BW Ministry failed, however, to provide the German teachers for the one-third German instruction. In consequence, the 400 Greek children attending “preparation classes” were not being prepared for integration at all. Instead, they were receiving a Greek-state- approved education.25 The implementation of Baden-Württemberg’s school laws extending compulsory schooling to non-German children in 1966 threw that setup into disarray. Legally, children were now required to transition into West German public schools after one year in the preparation courses.26 That meant those Greek schoolchildren attending Greek national preparation classes for more than one year were in breach of local law. Furthermore, the Baden-Württemberg Ministry was now responsible for enforcing the children’s right to education, so the school districts technically needed to compel attendance in public schools to ensure the children’s equality of opportunity. But according to those Greek parents and the Greek state, transition into West German schools actually denied children equal opportunities—in Greece. Inclusion under local school laws forced the Länder Ministries to consider how far difference should be allowed and supported. Theoretically, national private schools fit into European (both Council of Europe and European Community) recommendations and regulations for the support of national identities, particularly in regard to language acquisition. But ethnonational identity stretched beyond language, connecting to citizenship as well. The Italian government (and the one in four Italian citizens receiving consular instruction) were mostly content with a few weekly instructional hours in language, history, geography, and social studies. Greekness, however, was not Italianness. To support Greekness, the Greek government argued the children needed far more than a paltry five hours extra instruction.
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Further supporting demands for non-German instruction, ersatz national school fit within the 1960s West German federal government’s (hereafter “Federal Republic”) political agenda regarding so-called guest workers. The Federal Republic had increased its recruitment from Mediterranean states after the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 in order to maintain the West German economic miracle without eastern European labor.27 The Christian Democrat-Liberal (CDU/CSU-FDP) government claimed that these workers would be explicitly temporary, despite high recruitment of Italian citizens who had the right to permanent residence. According to Chancellors Konrad Adenauer (1949–1963) and Ludwig Erhard (1963–1966), these temporary workers would support economic growth, but leave again after a year or two well before they started drawing on West German social welfare programs. That emphasis on temporary residency meant the Greek state and parents’ preference for maintaining Greek identity over integration actually fit into the West German political project. In consequence, the Länder Ministries could not outright reject Greek requests for promoting Greekness.28 The emphasis on schooling to convey Greekness stemmed in part from the rigid structure of Greek education. The Greek Ministry of Education controlled a centralized school system. All children were supposed to learn the same curriculum with state-approved messages. To control class content, the state published necessary school books and trained teachers. In consequence, education in Greece could include specific political messages along with mathematics and sciences as well as language and religion. Part of the reason Greece could demand the provision of a Greek education in West Germany was that the Ministry of Education knew what its citizens needed to learn.29 The West German school system, in contrast, was federalized and the Länder taught divergent content.30 Over the 1950s and 1960s, the Länder Ministries did partially coordinate between the different systems, leading to the 1955 Düsseldorf Agreement and the 1964 Hamburger Agreement. The Düsseldorf Agreement established (among other things) English as a first foreign language and Latin and French as the normal options for a second required language.31 Local modifications to the school systems, however, meant a growing divergence between the states almost to the point of incompatibility.32 Except for agreeing that all children should speak German and know basic mathematics, there was little consensus on what other, essential information children needed to know in order to be German.
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In the 1960s, by contrast, the core components of “Greekness” centered around religion and language. In the first half of the twentieth century, religion had been the primary marker of ethnonational identity.33 During the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), the two combatants explicitly tied nationality and citizenship to religion.34 The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, negotiated under the eyes of the League of Nations, affirmed international support for that linkage. In the name of peace, the state governments involved declared 1.5 million individuals living across Turkey to be Greek because they were Greek Orthodox Christians, regardless of their language skills, place of origin, or preference.35 The states involved then forced a population exchange in order to ethnically cleanse both countries. After the Second World War, the Greek state began looking toward language as a core component of Greekness, in part in reaction to the 1920s population transfer, which included hundreds of thousands who could not speak Greek. By the mid-twentieth century, to be Greek, a citizen needed to speak Greek. Yet, through the 1960s, that stipulation was more complex than one might imagine. In the nineteenth century, in their efforts to foster a sense of Greekness in the new Greek state, Greek scholars wanted to promote a connection to antiquity.36 Modern Greek was not classical Greek, as those children attending classic German gymnasia were well aware.37 To bridge the gap between the classic and the modern, those scholars created a form of Greek—Katharevousa—combining classic and modern (Demotic Greek, or dimotiki). Even though few spoke Katharevousa, in the nineteenth century the new Greek state decided to use it for writing, official issues (including legal courts), and schooling.38 In short, Greek literacy in the 1960s meant speaking Demotic but writing in Katharevousa. That duality made learning more than one additional language a particular challenge as children were already effectively bilingual.39 The need to learn Demotic and Katharevousa also meant schools played a central role in disseminating this linguistic notion of Greekness. While most parents passed on the spoken components, they were often unable to teach their children the textual side.40 Greece was well prepared to teach the necessary components of Greekness to its citizens abroad. Since its establishment in 1830, The Greek government had worked on disseminating the idea of Greekness abroad.41 Taking the stance that all diaspora members belonged in Greece and, regardless of place or longevity of foreign residence, all Greeks would someday live in Greece, the government claimed that Greek education was necessary. As part of the state’s efforts to facilitate both identification with
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the national diaspora and the possibility of migration to Greece, the government had promoted the development of Greek schools and communities across the world.42 In 1962, when the Greek legation in West Germany heard about Italian consular instruction (described in Chap. 3), the Greek representatives quickly approached the Länder Ministries of Education about setting up the same. At that time, there were barely 500 children with Greek citizenship in West Germany but local Greek consulates viewed the Greek education of Greek citizens a priority. The consulates did not want the children’s proposedly short residence in West Germany to ruin their future chances in Greece.43 For the Länder Ministries, children with Greek citizenship met the necessary markers to qualify for consular programs, including cultural distance, from of entry, and legal status. With those markers met, the Ministries acknowledged the Greek children’s right to the classes and started working with Greece to set them up. The Greek government initially accepted the established parameters for five hours of consular instruction and the two-thirds/one-third preparation classes but quickly found them insufficient.44 Based on the Italian model, Greek teachers were supposed to pack language, geography, history, and social studies into the classes. But five hours was insufficient for learning a new alphabet with which to write Katharevousa and to speak Demotic. Furthermore, designed for Catholic Italian citizens who could (usually) take Catholic instruction alongside German citizens, the Länder Ministries did not intend those five hours to include Greek Orthodox instruction. Between the additional language and religious concerns, the Greek legations requested expanded instructional hours. As the Greek ambassador wrote to the NRW Ministry in 1964, “Greek children” needed to maintain “their mother language, religion, and their traditions as well as their connection to the [Greek] national structure.”45 According to Greece, children with Greek citizenship needed to learn each of those points in order to be fulfilled as individuals and to integrate successfully upon return.46 For the Länder, the request to expand consular instruction was usually permissible. It was hardly politic to deny requests to maintain ethnic identity, particularly when those requests fit within the international communities’ frameworks on minority rights and reflected the West German federal government’s claims that all guest workers would return to their countries of citizenship. Therefore, in 1966 first Baden-Württemberg and then most of the Länder Ministries agreed that for Greek children, consular instruction could extend to ten hours in addition to regular
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attendance in West German schools.47 The extended hours were supposed to permit children time not only to learn the language, but also to receive two hours of weekly religious training.48 Consular instruction enabled children with Greek citizenship to develop their ethnonational identity and Greek literacy but created challenges to both West German and Greek ideas of equal opportunities. On the West German side, children were supposed to take the consular instruction as supplemental instruction. Yet, schools quickly began to report that students were overburdened. “Greek children,” school districts across Baden- Württemberg announced, were not doing their German homework because they had too much Greek work.49 The reverse was also true. The consular instruction might promote literacy, but it did not provide sufficient instruction in mathematics or the sciences to count toward an equivalent primary school in Greece.50 Underperforming in German schools and not entitled to a Greek diploma, the children were facing unequal opportunities in both systems. That performance gap, particularly in the sciences, prompted the Greek government to push for permission to establish private Greek schools in West Germany.51 In its opening gambits in 1964, Greece expressed desire to establish Greek full-day classes wherever there were 20 to 30 children living in proximity. Instruction would be in Greek, with a few additional hours of German per week in order to provide them with an “important advantage for their futures in Greece.” Greece was willing to fund the classes but suggested that the West German governments provide the necessary schoolrooms as well as select and pay German language teachers.52 Receiving Greek government-approved instruction would entitle the children to a Greek school certificate and equal opportunities in Greece.53 Yet, equal opportunities in Greece did not amount to equal opportunities in West Germany, which was precisely why neither state recognized the other’s school certificates. For the Länder, the fact that Greek compulsory schooling only lasted five years with optional secondary schooling meant a Greek degree could not count in lieu of the West German where students had eight/nine years (depending on state and up to 12/13) of West German schooling. On the Greek side, because of the limited number of compulsory schooling years, Greece offered more science and mathematics in primary school and felt the Länder did not have a good enough system on the lower-secondary track to equal a Greek education. Between language differences, length of schooling, and
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Graph 4.1 Schoolchildren with Greek citizenship in West German general primary and secondary schools, 1965–1992 (It should be noted that this is a simplification of the West German school system. Hans Döbert, “Germany,” in The Education Systems of Europe, ed. Wolfgang Hörner et al. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 299–300)
c ontent differences, neither state was going to acknowledge the other’s degrees without some form of compromise.54 The two countries were willing to make a few concessions because of the number of people involved (see Graph 4.1 above).55 In Greece, leftist Minister of Education and later Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou wanted to implement widespread education reform that would extend compulsory schooling (as per international recommendation) to nine years from five.56 The West German Ministries acknowledged that if the changes took place, some level of equivalency might be possible. In the meantime, the Länder Ministries (with slight differences) agreed to allow Greek private schools (mostly as supplemental schools) as long as they ran a minimum of eight (later nine) years, offered at least five hours of German
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language instruction a week, and included the basic information necessary to qualify for West German vocational training programs. And, unlike consular instruction, Greece had to pay.57 In this way children with Greek citizenship could prepare for their (possible) eventual returns to Greece fully prepared to take advantage of their equal opportunities but also to attend German vocational programs of they stayed. Transitioning back to public school from a Greek private school would, however, be almost impossible as there was no direct equivalency before the degree was finished.58 The Länder agreed to extended consular instruction and private Greek schools precisely because the West German governments viewed schoolchildren with Greek citizenship as temporary, foreign nationals and not as West German minorities. If they had been local minorities, exceptions on this scale would have been unacceptable. But as temporary, foreign nationals, their futures were abroad. As education was about ensuring equal opportunities in the future, the children needed a non-German education despite concerns that permitting difference would lead to inequalities. In other words, the parents in Bad Cannstatt got to keep their school and even expand it.
The Politics of Teaching Foreign Identification and Loyalty During the Cold War Even as equivalency discussions were underway, the Greek government collapsed. Responding to internal instabilities and frustration, a conservative group of colonels decided that, to save the kingdom from a Communist specter, they needed to step in.59 On 21 April 1967, the group seized control. Within months the junta government instituted flag salutations, obligatory religious services, and demanded loyalty oaths from all civil servants (including teachers) with the intention of renewing the country’s national Greek-Christian spirit.60 The coup and subsequent behavior of the Greek junta government (1967 to 1974) forced the Länder Ministries to reconsider teaching foreign loyalty to non-nationals in West Germany. Allowing a friendly, democratic foreign government and fellow Council of Europe member state to educate a couple thousand non-nationals had seemed harmless, even beneficial. In light of the recent Nazi past, however, permitting a military, authoritarian government a foothold in the Federal Republic was deeply unsettling. The Länder does not want students attending Greek language and cultural instruction to start promote military uprisings. The realization
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of what teaching foreign loyalty could mean turned the Ministries’ attention to other foreign states as well, particularly as in the Cold War environment, the Länder stood firmly against the spread of Communist messages. In response to the coup and the potential of anti-democratic messages in the schools, the Länder decided to reevaluate their goals for teaching noncitizens while West German politicians and the media turned their concerns to other foreign states’ politics as well. That concern over school messages heightened as the reverberations of the Greek coup reached West Germany. In 1969, the Greek military government recalled the bulk of its teachers from abroad—including West Germany—for “pedagogical reasons.”61 The Greek military government was concerned about what its citizens were learning.62 Focus on traditional education meant rolling back Papandreou’s reforms and killing plans to extend compulsory schooling. Additionally worried about its teachers’ politics, the junta government wanted to ensure none of its instructors were preaching against the state. All teachers still overseas had to come home to be replaced by those who had taken loyalty oaths. That replacement happened as the West German government transitioned from a grand coalition (CDU/CSU-SPD) under Christian Democratic Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger (1966–69) to a social-liberal coalition (SPD-FDP) under Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt (1969–74). Officially, the government under Kiesinger was shocked by the Greek authoritarian military coup and had imposed sanctions.63 Within West Germany, however, several Christian conservative (CDU/CSU) politicians in the West German federal and state governments appreciated the military government’s anti-communist rhetoric and strong religious emphasis. That semi-acceptance of the junta government limited concerns about Greek education in West Germany.64 The Brandt government, in contrast, argued that the junta government had fascist components.65 If the regime was fascist, then West German politicians did not want it to have an ideological foothold in the country. “Junta-true” teachers providing instruction represented a possible foothold and needed to be stopped.66 Part of the reason why that possible foothold became a concern was because of the West German-Greek diaspora’s growth. As Graph 4.1 highlights, between the early 1960s and 1970s, the number of Greek schoolchildren in the country had more than doubled. As West German residents with Greek citizenship were less likely to return to Greece during the junta years, part of that population consisted of established families. Adding to that, West German industry continued to recruit guest workers, who were
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now more likely to bring their children with them. With new migrants (and births) adding to the established population, the number of children would continue climbing until the end of the junta government in 1974. With approximately half of Greek children in West Germany (around 15,000 in 1971) receiving consular instruction, West German politicians became concerned. With increasing frequency in 1970 and 1971, SPD (Social Democratic Party) and some CDU Bundestag members repeatedly pointed to the possibility of “anti-democratic” content in the children’s instruction, perhaps “glorifying the dictatorship.”67 It was one thing to cede sovereignty over children’s education who were supposed to return after a couple years to another democratic state. Many West German politicians were less sure about encouraging consular education for a country under dictatorial control, which even withdrew from the Council of Europe over human rights concerns.68 Consequently some West German politicians asked if it would be preferable to close Greek consular courses to schools altogether to focus instead on integration. Yet, to focus on integration would imply permanent residency and a clear place in West German society, an unpopular political move in the changing socio-economic environment of the late 1960s. Even as West Germany faced the first economic recession since 1945 (in 1967 the GDP did not grow), some politicians and members of the West German voting public realized that importing labor might have long-lasting consequences.69 Some, predominantly conservative politicians, wanted to prevent settlement and encourage emigration from West Germany. Responding to that political pressure and the media, Chancellor Willy Brandt’s administration argued that West Germany was not a country of immigration despite more than a decade of high immigration. Labor migrants were, according to federal policy, still supposed to leave someday.70 That official emphasis on return migration meant that, even as many Länder Ministries turned toward integration, federal and state political pressure for return rose, which increased the political importance of cultural maintenance. Despite an evident political connection, part of the question of the schooling of children with migrant backgrounds was whether or not schooling was a political act. The Brandt government claimed that schooling was a pedagogical issue and not political.71 Yet, as Pierre Bourdieu and countless other scholars before and after them have shown, education was (and is) inherently political.72 The goal of education may have been to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, but it was also—and still is—about
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citizenship. School materials used in social studies, first year readers, and early history books clearly highlight primary school’s inherently political nature. From first grade on, those materials depicted government and civil society, described politics, and outlined the meaning of concepts like “family.” Teaching materials for chemistry or math were not as explicit, but sample exercises listed monetary units such as Deutsch marks or lira and provided exercises featuring the number of bullets used in military maneuvers. Even if the educational content had been apolitical, migrants’ access to education was based on foreign relations and internal affairs.73 The Brandt government’s claim that education for migrant schoolchildren was apolitical was in itself a political statement, a refusal to consider those children as belonging to the West German populace. With the recall of Greek teachers, and worried about what a Greek authoritarian military government might teach its pupils, several West German politicians and the Länder Ministries of Education wavered in their support of consular instruction. Over the 1960s, the fascist Spanish and Portuguese governments had signed agreements about cultural contact before sending teachers to West Germany, as had communist Yugoslavia.74 Furthermore, those governments were apparently stable. In contrast, when the Greek state signed its bilateral labor agreement it was a democracy. The transformation from a democratic to a military government terrified many West German politicians, who worried Greek citizens might ferment support for government overthrow particularly in light of social and student unrest in 1968/69.75 That transition raised concerns about whether schoolchildren in West Germany should be learning to be good citizens if their country of citizenship did not follow democratic principles and even advocated the overthrow of a democratic regime. In response, the West German public media, politicians, and school administrators demanded to know what foreign schoolbooks said and details about foreign teachers’ lesson plans.76 In North Rhine-Westphalia, the state Cultural Committee debated whether, given that the foreign ministries of education from the guest worker countries (including Greece) selected consular teachers, who were then often paid by the relevant West German state, it was possible that these teachers held divided loyalties.77 This split loyalty could lead them to try and undermine West German ideals and goals. To clear up the issue, some politicians on both the national and regional levels suggested that schoolteachers from foreign countries be required to take West German loyalty oaths, swearing their adherence to the Basic Law. They argued that if Greek or other foreign teachers
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received funding from the West German Ministries of Education, they needed to adhere to the sentiments expressed in the West German constitution.78 The teachers never would have to take loyalty oaths in West Germany, but some Länder Ministries took steps to ensure consular courses and textbook content adhered to West German legal standards. Although the Länder Ministries of Education had the legal right to evaluate teachers, doing so was almost impossible.79 Most Ministries did not employ staff with the language skills necessary to perform such reviews.80 Nonetheless, to reassure local citizens and the Bundestag, some Länder Ministries, including the North Rhine-Westphalian, passed rules in the early 1970s declaring that “foreign teachers misusing their positions to incite against a free democratic basic order would be released from their positions.”81 The few complaints about consular teachers that did arise, however, were rarely about political messages. Instead, grievances usually focused on inappropriate disciplinary measures and came from the attending children’s parents. Because of the static nature of the printed word, the Länder Ministries of Education found it easier to evaluate Greek state textbooks than teachers. Initially, the lack of Greek (and other language) speakers in West German state employ was a stumbling block here too. Unable to analyze the books’ text, several Länder Ministries tried examining the pictorial content, which they judged militaristic but acceptable. To address the text, the Standing Conference of Länder Ministers of Education (Kultusministerkonferenz, KMK) arranged for a committee to handle the issue on behalf of all the states.82 The committee, in turn, commissioned Principal Beckmann, who could read Greek and had worked in a German school in Greece until the coup, to examine the presentation of history, democracy, and politics in a Greek sixth-grade civics textbook.83 Looking at the tone of the text, Beckmann described the volume as naïve as well as highly nationalistic and Christo-Hellenic. From the first page onward, the book directed children to “celebrate their history” and told them how “the Greek national government [had], in all its actions, the everlasting, immortal Helleno-Christian ideals in view.” Turning toward its political ideological stance, Beckman explained that the book celebrated democracy as a Greek invention but claimed that democratic freedoms had to be limited; otherwise, people would be unable to live together. The text also explicitly decried both communism and fascism. After condemning the Nazi hordes, the book explained that the Communist
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Party was “illegal in [Greece] as their entire ideology is anti-national.” The textbook warned that “the communist threat was not over, but continued to work in secret” and that “everything suggested that a communist storm [would] soon break out.”84 Although more extreme than the West German committee preferred, Beckmann informed the committee that the book’s politics did not contravene West Germany’s Basic Law but actually aligned with West Germany’s anti-communist stance. Adding additional concern to the question of what foreign governments were teaching their citizens, Greece was not the only government to see its democratically elected government overthrown in a military coup. West German perception, however, of the coups in Turkey was significantly different. In fact, West German politicians and educational administrators were not overly anxious about the political changes going on in Turkey and is impact on West Germany. There were a few politicians and media groups in West Germany who did express their concerns vis-àvis Turkish language materials. They worried that, given the military takeover in Turkey in 1971, the state schoolbooks could contain anti-democratic messages. But, in contrast to Greece’s coup, in the early 1970s the Turkish military was largely considered a secular, anti-communist force dedicated to reining in political corruption. The fact that the military rapidly returned the government to secular control also contributed to a positive West German perception of Turkey’s successive coups.85 Furthermore, the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research (GEI) had a long-standing relationship with the Turkish Ministry of Culture and had been exchanging textbooks since the 1950s. When West German politicians began questioning foreign schoolbooks, the Länder Ministers already had ready access to an analysis.86 Consequently, despite government instability, West German politicians and educators were more concerned about unrest among the adult population than problems with schoolbooks or teachers. Both the Greek and Turkish governments’ anti-communist stances meant the Greek classes were actually less of an issue than the Italian. Indeed, even as Brandt’s government started its Ostpolitik, the West German government, having outlawed the Communist Party in 1956, viewed communism as a significant threat.87 Within the Republic of Italy, in contrast, the Communist Party was gaining influence (earning over a quarter of the votes in the 1968 and 1972 elections). As social unrest swept Europe with the 1968 revolutions, some West Germans worried about the specter of a communist revolution, with a few politicians
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s uggesting that Italian citizens might support a communist incursion into the Federal Republic.88 Nevertheless, Italian membership in the European Community overshadowed those concerns. The issue eventually dropped out of conversation. In the end, despite reservations, the West German federal government agreed with the Länder committee and judged the schoolbooks sent from the various foreign ministries of education acceptable, if nationalistic.89 In 1972, the Bundestag and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution investigated excerpted translations of the various guest worker countries’ school materials for any conflicts with the West German Constitution and uncovered no “prosecutable offenses.”90 Even if they had found problematic content, as the Federal Ministry of Education explained to concerned Bundestag members, it would have only led to the banning of texts in truly extreme cases. The federal government took the stance that “return [migration was] under no circumstances to be made more difficult.” The materials were “based on the curricula of the sending country, to be used for the schoolchildren of that country,” which encouraged reintegration.91 Furthermore, established bilateral relationships with West Germany’s partner countries necessitated the continued employment of consular teachers.92 Banning books or restricting foreign teachers would damage international relationships and impede West German foreign residents’ immigration. Thus the classes were to be accepted regardless of reservations. Despite the federal government’s stance, the KMK decided that, between community longevity and concern over teaching foreign citizenship, the Länder governments needed to focus on integration. Toward that end “native language and cultural instruction” needed to move into the public schools (as opposed to extra afterschool instruction) in order to bring that instruction under West German oversight and reduce the children’s burden. Relabeling the courses “extra mother language and cultural instruction” instead of “consular instruction,” these classes were now supposed to celebrate heritage instead of construct national identity. Preparation for reintegration was now to be the job of the parents instead of the Länder.93 Where in the 1960s, enabling the children to maintain their foreign identities had been a state responsibility, in the early 1970s it became a recommendation. Not only did the Länder Ministries redefine the goal of cultural instruction, the states also reframed the idea of integration. To facilitate transition into the West German classroom, revised guidelines within the KMK’s 1971 Recommendations on instruction for the children of foreign workers stipulated classes be taught half in German and half in the
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children’s national language by consular teachers (instead of the onethird, two-third model). Furthermore, in addition to German language instruction, the KMK recommended placing children with non-German citizenship directly in the regular classroom for subjects like music, which were less dependent on the language of instruction.94 Ideally, the ongoing one-year preparation classes were to emphasize German classroom participation instead of cultural maintenance. After all, the children might have been foreign, but they were German residents. Those school programs highlighted a widespread shift in the perspective of who the children, as foreign citizens, were supposed to learn to be as nationals and as West German residents. Children raised in West Germany were expected to be loyal to German principles as outlined in the Basic Law, even if they were supposed to be foreign. Toward that end, children with Greek (and other) citizenship needed to transition rapidly into the German classroom in order to learn to operate in a German socio- cultural environment. That emphasis had the further benefit of mitigating children’s interactions with foreign political messages possibly at odds with the West German Basic Law. Yet, even as the children were supposed to integrate, they remained legal foreigners and social others.
Conclusion Ethnically non-German children were by and large foreign citizens. As national minorities, they were entitled to maintain their own heritage, which according to the West German governments involved maintaining an identity as foreigners. Yet, as concerns over education for Greek nationals in the early 1970s demonstrated, many politicians changed their minds when actually faced with the reality of what maintaining an identity as a foreign citizen meant in practice. Instead, non-German schoolchildren needed to integrate as West German residents. They were not supposed to be too foreign. The reasoning behind that swing had both to do with the growing emphasis across Europe on equality of opportunity as well as with concerns over foreign footholds (particularly fascist or communist) in West Germany. Within the scope of human and civil rights movements, promoting difference did not fit. Furthermore, pushing people to identify as foreigners suggested that they might maintain their loyalty to other states. While that was, in theory, precisely what a citizen was supposed to do, having tens of thousands and later millions of permanent foreign residents
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with their loyalty tied to another state with differing political ideologies was unpalatable. Taken together, most West German politicians and educators did not actually want West German residents to be entirely foreign. The result of the drive toward integration regardless of the country of citizenship’s preference was, to a minor extent, to acknowledge that these children were local, but also to put a crack in the West German emphasis on a connection between citizenship and ethnicity. To argue that integration was preferable to cultural maintenance suggested that it was in the child’s interest to be at least partly German. But, those same politicians dealt with that crack by ignoring it. As Brandt did in 1971, many politicians and educators focused on the connections between education and equality, particularly in terms of labor. Claiming schooling was apolitcal, they dropped a discussion of the connection between West German public education, citizenship, and political rights almost entirely.
Notes 1. It should be noted that the school was not an independently operated building, but rather spread across classrooms in four Stuttgart city public schools. 2. The West German courts later declared that they could not be forced from the country at all. See Christian Joppke, “The Evolution of Alien Rights in the United States, Germany, and the European Union,” in Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices, ed. Thomas Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas B. Klusmeyer (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001), 45. 3. Karin Hunn, “Nächstes Jahr kehren wir zurück–”: Die Geschichte der türkischen “Gastarbeiter” in der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005). 4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006). 5. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1951); Jacqueline Bhabha, “Arendt’s Children: Do Today’s Migrant Children Have a Right to Have Rights?,” Human Rights Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2009): 410–51. 6. Yasemin Nuhoğlu Soysal, “Changing Citizenship in Europe: Remarks on Postnational Membership and the National State,” in Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe, ed. David Cesarani and Mary Fulbrook (New York: Routledge, 2002), 17. 7. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2.
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8. Nira Yuval-Davis, “Gender and Nation,” in Women, Ethnicity and Nationalism: The Politics of Transition, ed. Robert E. Miller and Rick Wilford (New York: Routledge, 1998), 21–31; Douglas B. Klusmeyer and Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Immigration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany: Negotiating Membership and Remaking the Nation (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 18. 9. Matthew J. Gibney, “Statelessness and the Right to Citizenship,” Forced Migration Review, no. 32 (April 2009): 50–21; Bronwen Manby, “The Human Right to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept by Rhoda E. HowardHassmann and Margaret Walton-Roberts (Review),” Human Rights Quarterly 38, no. 2 (May 12, 2016): 526–34; Jeffrey L. Blackman, “State Successions and Statelessness: The Emerging Right to an Effective Nationality under International Law,” Michigan Journal of International Law 19 (1998): 1172. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art. 15(1)) states that everyone is entitled to a nationality, see Maarten P. Vink and Gerard-René De Groot, “Birthright Citizenship: Trends and Regulations in Europe,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, November 25, 2010). 10. The Council of Europe and European Communities both addressed the issue of how non-nationals fit within a national community. The linguistic issues of translation and comparison would lead to difficulties in international communities (like the European Community) discussions of what best practices could be, in part because of the legal differences and connection to rights. See Jan Blommaert, “Language Policy and National Identity,” in An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method, ed. Thomas Ricento (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009), 238–54. 11. Daniel Levy, “The Transformation of Germany’s Ethno-Cultural Idiom: The Case of Ethnic German Immigrants,” in Challenging Ethnic Citizenship: German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration, ed. Daniel Levy and Yfaat Weiss (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 221–38; Kathleen Canning, “Class vs. Citizenship: Keywords in German Gender History,” Central European History 37, no. 2 (2004): 225–44; Egbert Jahn, German Domestic and Foreign Policy: Political Issues Under Debate, trans. Anna Güttel-Bellert, vol. 2 (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2015), 98–100. 12. Martina Wasmer and Achim Koch, “Foreigners as Second-Class Citizens? Attitudes Toward Equal Civil Rights for Non-Germans,” in Germans or Foreigners?: Attitudes Toward Ethnic Minorities in Post-Reunification Germany, ed. Richard D Alba, Peter Schmidt, and Martina Wasmer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 95–118; Elspeth Guild and Sergio Carrera, “Introduction: International Relations, Citizenship and Minority Discrimination: Setting the Scene,” in Foreigners, Refugees or Minorities?: Rethinking People in the Context of Border Controls and Visas, ed. Didier Bigo, Elspeth Guild, and Sergio Carrera (New York: Routledge, 2016), 1.
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13. That goal was particularly salient as local organizations acknowledged the permanency of many migration groups. Mark E. Spicka, “Cultural Centres and Guest Worker Integration in Stuttgart, Germany, 1960–1976,” Immigrants & Minorities 33, no. 2 (May 4, 2015): 117–40. 14. Wilfried Von Bredow, “Conscription, Conscientious Objection, and Civic Service: The Military Institutions and Political Culture of Germany, 1945 to Present,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 20, no. 2 (1992): 289–303. Italian citizens in West Germany mostly fell into this group as, despite their status as foreign citizens, they were European Community Member State nationals and consequently after 1964 (and even more after 1968) had legal rights to residence and work. 15. Amand Berteloot et al., Niederländisch an Schulen in Nordrhein-Westfalen (New York: Waxmann Verlag, 2001). 16. Klusmeyer and Papademetriou, Immigration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany, 18–19, 97–99; Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood, “Diversity and Nationality: Contemporary Developments in Five European Citizenship Regimes,” in Naturalization Policies, Education and Citizenship: Multicultural and Multi-Nation Societies in International Perspective, ed. Dina Kiwan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 78–79. For the importance of naturalization for migrants, see Elspeth Guild, The Legal Elements of European Identity: EU Citizenship and Migration Law (Frederick, MD: Kluwer Law International, 2004), 84. 17. Dimitris Christopoulos, “Defining the Changing Boundaries of Greek Nationality,” in Greek Diaspora and Migration Since 1700: Society, Politics and Culture, ed. Dēmētrēs Tziovas (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 111–23. 18. Yasemin Nuhoğlu Soysal, “Citizenship and Identity: Living in Diasporas in Post-War Europe?” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23, no. 1 (January 1, 2000): 1–15; Thomas Faist, “The Fixed and Porous Boundaries of Dual Citizenship,” in Dual Citizenship in Europe, ed. Thomas Faist (New York: Routledge, 2016), 17–60. 19. For a selection of media responses, see “Auch Ausländer müssen Grundrecht achten,” Landespresse- und Informationsamt, January 27, 1972; “NRW: Kein fremder Einfluss auf deutsche Schulen,” Landespresseund Informationsamt, February 8, 1972; “Antidemokratische importe nicht dulden”; “Kontroverse um griechische Lehrer: ‘Auch Gegner des Regimes sollen unterrichten’: Girgensohn hingegen betont ‘Vertrauen der Heimatbehörden.’” 20. Council of Europe, “Convention on the Reduction of Cases of Multiple Nationality and on Military Obligations in Cases of Multiple Nationality” (Strasbourg, May 6, 1963); Council of Europe, “Protocol Amending the Convention on the Reduction of Cases of Multiple Nationality and Military
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Obligations in Cases of Multiple Nationality,” Explanatory Report 95 (Strasbourg, November 24, 1977). 21. Jeffrey T. Checkel, “The Europeanization of Citizenship?,” in Transforming Europe: Europeanization and Domestic Change, ed. Maria Green Cowles, James A. Caporaso, and Thomas Risse-Kappen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 185–86; Patricia Ehrkamp and Helga Leitner, “Beyond National Citizenship: Turkish Immigrants and the (Re) Construction of Citizenship in Germany,” Urban Geography 24, no. 2 (2003): 127–46. 22. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 52–59; Robert Carle, “Citizenship Debates in the New Germany,” Society 44, no. 6 (October 1, 2007): 149; Egbert Jahn, “Integration or Assimilation of Ethnic Minorities. On the Future of Danish, Sorbian, Italian, Turkish and Other Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany,” in German Domestic and Foreign Policy (Berlin: Springer, 2015), 91–105. 23. For multiple discussions of European identity, see Jeffrey T. Checkel and Peter J. Katzenstein, eds., European Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 24. “I. Resolutions Adopted by the 2nd and 3rd Conferences of European Ministers of Education on Modern Language Teaching; II. Summary of Action Taken on National and International Level as a Follow-up of the Resolutions (Extract from the Document Min.Ed./London (64) 1),” Fourth Conference of Ministers of Education (Strasbourg, France: Council of Europe, February 28, 1964), Box 2431, Council of Europe. 25. Nothardt and Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg, “Schulpflicht und Schulbesuch von Ausländerkindern, insbesondere von Kindern ausländischer Gastarbeiter,” Kultus- und Unterricht, April 14, 1965, 176; Oberschulamt Nordwürttemberg to alle Staatlichen Schulämter, “Vorbereitungsklassen für Kinder italienischer Gastarbeiter,” September 23, 1968, EA 3/609 Bü 92, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. Randall Hansen pointed out that for adults, the West German government was not particularly invested in teaching migrants the German language (“Citizenship and Integration in Europe,” in Toward Assimilation and Citizenship: Immigrants in Liberal Nation-States, ed. C. Joppke and E. Morawska (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 91–92). 26. Gesetz zur Vereinheitlichung und Ordnung des Schulwesens in BadenWürttemberg, SchVOG. See Dr. Hahn, “Schulunterricht für Gastarbeiterkinder,” Schriftliche Antwort des Kultusministeriums (Stuttgart: Landtag von Baden-Württemberg, October 26, 1965), EA 3/609 Bü 67, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart; Nothardt and Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg, “Schulpflicht und Schulbesuch 1965.”
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27. Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 36. 28. Stratenwerth to Bundesministerium des Innern, “Schulunterricht für Kinder ausländischer Arbeitnehmer in der BRD”; and Ambassade Royale de Grèce en Allemagne to Kultusminister NRW, “Notiz 3452/64,” 64. The discussions between the Greek Consulate in Berlin and the West Berlin Senator for Education reached decided that in the 1960s, Greek schools did not make sense in West Berlin (Senator für Schulwesen to Leonidas Evangelidis, Griechische Militärmission, and Gerd Effler, “Unterricht für griechische Kinder,” September 8, 1971, B Rep 002 23,582, Landesarchiv Berlin). 29. For a brief discussion of the system in the mid-1960s, see International Bureau of Education, “Greece,” in International Yearbook of Education (Geneva: International Bureau of Education, 1966), 149–53. For an overview of the system’s development, see Anna Fragoudaki, “Greek Education in the Twentieth Century: A Long Process Towards a Democratic European Society,” in Greece in the Twentieth Century, ed. Theodore A. Couloumbis et al. (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 198–216. 30. Marcel Helbig and Rita Nikolai, Die Unvergleichbaren: Der Wandel der Schulsysteme in den deutschen Bundesländern seit 1949 (Bad Heilbrunn: Verlag Julius Klinkhardt, 2015). 31. Saul B. Robinsohn and J. Caspar Kuhlmann, “Two Decades of NonReform in West German Education,” Comparative Education Review 11, no. 3 (October 1967): 311–30; Christoph Führ, “Zur Koordination der Bildungspolitik durch Bund und Länder,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Christa Berg, Christoph Führ, and Carl-Ludwig Furck, vol. 1, 2 vols., 6 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1998), 68–86. 32. For a discussion of how much the states began to diverge between the FRG’s founding and the 2000s, see Helbig and Nikolai’s 2015 Die Unvergleichbaren. 33. George Mavrogordatos, “Orthodoxy and Nationalism in the Greek Case,” West European Politics 26, no. 1 (January 1, 2003): 117–36. 34. Eugene Rogan, “World War I and the Fall of the Ottomans: Consequences for South East Europe,” in Balkan Legacies of the Great War: The Past Is Never Dead, ed. Othon Anastasakis, David Madden, and Elizabeth Roberts, St Antony’s Series (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 59–65. 35. For more on the tragedy, see Renee Hirschon, ed., Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange Between Greece and Turkey (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003). 36. Petros Diatsentos, “Modern Greek: Founding Myths, Reform and Prescription Matters in 19th Century,” in Constructing Languages: Norms,
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Myths and Emotions, ed. Francesc Feliu and Josep Maria Nadal (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2016), 215–28. 37. James C. Albisetti, Secondary School Reform in Imperial Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 20–24, 294; H. Enderwitz, “Two German Educational Reform Schemes: The Rahmenplan and the Bremerplan,” Comparative Education Review 7, no. 1 (June 1963): 47; Torsten Gass-Bolm, Das Gymnasium 1945–1980: Bildungsreform und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Westdeutschland (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005), 89. 38. Regierungspräsident Köln to Kultusministerium des Landes NordrheinWestfalen, “Sprachkurse für Kinder griechischer Nationalität innerhalb des Regierungsbezirks Köln,” November 23, 1962, NW 141-114, Landesarchiv NRW. Citing that agreement, the Regierungsbezirk set the recommended weekly hours at five and told the Greek Consulate that it would pay the teachers the Greek Ministry of Education’s selected (with approval). 39. Constantine P. Charis, “The Problem of Bilingualism in Modern Greek Education,” Comparative Education Review 20, no. 2 (June 1, 1976): 216–19. 40. Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 288–320. 41. Elpida Vogli, “A Greece for Greeks by Descent? 19th-Century Policy on Integrating the Greek Diaspora,” in Greek Diaspora and Migration Since 1700: Society, Politics and Culture, ed. Dēmētrēs Tziovas (Burlington, V.T.: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 99–110; Christopoulos, “Defining the Changing Boundaries of Greek Nationality,” 114–16. 42. Elena Barabantseva and Claire Sutherland, “Diaspora and Citizenship: Introduction,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 17, no. 1 (March 11, 2011): 1–13; “Protokoll der 4. Tagung des Ständigen gemischten deutschgriechischen Ausschusses nach dem Kulturabkommen vom 17. Mai 1956 zwischen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Griechenland vom 7.-9. 11. 1966 in Munich” (Munich, November 9, 1966), B 304/3735, Az.3247/4, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 43. “2. Sitzung des Ständigen gemischten deutsch-griechischen Ausschusses in Bonn vom 23. bis 25. Januar 1961” (Bonn, January 25, 1961), B 96 876, PA AA. For information about early Greek emigration, particularly to the US, Konstantinos D. Magliveras, Migration Law in Greece (Frederick, MD: Aspen Publishers, 2011), 14. For an exploration of the role of the state in diaspora formation, see Elpida Vogli, “The Making of Greece Abroad: Continuity and Change in the Modern Diaspora Politics of a ‘Historical’ Irredentist Homeland,” in Diaspora and Citizenship, ed. Claire Sutherland and Elena Barabantseva (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2011), 14–33.
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44. Regierungspräsident Köln to Kultusministerium des Landes NordrheinWestfalen, “Sprachkurse für Kinder griechischer Nationalität innerhalb des Regierungsbezirks Köln”; Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Unterricht und Kultus and Stöhr, “Unterricht für Kinder griechischer Gastarbeiter; hier: Unterricht in griechischer Sprache,” zu IV 111926, December 17, 1962, MK 62244, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv. 45. Ambassade Royale de Grèce en Allemagne and Alexis Kyrou to Kultusminister NRW, “Schulung der Kinder der griechischen Gastarbeiter,” July 30, 1964, NW 388-14, Landesarchiv NRW. 46. Discussed in Chap. 2. Andreas M. Kazamias, “Modernity, State-Formation, Nation Building, and Education in Greece,” in International Handbook of Comparative Education, ed. Robert Cowen and Andreas M. Kazamias, vol. 22 (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2009), 239–56. 47. Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg and Leitmeyer to Oberschulämter Nordwürttemberg, Südwürttemberg-Hollenzollern, Nordbaden, Südbaden, “Schulpflicht und Schulbesuch von Ausländerkinder, insbesondere von Kindern ausländischer Gastarbeiter; hier: Unterricht in der Muttersprache (s. Erlaß U II 2111/29 v. 14. 04. 1965 Abschn. IV),” Erlaß U II 2111/123, December 23, 1966, EA 3/609 Bü 69, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. 48. Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg, “Schulische Betreuung der Gastarbeiterkinder” (Stuttgart, January 14, 1966), EA 3/609 Bü 67, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. Baden-Württemberg recognized the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in 1978, enabling Greek Orthodox instruction to move into West German public schools (Kultusministerium BW, “Bekanntmachung des Kultusministeriums über die Verleihung der Körperschaftsrechte an die Griechisch-Orthodoxe Metropolie von Deutschland,” Gesetzblatt Baden-Württemberg, no. 9 (1978): 202). 49. Sekretariat, “2. Sitzung der Arbeitsgruppe ‘Unterricht für Kinder von ausländischen Arbeitnehmern’ am 27./28. April 1971 in Winkel im Rheingau,” Ergebnisniederschrift (Winkel im Rheingau: Kultusministerkonferenz, April 28, 1971), B 304/2057, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. That concern would not diminish. (Winfried Bauer to Sütterlin, “Überforderung griechischer Kinder,” April 8, 1980, EA 3/609 Bü 101, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart). 50. “Protokoll der 5. Tagung des Ständigen gemischten deutsch-griechischen Ausschusses nach dem Kulturabkommen vom 17. Mai 1956 zwischen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Griechenland” (Athen, November 5, 1969), B 96876, Auswärtiges Amt; Oberschulamt Nordwürttemberg to Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg, “Errichtung einer privaten griechischen Hauptschule (Ergänzungsschule),” U II A 2111/444-1, November 6, 1971, EA 3/609 Bü 97, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart.
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51. Ambassade Royale de Grèce en Allemagne and Kyrou to Kultusminister NRW, “Schulung der Kinder der griechischen Gastarbeiter.” 52. Gerhard Stratenwerth to Bundesministerium des Innern, “Schulunterricht für Kinder ausländischer Arbeitnehmer in der BRD,” May 29, 1964, B 304/2058/2, Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Ambassade Royale de Grèce en Allemagne to Kultusminister NRW, “Notiz 3452/64,” November 10, 1964, 64, NW 388-14, Landesarchiv NRW; Kultusminister NRW to Sekretariat, “Deutsch-griechisches Kulturabkommen,” October 21, 1964, NW 141-115, Landesarchiv NRW. 53. Hanna-Renate Laurien and Chrysostomos Karapiperis, “Deutschgriechische Gespräch über die schulische Betreuung der Kinder griechischer Wanderarbeitnehmer in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, am 23. März 1976 in Bonn,” Protokoll (Bonn, June 20, 1976), B 93, Bd. 1154, PA AA; Auswärtige Amt, “Deutsch-griechische Expertengespräch über Fragen der schulischen Betreuung von Kindern griechischer Arbeitnehmer in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” Vermerk (Bonn: Auswärtiges Amt, January 27, 1977), B 93, Bd. 858, PA AA. In a talk with the Greek Embassy in 1976, the Greek legates finally agreed that German school certificates should be accepted in Greece (Kultusminister des Landes NordrheinWestfalen, “Information für griechische Eltern über Ziel, Organisation, Gestaltung und Bedeutung des Unterrichts ihrer Kinder in Vorbereitungsklssen an den Grundschulen/Hauptschulen des Landes Northrhein-Westfalen,” Informationspapier (Düsseldorf: Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, January 7, 1977), NW 388-52, Landesarchiv NRW). 54. Auswärtiges Amt to Deutsche Botschaft Rom, “Anerkennung der von italienischen Schülern deutscher Schulen in Italien erworbenen Reifezeugnisse durch die Italienischen Behörden,” November 14, 1967, PA AA. 55. Martin Ruhs and Philip Martin, “Numbers vs. Rights: Trade-Offs and Guest Worker Programs1,” International Migration Review 42, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 249–65. 56. Andreas M. Kazamias, “The ‘Renaissance’ of Greek Secondary Education,” Comparative Education Review 3, no. 3 (February 1, 1960): 22–27. Georgios Papandreou (1888–1968), Greek politician, served three times as prime minister of Greece (1944–1945, 1963, and 1964–65). In 1961, he founded the Center Union party (EK), with various liberal and dissatisfied conservative politicians. The party split in 1965, although existed nominally until 1977. During his long political career, he served in multiple ministries, including Finance, the Interior, and Education. In the 1920s, he reformed the Greek education system and, in the 1950s and 1960s, tried to continue those reforms (Harris M. Lentz, Heads of States and Governments Since 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1452–1453).
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57. Depending on local Länder school laws, supplementary schools usually came under some form of government oversight and faced certain restrictions. Article 7 Paragraph 4 of the Basic Law. Staatl. Schulamt Stuttgart, “Griechische Gastarbeiterkinder,” December 10, 1965, EA 3/609 Bü 68, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart; Oberschulamt Nordwürttemberg, “Anerkennung der griechischen Ergänzungsschule in Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt,” Erlaß U II 0973/45-112 (Stuttgart, July 14, 1966), EA 3/609 Bü 97, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. 58. Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg to Generalkonsulat der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Saloniki, “Eröffnung einer griechischen Privatschule in Stuttgart,” UA II 2111 – 3/26, March 13, 1969, EA 3/609 Bü 97, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. See also Oberschulamt Nordwürttemberg and Mayer to Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg, “Einrichtung von Vorbereitungsklassen für griechische Kinder im Kreis Ludwigsburg,” February 16, 1968, EA 3/609 Bü 97, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. The private school law was changed in 1968, (“Privatschulgesetzes in der Fassung vom 14. Mai 1968 (PSchG),” Gesetzblatt für BadenWürttemberg, May 14, 1968, 223). To attend, the children had to be released individually from their compulsory schooling requirements at a German school (Article 41 Paragraph 5 SchVOG) (Jochen Abr. Frowein, Zur verfassungsrechtlichen Lage der Privatschulen: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der kirchlichen Schulen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1979), 11). 59. Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 160–66; “Kulturpolitischer Jahresbericht 1967,” Cultural Report (Athens: Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, February 22, 1968), 1–5, PA AA; “Kulturpolitischer Jahresbericht 1968,” Cultural Report (Athens: Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, February 28, 1969), 1–5, PA AA. 60. “Kulturpolitischer Jahresbericht 1967,” 2. 61. “5. Sitzung des Ständigen Gemischten Deutsch-Griechen Kulturausschusses”; “6. Tagung des Ständigen Gemischten deutschgriechischen Ausschusses nach dem Kulturabkommen vom 17. Mai 1956 zwischen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Griechenland,” Protokoll (Bonn, November 29, 1972), B 96876, Auswärtiges Amt. 62. Sekretariat der Ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, “Vorbereitende Notizen für das deutschgriechische Expertengespräch am 23. 3. 1976,” Vorbereitende Notizen (Bonn: Sekretariat der Ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepulik Deutschland, March 1976), 2, B 93, Bd. 1154, PA AA. See also EURYDICE, The Greek Education System (Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1988); Fragoudaki, “Greek
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Education in the Twentieth Century: A Long Process Towards a Democratic European Society.” 63. For a discussion of the two countries relations in the 1950s and 1960s, see Dimitrios K. Apostolopoulos, “Greece and Germany in Postwar Europe: The Way towards Reconciliation,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 21, no. 2 (2003): 223–43. 64. Alexander Clarkson, Fragmented Fatherland: Immigration and Cold War Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945–1980 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 123–27. 65. Nonetheless, the West German Foreign Office, which still included many former Nazis in its ranks, tried to suppress migrants’ left-leaning political groups (Clarkson, Fragmented Fatherland, 126). For a discussion of the history of the (West) German Foreign Office during the Second World War through reform under Willy Brandt, see Eckart Conze et al., Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik (Munich: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2010). 66. Wende, “Mdl. Fragen Wende betr. Verwendung von Lehrbüchern mit tendenziösem Inhalt bei der Unterrichtung griechischer Gastarbeiterkinder in deutschen Schulen sowie Schutz der Lehrfreiheit gegen den Mißbrauch durch undemokratische Kräfte,” Drs. VI/480 (Bonn: Bundestag, March 11, 1970); Hansen, “Mdl. Fragen Hausen betr. Unterrichtung von Kindern griechischer Arbeitnehmer in der BRD durch griechische Lehrer an Schulen außerhalb öffentlichen Schulwesens,” Drs. VI/1253 (Bonn: Bundestag, October 14, 1970). 67. Wende, “Mdl. Fragen Wende”; Hansen, “Mdl. Fragen Hausen.” 68. “Withdrawal of Greece from the Council of Europe Speech by the Foreign Minister of Greece H.e. Mr. Panayotis Pipinelis at the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe,” International Legal Materials 9, no. 2 (1970): 396–410. 69. Joachim Möller, “The German Labor Market Response in the World Recession: De-Mystifying a Miracle,” Zeitschrift für Arbeitsmarktforschung 42, no. 4 (February 1, 2010): 328. 70. Klaus J. Bade, ed., Population, Labour, and Migration in 19th- and 20thCentury Germany (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 1–14; Klusmeyer and Papademetriou, Immigration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany, 93–96. 71. Lederer, “Unterricht für Kinder ausländischer Arbeitnehmer in der BRD” (Bonn: Auswärtiges Amt, February 17, 1972), B 93745, PA AA; Auswärtiges Amt and Lederer to Bundespressestelle des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, “Unterricht für Kinder ausländischer Arbeitnehmer,” March 7, 1972, B 93745, PA AA.
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72. See, for example John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005); Pierre Bourdieu, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, trans. JeanClaude Passeron, 2nd ed. (London: Sage Publications, 1990); Cristina Allemann-Ghionda, Schule, Bildung und Pluralität: sechs Fallstudien im europäischen Vergleich (Bern: P. Lang, 1999). For a discussion of how these ideas reach back to the Enlightenment, see James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 73. Jürgen Oelkers, “Pädagogische Reform und Wandel der Erziehungs wissenschaft,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Christa Berg, Christoph Führ, and Carl-Ludwig Furck (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1998), 217–44. 74. For more on the cultural contracts, see collection 97 in the PA AA. 75. For more on 1968 student movements, see Mark Roseman, ed., Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany, 1770– 1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Ingrid GilcherHoltey, Die 68er Bewegung: Deutschland, Westeuropa, USA (Munich: Beck, 2001); Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, eds., 1968, the World Transformed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 76. Deutscher Bundestag, “38. Sitzung: Schriftliche Antwort des Parlamentarischen Staatssekretärs Dr. Dahrendorf vom 13. März auf die mündlichen Fragen des Abg. Kern (Drs. 6/480 Fragen A 116 Und 117)” (Deutscher Bundestag, March 13, 1970), 1929 B-D; Deutscher Bundestag, “74. Sitzung: Schriftliche Antwort des Parlamentarischen Staatssekretärs Dr. von Dohnanyi Vom 14. Oktober auf die mündlichen Fragen des Abg. Hansen (Drs. 6/1253 Fragen A 98 Und 99)” (Deutscher Bundestag, October 16, 1970), 4118 C-D. Karl-Hans Kern was a Bundestag member from 1967 to 1976 and Karl Heinz Hansen served in the West from 1969 to 1981. 77. Kultusausschusses NRW, “Beschluß des Kultusausschusses vom 27. 01. 1972 zum ‘Eingriffs- bzw. Gestaltungsrecht’ von Vertretern ausländischer Staaten in den Unterricht an deutschen Schulen, zur Schulaufsicht und zur Einstellung und Entlassung ausländischer Lehrer,” Kabinettvorlage (Landessache) (Düsseldorf: Kultusministerium NRW, June 15, 1972). 78. For a selection of media responses, see “Auch Ausländer müssen Grundrecht achten,” Landespresse- und Informationsamt, January 27, 1972; “NRW: Kein fremder Einfluss auf deutsche Schulen,” Landespresseund Informationsamt, February 8, 1972; “Antidemokratische importe nicht dulden”; “Kontroverse um griechische Lehrer: ‘Auch Gegner des Regimes sollen unterrichten’: Girgensohn hingegen betont ‘Vertrauen der Heimatbehörden.’”
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79. Nonetheless their service under the West German school system did entail adherence to the West German Basic Law (Raffert, “Schrftl. Fragen Engholm (SPD) betr. Inhalte der im muttersprachlichen Unterricht verwendeten Lehrbücher und Einstellung ausländischer Lehrer für Ausländerkinder in der BRD: Drs. VI/3468,” Schrftl. Antw.: 190 Sitzung (Bonn: Bundestag, June 9, 1972)). 80. “Erfahrungsbericht über den Unterricht für Kinder ausländischer Arbeitnehmer,” II A 3. 36-6/1 Nr. 2679/73 (Düsseldorf, July 20, 1973), NW 388-33, Landesarchiv NRW. I did not see any of these claims in the archives I visited, but it is possible they exist. See also Lederer, “Unterricht für Kinder ausländischer Arbeitnehmer in der BRD”; Auswärtiges Amt and Lederer to Bundespressestelle des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, “Unterricht für Kinder ausländischer Arbeitnehmer.” 81. “Erfahrungsbericht über den Unterricht für Kinder ausländischer Arbeitnehmer.” Domhof sent a letter to the regional presidents telling them to alert him to any “anti-democratic, fascist propaganda material taught by Greek teachers,” but the problems raised were never more than minor (Kultusministerium NRW to Regierungspräsidenten, “Schulunterricht für Kinder griechischer Arbeitnehmer,” October 9, 1970, NW 388-14, Landesarchiv NRW). 82. The KMK established a small committee, including representatives from Hesse, Schleswig-Holstein, and North Rhine-Westphalia. 83. Beckmann, who had taught at a German School in Athens between 1957 and 1967, translated the 1969 Education of the Citizen by Antonius Anreas Tsitimbas. Oberstudiendirektor Beckmann put together the report at the behest of North Rhine-Westphalia’s Ministry of Education (Harald Kästner to Direktor des Internationalen Schulbuch-Instituts and Georg Eckert, “Griechische Schulbücher für den Unterricht von Kindern griechischer Arbietnehmer in der Bundesrepublik,” May 4, 1971, 143 N Zg. 2009/069, Nr. 179, NLA). 84. Beckmann, “‘Erziehung des Bürgers’ (für Schüler der 6. Volksschulklasse) von Antonius Anreas Tsitimbas, Athen 1969,” 1970, 143 N Zg. 2009/069, Nr. 179, NLA. The text included multiple descriptions of how “God gave freedom to people as a gift.” The children would also read “We Greeks must in our personal, familial, and social lives keep to the noble teachings of our church, with Christ as our guide and ruler of our beings.” 85. Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Ankara, “Kulturpolitischer Jahresbericht für 1971 aus der Türkei” (Ankara: Auswärtige Amt, March 8, 1972), B 97, Bd. 242, PA AA; Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Ankara, “Kulturpolitischer Jahresbericht für 1972 aus der Türkei” (Ankara: Auswärtige Amt, March 19, 1973), B 97, Bd. 364, PA AA. For a discussion of Turkish politics in the early 1970s, see Debbie
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Lovatt, Turkey Since 1970: Politics, Economics and Society (New York: Palgrave, 2000); Özgür Ulus, The Army and the Radical Left in Turkey: Military Coups, Socialist Revolution and Kemalism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011). 86. Georg Eckert (1912–1974), SPD member and historian from Braunschweig founded an institute for international schoolbook research in 1951 with the political nature of textbooks in mind. Later chair of the German UNESCO-Commission, Eckert promoted international cooperation in the understanding of history and hosted multiple bilateral and international schoolbook conferences. Seeking to promote peace, Eckert’s institute encouraged communication between different countries on textbook content and development. For information on the current state of the institution, see “Georg-Eckert-Institut – Leibniz-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung,” October 21, 2013, http://www.gei.de/. The “Arbeitssitzung von der Sachverständigengruppe “Griechische Schulbücher” met for the first time 27 May 1971 (Sekretariat der Kultusministerkonferenz, “Arbeitssitzung von der Sacherständiggengruppe ‘Griechische Schulbücher’” (Kultusministerkonferenz, May 27, 1972), B 304/2057/2, Bundesarchiv Koblenz). 87. Paul Betts, “The New Fascination with Fascism: The Case of Nazi Modernism,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 4 (October 2002): 541–58; Mohammad A. Chaichian, Empires and Walls: Globalization, Migration, and Colonial Domination (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 108–9. For more on Brandt’s Ostpolitik, see for example Carole Fink and Bernd Schäfer, Ostpolitik, 1969–1974: European and Global Responses (Washington D.C.: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 88. For more on the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano) see Stephen Hellman, Italian Communism in Transition: The Rise and Fall of the Historic Compromise in Turin, 1975–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). For more on the “Years of Lead,” see Andrea Hajek, Negotiating Memories of Protest in Western Europe: The Case of Italy (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 17–34. 89. Sekretariat der Kultusministerkonferenz, “Arbeitssitzung von der Sachverständigengruppe ‘Griechische Schulbücher.’” 90. Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz. 91. Raffert, “Schrftl. Fragen Engholm, Drs. VI/3468.” 92. “Erfahrungsbericht über den Unterricht für Kinder ausländischer Arbeitnehmer.” 93. Ray C. Rist, Guestworkers in Germany: The Prospects for Pluralism (New York: Praeger, 1978), 190–92. 94. An idea already being implemented in North Rhine-Westphalia.
CHAPTER 5
Equal Opportunities for West German Foreign Residents (1968–1977)
In April 1976, the daily Kölnische Rundschau based in Cologne announced “For Foreign Children a ‘Bomb is Ticking.’” Ruth Lingenberg’s article explained that children of migrant workers, particularly those with Turkish citizenship were “threatened by youth unemployment.” According to Lingenberg, the boys, unable to find work, were being pushed toward crime while the girls were likely to end up as prostitutes. Lingenberg argued that the West German federal and Länder governments needed to act quickly to integrate non-German children into school and society. Integration was the only path to escape those harrowing futures and to prevent the development of ghetto communities.1 The possible ghettos Lingenberg feared concerned journalists and politicians across West Germany during the 1970s. Various West German television news channels displayed images of cityscapes like Harlem in the United States, warning that these rough, depressed neighborhoods would be West Germany’s future if the state did not address the growing “foreigner problem.”2 Those reporters were extrapolating wildly from a real situation. During the “guest worker period” from 1955 to 1973, the West German federal and Länder governments encouraged the recruitment of millions of workers. Over the late 1960s and early 1970s, those workers as well as other groups of new migrants moved out of company provided barracks into housing across most major West German cities. Their goals were often to find privacy as well as have space for families. But, possessing limited funds and facing housing discrimination, guest workers and their families were often pushed into concentrated © The Author(s) 2019 B. Lehman, Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1949–1992, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97728-7_5
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areas, leading to the development of “little Turkeys” or “little Italys” in cities like Stuttgart and West Berlin.3 It was these areas many journalists and politicians worried would become ghettos. In the journalists’ imaginations, the people living in those districts would become criminals and crime-ridden areas would expand out like a disease, destroying the West German social order.4 Part of the West German fear of the ghetto revolved around its emphasis on welfare and state security. As a welfare state, a major point of the government was to ensure a basic standard of living and mitigate causes of discrimination. That egalitarianism was, in turn, supposed to ensure state security.5 To have a significant portion of the West German population living under West German living standards undermined the entire premise of the state. To fix that issue, the Länder governments turned among other measures to fine-tuning the main tool already at their disposal: public schooling. The imagined end goal of public schooling had, however, changed over the 1960s as the international concept of the right to education expanded to necessitate secondary school. Internaitonal bodies like the Council of Europe had started stressing the connection between the right to education and the right to work as opposed to emphaszing schooling’s connection to ethnic identity. The Länder Ministries turned from explicitly discussing teaching Germanness to talking about equal opportunity and access to the multiple layers of skilled labor. That conceptual turn was harly new. Since the mid-1960s, schools were supposed to provide children with non-German citizenship equal education opportunities alongside West German children, thereby also enabling them to integrate into West German society (as discussed in previous chapters). But access to education was a problem.6 Usually living in working-class neighborhoods, foreign children often went to schools with limited resources and fewer teachers than wealthier neighborhoods. Public schooling may have been one of the main tools for overcoming socio-economic disparity but the situation often fell short of this ideal. Officially responsible for their education as a human right, part of the question on the table was how far the Länder would go to make that equality a reality. This chapter looks at a brief period around 1970 when the European Ministries of Education—including the West German—emphasized the importance of extending the right to education to “foreign fellow residents.”7 Analyzing what that claim meant, this chapter examines first how those European states defined the right to education particularly in regards to equality of opportunity. Addressing that concept, the chapter then explores how arguments regarding integration and equality for all mapped onto discussions of specifically “Turkish guest workers,” who became the
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largest minority group in West Germany and—for West German citizens— the quintessential “foreigners.” Intersectionality was important here: most children with Turkish citizenship (hereafter “Turkish children”) faced challenges in the school on account of social othering as well as socioeconomic background.8 Finally, the chapter analyzes the programs the Länder Ministries developed to promote the late 1960s definition of equality, focusing in particular on preschool education and homework help. Looking at a decade in which the European and Länder Ministries tentatively promoted integration, this chapter argues that despite an emphasis on education as a human right, continued legal and social othering combined with limited programmatic implementation led to failure in attempts to ensure equality of opportunity.
Secondary Schooling as Part of the Right to Education During the 1960s, students took to the streets to protest limited education access, arguing among other points that inadequate working-class access to schools was a sign of societal inequality. In one 1965 Associated Press picture, a photographer captured a group of students in the midst of a protest in Frankfurt am Main. In the image, students stood around the Fountain of Justice (Gerechtigkeitsbrunnen) with its statue of Lady Justice brandishing a sword in one hand and scales in the other. Lady Justice watched over the students, glasses perched on their noses and smiles on their lips, holding signs warning “Emergency: Only 5% of College Students are Working Class Children” while other students’ signs lamented the fact that at the age of 18 in the United States, 71 percent of youths still attended school but in West Germany only 15 percent did.9 According to the protesters, those numbers represented institutional inequality and discrimination. Those two points—social inequality and secondary schooling—featured as a central component of demands across Europe for full equality during the late 1960s and early 1970s.10 Over 1968 and 1969, people took to the streets to protest increasing authoritarianism associated with US and/or Soviet imperialism, claiming that imperialism often led to social stratification and exacerbated poverty. Most of the myriad groups protesting shared the view that the contemporary world-system was corrupt and discriminatory, condemning working-class families to lives on lower social levels. To combat that authoritarianism, in countries from
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West Germany to Turkey, students and workers demanded access to education—particularly upper-secondary schooling—and jobs. Schoolchildren with working-class backgrounds had limited education opportunities generally and students with foreign citizenship even less. In West Germany, those marches and uprisings became a story promoting the idea of absolute freedom and equality.11 The 1949 West German Basic Law included an anti-discrimination clause, stating that people were not supposed to face disadvantage because of their background.12 Yet, as the education crisis of the mid-1960s demonstrated, society privileged families with white-collar jobs. The children of “working-class families” (Arbeiterfamilie), as the young student’s sign in the 1965 photo declared, only occasionally finished secondary school at all and rarely attended upper-secondary institutions (Gymnasia), much less university. In order to have equal access to the workforce, to politics, as well as to power, all people needed equivalent access to all levels of secondary schooling.13 In short, the Länder needed to act in order to fulfill their constitutional responsibilities.14 Addressing global concerns over secondary school and college, groups like UNESCO, the Council of Europe, and the new Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, founded in 1960) stepped up their efforts to promote education. Those organizations had been advocating for the inclusion of secondary schooling under compulsory school laws since the beginning of the decade.15 During the 1950s and early 1960s, however, basic literacy had been a greater global concern. Children needed basic skills before they could attend secondary school. As most European states improved access to primary school education and improved literacy rates, however, those supranational organizations turned toward advanced compulsory education. Tying secondary school graduation to human rights, those supranational organizations emphasized the connection of social, political, and labor equality to education. On that basis, they argued that for a state to claim all citizens had equal rights, said state needed to ensure its citizens’ equal education opportunities. It was only a small step to ask how non-citizens fit into the equation. By the mid to late 1960s, those supranational bodies expanded their definition of the right to education from basic literacy to equal education opportunities—which included access to and graduation from secondary schooling. Supranational organizations like the Council of Europe argued the growing technologization of industrialized societies—including most
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of western Europe—meant that semi-skilled and skilled jobs demanded ever higher levels of schooling.16 Children with only four or five years of primary schooling would be condemned to unskilled labor and possible unemployment. Unskilled labor was fine if children wanted it, but not if they were constrained to it. To combat that problem, the Council of Europe argued that all European states needed to provide their citizens not only with access to secondary schooling, but also enable them to graduate. General enrollment and basic literacy were now insufficient.17 As with host-country citizens, non-citizens without the opportunities to finish their secondary degrees were unlikely to be able to attend vocational school or find skilled employment. Including secondary schooling as part of the right to education reflected the changing goals behind school away from a focus on ethnonationality and toward labor. In countries like West Germany, the link between labor and secondary education was particularly stark. In the Federal Republic of Germany, secondary education, already technically compulsory (but frequently not enforced) was supposed to be about preparing youths for specific kinds of employment.18 Based on merit, teachers and/or parents selected children to enter upper-secondary, middle-secondary, or lower- secondary schools. In the mid-1960s, approximately 20–25 percent of students (up from 5 percent to 10 percent in the immediate post-1945 world) transitioned into upper secondary (Gymnasium, running to the 13th grade), which prepared them to attend university and/or become skilled professionals (e.g., government officials, professors). Teachers then selected 15–20 percent of students to attend middle-secondary schools and move toward business and industry employment (e.g., nurses, engineers). The rest of the students—the majority—continued on at the lower-secondary level, which prepared them for vocational training.19 These students would become factory workers and hairdressers, or find careers as cooks and garbage collectors. Although selection was supposed to be based on merit, students transitioning into the higher-secondary levels were usually from families with a tradition of higher levels of education.20 These children had the time to absorb the requisite cultural capital from their parents and surroundings. Sorted at the end of primary school, often the fourth grade, a child’s future options were all but set by the age of 10 or 11.21 The emphasis on the connection between education and labor swept through the European Community (EC) member states. The European Community (and the OECD) were designed to focus on economic development and resource management, which included labor. Initially, the EC member states explicitly did not hold jurisdiction over cultural issues
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including education (as discussed in Chap. 3). Instead, the six founding member states assumed that the Council of Europe (of which each was a member) would coordinate cultural issues.22 Over the early 1960s, however, the Commission of the European Community established that vocational training was a precursor to labor and thus fell under EC jurisdiction. The Commission further (correctly) declared that children could not access vocational training if they did not have public primary and secondary schooling. Based on that connection, the EC claimed jurisdiction over all schooling from start to finish. Because of its emphasis on resources and the economy, the EC effectively declared that, from its standpoint, the point of schooling was to prepare children for eventual employment. To avoid squandering future human resources, children needed equal education opportunities today.23 Following that logic, the children of migrant workers were European Community resources and they—like their host country’s school-age citizens—needed equal education opportunities. In 1968 the European Community Regulation 1612/68 on freedom of movement declared in Article 12 that the children of workers who were EC member state nationals had the right to admittance into “general educational, apprenticeship and vocational training courses” on the same basis as host-country nationals.24 Given that most of the labor migrants crossing the European continent through the end of the 1960s either already fit into this category or possibly would soon (including Turkey), most states (including West Germany) assumed that the regulation covered all children of labor migrants regardless of citizenship status.25 After all, Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom were set to accede to the European Community in 1973 and—after the fall of their respective dictators/military governments—Greece, Portugal, and Spain entered talks about joining as well (becoming members in 1981, 1986, and 1986, respectively).26 As European (future European Community) labor migrants, the citizens of these countries were clearly European workers. Therefore, logic dictated their children needed access to education in order to ensure that these future resources were not wasted. The Commission of the European Community explicitly wanted its decision to extend beyond resource management and into human rights. In 1974, the European Courts made that desire law when it tried a case filed by Donato Casagrande (born 29 December 1953) against the City of Munich.27 The plaintiff, Casagrande, was not a German citizen. Born in Italy, he moved to West Germany with his father, who then died leaving his son an orphan. During the 1971/72 school year (when he was 17/18),
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Casagrande attended the Fridtjof-Nansen-Realschule (a middle-secondary school) in Munich and applied for state support allocated for “youths [in higher levels of secondary school] without sufficient means.”28 While Casagrande had clear financial need, the Fridtjof-Nansen-Realschule denied his request as the relevant Bavarian law specified the recipients had to be “Germans, … stateless persons, or aliens benefiting from the right to asylum.”29 Technically, Casagrande was none of those.30 But Casagrande took his case to court and won. Based on Regulation 1612/68, the European Courts declared that access to education “on the same basis” as host-country nationals included funding. Schoolchildren needed access that mitigated socio-economic difference in order to have equal opportunities. To exclude children based on citizenship status violated the idea of equality.31 In doing so, it further contradicted the idea of human rights for all that the EC sought to promote.32 Ensuring that children from working-class families, be they nationals or not, had the chance to enter and graduate secondary school was hardly a simple task. In North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), for example, between 1971 and 1973 some 25 percent of German children failed to complete their secondary school certificates. Those children, usually born in the country, had started West German public school in the first grade and had time to finish the various requirements for advancing in the rigid West German school systems. With only approximately eight percent of children with non-German citizenship attending West German schools for between six and nine years (as of 1971), most members of these groups did not have the chance to finish secondary school requirements at all. Partly in consequence, children with non-German citizenship in NRW left school without their certifications at a rate of almost 69 percent (851 of 1236 in 1969/70).33 That was a problem in regard to equality, but in an environment of low unemployment most European states still believed these future laborers would still be able to work (i.e., not unemployable). But, as the issue persisted and those communities grew, some people across western Europe began to raise concerns over human rights for migrant workers’ children and the possible rise of the ghetto communities discussed in the introduction. For many states, the 1973 oil crisis and associated global recession underlined the importance of integration and equality of opportunity as well as increasing concerns over the possibility of ghettoized communities. As unemployment rose for the first time since the end of the Second World War, states like West Germany and France halted their foreign labor
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(e.g., guest worker) recruitment programs. But associated migrant populations did not vanish. Instead, secondary migration for the purpose of family reunification increased.34 The West German federal government had refused to consider fully the ramifications of its recruitment practices and was largely unprepared for the shift.35 While many of the Länder Ministries of Education had emphasized the need for integration, the federal government only now acknowledged that the country was home to more than four million residents who were not West German citizens (of whom 360,363 were schoolchildren).36 As only a small portion of migrant workers and their families left the country in the mid-1970s, the West German federal and Länder governments had to address the rights of the remaining millions of permanent residents in the country (most of whom had the right to reside).37 West Germany—as well as other EC member states—began to argue that the “floods” of migrants needed to be policed and contained in order to combat lawlessness and social decay. Yet, that containment and associated othering also promoted the segregation and ghettoization of migrant populations.38 As most of the European Community member states faced similar concerns, the promotion of education shifted from focus on equal opportunities to also encompassing the prevention of ghettoization. Education was still, after all, one of the main avenues of integration for migrant children, who in turn provided points of contact between their parents and local citizenry. Toward that end, the EC developed a 1975/76 action program, which emphasized the importance of education for “migrant workers’ children” for integration.39 As the West German representative Franz Domhof (from NRW) declared regarding the associated West German programs in 1975, “in that way the beginnings of communication should successfully get off the ground and friendships develop between the German and foreign children,” thus avoiding “ghettoization.”40 As Lingenberg pointed out in her 1976 article, children with Turkish citizenship needed schooling for full social mobility.41 In the post-1945 world, most European states claimed people should be equal, regardless of their backgrounds. Because social mobility was attached to education, to realize equality all children required entrance to all levels of primary and secondary schooling. If that right to education was, however, a human right then it needed to be extended to all people—not only citizens—particularly if a state’s goal was to avoid developing a ghetto class. Yet, children did not have identical experiences based solely on their socio-economic status partly as many children strongly identified by ethnic group. Indeed,
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children with foreign citizenship often identified as Turkish or as members of other ethnic minority groups. These children did not necessarily want to integrate and be German even as they identified as West German residents.
Depicting Turkishness as the Quintessential West Germany Other Searching through newspaper image archives for pictures of Berlin’s Kreuzberg district from the 1960s and 1970s uncovers dozens of images of streets lined with worn-down buildings. Those tired buildings, with their missing toilets and lack of central heating, still remembered the war.42 They carried the marks of their fallen comrades, the brick line of a chimney visible in the empty spaces where buildings once stood. A handful of small, barren parks, the occasional billboard advertisement (for beer or for cigarettes), and plenty of graffiti (“Wer sich nicht wehrt lebt verkehrt”) energizing the images. Adding color were the grocers, with their deep red cherries and bright green leeks arranged on tables just outside the stores’ doors. Adding life, children moved through the images, playing on the streets and in the vacant lots.43 They built tiny forts out of construction materials and smiled at the camera as they climbed over furniture abandoned in the street or jumped in puddles at the curbside.44 As those photos moved later into the 1970s, several grocers’ signs switched from German into Turkish and more photographers labeled the children “Turkish” in their captions.45 Kreuzberg had become a “migrant neighborhood” as so-called guest workers and their families moved into these possible future ghettos. Rents were low, even if inflated beyond what many ethnic Germans were willing to pay for a building with limited plumbing and no bathrooms.46 But ethnic German families frequently had other options while landlords in refurbished or new neighborhoods often refused to rent to Turkish families. And for many renters there were benefits to living in “little Turkeys.” Groups of children were entitled to education support programs in their mother tongues and culture that individuals were not. And, as communities developed, these became places to buy okra and a decent cup of tea that only a Turkish grocery or imbiss would provide.47 They were communities on the way to becoming diasporas.48 Diaspora development flew in the face of Länder Ministries’ emphasis on integration, particularly as many groups with Turkish citizenship developed their own communities outside of Turkish state oversight. These
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communities were integrating into their surroundings but not on the West German or Turkish states’ terms. Instead, many groups set up their own community centers and religious—usually Islamic—instruction. Without full support from either state and facing ongoing housing and other forms of discrimination, the highly heterogeneous groups with Turkish citizenship were developing their own day-to-day practices suiting their own needs and forming what were, effectively, new communities entirely.49 As this section explains over the following pages, for the Länder that diverse non-German community development looked dangerous in part because these groups did not conform to recognizable German standards instead representing both ethnic and socio-economic otherness. To begin with, many diasporic communities failed to reflect what the Länder viewed as an appropriate, middle-class German existence. That perception of impoverished otherness prompted the Länder to question whether “Turkishness” was even compatible with Germanness, leading to the idea that Turks needed to assimilate (as opposed to integrate) for their own good. Toward that end, most Länder Ministries—including Baden- Württemberg’s—tried to limit access to consular and national instruction with the claim that those classes limited integration. Yet, to control their foreignness, most Länder Ministries—including in NRW—also encouraged the Turkish government to expand consular instruction particularly with an eye toward controlling religious indoctrination. If the groups had to be other, the Ministries preferred that they toed a definable, state managed line. The resulting mess within the Länder Ministries rather contradictorily suggested that to be equal, the children with Turkish citizenship needed to be more German even as the Länder declared the children could never be German because they were too foreign. The Länder advocated for integration in part because of the perception of socio-economic disparity that developed, which in turn exacerbated fears of ghettoization. These pictures of children playing in the streets with construction materials did not depict a stereotypical, West German middle-class existence. Instead, the images suggested that the children lacked material comforts and access to equal opportunities in school or work. To enable the children to get out of those ghettos, the Ministries decided they needed to focus on integration in the West German school system. With Ministries like the one in Baden-Württemberg worried that native language and cultural instruction would get in the way, they argued that trying to balance integration and cultural maintenance would overburden the students. In order to secure the children’s economic futures in Germany and permit social
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mobility, they needed to focus on a German education. The catch here was that the Länder Ministries still assumed a connection between schooling and ethnic identity, meaning that to attend German schools only would be to imbibe Germanness, which would deny a connection to their heritage. That apparent lack of wealth depicted in the photos became a concern in part because of West Germany’s position as a welfare state. As discussed above, a welfare state was expected to ensure its citizens with a basic quality of life by making social mobility possible and providing an economic safety net. People in West Germany were not supposed to be impoverished and play in dirty streets. In the 1950s, scholars like liberal sociologist Helmut Schelsky claimed that West Germany had developed into a “flattened middle-class society” (Mittelklassegesellschaft).50 Legally, the country did not have an aristocracy any longer and theoretically any child in West Germany could achieve any social or political position. Between the claim of full mobility and the state-sponsored social net, purportedly West Germany no longer had lower classes. The existence of millions of taxpayers, however, who could not rely on that social net on account of their citizenship status and additionally did not have the rights of citizens or full access to schools suggested that West Germany had an underclass.51 And, because that possible poverty was explicitly associated with non-citizens, class became associated with foreignness generally and Turkishness in particular.52 This was then the situation that the West German governments (federal and Länder) were supposed to prevent from becoming permanent. Common West German stereotyping of “Turks” in newspapers and government reports did not stop with connections as an impoverished working class. Landlords and neighbors, politicians and educators cast heterogeneous individuals with Turkish citizenship as a monoethnic, “Oriental,” Muslim other.53 It was difficult to see each of the more than one million Turkish residents in Germany in 1974 (217,000 aged 15 or younger) as independent individuals, with diverse beliefs and familial traditions.54 Instead, in part because most people across West Germany in the 1970s had little understanding of what Islam entailed, many West German journalists opted to lean on the Oriental stereotype. In so doing, West German politicians and journalists (sometimes unintentionally) suggested that those million individuals with Turkish citizenship possessed an aggressive, barbaric masculinity or an exotic, docile femininity.55 Several journalists for publications like Der Spiegel went a step further, depicting Islam as an inherently violent religion promoting patriarchal oppression. Combining those two stereotypes, many journalists and politicians began
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using the image of the “headscarf girl” as a symbol of the supposed misogyny built into Turkishness. As that view spread, individuals “belonging to a Muslim group” were more likely to face discrimination in West Germany (as well as in France and Great Britain) than most other foreign groups.56 Over the early and mid-1970s, the conflation of different identity labels including socio-economic status, nationality, and religious affiliation meant that for many people across West Germany, “Turkishness” encapsulated the foreign other against which Germanness could be defined. In consequence, several journalists began emphasizing how contact between “Turkish children” and West German society—particularly through the schools—could save them. Public schooling would enable “Turks” to raise themselves out of their cultural as well as economic poverty. It would bring them into contact with German society, encouraging integration. Some journalists went a step further and suggested that West German schools would actively civilize the children and offer the little headscarf girls escape from oppressive fathers and brothers.57 Although many school administrators knew the latter image was usually absurd, the beliefs were pervasive enough for many journalists and politicians to argue that the children’s integration through the schools would enlighten and free them.58 For many politicians and school administrators, the children’s very non-German identities (not only working-class backgrounds) were holding them back. Even as the Länder Ministries turned to schools to promote equal opportunities and socio-cultural integration, the Turkish government began advocating its citizens’ right to maintain their cultural heritage, which had not been a focus in the 1960s. In fact, in 1964 when the Länder Ministries first asked the Turkish government about setting up consular instruction and preparatory classes, the Turkish government had expressed interest.59 But, with only 3000 children with Turkish citizenship in West Germany for the start of the 1965 school year (see Graph 5.1), their schooling could not be a priority. Instead, through the 1960s, the Turkish government focused on education within Turkey in order to combat high illiteracy. The Turkish compulsory school system featured five years of primary schooling with 26 hours of instruction a week. Technically, the government had expanded compulsory schooling into the secondary levels in 1961 (from five to eight years), but most students did not have access to the upper levels.60 But then not all children had access to a primary school or, if they did, class sizes of upwards of 50 pupils often made learning difficult. In c onsequence,
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Graph 5.1 Schoolchildren with Turkish citizenship in West German general primary and secondary schools, 1965–1992. (Kultusministerkonferenz, “Der Schulbesuch ausländischer Schüler in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1965/66 – 1978/79: Allgemeinbildende Schulen” (Bundeseinheitlichen Schulstatistik, August 10, 1979), 15, 28, 41, 53, 67, B 93, Bd. 745, PA AA; Kultusministerkonferenz, Ausländische Schüler und Schulabsolventen 1970 bis 1986, vol. 102, Statistische Veröffentlichungen der Kultusministerkonferenz (Bonn: Sekretariat der Kultusministerkonferenz, 1987), 4, 14, 18, 69, 82, 95, 109; Kultusministerkonferenz, Ausländische Schüler und Schulabsolventen 1984 bis 1993, Statistische Veröffentlichungen der Kultusministerkonferenz (Bonn: Sekretariat der Kultusministerkonferenz, 1994), 37, 40, 45, 49, 53, 59, 63, 68, 74, 79, 83, 87)
through the 1960s, the Turkish government focused on expanding primary school availability. Nonetheless, teacher shortages—in part because of emigration to countries like West Germany—made that an almost-unattainable goal, which exacerbated the lack of teachers as not enough people were being trained.61 Reflecting their goals in Turkey, the Turkish state may not have sent many teachers in the 1960s but it did have a clear goal
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for Turkish citizens abroad. Children in places like West Germany should be Turkish (attuned to secular Kemalism) but first and foremost those citizens needed to learn to read and write and perhaps even attend vocational schooling.62 In the 1960s, the Länder Ministries responded to the Turkish state’s goals differently. Baden-Württemberg’s Ministry of Education (hereafter BW Ministry) supported Turkey’s goals, arguing that schoolchildren with Turkish citizenship needed to integrate into West German schools anyway. Toward that end, the BW Ministry focused on providing preparatory classes and extra German language instruction for children with Turkish citizenship and let language and cultural instruction go.63 Other Länder—notably NRW—focused on cultural instruction than integration. The NRW Ministry claimed that such an emphasis ensured the right to personhood, meaning the development of an ethnonational identity corresponding to citizenship. The NRW Ministry believed that ethnonational education so vital that it established and staffed its own version of consular instruction with teachers from among local Turkish residents.64 The differences between Länder programs reflected ongoing political emphases. States focused on social order and labor stressed integration. Those committed to personhood and ethnonational identity tried to ensure language and cultural maintenance. Neither the preparatory classes nor the NRW-run language and cultural instruction were designed, however, to promote full literacy in either German or Turkish, the completion of secondary school certificates, or to provide access to vocational training. Instead, the classes the Länder Ministries designed specifically for “guest worker children” during the 1960s (discussed in Chaps. 3 and 4) promoted access to school and basic literacy in both Turkish (to maintain cultural connections) and German (in order to integrate). Full German literacy was particularly unlikely as children, although they were promised around 10 hours of weekly language instruction, often received between zero and two hours. Turkey had a teacher shortage but so did West Germany, particularly for German as a second language.65 In consequence, as the Council of Europe and European Community pushed secondary school completion as a minimum educational standard, thousands of children with non-German citizenship had barely been provided the chance to learn to read. That limited education access proved to be a growing problem as the number of Turkish schoolchildren in West Germany rose exponentially over the 1970s (see Graph 5.1), prompting new efforts from the Turkish government on its citizens’ behalf. Between population growth and the
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1968 Turkish student movements, the Turkish government had to reconsider its stance on schooling for emigrants.66 Local protests in Turkey and widespread political unrest across Europe triggered Turkish politicians to worry that the growing number of Turks who spent time abroad could incite more social unrest upon their return. Their fear centered in part on probable exposure to new political ideas and the possibility of migrants becoming radical agitators. Turkish politicians found it particularly worrisome that Turkish citizens abroad could come into contact with communist ideologies.67 Furthermore, as some migrants did return, there was a clear cultural and social distance between re-migrants and the local population, making the returnees stand out as foreign others regardless of their citizenship status.68 Addressing both its internal and expatriate citizens, the Turkish state began to reconsider what precisely constituted Turkishness.69 In the 1970s, the Turkish government intentionally emphasized language and Islam as markers of Turkishness for its citizens abroad in addition to history and geography.70 For the government after the state’s foundation in 1923, “Turkishness” had been officially about the desire to live together, compatible with religious and ethnic diversity.71 In contrast to the state’s claims, however, the Turkish government’s naturalization practices in the interwar period had already required a high level of cultural and religious assimilation.72 Still, in official parlance through the 1960s, Turkishness was about having Turkish citizenship, living in Turkey, maybe being a secular Muslim, and—hopefully—attending Turkish schools in order to become literate.73 With the government recording 96 percent of the population as Muslim by 1945 (often regardless of personal belief), perhaps the link between religion and ethnonational identity was unsurprising. But the state emphasis on secular Kemalism meant that until the 1970s, the Turkish government did not offer religious instruction in public schools and certainly did not push the issue in West Germany.74 The Turkish government began actively addressing its émigré education in 1971, two months after the military coup.75 As a Turkish delegation informed the Länder Ministries of Education during a West German-Turkish Cultural Commission meeting, the new Turkish government felt that “with 60,000 Turkish schoolchildren in West Germany” the issue needed to be addressed (see Graph 5.1).76 Toward that end, the Turkish government began sending teachers to West Germany in order to impart Turkishness. Unlike the Greek government’s aims, however, the Turkish government wanted its students to integrate into West German society as well as
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maintain their Turkishness (reflecting 1964 and 1971 goals of the Standing Conference of Länder Ministers of Education). In fact, the 1971 negotiations between West Germany and Turkey about education for Turkish children in the FRG focused particularly on establishing parameters for preparation classes designed to integrate newly arriving schoolchildren into the West German school system.77 After all, the sharp rise in family reunification particularly after 1973 meant a high (and growing) number of school-age Turkish individuals migrating to West Germany whose education needed immediate attention.78 But in contrast with the 1960s, the post-1971 Turkish government wanted its citizens to be Turkish as well—specifically a “Turkish” matching the government’s vision. That ideal Turkishness now included religion alongside language, history, and geography. Because many families wanted to pass their beliefs and traditions on to their children, both in Turkey and in West Germany, many parent groups and Islamic religious organizations established afterschool and weekend “Qur’an schools,” often called Hodschas. While most iterations of the classes differed, they were generally composed of a single-sex group of pupils and taught by a Turkish-speaking imam.79 Both the Turkish and Länder governments took issue with those classes. In the 1970s, in order to take control of Islamic instruction and reflecting increasingly conservative currents running through Turkish politics, Turkey included some religious instruction in the schools and opened more colleges for instructors.80 Even as many of the Länder, such as NRW, tried to encourage integration, the Ministries made it clear that Islam was not part of Germanness. Instead of incorporating it into the schools alongside various Christian and ethical instruction, most of the Länder Ministries refused to offer Islamic instruction in the public school. Most of the states did not want to officially permit the instruction in part because many West German politicians and educators did not know what Islam entailed.81 Furthermore, some reports of bullying and the use of corporal punishment reached the Länder Ministries.82 Nonetheless, as the “clubs” were separate from the West German school system, the Länder governments had little to no control over the classes, making them nervous about possible radical messages the attending children might learn. To try and balance the difference, the Länder Ministries, particularly in NRW and Bavaria, encouraged the Turkish government to include religious
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instruction during consular classes once the Turkish teachers had received training.83 In consequence, even as the Länder Ministries stressed integration, keeping non-Christian religious instruction outside public schools promoted the idea of ethnic incompatibility. Although the Länder Ministries were focused on integration, they could not deny the Turkish state the right to develop classes for its citizens or prevent Turkish schoolchildren from attending. Those Länder had already passed regulations guaranteeing a level of access to cultural instruction and then signed that right into law with bilateral treaties. Baden- Württemberg was not pleased to have to set up those extra mother language and cultural classes in the early 1970s, but it had already ceded sovereignty.84 Furthermore, as mother language and cultural instruction staffed by Turkish teachers from Turkey now included religious instruction, those classes were even more important. Consequently, even as most Länder Ministries advocated integration over cultural maintenance, the number of mother-tongue and cultural classes (usually held five hours weekly) exploded. In Baden-Württemberg alone, the number of courses rose from 10 in 1971 to 351 in 1977.85 Even as the Turkish government advocated a Turkish ethnonational identity for its citizens abroad, the Länder were undecided on the advisable balance between integration and cultural maintenance on account of both ideological and political reasons. Technically, international recommendations suggested the Länder should support both. On the one side, the Länder had committed to promoting equality of opportunity, which through the 1970s meant state-enabled access to all levels of the West German school system. And, on the other side, those children—based on local and international law—had the right to maintain their heritage (both ethnonational and religious identity). Yet many West German educators felt that Turkishness and Islam were inferior to Germanness, leading many Länder Ministries to believe that only integration to the point of assimilation could help children with Turkish citizenship rise above their ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. But many Länder also promoted return migration or preferred its residents with Turkish citizenship adhere to a state related, Turkish ethnonationality rather than develop their own, separate identities and beliefs removed from state oversight. Taken together, the federal and Länder governments supported consular courses but believed extra mother language and cultural instruction implied a rejection of Germanness.
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Piloting Successful Integration Through Preschool and Homework Help The Länder Ministries encouraged and funded several pilot programs to promote integration. Among them, in the early 1970s, the West German Federal Government released a series of posters highlighting the isolation of foreign children in Germany. One poster showed a dark-haired girl sitting on a stool with her guitar. Her mouth turned down, suggesting sorrow. Another featured a young, dark-haired boy in a knit sweater and shorts staring at a soccer pitch. He stood alone, his profile only partly visible, the direction of his gaze inviting the viewer to join him in looking at the group of blonde boys playing together. Emphasizing isolation, the posters were part of a government program calling on parents (presumably German) to include these children (presumably foreign citizens) in West German public schools and youth programs.86 As discussed above, during the early and mid-1970s, the West German federal and Länder Ministries of Education were committed to promoting equal opportunities for the children of migrant workers. Toward that end, the KMK agreed in 1971 that integration needed to be the primary goal of education with cultural maintenance relegated to an important second place.87 In the spirit of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Ministries viewed themselves as responsible for providing some sort of programs to ensure that children could integrate. Toward that end, the Ministries, frequently with Council of Europe funding, began a series of pilot programs focused particularly on access (through preschool programs) and retention (through homework help). Part of the decision to begin pilot programs stemmed out of concerns that the “double goal” from the 1964 Recommendations was too much for most students, perhaps even preventing integration and leading to ghettoization. Expressing the views of many of his colleagues, Member of Baden-Württemberg’s parliament, Willi von Helden (SPD) raised his concerns on the topic in 1969.88 Von Helden claimed that non-German schoolchildren needed to “attend German schools and come out of the ghetto, in which they otherwise must live for their entire lives.”89 A few months later, in the West German Bundestag, Lothar Späth (CDU) expressed similar worries, arguing that children with non-German citizenship were not receiving enough exposure to German schools. Fearing inadequate integration, he argued that extra mother-tongue and cultural classes needed to be cut back.90
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Up to the end of the 1960s, the main definition of integration for non- German citizens in the Federal Republic was German language proficiency. To overcome language barriers, the Länder Ministries had agreed that children with non-German citizenship should have access to extra German language instruction. Children needed enough German language to integrate socially and be able to hold an (unskilled) job. Toward that end, alongside in-class exposure, the child was entitled to various extra support programs.91 Yet, as discussed above, those classes had been continually understaffed, underfunded, and faced problems with material access particularly as no schoolbooks for children’s German as a second language courses existed in the early 1960s. Now, in the mid-1970s, the children needed enough language competency to allow them to complete secondary school, which effectively meant the children were supposed to become almost trilingual (in Turkish, German, and English) due to foreign language requirements. Like many of their colleagues, both von Helden and Späth believed that without completing a full West German education (primary and secondary), migrant children could not learn sufficient German, but English and the children’s native languages were also often an issue. Children with a strong command of high German had a decided leg-up in public schools, particularly in those Länder separating children into secondary school in the fourth grade.92 Starting out with a disadvantage, children with non- German backgrounds usually spoke a different native language at home. Adding to the problem, those children often did not know the state language the Länder Ministries assumed had to be their mother language based on their citizenship (i.e., not all Turkish citizens spoke Turkish, as discussed in Chap. 7). In consequence, for most children tackling that double goal meant an expectation the children master German, start learning English (or French), and pick up the state language associated with their citizenship, particularly if they migrated after the age of ten. Becoming effectively bi- or trilingual by that age in order to be tracked into middle or upper secondary schools was more than most children could do without state support.93 Adding to that challenge, according to West German education researchers, children with migrant backgrounds were further disadvantaged in the public schools on account of their parents’ unfamiliarity with the system. West German primary schools were built on a half-day structure, providing classes in the morning and expecting stay-at-home mothers to assist with homework in the afternoons.94 Working parents or parents
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who were unfamiliar with the system had trouble guiding their offspring through schoolwork.95 Even if the children had stay-at-home mothers, they ran into the problems associated with what Pierre Bourdieu called “symbolic power.” State systems supposedly designed to promote equality often reinforced socio-economic divides by rewarding children based on achievements determined by those already in power, reifying their control. In the West German school system, the knowledge—the social and cultural capital—necessary to demonstrate merit to advance into middle- and upper-secondary schools often developed in upper-class children’s homes and through social exposure rather than during the short school day.96 Coming from non-German, mostly working-class families, children with foreign citizenship frequently did not have access to the necessary knowledge. To overcome disadvantages associated with background in accordance with European Community and West German anti-discrimination law, the Länder (working with the EC and Council of Europe) developed a series of pilot programs aimed at integration, including preschool promotion.97 Preschool education was supposed to help overcome class divides by teaching the necessary social, cultural, and lingual capital before the child started primary school. Access to preschool would enable children from working-class backgrounds (including migrant backgrounds) to begin acquiring that capital at the same age as children from families of skilled and professional workers. Children from diverse social backgrounds entering the first grade would then start on a level playing field.98 For foreign children, early childhood education would expose them to the German language and local culture in a school environment thereby increasing the probability of successful integration (i.e., completion of a secondary school certificate, entrance into higher levels of secondary school, and future employment).99 To rectify the situation, the North Rhine-Westphalian government financed the expansion of the 1973 Denkendorf Model for Language Assistance (named for the location of development), which promoted preschool language acquisition. The Denkendorf Model was premised on the idea that the number of legally foreign children was growing, particularly due to in-country births. These children needed to learn German as early as possible, specifically with the goal of “someday learning a vocation.” Toward that end, the Model advocated that children with foreign, particularly Turkish, citizenship attend preschool classes with teachers dedicated to imparting German.100 Yet, the reason the North Rhine-Westphalian
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government funded those programs was partly based on the Ministry of Education’s belief that children over the age of 10 were beyond help. In order to save “the children of migrant workers” from a “ghetto education,” they had to integrate properly. The NRW Ministry felt that the window of opportunity had closed for older children and argued against wasting money and effort.101 Although agreeing that preschool education would help, in Baden- Württemberg, the Ministry of Education under Wilhelm Hahn (CDU) expressed concern over NRW’s focus on young children. Even if it was difficult, Hahn claimed that it was important that the “guest worker youths” attend West German schools in order at the very least to receive the German language instruction to which they were entitled. Under Hahn’s leadership, the Ministry’s official stance was that “foreign guest workers should be treated the same as German workers.” After all, Hahn argued, the successful training of these youths was “in the interest of the guest workers as well as the state of Baden-Württemberg.”102 To ensure that all children were reached, Hahn agreed that preschool education would help. Working with different church groups and trying to increase state coverage, the BW Ministry made an effort to provide all young children with places in preschool, including the children of foreign workers. Although the state could not provide complete coverage, by the end of 1976, Baden-Württemberg offered almost one-third of the preschool spots in the Federal Republic, 15 percent of which went to the children of foreign workers.103 Preparing children for school was only a first step; children also needed to graduate to have a full range of employment options. Toward that end, the Länder Ministries also attempted to set up programs to promote retention. One of the main—and easiest—programs setup across the country was extra assistance with homework (Silentien). The West German Federal Ministry of Education first encouraged the creation of volunteer homework help programs in 1970. UNESCO had labeled 1970 “the year of education” to encourage the spread of compulsory education and the expansion of secondary schooling across “the developing world.”104 The West German federal government decided its “guest worker populations” fit into that framework. With a tiny budget, the Federal Ministry sent out brochures and pamphlets to encourage school administrators to establish local “Homework Help for Foreign Children” programs—and inspiring the posters described above.105 In order to keep costs down, the programs relied on volunteer labor to offer assistance with homework. In theory,
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those volunteers, preferably the parents of German children from within the local community, would increase contact between West German and foreign citizens, thereby encouraging acceptance and integration. Furthermore, the existence of the program was supposed to encourage children to believe they were meant to succeed, overcoming the “not for me” mentality often associated with school.106 The effects of the homework help programs were never clearly ascertained, but the idea of homework help became increasingly popular with the different Länder as well as both German and non-German parents. The North Rhine-Westphalian and Berlin Education Administrations both instituted regular programs. Initially, the local schools bore the bulk of the costs because of the structure of the West German school systems. Over the next decade, however, the federal and Länder governments heavily subsidized the programs as the social and political importance of secondary school completion climbed.107 To at least some extent, the programs worked in that they were popular. Although both preschool and homework help programs were popular, they did not fully facilitate equality or integration. The main issue was the same as had plagued integration classes and extra German language instruction: shortages. None of the Länder had sufficient funding to provide seats in preschool or homework help for all interested parents’ children. With insufficient seats, German parents complained that German resources were being used for non-German children. Furthermore, many of the preschools were privately operated, which meant fees. In consequence, middle-class families often filled those programs instead of the working-class families that the West German federal and Länder Ministries were at least theoretically trying to reach. Similar problems led to some issues with homework help. Working-class German parents argued that their children needed support as well. They asked why “foreigners” should receive help when their children did not. Their children were disadvantaged too, as the West German federal and Länder governments had acknowledged a decade prior.108 Further contributing to the enrollment gap, even as some seats in preschool (or other programs) became available, many parents belonging to West German minority groups hesitated over enrolling their children. Some were concerned about the possibility of schools promoting indoctrination. For example, parents with Turkish citizenship expressed concern that their children would be given an explicitly Christian preschool education.109 Since the Catholic Caritas and the Protestant Diakonisches Werk
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(two welfare organizations associated with the two largest West German churches) ran 80 percent of all childcare (Krippen and Kindergarten), preschool (Vorschule), and afterschool (Hort) programs, the parents’ concerns were understandable.110 Lingenberg’s 1976 article emphasized the idea that the state was supposed to enable “foreign children” to succeed in West German schools for the benefit of West German society as well as the children themselves. What Lingenberg and most other journalists did not address was how the state was supposed to enable that integration.111 As a good welfare state, the Länder were supposed to facilitate success. And, in fact, the Länder Ministries did try to establish programs for integration in line with the individual state’s specific politics. Yet, over the 1970s, the global socio-political environment shifted as state budgets shrunk and unemployment rose. Without the money, teachers, or school materials to fulfill their plans, most schoolchildren with non- German citizenship were forced to do without access to either preschool or homework help. As the West German media would continue to point out through the end of the decade, “Turkish children” attended “ghetto schools” in “ghetto neighborhoods.”112 Many non-German schoolchildren continued to drop out and, as the mainstream press in 1978 decried, these groups were often, by the new educational standards, illiterate in two languages.113 Yet, thousands of children with non-German citizenship did succeed in the schools. The majority were underserved, marginalized, and ghettoized but some rose through the system despite the odds they faced. In the subsequent years, more and more children would transition into higher levels of secondary schools (as Graph 5.1 illustrates), attend universities, and go on to become members of parliament, doctors, and teachers, not to mention artists and local community leaders.114
Conclusion The education offered to the children of non-citizens in West Germany reflected both international and local assumptions about migrant groups within European society more generally. Here, the idea that Europe—both in terms of the European Community and Council of Europe—wanted to promote was that all children had a right to education within local schools and under the same laws as children with host-country citizenship: equality was supposed to apply to all residents as humans. Whereas in the 1950s
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the country of citizenship was supposed to take responsibility, now European states argued that ongoing mass migration across the continent meant the host country needed to do so. Otherwise, too many migrant children would fall through the cracks. That, in turn, would mean that the European states had failed in their duty to promote human rights and protect the social order. Complicating attempts to address the rights of non-citizens was the fact that institutional discrimination down class lines affected non-German children as well as German. Children do not experience life solely based on single, state-enforced identity labels. They are instead individual, with life choices dependent on multiple, intersecting identity points as well as individual experiences. Here, West German residents with foreign citizenship socio-economic background mattered for their access to schooling perhaps just as much as their ethnonational identities. Although some people in West Germany truly believed that their society was supposed to be a flattened middle class, social background continued to play a significant role in scholastic success. Children—regardless of citizenship—with working-class backgrounds were significantly less likely to be tracked into middle- or upper-secondary schools or to finish lower secondary. That institutionalized discrimination was magnified for foreign citizens. Most families with Turkish citizenship faced housing discrimination, among other rejections, often meaning that children with non-German citizenship lived in poorer neighborhoods and attended schools with even less materials and funding. That social exclusion combined with limited resources hardly presented equal opportunities in the West German system. Reframing the right to education in terms of host-country responsibility meant that the host countries—including the Federal Republic—were supposed to figure out how to ensure equal opportunities despite those disadvantages. As a welfare state and on account of anti-discrimination clauses, the Länder (still with jurisdiction over education) were theoretically obligated to enable children’s access regardless of background. Identifying difference in social and lingual capital as the main problems, the Länder Ministries of Education tried to equalize access through preschools and retention through homework help. Limited implementation (due to lack of space, money, and teachers), however, and West German citizens’ pushback (complaints of using “German” resources for foreigners) meant the Länder only reached a limited number of children with
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non-German citizenship. Many, especially children with Turkish citizenship, fell through the cracks. Even if the Ministries had provided sufficient access, part of the problem with the idea of integration in West Germany was the Länder’s assumption that integration was about Germanness. If West German schools taught German social values, history, language, as well as preparing children for the West German workforce, then public schools taught Germanness. Extra cultural instruction, mitigated that indoctrination, but also added to students’ workloads. Yet, associated with foreign state loyalty, many West German politicians assumed that attending those classes indicated a rejection of Germanness, which for many politicians and educators implied a failure to integrate.
Notes 1. Hartwig Suhrbier, “Bildungsplan für Ausländer: DGB fordert schulische Integration und Chancengleichheit,” Frankfurter Rundschau, June 2, 1973; Ruth Lingenberg, “Bei Ausländerkindern ‘tickt eine Zeitbombe’: Von der Jugendarbeitslosigkeit sind sie besonders bedroht,” Kölnische Rundschau, April 15, 1976. 2. Maria Stehle, Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German Culture: Textscapes, Filmscapes, Soundscapes (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), 12; Nermin Abadan-Unat, Turks in Europe: From Guest Worker to Transnational Citizen (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 110–11. 3. Joti Bhatnagar and Schole Raoufi, eds., “The Children of Guest-Workers in the Federal Republic of Germany: Maladjustment and Its Effects on Academic Performance,” in Educating Immigrants (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 113–36; Riva Kastoryano, Negotiating Identities: States and Immigrants in France and Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 30, 71–72. 4. For more on the process of finding housing, see Jennifer Miller’s Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s to 1980s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 78–106. In reality, “Germans” were just as statistically likely as West German “foreign fellow residents” (ausländische Mitbürger) to commit crimes. The latter groups, however, did face housing and employment discrimination (Stehle, Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German Culture, 12; Abadan-Unat, Turks in Europe, 110–11; Rob T. Guerette, Migration, Culture Conflict, Crime and Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 2016), 94–97). 5. Ole Borre, The Scope of Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 165–66; Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Leo Hansen, and Stephen Castles,
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Migration, Citizenship, and the European Welfare State: A European Dilemma (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 137–40. 6. Hartwig Suhrbier, “Bildungsplan für Ausländer”; Marieke Boom, “Modellversuch für Lehrer: Deutsch als Fremdsprache: Ein Schritt zur Chancengleichheit für Ausländer-Kinder,” Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, April 20, 1979. 7. Walter Fröhder, “Vom Gastarbeiter zum Mitbürger auf Zeit: Die Gewerkschaften wollen die Rechte der Ausländer erweitert sehen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 31, 1972. 8. For more on the concept of intersectionality, see Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law,” Harvard Law Review 101, no. 7 (1988): 1331–1387; Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 4 (2013): 785–810. 9. “At 18, schoolchildren and students in the USA 71%, FRG 15%” (Associated Press, Studenten während einer Demonstration in Frankfurt am Main im Jahr 1965, 1965, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, http://www.bpb.de/geschichte/deutsche-geschichte/geschichte-derraf/49201/apo-und-studentenproteste). 10. The implication here was twofold: First that low numbers of students were transitioning into either middle- or upper-secondary schools and second that children were dropping out before graduation. For more information, see Carl-Ludwig Furck, “Das Schulsystem: Primarbereich— Hauptschule—Realschule—Gymnasium—Gesamtschule,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Christa Berg, Christoph Führ, and Carl-Ludwig Furck, vol. 1, 6 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1998), 282–347. 11. Immanuel Wallerstein, “1968, Revolution in the World-System,” Theory and Society 18, no. 4 (July 1, 1989): 431–49; Ingo Cornils, Writing the Revolution: The Construction of “1968” in Germany (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016), 218. 12. Articles 1, 2, and 3 specify the federal government was supposed to prevent discrimination in terms of sex, ancestry, race, language, homeland and origin, faith, or religious and political views. For a discussion of the Basic Law and immigration, see Christian Joppke, “Not a Country of Immigration: Germany,” in Immigration and the Nation-State: The United States, Germany, and Great Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 67–70. 13. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, and Utopia (New York: Central European University Press, 2011), 206.
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14. Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959), 241–79; Klaus Larres and Panikos Panayi, The Federal Republic of Germany Since 1949: Politics, Society and Economy Before and After Unification (New York: Routledge, 2014), 49; Terri E. Givens and Rhonda Evans Case, Legislating Equality: The Politics of Antidiscrimination Policy in Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 42–43. 15. Founded in 1960, the OECD’s mission is now to “promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being” (OECD, “About the OECD,” accessed April 29, 2018, http://www.oecd.org/about/; Richard Woodward, The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), eBook (New York: Routledge, 2009); Mary Ellen Dunn, Reclaiming Opportunities for Effective Teaching: An Institutional Ethnographic Study of Community College Course Outlines (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 43). 16. Committee of Senior Officials and Jean Thomas, “Educational Problems Common to European Countries,” Collective Report ESC/HF (61) 3, Third Conference of Ministers of Education (Strasbourg, France: Council of Europe, October 16, 1961), Box 2428, Council of Europe. See also European Commission and Luce Pépin, The History of European Cooperation in Education and Training: Europe in the Making—an Example (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publication of the European Communities, 2006), 43–58. The International Bureau of Education and UNESCO made the same argument (International Bureau of Education, “Educational Trends in 1970: An International Survey” (Geneva: International Bureau of Education, 1970), 8). 17. “DE Council of Europe CS/1/LB/Ck/1355,” Draft Agenda (April 3, 1969), B 91, Bd. 302, PA AA. The conference took place between 20 and 22 May 1969 in Versailles. See also “Educational Opportunity for All: Paper Prepared by the O.E.C.D. on Development of Secondary Education Policy Implications,” Sixth Conference of Ministers of Education (Versailles: OECD, May 1969), 4, B 91, Bd. 301, PA AA. 18. Anthony J. La Vopa, Grace, Talent, and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Andreas Hadjar and Rolf Becker, “Education Systems and Meritocracy: Social Origin, Educational and Status Attainment,” in Education Systems and Inequalities: International Comparisons, ed. Andreas Hadjar and Christiane Gross (Chicago: Policy Press, 2016), 231–58. 19. Volksschule was divided in 1964 into primary and lower-secondary school levels, but the transition was often meaningless as the newly named institutions often remained in the same buildings and structures (Furck, “Das
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Schulsystem: Primarbereich—Hauptschule—Realschule—Gymnasium— Gesamtschule,” 294). 20. Furck, “Das Schulsystem: Primarbereich—Hauptschule—Realschule— Gymnasium—Gesamtschule”; Brian M. Puaca, Learning Democracy: Education Reform in West Germany, 1945–1965 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 41; Marcel Helbig and Rita Nikolai, Die Unvergleichbaren: Der Wandel der Schulsysteme in den deutschen Bundesländern seit 1949 (Bad Heilbrunn: Verlag Julius Klinkhardt, 2015), 30–38. 21. “Educational Opportunity for All: Paper Prepared by the O.E.C.D. on Development of Secondary Education Policy Implications,” 2–3. 22. European Commission and Luce Pépin, History of European Cooperation, 61–64; Gisella Gori, Towards an EU Right to Education (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2001), 19. The six included France, West Germany, Italy as well as Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. 23. With a clear connection between the labor market and job training, the European Economic Community could lay “down [ten] general principles for implementing a common vocational training policy.” Among other points, the Decision (63/266/EEC) called for a common training policy to contribute to the continued “harmonious development” of the national economies and the common market. See Council of the European Communities, “63/266/EEC: Council Decision of 2 April 1963 Laying down General Principles for Implementing a Common Vocational Training Policy,” Official Journal P 63 (April 20, 1963): 1338–41; European Commission and Luce Pépin, History of European Cooperation, 22–23, 56–58. For a discussion of the decision, see Euan Reid and Hans H. Reich, eds., Breaking the Boundaries: Migrant Workers’ Children in the EC (Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 1991), 182. 24. The Council of European Communities, “Regulation (EEC) No 1612/68 of the Council of 15 October 1968 on Freedom of Movement for Workers Within the Community,” Official Journal L 257, October 19, 1968, 0002–0012; European Commission and Luce Pépin, History of European Cooperation, 63–64, 72–73; Klaus Dieter Beiter, The Protection of the Right to Education by International Law: Including a Systematic Analysis of Article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2006), 189– 90. The Conference of Ministers of Education of member states of the European Community would reaffirm that cooperation in the education sector was indeed a task for the European Community (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Wissenschaft, “Conference of Ministers of Education of European Member States,” Reply to EP/4114/4 (Bonn, June 15, 1973), 2, B 91, Bd. 431, PA AA).
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25. For a discussion of 1960s and 1970s labor immigration, see Stephen Castles, Heather Booth, and Tina Wallace, Here for Good: Western Europe’s New Ethnic Minorities (London: Pluto Press, 1984). For some information on the relationship between Turkey and the European Community during this period, see Nicholas Rogers, A Practitioner’s Guide to the EC-Turkey Association Agreement (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1999). 26. The Federal Republic agreed with the Council. For a discussion of developing European cooperation, see Samantha Currie, Migration, Work and Citizenship in the Enlarged European Union (New York: Routledge, 2016), 11–32. 27. Donato Casagrande v Landeshauptstadt München, 1974 European Court Reports (European Court of Justice 1974). 28. Under Bavarian law poorer children in secondary school between the fifth and tenth classes could apply for 70 DM a month as a “benefit for encouraging education” (Article 2 of the Bavarian Law on Educational Grants (Bayerisches Ausbildungsförderungsgesetz)). 29. Casagrande Case, 1974 European Court Reports. Stateless persons were defined under BGBl. From 25 April 1951 and as amended on 9 September 1965 BGBl. I, p. 1273. 30. Michèle Finck, Subnational Authorities in EU Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 136–39. 31. Bayerisches Verwaltungsgericht. The European Court of Justice is designed to ensure that European law is applied equally in each of the member states. The Court has one judge from each member state. For more on the European Court of Justice, see for example Maurice Adams et al., Judging Europe’s Judges: The Legitimacy of the Case Law of the European Court of Justice (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2013); Dennis F. Thompson, Restoring Responsibility: Ethics in Government, Business, and Healthcare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 318–21; Beiter, The Protection of the Right to Education. 32. For a discussion of the idea see Gori, Towards an EU Right to Education, 342–50; Kirsten Shoraka, Human Rights and Minority Rights in the European Union (New York: Routledge, 2010). 33. Furthermore, 40 percent of the schoolchildren in middle- and uppersecondary schools only reached the mid-level certificate (Mittlere Reife, equivalent to a high school diploma but not sufficient for entering university) in 10 years of schooling (Ministerium für Arbeit, Gesundheit und Soziales des Landes NRW, “Sitzung des Arbeitskreises III ‘Schulische und weiterführende Ausbildung’ des Landesbeirats für ausländische Arbeitnehmer am 15. 1. 1973,” Ergebnisniederschrift (Düsseldorf, 1973), NW 670-142, Landesarchiv NRW). Franz Domhof, head of the
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Ministry of Education’s department for “the education of migrant workers’ children’s instruction in their mother-tongue,” reminded the interministerial group of that problem (Franz Domhof, “Die Entwicklung des Unterrichts für ausländische Schüler in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland” (Dissertation, Gesamthochsch., 1982)). 34. Anthony M. Messina, The Logics and Politics of Post-WWII Migration to Western Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 37. To address the issue, the French government doubled down on its citizenship laws emphasizing jus soli in order to push integration among its migrant worker populations (predominantly from the former colonies). 35. After all, as Swiss author Max Frisch famously said, “We asked for workers and people came” (See Yannick Lemel and Heinz Herbert Noll, eds., Changing Structures of Inequality: A Comparative Perspective (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2003), 288; Doris Meissner, “Managing Migrations,” Foreign Policy, no. 86 (April 1, 1992): 69). 36. Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany, Statistisches Jahrbuch für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1976), 65, 94–96. 37. For information on the right to reside, see Jeffrey Jurgens, “The Legacies of Labor Recruitment: The Guest Worker and Green Card Programs in the Federal Republic of Germany,” Policy and Society 29, no. 4 (November 1, 2010): 348–49. 38. Maria Stehle, “Narrating the Ghetto, Narrating Europe: From Berlin, Kreuzberg to the Banlieues of Paris,” Westminster Papers in Communication & Culture 3, no. 3 (October 2006): 48–70. 39. In connection with a 1974 Social Action Plan (“Council Resolution of 21 January 1974 Concerning a Social Action Programme,” Official Journal of the European Communities, no. C 13 (February 12, 1974): 1–4; Council of the European Communities, “Draft ‘A’ of the Council Resolution on an Action Programme for Migrant Workers and Their Families: Report from the Working Party on Social Questions to the Permanent Representatives Committee,” Draft (Brussels: European Community, December 5, 1975), BAC 14/1989 44, Commission of the European Union; Karen M. Anderson, Social Policy in the European Union (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 146–47). 40. Franz Domhof, “Gedanken zur Verbesserung des Unterrichts für Kinder ausländischer Arbeitnehmer in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” 1975, 1, BAC 144/1987 53, Commission of the European Union. 41. See also Ruth Herrmann, “Die soziale Zeitbombe tickt: Immer mehr junge Ausländer werden in die Kriminalität gedrängt,” Die Zeit, November 3, 1978; “Die soziale Zeitbombe tickt nicht überall: Bremens
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Schule an der Schmidtstraße als Modell für die Integration,” Stuttgarter Zeiting, September 21, 1979. 42. Sule Özüekren and Ebru Ergoz-Karahan, “Housing Experiences of Turkish (Im)Migrants in Berlin and Istanbul: Internal Differentiation and Segregation,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36, no. 2 (February 1, 2010): 362–63. 43. Andreas Wolf, “So sah Kreuzberg in den 70er Jahren aus,” Berliner Zeitung, April 18, 2017, https://www.bz-berlin.de/berlin/friedrichshain-kreuzberg/so-sah-kreuzberg-in-den-70er-jahren-aus; “Kreuzberg 1970s Stock Photos and Pictures,” Getty Images, accessed May 9, 2018, https://www.gettyimages.com 44. The Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum (on Adalbertstraße) takes visitors inside some of those children’s apartments, highlighting the fact that these buildings were home to families (“FHXB Museum: Home,” accessed May 8, 2018, https://www.fhxb-museum.de; H. Julia Eksner, Ghetto Ideologies, Youth Identities and Stylized Turkish German: Turkish Youths in Berlin-Kreuzberg (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2007)). 45. Wolf, “So sah Kreuzberg in den 70er Jahren aus.” 46. Families with Turkish citizenship often did not know the law or their rights as tenants (Cihan Arin, “The Housing Market and Housing Policies for the Migrant Labor Population in West Berlin,” in Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Elizabeth D. Huttman, Wim Blauw, and Juliet Saltman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 199–208; Özüekren and Ergoz-Karahan, “Housing Experiences of Turkish (Im)Migrants in Berlin and Istanbul”). 47. Maren Möhring, Fremdes Essen: Die Geschichte der ausländischen Gastronomie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2012). 48. Janroj Yilmaz Keles, Media, Diaspora and Conflict: Nationalism and Identity amongst Turkish and Kurdish Migrants in Europe, Google eBook (New York: I.B.Tauris, 2015); Bahar Baser, Diasporas and Homeland Conflicts: A Comparative Perspective, eBook (New York: Routledge, 2016), Chap. 8. 49. Abdelmalek Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant, trans. David Macey (Malden, MA: Polity, 2004). 50. See Hans Braun, “Helmut Schelskys Konzpt der ‘nivellierten Mittelstandsgesellschaft’ und die Bundesrepublik der 50er Jahre,” Archive für Sozialgeschichte 29 (1989): 119–223. Helmut Schelsky (1912–84) was a German sociologist. Educated during the Third Reich, he served in the Wehrmacht. After the Second World War Schelsky became a professor in 1949 and helped establish Bielefeld University.
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51. Martin Wengeler, “Von ‘Belastungen’, ‘wirtschaftlichem Nutzen’ und ‘politischen Zielen’: Die öffentliche Einwanderungsdiskussion in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz Anfang der 70er Jahre,” in Einwanderungsdiskurse, ed. Thomas Niehr and Karin Böke (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2000), 135–57; Stephen Castles, “The Social Time Bomb: Education of an Underclass in West Germany,” in Ethnicity and Globalization (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2000), 46–62. 52. Stephen Castles, Ethnicity and Globalization (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2000), 191–96. 53. Brittany Lehman, “The Limits of Cultural Rights: The Public Debate on Schooling for Moroccan and Turkish Girls in West Germany in the 1980s,” in Gendering Post-1945 German History: Entanglements, ed. Friederike Brünhöfener, Karen Hagemann, and Donna Harsch (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), Forthcoming. 54. Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany, Statistisches Jahrbuch 1976, 65. Humans, after all, have difficulty comprehending the reality behind large numbers. 55. The stereotype of the “Oriental” built on centuries of stories and images (Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Todd Curtis Kontje, German Orientalisms (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); B. Venkat Mani, Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (University of Iowa Press, 2007), 95; Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013)). 56. Özüekren and Ergoz-Karahan, “Housing Experiences of Turkish (Im) Migrants in Berlin and Istanbul,” 359. 57. Katherine Pratt Ewing, Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 169–72. 58. Lehman, “The Limits of Cultural Rights.” See also Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 85–93; Jürgen Zimmer, “In the Service of Empire: Geographers at Berlin’s University between Colonial Studies and Ostforschung (Eastern Research),” in Hitler’s Geographies: The Spatialities of the Third Reich, ed. Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 67–92; Elena Pnevmonidou, “Veiled Narratives: Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen as a Staging of Orientalist Discourse,” The German Quarterly 84, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 21–40. 59. As discussed in Chap. 3, the eight official “guest worker countries” included Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yugoslavia (Ulrich Herbert and Karin Hunn, “Guest Workers and Policy on Guest Workers in the Federal Republic: From the Beginning of
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Recruitment in 1955 until Its Halt in 1973,” in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968, ed. Hanna Schissler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 187–218; Mehmet Dösemeci, “The Turkish Drawbridge: European Integration and the Cultural Economics of National Planning,” Contemporary European History 22, no. 4 (November 2013): 627–47). 60. Without the necessary infrastructure, however, the law was not implemented (International Bureau of Education, “Turkey,” in International Yearbook of Education (Geneva: International Bureau of Education, 1970), 146–47; OECD, Reviews of National Policies for Education: Basic Education in Turkey 2007 (Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2007), 30–31, http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/content/book/9789264030206-en). 61. Turkish emigration further destabilized the country and access to school as skilled labor moved to places like West Germany in order to receive higher pay than the Turkish state could afford. Part of that destabilization stemmed from the thousands of individuals trained for skilled labor, including 9000 primary school teachers, leaving the country to work in West German factories (Ali Arayıcı, “Les disparités d’alphabétisation et de scolarisation en Turquie,” International Review of Education 46, no. 1–2 (May 2000): 117–46). For more on education reform, see Sam Kaplan, The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 39–56. 62. The state was not a traditional sending country and did not have prior experience trying to influence the identities of its citizens abroad. Only during the Korean War did the country open its borders to its citizens’ emigration (John M. Vander Lippe, “Forgotten Brigade of the Forgotten War: Turkey’s Participation in the Korean War,” Middle Eastern Studies 36, no. 1 (January 1, 2000): 92–102). For more on women’s and family labor migration, see Esra Erdern and Monika Mattes, “Gendered Policies—Gendered Patterns: Female Migration from Turkey to Germany from the 1960s to the 1990s,” in European Encounters: Migrants, Migration, and European Societies Since 1945, ed. Rainer Ohliger, Karen Schönwälder, and Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 167–85. 63. As Baden-Württemberg required the sending county governments to pay for consular instruction, getting “foreign children” out of preparatory classes and into West German classroom instruction with afterschool consular instruction and German language instruction saved the state money (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Wissenschaft and Mikoleit to Parlamentarischen Staatssekretär et al., “EG-Vorschlag einer Richtlinie des Rates über die schulische Betreuung von Auländerkinder; hier: Stand
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der Beratungen vor der Ratstagung der Arbeits- und Sozialminister am 28. Juni 1977 in Luxemburg,” IV C 2 – 9702 – 3, June 21, 1977, B 138/20221, Bundesarchiv Koblenz). 64. Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen to Regierungspräsidenten, October 13, 1964, NW 388-16, Landesarchiv NRW. For the mention of the possibility of constructing such classes for “Greek guest worker children,” see Kultusministerium NRW to Regierungspräsidenten, Erlaß, (October 20, 1964), NW 388-16, Landesarchiv NRW). For less that 20 children, then the Decree “Unterrichtung italienischer Gastarbeiterkinder” from 13 October 1964 (II C 36-6/1 Nr. 2995/64) remained valid (Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen to Finanzminister des Landes NordrheinWestfalen, “Unterricht für Kinder ausländischer Arbeitnehmer; hier: Erweiterung des schulischen Angebots,” October 28, 1975, NW 38851, Landesarchiv NRW). 65. “Türkischer Schulunterricht für Gastarbeiterkinder in Deutschland,” IV 4 – 88 (Ankara: Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, March 2, 1971), B 93, Bd. 747, PA AA. See also Botschaft der Türkei, “4581/1080”; Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Ankara, “Türkischer Schulunterricht für Gastarbeiterkinder in Deutschland,” IV 4 – 88 (Ankara, March 2, 1971), B 93, Bd. 747, PA AA. 66. “Stellungnahme der türkischen Presse zu dem Ausgang der Gespräch der deutsch-türkischen Gemischten Kommission” (Ankara: Deutsche Botschaft Ankara, May 16, 1968), B 85, Bd. 771, PA AA. 67. Not only was the Communist Party legal and thriving in countries like France and Italy (see Donald L. M. Blackmer and Sidney Tarrow, eds., Communism in Italy and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015)), but it was actually easier for a Turkish citizen in West Berlin to cross over to East Berlin than for a West German citizen (Jennifer Miller, “Cold War Borders and Suspicious Persons: Turkish ‘Guest Workers’ Between East and West Berlin through the Eyes of the Stasi” (Berlin Porgram Summer Workshop: Germany Looks East, Berlin, 2013)). 68. Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Ankara, “Kulturpolitischer Jahresbericht für 1968 aus der Türkei” (Ankara: Auswärtiges Amt, January 23, 1969), 1–2, B 97, Bd. 185, PA AA. 69. “Türkischer Schulunterricht für Gastarbeiterkinder in Deutschland.” 70. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) was an army officer credited as the founder of the modern Republic of Turkey. He officially served between 1923 and 1938 as the first president of the country (Soner Cagaptay, “Passage to Turkishness: Immigration and Religion in Modern Turkey,” in Citizenship and Ethnic Conflict: Challenging the Nation-State, ed. Haldun Gülalp (New York: Routledge, 2006), 61–82).
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71. Kaplan, The Pedagogical State, 41–43, 65–66; Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964). 72. Cagaptay, in their “Passage to Turkishness: Immigration and Religion in Modern Turkey,” discussed how, as its Christian population rapidly shrank after the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, the concept of “Turkish” increasingly emphasized ethnic assimilation and included Islam as part of the concept of the Turkish ethnonational identity despite government protestations of secularism. Allied and Associated Powers, George II, and Atatürk, Treaty of Peace with Turkey: And Other Instruments Signed at Lausanne on July 24, 1923, Together with Agreements Between Greece and Turkey Signed on January 30, 1923, and Subsidiary Documents Forming Part of the Turkish Peace Settlement. (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1923). 73. “2. Sitzung des Ständigen Gemischten deutsch-türkischen Kulturausschusses,” 4, 7; Auswärtige Amt, “Besuch des türkischen Erziehungsministers,” Vermerk (Bonn, April 17, 1961), B 90, Bd. 859, PA AA; “5. Sitzung des mit der Durchführung des deutsch-türkischen Kulturabkommens beauftragten ständigen Gemischten deutschtürkischen Kulturausschusses,” Protokoll (Ankara, November 19, 1969), 6–7, B 85, Bd. 771, PA AA. 74. After 1961, religious education was written into the constitution with Paragraph 4 of Article 19 stating “religious education and instruction is dependent on the wishes of the parents or the legally appointed guardians of minors” (Recep Kaymakcan, “Religious Education Culture in Modern Turkey,” in International Handbook of the Religious, Moral and Spiritual Dimensions in Education, ed. Marian de Souza et al. (Dordrecht: Springer, ̇ 2006), 450; Ismail Güven, “Education and Islam in Turkey,” in Education in Turkey, ed. Arnd-Michael Nohl, Arzu Akkoyunlu-Wigley, and Simon Wigley (Münster: Waxmann Verlag, 2008); Özgür H Çinar, “Compulsory Religious Education in Turkey,” Religion and Human Rights 8, no. 3 (2013): 226). By 1970, religious instruction was instituted in year four and five of primary school; one, two, and three of secondary school; and years one and two of high school. 75. Özgür Ulus, The Army and the Radical Left in Turkey: Military Coups, Socialist Revolution and Kemalism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 16–19. 76. “6. Sitzung des mit der Durchführung des deutsch-türkischen Kulturabkommens beauftragten Ständigen Gemischten deutschtürkischen Kulturausschusses (Bonn, 24. und 25. Mail 1971),” Protokoll (Ankara, May 25, 1971), B 97, Bd. 311, PA AA. See also Ulus, The Army and the Radical Left in Turkey, 154–57; Senol Durgun, “Left-Wing Politics in Turkey: Its Development and Problems,” Arab Studies Quarterly 37, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 9–32.
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77. “6. Sitzung des Ständigen Gemischten deutsch-türkischen Kulturausschusses (1971),” 5–7. 78. Rainer Münz, Wolfgang Seifert, and Ralf Ulrich, Zuwanderung nach Deutschland: Strukturen, Wirkungen, Perspektiven, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1999), 69. See also Abadan-Unat, Turks in Europe, 17–31; Münz, Seifert, and Ulrich, Zuwanderung nach Deutschland, 44–45. 79. For a discussion of the experience of Koranschulen, see Sarah Thomsen Vierra, “At Home in Almanya: Turkish-German Space of Belonging in West Germany, 1961–1990” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2011), 216–24. For a discussion of the development of mosques and religious education in the Netherlands, see Murat Es, “Turkish-Dutch Mosques and the Construction of Transnational Spaces in Europe” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012); Jan Rath, ed., Western Europe and Its Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 160–88. 80. In the 1970s, primary school teachers also began receiving training for providing Islamic instruction. For a summary of the education of religious teachers in Turkey, see Mustafa Koylu, “Religious Education in Modern Turkey,” in Change and Essence: Dialectical Relations Between Change and Continuity in the Turkish Intellectual Tradition, ed. Sinasi Gündüz and Cafer S. Yaran (Washington, D.C.: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2005), 45–64. 81. “Koranschulen für türkische Kinder islamischen Glaubens,” Drs. 8/2235 (Düsseldorf: Landtag Nordrhein-Westfalen, July 11, 1977); Hermann, “Islamischer Religionsunterricht für türkische Kinder,” Vermerk (Bonn: Sekretariat der Ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepulik Deutschland, June 9, 1980), B 93, Bd. 1154, PA AA; Hermann and Sekretariat der Ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der BRD, “1. Sitzung der Kommission ‘Islamischer Religionsunterricht,’” Ergebnisniederschrift (Bonn, May 17, 1983), B 304/7771, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 82. “Der Hodscha bleut die Suren ein: Nordrhein-Westfalens Lehrern machen die Haß predigenden Koranschulen für türkische Kinder Sorgen,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1977, B 93/860, Auswärtiges Amt; “Koranschulen für türkische Kinder islamischen Glaubens”; “Islamischer Religionsunterricht an Schulen des Landes und Tätigkeit türkischer Koranschulen,” PlPr 8/103 2. 05. 1979 S. 6958 B – S. 6960 D (Düsseldorf: Landtag Nordrhein-Westfalen, May 2, 1979). 83. “Koranschulen für türkische Kinder islamischen Glaubens.” M. Sitki Bilmen, “Educational Problems Encountered by the Children of Migrant
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Workers,” in Turkish Workers in Europe 1960–1975: A Socio-Economic Reappraisal, ed. N. Abadan-Unat (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 235–52. 84. Furthermore, states like Bavaria continued emphasizing cultural instruction with an eye toward return migration (“Die Brücken zur Heimat nicht abbrechen: Das ‘Offene Modell’ Bayerns,” Schulreport 21 (1974): 20; Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Unterricht und Kultus and Hans Maier, “Unterrichtung von Kindern ausländischer Arbeitnehmer” (Munich: Bayerischer Landtag, July 26, 1974), StK 17606, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv). There were multiple members of both parties that actively disagreed with that stance, including several Ministers of Education. For a discussion of the major (West) German political parties and their stances on migration, see Klaudia Tietze, Einwanderung und die deutschen Parteien: Akzeptanz und Abwehr von Migranten im Widerstreit in der Programmatik von SPD, FDP, den Grünen und CDU/ CSU (Berlin: LIT, 2008). 85. See EA 3/505 Bü 405/4 in Stuttgart’s Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg. In 1976, Baden-Württemberg subsidized 1788 consular courses attended by 39,142 schoolchildren with foreign citizenship (47 percent of the total 83,329). The issue of “former guest workers and their families” had become a hot political topic. It was no longer possible for the Ministry of Education to disregard public opinion about the growing “threat of foreigners” (Landtag von Baden Württemberg, “Drucksache 6/7571: Stellungnahme des Kultusministeriums zu dem Antrag der Abd. Uhri und Gen. (CDU) betr. Kinder ausländischer Arbeitnehmer in unseren Schulen” (Stuttgart, April 18, 1975), EA 8/203 Bü 386, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart; “Unterricht für Kinder ausländischer Arbeitnehemr Interministerielle Arbeitsgruppe aus Vertretern des Staatsministeriums, des Finanzministeriums, des Ministeriums für Arbeit, Gesundheit und Sozialordnung unter Federfürhrung des Kultusministerium,” Ergebnisprotokoll, (October 20, 1976), EA 3/609 Bü 78, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart). 86. Kultusministerium NRW to Türkische Botschaft, “Beschulung türkischer Kinder in der Stadt Köln, III A 36-6/1, Nr. 2822/69,” July 16, 1969, 69, NW 388-18, Landesarchiv NRW. For the posters, see B 138/38289, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 87. Domhof, “Gedanken zur Verbesserung des Unterrichts,” 1; Ray C. Rist, Guestworkers in Germany: The Prospects for Pluralism (New York: Praeger, 1978), 190–92. Domhof also held the post of Assistant Undersecretary in North Rhine-Westphalia’s Ministry of Education (to Jacoby, “Domhof,” Note, (December 12, 1974), BAC 144/1987 53, Commission of the European Union).
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88. SPD Member Willi von Helden was a teacher. He served as member of the Baden-Württemberg Parliament (Landtag), 1964–1972. 89. “31. Sitzung des Landtags: Punkt 17 der Tagesordnung” (Stuttgart: Landtag von Baden-Württemberg, April 24, 1969), 1643. For an example of descriptions of “ghettoization” and “ghetto education” in public media, see Ulrich Bäder, “Hilfe für die ‘Getto-Kinder’: Opladen: Modellversuch soll Bildungschancen der ausländischen Schüler verbessern,” Neue Rhein Zeitung, May 25, 1973. 90. “31. Sitzung des Landtags: Punkt 17 der Tagesordnung,” 1643. Lothar Späth (born 1937) was a West German politician and manager. He first became a member of the Bundestag in 1968 and then the chair of the CDU-Faction in 1972. He served as Ministerpräsident of BadenWürttemberg, 1978–1991. See “Antrag des Abg. Späth zu dem Entwurf des Staatshaushaltsplans für 1969, Einzelplan 04/14: Kultusministerium: betr.: Erfüllung der Schulpflicht durch Kinder und Jugendliche ausländischer Staatsangehörigkeit” (Stuttgart: Landtag von BadenWürttemberg, December 31, 1968). 91. Rist, Guestworkers in Germany, 187–92. 92. For a complete chart of when the different Länder end the primary school level, see Helbig and Nikolai, Die Unvergleichbaren, 82–83. 93. During this period, the West German federal and state governments worked together to alter the West German secondary system, including abolishing school fees for higher levels of secondary school. For the Länder, ensuring that the children’s right to education then necessitated the state guarantee the possibility of success through appropriate programs. For more on education reform, see Jürgen Oelkers, Reformpädagogik: eine kritische Dogmengeschichte (Munich: Juventa, 2005). 94. Veronika Fischer, “Der Internationale Frauen Treff,” in Fremdheit überwinden (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1990), 155–69; Karen Hagemann, “A West-German ‘Sonderweg’? Family, Work, and the Half-Day Time Policy of Childcare and Schooling,” in Children, Families, and States: Time Policies of Childcare, Preschool and Primary Education in Europe, ed. Karen Hagemann, Konrad H. Jarausch, and Cristina Allenmahn-Ghionda (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 275–300; Thomas Coelen and Bernd Dollinger, “Geschichte, Gegenwart und Perspektiven der Ganztagsschule,” in Handbuch Bildungs- und Erziehungssoziologie, Bildung und Gesellschaft (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2012), 763–77. 95. Erdern and Mattes, “Gendered Policies—Gendered Patterns: Female Migration from Turkey to Germany from the 1960s to the 1990s”; Christina Allemann-Ghionda, “Ganztagschule im europäischen Vergleich:
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Zeitpolitiken modernisieren – durch Vergleich Standards setzen?,” Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, no. supplement no. 54 (2009): 190–208. 96. Pierre Bourdieu, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, trans. Jean-Claude Passeron, 2nd ed. (London: Sage Publications, 1990); Don Reid, “Towards a Social History of Suffering: Dignity, Misery and Disrespect,” Social History 27, no. 3 (October 3, 2002): 343–58. 97. Der Bundesminister für Bildung und Wissenschaft, “Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die Große Anfrage der Abgeordneten Lattmann, et al. und der Fraktionen der SPD, FDP, ‘zur Bildungspolitik,’” 8/1703, April 13, 1978, 47; Reinhard Grindel, Ausländerbeauftragte: Aufgaben und Rechtsstellung (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1984); Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für die Integration der Ausländischen Arbeitnehmer und ihrer Familienangehörigen, ed., Anregungen der Ausländerbeauftragten zur Novellierung des Ausländerrechts (Bonn: Das Amt der Ausländerbeauftragten, 1987). 98. Michelle J. Neuman and Peer Shanny, Equal from the Start: Promoting Educational Opportunity for All Preschool Children – Learning from the French Experience. A Welcome for Every Child Series (New York: FrenchAmerican Foundation, 2002); Markus Freitag and Raphaela Schlicht, “Educational Federalism in Germany: Foundations of Social Inequality in Education,” Governance 22, no. 1 (2009): 62–63. 99. Der Bundesminister für Bildung und Wissenschaft, “8/1703,” 40. 100. See “Sprachhilfe für ausländische Kinder: Denkendorfer Modell,” Bericht über das erste Arbeitsjahr, (November 1973); Gert Bürgel, “Intensive Bemühungen um Ausländer-Integration: Kein Getto in Denkendorf: Ein Nahziel: Hauptschulabschluß für die Kinder,” Stuttgarter Nachrichten, September 13, 1975. 101. Landtag NRW, “Drucksache 7/3137: Antwort der Landesregierung auf die Kleine Anfrage 1052 der Abg. Doris Altewischer (CDU) betr.: Berufsschulpflichtige Ausländer” (Düsseldorf: Landtag NRW, October 12, 1973); Landtag NRW, “Drucksache 7/2837: Antwort der Landesregierung auf die Kleine Anfrage 1066 der Abg. van Nes Ziegler (SPD) betr.: Anteil ausländischer Schüler an Grund- und Hauptschulen des Landes” (Düsseldorf: Landtag NRW, June 27, 1973). 102. Under Baden-Württemberg School Law, youths were required either to attend three years of vocational training (Article 47 Paragraph 1) or finish the school year during which they turned 21 (Article 47 Paragraph 3). Youths with limited German language skills were to attend intensive German training. If there were not enough youths for a class, the youth could temporarily be freed until they achieved a sufficient language proficiency needed to participate in vocational training. Further release from compulsory schooling was not permissible, even if the youth had com-
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pleted their vocational training in another country, such as Yugoslavia where compulsory vocational training ended with the eighteenth year (Landtag von Baden Württemberg, “Drucksache 5/1473: Stellungnahme des Kultusministeriums zu dem Antrag der Abg. Haase und Gen. (SPD) betr. Schulpflicht für jugendliche Gastarbeiter” (Stuttgart: Landtag von Baden Württemberg, November 28, 1969); Landtag von Baden Württemberg, “Drucksache 5/2860/I: Schriftliche Antwort des Kultusministeriums auf die Kleine Anfrage des Abg. Dr. Gurk (CDU) betr.: Berufsschulpflicht von Gastarbeiterinnen und Gastarbeitern” (Stuttgart: Landtag von Baden Württemberg, September 15, 1970)). 103. Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg im Hause, “Besuch deutschen Kindergärten durch ausländische Kinder,” 9-Sep-76, EA 8/203 Bü 388, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart; “Hilfe für Ausländerkinder im deutschen Kindergarten,” Stuttgarter Zeitung, May 29, 1978, EA 8/203 Bü 395, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart; Fridtjof Theegarten, “Erstmals im Land: Sonderkurse für Gastarbeiterkinder im Vorschulalter: Bambini lernen Deutsch,” Stuttgarter Nachrichten, April 7, 1978, EA 8/203 Bü 394, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. 104. UNESCO, “Item 21.3 of the Provisional Agenda: International Education Year,” 15 C/53 (Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, September 12, 1968). 105. Controlled from 1969 to 1981 by the FDP-SPD coalition under Minister of Education Hans Leussink (1969–1972). Bundesministerium für Bildung und Wissenschaft, for more information on the role of the Federal Ministry of German education, see Christoph Führ, “Zur Koordination der Bildungspolitik durch Bund und Länder,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Christa Berg, Christoph Führ, and Carl-Ludwig Furck, vol. 1, 6 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1998), 74–75. For more on the homework help programs, see Kultusministerium NRW to Regierungspräsidenten Aachen, Detmold, Düsseldorf, Köln und Münster, “Schulunterricht für Kinder ausländsicher Arbeitnehmer; hier: Aktion ‘Hausaufgaben-hilfe für Ausländerkinder,’” August 10, 1970, BR 1025-218, Landesarchiv NRW; Monika Bistram, “Verständigung durch Bildung: Hausaufgabenhilfe für Ausländerkinder,” Hamburger Lehrerzeitung 24.1971, no. 10 (1971): 359–60; “Kultusminister Jürgen Girgensohn: ‘Helft ausländischen Kinder bei ihren Hausaufgaben,’” Nordrhein-Westfalen Pressemitteilung, January 9, 1971, Landesarchiv NRW; “Hausaufgaben - Ausländerkinder brauchen Hilfe,” Das Diakonische Werk: Neue Ton-Bild-Reihe über ausländische Arbeitnehmer 4 (April 1972): 10. 106. Ulrike Popp, “Die sozialen Funktionen schulischer Bildung,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Christa Berg, Christoph Führ, and Carl-Ludwig Furck, vol. 6 (Munich:
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C.H. Beck, 1998), 267; Margitta Rudolph, “Außerschulische Lernbegleitung,” in Erziehungs- und Bildungspartnerschaften, ed. Waldemar Stange et al. (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2012), 384–90; Frederick Erickson, “Transformation and School Success: The Politics and Culture of Educational Achievement,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 18, no. 4 (1987): 335–56. 107. Essentially intensive tutoring available to both “German” and “foreign” children, although in later years money was specifically earmarked for the “foreign” schoolchildren (Kultusministerium NRW, “Schulversuch ‘Silentien,’” Gemeinsames Amtsblatt des Kultusministeriums und des Ministeriums für Wissenschaft und Forschung des Landes NRW, July 7, 1971, 424). 108. Churches and some civic groups provided programs as well. Local libraries set up homework programs and church groups set up preschools. Although hardly covering all children, these measures did alleviate some need even as some of the programs showcased the social divide between “German” and “foreign.” See Der Bundesminister für Bildung und Wissenschaft, “8/1703,” 40. 109. Council for Cultural Cooperation and Kultusministerkonferenz, “Die Vorschulerziehung von Wanderarbeitnehmerkinder,” Council of Europe, October 12, 1977, B 93, Bd. 857, PA AA; “Schulreifetests bestätigen das städtische Konzept: Erfolgreiche Vorschulklassen für Ausländerkinder / Hilfreiche Mitarbeit der Eltern,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 24, 1981; Ministerium für Arbeit, Gesundheit und Soziales NRW, “Vorläufige Richtlinien über die Gewährung von Zuwendungen für Hilfen zur Einschulung (vorschulische Förderung von Ausländischen Kindern),” Rund Erlaß (Düsseldorf, February 5, 1988); Andrea Lanfranchi, Schulerfolg von Migrationskindern: Die Bedeutung familienergänzender Betreuung im Vorschulalter (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 2002). 110. Both church organizations opposed all-day childcare as a threat to the family. They requested and received state support but rejected state control. 111. Lingenberg, “Bei Ausländerkindern ‘tickt eine Zeitbombe.’” 112. Key L. Ulrich, “Das Leben im Ghetto ist ihnen aufgezwungen worden,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 28, 1978; Konrad Adam, “Hauptschule: Ghetto für Ausländerkinder?: Jeder siebte Schüler scheitert—In der Gesamtschule überfordert,” Stuttgarter Nachrichten, April 26, 1979, EA 8/203 Bü 397, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart; Dieter Fritz, “Schule für italienische Gastarbeiterkinder in Reutlingen eingerichtet: Das eigentlich Neue an dem Modell: Die Kinder aus dem Ghetto her-
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ausholen: Chancen der Kinder in der Bundesrepublik und in ihrer Heimat verbessern,” Stuttgarter Nachrichten, August 24, 1979. 113. Wolfram Köhler, “Ein Problem, für das es keine Patentlösung gibt: Analphabeten in zwei Sprachen: Ratlosigkeit über die Schulausbildung der Gastarbeiterkinder in Deutschland,” Badische Neueste Nachrichten, June 3, 1978, EA 8/203 Bü 395, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart; Martina Kemff, “Die meisten Ausländerkinder verlassen die Schule ohne Abschulß: Die werden zu Analphabeten in zwei Sprachen,” Die Welt, March 28, 1979. 114. Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Georg Meck, “Erfolgsgeschichten: Der Aufstieg der Gastarbeiter-Kinder,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 8, 2008.
CHAPTER 6
More of a Right to Education for German Citizens (1976–1985)
“As I started the fourth grade, they said to me: ‘Eww, we have a Turk in class now,’” Nargül, 11 years old, informed Der Spiegel (a weekly news magazine) readers in 1982 in the opening of a series of short interviews with “foreign children in German schools.” Describing the experience of her first day of class, she said “And when I froze, they all laughed at me. I was very sad. And as I sat, they said: ‘I must move a meter away from the Turk.’”1 The Spiegel interviews provided space for a nationally diverse group of children—Mehmet (11, Turkish), Tariq (10, Pakistani), Yüksel (12, Turkish), Pinuccia (12, Italian), Levent (6th grade, Turkish), and Nazil (12, Turkish)—to describe their first experiences in West Germany. They also follow an established pattern.2 In their accounts, the children arrived in West Germany, had trouble in school because of limited German comprehension and abusive German classmates. As time passed, the children learned German, making school easier. Most German children, however, continued to reject them, taunting them as well as making stereotyped assumptions about family life and bodily smell. Pinuccia mentioned that only two classmates would spend time with her. Yüksel only played with his siblings. For these children, Germany was home, “but not paradise,” as Nazil informed the readers. Der Spiegel’s portrayal of the ethnically diverse girls and boys was sympathetic but the interviews nevertheless reinforced some problematic, essentializing stereotypes about “foreigners.” Although Der Spiegel technically acknowledged national diversity, the magazine—reflecting most © The Author(s) 2019 B. Lehman, Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1949–1992, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97728-7_6
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mainstream coverage of foreign residents—emphasized new migration. Depicting all “foreign children” as first-generation immigrants, the text obfuscated the presence of second- and third-generation residents. That emphasis on recent arrivals further suggested all foreign children were culturally as well as legally foreign, implying the new arrivals could not be German. The children could integrate and function socially but the presses comprehensive othering suggested they did not belong.3 That emphasis on (not) belonging mattered in part because of the changing geopolitical environment. In the late 1960s and early 1970s—during the economic miracle—most governments across western Europe were flush with cash, allowing them to emphasize programs for development and expansion. In contrast, at the end of the decade, most western European countries’ economies were no longer growing. With that economic change, so too did political and social climates. Reminiscent of the 1950s, many states began cutting programs and discussing who deserved resources the most. Several states opted to continue programs when legally mandated. In West Germany, most non-citizens were not fully protected unless regulation specified their coverage as the Basic Law’s anti-discrimination clause did not protect down citizenship lines. As most school regulations across the Länder did not specifically included non-German citizens, foreign citizens became easy targets. That distinction led many scholars and politicians to discuss the right to citizenship as a human right.4 As discussed in previous chapters, Hannah Arendt argued in the 1950s that differentiating between national groups and denying ethnic minorities citizenship was part of the cause of most crises in the first half of the twentieth century. As discussed in Chap. 1, that belief was part of why supranational communities pushed human rights, advocating equal inclusion for all people under school—and other—laws. In its infancy, West Germany had tried, not always successfully, to follow that international guideline. Ethnic German migrants, for example, were immediately entitled to all civil rights and freedoms accorded West German citizens. In the 1960s, the Länder Ministries of Education (hereafter “Ministries”) attempted to extend equal opportunities for all, including non-citizens. In the late 1970s and 1980s, however, the West German federal and Länder governments began actively to differentiate between the rights of the citizen and non-citizen. As civil services including education became dependent on legal status, many scholars and human rights activists argued that to deny access to citizenship was to deny human rights.5 That differentiation between citizen and non-citizen reached into the realm of education. Whereas most of the Länder Ministries of Education
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had in the 1960s emphasized integration with some cultural maintenance, many education officials now claimed these dual goals overburdened children. Children should integrate fully (i.e., assimilate) or prepare for return to their countries of citizenship. That appeal effectively reinforced an either-or perception of identity. Children were either integrated or ethnically non-German with little room for both. This chapter examines debates about extending citizenship to children educated and/or born in West Germany to non-German parents and explores some of the ramifications of the refusal to do so between the 1970s and mid1980s. The first part of this chapter discusses the federal government’s citizenship debates, focusing on the idea of learned ethnicity and Germanness. Emphasizing children with Turkish citizenship, West German politicians argued over whether these children could ever integrate, particularly if they attended extra language and cultural instruction. As the second portion of the chapter demonstrates, stress on these children’s ethnic and legal Otherness— their non-Germanness—as well as ongoing discriminatory stereotyping against different southern groups (here Italian and Turkish) resulted in very real consequences in terms of access to public schooling particularly at the secondary school levels. It also, as the third portion of the chapter lays out, prompted the West German federal government’s attempt to use extra cultural instruction to prevent foreign children from feeling German. Yet, even as many members of the West German federal and Länder governments pushed foreign identification, the schooling of non-German children remained an international affair. The foreign states involved—including the Italian, Greek, and Turkish—each had their own aims and agendas, particularly in light of the expansion of the European Community and movement toward a multicultural European Union. Taken together, children’s access to education and the intent behind it highlights why many human rights organizations condemned (West) Germany’s behavior toward its “foreign fellow residents” until the country’s citizenship laws changed in the 2000s.6
Questioning Legal Connections Between Ethnicity and Citizenship Discussing the education of approximately 80,000 Italian citizens in West Germany in the early 1980s, the Italian government pointed out that its citizens in West Germany were in the third generation.7 Some of those children were new migrants, but the majority had grandparents who had
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moved to West Germany and stayed. The Italian delegation reminded the Länder governments that these third-generation Italian citizens needed to be covered under compulsory schooling laws and continue to integrate into West German society. But, as the Italian Ambassador pointed out in a speech at the University of Würzburg on 9 July 1982, these children also needed classes in order to create a connection to their Italian heritage. Third generation children frequently had a limited connection to any sense of Italianness, often speaking only German.8 While the children were not legally Germans, they were hardly Italian either. Those Italian children were only a small number of the residents with foreign citizenship living in West Germany in the 1980s.9 By 1981, 7.5 percent of the total population (4.5 million of 61.6 million) did not have access to citizenship. Of those, despite media coverage depicting “foreigners” as new migrants, half had been in the country ten years or more. Another 400,000 were children under the age of six, most of whom would spend their entire lives in country.10 And, those numbers were growing due to continued family migration and new births. In 1981 alone, more than 80,000 babies were born in West Germany without any entitlement to German citizenship (14 percent of all live births).11 With a higher birthrate among the non-German population than the German, even if all new migration stopped, the proportion of non-German citizens would (and did) continue to expand. The sheer number of “non-Germans” residents, particularly those hundreds of thousands of young children raised in West Germany, forced politicians across the country to reconsider the Federal Republic’s citizenship law. Conceptually, citizenship law was still tied to ethnonationality. To have a claim on citizenship, one was supposed to be ethnically German.12 As discussed in previous chapters, Germanness was supposed to be legally tied to blood.13 Yet in a post-1945 world, most people did not want to acknowledge a specifically blood-based Germanness. Instead, many emphasized ethnic heritage, which children inherited from parents as well as learned through social exposure and in school. The acceptance of learned ethnicity, however, opened the possibility that children with non-German parents raised in Germany could learn Germanness. If they could absorb ethnicity in the schools, then the legal tie between citizenship and ethnicity suggested those children should also legally be German.14 If a child with Italian citizenship living in the FRG who neither spoke Italian nor adhered to Italian cultural norms was not Italian, then it followed said child might be German.15 The possibility became particularly pressing as tens of thousands of non-German children attended
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school speaking German as their first language and adhering to German cultural norms. Children were supposed to possess one nationality or the other because there was little space in the West German conceptualization of identity for children who were neither specifically Italian nor German.16 Ethnicity, citizenship, and nationality were set up as either-or propositions. Either the child was a citizen, or they were not. Either the child was ethnically German, or foreign. Children were not supposed to be both. That rejection of hyphenated and hybrid identities was a problem as most children maintained some connection to their parents’ ethnic affiliations even when speaking German as a first language. Tens of thousands of children, for example, attended extra language and cultural instruction (usually history, geography, and social studies as well as religion). Those classes—still taught by teachers from the relevant former guest worker country—were designed to impart foreign ethnonationality. Yet, most politicians in both West Germany and the relevant countries of citizenship did not have an answer to who a German-speaking Italian citizen attending cultural classes while also participating in West German public school was supposed to be. With ethnicity understood as an either-or dichotomy, most politicians across West Germany also rejected the idea that a child could even be something new.17 That meant that politicians had to decide on a line between identity labels. In the early 1970s, some members of the press and politicians (mostly SPD and other, leftist parties) argued that these children should be German. Those members of the press and politicians acknowledged that “guest workers had become fellow residents.”18 That transition was part of what had prompted the Länder Ministries to advocate integration over cultural maintenance (as discussed in Chap. 5). As the decade progressed, some few politicians argued children attending West German public schools from start to finish were effectively German, which meant they should be German citizens. Initially, the idea was shot down. According to most politicians and education researchers, the children needed to integrate as part of the local West German social fabric, but the children would still grow into foreign legal residents in part because of the trauma of distancing them from their families.19 The idea that these “foreigners” could be German citizens was, however, spreading. The first serious challenge to the continued legal foreignness of “foreign” children born in West Germany arose over the children of married couples with a foreign father and a West German mother. West German citizenship law from 1949 tied citizenship specifically to paternity. The children of ethnic German men married to foreign (e.g., Italian and Turkish
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nationals) women obtained German citizenship at birth, regardless of location. The children of unmarried ethnic, German women were also legally German. In contrast, the children of ethnic German women living in West Germany, married to men with foreign citizenship (be it Italian or Turkish) were legally foreign. Those children inherited Italian or Turkish citizenship, despite being raised with an ethnic German mother and attending West German schools.20 As the number of these children living in West Germany grew well into the six figures, various groups across the country pointed out the sexism inherent in citizenship law and the fact that these children were clearly ethnically German. In the West German popular imagination, that clear ethnic Germanness of children born in West Germany to German mothers going to German schools meant the children should also be legally German. If a father could pass down ethnicity to a child, then a mother—particularly as women supposedly taught their children culture—could as well, especially when surrounded by German society.21 The West German federal government agreed. In 1974, the Bundestag altered citizenship law to allow married, ethnic German women to pass down their citizenship status.22 Technically, the law opened up the possibility of dual citizenship (from father and mother), which raised questions about mixed (not entirely German) identities. Nonetheless the ethnic component of the dilemma was largely ignored in part because most people in West Germany failed to imagine mixed ethnic identities. Instead, the West German government avoided the issue by declaring that, when adults, these children would have to pick one citizenship. The changing meaning of Europeanness made that emphasis on single- ethnicity and single-citizenship status simultaneously easier and harder, depending on a child’s relationship to the European Community (EC). Even as most people in West Germany continued having difficulties discussing mixed heritage, the West German government was willing to acknowledge European Community member state nationals as ethnically compatible. An Italian citizen could not be German, but they could be European (as close as most people in West Germany came to multiculturalism in the 1970s). The West German government argued that, with the spread of the EC, children with Italian or Greek citizenship did not need German citizenship as EC inclusion meant access to most civil as well as human rights (including freedom of movement).23 But, that EC expansion also meant many people within West Germany began to imagine Turkey as outside of Europe—implying that children with Turkish citizenship were not
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European. As European identity increasingly implied status as a European Community member state national, Third Country nationals (i.e., Turkish and Moroccan citizens) were redefined as especially foreign and inherently non-European. In part because of EC regulations regarding freedom of movement, after the 1973 recruitment stop, migration from places like Turkey grew even as movement between Italy and Greece to West Germany plateaued. Migrants from countries like Turkey faced possible blocks to reentry if they left and tried to return.24 In consequence, by 1982, almost one and a half million individuals with Turkish citizenship lived in the country (up from 500,000 since 1974). In contrast, the Italian population remained relatively stable at 617,000 (down from 629,000 in 1974).25 Within those groups, roughly 194,000 were Turkish children under the age of six while only 51,000 possessed Italian citizenship. None of those children had access to naturalization, but the children with Italian citizenship had automatic rights to residence and labor. Turkish citizens, in contrast, were subject to ever-changing, increasingly stringent restrictions on labor and residency permits.26 In order to address the ongoing “foreigner problem,” more and more people across the country, both within “non-German” groups and among West German citizens, pushed for legal changes. With the overall proportion of “foreign” children in the schools growing, the issue was increasingly visible and pressing. Famously, the newly appointed Commissioner for Foreigners Heinz Kühn (SPD) argued that the legal differentiation between national groups created a continued potential for conflict and perpetuated performance gaps.27 Emphasizing equality, Kühn claimed that it was necessary for residents with migrant backgrounds to have clear paths to citizenship.28 Difference needed to be eliminated and foreign citizens recognized as permanent immigrants before they could become full participants in West German society. According to Kühn, support for “full social integration” also necessitated the “entire removal of all segregating measures in the school sector.”29 Reflecting discussions within the Ministries of Education from the early 1970s, Kühn argued the Länder needed to “intensify integrative measures for all children and youth, meaning those in preschool (Vorschule and Kindergarten), school, and vocational training.”30 Without radical changes in policy and the extension of all political and social rights to foreign residents, the West German “foreigner problem” would persist.31 Despite spreading agreement with Kühn’s claims, the West German federal and Länder governments did not implement Kühn’s recommendations and the West German “foreigner problem” continued into the 1980s.
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Attempting to address the issue again in 1981, a coalition of SPD and FDP politicians introduced a new bill in the West German Bundestag for easing the naturalization process for second- or third-generation foreigners who were born or raised from a young age in the Federal Republic.32 As Baden-Württemberg’s Christian Democratic Minister of Education Roman Herzog (1978–1980, later President of Germany, 1994–1999) pointed out, easing naturalization for second- and third-generation migrants would be the fastest way of reducing the numbers of non-citizens in the Federal Republic.33 And according to the SPD-FDP coalition, children born and raised in the country could be German—if they chose.34 The catch here was the lines between integration and assimilation. Kühn had focused on problems like the Bavarian “long form” classes, which allowed children with non-German citizenship to spend their school careers entirely segregated from the West German regular classroom.35 If schoolchildren remained segregated, they were less likely to integrate. Yet, many individuals (particularly part of the CDU or NPD), felt even children attending mother language and cultural instruction were going too far. Because Germanness was an either-or proposition for many people, to maintain a cultural connection to another ethnonational community (one outside central or northern Europe) was to deny Germanness. For many, to integrate was to assimilate.36 In part because of disagreements over the meaning of integration and the role of school in identity development, the SPD-FDP coalition’s bill would not pass. Although some did think children with non-German citizenship could choose to be German, most could not imagine being simultaneously German and other. As Herzog explained in the Parliamentary debates over the bill in 1982, “we are deluded if we imagine that it is possible to teach tender six-year old children to simultaneously be German and remain Turkish.” To be both, the child would need too much extra schooling as it “would entail teaching an extra ten school hours [in addition to regular instruction] as [Turkish children] must learn German.” For Herzog, Islam only added to that burden as the children would also need “Qur’an instruction.”37 Partly on that basis, several politicians on all sides of the political spectrum rejected the possibility of dual cultural identities as too much work.38 The implication here was that the children could indeed learn to be German, but only at the expense of their Turkishness. The children had to pick between identities as opposed to simply being both.
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Some politicians (particularly within the CDU, CSU, and NPD) went a step further to claim that children with Turkish citizenship could never be German even if they tried to integrate. European Community development combined with a higher rate of Turkish migration contributed to an increasing conflation among West German journalists and politicians between idea of the “foreigner” and the “Turk.” As the model of “foreignness,” children with Turkish citizenship were increasingly depicted as quintessentially non-German.39 Particularly after the Turkish government began its Turkification campaigns, several West German journalists claimed that patriarchal Turkish Islam contrasted with a supposedly egalitarian Christian or secular Germanness (as discussed in Chap. 5).40 These depictions suggested children with Turkish citizenship (or from North African and Middle Eastern states) were not only foreign citizens, their very beings were antithetical to Germanness.41 If that were true, no amount of schooling could impart Germanness to them. Instead of easing naturalization, West German citizens voted for a CDU/CSU-FDP government under Chancellor Helmut Kohl (1982– 1998), who ran on a platform of “Germany for the Germans” and the promise to reduce the number of “foreigners” in the country by half.42 The new federal government as well as Länder governments across the country would try to push non-citizens to leave and endeavor to discourage new migration by limiting access to work or residency permits. Attempts to further prevent migration through family reunification were, however, partly stymied by the Christian Democrats’ emphasis on family and the Supreme Court’s decision that prevention of nuclear family reunification violated an individual’s human rights.43 Nonetheless, at the beginning of his Chancellorship, Kohl used public fears that an underclass of non-Germans was developing and concern that German culture was disappearing to take a tough stance against “guest workers and their families” as well as asylum seekers and refugees.44 Part of that tough stance included cutting federal support for programs promoting integration such as homework help. Instead of the government taking responsibility for ensuring education equality, the government argued children could do it on their own. If they did not like it, they could leave.45 Emphasis, as with the opening interviews, on new migration and clear cultural distance allowed for journalists and politicians to claim that children with foreign citizenship did not belong in West Germany.46 They did not belong in part because they had citizenship to another state, which implied that they were foreign ethnonationals. While having the right
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under EC law to maintain their ethnic heritage, to claim that right (including enrollment in mother language and cultural instruction) was to deny Germanness. For many politicians, because some opted to maintain their heritage, other children’s choice to be German was suspect. Ergo, no one in the group was German. In following, children with non-German citizenship did not belong in Germany. That claim permitted the federal and Länder governments to suggest that these children should leave. And, if they opted to stay, not being German, they did not have the rights of Germans.
Un/Intentionally Segregating the West German Classroom Across West Germany, some politicians and ethnic German parents questioned the right of non-Germans to the school system, particularly in classes alongside German children. Some parent groups, including in Lübeck (in Schleswig-Holstein) in 1976, went so far as to strike in protest of the high percentages of “foreigners” in “their schools.” Those parents argued their children’s education opportunities were threatened by contact with non-Germans. In Berlin, parents of German children took up those complaints, claiming their children faced disadvantage because of the high number of foreign children in the schools. Demands and complaints became so virulent that Christian Democratic Berlin Senator of Education Ulf Fink wrote that the parents “ended up in one pot with the NPD…,” saying: “the Turks must go.”47 Given the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) was considered a right wing, extremist party not far removed from Nazi ideology, the comparison was not a compliment. Children with non-German citizenship’s access to education in the 1980s exemplified why many scholars began to suggest that the right to citizenship should be considered a human right.48 Some people argued— and continue to—that citizenship status was becoming a less important category as the twentieth century rolled toward a close as human rights ideology dictated that both the citizen and the non-citizen were supposed to be treated the same. Yet, in the early 1980s, as resources become strained, many states began to pick and choose who had access to support programs and civil services along citizenship lines. Those states—including the West German federal and Länder governments—claimed they had more of a responsibility toward their citizens than non-citizens. Following
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that line of reasoning, because of their legal status, some politicians felt parents saying that “Turks must go” in order to protect their children’s right to education had a more important voice than non-citizens. Several studies have indicated a correlation between economic recessions or depressions and xenophobia.49 At the least, the West German case at the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s bears out those claims. Although many people across West Germany condemned the overt expression of xenophobia, anti-foreigner, anti-Turkish, and anti-Muslim slogans nonetheless appeared across walls and in newspapers as well as in successful political campaigns (including Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s).50 The expressions of “Turks must go” and “Germany for Germans” were common enough that the West German Länder governments increasingly restricted immigration from Third Countries (non-EC) and implemented intentionally discriminatory policies within West Germany in order to make continued residence unpalatable. West German anti-discrimination clauses, as discussed in earlier chapters, specified people with different backgrounds, not citizenship status. All West German residents might be entitled to human rights but not necessarily to state support. This division was part of what made the denial of access to citizenship such an issue: it was not only about ethnic identity but also about access to jobs, residence, and school (to name only a few points). And, for many people—including some parent groups and politicians—the lack of citizenship justified limited access to civil rights. In addition to limitations on residence, movement, and labor, children with foreign citizenship had to face pervasive implicit bias. Stereotypes against “Southerners,” “Orientals,” and Muslims shaped discussions of “non-Germans” (laid out in Chaps. 3 and 5). Following ongoing assumptions of racial superiority, many people in Germany believed “Germans” were innately smarter that “Southerners.” “Orientals,” in turn, supposedly had a tendency toward masculine, barbaric violence or feminine docility leading to assumptions about probable criminality as well as hyper sexualization.51 Yet, as most people carried these stereotypes subconsciously, they failed to recognize them or even denied associated prejudice.52 Those implicit biases proved a problem for integrating children with non-German citizenship into the classroom, as rates of transfer into special schools for the learning disabled (Sonderschule, hereafter “special schools”) demonstrated at the end of the 1970s (and through the 1990s). Boiled down, the situation was that teachers across West Germany (particularly in Baden-Württemberg) referred more children with Italian
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citizenship to special schools than any other ethnonational group.53 The issue came to a head in June 1978, when a group of Italian teachers in consular and integration classes in South Baden sent a letter to both the Italian and Länder Ministries decrying the “catastrophic and scandalous school situation.” The teachers were concerned that less than 30 percent of children with Italian citizenship completed their secondary school certificates and condemned the high rates of “dual illiteracy” among children with Italian citizenship. Furthermore, the Italian teachers claimed, “to solve the discriminating and embarrassing status of the problem of foreign schoolchildren” West German teachers “transferred them en-masse into special schools for the learning disabled.” The Italian teachers cited the most recent data from the State Office in Stuttgart, which “reveal[ed] the shameful reality that, of 7,233 Italian schoolchildren in South Baden, a full 2,541 [were] in special schools” (35 percent, see Table 6.1 for federal statistics). The special schools the Italian teachers were worried about were schools for the learning and/or physically disabled. Set-up after the Second World War, they were supposed to provide “disabled children” with an education “in accordance with his or her ability and nature.”54 Usually, teachers recommended children for placement in special schools, although parents could request reconsideration.55 Once there, students had access to smaller classes in order to provide extra support and individual attention. Spanning both primary and secondary schooling, pupils could in theory earn their lower (Hauptschule) or higher (Realschule) secondary school certificates. But, a degree from a special school did not have the same weight in the job market that other schools carried. The Italian government agreed with its school teachers that the high transfer rates were a “grave concern.”56 To make the situation even more distressing, by the late 1970s a majority of the children with Italian citizenship entering West German schools were second and third generation in the country and should have already integrated into West German society.57 The Italian government acknowledged that most of these schoolchildren were from working-class families, which diminished their chances in the schools. Yet, theoretically these children should have been as likely as West German working-class children to complete their secondary school certifications. And, even if they were first generation, West German teachers should not have referred the children at a higher rate to special schools than any other ethnonational group.58 With that discrepancy blatantly following ethnonational lines, the Italian government, Italian teachers, and parent groups argued something had to be happening beyond structural
10,099,690 9,903,800 9,677,000 9,489,500 9,186,400 8,865,500 8,472,100 8,042,600 7,590,400 7,212,600
393,800 398,176 398,015 387,829 370,700 354,300 337,000 319,300 301,900 284,600
Of these in special schools 3.9 4.0 4.1 4.1 4.0 4.0 4.0 4.0 4.0 3.9
% 404,351 434,503 486,265 552,050 637,073 697,128 723,296 712,660 667,589 667,200
Total schoolchildren with non-German 14,959 18,098 21,094 23,925 27,819 31,929 36,353 39,455 39,364 39,771
Of these in special schools 3.7 4.2 4.3 4.3 4.4 4.6 5.0 5.5 5.9 6.0
% 65,745 57,933 70,441 73,880 76,229 79,559 78,337 74,449 70,885 69,119
4771 5344 5769 5905 6002 6299 6425 6287 5985 5745
Total schoolchildren with Of these in Italian citizenship special schools
7.3 9.2 8.2 8.0 7.9 7.9 8.2 8.4 8.4 8.3
%
Kultusministerkonferenz, Ausländische Schüler und Schulabsolventen 1970 bis 1986, vol. 102, Statistische Veröffentlichungen der Kultusministerkonferenz (Bonn: Sekretariat der Kultusministerkonferenz, 1987); Kultusministerkonferenz, Ausländische Schüler und Schulabsolventen 1984 bis 1993, Statistische Veröffentlichungen der Kultusministerkonferenz (Bonn: Sekretariat der Kultusministerkonferenz, 1994), 74.
1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985
Total schoolchildren
Table 6.1 Total schoolchildren and schoolchildren with Italian citizenship in special schools for the disabled in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1976–1985
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discrimination against working-class children. Italian citizens and children, they insisted, were not less intelligent than children with West German citizenship.59 Research into the problem of over-selection showed the main issue was implicit bias. As a federally funded 1978/79 study of the issue at the University of Tübingen confirmed, approximately half of the students with Italian citizenship referred to special schools could have stayed in standard instruction.60 But, as the Italian delegation reported to the Italian Foreign Office, the West German authorities’ tests were tailored specifically to the West German cultural environment and with German children in mind.61 Looking at those tests as well as interviewing examiners, teachers, and children, the research team concluded that “the reason for the high quota was the perception of socio-cultural and affective deficits.” Teachers in the West German classroom were reading children with Italian citizenship’s facial expressions and gesticulations as indicative of mental disability. These cultural miscommunications were particularly severe when it came to children whose families were from southern Italy.62 Addressing that problem proved challenging. Because individual teachers had final recommendation, ingrained biases played a significant role. Unconsciously reflecting negative social perceptions, teachers’ and psychologists’ assumptions of West German cultural superiority were difficult to alter through Ministry of Education warnings.63 The problem was slightly mitigated by the inclusion of Italian teachers in evaluation and by allowing consulates to work as mediators between the teachers and parents.64 Yet, as Table 6.1 demonstrates, the situation was hardly solved as children with Italian citizenship continued to be referred to special schools at almost twice the rate for children with West German citizenship through the 1990s. Most classroom segregation was the result of implicit bias, arguably unintentional. Rather, long-standing prejudice built on years of othering and racial discrimination resulted in xenophobia and misunderstanding. Alongside tracking into special schools, those same implicit—and sometimes overt—biases contributed to higher tracking into lower-secondary schools (as Graphs 3.1, 4.1, and 5.1 show).65 Indeed, even as some families with West German citizenship complained that their children would be disadvantaged by “overburdened schools,” they were actually more likely to be tracked up than their non-German colleagues.66 Supposedly in order to address the problem and reduce xenophobia, in 1982 the Berlin Senator of Education Hanna-Renate Laurien (CDU)
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capped the number of “non-German” children in any one class with “German” children at 30 percent. As first glance, her policy made a limited amount of sense. Since the 1964 KMK Recommendations, school administrators were officially supposed to spread “the children of guest workers” across multiple classrooms corresponding with their age in order to facilitate integration. Supposedly, non-native speakers learned local languages faster when composing 20 percent of the class or less. But instead of promoting integration, Laurien’s intent was to prevent German children from “becoming a minority.” Laurien did concede that some foreign citizens spoke German fluently, and in those cases, schools could support 50 percent non-Germans in a class, but no more. According to the Senator, German children needed to be protected and, as citizens, they had “more of a right” to education.67 After all, most of the children with German citizenship in affected classes were from working-class families and at a disadvantage. These “German” children were not to be set back further by becoming a minority in their own state. To make matters worse, Laurien was targeting neighborhoods like Kreuzberg and Wedding, where the majority of the schoolchildren were non-German due to decades of housing discrimination and white flight. There were too many children with non-German citizenship to cap attendance at 30 or even 50 percent per class and still place each child in a regular schoolroom. While declaring it an unfortunate side effect, Laurien decreed any extra children were to be placed in a foreigners-only class, separated from their German colleagues. In setting out the regulations, Laurien specified that the move was to support German citizens and ensure that their education was not harmed because of classrooms overfilled with foreigners who might need different support.68 Some parents pushed back against the Berlin regulation, but the Berlin Administrative Court (Verwaltungsgericht) agreed with Laurien’s reasoning. Among various measures taken (including withdrawing students from school), three parents, two with Greek citizenship and one with Turkish, claimed that the Senate’s new regulation was discriminatory. The parents felt it was fine to place children with limited German language skills in separate classes, but they maintained that children like theirs should not be placed in “foreigner classes.”69 Their children, the parents pointed out, had been born in West Germany and spoke German as their first language. Effectively, they were German.70 Nonetheless, the Court ruled that because Laurien had emphasized that German children had more of a right and not that foreign children had less of a right, the law could stand.71 Supporting that argument, the Berlin government under Mayor Richard
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von Weizsäcker (CDU) underscored the idea that children with non- German citizenship were foreign. The Berlin decision to partially segregate the public schoolroom reflected the ramifications of the West German federal and Länder governments’ continued refusal to extend citizenship to children with non- German parents as well as continued (implicit) bias. Here, the Berlin government assumed all children with non-German citizenship were ethnically as well as legally foreign. These children would necessarily need extra help, but different support than West German citizens. Regardless of the Court’s ruling, the assumption further suggested that these children were of less value. If German citizens had more of a right, that implied that someone—here non-citizens—had less of one. The West German government had an obligation to its citizens, not to its residents. Non-German children frequently did not have the same chances as children with West German citizenship, whatever their social level, in part because of that stated differentiation and rejection. A further problem with this implicit and explicit othering combined with state acceptance was the promotion of internalized bias. Children with non-German citizenship often internalized bias—stereotype threat—which led to lower test scores, contributing in turn to ongoing claims regarding groups with foreign citizenship dragging West German citizens down.72 As Bourdieu and Dahrendorf pointed out in the 1960s and 1970s, the majority community’s rejection of these children as part of the larger social body creates a “not for us” mentality that is difficult to overcome.73 Children with non-German citizenship had to combat social ostracization as well as the knowledge that they faced difficult odds, which frequently contributed to them questioning why they should try.74 Most of these youths would be “Italian” or “Turkish” no matter what they did, but not “German.” It was possible for students to become an exception through hard work, but the rule was what pushed the expectation of success.75 And, in the 1980s, stories of success rarely reached the papers.
Teaching Foreignness to First-, Second-, and Third- Generation “Foreigners” Even as the Länder cut back programs promoting integration, they continued pushing instruction designed to teach foreignness. Children like those in the opening vignette were migrants, but hundreds of thousands of the 1.1 million children (ages 0–15) with foreign citizenship in West
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Germany in 1982 were born in the country.76 Despite legally being foreign, these children did not necessarily have a connection to any other place, begging the question of what was “foreign” about them. They certainly did not have a country to “return” to as West Germany was their place of origin.77 In order to urge them to leave, the West German government wanted them to learn foreignness. To feel German, after all, might encourage them to think they belonged in West Germany.78 In order to teach foreignness, the West German federal and Länder governments decided to continue encouraging national identification and loyalty through extra language and consular classes even as they cut funding for integration programs. The old, 1960s cultural programs were, however, no longer sufficient as they emphasized maintenance without reference to creating a new connection (as the Italian Ambassador pointed out at the University of Würzberg in 1982). Toward that end, the West German government worked with the relevant foreign governments to develop new programs designed to teach foreign loyalty as well as the necessary hallmarks of Italianness, Greekness, and Turkishness (as well as Spanish, Portuguese, and Yugoslav identity). Yet, in promoting that identification, the West German federal and Länder governments also un/ intentionally began supporting multiculturalism.79 The Italian, Greek, and Turkish states were among the most vocal about their citizens’ identity development, for which they followed their own (and not the West German) political goals. After all foreign identities were explicitly non-German and ergo not shaped by, although decidedly influenced by, the Länder governments and West German society. Instead the foreign states and citizens involved had their own ideas about identity, taking diverse stances on what ethnicity, citizenship, and nation meant and how to promote those perspectives through education. Furthermore, most foreign states did not support the West German federal and some Länder plans to promote mass return migration. Nonetheless, many people were happy to maintain non-German identities in West Germany, just on their own terms. What almost all the foreign states involved did do was frame their plans in reference to the European Community. Between 1980 and 1985, the directive Italy, Greece, and Turkey turned to was usually European Community Directive 486/77 on the “Education of the Children of Migrant Workers.” That text emphasized integration, but the authoring committee had reluctantly included support for return migration in order to gain unanimous member state agreement.80 Consequently, based on 486/77 as well as the associated Action Plans, member states were to support children with foreign citizenship’s re/integration into “the educational
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system and social and working life of his country of origin…”81 And, as the directive specified, toward that aim, the country of residence needed to work “in conjunction with the Member States of origin, [to develop] appropriate measures to promote the teaching of the mother tongue and of the culture of the country of origin.”82 As Italy, Greece, and Turkey all pointed out, West Germany was responsible for enabling them to maintain their citizens’ nationality on their terms. The Italian state’s approach to teaching its citizens in West Germany focused on the importance of European integration and the necessity of realizing the “philosophy of multiculturalism.” Among other programs, the Italian state wanted to see Italian language instruction in West German public secondary schools as well as bilingual schools taught in both Italian and German.83 With Italian citizens abroad moving into the third generation and the Italian population in West Germany mostly stable, the Italian state felt that these “Italians” needed to be simultaneously a part of both cultures (as they had been since the 1960s). But according to the Italian state, to push toward that interculturalism also meant West German schoolchildren needed to have access to Italian classes alongside Italian citizens. A multicultural Europe, after all, was supposed to see the different European cultures placed equally side by side and mixing.84 Separating children by citizenship would hardly promote that equality.85 Using European Community funding, the West German and Italian governments worked together to develop curricula and school materials for both Italian as a foreign language instruction and bilingual classes. Acknowledging the European push for multiculturalism, the Länder governments also opened up Italian mother language and cultural instruction to West German citizens.86 Much to the Italian legations’ delight and the Länder Ministries’ frustration, those classes became so popular in some areas that they were attended by “seventy to ninety percent German schoolchildren.”87 According to the Länder Ministries that was a problem. Italian classes were for foreigners and supposed to teach ethnicity and foreign loyalty, which was theoretically inappropriate for West German citizens. Yet, the Länder Ministries acknowledged that the classes did meet European Community goals for intercultural education. Nonetheless, for the West German government, Italianness was still foreign.88 The Greek government also used the European Community’s 1977 Directive on the education of migrant workers’ children to push its goals. The Junta government had fallen in 1974 and the country joined the EC in 1981. But, in contrast to the Italian government, the Greek state advocated
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a different idea of multiculturalism. The difference was the emphasis on mixing. Through the mid-1980s, the Greek government continued to assume that most of its citizens would return to Greece and continued promoting the development of an explicitly Greek identity. To justify that claim, the Greek government used Directive 486/77 as legal permission for a minority group to retain its specific ethnic attributes while being allowed to succeed in the host country’s society.89 To make that goal a reality, the Greek government wanted to make bilateral (or private) schools more palatable to minority communities (diaspora) abroad and agreed to collaborate with the Länder Ministries. The goal was to enable schoolchildren to remain in the West German system but learn to be ethnically Greek. To do so, the children were to receive enough of a German education to enable them to attend vocational schooling or university. They were, however, supposed to learn the Greek language (now only Demotic) and Greek culture, as well as be taught to identify as Greek. Toward that end, the 1985 Joint Meeting of Experts agreed that the Länder offering bilingual classes (among them, Baden- Württemberg, Bavaria, Hesse, and Rhineland-Palatinate) or extra mother- tongue instruction would work with the Greek government to develop new curricula incorporating both West German and Greek school material.90 Those classes, however, were supposed to be specifically for Greek citizens. Because Turkey was not a European Community member state, the situation facing children with Turkish citizenship was significantly different from those with Italian or Greek citizenship. A higher percentage of these children were new migrants, although tens of thousands were also second and third generation. Furthermore, children with Turkish citizenship (like Nargül at the beginning of the chapter) faced overt discrimination in the form of inflammatory news articles and constant ostracization in the classroom.91 The ethnonational majority’s widespread rejection of West German residents with foreign citizenship had a long-lasting impact on how many Turkish citizens interpreted their own identities.92 Many (nowhere near all) individuals with Turkish citizenship decided that, if the West German state and ethnic majority was going to reject them, they would embrace an ethnically Turkish and explicitly Muslim over German identity.93 Responding to that situation, and because of shifting political and social circumstances in Turkey, the Turkish government took a more active stance in promoting a cultural connection to Turkey for children with Turkish citizenship than it had in the early 1970s. The shift reflected and
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explicitly emphasized a very specific, Muslim Turkish identity. Similar to the Greek government, Turkish citizens were to maintain their ethnic- Turkish identities (or develop them) regardless of where they lived. Unlike the Greek government, however, the Turkish government expected the majority of its citizens to remain abroad. Consequently, even as the government highlighted a specific Turkish identity, the Turkish legations in West Germany stressed the need for Turkish citizens to enroll in and finish secondary schooling in Germany. To achieve its goals, the Turkish government promoted a series of education initiatives for language and religious instruction in cooperation with different Länder Ministries.94 Among these programs, trying to make it easier for immigrant youths to complete their secondary school certificates, the Turkish Embassy and delegations, as well as families with Turkish citizenship, requested permission to develop Turkish as a first foreign language classes in West German schools.95 The idea behind these programs was to enable newly arriving schoolchildren to continue taking Turkish so as not to lose the language. In addition, many politicians and families felt that it would be easier for the children to focus solely on learning German after arrival than both German and English. Thereby, the Turkish legations and Länder Ministries felt that the course might enable schoolchildren to boost their grades moving them toward graduation. And, of course, as many Länder only offered extra mother language and cultural instruction for primary school, Turkish as a first foreign language provided Turkish citizens considering returning to Turkey (or simply with an interest in the language) with an opportunity to learn and/or perfect their skills.96 The classes for Turkish as a first foreign language, while theoretically appealing, proved problematic in their implementation. In contrast with West German citizens’ interest in Italian classes, children with Turkish citizenship hesitated to enroll in the extra secondary school programs. Part of the issue were distance and access. But, for those who did go, the larger concern was the rigidity of the West German school structure. Children with German citizenship usually took English (or French) as a first foreign language. In consequence, not only did Turkish language competency mark youths with Turkish citizenship as non-German, but it also made transition into vocational programs difficult. Several vocational programs as well as university tracks required a minimum level of English language achievement for access. Those programs did not view Turkish as an English language substitute.97 In the mid–1980s, all three foreign states realized their citizens faced similar issues with accessing higher-secondary school levels, vocational
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training, as well as workplace competition. The Italian government, following (and pushing) EC trends would endorse intercultural over multicultural education in order to further endorse the idea of mixing identity and overcome the West German stigma against southern foreignness. The Greek government would turn in that direction as well, noting that many of its citizens were in fact remaining in West Germany despite assumptions of return. Turkey, in turn, shifted its advocacy toward Turkish instruction in secondary schooling with an emphasis on Turkish as a second foreign language (instead of first). All three—and most of the parents involved— felt that for the students, the cost of maintaining a completely non-German identity too high when it led to exclusion from the West German labor market and society.98 For those who did return, the language and cultural courses were indeed useful but the majority of schoolchildren stayed in West Germany. As Nazil pointed out in her 1982 interview in Der Spiegel, West Germany may not have been paradise, but it was home.99 Despite widespread rejection of “foreign children” across West Germany in the early 1980s, by the mid-1980s, the West German federal and Länder governments did encourage a certain level of multiculturalism. Although Kohl’s CDU/CSU-FDP government had tried to push “foreigners” generally and “Turks” particularly to leave, most West German foreign residents had remained. Recognizing that West Germany had changed, the federal government acknowledged to a minor extent that the country had become a multicultural state. After all, many of these supposed “foreign” children were clearly a part of West Germany, having in fact been born into it. Yet that acceptance also meant increasingly questions over what school content “children with migrant backgrounds” should be learning. European Education Minsters and politicians asked if migrants’ children even needed to learn and associate with the cultural backgrounds “with which [their parents] arrived in the country.”100 Some even argued promoting diversity and multiculturalism came into direct conflict with integration.101 Those European states asked how far, precisely, multiculturalism was supposed to go and how diverse their nationals should be—driving the question of what ethnonational identity meant at all.102
Conclusion Children like Nargül, Mehmet, Tariq, Yüksel, Pinuccia, Levent, and Nazil represented ethnic and legal “foreignness” in West Germany. For some, these children had invaded and were taking over the country, forcing change. For others, the children were just trying to live and have a poten-
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tially equal shot in West Germany. As mentioned above, Nazil had no intention to leave. West Germany was her home, even if the foreigner politics were difficult.103 Regardless of the children’s plans, as a whole West German society was not prepared to accept them in the early 1980s. Instead, the West German federal and Länder governments encouraged children to understand themselves as legal and foreign others, citizens of other states, instead of as “German.” Yet, the ridiculousness of the situation meant that the classes those governments funded to impart foreign loyalty frequently supported different aims. Instead of teaching solely foreign heritage, those classes— frequently with local support—often promoted a certain kind of multiculturalism or interculturalism as they taught children to be part of a German society albeit as members of ethnonational minorities. The emphasis on otherness was loud enough, however, that children still faced continual implicit and overt bias in daily life and in the very public schools that were supposed to serve as the main tools for integration. Teacher bias meant children with non-German citizenship were more likely to be placed in special schools or stay in lower-secondary school, turning those institutions into “migrant schools” in the West German public’s imagination. Full segregation was rare but cries of “Germany for the Germans” nonetheless reached across the country as a viable political platform. Enough people shared that exclusive view of Germanness in the 1980s that the varied attempts (usually from the SPD, FDP, or new Green Party) to include children with foreign citizenship as part of the national body as West German minorities instead of legal foreign residents largely failed. That breakdown was partly because even many of those arguing that children born in or attending school in the country should be able to naturalize failed to understand them as “Germans.” The tie between ethnonational identity and citizenship was strong enough that many West German citizens had difficulty conceiving of children born to non-German parents as capable of complete integration. Despite the prevalence of the idea within West Germany that ethnic heritage determined nationality and ergo appropriate citizenship, the West German federal and Länder governments used schools to promote ethnonationality and state loyalty. Because the Länder then defined integration primarily as German acculturation, the very act of taking classes for cultural maintenance opened space for many politicians and journalists to argue children with non-German citizenship refused to integrate. And, as most of those
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politicians and journalists essentialized all children with foreign citizenship as a single, monoethnic collective instead of acknowledging the unique individuals involved, attending cultural classes indicated non- Germanness. Although many people acknowledged the absurdity of those claims and pushed for inclusion and acceptance, the sentiment was widespread and ingrained enough to promote an “us and them” mentality across the country.
Notes 1. “Hier stinkt es nach Türken,” Der Spiegel, November 15, 1982; “Wir können nicht mal sagen, was wir fühlen,” Der Spiegel, November 15, 1982. 2. Switch to grade from age in original text. “Hier stinkt es nach Türken.” 3. Richard Alba, “Bright Vs. Blurred Boundaries: Second-Generation Assimilation and Exclusion in France, Germany, and the United States,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 1 (2005): 20–49; Anastasia Christou and Russell King, “Imagining ‘Home’: Diasporic Landscapes of the Greek-German Second Generation,” Geoforum 41, no. 4 (2010): 638– 646; Jens Schneider et al., “Identities: Urban Belonging and Intercultural Relations,” in The European Second Generation Compared: Does the Integration Context Matter?, ed. Maurice Crul, Jens Schneider, and Frans Lelie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 332. 4. Will Kymlicka, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 2; Alison Brysk, Mellichamp Professor of Global Governance Alison Brysk, and Gershon Shafir, eds., People Out of Place: Globalization, Human Rights and the Citizenship Gap (New York: Routledge, 2004); Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann and Margaret WaltonRoberts, eds., The Human Right to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 5. Yasemin Nuhoğlu Soysal, “Changing Citizenship in Europe: Remarks on Postnational Membership and the National State,” in Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe, ed. David Cesarani and Mary Fulbrook (New York: Routledge, 2002), 25; Paul Grosse, “Conceptualizing Citizenship as a Biopolitical Category from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” in Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 181. 6. Patricia Ehrkamp and Helga Leitner, “Beyond National Citizenship: Turkish Immigrants and the (Re)Construction of Citizenship in Germany,” Urban Geography 24, no. 2 (2003): 127–46; Jorge
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A. Bustamante, “Immigrants’ Vulnerability as Subjects of Human Rights,” International Migration Review 36, no. 2 (2002): 333–54; Peter J. Spiro, At Home in Two Countries: The Past and Future of Dual Citizenship (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 123. 7. Kultusministerkonferenz (Germany), Ausländische Schüler in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1970 bis 1983, Statistische Veröffentlichungen der Kultusministerkonferenz (Bonn: Sekretariat der Kultusminister konferenz, 1984), 4. 8. Italian Ambassador, “Schulpolitische Vorstellung der italienischen Seite für ihre Landsleute in der Bundes Republik Deutschland,” Eröffnungsrede (Würzburg, July 9, 1982), B 304/6253, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 9. Jeffrey Peck, “Turks and Jews: Comparing Minorities in Germany after the Holocaust,” in German Cultures, Foreign Cultures: The Politics of Belonging, ed. Jeffrey Peck (Washington D.C.: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 1997), 13. 10. And more than 700,000 school age 6–15. Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany, Statistisches Jahrbuch für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1984), 52, 68. For a discussion of continued migration to and from Turkey (Ibid., 156–158). It should also be noted that in 1983, of the 32,044 children born in West Germany who had at least one parent with Turkish citizenship, 2113 had one parent with German citizenship and consequently could choose their national affiliation. See Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany Statistisches Jahrbuch für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1986), 74. 11. Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany, Statistisches Jahrbuch 1984, 74. 12. As Walter Benjamin’s oft-used example for cultural contact, for hundreds of thousands of these children Brot (bread) was Brot and not pane or ekmek. Homi K. Bhabha, “How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trials of Cultural Translation,” in Writing Black Britain 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. James Procter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 300; Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968), 74. 13. Thomas Faist, “Shapeshifting Citizenship in Germany: Expansion, Erosion, and Extension,” in The Human Right to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept, ed. Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann and Margaret Walton-Roberts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 193–208. 14. Douglas B. Klusmeyer, “Aliens, Immigrants, and Citizens: The Politics of Inclusion in the Federal Republic of Germany,” Daedalus 122, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 91. 15. Una M. Röhr-Sendlmeier and Jenny Yun, “Familienvorstellungen im Kulturkontakt: Ein Vergleich italienischer, türkischer, koreanischer und
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deutscher junger Erwachsener in Deutschland,” Journal of Family Research 18, no. 1 (2006): 99–110; Anne Juhasz and Eva Mey, Die zweite Generation: Etablierte oder Außenseiter?: Biographien von Jugendlichen ausländischer Herkunft (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2013); Sonja Haug, “Interethnische freundschaftsbeziehungen und soziale integration,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 55, no. 4 (2003): 716–736. 16. Richard Alba and Nancy Foner, Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 86, 183; G. Liebscher and J. Dailey-O’Cain, Language, Space and Identity in Migration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 255–69. 17. Abdelmalek Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant, trans. David Macey (Malden, MA: Polity, 2004). 18. Walter Fröhder, “Vom Gastarbeiter zum Mitbürger auf Zeit: Die Gewerkschaften wollen die Rechte der Ausländer erweitert sehen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 31, 1972; “Ausländische Arbeitnehmer in der BRD; hier: Integration oder ‘Bürger auf Zeit’?,” Aufzeichnung (Bonn, March 22, 1972), B 93., Bd. ZA_1 Nr. 746, PA AA. For a discussion of party stance on immigration, see Klaudia Tietze, Einwanderung und die deutschen Parteien: Akzeptanz und Abwehr von Migranten im Widerstreit in der Programmatik von SPD, FDP, den Grünen und CDU/CSU (Berlin: LIT, 2008). 19. Klusmeyer, “Aliens, Immigrants, and Citizens,” 88–89; Douglas B. Klusmeyer and Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Immigration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany: Negotiating Membership and Remaking the Nation (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009). 20. Folker Schreiber and Karl Furmaniak, “Eine Umfrage der Bundesanstalt für Arbeit hat überraschende Ergebnisse zu Tage gefördert: Mehr als 80 Prozent der Gastarbeiter in der Bundesrepublik bleiben im Lande. Vor allem die jüngeren unter ihnen holen ihre Frauen und Kinder nach. 20 Prozent der Italiener und 7 Prozent der Türken haben eine deutsche Frau geheiratet: Aus Gastarbeitern werden Einwanderer,” Die Zeit, July 16, 1971. http://www.zeit.de/1971/29/Aus-Gastarbeitern-werdenEinwanderer 21. Carole Pateman, “Equality, Difference, Subordination: The Politics of Motherhood and Women’s Citizenship,” in Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics and Female Subjectivity, ed. Gisela Bock and Susan James (New York: Routledge, 1992), 17–31; Nira Yuval-Davis, “Gender and Nation,” in Women, Ethnicity and Nationalism: The Politics of Transition, ed. Robert E. Miller and Rick Wilford (New York: Routledge, 1998), 21–31.
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22. “Zweites Geesetz zur Änderung des Reichsund Staatsangehoerigkeitsgesetzes,” Drs. 7/1880 (Bonn: Bundestag, March 26, 1974); Washington Post Foreign Service, “W. Germany Alters Law on Citizenship,” The Washington Post, December 6, 1974. For a discussion of gender and equality in citizenship law, see Eli Nathans, The Politics of Citizenship in Germany: Ethnicity, Utility and Nationalism (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 238–39. The Council of Europe also advocated these changes, leading to new Resolutions (including (77) 2) to “ensure the equality of conditions for both spouses” and permit children to hold the citizenship of the father as well as the mother. National legislation then promoted these changes (Council of Europe, “Second Protocol Amending the Convention on the Reduction of Cases of Multiple Nationality and Military Obligations in Cases of Multiple Nationality,” Explanatory Report 149 (Strasbourg, February 2, 1993)). 23. Italian Ambassador, “Schulpolitische Vorstellung der italienischen Seite für ihre Landsleute in der Bundes Republik Deutschland.” 24. Çigdem Nas and Yonca Özer, Turkey and EU Integration: Achievements and Obstacles (New York: Routledge, 2017), 146–49. 25. Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany, Statistisches Jahrbuch 1984, 68; Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany Statistisches Jahrbuch für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1976), 65. 26. Suzan Ilcan, Longing in Belonging: The Cultural Politics of Settlement (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 55–61; Jennifer A. Miller, Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s to 1980s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 151. 27. Heinz Kühn (SPD), previously the Minister President of North RhineWestphalia, was appointed as Länder for Ausländerbeauftragter by under Chancellor Schmidt in 1978 and retained the position until 1980. For more information on Kühn’s service, see Bernd Geiß and Bundesrepublik Beauftragter für die Integration der ausländischen Arbeitnehmer und ihrer Familienangehörigen, “Das Amt der Ausländerbeauftragten: Tätigkeitsbericht 1983 bis 1986” (Bonn: Das Amt der Ausländerbeauftragten, November 1986), 3. 28. Geiß and Bundesrepublik Beauftragter für die Integration der ausländischen Arbeitnehmer und ihrer Familienangehörigen, 10. 29. For more on the KMK and its dual goals, see Ray C. Rist, Guestworkers in Germany: The Prospects for Pluralism (New York: Praeger, 1978), 179–204. 30. Heinz Kühn, “Stand und Weiterentwicklung der Integration der ausländischen Arbeitnehmer und ihrer Familien in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Memorandum des Beauftragten der Bundesregierung”
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(Bonn: Das Amt der Ausländerbeauftragten, September 1979), 3–4, NW 670-70, Landesarchiv NRW. 31. Kühn, 3–4, 20. For a brief description of the Kühn Memorandum, see Ulrich Herbert, Geschichte der Ausländerpolitik in Deutschland: Saisonarbeiter, Zwangsarbeiter, Gastarbeiter, Flüchtlinge (Munich: Beck, 2001), 245–46. Whether or not Kühn’s general indictment of both West German government and society caused his promotion, he was not long in his position as Advocate. In 1980 Liselotte Funcke, member of the FDP and longtime advocate for women’s rights, replaced him (Liselotte Funcke, “Notiz zum Gespräch mit dem türkischen Erziehungsminister am 07. 09, 11.30 Uhr,” September 7, 1981, B 304/6178, Bundesarchiv Koblenz). 32. “Protokolle des Deutschen Bundestags, 83. Sitzung. Bonn, Donnerstag, den 4. Februar 1982” (1982), 4889. For a discussion of the proposal, see Klusmeyer, “Aliens, Immigrants, and Citizens,” 93; Horst Staufer, “Die Hauptschule wird zur Ausländerschule: Deutsche Kinder sind bald in der Minderheit,” Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung, December 17, 1977. 33. Roman Herzog (born 1934) was a German lawyer and CDU politician who served as President of Germany between 1994 and 1999. He began his political career in Rheinland-Pfalz under Helmut Kohl. He then served in the Government in Baden-Württemberg in the Ministry of Education under Lothar Späth (1978–1980) before becoming a Member of Bundestag and serving in the Office of the Ministry of the Interior (1980–1983). Ernst Benda then named him Vice-president and Chair of the First Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, where he became President upon Benda’s retirement in 1987 (until 1994). Protokolle des Deutschen Bundestags, 83. Sitzung. Bonn, Donnerstag, den 4. Februar 1982, 4945. 34. Protokolle des Deutschen Bundestags, 83. Sitzung. Bonn, Donnerstag, den 4. Februar 1982, 4889. 35. Böck and Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Unterricht und Kultus to Regierungen and Staatliche Schulämter, “Unterricht für ausländischer Arbeitnehmer,” III A 2 – 4/67011, May 24, 1971, StK 17606, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv. 36. Egbert Jahn, “Integration or Assimilation of Ethnic Minorities: On the Future of Danish, Sorbian, Italian, Turkish and Other Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany,” in German Domestic and Foreign Policy (Berlin: Springer, 2015), 91–105. 37. Feeling that this position could not be maintained, Herzog advocated easing naturalization. Claiming that the children were overwhelmed by too much instruction and feeling that the children could not expect in
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their “tender” youth to learn to straddle two cultures, he argued that the families should be asked to choose between integration and cultural maintenance when they first enrolled their child in school. Herzog also asked, “what about those who declined West German citizenship. Should they still be allowed in or to stay in the country?” Protokolle des Deutschen Bundestags, 83. Sitzung. Bonn, Donnerstag, den 4. Februar 1982, 4945. 38. Protokolle des Deutschen Bundestags, 83. Sitzung. Bonn, Donnerstag, den 4. Februar 1982, 4905. The SPD/FDP had a bill to provide for the facilitation of the naturalization of that group of foreigners, which was to be discussed in the Bundesrat on 12 February. 39. Frank Asbrock, “Stereotypes of Social Groups in Germany in Terms of Warmth and Competence,” Social Psychology 41, no. 2 (January 1, 2010): 76–81. 40. Sarah Thomsen Vierra, Turkish Immigrants in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961–1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), forthcoming. 41. Shaswati Mazumdar, “The Jew, the Turk, and the Indian: Figurations of the Oriental in the German Speaking World,” in Deploying Orientalism in Culture and History: From Germany to Central and Eastern Europe, ed. James R. Hodkinson, John Walker, and Johannes Feichtinger (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), 99–116. 42. Kirsten Hoesch, Migration und Integration: Eine Einführung (Münster: Springer, 2017), 236–40. 43. Ute Knight and Wolfgang Kowalsky, Deutschland nur den Deutschen?: Die Ausländerfrage in Deutschland, Frankreich und den USA (Erlangen: Straube, 1991); Herbert, Geschichte der Ausländerpolitik in Deutschland, 249–62. 44. Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 142–54. See also Helmut Kohl, “Koalition der Mitte: Für eine Politik der Erneuerung,” in Bundeskanzler Helmut Kohl: Reden 1982–1984 (Cologne: Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, 1984), 143–44. Translation from Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes, eds., Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–2005 (Berkley: University of California Press, 2007), 45–46. Irina Ludat, “Gastarbeiter: Eine Frage der größeren Angst,” Die Zeit, October 18, 1985; Klaus J. Bade and Michael Bommes, “Migration und politische Kultur im ‘NichtEinwanderungsland,’” in Sozialhistorische Migrationsforschung, ed. Michael Bommes and Jochen Oltmer (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2004), 449–55.
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45. Jan Motte, “Nicht Ausländer-, sondern Strukturpolitik: Die bundesdeutsche Praxis der Rückkehrförderung in den 80er Jahren,” in Einwanderung im Spiegel sozialwissenschaftlicher Forschung (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2000), 55–72. 46. Bundesministerium für Arbeit und Sozialordnung, “Ausländerpolitik,” Antwort Bundesregierung Drs. 9/1629 (Bonn: Bundestag, May 5, 1982). France, for example, required a foreign citizen to live in the country for five years before becoming eligible to apply for citizenship. For a discussion of German identity and citizenship, see also Brett Klopp, German Multiculturalism: Immigrant Integration and the Transformation of Citizenship (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 40–44. 47. Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, founded in 1964, was an ultra-right wing party that many in Germany and abroad view as a neoNazi party. See Bundesministerium für Arbeit und Sozialordnung, “Ausländerpolitik,” 4919; “Brief von Mietern an Ihre Wohnungsbaugesellschaft ‘Neue Heimat,’” Der Tagesspiegel, October 10, 1979. 48. Howard-Hassmann and Walton-Roberts, The Human Right to Citizenship; Gonçalo Matias, Citizenship as a Human Right: The Fundamental Right to a Specific Citizenship (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); David Owen, “Citizenship and Human Rights,” in The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, ed. Ayelet Shachar et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 49. Manuel Castells, “Immigrant Workers and Class Struggles in Advanced Capitalism: The Western European Experience,” Politics & Society 5, no. 1 (1975): 33–66; O. Soyombo, “Xenophobia in Contemporary Society: A Sociological Analysis,” IFE PsychologIA 16, no. 2 (January 1, 2008): 85–104. 50. Stephen Castles, “Racism and Politics in West Germany,” Race & Class 25, no. 3 (1984): 37–51; Trutz Von Trotha, “Political Culture, Xenophobia and the Development of the Violence of the Radical Right in the Federal Republic of Germany,” Crime, Law and Social Change 24, no. 1 (March 1, 1995): 37–47; Klaus A. Lankheit, “Archival Collections and the Study of Migration,” in Migration, Memory, and Diversity: Germany from 1945 to the Present, ed. Cornelia Wilhelm (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 184–85; James R. Dow, “Germany,” in Handbook of Language & Ethnic Identity, ed. Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 233–34. 51. Ruth Lingenberg, “Bei Ausländerkindern ‘tickt eine Zeitbombe’: Von der Jugendarbeitslosigkeit sind sie besonders bedroht,” Kölnische Rundschau, April 15, 1976; L. Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary
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German Literature: Towards a New Critical Grammar of Migration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 52. Peck, “Turks and Jews.” 53. For a brief description of “special schools,” see Sieglind Ellger-Rüttgart, “Entwicklung des Sonderschulwesens,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Christa Berg, Christoph Führ, and Carl-Ludwig Furck, vol. 6 (München: C.H. Beck, 1998), 356–77. 54. In 1972, Recommendations 302–315 guided the development of the special school system. They have since been superseded by a series of Recommendations from 6 May 1994 (Christoph Führ, The German Education System Since 1945, trans. Iván Tapia (Bonn: Inter Nationes, 1997), 164–166). The practice of developing special schools for the physically and learning disabled began before the Second World War, stemming from church initiatives. They were, however, restructured in the post-war period, in part because of problems with teaching and material shortages and poor treatment of those with supposed disabilities during the Third Reich. 55. Teachers made referrals based on a battery of tests, usually by the fourth grade (before schoolchildren started middle school or entered the secondary school system). Tests included a variety of intelligence as well as visual and aural recognition examinations, which the test administrator could select from based on personal preference. Referrals for transfer were explicitly not to be made solely on IQ, but rather based on what the school administrator thought would best meet the child’s individual needs. Oberschulamt Freiburg, “Arbeitsgruppe im Oberschulamt Freiburg zur Überprüfung des Überweisungsverfahrens auf Sonderschulen für Kinder ital. Nationalität,” 440.65-5a, March 21, 1979, 3–4, EA 3/609 Bü 94, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. 56. “1. Tagung der Gemischten deutsch-italienischen Kommission für den Unterricht italienischer Schüler in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland vom 23. bis 24. Mai 1978 in Bonn,” Protokoll (Bonn, May 24, 1978), 9, B 93, Bd. 859, PA AA. 57. Ambasciata d’Italia, “Memorandum” (Bonn-Bad Godesberg, July 13, 1977), B 93, Bd. 859, PA AA; Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Rom, “Schulunterricht für italienische Gastarbeiterkinder,” Sachstands bericht (Rome: Auswärtige Amt, March 31, 1977), B 93, Bd. 859, PA AA. 58. For an article on the social acceptance of children attending schools for the learning disabled in Italy, see M. Manetti, B. H. Schneider, and G. Siperstein, “Social Acceptance of Children with Mental Retardation: Testing the Contact Hypothesis with an Italian Sample,” International Journal of Behavioral Development 25, no. 3 (2001): 279–86.
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59. This problem is not limited to Germany. For a recent discussion of the over-enrollment of Hispanic and Africa-American schoolchildren in US schools, see Beth Harry and Janette K. Klingner, Why Are so Many Minority Students in Special Education?: Understanding Race and Disability in Schools, 2nd ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2014). 60. The participants in the federally funded German-Italian Workshop of Special Education Specialists in November 1979 in Stuttgart came to the conclusion that West German teachers were responding to the students’ affects. Dr. Poggio from the University of Tübingen presented the results of a year-long research project performed by local and Italian experts as well as a representative from the Regional School Administration in Tübingen. “2. Tagung der Gemischten deutsch-italienischen Kommission für den Unterricht italienischer Schüler in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland vom 23. bis 24. Mai 1978 in Bonn,” Protokoll (Rome, February 8, 1980), 12, B 93, Bd. 1151, PA AA. 61. “2. Tagung,” 12. 62. The 1979 workshop also acknowledged additional causes and influences, including working-class background and rural-urban migration concerns. Kultusministerkonferenz, “Schulsituation italienischer Kinder in der Bundes Republik Deutschland,” IIc 3 – 24327/8, June 14, 1983, B 304/6253, Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Hermann, “Deutsch-italienisches Kulturabkommen; hier: Deutsch-italienische Arbeitstagung von Sonderschulfachleuten am 7 – 9. 11. 1979 in Stuttgart,” Kurzbericht, December 11, 1979, B 93, Bd. 859, PA AA. 63. Arguably, this demonstrates Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that any school system perpetuates symbolic violence as the system judges schoolchildren based on arbitrary values designed to validate the upper classes. The schools, and teachers in them, are unable or unwilling to move beyond their ingrained assumptions and devalue other cultural capital, usually unconsciously. See Pierre Bourdieu, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, trans. Jean-Claude Passeron, 2nd ed. (London: Sage Publications, 1990), 54–57; Ulrike Popp, “Die sozialen Funktionen schulischer Bildung,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Christa Berg, Christoph Führ, and Carl-Ludwig Furck, vol. 6 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1998), 265–76; Umut Erel, “Migrating Cultural Capital: Bourdieu in Migration Studies,” Sociology 44, no. 4 (2010): 642–60. 64. To try and address the issue, the KMK recommended that, as a rule, the referral process involve Italian pedagogues. Kultusministerkonferenz, “Schulsituation italienischer Kinder in der Bundes Republik Deutschland”; Schürmann, “Ausländische Kinder an Sonderschulen für Lernbehinderte,” Kleine Anfrage (Berlin: Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin, June 15, 1987);
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“Kommuniqué über die 11. Tagung der gemischten deutsch-türkischen Expertenkommission für den Unterricht türkischer Schüler in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland am 21.-23. März 1990 in Berlin,” Kommuniqué (Berlin, March 23, 1990), 18, B 304/7794, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 65. Horst Staufer, “Nach Bewältigung des ‘Schülerbergs’: Wird die Hauptschule zur Ausländerschule? Ein neues Problem kommt auf uns zu: Deutsche Kinder in der Minderheit,” Badische Zeitung, December 17, 1977, EA 8/203 Bü 394, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart; Konrad Adam, “Hauptschule: Ghetto für Ausländerkinder?: Jeder siebte Schüler scheitert—In der Gesamtschule überfordert,” Stuttgarter Nachrichten, April 26, 1979, EA 8/203 Bü 397, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. 66. “Warum sie versagen: Ausländer in der Schule: Lehrer und Eltern – ratlos und überfordert,” Frankfurter Rundschau, February 10, 1978. 67. That the majority of “foreigners” lived in working-class neighborhoods underlined that decision as those “German” children in particular needed extra support to ensure their equality of opportunity. “20 Prozent der ABC-Schützen sind Ausländer,” Morgen Post, August 10, 1982, B Rep 002 16864, Berlin Landesarchiv; Dirk Cornelsen, “Deutsche Kinder dürfen nicht Minderheit in Schulen werden: CDU-Politikerin Laurien widerspricht katholischer Kirche: ‘Keine türkischen Kinder über sechs Jahre nachholen,’” Frankfurter Rundschau, August 13, 1982, B Rep 002 16864, Berlin Landesarchiv. For a brief discussion of the Berlin laws as of 2001, including the 1982 law, see Christine Langenfeld, Integration und kulturelle Identität zugewanderter Minderheiten: Eine Untersuchung am Beispiel des allgemeinbildenden Schulwesens in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 102–11. 68. Hanna-Renate Laurien (1928–2010) was a CDU politician and converted to Catholicism (from Lutheranism at age 24). She served as Senator for School, Youth and Sports in Berlin from 1981 to 1989, when she had to resign. Laurien was elected President of the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin in 1991 (the first female to be so elected), in which capacity she served until 1995. She also served from 1967 to 2000 as the main committee member of the Central Committee of German Catholics (Zentralkomitees der deutschen Katholiken). 69. For example, Cornelsen, “Deutsche Kinder dürfen nicht Minderheit in Schulen werden: CDU-Politikerin Laurien widerspricht katholischer Kirche: ‘Keine türkischen Kinder über sechs Jahre nachholen’”; “Begrenzung des Anteils ausländischer Kinder in Schulklassen? Gesetzentwurf in Berlin/Frau Laurien für einen frühzeitigen Nachzug/ Kongresse, Initiativen, Pläne,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 13, 1982, B Rep 002 16864, Berlin Landesarchiv; “Deutsche Kinder
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dürfen nicht zur Minderheiter werden: Senatorin Laurien für reine Ausländerklassen,” Morgen Post, August 13, 1982, B Rep 002 16864, Berlin Landesarchiv; “Gemeinsamer Unterricht: Ja! Aber deutsche Schüler dürfen nicht zur Minderheit werden,” Berliner Zeitung, August 13, 1982, B Rep 002 16864, Berlin Landesarchiv. Other than citizenship status, the background of the parents is unclear in the press reports. 70. One example is the Fritzlar-Homberg-Grundschule in Tiergarten: After bringing their children to the first few days of class, some parents removed their children and insisted instead on a common “deutsche Erstkläßler” (German first grade). The new rules actually raised the limits from 15 percent to 30–50 percent, depending on language competency. For the Fritzlar-Homberg-Grundschule, there were 24 “German” and 33 “foreign” schoolchildren registered. Given the rules, the school had created two classes, one with 24 German and 5 foreigners since the German children could not be separated and still maintain the legal limits. “Eltern schickten ihre Kinder nicht in Ausländerklasse,” Tagesspeigel, August 14, 1982, B Rep 002 16864, Berlin Landesarchiv. 71. “Zahl der Asylbewerber sank um 55 Prozent: Seit Jahresbeginn nur noch knapp 4000 Anträge,” Tagesspeigel, September 3, 1982, B Rep 002 16864, Berlin Landesarchiv; Sabine Reuter, “Kälte, welche die Seele krank macht: Das Beispiel der Familie Yesiltepe zeigt den Zwiespalt auf, in dem sich Gastarbeiter angesichts der Ausländerfeindlichkeit befinden,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 17, 1982, Rep. B 4.7, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. 72. Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 54. 73. Ralf Dahrendorf, “The Crisis in German Education,” Journal of Contemporary History 2, no. 3 (July 1967): 139–47; Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage Publications, 1977). 74. Ayse S. Cağlar, “German Turks in Berlin: Social Exclusion and Strategies for Social Mobility,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 21, no. 3 (July 1, 1995): 309–23; Regina Bendix and Barbro Klein, “Introduction: Foreigners and Foreignness in Europe,” Journal of Folklore Research 30, no. 1 (1993): 1; Bican Sahin and Nezahat Altuntas, “Between Enlightened Exclusion and Conscientious Inclusion: Tolerating the Muslims in Germany,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 29, no. 1 (March 1, 2009): 27–41. 75. “Schulbesuch und Schulerfolg ausländischer Schüler,” Statistische Monatsberichte (Bremen) 4/78 (1978): 99–104; “Bildungsverhalten und Schulerfolg der ausländischen Kinder in Baden-Württemberg: 2. Bericht zum Projekt ‘Untersuchung von Schulbesuch und Schulverlauf auslän-
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discher Schüler in Baden-Württemberg’; Tabellen,” Materialien zur Förderung ausländischer Kinder und Jugendlicher an allgemeinbildenden und beruflichen Schulen : Reihe C; 6 (Stuttgart: Ministerium für Kultus und Sport Baden-Württemberg, 1983), http://www.statistik.badenwuerttemberg.de 76. Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany, Statistisches Jahrbuch 1984, 68. 77. Instead, these groups often put down roots, becoming permanent residents (and often citizens) in their countries of residence, although they frequently faced continued xenophobia and othering. Nermin AbadanUnat, Turks in Europe: From Guest Worker to Transnational Citizen (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 183–92; Ute Frevert, “How to Become a Good European Citizen,” in The Making of Citizens in Europe: New Perspectives on Citizenship Education, ed. Viola B Georgi (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 2008), 39; Eva ØstergaardNielsen, Transnational Politics: The Case of Turks and Kurds in Germany (New York: Routledge, 2003), 38–39. See also Stephen Castles, Heather Booth, and Tina Wallace, Here for Good: Western Europe’s New Ethnic Minorities (London: Pluto Press, 1984); Panikos Panayi, Outsiders: History of European Minorities (London: Hambledon, 1999), 117–60. 78. European Parliament, “The Teaching of Immigrants in the European Union,” Working Document, Education and Culture (Luxembourg: European Parliament, November 1997), 43. See also Commission of the European Communities, “Report on the Implementation in the Member States of Directive 77/486/EEC on the Education of the Children of Migrant Workers” (Brussels, January 3, 1989); Sekretariat and Hermann, “39. Sitzung des Unterausschusses für ausländische Schüler am 18. Mai 1989 in Stuttgart,” Ergebnisniederschrift (Bonn: Kultusministerkon ferenz, June 15, 1989), B 304/7775, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 79. Kevin Kenny, Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 80. Parliament, “EDUC 100 EN,” 43; Gisella Gori, Towards an EU Right to Education (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2001), fn on 215. There were some flurries of attempts to update or change 486/77/EEC, but each of these was frustrated. West Germany declined to support the re-drafting the agenda. The sense of obsoletion meant less emphasis, which in turn led to less funding particularly as new EC projects focused on integration fell away in favor of other initiatives. 81. Commission of the European Communities, “Standing Conference of European Ministers of Education: Ad Hoc Conference on the Education of Migrants (Strasbourg, 5–8 November 1974): The Education of Children of Migrant Workers in the European Community,” Communication from the Commission of the European Communities,
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November 8, 1974, 2, BAC 144/1987 53, Commission of the European Union. The Associated Action Plan came into force before the Directive (Council of the European Communities, “Council Resolution of 21 January 1974 Concerning a Social Action Programme,” Official Journal of the European Communities, no. C 13 (February 12, 1974): 1–4). 82. By 1988, the Commission assembling the report laid out the unequal implementation across the Community. Because of the phrasing of the Directive, there was little that the Community could actually do regarding punitive measures against those avoiding implementation. Nonetheless, the ongoing use of the directive both in West Germany and by countries of citizenship continued to underline its impact as rhetorical tool, even if its weight as a legal device was limited. Council of the European Communities, “Council Directive 77/486/EEC of 25 July 1977 on the Education of the Children of Migrant Workers,” Official Journal L, no. 199 (August 6, 1977): 0032–0033; Council of the European Communities and John Morris, “451st Meeting of the Council – Social Affairs – Luxembourg, 28 June 1977,” Press Release (Luxembourg: Commission of the European Communities, June 28, 1977), BAC 14/1989 44, Commission of the European Union. Both sets of measures are supposed to be implemented within four years. 83. Wilhelm Hilpert, “76 000 Italiener an deutschen Schulen: Kinder zwischen Eingliederung und nationaler Identität/Botschafter empfiehlt Zweisprachigkeit,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 12, 1982, B 138/38640, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 84. “Entwicklung von Lehr- und Lernmittel für den muttersprachlichen Unterricht mit italienischen Schülern in deutschsprachigen Ländern; hier: Arbeitstagung mit Vertretern der EG, des UAauslS, verschiedener italienischer Behörde und Mitarbeitern des Instituto della Enciclopedia Italiana am 28. und 19. 10. 1985 in Rome,” Anlage (Bonn: Kultusmini sterkonferenz, February 12, 1985), B 304/7788, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 85. Euan Reid and Hans H. Reich, eds., Breaking the Boundaries: Migrant Workers’ Children in the EC (Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 1991), 38–43. 86. Some new bilingual schools were set up in North Rhine-Westphalia, Berlin, and Bavaria (as well as in some other locations). 87. The European Community funded (money associated with the 1976 Action Programme and 1977 Directive) the development of a schoolbook for the children of Italian citizens. Because the majority of schoolchildren with Italian citizenship were third generation (some second, some fourth), the Italian government argued that the older materials available were no long applicable. Instead, they wanted materials available that could be used for children with Italian citizenship who spoke no
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Italian as well as those who possessed some knowledge as heritage speakers. See “Entwicklung von Lehr- und Lernmittel für den muttersprachlichen Unterricht mit italienischen Schülern in deutschsprachigen Ländern; hier: Arbeitstagung mit Vertretern der EG, des UAauslS, verschiedener italienischer Behörde und Mitarbeitern des Instituto della Enciclopedia Italiana am 28 und 19 10. 1985 in Rome”; Reid and Reich, Breaking the Boundaries; Reid and Reich, 38–40. 88. Hermann, “Ergebnisniederschrift über die 10. Sitzung des Unterausschusses für ausländische Schüler am 7 September 1983 in Bonn,” Ergebnisniederschrift (Bonn: Sekretariat der Ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepulik Deutschland, September 7, 1983), 16, B 304/7771, Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Hermann, “Ergebnisniederschrift über die 28. Sitzung des Unterausschusses für ausländische Schüler am 15./17. März 1987 in Berlin,” Ergebnisniederschrift (Bonn: Sekretariat der Ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepulik Deutschland, March 20, 1987), 16–18, B 304/7772, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 89. Commission of the European Communities, “Report from the Commission to the Council on the Implementation of Directive 77/486/ EEC on the Education of the Children on Migrant Workers” (Brussels: European Community, February 10, 1984); Antonio Perotti, “The Impact of the Council of Europe’s Recommendations on Intercultural Education in European School Systems,” European Journal of Intercultural Studies 5, no. 1 (January 1, 1994): 9–17. 90. Part of the reason for that increase was because many children tracked into lower-secondary school returned to Greece to finish their education. See “Protokoll über die 5. Tagung der gemischten deutsch-griechischen Expertenkommission für den Unterricht griechischen Schüler in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland vom 3. – 5. 12. 1985 in München,” Protokoll (Bonn, December 5, 1985), 7–9, B 304/6120, Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Seifert and Ministerium für Kultus und Sport BadenWürttemberg to Oberschulämter, “Allgemeine Hinweise und Empfehlungen zum Schulversuch; hier: Hauptschulen für griechsiche Schüler,” IV-2-2111/713, January 14, 1987, EA 3/609 Bü 90/2, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. The Greek state worked closely with both Social Democratic and Christian Democratic Parties (in North RhineWestphalia and Hesse, as well as Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, respectively). 91. “Hier stinkt es nach Türken.” 92. Abadan-Unat argues in the 2011 book that “by the 1980s, Turks were the most visible and numerous of Germany’s ethnic groups, making them a primary target of xenophobia” (Turks in Europe, 186). See also Stephan Lanz, “The German Sonderweg: Multiculturalism as ‘Racism with a
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Distance,’” in European Multiculturalism Revisited, ed. Alessandro Silj (London: Zed Books, 2010), 105–46. 93. Zeynep Kılıç, “Second-Generation Turkish Immigrants in the United States and Germany: Dilemmas of Cultural Identity,” in Crossing Over: Comparing Recent Migration in the United States and Europe, ed. Holger Henke (Lanham, M.D.: Lexington Books, 2005), 169. For a discussion of the situation regarding immigrant identity in the 2000s, see Yıldız Köremezli, “Immigrants’ Struggle for Recognition: Religion and Politics,” in Religion, Identity and Politics: Germany and Turkey in Interaction, ed. Haldun Gülalp and Günter Seufert (New York: Routledge, 2013), 60–71. 94. “Kommuniqué über die 8. Tagung der Gemischten deutsch-türkischen Expertenkommission für den Unterricht türkischer Schüler in der BRD vom 10. – 12. June 1985 in Izmir,” Kommuniqué (Bonn, June 12, 1985), 4–7, B 304/7794, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 95. “Kommuniqué über das dritte Tagung der Gemischten deutsch-türkische Kommission für den Unterricht türkischer Schüler in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland vom 10. – 12. 10. 1979 in Bonn,” Kommuniqué (Bonn, October 12, 1979), 1–2, B 93, Bd. 861, PA AA. 96. Sekretariat and Hermann, “3. Sitzung des Unterausschusses für ausländische Schüler am 17./18. October 1978 in Wiesbaden,” Ergebnisniederschrift (Bonn: Kultusministerkonferenz, October 18, 1978), 6, B 304/7771, Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Hermann, “8. Sitzung des Arbeitsgruppe ‘Unterricht für ausländsiche Schüler’ am 19/20. 11. 1979,” Ergebnisniederschrift (Bonn: Sekretariat der Kultusmini sterkonferenz, November 20, 1979), NW 388-43, Landesarchiv NRW. See also AL Kantemir, “Modellversuch Türkisch anstelle der 1. Fremdsprache,” KA 9/879 (Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin, April 5, 1982). 97. “Kommuniqué über die 10. Tagung der gemischten deutsch-türkischen Expertenkommission für den Unterricht türkischer Schüler in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland am 28. September – 01. Oktober 1987 in Antalya,” Kommuniqué (Berlin, October 1, 1987), 4–5, B 304/7794, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 98. Privatschule der Deutschen botschaft Ankara to Sekretariat der Ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, “Türkisch als 2. Fremdsprache an deutschen Schulen,” October 7, 1981, B 304/6178, Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Sekretariat der Ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland and Hermann to Privatschule der Deutschen botschaft Ankara, “Türkisch als 2. Fremdsprache an deutschen Schulen,” IA – Tgb. Nr. 20.295/81, November 13, 1981, B 304/6178, Bundesarchiv Koblenz.
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99. “Hier stinkt es nach Türken.” 100. Reimut Jochimsen, BMBW, and Pressereferat, “Statement des Staatssekretärs des Bundesministeriums für Bildung und Wissenschaft, Professor Dr. Reimut Jochimsen, bei der Pressekonferenz des Stifterverbandes am 22. Juni 1977 im Wissenschaftszentrum in Bonn” (Bonn, June 22, 1977), B 93, Bd. 857, PA AA. 101. Council 16/11/1971 on cooperation in the field of education. Commission of the European Communities and Henri Jane, “For a Community Policy on Education,” Bulletin of the European Communities Supplement 10/73 (1973), http://aei.pitt.edu/5588. The European Community avoided programs directly overlapping with the Council of Europe’s programs (i.e. modern language instruction). For a list of programs in place as of 1974, see Etienne Grosjean, Forty Years of Cultural Co-Operation at the Council of Europe 1954–94 (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1997). 102. “2215 die Verwaltungskommission für die soziale Sicherheit der Wanderarbeitnehmer,” EG-Bulletin, October 1973. 103. “Hier stinkt es nach Türken”; Mustafa Tekinez, “Sind wir nicht alle Menschen?,” in Deutsches Heim – Glück allein: Wie Türken Deutsche sehen, ed. Dursun Akçam, trans. Helmut Oberdiek (Bornheim-Merten: Lamuv, 1982), 206–14.
CHAPTER 7
The Right to Education for Asylum Seekers and Ethnic Germans (1985–1992)
On 1 November 1991, Die Zeit published an article called “Ali in Wonderland” about “the history of German-Turks.” In the article, authors Claus Leggewie and Hans Groffebert used Frankfurt law student Yasemin, holder of a one-year scholarship for highly gifted students, and Gülhan, who worked for Saz-Rock (a ten-year-old German-Turkish cultural club), to illustrate the changing face of Germany. As Gühlan declared, they “were not foreigners,” but young students and professionals consciously part of a multicultural, German-Turkish society.1 The two authors agreed, but also acknowledged continued discrimination and repression across the (re) united Federal Republic of Germany. Articles like “Ali in Wonderland” emphasized the multicultural nature of German society using scholastic success and naturalization as measures. According to Leggewie and Groffebert, 30 years of migration (starting in 1961) and integration had irrevocably changed the country’s identity. For the authors, Yasemin and Gülhan were absolutely not foreign. How could they be? Clubs like Saz-Rock (“saz” for the musical instrument and “rock” to symbolize youth cultural) visibly highlighted the commingling of different cultural influences as both “Germans” and “German-Turks” alike ate döner kebabs.2 Furthermore, 150,000 schoolchildren with non- German citizenship in middle- and upper-secondary schools alongside those attending vocational schools and university demonstrated a high measure of successful integration.3 Unlike the news articles from the early © The Author(s) 2019 B. Lehman, Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1949–1992, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97728-7_7
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1980s, however, this article focused on established residents. Now new migration did not necessarily sit tidily with established social frameworks particularly not after the dramatic changes take took place across Europe and Germany in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Leggewie and Groffebert’s Zeit article’s tone reflected those changing geopolitical circumstances. On the one side, there was a breakdown in the established Cold War divide beginning with Hungary opening its borders in 1987. Then the Berlin Wall was torn to pieces (1989), Yugoslavia fell violently apart (1990–1992), and the USSR broke down (1991). Those collapses alongside internal conflicts in countries like Turkey led to hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers moving throughout Europe. A quickly changing geopolitical world along with population movements combined with the formation of new national and supranational political entities led established countries across the continent to reconsider the meaning of national and multicultural identities. For Germany, the (re)unification of the two Germanies East and West as the Federal Republic of Germany (1990) and the signing of the Treaty of Maastricht (1992) forming the European Union (EU, 1993) forced the reconceptualization of Germanness as both an ethnic and legal category. The corresponding changes each contributed to the specific multiculturalism Leggewie and Groffebert discussed as an accomplished fact. That shift toward multiculturalism rested partly on the Europeanwide reconceptualization of nationality generally and Germanness specifically as tied to language.4 As Greece had already sent decades emphasizing, if a child learned Greek at their mother’s breast, they must in some way be part of the Greek community and in turn the Greek nation. In Germany, many politicians and part of society turned in the same direction. Decades of immigration meant many legal non-Germans spoke German as their first language. As discussed in Chap. 6, several politicians had already seriously been considering whether those children should be German since the early 1980s. The subsequent arrival of hundreds of thousands of new ethnic German migrants who could not speak German raised further questions about the wisdom of assuming a connection between culture and heritage. Instead, following European trends, many German politicians argued to be German one needed to speak German.5 Yet, even as the Federal Republic of Germany followed some European trends, the emphasis on adhering to international human rights norms— dating back to the late 1940s—was diminishing. In part because of the Nazi past, the Federal Republic spent decades emphasizing a need to make
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reparations, leading among other things to some of the most flexible asylum laws in Europe. Now, with the war and Nazi atrocities decades in the past, the federal and Länder governments moved away from careful adherence to human rights norms. Instead, the Länder emphasized civil rights and immediate necessity over human rights. Those Länder followed international guidelined when convenient or legally binding.6 That shift becomes apparent when looking at the right to education for new migrants—particularly asylum seekers—at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. Here, coverage under compulsory schooling as well as access to extra mother language and cultural instruction (in history, geography, religion, and social studies) became symbolic of how the Länder governments interpreted the relationship between the individual and the state. With the Länder basing rights on citizenship and form of entry, legal status was more relevant than ever even as those governments redefined German identity in terms of language and multiculturalism. This chapter argues even as “multiculturalism” became a buzzword across the Federal Republic of Germany and the European Community (EC) member states, actual support for human rights—including education—diminished in favor of civil rights. As the chapter’s first section demonstrates using Kurdish asylum seekers from Turkey, the Länder Ministries moved away from emphasis on providing mother language to support the right to personhood in favor of state language instruction. The second section, focusing on Polish- and Russian-speaking ethnic Germans, emphasizes the role of citizenship status in the right to and shape of education, looking at how these groups had the right to equal opportunities, but not to maintain their native languages. The third section provides a contrast to those first two, discussing the right to education for asylum seekers who were neither German nor former guest worker state nationals, but from Poland and Russia. In contrast with the first two groups, their very right to any education was in question, not only access to extra mother language and cultural instruction. Using those three examples, this chapter demonstrates how, even as the concept of multiculturalism spread and the idea of Germanness became more inclusive, the understanding of the state’s responsibility toward the individual became limited. That limitation reflected the Federal Republic’s move away from clear support for the Council of Europe’s continued efforts to embrace diversity and toward the tight borders of fortress Europe.7
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The Right to Mother Language Instruction for Kurdish Minority Groups In the early 1980s, a young Kurdish child arrived in West Germany seeking asylum from Turkey. More than a decade later, the weekly news magazine Die Zeit published an open letter from the now young adult describing the situation they had fled. My parents were born to war. They were raised in a war zone, married during war, and I was born during that same war. As much as children can be, I because accustomed to the sight of death. As my mother carried me through narrow streets in full view of the dead, I would wonder if there would be any rice for dinner. I became familiar with interruptions in sleep caused by my mother gathering me up to escape into the mountains. But I never would become used to the memory of soldiers beating my mother as her arms trembled with dread.8
After that experience, the author fled to West Germany to seek asylum alongside tens of thousands of other Kurdish individuals over the 1980s. The conflict the letter-writer left behind was, in part, about ethnic and national identity. In the post-WWI era, as the League of Nations cut the Ottoman Empire to pieces, the European powers (predominately Britain and France) dominating the League did not attempt to acknowledge local ethnic groupings. The borders those officials drew up cut through mountain ranges and divided multiple people self-identifying as Kurdish into Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. In the western European imagination, that separation barely mattered. Rather, most assumed that people living in Iraq would be Iraqi. And depending on the new government in place, those new states also expected their citizens to conform to a new ethnonational identity. As discussed in Chap. 5, for example, in the 1920s the Turkish government claimed all people in Turkey were Turks by dint of living in Turkey. Over the 1970s and 1980s, however, the Turkish government adopted a more aggressive nationalization policy, which was part of what prompted thousands of self-identifying Kurds to seek asylum across Europe. Despite banning public education in minority languages in the 1920s (limited foreign language instruction in languages like German was acceptable), the Turkish language had not overwhelmed the use of other languages and dialects like it had in Italy. To try and force the issue, during the 1970s and 1980s subsequent Turkish governments escalated their efforts to spread a unified Turkishness, in part
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to promote stability and unity. Among other measures, in the 1970s the government shut down Kurdish presses and in 1983 the government implemented a complete ban of any publications or broadcasts in languages other than Turkish in the country.9 Partly in response, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK, Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan) demanded the right to separate from Turkey and become an independent state. As a self-identifying national community, they wanted the right to self-determination.10 The ensuing armed conflict in the East and oppression across the country prompted thousands of self-identifying Kurds to leave in search of their rights to personhood and religious expression.11 Reports like the opening article engendered sympathy in West Germany for the Kurdish plight in Turkey. For many West German citizens, these asylum seekers were deserving of West German aid. They were desperate to follow their own religious traditions and wanted to speak their own language, hoping to raise their children without fear of violence. Those desires, as the West German federal government pointed out, were supposed to be their rights as humans and in keeping with international human rights law. With the Federal Republic officially acknowledging their need and right to asylum, the country would become one of the primary destination of Kurdish migrants. International asylum recommendations emphasized the importance of country of residence’s role in providing succor, including for maintaining cultural heritage. But once in West Germany, those self-identifying Kurds were treated as Turkish citizens, which meant allowing them to “maintain” their Turkish heritage. Because the West German federal and Länder governments continued tying ethnicity specifically to citizenship (regardless of personal identity), the Länder governments assumed all citizens of another state were supposed to identify in accordance with the state nationality, even if the situation at hand demonstrated the fallacy of that relationship.12 In short, once in West Germany a Kurdish child, as a Turkish citizen, was entitled to the same rights as other Turkish citizens. Consequently, if a Kurdish child with asylum in West Germany came from Turkey and wanted to take “mother language and cultural instruction,” they were welcome to do so—in Turkish.13 The seeming absurdity of offering “Turkish mother language instruction” to Kurdish-speaking asylum seekers with Turkish citizenship was not lost on West German local educators or political groups.14 In 1987, Berlin Members of Parliament Wolfgang Wieland and Sevim Çelebi-Gottschlich’s asked the Berlin government to provide mother language instruction in
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Kurdish for self-defining Kurds with Turkish citizenship.15 Technically, schoolchildren in West Berlin (based on the KMK’s 1976 Recommendations on the instruction of the children of foreign workers) had the right to be schooled in their respective native language regardless of ancestry or residency status.16 To fulfill that right, the two Alternative Liste (AL) members argued that Kurdish children should receive language instruction in Kurdish. Wieland and Çelebi-Gottschlich based their claims on decades of sociological and educational studies as well as Berlin teachers’ reports underscoring the necessity of mother-tongue instruction for children’s cognitive, emotional, and social development. Otherwise, children born in West Germany to Kurdish immigrants from Turkey were “overburdened by confrontation with Turkish in the schools,” after learning Kurdish in their parents’ homes as their mother tongue and German in their surroundings.17 The two politicians then, referring to the 1975 Helsinki Accords, argued that the state needed to act as though “the right to the mother tongue [was] a universal human right.”18 Acknowledging the heterogeneity of national groups threw the validity of the Länder Ministries of Education’s programs for mother-tongue and cultural instruction into question. The initial purpose of the courses was supposed to ensure the child’s right (as an individual) to education and self-actualization as well as their rights as a member of a minority by enabling the child to learn the language and culture of their parents (as discussed in previous chapters). Yet the Standing Conference of Länder Ministries of Education’s (Kultusministerkonferenz, KMK) 1976 Recommendations only guaranteed the offer of state languages—and then only from former guest worker countries.19 Accepting that not all children spoke the official state language of their (or their grandparents’ or parents’) countries of citizenship, the Länder Ministries did question if they were actually offering appropriate support or truly ensuring the children’s rights to education, to their native language, and right to personhood. The pedagogical foundation behind offering mother language and cultural instruction rather fell apart if the languages taught had little relation to any languages a child spoke. Yet, the only reason the Kurdish children had a right to such instruction at all was because they were Turkish citizens. Theoretically, the desire for mother language and cultural instruction fit into basic human rights frameworks regarding the right to speak and learn a child’s native tongue as well as international norms regarding religious freedoms. Since the 1950s, the Council of Europe and other
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international bodies, including UNESCO, had argued that families should have the right to pass down their cultural heritage, which included language.20 Technically, the Länder Ministries agreed. In the 1950s, as discussed in Chap. 2, the Ministries had established Polish instruction for stateless and refugee children in and coming to the Federal Republic for precisely those reasons. The North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Education (hereafter NRW Ministry) used that argument in the 1960s to develop “consular instruction” for Italians (later “extra mother language and cultural instruction”).21 Offering language, geography, history, social studies, and sometimes religion, the classes were supposed to permit children to maintain their heritage. Working with the countries of citizenship to develop those courses, however, the classes became increasingly focused on teaching national identity rather than ethnic heritage. In emphasizing national identity, the Länder Ministries ignored non- national ethnicities, a European-wide trend which the Council of Europe tried to combat over the 1980s. In 1981, for example, the Council addressed precisely this issue by acknowledging the existence of ethnic (in addition to national) minority groups as well as the gap between state languages and mother tongues. In so doing, the Council recognized people were individuals who participated in local cultural communities rather than solely as representatives of the country to which they held citizenship.22 Most people straddled the line between viewing the right to native language was a positive and negative right. Ideally, the Council of Europe argued the state needed to facilitate instruction in children’s native languages when possible. Yet, the concept of the mother language and cultural heritage was problematic. A mother language was technically supposed to be whatever language a mother spoke to a child. That language could be anything—as many as there were mothers. Yet, not only was the concept gendered, presuming the existence of a biological mother as a primary caretaker, but it neglected social influence. Particularity given the complications associated the differences in native language, the Council felt a state’s primary role in ensuring personhood was not to prevent individuals from maintaining their ethnic affiliations and connections (as the Turkification campaign was doing). In short, a state would ideally help when possible but absolutely not prevent. But, the state was also obligated not to force the affiliation as part of the right to personhood included the right to leave a group. Ideally, native language instruction was supposed to be offered but not compelled.23
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In the mid-1980s, the individual Länder Ministries began extensive discussions about whether to treat foreign ethnic minorities differently from foreign national minorities. The debates developed in response to international trends but also to non-national foreign minority groups’ requests for recognition as official minorities as well as for state assistance with language and cultural classes.24 The Länder Ministries were willing to grant the first but were hesitant to permit the second. Since the mid- 1960s, the Ministries had agreed that children had a right to speak and learn their native languages. But the state only agreed to provide classes for those groups with citizenship to a guest worker state on account of the FRG’s social responsibilities specifically toward those groups (as discussed in Chaps. 3, 4, and 5).25 And, because of the complications with dialects and multilingualism, the KMK restricted West German responsibility only to the sending state’s official language.26 To accept responsibility for non- national language training would have added a significant liability that the Länder were not usually willing to take on. The distance between rhetoric, policy, and practice resulted in multiple contradictions within these discussions. Although lack of prevention was in fact an internationally accepted form of support for minority rights, a state’s responsibility for its residents within the parameters of a welfare state implied that the state should provide for clear needs (in this case native language instructions). International recommendations and local studies, as Wieland and Çelebi-Gottschlich pointed out, all stipulated that children were better off with native language instruction. Following that logic, the Ministers of Education would try to ensure the citizens of states associated with the former Yugoslavia were able to continue language instruction even during the civil wars. As the associated education administrators acknowledged, to do otherwise would deny the children’s rights. Yet, in direct contradiction to the claim, in cases like with Japanese minority groups, the Länder simply declaimed responsibility. The Länder Ministries, in accordance with international norms, were not going to prevent children from learning Japanese but they also refused to facilitate lessons. The resulting Ministry actions presented a verbal contradiction. Setting up Croatian instruction based on claims that it was the children’s right as humans suggested that it should be Japanese children’s rights too. In practice, however, the Länder were no longer treating extra language and cultural instruction as a human right, but rather a right specifically dependent on citizenship status. And, based on their own regulations, the Länder were obligated to provide those classes to the children of former guest worker states’ nationals.
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Neither the Länder Ministries nor the Turkish government supported multiculturalism among the diverse Turkish minority groups. The Turkish government was in the middle of a concentrated effort to bring about cultural unification and/or homogenization in Turkey. The Länder Ministries, in turn, wanted to be able to work with a single Turkish minority group instead of a multiplicity. In consequence, despite international recommendations regarding asylum seekers, the Länder Ministries of Education supported the Turkish government’s brand of both Islamic instruction and Turkish language and cultural classes, outright denying most groups the right, or even permission, to maintain their own cultures within a public setting like the school. For the Länder governments, multiculturalism was acceptable in terms of state-approved national identities. As such, “German-Turkishness” was slowly becoming an acceptable multicultural identity. For many, however, adding combinations like German-Kurdish was a step too far.27 But most Kurds in West Berlin still had more rights to extra support than many non-national or national ethnic minority groups on account of their citizenship to a former guest worker state. The CDU-FDP Senate argued “the Turkish Kurds in Berlin came as Turkish citizens.”28 As such, they would be offered the same support programs as their fellow Turkish citizens.29 In Berlin, the relevant foreign consulates were responsible for providing extra native language classes outside of regular school instruction and for ensuring the children’s right to their native language. Hence, if the Turkish General Consulate did not choose to offer language instruction in Kurdish, then the Senator of Education decided instruction in Kurdish would be dependent on the group’s own initiative.30 The issue of liability was one of the main reasons for that limitation, which was what the Berlin Senate explained as it denied Wieland and Çelebi-Gottschlich’s request for Kurdish in public schools. In 1986, the Berlin Senate officially acknowledged that “the Kurdish belong to a people (Volk) with their own culture and language.”31 As a recognized minority, the group had the right to speak Kurdish and pass down cultural traditions. The Berlin government would not stop them, but it also would not agree to help. If a state like Berlin agreed that all recognized minority groups had the right to state instruction in their native languages, then Berlin would have been responsible for funding teachers, materials, and space. In a period of economic decline, the government did not want to take on added duties. West Berlin would by no means deny children their
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right to Kurdish language instruction but the city was not going to pick up the tab when state funds were already limited.32 Kurdish children with Turkish citizenship’s access to language instruction in West Germany highlights the complicated relationship between identity, citizenship, human rights, and state responsibility in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Council of Europe argued non-national minorities needed recognition and state support where possible. Asylum seekers were in even more need of that support. The Länder, in turn, recognized groups like the Kurdish as legitimate ethnic groups with real need. But, even as the Länder Ministries of Education agreed that native language instruction was an important human right, most refused to support that right. It was not their responsibility. Instead, the Länder facilitated “extra language and cultural instruction” specifically down citizenship lines associated with the former guest worker states. In implementation, the classes became about state language and culture, focused on national rather than ethnic identities. That limitation in turn reflected the kinds of multiculturalism the Länder were willing to acknowledge and countenance. Even as international groups like the Council of Europe acknowledged the rights of non- national minorities, for most of the Länder, identity was supposed to be connected to the state. If a person was a Turkish citizen, they should speak Turkish even if they identified as Kurdish. And, if a person was a (West) German citizen, they needed to speak German. Yet, even as the Länder emphasized state langauge competency, the idea of a German-speaking Turkish-German with Turkish citizenship was becoming common, straining both states’ exclusive ideas of the nation.
Redefining the Limits of Germanness Within a Multicultural Europe The emphasis on a connection between ethnonational identity and language contributed to the redefinition of Germanness in the late 1980s and through the 1990s. Part of the issue on the table was the continued presence of multi-generational legally foreign residents in the Federal Republic. Despite denying these millions of individuals citizenship and ongoing social othering, most German foreign residents had remained in the country and continued growing families. These individuals—represented in Yasemin and Gühlan—were clearly members of a multicultural German society.33
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Most politicians in the Federal Republic acknowledged some level of German multiculturalism when discussing Italians or Turks in Germany. Those West German residents, as Italian-German or Turkish-German were multicultural. But most of those politicians had difficulty acknowledging multiculturalism within the German national identity. They continued envisioning Germanness as a homogeneous, clear identity. Focusing on language made that emphasis seemingly clear. German parents in West Germany, after all, taught German to their children, making the children clearly German. The arrival of thousands of Polishand Russian-speaking German citizens (Spätaussiedler, as the largest two migrant groups, see Table 7.1) put a lie to the seeming simplicity of that belief. The clear disconnect between German heritage and either lingual or cultural knowledge among ethnic German migrants was not new, stretching back to the 1970s. In the Soviet Sphere, children outside of the German Democratic Republic were usually discouraged from speaking or learning languages other than the state language (i.e., Polish in Poland) Table 7.1 Ethnonational German (Aussiedler) migration to West Germany, 1968–1992 Total
1968–1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992
530,343 48,170 37,925 36,459 38,968 42,788 78,523 202,673 377,055 397,075 221,995 230,565
From Poland
From the Soviet Sphere
298,302 30,355 19,122 17,455 22,075 27,188 48,419 140,226 250,340 113,253 40,129 17,742
68,233 2071 1447 913 460 753 14,488 47,572 98,134 147,455 147,320 195,576
From the School age (former) (6–18) Yugoslavia 9442 213 137 190 191 182 156 223 1469 530 450 199
112,461 7674 6635 5540 6303 7108 14,217 38,990 63,718 66,905 47,843 56,738
Percentage of total 21.2 15.9 17.5 15.2 16.2 16.6 18.1 19.2 16.9 16.8 21.6 24.6
Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany, Statistisches Jahrbuch für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1990), 73; Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany, Statistisches Jahrbuch 1993 für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Wiesbaden: Wiesbadener Graphische Betriebe GmbH, 1993), 92
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and Russian as a first foreign language. Children with some proof (real or forged) of Germanness moving West into the Federal Republic thus rarely had a continued connection to Germanness beyond heritage. The KMK acknowledged that gap in the late 1970s with its 1977 Recommendations regarding mother language instruction for ethnonational German immigrants. Those Recommendations pushed rapid integration into the West German public school system with programs focused almost exclusively on the German language. According to the KMK, these children needed placement in West German public schools as soon as possible. After all, as citizens, those children were supposed to have the right to education on the same basis as other citizens, which included support to ensure equal education opportunities. This system worked as long as the number of immigrants remained low. Before 1987, a few thousand children arrived a year. In 1988, however, almost 40,000 school-age ethnic German children made their way to West Germany, followed by almost 64,000 in 1989. Faced with thousands of new arrivals, none of the West German states had the resources to actually provide the education to which the children were legally entitled. Furthermore, as with the Kurdish minority groups in the FRG, legal entitlement did not necessarily reflect what the ethnic German migrant groups wanted for their children. Moving in blocks instead of as individuals or small families, many migrant ethnic Germans expressed interest in their cultural connections to their countries of origin instead of aiming for complete assimilation. In following, many of the families involved wanted their children to continue to learn Polish or Russian. These families did not consider their languages and cultural practices in conflict with their German identities. The Länder Ministries of Education, however, did not view Polish or Russian as compatible with Germanness. As with Kurdish children with Turkish citizenship, Polish- and Russianspeaking German children were entitled only to instruction in German. In accordance with international norms, the children had the right to support in their mother language. But although the children could not speak German, the Länder Ministries officially claimed the children’s mother tongue was German on account of their citizenship status. In following, children with German citizenship were denied public school access to Polish or Russian instruction despite the fact that several schools offered the classes to asylum seekers with the same lingual competence.
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The presence of hundreds of thousands of foreign language-speaking Germans stained the conceptual tie between heritage and culture. These children might have state-acknowledged German heritage, but with language as a primary marker of identity, they did not reflect contemporary definitions of Germanness. For many German-speaking politicians and journalists, the idea that arriving ethnic German children could be “German” while culturally and linguistically dissimilar to their other “German” classmates heightened concerns about the pollution of German cultural identity.34 If looking to culture (including both language and history) as a rubric of Germanness instead of blood, then those same German-speaking Turkish citizens denied citizenship at the beginning of the 1980s were more ethnically German than these new migrants. Consequently, the very existence of the new migrants complicated the idea of who possessed enough Germanness to belong to the Federal Republic and who was truly “foreign.”35 According to some scholars, the flood of ethnic German migration at the end of the 1980s was one of the reasons reunification happened as quickly as it did. While many ethnic German migrants traveled from Poland, Russia, and other eastern European states, some also hailed from East Germany. The West German ethnonational majority did not want to have to pay for and accommodate the thousands of co-nationals arriving monthly. In their turn, many individuals in the GDR wanted the material comforts capitalism afforded. While it is difficult to determine exactly to what extent the demands of migration and the reintegration of ethnic Germans played, in 1990 the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic unified as a single country.36 Unification shook the foundations of what it meant to be legally and ethnically German. Regardless of continued claims of ethnic similarity, 40 years of different schooling, governance, and food had had an impact on culture. However great or slight the difference, both Ossies and Wessies (informal terms for people born in East and West Germany respectively) claimed that there was one. At the same time, the Federal Republic’s legal and cultural definitions of “Germanness” had developed partly in response to the West German federal government’s claim that all East Germans, as ethnic Germans, were entitled to citizenship in the West. As unification resolved the question of the GDR’s citizens’ place in the Federal Republic, it also obviated a political need to maintain the connection between ethnicity and citizenship.
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Responding to the forced reconceptualization of “Germanness” on multiple levels (e.g., ethnic, lingual, and political), the German government revised its citizenship laws in 1990 shortly after unification. The new law restricted the number of people entitled to status as ethnic Germans and hence German citizenship.37 Only individuals from the former Soviet Union had “an unconditional claim to immigration to Germany” if they could demonstrate proof of ancestry.38 Individuals from other countries now faced generational limits on inheriting Germanness. Furthermore, the grant of citizenship could no longer happen without significant bureaucratic delays. And among the new steps toward citizenship, applicants had to demonstrate sufficient knowledge of the German language. To be German, an applicant had to speak German. Focusing on culture rather than heritage, the new citizenship laws also opened citizenship to members of established German foreign residents including Italian and Turkish citizens.39 The legislation stipulated that youths between 16 and 23 who had lived at least 8 years in Germany and attended school in the country could apply for naturalization.40 Adult foreigners who had lived for at least 15 years in Germany (around 40 percent of foreign citizens) were also entitled to apply for citizenship regardless of their economic standing, though they had to have paid into social insurance funds for 60 months to receive the right to unlimited residence to begin with.41 And, like ethnic Germans, these groups had to prove sufficient “integration,” including German language knowledge. In short, the law now officially suggested Germanness could be learned. But the revised citizenship laws did not have space for dual identities, instead compelling all individuals to choose to be either “German” or “other.” Partly in consequence comparatively few people took the step. Many residents with foreign citizenship demurred in part because of continued restrictions regarding dual citizenship and legal complications with the other country involved (i.e., inheritance rights). Furthermore, many were disinclined to renounce their inherited citizenship after years of facing widespread rejection in West Germany. Others, particularly European Community member state nationals, saw only limited benefits to changing their legal status.42 Those changed legal parameters for citizenship combined with an European Community (moving toward Union) emphasis on multilingualism prompted the German state to change is stance on Polish and Russian instruction for its citizens. Looking at potential markets in the East as well as wanting to secure political orientation, the EC encouraged its member states to offer instruction in central and eastern European languages in order to
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improve contact between the “West” and “East.” Feeling that they should take advantage of native Polish and Russian speakers with German citizenship, the German Ministries decided to support immigrant children’s maintenance of their language skills.43 Limited resources, however, limited widespread implementation. Unlike Germany, many western European states viewed multiculturalism as both internal and inter-European. States such as France and the Netherlands, for example, at least partly acknowledged their internal diversity, extending options for dual citizenship.44 The Council of Europe further encouraged the practice with its 1993 Protocol amending the Convention on the Reduction of Cases of Multiple Nationality and Military Obligations in Cases of Multiple Nationality, which added three cases for which dual citizenship was now permissible. Among them, in order to reflect the dynamic nature of society, the Council of Europe recommended second- generation migrants be permitted to maintain their parents’ citizenship and that of the host country. Although France, Italy, and the Netherlands signed and ratified the amendment, the Federal Republic declined.45 That refusal reflected the ongoing perception in the Federal Republic of who could and could not be fully a part of the national body. For most people in Germany, a German-speaking individual with Dutch or Polish heritage could simply be German (not Dutch-German or Polish-German) once they learned German. In contrast, young adults with Turkish heritage—as with Yasemin and Gühlan in the introduction—could be Turkish- German, but not simply German.46 Over time, however, and depending on the exact location in the Federal Republic, many of the varied long- term minorities began to see—or already saw—themselves as at home. The ethnic German majority, in turn, started viewing these permanent foreign citizens as at least partly German. While still not common, the hyphenated identity (i.e., Turkish-German) was slowly making its way through (West) German society in order to describe the mixed status. Yet, even as the acceptance of some forms of multiculturalism became more common among the ethnonational majority, minority groups, and governments involved, the concept introduced new problems even as it solved others. Arguing that multiculturalism allowed for diversity and a heterogeneous society, many actors involved felt that state- sponsored multiculturalism addressed problems with discrimination. To an extent, that was true as accepting possible inclusion under a “German” umbrella encouraged the ethnic majority to acknowledge the existence of minority groups within the German socio-political community. Just as true,
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however, was the fact that state-sponsored multiculturalism ossified the boundaries of what official minority cultures were supposed to be and entail. For the West German majority, West German Muslims were Turkish citizens and Turkish citizens were Turks. Setting those parameters meant that groups like the Kurds and the Alevi had to struggle for recognition and permission to maintain their own cultural capital. Acknowledging a multiplicity of “us” still excluded thousands of people as “them.”47
Asylum and the Compulsory Nature of the Right to Education In August 1988, there were around 2500 recently arrived ethnic German children (Aussiedlerkinder) in West Berlin. These children came from across eastern Europe, particularly from Poland and Russia and spoke corresponding state languages (i.e., Polish and Russian). However, they also had the paperwork to prove sufficient association with Germanness to count as West German citizens. In response, the Berlin Education Administration’s (Senator for Education, Vocational Training, and Sports) Hanna-Renate Laurien (CDU) sorted around two-thirds of the Polish-speaking ethnic German migrant children into primary schools, and one-third into secondary schools alongside the local, German population. These children were, after all, German and entitled to enrollment in German schools alongside other German students as disscused above.48 Laurien, significantly, did not mention the simultaneous arrival of thousands of Polish-speaking migrants without German citizenship. In contrast to migrant German children, non-German children arriving as asylum seekers from Poland did not have the right to attend schools in Berlin. While some non-citizens were afforded that right, children seeking asylum were rarely covered under the Länder school laws.49 According to local and international law, all children were entitled to “equal education opportunities,” but, depending on form of entry into a country and citizenship status, the meaning of that equality differed. Legally, across West Germany children with their regular residence within the country fell under compulsory schooling law for both primary and secondary school.50 “Children of foreign workers” from former “guest worker countries” had the right to learn their country of citizenship’s state language and culture (as discussed above). That wording meant that a Polish-speaking child from Poland (not a guest worker country, but part of the Eastern bloc) seeking asylum in West Germany in the late 1980s was entitled neither to mother language instruction nor to coverage under
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school laws. For children in West Germany the promise of equality was limited by legal status and funding. According to the UN and Council of Europe since the 1940s, the right to education as a general concept was supposed to be a human right but the interpretation thereof and state responsibility for that right changed over the subsequent decades. In the 1950s, supranational entities including the Council of Europe expected that the child’s country of citizenship would ensure that right—particularly because of its association with civil rights (discussed in Chaps. 2 and 4). Because stateless and homeless children did not have a state to represent and protect them, the Council of Europe assumed it needed to fill that position. As labor migration picked up across Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, however, the Council of Europe and the new European Community pushed their member states to redefine the right to education to include all children within their borders instead of just citizens (discussed in Chaps. 3 and 4). Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, as those member states redefined the right to education to include both primary and secondary schooling in order to promote equal education opportunities, they also included non-nationals within that scope (discussed in Chap. 5). During the 1980s, efforts toward equal inclusion—which never succeeded in being equal in implementation—fell apart (discussed in Chap. 6). States like the West German Länder pointed out that, based on their legal statuses, all children were not the same. Children had different rights based on citizenship, including access to schools. In emphasizing that difference, the Länder reframed the right to education including equal education opportunity (particularly for transition into secondary school based on merit) as a civil right.51 In the mid and late-1980s, that gap between civil and human rights was particularly evident when looking at children of asylum seekers, de facto refugees (Flüchtlinge), and children seeking asylum themselves (all three groups hereafter “asylum seekers”).52 As with the right to education generally, the rights of refugees to education depended on precise legal status and citizenship. In the 1950s, international and local laws addressing refugees had focused on stateless and homeless migrants and not on those with citizenship. The laws’ phrasing, although conceptually aimed at all refugee and asylum seekers, did not cover everyone. Consequently, in the 1980s, as tens and then hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers with (mostly) clear citizenship status—meaning they were not stateless— entered the country, their right to education had not explicitly been addressed. Indeed, many asylum seekers fell into an evident, semi- intentional gap in access to public education.
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Initially, that gap in access to education—including coverage under compulsory schooling law—was mostly unintentional. Because of the horrors the Nazi government perpetrated in the 1930s and 1940s, the 1949 West German Basic Law enshrined some of the most open asylum procedures in all of Europe. In the 1950s and 1960s, asylum seekers counted for a small proportion of overall West German immigration. When, in the 1950s, some larger groups of asylum seekers began to enter the country, the Länder Ministries like that in Baden-Württemberg determined that groups from places like Hungary (1956) had already experienced trauma. The children did not need to be immediately thrown into the West German school system. Furthermore, most of the larger asylum-seeking groups before 1980 enjoyed widespread sympathy from West German citizens. For most, the children escaping American imperialism in the Vietnam War (1970s) or fleeing political suppression in Poland (1981) were among the “deserving.”53 Instead of forcing further suffering, the children could voluntarily attend local public schools when ready but were not bound to by law.54 For humanitarian considerations, the children were not compelled and there were no truancy officers knocking at the door. Over the course of the 1970s, sentiment toward asylum seekers and “foreigners” changed as xenophobia found public expression across the country (as discussed in Chap. 6). That sentiment not only influenced families associated with guest worker migration, but also asylum seekers. For instance, in the 1950s, most West German citizens believed that children with Hungarian citizenship were fleeing for their political rights (not to be communist) or even their lives. But as Graph 7.1 shows, the pace of asylum seeker applications rose in the 1980s, primarily due to inter-European crises (under which the German Statistical Office included Turkey). Consequently, over the 1980s, groups from Turkey and Poland—the two largest citizenship groups—became suspect as many German citizens believed these asylum seekers were gaming the system, using the long application process to join families or find jobs. As a few thousand became hundreds of thousands, many German citizens complained about an imagined strain on resources and possible ethnic pollution.55 Some members of the press and in parliament cast these asylum seekers as moochers, desirous of taking advantage of the German welfare state’s services, including schools.56 Because the right to asylum was inscribed into the constitution, the West German Länder governments could not actually prevent entry. Instead, beginning under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s Social-Liberal federal
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Graph 7.1 Asylum applicants by geographic region of origin, 1980–1992. (“African” asylum applicants include individuals from Afghanistan, India, Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka as the largest countries of origin. “Europe” includes Turkey, Poland, and the (former) Yugoslavia as well as multiple other states. Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany, Statistisches Jahrbuch 1990, 59; Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany, Statistisches Jahrbuch 1993 für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 73)
government (SPD-FDP, 1974 to 1982) and continuing under Helmut Kohl’s Conservative-Liberal federal government (CDU/CSU-FDP, 1982 to 1998), the federal and state governments instituted legal restrictions to make asylum seekers’ lives harder and severely curtailed personal freedoms and rights. Among the measures used to discourage asylum seekers from coming to West Germany, local governments conscribed where asylum seekers were allowed to live and limited their ability to work.57 The West German federal and Länder measures to discourage asylum seekers temporarily worked, as reflected in the total number of asylum seekers between 1980 and 1983 and again between 1986 and 1987 (see Graph 7.2). The restrictions on right of resident and freedom of movement directly influenced access to education. Over the 1970s and 1980s, instead of allowing asylum seekers to live anywhere in a city, the Länder assigned temporary housing (asylum houses).58 Because the
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Graph 7.2 Asylum applicants by largest countries of citizenship, 1980–1992
housing was technically temporary—although residence could last for years—children living there did not legally have a regular residence (gewöhnlicher Aufenthalt). Without a regular residence, in several West German states—NRW and BW among them—most asylum seekers’ children did not fall under compulsory schooling law.59 In consequence, thousands of asylum seekers and those sans papiers (without papers), were not covered.60 The situation was a problem, fostering inequalities, and clearly discriminatory, which the Länder Ministries well knew. Despite largely acknowledging the problems in education policies for asylum seekers, Länder like NRW and BW did not want to change their laws. That reticence stemmed in part from the tens of thousands of Polishand Russian-speaking children entitled to German citizenship (discussed above) who arrived alongside Polish- and Russian-speaking asylum seekers in the late 1980s (40,000 in 1988 alone). Despite the lingual and cultural similarities between children with Polish and Russian citizenship seeking asylum and those with German citizenship, states like Berlin viewed the latter as having a right to placement in local public schools first. Extending compulsory schooling to cover non-German asylum seekers would have required both groups receive access to local schools immediately. With the enormity of arrivals, most schools had neither the space nor the staff to accommodate all children in need. As most state school laws stood, the Länder
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Ministries could delay admittance for Russian and Polish students seeking asylum.61 Instead of trying to put all new migrant schoolchildren in public school, the Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK) decided in 1988 to apply the 1976 “Revised Agreement on the Instruction of Children of Foreign Workers,” which established guidelines for integration and preparation classes. Because the Länder Ministries had agreed that “the children of foreign workers” specifically meant the children of citizens of former guest worker states (and not actually all foreign workers), those recommendations already covered asylum-seeking children with Turkish (including self-identifying Kurds) and (former) Yugoslav citizenship.62 Expanding the KMK’s 1976 Recommendations to cover asylum-seeking children provided a basis off of which to set-up some support outside the public school. Additionally— and importantly—extending those Recommendations also entitled the children to state supported mother language and cultural classes as well as allowing the children to voluntarily take their native language instead of English as a first foreign language.63 In short, while the children were entitled to be foreign, they did not have the right to education as defined by either UNESCO or the Council of Europe.64 Based on international law, both returning German schoolchildren and asylum seekers were supposed to have the same right to education, which included coverage under local compulsory schooling law. Nonetheless, within West Germany, state responsibility for education remained contentious, in part because of the question of whether children with German citizenship had more of a right (rather than the same right). Within the KMK’s Subcommittee on Schooling for Foreign Children, some representatives felt the children needed to be covered and integrated into the public school system as soon as possible, suggesting new asylum seekers from Poland and Russia attend integration classes with returning ethnic Germans. With the same language competency and culture, both asylum seekers and ethnic German migrants from places like Poland and Russia needed German lessons in order to be able to participate fully in the West German classroom. Nonetheless, as representatives from Berlin and Hamburg pointed out, despite those similarities, the children’s legal status as citizens (or not) trumped their language abilities or personal needs.65 Both groups might have the right to education, but law and West German states’ regulations did not view them as identical.66 The German states were divided on the advisability of changing their individual laws to extend coverage to asylum seekers even as they dealt
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with the unification between East and West. Most of the Länder Ministries of Education felt that inclusion might lead to legal difficulties, such as with liability for providing space in public schools when there were not actually enough teachers or space.67 Others argued for partial coverage. BW’s CDU-controlled Ministry of Education, for example, supported the idea of compulsory schooling specifically for those children who remained despite the rejection of their asylum application. BW’s Ministry argued that these children’s status was semi-resolved and—as the state was not going to expel the children—they needed an education. SPD-governed NRW briefly moved in that direction, as well, claiming that private groups (including the churches) could no longer carry associated costs on account of the significant increase in numbers of asylum seekers. Similarly, Bavaria, governed by the CSU, extended its compulsory schooling specifically to its center for asylum seekers in Zirndorf, which had its own primary and lower-secondary school (Volksschule). Regardless of their individual decisions, by 1989 each of those Länder Ministries without clear compulsory schooling laws agreed to (usually) permit voluntary school attendance on the grounds that “something needed to be done for the children.”68 For those asylum seekers who did fall under compulsory schooling laws, the Länder Ministries of Education theoretically agreed to provide German language training and access to integration programs. After all, the West German states’ understanding of the right to education demanded integration support in order to enable asylum seekers to attend (West) German schools, as did the United Nations Refugee Act (1951). Despite the KMK’s Subcommittee’s partial extension of the KMK’s 1976 Recommendation’s programs, however, asylum seekers seldom had access to the proposed programs, much less the regular classroom. Even when the Ministries stipulated that specific groups were supposed to receive German language support, there were significant difficulties in the provision. Insufficient funding and materials compounded the already complicated legal situation. It was not uncommon that the Länder dictate that the children’s attendance “could be postponed for half a year on account of adverse conditions” (i.e., limited teachers).69 What limited access to education, asylum seekers might have hoped for proved to be almost nothing in most of the German states. Over the course of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the number of school-age asylum seekers was so high that doing anything was impractical. Children arriving as asylum seekers numbered in the tens of thousands from Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, Russia, and Poland, as well as other countries. For children born in the country, the Länder Ministries could plan
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expanded education coverage. To have 5000 new children in a city over a couple of months, however, flooded the system, overwhelming it. Without enough teachers or materials to go around, the federal and Länder governments created a hierarchical system to determine who was more deserving. For them, the answer fell down legal lines, placing children with German citizenship at the top. Even if the now 16 Länder had possessed sufficient resources, most of the German Ministries had already explicitly chosen to exclude children seeking asylum from compulsory schooling. Whether for humanitarian purposes or explicitly to limit rights, exclusions meant that children seeking asylum had less of a right to education than either German residents with foreign citizenship or German citizens. Rights were tiered and certain children marked as having more or lesser value rather than set as equals.
Conclusion This chapter returned to teaching goals and programs for new migrants, focusing on asylum seekers. Looking at how the German states extended education—from mother-tongue and cultural instruction to compulsory schooling—to recent migrants from Turkey, Poland, and Russia, this chapter demonstrated three points: First, the assumed connection between ethnicity and citizenship began to unravel in the 1980s and 1990s due to increased migration from individuals explicitly rejecting majority cultures. Second, the fall of the Eastern bloc and development of the European Union forced the now-unified Federal Republic to reconceptualize the idea of Germanness as both an ethnic and legal category, in part due to the clear presence of minority groups (Polish and Russian) within the larger “German” category. Third, reframing the idea of Germanness meant a reestablishment of parameters both for social inclusion and exclusion. Where Chap. 6 explored the ramifications of lumping new migrants and long-term residents as “foreigners,” this chapter examined at how those categories were reapplied and stretched to new arrivals. Looking first at children self-identifying as Kurds, then at newly arriving Polish- and Russian-speaking German citizens, the chapter then turned to Polish- and Russian-speaking Polish and Russian citizens. Through these groups’ temporal overlap, they inadvertently forced the German federal and Länder governments—and larger Europe Union—to question the relationships between nation and ethnicity. Arriving in the same years, the German states’ extension of different rights and programs to each group inadvertently highlighted
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disparity in treatment and the inherent inequalities in how the German states guarenteed human rights. Yet, at the same time, these groups’ simultaneous arrival emphasized the multicultural nature of Germanness. As Chancellor Kohl had already acknowledged in the mid-1980s, the country had a multicultural population. But for many people (particularly on the political right), multiculturalism expressed in “Turks” and “Germans” living side by side. The specific lingual abilities as well as self-identities of the new migrants, however, suggested a distance between ethnicity and citizenship as well as the potential of mixed “German” identities. The build-up to the establishment of the European Union (1993) further underscored that possibility as the different member states involved increasingly turned toward acknowledging a multicultural European identity, incorporating multiple aspects of different European ethnicities (as opposed to exclusively German).70 That idea of Europeanness combined with the arrival of asylum seekers and ethnic German migrants put a lie to claims of a fixed, monoethnic, Germanness. The possibility—even if limited—of naturalization demonstrated that shift.71 Yet, as access to regular schooling as well as extra mother language and cultural classes demonstrated, the German states continued differentiating between diverse groups into the 1990s, particularly based on citizenship status and form of entry. Children entitled to German citizenship could immediately attend public schools but were not necessarily entitled to instruction in their native languages. In contrast, children of asylum seekers were theoretically (often not in practice) supposed to receive instruction in their state languages and cultures, but not immediate entry into public schools. Access to education was tiered, with the German states privileging children entitled to citizenship as their responsibility. The implication remained that even as the category of “Germanness” opened up, the state was primarily responsible for its citizens’ right to education.
Notes 1. Claus Groffebert and Hans Leggewie, “Ali im Wunderland: Die Geschichte der Deutsch-Türken: wirtschaftlich im Aufstieg, im Kulturleben unübersehbar, politisch machtlos,” Die Zeit, November 1, 1991, http://www.zeit. de/1991/45/ali-im-wunderland/komplettansicht 2. Maren Möhring, Fremdes Essen: Die Geschichte der ausländischen Gastronomie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2012), 395–402.
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3. Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany. Statistisches Jahrbuch 1993 für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Wiesbaden: Wiesbadener Graphische Betriebe GmbH, 1993), 417; Kultusministerkonferenz, Ausländische Schüler und Schulabsolventen 1984 bis 1993, Statistische Veröffentlichungen der Kultusministerkonferenz (Bonn: Sekretariat der Kultusministerkonferenz, 1994). 4. Jan Blommaert, “Language Policy and National Identity,” in An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method, ed. Thomas Ricento (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009), 238–54; Lionel Wee, “Linguistic Human Rights and Mobility,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 28, no. 4 (July 15, 2007): 325–38; Umut Erel, “Migrating Cultural Capital: Bourdieu in Migration Studies,” Sociology 44, no. 4 (August 1, 2010): 655. 5. Florian Coulmas, “Germanness: Language and Nation,” in The German Language and the Real World: Sociolinguistic, Cultural, and Pragmatic Perspectives on Contemporary German, ed. Patrick Stevenson (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997), 55–68; Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood, “The Multicultural State We’re In,” in European Multiculturalisms: Cultural, Religious and Ethnic Challenges, ed. Anna Triandafyllidou (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 69–70. 6. Michael Bommes, “National Welfare State, Biography and Migration: Labour Migrants, Ethnic Germans and Re-Ascription of Welfare State membership,” in Immigration and Welfare: Challenging the Borders of the Welfare State, ed. Michael Bommes and Andrew Geddes (New York: Routledge, 2003), 90–108; Lydia Morris, Managing Migration: Civic Stratification and Migrants Rights (New York: Routledge, 2003), 28–52. 7. Alfio Cerami, “Human Rights and the Politics of Migration in the European Union,” in Migration and Welfare in the New Europe: Social Protection and the Challenges of Integration, ed. Emma Carmel, Alfio Cerami, and Theodoros Papadopoulos (Bristol: Policy Press, 2012), 67–84; Cathryn Costello, The Human Rights of Migrants in European Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 319–23; Martin SeeleibKaiser and Frans Pennings, “Intra-EU Migration and Social Rights: An Introduction,” in EU Citizenship and Social Rights: Entitlements and Impediments to Accessing Welfare, ed. Frans Pennings and Martin SeeleibKaiser (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018), 1–10. 8. “Kurdistan in Deutschland: Ein Offener Brief an Gerhard Schröder,” Die Zeit, December 10, 1998. 9. Soner Cagaptay, “Passage to Turkishness: Immigration and Religion in Modern Turkey,” in Citizenship and Ethnic Conflict: Challenging the Nation-State, ed. Haldun Gülalp (New York: Routledge, 2006), 61–82; Amir Hassanpour, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, and Michael Chyet, “The NonEducation of Kurds: A Kurdish Perspective,” International Review of
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Education 42, no. 4 (January 1, 1996): 367–79. The Turkish government also decided to take a stricter control over Islamic religious instruction. Toward that end, on 24 July 1981 the President of Turkey, Bülent Ulusu, a retired Admiral from the Turkish Navy, announced the decision of the Military Security Council in Erzurum to change Turkey, School law(s), making Islamic instruction compulsory in primary and secondary school (Recep Kaymakcan, “Religious Education Culture in Modern Turkey,” in International Handbook of the Religious, Moral and Spiritual Dimensions in Education, ed. Marian de Souza et al. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 450). For a description of the new classes, see Sam Kaplan, The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 44–46. 10. Janroj Yilmaz Keles, Media, Diaspora and Conflict: Nationalism and Identity amongst Turkish and Kurdish Migrants in Europe, Google eBook (New York: I.B.Tauris, 2015), Constructing the Imagined Turkish National Identity; The Kurdish Question: Identity, Representation and the Struggle for Self- Determination: Identity, Representation and the Struggle for Self- Determination, eBook (New Delhi: KW Publishers, 2015), The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. 11. Nermin Abadan-Unat, Turks in Europe: From Guest Worker to Transnational Citizen (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 8, 21; Patrice G. Poutrus, “Asylum in Postwar Germany: Refugee Admission Policies and Their Practical Implementation in the Federal Republic and the GDR Between the Late 1940s and the Mid-1970s,” Journal of Contemporary History 49, no. 1 (January 1, 2014): 115–33; Hartmut Wendt, “Asylum-Related Migration to Germany: Dimensions, Categories of Refugees, Legal Basis, Development, Regions of Origin and European Comparison,” Zeitschrift für Bevölkerungswissenschaft 28, no. 1 (2003): 67–90. 12. Sṃ ener Aktürk, Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 40–42. 13. For a discussion of asylum seekers from Turkey across Europe, see AbadanUnat, Turks in Europe, 176–201; Rudolf Schmidt, Die Türken, die Deutschen und Europa: Ein Beitrag zur Diskussion in Deutschland (Wiesbaden: Springer-Verlag, 2013), 81–83. 14. It should be noted that many Kurdish families did want their children to enroll in Turkish langauge instruction order to have access to greater economic opportunities in Turkey. 15. Sevim Çelebi-Gottschlich was the first migrant with Turkish origins to serve on a (West) German parliament. A Green (Alternative Liste (AL) at the time) politician, Çelebi-Gottschlich, served in the West Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus from 1987 to 1989. Wolfgang Wieland (born 1948) was a Bündnis 90/Die Grünen politician. After studying law, he served in Berlin 1987–1989, 1993–1995, 1999–2001, and again from 2002 to
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2004. From 2001 to 2002, he served in Berlin as Bürgermeister and Senator for Justice. From 2005 to 2013, he was a Member of Parliament in the German Parliament. 16. Ray C. Rist, Guestworkers in Germany: The Prospects for Pluralism (New York: Praeger, 1978), 193–96; Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin, “Idf. Nr. 8, Drucksache 10/1152: Große Anfrage der Fraktion der AL über Situation der Kurden in Berlin,” 40. Sitzung vom 10. Dezember 1986 (Berlin, 1986). 17. Wieland and Çelebi-Gottschlich, “Kurdisch als muttersprachlicher Unterricht,” Antrag (Berlin: Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin, September 2, 1988), B Rep. 002, Nr. 16868, Berlin Landesarchiv. 18. The Helsinki Accords’ “Declaration on Principles Guiding Relations between Participating States” eighth article was on the “Equal Rights and Self-Determination of Peoples.” It affirmed that the right to speak and learn a mother language was supposed to be a universal human right. See Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, “Helsinki Final Act” (Helsinki, August 1, 1975), http://www.osce.org/ mc/39501. For more on the Helsinki Accords, see Antonio Cassese, The Human Dimension of International Law: Selected Papers of Antonio Cassese (Oxford University Press, 2008), 76; Thomas Buergenthal, ed., Human Rights, International Law, and the Helsinki Accord (Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld, Osmun, 1977). 19. For a reminder: the 1976 Recommendations suggested both preparatory classes for integration into the German classroom as well as national instruction and mother language and cultural instruction. Unlike the 1971 Recommendations, the 1976 Recommendations focused on the double goal, reemphasizing maintaining/creating a connection to the country of citizenship. See Rist, Guestworkers in Germany, 193–96. 20. As discussed in Chap. 2. 21. As discussed in Chap. 3, see “Italienischunterricht für Kinder italienischer Arbeitskräfte in der Bundesrepublik” (Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, January 5, 1961), NW 141-111, Landesarchiv NRW. 22. “Recommendation 928 (1981) on the Educational and Cultural Problems of Minority Languages and Dialects in Europe,” Western European Education 17, no. 1 (1985): 8–9; Charles L. Glenn and Ester J. De Jong, Educating Immigrant Children: Schools and Language Minorities in Twelve Nations (New York: Routledge, 2012), 281–83. 23. Christine Helot and Andrea Young, “Bilingualism and Language Education in French Primary Schools: Why and How Should Migrant Languages Be Valued?,” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 5, no. 2 (2002): 96–112.
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24. Sekretariat and Lohmar, “45. Sitzung des Unterausschusses für ausländische Schüler am 15./16. Januar 1991 in Berlin,” Ergebnisniederschrift (Bonn: Kultusministerkonferenz, January 30, 1991), B 304/7775, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. Before those 1992 alterations, the question of which national minorities should be covered again became an issue, in part because of the reframing of the question of which countries constituted guest worker countries. See also Hermann, “40. Sitzung des Unterausschusses für ausländische Schüler am 8. September 1989 in Bonn,” Ergebnisniederschrift (Bonn: Sekretariat, September 29, 1989), 23–24, B 304/7775, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 25. Former “guest worker” countries, meaning those which had official bilateral labor agreements with the Federal Republic, included Italy, Greece, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. 26. Sekretariat and Lohmar, “45. Sitzung des UAauslS.” 27. Dılek Altinkaya Nergıs, “Cultures of Remembrance in German/Turkish Literature: Remembrance Literature as a Pioneer of Political Change,” in Turkish Literature and Cultural Memory: “Multiculturalism” as a Literary Theme After 1980, ed. Catharina Dufft (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009), 243–50; Ayhan Kaya, Islam, Migration and Integration: The Age of Securitization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 39–45, 168–77. 28. Senator für Schulwesen, Berufsausbildung und Sport, “Senatsvorlage zur Beschlußfassung für die Sitzung am Dienstag, dem 19. Juli 1988” (Berlin, July 11, 1988), B 002 16868, Berlin Landesarchiv. “The Kurds are one among many tribes (Volksstamm) in Turkey.” 29. Some individual schools offered their own programs, but those programs were not standard or guaranteed. Hermann, “40. Sitzung des Unterausschusses für ausländische Schüler am 8. September 1989 in Bonn,” 23–24. 30. Senator für Schulwesen, Berufsausbildung und Sport, “Senatsvorlage zur Beschlußfassung für die Sitzung am Dienstag, dem 19. Juli 1988.” 31. Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin, “Idf. Nr. 8, Drucksache 10/1152: Große Anfrage der Fraktion der AL über Situation der Kurden in Berlin.” 32. As of 1992, the West German states were still split on the issue of a moral right to native language versus state language instruction. Largely because of financial expediency, however, most decided to continue only offering mother-tongue and cultural instruction in the official state languages. The SPD-governed city-state Bremen alone decided to offer Kurdish instruction in its schools as of 1 February 1992. Using teaching materials produced in Sweden, the classes were supposed to open their doors on 1 August 1993 at the latest. In contrast, Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Berlin, Hessen, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Rhineland-Pfalz each explicitly declared that they neither intended to offer Kurdish native language
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classes nor provide financial support for any instruction other than official state languages. Some individual schools and teachers did, however, offer other language instruction (Sekretariat and Lohmar, “49. Sitzung des Unterausschusses für ausländische Schüler am 12. Dezember 1991,” Ergebnisniederschrift (Bonn: Kultusministerkonferenz, April 1, 1992), 8–9, B 304/7776, Bundesarchiv Koblenz). Sekretariat and Lohmar, 8–9; Sekretariat and Lohmar, “50. Sitzung des Unterausschusses für ausländische Schüler am 29. April 1992,” Ergebnisniederschrift (Bonn: Kultusministerkonferenz, July 31, 1992), 9–10, B 304/7776, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. Rhineland-Pfalz wrote that “Die Meschenrechtsverletzungen an Kurden werden aufs schärfste verurteilt. Es ist nicht angebracht, unter bewußter Einbeziehung von Kindern und Jugendlichen, den zu erwartenden Konflikt zu eröffnen.” 33. Abadan-Unat, Turks in Europe, 28, 228–29; Ruth Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 180–83. 34. Landespressedients aus dem Senat, “Aussiedlerkinder an Berliner Schulen Willkommen”; Fink, “Sprachprobleme bei Aussiedlerkindern”; Ausschuß für Schule und Weiterbildung, “Eingliederung Der Aussiedler (Antr CDU Drs. 10/3650) in Verbindung mit Eingliederung der Aussiedler – Koordiniertes Vorgehen von Bund und Ländern (Antr SPD Drs. 10/3651),” Vorlage, (November 8, 1988); Nora Räthzel, “Aussiedler and Ausländer: Transforming German National Identity,” in Transformations of the New Germany, ed. Ruth A. Starkman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 157–79. 35. Bundespressestelle des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, “Richert: Ausländergesetz ist Nationalistisch und dient der Ausländerabwehr,” Nachrichten Dienst 67 (April 6, 1990); Daniel Levy, “The Transformation of Germany’s Ethno-Cultural Idiom: The Case of Ethnic German Immigrants,” in Challenging Ethnic Citizenship: German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration, ed. Daniel Levy and Yfaat Weiss (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 221–38. 36. The populations of West and East Germany were approximately 63 and 16 million, respectively. For a discussion of German (re)unification, see Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 221– 45; Mary Fulbrook, A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation, 4th ed. (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 259, 274–77. 37. “Ethnic Germans” as of 1 July 1990 had to apply for visas before leaving their home country. The 1992 Kriegsfolgenbereinigungsgesetz further stipulated that only people born before 1 January 1993 could apply for entry into Germany as ethnic Germans. See Rainer Münz, “Ethos or
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Demos? Migration and Citizenship in Germany,” in Challenging Ethnic Citizenship: German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration, ed. Daniel Levy and Yfaat Weiss (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 29–30. 38. Marc Marje Howard, The Politics of Citizenship in Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 119–25; Hans Werner, Imagined Homes: Soviet German Immigrants in Two Cities (University of Manitoba Press, 2014), 202–3. 39. There had been limited possibilities before, with almost prohibitive costs. See Claudia Diehl and Michael Blohm, “Rights or Identity? Naturalization Processes among ‘Labor Migrants’ in Germany,” International Migration Review 37, no. 1 (February 23, 2006): 133–62; Douglas B. Klusmeyer and Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Immigration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany: Negotiating Membership and Remaking the Nation (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 198–204. 40. Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes, eds., “Foreigner Law (1990),” in Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–2005, trans. Tes Howell (Berkley: University of California Press, 2007), 160–61. 41. For a discussion of the “naturalization of foreigners” in the 1990s and additional technicalities of citizenship, see Rainer Münz, Wolfgang Seifert, and Ralf Ulrich, Zuwanderung nach Deutschland: Strukturen, Wirkungen, Perspektiven, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1999), 124–32. 42. For a discussion of Turkish citizens “practicing German citizenship,” see Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties, 206–31. 43. Sekretariat and Lohmar, “45. Sitzung des UAauslS,” 2. The members of the KMK’s Sub-Committee suggested that the Länder Ministries offer two approaches: First, that schools offer Polish or Russian as a first foreign language. Second, in accordance with European Community developments, the Subcommittee advocated offering tests to give credit for language competency. Sekretariat and Hermann, “35. Sitzung des Unterausschusses für ausländische Schüler am 2. September 1988 in München,” Ergebnisniederschrift (Bonn: Kultusministerkonferenz, September 26, 1988), 2–5, B 304/7775, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. Several Länder Ministries did eventually offer Russian and Polish language classes in addition to providing intensive German instruction. Berlin even decided to offer Russian as a first foreign language instead of English. See Kultusminister NRW, Antwort der Landesreigerung auf die Kleine Anfrage 1648 des Abgeordneten Wickel F.D.P. Über Schulische Integration von Aussiedlerkindern (Düsseldorf: Landtag Nordrhein-Westfalen, May 26, 1989). The NRW schools hired 1900 extra teachers for normal instruction and 400 for support classes. 44. Betty de Hart, “The End of Multiculturalism: The End of Dual Citizenship?: Political and Public Debates on Dual Citizenship in The Netherlands
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(1980–2004),” in Dual Citizenship in Europe: From Nationhood to Societal Integration, ed. Thomas Faist, Reprint (New York: Routledge, 2016), 77–102; Olivier Vonk, Dual Nationality in the European Union: A Study on Changing Norms in Public and Private International Law and in the Municipal Laws of Four EU Member States (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2012), 120–27. 45. Maarten P. Vink, “The Limited Europeanization of Domestic Citizenship Policy: Evidence from the Netherlands,” Journal of Common Market Studies 39, no. 5 (December 16, 2002): 877–78; Rey Koslowski, “European Migration Regimes: Emerging, Enlarging and Deteriorating,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 24, no. 4 (1998): 735–749. 46. Kaya, Islam, Migration and Integration, 39–61. For more information on plural or hyphenated identities and Germany, see Tariq Modood and Pnina Werbner, eds., The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe: Racism, Identity, and Community, Postcolonial Encounters (London: Zed Books, 1997), 167–206; Ayhan Kaya, “Citizenship and the Hyphenated Germans: German-Turks,” in Citizenship in a Global World: European Questions and ̇ Turkish Experiences, ed. Emin Fuat Keyman and Ahmet Içduygu (New York: Routledge, 2005), 219–41. 47. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25–74; Kaya, Islam, Migration and Integration, 152–67; Alessandro Silj, “Introduction,” in European Multiculturalism Revisited, ed. Alessandro Silj (London: Zed Books, 2010), 235–51. 48. Landespressedienst aus dem Senat, “Aussiedlerkinder an Berliner Schulen Willkommen.” 49. Sekretariat and Hermann, “35. Sitzung des USAuslS,” 2–6; Sekretariat and Lohmar, “45. Sitzung des UAauslS,” 5–9. 50. Between 1960 and 1970s, most primary schools went to four years, followed by either an orientation or middle-school levels and then secondary school or comprehensive schools. Lower secondary (Hauptschule) ran to the ninth or tenth class. Upper secondary ran to a thirteenth year. See CarlLudwig Furck, “Das Schulsystem: Primarbereich—Hauptschule— Realschule—Gymnasium—Gesamtschule,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Christa Berg, Christoph Führ, and Carl-Ludwig Furck, vol. 1, 2 vols., 6 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1998), 282–356. 51. Holly Cullen, “Education Rights or Minority Rights?,” International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 7, no. 2 (August 1, 1993): 143–77. 52. Sekretariat and Hermann, “35. Sitzung des USAuslS,” 2.
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53. Alice Bloch and Liza Schuster, “Asylum and Welfare: Contemporary Debates,” Critical Social Policy 22, no. 3 (August 1, 2002): 393–414; Martina Ruf, Maggie Schauer, and Thomas Elbert, “Prävalenz von Traumatischen Stresserfahrungen Und Seelischen Erkrankungen Bei in Deutschland Lebenden Kindern von Asylbewerbern,” Zeitschrift Für Klinische Psychologie Und Psychotherapie, 2010; Nadine El-Enany, “The EU Asylum, Immigration and Border Control Regimes: Including and Excluding: The ‘Deserving Migrant,’” European Journal of Social Security 15, no. 2 (June 1, 2013): 171–86. 54. Schulausschuß, “6. Besondere Förderungsmaßnahmen für ungarische Flüchtlingsschüler und Studenten,” Auszug aus den Vorausmitteilung über die 44. Sitzung des Schulausschusses am 31.1./1.2.57 in Wiesbaden (Wiesbaden: Kultusministerkonferenz, February 1, 1957), B 304/2058, Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Hermann, “Ergebnisniederschrift der 9. Sitzung des Arbeitsgruppe ‘Unterricht für ausländsiche Schüler,’” Ergebnisniederschrift (Bonn: Sekretariat der Ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepulik Deutschland, January 31, 1980), B 304/7771, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 55. Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes, eds., Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–2005 (Berkley: University of California Press, 2007), 107–9; Matthew J. Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2; Eric Neumayer, “Bogus Refugees? The Determinants of Asylum Migration to Western Europe,” International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 3 (September 1, 2005): 389–409; Andrew Geddes and Peter Scholten, eds., The Politics of Migration and Immigration in Europe (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2016), 77–79. 56. Alice Bloch and Liza Schuster, “Asylum and Welfare: Contemporary Debates,” Critical Social Policy 22, no. 3 (2002): 393–414; Eric Neumayer, “Bogus Refugees? The Determinants of Asylum Migration to Western Europe,” International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 3 (September 1, 2005): 389–409. 57. Restrictive measures included the 1978 and 1980 Acceleration of the Asylum Procedure (Beschleunigung des Asylverfahrens) as well as the Asylum Procedure Act (Asylverfahrensgesetz) from 1980 and 1987 (Ulrich Herbert, Geschichte der Ausländerpolitik in Deutschland: Saisonarbeiter, Zwangsarbeiter, Gastarbeiter, Flüchtlinge (Munich: Beck, 2001), 286–322; Andreas Zimmermann, Das neue Grundrecht auf Asyl: Verfassungs- und völkerrechtliche Grenzen und Voraussetzungen (Berlin: Springer, 1994), 5–38). 58. Herbert, Geschichte der Ausländerpolitik in Deutschland, 286–307. See also “GEW sieht Schulprobleme bei Asylbewerber-Kindern,” Stuttgarter
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Zeiting, June 29, 1987; “Kinder von Asylbewerbern müssen nicht in die Schule,” Berliner Zeitung, April 28, 1988; Ursula Herdt, “Diskriminierung ist noch ein Mildes Wort: Aussidler gegen Asylbewerber und Flüchtlinge,” Lehrzeitung B-W 8/1989 (1989): 170. 59. “Ergebnis einer Umfrage in den einzelnen Bundesländern zur Schulpflicht für Kinder von Asylbewerbern” (Kultusministerkonferenz, 1990), B 304/7773, Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Sekretariat and Lohmar, “45. Sitzung des UAauslS,” 9. 60. There was also a problem of under-age refugee children living alone. Hessen recommended creating a nation-wide program to place these children in occupational programs “Situation unbegleiteter minderjähriger Ausländer/innen in Berlin,” Drs. 11/158 (Berlin: Abgeordnetenhaus, February 21, 1991). 61. Sekretariat and Hermann, “35. Sitzung des USAuslS,” 2–5; Sekretariat and Lohmar, “45. Sitzung des UAauslS,” 2. 62. Sekretariat and Hermann, “35. Sitzung des USAuslS,” 2–6. 63. The Hamburger Abkommen in 1964—but more so in the 1971 version— opened up “modern languages or Latin” in schools. English was still advised, but taking Italian, Greek or Turkish was legal. See Inez De FlorioHansen, “Italienischunterricht in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Andante con moto,” bulletin vals-asla 73 (2001): 67. For the 1976 Recommendations, see “Beschlüsse der Kultusministerkonferenz: Unterricht für Kinder ausländischer Arbeitnehmer,” April 8, 1976, B 304/3285 Az. 2797/2, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. This description does not cover the full, complicated gambit of different programs offered. For more, see the above or Brittany Lehman, “Teaching Migrant Children: Debates, Policies, and Practices in West Germany and Europe, 1949– 1992” (Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015). 64. For more on “gleichen Eingliederungshilfen,” see Sekretariat and Hermann, “35. Sitzung des USAuslS,” 2–3. Namely, in the revision of the guidelines for the “Instruction for the Children of Foreign Workers” from 8 April 1976 (with revisions in 1979) for the children of foreign workers is planned. For this group, the regulations for equal integration assistance (Eingliederungshilfen) and support programs were of more relevance. Yet, in contrast to ethnic German migrants, as asylum seekers, these groups’ continued residence was often in question. In addition, these children’s education in their countries of origin could not be equated. 65. Sekretariat and Hermann, 2–5. The UAauslS addressed this topic both because of the similarity of concerns between this group and “foreign children” and because within their West German states, these representatives were being given the task anyhow. Their decision to look at the issue was officially supported when the Amtschefkonferenz (110. Meeting on 8/9
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September 1988) turned to the SchA (277th Meeting 22/23 September 1998), which asked the UAauslS to look at the issue of what to do with this group (Hermann, “36. Sitzung des Unterausschusses für ausländische Schüler am 14. Oktober 1988 in Frankfurt,” Ergebnisniederschrift (Bonn: Sekretariat der Kultusministerkonferenz, November 10, 1988), 2–3, B 304/7775, Bundesarchiv Koblenz). 66. Juergen Haberland, Eingliederung von Aussiedlern und Zuwanderern: Sammlung von Texten, die für die Eingliederung von Aussiedlern aus den osteuropäischen Staaten und Zuwanderern aus der DDR und aus Berlin (Ost) von Bedeutung sind. Leverkusen: Hegen-Verlag, 1979. 67. Sekretariat and Hermann, “26. Sitzung des Unterausschusses für ausländische Schüler,” Ergebnisniederschrift (Bonn: Kultusministerkonferenz, November 1986), 9–10, B 304/7776, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. 68. “Ergebnis einer Umfrage in den einzelnen Bundesländern zur Schulpflicht für Kinder von Asylbewerbern.” 69. Sekretariat and Lohmar, “45. Sitzung des UAauslS,” 5. 70. Sabine von Dirke, “Multikulti: The German Debate on Multiculturalism,” German Studies Review 17, no. 3 (October 1994): 513–36; Will Kymlicka et al., eds., “Multiculturalism in Germany: Rhetoric, Scattered Experiments, and Future Chances,” in Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Recognition and Redistribution in Contemporary Democracies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 204. 71. Yasemin Nuhoğlu Soysal, “Changing Citizenship in Europe: Remarks on Postnational Membership and the National State,” in Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe, ed. David Cesarani and Mary Fulbrook (New York: Routledge, 2002), 17–30.
CHAPTER 8
Conclusion
The book’s cover is a photograph of two young children walking through a field. The bags on their backs suggest that they are on their way to school. The children appear unhurried as they move along, the shadows of their dresses dancing sedately around their knees. We know little about the image other than its 1960 origin near the city of Bremen in (West) Germany. Nonetheless, examining the image many people assume the children are not German, particularly when the picture is viewed in its full size, to include a very blonde, very pale child walking with the two individuals on the cover. The only difference between them is the precise tone of their skin, the color of their hair, and the patterns of their dresses. Yet, viewers read the photograph in accordance with what they have been trained to see. For many, internal bias suggests that the two children must be non-German, perhaps part of the small groups of Turkish citizens already living in northern Germany. Given the numbers of children with foreign citizenship in Bremen in 1960, however, it is more likely that the children were German. Without clear context or further information, how the viewer perceives the schoolchildren suggests more about the reader than it tells us about the girls themselves. Contemporary viewers, filtering their understanding through the subsequent decades of history and media, often know about the rapid West German demographic shifts that started in earnest after the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1962, permanently changing the country’s society and culture. Those viewers will also usually have been taught to view the contemporary diverse, heterogeneous German population as © The Author(s) 2019 B. Lehman, Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1949–1992, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97728-7_8
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made up of German as well as other ethnonational groups—mainly Turkish—living side by side in various degrees of harmony or discord. Reality is more complex, of course, with every person a discrete individual responding to and mirroring multiple influences as their identities shift. Most people are not clearly Italian or Greek, Turkish or German but rather exist as composites—in part because those ethnonational labels only mean what people imagine they do. Nonetheless, those identity labels have real impact, in part because they are assigned political connotations and associated with citizenship, belonging, and rights. Yet, to bear such weighty meaning, those associations must be taught—usually in public schools and in surrounding society. This book looks at what those identities meant within a changing western Europe between 1949 with the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany and 1992, when the Treaty of Maastricht was signed to establish the European Union (EU). The European Union was supposed to be to precisely that: a union of equals, all part of a common, multicultural society. Yet, that society was built upon a foundation of discrimination and othering, based in part on perceptions of national difference. Through the twentieth century, most governments in western Europe staked their right to rule on the claim that they represented a common national people, for whom the state was responsible. The population was, in turn, supposed to be loyal to the state. That idea of the nation precluded the possibility of mixed-identities or multiculturalism as multiple points of cultura, ethnic, or national identification would have muddied the issue of loyalty and raised questions over state boundaries. Yet, the Second World War and other tragedies associated with the idea of nationalism undermined the continued emphasis on nations narrowly defined in ethnic, linguistic, and/or religious terms as many politicians, scholars, and other thinkers argued associated suffering and exclusion was not worth the benefit. Perhaps, many asked, the rights of the human should take precedence over the rights of fictional communities. The result was the beginning of the age of human rights, emphasizing the individual, and the slow development of a Europe rhetorically committed to equality for all. Rhetorical committment is, however, not implementation. Within the post-1945 world, most politicians still associated the nation with citizenship and citizenship with access to rights like residence or education creating tension between concepts of government responsibility, group identity, and universal equality. Nowhere was the tension between the promotion
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of human rights for all and the lingering idea of the nation clearer than the construction of and access to state schools. Most states used public education to teach good citizenship, including loyalty and national identification alongside the three Rs of reading, writing, and arithmatic. It was the space in which children learned who could and should be considered part of the nation or as an other. Schooling was also, however, necessary as a precursor to other rights, including political participation and social mobility. Regardless of their backgrounds, children needed an education in order to be law-abiding social participant’s today and good workers tomorrow. Thus, in the best interest of the state as well as the individual, children had to be compelled to attend public school. In turn, states paid for those schools because the future benefit to the country and society justified the heavy monetary investment. The importance of education for a child’s future and society forced both supranational entities and nation-state governments to consider how migrant, foreign citizens fit into an institution designed to teach citizenship and national identity. On the one hand, as humans, foreign citizens needed an education. To exclude foreign nationals denied their rights as humans to equal social and economic participation. On the other hand, as public schools taught national identification, a foreign national attending school might assimilate into the national community, which could violate their right to personhood. As those individual and group rights conflicted, there was no way to avoid causing trauma entirely. The decision on how to balance that dilemma rested on which rights a state valued more and whether the relevant governments believed they were responsible for ensuring those rights. Resting at the center point of each of these issues, the right to education became a lens through which to view conflicts over belonging and identity, rights to residency and labor, as well as state responsibility. Examining the tension between education as a human right and as a right of a national citizen, this book set out to accomplish three goals: first, it tracked the changing meaning of the right to education in western Europe across four decades through the Council of Europe and the European Community (EC). Second, the book used West Germany as a case study to explore how the right to education was extended to include children with foreign citizenship. Third, using that case study, the book analyzed state regulations that were designed and programs implemented to teach foreign children resident in (West) Germany, particularly focused on access to public school as well as extra language and cultural i nstruction.
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Through these three levels—ideological, legal, and practical—I have argued that how a state attempted to teach migrant children illuminates a host country’s willingness to include new migrants in local communities as well as demonstrating what that inclusion was supposed to mean. Within and between the chapters, this book additionally made a series of smaller claims. The rest of this conclusion lays out some of those arguments starting with how, although there were European-wide trends in the education of migrants (highlighted in the Council of Europe and European Community’s recommendations and directives), each state involved interpreted and implemented those trends differently. Part of the issue was how law functions in terms of interpretation and implementation. Instead of rights being equally available to all humans, most states treated residents differently depending on a series of intersecting legal and identity labels. As the book demonstrated, this was not a monolithic story about citizens and non-citizens. Rather, as the cross-chapter comparisons of Polish- and Russian-speaking displaced persons and asylum seekers, Italian, Greek, and Turkish labor migrants, as well as ethnic German returnees highlights, the development of scholastic goals and programs for non-citizens involved multiple groups of people as well as supranational organizations and local Länder governments with conflicting goals. That mess resulted in the Länder Ministries of Education in states like BadenWürttemberg, Bavaria, (West) Berlin, and North Rhine- Westphalia (NRW) each providing and limiting different access to state programs, which changed and shifted depending on when, where, and who was involved. Even in one European state—here the Federal Republic of Germany—the different regional school administrations had divergent political goals, particularly in regards to the concept of equality of opportunity in terms of identity development (right to personhood) versus labor rights and state security. The idea of human rights was that they were ideally supposed to be for all humans, but how those rights were realized depended on individual interpretation of the right and perception of state responsibility. Within Europe, the various European states agreed to international recommendations like the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the Council of Europe’s European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in order to promote both peace and collaboration. As legal scholars are aware, without clear parameters, international recommendations and law can be ignored or implemented as convenient as the partial realization of European Community Directive 77/486/EEC
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demonstrats.1 Nonetheless, some states used those international recommendations and conventions against which to measure their own behavior. The Federal Republic of Germany, for example, used both non-binding recommendations and international law to guage its own behavior for its first decades as it reasserted its international position. Over the subsequent years, the Länder increasingly opted to pick and choose both which international aims to support and which residents they were obliged to serve. Precise wording in laws and regulations matters in part because of changes in international aims and local goals. Even as the Council of Europe’s members agreed education was supposed to be for all in the 1950s, their focus was on citizens and stateless displaced persons. The supranational communities later added the children of labor migrants to their definition of all. Most European state laws, including the West German, mirrored those developments. That specificity designed to include meant, however, that other groups were left out. In the Länder, for example, regular school laws emphasized residence as a prerequisite for coverage. In consequence, despite claims that education was for all children, in the 1970s and 1980s, asylum seekers often did not have the right to attend public schools as they had a clear citizenship status but not a regular residence in a West German state. I argue that the gap in education access for asylum seekers demonstrates that the connection between law and human rights matters in part because of permanence of coverage. Without a legal guarantee, a right can be stripped away. It can be removed even with legal coverage, but at the least law provides grounds on which to fight. Part of a European state’s willingness to ensure specific groups’ (e.g., host-country citizens or asylum seekers) rights depended on its understanding of its own responsibility. For the immediate post-war period, European states, particularly social democratic welfare states, were obligated to cover citizens and people displaced on account of the Second World War. West Germany also felt obliged to ethnic Germans expelled from central and eastern Europe. In the 1950s, western Europe also accepted stateless and political refugees as part of the Cold War struggle. That responsibility would expand to include labor and (de)colonial migration and then European Community member states nationals over the 1960s. As Council of Europe and EC viewed their member states as responsible for these migrant groups’ care, they negotiated how best to ensure their welfare, although actual implementation was heavily dependent on the member state’s internal laws and goals.2
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What support the European Community member states decided those groups deserved depended on citizenship status and form of entry, often leading to differing levels integration. For displaced persons, the Council of Europe pushed the ability to integrate as permanent members of their new homes but also to maintain their ethnic heritages on account of their past trauma. The children of labor migrants had a different right to education, in part due to European Community development. As they had with refugees, the Council of Europe and the EC argued that children of labor migrants should have access to public schools on the same basis as hostcountry nationals as well as the opportunity to maintain their cultural heritage. These migrants were encouraged to maintain national ties but also supposed to receive equal rights. Yet, the intention behind that support for cultural maintenance differed. For refugees including displace persons, the goal was to enable a connection to ethnic heritage in order to support the child. For labor migrants, the point of encouraging children to maintain ethnonational identities was often to push difference and/or return migration. In response, even as displaced person groups were slowly folded into their host societies—including the West German—many groups associated with labor migration developed parallel communities, often forming permanent diasporas instead of integrating into their surrounding communities. The western European emphasis on national identity and loyalty was one of the main stumbling blocks for migrants’—including both refugees and labor migrants—integration as well as individual identification as access to extra language and cultural instruction demonstrated. In theory, children were supposed to learn their mother language and maintain their ethnic heritage both for cognitive purposes as well as to avoid the spiritual trauma of migration. Most European Ministries of Education viewed that goal essential enough that the 1975 Helsinki Accords listed mothertongue maintenance as a human right. Yet, from the 1950s onward, the languages and culture that the European Ministries of Education supported were explicitly the national languages of migrants’ countries of citizenship instead of the children’s own mother tongues. In West Germany, for example, the Länder worked in collaboration with the children’s countries of citizenship to offer children from Italy Italian, even though most children spoke dialects including Neapolitan or Sicilian, while Kurdish children from Turkey were offered Turkish. Focused on state governments’ definitions of identity, the Länder and most other European states turned classes ostensibly about ethnic heritage into political indoctrination.
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The Länder worked with the children’s countries of citizenship in part because of the ongoing belief across Europe that the nation-state was responsibility for its nationals. That belief limited most European states’ assumption of responsibility for non-citizens, particularly during periods of economic recession. In the 1950s and 1960s, supranational communities agreed that statelessness needed to be avoided precisely because it opened up pathways for abuse and the denial of human rights. To a minor extent, the idea of the nation and the majority were partly decoupled but not entirely. Instead, several states—including the West German—linked responsibility for ensuring human rights to citizenship. That connection particularly mattered in social democratic societies as the state was committed to ensuring its citizen’s rights and standard of living. How migrant groups fit into that equation was an ongoing question, particularly as many migrant groups—including labor migrants—paid taxes to the host country and contributed to welfare systems (depending on state). Yet, as most migrants had a legal connection to another state, according to some politicians the country of citizenship was responsible for the migrants’ welfare. To allow a foreign state to interfere with the lives of its citizens abroad would, however, be a breach in sovereignty. But to deny that interference and then refuse responsibility for non-nationals was to prevent the right, particularly for a right like education which needed to be compelled in order to be fulfilled. That connection was precisely why UNESCO, the Council of Europe, and the European Community each pressed for coverage of all migrant children under school laws regardless of citizenship. The resulting three main program types states like West Germany developed first within the Council of Europe and then with Italy, Greece, and Turkey over the 1950s and 1960s for displaced persons and the children of guest workers reflected that confusion over responsibility, belonging, and identity. First, to meet the child’s basic right to education as free and compulsory, children with foreign citizenship (or stateless individuals) needed to be able to integrate, which meant German language instruction and access to local schools. But that schooling would Germanize them, harming their right to personhood. To mitigate that Germanization, the second program set emphasized extra instruction to enable people to learn and/or maintain their ethnic heritage through the study of language, history, geography, and social studies as well as religion, depending on group. Those markers were non-coincidentally the markers associated with the nation, allowing children to learn about Germanness, but also to imbibe their own ethnonationality. These classes were, however, still very much
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about teaching national identity, not about teaching the children’s parents’ particular regional heritage. The third option—private schools— were largely about having the choice not to be German, but they also impeded integration. Children enrolling in national private schools still learned their three Rs, but distanced from the German national curriculum, they often had difficulties winning a place in the West German workforce or university system. Which of the three program types the different states supported usually reflected how that government envisioned different migrant groups fitting within local communities. The Council of Europe and later European Community pushed all three program types for each of their members. The specific form instruction in any of those three program types took depended on both on countries of residence and citizenship’s political goals. Because of the focus on a nation-state’s responsibility for its nationals, governments like the Italian and Greek were expected to and did advocate for the rights of their citizens abroad. For the Italian state, theoretically five hours per week for teaching the children’s mother language and enabling them to maintain their ethnic heritage sufficed for imparting Italianness. In contrast, the Greek government stressed a centralized Greek identity connected to language and religion that required a minimum of ten extra hours a week, although the Greek government preferred private schools for its citizens in West Germany. Both states’ decisions reflected their interpretations of their national identities. The Italian government’s emphasis on national identity emphasized integration with a continued ethnic connection, in other words creating mixed identities. In contrast, until the mid-1980s the Greek state pushed an isolated Greekness that did not encourage mixing. Whether a migrant’s countries of citizenship could achieve their goals depended on their citizens’ countries of residence. In West Germany, the Italian and Greek states understandings of ethnonationality may have fit within the Länder Ministries’ conceptions of identity and personhood, but implementation depended on how those West German states understood these groups as fitting into West German society. States like the North Rhine-Westphalian emphasized the role of education in developing personhood. Consequently, the NRW Ministry of Education pushed extra mother language and cultural instruction as well as private schools. In contrast, Baden-Württemberg usually stressed education teaching social order, which included social participation and access to the work force, prompting the BW Ministry of Education to stress integration and German
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literacy. Neither of those Länder cut out other school programs nor fully funded the initiatives they did support but their goals influenced their willingness to support specific school initiatives. In consequence, where a child lived changed their access to education. In addition to state goals, host-country perception and bias toward a group influenced integration and belonging, as the case with Turkish citizens demonstrates. Between 1961 and 1973, hundreds of thousands of Turkish migrants were recruited as guest workers, making their situation in West Germany theoretically similar to that of Italian and Greek citizens. At the same time, most ethnic Germans saw these workers’ children as having even greater cultural distance than children with Italian citizenship, in part because of their legal status as Muslim (not necessarily reflecting personal identity). With ingrained prejudice across much of western Europe against “Orientals” and a widespread lack of understanding of Islam, many western European states misunderstood what it meant to be Muslim. Thus, the Länder (as well as most western European states) interpreted these groups’ very culture as a problem, meaning integration became an issue not only of rights and choice but also of “saving” them. Unlike the growing acceptance of the idea that Italians and Germans were European and therefore sufficiently similar to cohabitate, there was an increasing assumption across western Europe that Islam was inherently non-European. That perception in turn pushed the sentiment that public school was not for the Turkish “them” as opposed to the German “us.” Xenophobia—here targeting particularly Turkish citizens—is part of the reason I argue legal coverage matters. As the European Community expanded its borders and its legal jurisdiction, children with Turkish citizenship became Third Country nationals, at least temporarily separated from a “European” idenity. Children with Turkish citizenship who had, up until the end of the 1980s, been entitled to the same provisions and coverage as Italian or Greek children on the basis of their status as citizens of former guest worker countries, now had access to different programs. That resulted in part from the (West) German federal and Länder governments cutting extra school programs during periods of economic recession to cover only those they were legally mandated to serve. Because of limits of EC jurisdiction, EC laws often specified member state nationals even when the inital intention was to provide access for all children, effectivly cutting out Third-Country nationals. Furthermore, in the late 1980s, the European Community—moving toward Union—simultaneously verbally stressed multiculturalism and cut its funding for programs
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promoting it. Instead, the state started supporting inter-European measures specifically for European Union member state nationals. A component of that argument, however, was the connection to human rights. Initially, the Council of Europe and European Community both wanted to coordinate cultural connections and promote individual equality. In the 1960s and 1970s, the idea of who was and could be European was comparatively open, in part because of colonial legacies (France wanted Algeria to be part of a Eurafrica) but also on account of the possibilities of European expansion. As “European,” like almost any identity label, was an imagined category, its limits were unclear. It followed that everyone needed to be included within a framework of human rights because everyone might have become part of the global citizenship. With the lead-up to and founding of the European Union, however, the emphasis on legal boundaries to European inclusion also meant Third Country (non-European) exclusion. As the evolving relationships between the Federal Republic of Germany with Italy and Greece with West Germany highlighted, the EC member states turned inward to emphasize European compatibility. By acting as a kind of supranational ethnicity, the development of European identity permitted the acceptance of limited kinds of mixed, intercultural identities.3 Yet, focused on building a multiethnic interior of Europe, the Commission of the European Community cut support for the “schooling of the children of migrant workers,” reducing funding to almost nothing by 1989.4 In 1990, the Commission also decided to discontinue all national or local projects, focusing instead on investing in European Community networks and exchanges.5 Furthermore, many of the projects that had previously been covered by general funds for “migrant workers’ children” or “intercultural education” now fell under the purview of one of the already established European Community education programs (e.g., Lingua), which were only available to EC (then EU) member state nationals.6 Thus European interculturalism abandoned early attempts to emphasize a global citizenship and inclusive human rights. Instead, as EU politicians excluded Third Country nationals from EU programs, those very program came to act simultaneously as sites of inclusion and othering.7 Following some of the complexities of inclusion and othering across western Europe, the ultimate lesson I hope this book conveys is how vital education access and state support is for both state security and social cohesion. But, for schools to fulfill that dual purpose, host-country citizens
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have to be taught to include their new fellow residents, just as new migrants need to be instructed in how to be part of the local social body. Furthermore, that achievement is unlikely unless the the law reflects intent. As I have shown across the more than four decades covered here, the purpose behind a school program matters as well as the programs themselves because public schools serve as sites for exclusion as well as integration.
Notes 1. Commission of the European Communities, “Report on the Implementation in the Member States of Directive 77/486/EEC on the Education of the Children of Migrant Workers” (Brussels, January 3, 1989); Andrew Geddes, “Thin Europeanisation: The Social Rights of Migrants in an Integrating Europe,” in Immigration and Welfare: Challenging the Borders of the Welfare State, ed. Michael Bommes and Andrew Geddes (New York: Routledge, 2003), 215. 2. Gregory J. Kasza, “The Illusion of Welfare ‘Regimes,’” Journal of Social Policy 31, no. 2 (April 2002): 271–87. 3. Ute Frevert, “How to Become a Good European Citizen,” in The Making of Citizens in Europe: New Perspectives on Citizenship Education, ed. Viola B. Georgi (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 2008), 42–44; Viola B. Georgi, “Citizenship and Diversity,” in The Making of Citizens in Europe: New Perspectives on Citizenship Education, ed. Viola B. Georgi (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 2008), 80–81. 4. Gerhart Mahler, “3. Sitzung der ad-hoc-Gruppe ‘Wanderarbeitnehmer kinder – interkulturelle Erziehung’, am 13. und 14. September 1989 in Brüssel,” Bericht, October 24, 1989, B 304/7773, Bundesarchiv Koblenz. In the early 1990s, in response to the planned European Community border changes and new treaties (i.e. the Treaty of Maastricht), programs for children of guest workers and intercultural education were again funded, but hardly with the same emphasis or level of financial support (Vorsitzender des Unterausschusses für ausländische Schüler and Gerhart Mahler, “5. Sitzung der ad-hoc-Gruppe der Kommission der Europäische gemeinschaften ‘Wanderarbeitnehmerkinder – interkulturelle Erziehung’ am 21. 5. 1991 in Brüssel,” June 13, 1991, B 304/7773, Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Schwenke, “8. Sitzung der ad-hoc-Gruppe der Kommission der Europäische Gemeinschaften ‘Wanderarbeitnehmerkinder – interkulturelle Erziehung’ am 30. März 1992 in Brüssel” (Hamburg: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg Behörde für Schule, Jugend und Berufsbildung, April 9, 1992), 1–3, B 304/7776, Bundesarchiv Koblenz).
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5. Directorate-General for Education and Culture, European Commission, “Report on the Education of Migrants’ Children in the European Union,” COM (94) 80 final (Brussels: European Commission, March 25, 1994), 15, http://aei.pitt.edu/1257/. 6. Lingua, a program for promoting the dissemination of the European Community member state official languages (in secondary school) in order to promote vocational training and university exchange programs, was folded into SOCRATES in the 1990s (European Commission and Luce Pépin, History of European Cooperation, 122–124). The member state representatives further argued that there was no clear solution for supporting bicultural education and intercultural education Marianne Krüger-Potratz, Interkulturelle Bildung: Eine Einführung (New York: Waxmann, 2005). 7. Frevert, “How to Become a Good European Citizen,” 39.
Glossary
Abitur Diploma from a higher German secondary school qualifying for university admission or matriculation Abschluß (also Schulabschluss) School certificate Alternative Liste für Demokratie und Umweltschutz (AL) Alternative List for Democracy and the Protection of the Environment Anzeigepflicht Disclosure requirements Arbeitsgruppe “Unterricht für ausländische Schüler” des KMK Schulausschusses Working Group on “Instruction for Foreign Workers” of the KMK’s Subcommittee on Education Ausländergesetz Foreigner Laws Ausländerbeauftragte Office of the Commission for Foreigners Ausländerbehörde Foreigners Office Ausländischer Arbeitnehmer Foreign worker Aussiedler Resettler (returning “ethnic” Germans from eastern Europe) Auslandstürken Turks Abroad Baden-Württemberg (BW) Baden-Württemberg (West German federal state) Beamte German civil servant Berufsschule Vocational school Bezirk District Bildungsberater Educational consultant
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Bund-Länder-Kommission für Bildungsplanung und Forschungsförderung (BLK) Federal-Länder Commission for the Planning of Education and Research Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD) Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) Bundestag West German Parliament Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (Grüne) Alliance ‘90/The Greens (Greens) Caritas Catholic welfare organization CERI Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (OECD Center in Paris) Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU) Christian Democratic Union of Germany Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU) Christian Social Union of Bavaria Denkschrift Memorandum Deutsche Volkstum German Folkdom Diakonisches Werk Protestant welfare organization DP Displaced person (DP) Einklassige Schule One-room school including all age groups Ergänzungsschule Supplementary school Ergänzungsunterricht Supplementary instruction Erlass Decree Ersatzschule Substitute school Europarat Council of Europe (CoE) (since 1949) Europäische Gemeinschaften (EG) European Communities (EC) (1958–1992) Europäische Union (EU) European Union (since 1992) Europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft Grundgesetz (EWG) European Economic Community (EEC) Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP) Free Democratic Party Flüchtling Refugee Flüchtlingslehrer/in Refugee teacher Förderlehrgang Special support class Fördermaßnahme Support measure Gastarbeiter/in Guest worker Gastschüler/in Guest schoolchild Genehmigungspflicht Licensing requirement Gesamtschule Comprehensive school Gesprächskreis Conversation group Grundgesetz Basic Law (West German constitution, introduced 1949)
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Grundschule Primary school Gymnasium Highest (upper) secondary school that leads to the Abitur Hauptschule Lower-secondary school Heimat- und Sachkunde Local studies (history, geography, and social studies) Heimatunterricht Cultural instruction Heimatvertriebene Expellee Innere Mission Inner Mission, Protestant welfare organization Jugendamt Youth Welfare Office Jugendbericht Youth Report Kinder heimatloser Ausländer Children of homeless foreigners Konsularklasse Consular class (“embassy mother language and cultural course” in Great Britain) Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK) The Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany Länder or Bundesländer West German states (federal states) Landesamt State Office Landesarbeitsamt State Employment Center Landtag State Bundestag Lehrplan Curriculum Mehrschichtigen Einschaltungsklasse Stepped preparation class Menschenwürde Human dignity Ministerpräsident Minister President Muttersprachlicher Ergänzungsunterricht Mother language and cultural instruction Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) National Democratic Party of Germany Nord Rhein-Westfalen (NRW) North Rhine-Westphalia (West German federal state) Oberschulamt Regional School Board OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Persönlichkeit Selfhood Pflichtsprache Required language Realschule Middle-level secondary school Regierungsbezirk Administrative District Regierungspräsident/in District President Reichsschulpflichtgesetz German compulsory schooling laws (during the German Empire, Weimar Republic, and Third Reich)
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Schulamt School Office Schulaufsichtsbehörde School Regulatory Authorities Schulausschuss School Committee Schulleiter Principal Schulpflichtgesetz Compulsory schooling law Schulträger Authorities responsible for the maintenance of the schools Senate/Senator Senate/Senator (body of the Ministers/Minister in the city-states of West Germany: Bremen, Hamburg, and West Berlin) Silentien Homework help Sonderklasse Special class Sonderschule Special school for the learning disabled Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) Social Democratic Party of Germany Sprach- und Kulturgut Language and cultural assets Ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (also Kultusministerkonferenz or KMK) The Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany Übergangsklasse (in NRW) Preparatory class (implies “transition class”) Unterrichtsverwaltung Educational Authorities Verschleppte Person Displaced person Volk People or nation Volksgruppe Ethnic group Volksschule Primary and lower-secondary school (grades 1–8/9) Vorklasse (in KMK Recommendations) Preparatory class Vorschule Preschool Wanderarbeiter Migrant worker Westberlin (B) West Berlin (West German federal city-state with special legal status) Westeuropäische Union (WEU) West European Union (1954–1992) Zeugnis School transcript Zusätzliche muttersprachliche Ergänzungsunterricht Extra mother language and cultural instruction
Index1
NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 1968 revolutions, 99, 101 A Adenauer, Konrad, 91 Algeria, 4, 240 Allied High Command (AHC), 29, 31, 35 Allied Powers, 2, 16, 17, 20, 32 Alternative Liste (AL), see Green Party Anti-discrimination, 120, 136, 140, 160, 169 Arendt, Hannah, 18, 34, 86, 160 Assimilation, 23, 28, 31, 56, 126, 131, 133, 134, 161, 166, 208, 233 Asylum law(s), 199, 214 Asylum seekers, 6, 9, 23, 167, 205, 213–215, 218, 235 Hungarian, 214
Kurdish, 198–201, 217 Kurish, 201 Polish, 199, 212, 216, 234 Polish citizens, 214 Russian, 199, 216 Turkish citizens, 214 Vietnamese, 214 Yugoslav, 218 B Baden-Württemberg, 30, 48n84, 61, 94, 134, 169, 177, 216 Ministry of Education, 45n71, 53, 65, 73n29, 83, 90, 93, 126, 130, 133, 137, 185n33, 214, 216, 218, 238 schooling, public, 65, 90 school law(s), 49, 54, 64, 90, 155n102
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.
1
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school program(s), 234, 239 Balkans, 18 Bavaria, 32, 177 Ministry of Education, 29, 132, 218 school law(s), 29, 32, 123 school programs, 166, 234 Belgium, 49, 50, 56 Belonging, 5, 6, 8, 10, 24, 52, 99, 127, 138, 160, 232, 233, 237, 239 Berlin (West), 118, 168, 172, 173, 205, 212 administrative court (Verwaltungsgericht), 173 government, 201, 205 Kreuzberg, 125, 173 school law(s), 173, 216 school, public, 174, 205 Senate of Education, 138, 173, 205, 212, 216 wedding, 173 Berlin Wall, 59, 91, 198, 231 Berufsschule, see Vocational training Bias(es), 4, 169, 172, 174, 180, 231, 239 Bilateral labor agreements, 49, 58, 85, 99, 224n25 Bilingualism, 89 Bilingual school(s), 176, 193n86 Birthrate, 162 Borders, 22, 29, 59, 88, 198–200, 213, 239, 241n4 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2, 98, 135, 174 Brandt, Willy, 97–99, 101, 104, 113n65 Bremen, 224n32 C Children with Dutch citizenship, 59, 60, 68, 77n58, 87
with German citizenship, 24, 30, 61, 118, 123, 138, 172, 173, 176, 178, 217 with Greek citizenship, 83, 84, 86, 88, 90, 93, 94, 96, 164, 177 with Italian citizenship, 7, 49, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60–62, 66, 68, 162, 165, 169–172, 174, 177, 193n87, 239 Kurdish, 206, 208, 236 with Turkish citizenship, 3, 119, 124, 126, 128–130, 132, 133, 140, 161, 164, 167, 174, 177, 178, 206, 208, 217, 239 Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 30, 91, 97, 98, 134, 137, 166, 167, 172, 173, 179, 185n33, 190n68, 205, 212, 215, 218 Christian Social Union (CSU), 29, 30, 97, 167, 215, 218 Citizenship law(s) jus sanguinis (right of blood), 3, 12n18, 19, 26, 56, 162 jus soli (birth right), 3, 12n18, 19, 56, 146n33 Civil rights, 3–7, 9, 12n22, 32, 54, 84, 103, 160, 164, 199, 213, 233 Cold War, 16, 22, 23, 33, 86, 97, 198, 235 Cologne, 49, 60, 117 Colonial empires, 3 Communism, 96, 97, 100, 101, 103, 131, 214 Compulsory education, 8, 20, 28, 32, 53, 55, 63, 120, 137, 214, 233 Compulsory schooling, 1, 2, 19, 26, 29–32, 49–56, 61, 64, 66, 67, 71n15, 81n88, 83, 94, 95, 97, 128, 199, 212, 214, 216–219 Germany 14, 162 Consular instruction, see Language and cultural instruction
INDEX
Convention against Discrimination in Education (1960), 53, 56 Convention on the Reduction of Cases of Multiple Nationality and on Military Obligations in Cases of Multiple Nationality (1963), 88 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951), 22, 35 Council of Europe (CoE), 2, 4, 6, 8, 16, 17, 21–23, 25, 26, 34, 35, 50, 51, 53–56, 63, 67, 87–90, 96, 98, 105n10, 120–122, 130, 134, 136, 139, 199, 202, 203, 206, 211, 213, 217, 233–238, 240 Country of citizenship, 9, 24, 46n75, 52, 55, 57, 99, 104, 139, 212, 213, 223n19, 237, 238 Country of immigration, 98 Country of residence, 20, 22, 55, 176, 201 Cultural difference, see Cultural distance Cultural distance, 25, 58–60, 68, 93, 167, 239 Cultural heritage, 34, 52, 57, 128, 201, 203, 236 Cultural maintenance, 9, 23, 57, 67, 85, 98, 103, 104, 126, 130, 132–134, 161, 163, 180, 186n37 D Dahrendorf, Ralf, 174 Democracy, 2, 29, 68, 99, 100 Diaspora(s), 9, 57, 92, 93, 97, 125, 177, 236 Dignity, 2, 4, 54 Disadvantage, 120, 135, 136, 138, 140, 168, 172, 173 Discrimination, 60, 76n53, 118, 119, 140, 170, 173, 177, 216, 232
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gender, 4, 19, 63 Germany for the Germans, 167, 169, 180 housing, 4, 117, 140, 173 Islam, 9, 127, 131–133, 166, 167, 169, 239 Muslim, 127 nationality, 19, 30, 34, 57, 59, 68, 89, 92, 128, 180, 198, 201 Oriental, 4, 127, 169, 239 prejudice, 172 racism, 56, 172 sexism, 164 southern, 58, 161, 169, 172, 179 xenophobia, 169, 172, 214 Displaced person camps, 16, 20, 31 Backnang displaced persons camp, 20 Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp, 15 school(s), 17, 20 See also Refugee camp(s) Displaced person(s), 17, 26, 34, 37n8, 235, 236 children, 16, 20, 21, 24–26, 28, 30–32 Hungarian, 25 Jewish, 15, 16, 34 Lithuanian, 16, 25 parents, 24 Polish, 16, 33, 234 Romanian, 16 Russian, 16 Diversity, 8, 23, 26, 34, 131, 159, 179, 199, 211 Dual citizenship, 88, 164, 210, 211 Dutch children, see Children, with Dutch citizenship E Eastern bloc, 16, 207, 212, 219 Economic miracle, 91, 160
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Economic rights, 10, 51–53, 63 Education access, 4–6, 10, 19, 21, 22, 25, 27, 28, 31, 35, 51, 53, 63–67, 85, 89, 99, 118–120, 122, 123, 126–128, 130, 133–136, 139–141, 161, 162, 168, 208, 213–216, 218, 220, 233, 234, 236, 239, 240 attend, 25 double goal, 134, 135 to education, 118 goals, 6, 8, 20, 27, 50, 52, 63, 67, 86, 98, 102, 121, 124, 132, 134, 161, 176, 236 reform, 41n41, 64, 66, 95 retention, 140 three Rs, 1, 63, 238 Employment, 121, 122 semi-skilled labor, 28 skilled labor, 1, 4, 118, 149n61 unemployment, 53, 58, 117, 121, 123, 139 unskilled labor, 26, 84, 86, 121, 135 Enrollment, 24, 28, 30, 34, 63, 65, 121, 138, 168, 212 Equal education, see Equality of education opportuninties Equal education opportunities, 30, 66, 83, 94, 118, 120, 122, 123, 134 Equality of education opportunities, 25, 26, 51, 53, 62–64, 67, 90, 94, 103, 118, 123, 124, 126, 128, 133, 140, 160, 167, 199, 208, 212, 213, 234 Equality of opportunity, 27 Equal opportunities, see Equality of education opportuninties Equal rights, 5, 26, 120, 236 Equivalency, 29, 66, 86, 90–96 Erhard, Ludwig, 91
Ethnic German migrants, 9, 17, 26, 64, 160, 207, 208, 217, 220 Polish speaking, 208, 212 Russian speaking, 208, 219 Ethnic German returnees, see Ethnic German migrants Ethnicity, 9, 18, 19, 34, 87, 104, 161–168, 175, 176, 201, 203, 209, 219, 220, 240 Ethnonational identity, 15, 16, 34, 60, 140, 162, 175, 179, 180, 232, 233, 237 Dutch, 59 German, 5, 7, 92, 94, 166, 177, 180, 206, 236 German-Turkish, 197 Greek, 92–94, 177, 238 Italian, 55, 59, 90 Polish, 33 Turkish, 7, 130–133, 151n72, 166, 177, 206 Europe central, 16, 166, 235 eastern, 21, 23, 64, 91, 209, 212, 235 northern, 166 southeastern, 49 southern, 49 western, 2, 5, 23, 51, 53, 58, 86, 121, 123, 160, 211, 232, 233, 235, 240 European Community (EC), 50, 54–56, 58, 67, 102, 121, 122, 124, 130, 164, 167, 176, 177, 179, 199, 210, 213, 233–240 compulsory school law(s) (Reichsschulpflichtgesetz), 54 Council Directive 486/77 (1977), 175–177, 193n82, 193n87, 234 Council Regulation 38/64 (1964), 54
INDEX
Council Regulation 1612/68 (1968), 122 member state nationals, 164 European Convention on Establishment (1955), 55 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR 1953), 22, 234 European Economic Community (EEC), see European Community (EC) European identity, 165, 220, 240 European Ministers of Education, 89 European Ministries of Education, 118, 236 Europeanness, 58, 89, 164 European Union (EU), 220, 232, 240 See also European Community (EC) Exclusion, 3, 6, 17, 140, 179, 219, 232, 240, 241 Exiles, 17, 22, 23, 40n32 Extra language and cultural classes, see Language and cultural instruction F Family reunification, 132, 167 government, 174–177 Fascism, 6, 9, 97, 99, 100, 103 Federal Ministry of Education, 102 First generation migrant(s), see Migrant children Forced migration, 16, 34 Foreignness, 55–61, 126, 127, 163, 167, 174–179 France, 3, 4, 16, 19, 20, 39n31, 50, 88, 123, 128, 200, 211, 240 Free Democratic Party (FDP), 91, 97, 166, 167, 180, 205, 215 Freedom of movement, 50, 74n34, 122, 164, 165 Fundamental rights, 19, 56
251
G Gender, 4, 19, 63, 79n72, 117, 127, 128, 184n22 Georg Eckert Institute for International Schoolbook Research (GEI), 101 German as a first language, 163, 173, 198 German children, see Children, with German citizenship Germaneness, 59 Germanization, 26, 237 Germanness, 3, 9, 17, 20, 25, 52, 58–60, 68, 89, 118, 126–128, 132, 133, 141, 161, 162, 164, 166–168, 180, 198, 199, 206–212, 219, 220, 237 German (West) residents, 9, 50, 85, 103, 161, 162, 165, 169, 174, 180 Danish groups, 87 with Dutch citizens, 59, 60 with Dutch citizenship, 32 German citizens, 25, 31, 35, 58, 61, 68, 88, 119, 140, 150n67, 164, 165, 167, 174, 176, 178, 180, 201, 206, 214 with German citizenship, 212 Greek citizens, 84, 89, 93, 96, 97, 99, 239 Italian citizens, 50, 51, 56–58, 102, 106n14, 161, 163, 165, 176, 207, 210 with Italian citizenship, 122 Kurdish, 200–202, 205, 208 Polish speaking, 20, 212 Russian speaking, 211 Turkish citizens, 9, 125, 130, 133, 136, 140, 163, 165, 177, 178, 201, 206, 207, 210, 212, 239 with Turkish citizenship, 117, 205 Germany (East), 207, 209
252
INDEX
Germany (West) Basic Law, 27, 28, 31, 99, 101, 103, 120, 160, 214 citizenship law, 87, 162–164, 210 federal government, 24, 31, 41n38, 84, 87, 91, 93, 97, 98, 100, 102, 124, 134, 137, 138, 160, 161, 164–168, 174, 175, 179, 180, 199, 201, 215, 219 Federal Ministry of Education, 134, 137, 138 media, 64, 97–99, 101, 117, 125, 128, 139, 159, 160, 162, 177, 214, 231 Ghettoization, 123, 124, 126, 134, 137, 139 Ghetto(s), 117, 118, 123–126, 134, 139 Global citizenship, 240 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 58 Government responsibility, 5–9, 17, 21, 23, 25, 31–33, 35, 51, 55, 61, 63, 65, 80n80, 80n82, 88, 102, 120, 121, 133, 139, 140, 167–169, 176, 199, 204, 206, 213, 217, 220, 232–235, 237, 238 Great Britain, 16, 36n4, 39n31, 122, 128, 200 Greece, 49, 161, 165, 194n90 1967 military coup, 85, 96, 100 with Greek citizenship, 98 language and cultural instruction, 85 legations, 93, 162 military junta, 96, 97, 99, 176 Ministry of Education, 90, 91, 99 schooling, 94 state, 22, 39n31, 83–85, 90, 92–96, 101, 131, 177–179, 198, 237, 238 with Turkish citizenship, 161
Greek children, see Children, with Greek citizenship Greek government, see Greece Greekness, 89–96, 175, 238 Green Party, 180, 202, 222n15 Guest worker agreements, see Bilateral labor agreements Guest worker children, 1, 55, 57, 58, 68, 83–104, 130, 137, 237 Guest worker countries, 58, 99, 163, 202, 204–206, 212, 217, 224n24, 224n25, 239 Gymnasium, see Schooling, secondary, upper (Gymnasium) H Hall, Stuart, 7 Hauptschule, see Schooling, secondary, lower (Hauptschule) Headscarves, 127, 128 Helsinki Accords (1975), 202, 223n18, 236 Heritage, 19, 22, 26, 34, 35, 52, 56–59, 89, 102, 103, 127, 128, 133, 162, 164, 168, 180, 193n87, 198, 201, 203, 207–211, 236–238 Herzog, Roman, 166, 185n33 Hessen, 177, 224n32, 229n60 Holocaust, 6, 86 Homeless person(s), see Stateless person(s) Homogeneity, 22, 34 Host country, 1, 4, 7, 19, 22, 35, 51, 53, 54, 56–58, 61–63, 83, 86, 121–123, 140, 177, 211, 234, 236, 237, 239, 240 Human rights, 2, 5–10, 11n11, 12n22, 17, 18, 21, 22, 24, 27, 35, 50, 51, 54, 55, 60, 64, 67, 69, 70n9, 87, 118–120,
INDEX
122–124, 140, 160, 161, 164, 167–169, 198, 199, 201, 202, 204, 206, 213, 220, 232–237, 240 Hungary, 198, 214 I Identity label(s), 128, 140, 232, 240 dual, 166 hybrid, 34, 163 hyphenated, 26, 89, 205, 211 intercultural, 240 inter-European, 88, 211, 239 mixed, 26, 164, 220, 238, 240 national, 3, 5, 10, 16, 56, 60, 68, 69, 83–104, 128, 200, 203, 205, 207, 232, 233, 238 religious, 69, 133 socio-economic, 128 Illiteracy, 53, 58, 77n55, 84, 128, 139, 170 Inclusion, 3, 5, 6, 10, 17, 19, 49, 50, 55, 83, 86, 90, 120, 160, 164, 172, 181, 211, 213, 218, 219, 234, 240 Inequality, 5, 26, 32, 64, 96, 119, 138, 216, 220 Integration, 1, 4, 9, 18, 25, 26, 28, 34, 35, 57, 65, 67, 85, 90, 91, 98, 102, 104, 117–119, 123–126, 128, 130–139, 141, 146n34, 161–163, 165–167, 170, 173–176, 179, 180, 197, 208, 210, 217, 218, 236–239, 241 Intercultural education, 176, 179, 240, 241n4, 242n6 Interculturalism, 176, 180, 240 International Refugee Organization (IRO), 20–22, 30, 39n24 Iran, 200, 215
253
Iraq, 200 Islam, 9, 126, 127, 131–133, 166, 167, 177, 205, 239 Israel, 15, 21 Italian children, see Children, with Italian citizenship Italianness, 57, 89, 90, 162, 175, 176, 238 Italian state, see Italy Italy, 49, 59, 161, 165, 170 Communist Party, 101 legations, 51, 53, 60, 81n89, 162, 172, 176 Ministry of Education, 170 schooling, 61 state, 39n31, 49–51, 53, 56, 57, 59, 65, 68, 71n15, 81n88, 83, 85, 90, 162, 170, 176, 179, 211, 237, 238 unemployment, 53, 58 J Jurisdiction, 6, 8, 19, 24, 29, 51, 54, 121, 122, 140, 239 K Kiesinger, Georg, 97 Kohl, Helmut, 167, 169, 185n33, 186n44, 215, 220 Kühn, Heinz, 165, 166, 184n27 Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK), 31–33, 57, 100, 102, 204, 208, 226n43 1964 Recommendations, 57, 65, 132, 134, 173 1971 Recommendations, 102, 132, 134, 223n19 1976 Recommendations, 202, 217, 218, 223n19, 229n63 Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), 201
254
INDEX
Kurd(s), see Asylum seekers, Kurdish Kurd(s), asylum seekers, see Asylum seekers, Kurdish L Labor market, 1, 2, 20, 24, 67, 84, 144n23, 179 Language and cultural instruction, 23, 25, 31, 33, 34, 56, 65, 69, 93, 99, 102, 130, 133, 134, 153n85, 163, 166, 168, 176, 179, 199, 202–204, 206, 212, 217, 220, 233, 236, 237 Dutch, 59 Greek, 93, 94, 96, 98, 100, 238 Italian, 50, 56, 57, 60, 61, 68, 101, 170, 176, 203, 236, 238 Polish, 33, 46n77 Turkish, 125, 126, 128, 130, 133, 178, 199, 201, 205, 236 with Turkish citizenship, 167 Language competency English, 135, 178 German, 26, 28–30, 34, 47n81, 52, 53, 59, 61, 63, 135, 159, 191n70, 210, 217 Greek, 94 Italian, 53 Polish, 33 Turkish, 135, 178 Language instruction bilingual, 176 English, 87, 91, 135, 178 French, 33, 87, 178 German, 27, 30, 65, 67, 95–96, 103, 130, 135–138, 149n63, 176, 178, 199, 200, 208, 218, 237 Greek, 92–94, 177 Hebrew, 15 Italian, 56, 176 Kurdish, 200–206
Polish, 33, 46n77, 47n80, 199, 208, 210 Russian, 199, 208, 210 Turkish, 178, 179, 201, 205, 206 See also Language and cultural instruction Language mastery German, 30 See also Language competency Laurien, Hanna-Renate, 172, 173, 212 League of Nations, 18, 92, 200 Legal status, 19, 33, 41n40, 60, 93, 169, 199, 210, 213, 217, 239 Literacy, 20, 63, 66, 121 German, 20, 27, 50, 63, 68, 130, 238–239 Greek, 84, 86, 92, 94 Hebrew, 21 Italian, 50, 53, 58 Polish, 20 Turkish, 130, 131 M Majority group(s), 8, 18, 211 Meritocracy, 64 Migrant children, 1, 4, 10, 10n4, 20, 28, 50, 56, 57, 64–66, 86, 124, 132, 135, 140, 159–161, 177, 178, 212, 217, 219, 234, 237 German, 173 Italian, 170 Migrant ethnic Germans, 235 Migrants, guest workers, 61, 91, 93, 117, 118, 137, 163, 167, 173, 199 See also Migrants, labor Migrants, labor, 3, 6, 32, 36, 59, 84, 85, 98, 117, 122, 213, 214, 234–237 family reunification, 124 Greek, 90
INDEX
Spanish, 99 Yugoslav, 99 See also Migrants, guest workers Migration, 213 family, 132, 162 guest workers (see Migrants, guest workers) labor (see Migrants, labor) return, 83, 85, 98, 102, 131, 133, 161, 165, 175, 177, 179, 236 spontaneous, 50, 59 Minorities, 2, 5, 8, 18, 23, 25, 44n55, 44n57, 45n63, 46n77, 47n81, 56, 59, 60, 83, 86–89, 93, 96, 103, 119, 125, 138, 160, 173, 177, 180, 200–206, 208, 211, 212, 219, 224n24 Minority rights, 18, 25, 93, 204 Mixed identification, see Identity label(s) Monoethnicity, 127, 163, 181, 220 Morocco, 4, 85, 224n25 Mother language, see Native language(s) Multicultural education, 179 Multiculturalism, 1, 9, 26, 50, 164, 175–177, 179, 180, 198, 199, 205–207, 211, 212, 220, 232, 239 Multilingualism, 89, 135, 204, 210 Munich, 123 N National Democratic Party (NPD), 166–168 National heritage, 56, 59 National identification, 20, 60, 86, 175, 233 National identity, see Identity label(s); Nationality
255
Nationality, 31, 34, 57, 59, 63, 68, 88, 89, 92, 128, 163, 176, 180, 198, 201, 238 German, 163 Italian, 163 See also Ethnonational identity National Socialists (Nazis), 17–19, 25, 29, 35, 54, 59, 76n53, 96, 100, 198, 214 ideology, 168 school law (Reichschulpflichtgesetz), 24, 27, 29, 30, 44n62, 54, 213, 235 Nation-state, 2, 3, 7, 15, 18, 88, 233, 237, 238 Native language(s), 135, 199, 202–205, 217 Native language instruction, see Language and cultural instruction Naturalization, 20, 85, 88, 131, 165–167, 186n38, 197, 210 Netherlands, the, 3, 4, 39n31, 50, 56, 59, 71n15, 77n57, 83, 211 North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), 24, 30, 33, 48n84, 55, 59, 99, 123, 130, 136, 216, 238 government, 55, 56 Ministry of Education, 25, 28–30, 33, 44n62, 45n71, 52, 54, 58, 59, 81n88, 87, 93, 100, 115n83, 126, 130, 132, 136–138, 203, 216, 218, 238 schooling, public, 46n77, 49, 52 school law(s), 24, 30, 32, 33, 49, 52, 54, 55, 66, 120 O Occupied Germany, 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 120, 121 Other, see Othering Othering, 3, 5, 24, 36, 56, 67, 119, 124, 126–128, 131, 160, 161,
256
INDEX
172, 174, 180, 192n77, 206, 232, 233, 240 Ottoman Empire, 200 P Parallel societies, 4 Parents, 121, 135, 138 Dutch, 59, 69 German, 16, 20, 25, 69, 87, 134, 138, 168 Greek, 83–86, 89–91, 173 Italian, 49, 53, 59, 60, 88, 172 Jewish, 15, 16 Polish, 33 refugee, 24–26, 30 Turkish, 138, 173 Poland, 15, 16, 20, 21, 33, 199, 207, 209, 212, 214, 215, 217–219 Polishness, 26 Political rights, 88, 104, 120, 165, 214, 220 Portugal, 85, 122, 224n25 Positive rights, 53 Preparatory class(es), 65, 90, 103, 128, 130, 132, 149n63, 217, 223n19 Preschool(s), see Schooling, preschooling Primary school(s), see Schooling, primary Prussia, 3, 8, 26 citizenship law, 3, 29, 32 school law(s), 30, 32 Public school(s), see Schooling R Racism, see Discrimination Realschule, see Schooling, secondary, middle (Realschule) Refugee camp(s), 21, 25, 26, 30
camp school(s), 25, 28, 30, 34, 41n43 Refugee(s), 6, 15, 17, 22, 23, 34, 167, 235, 236 children, 15–36, 203, 213, 229n60 Polish, 25, 35 Russian, 25, 209, 212, 218, 219 Yugoslav, 217, 218 See also Displaced person(s) Religious instruction, 133 Catholic, 57, 68, 93 Christian, 132, 138 Greek Orthodox, 93, 110n48 Islamic, 126, 131, 132, 152n80, 166, 178, 205, 222n9 Protestant, 68 Resource(s), 4, 7, 9, 16, 21, 25, 28, 29, 35, 50, 54, 118, 121, 122, 135, 138–140, 160, 168, 208, 211, 214 See also Teaching material(s) Reunification, 198 Rhineland-Palatinate, 13n30, 177 Right to asylum, 123, 201, 214 to citizenship, 160, 168 to cultural heritage, 128 economic, 233, 234 to education, 2, 4, 5, 8–10, 11n12, 15–36, 49–69, 83–85, 90, 118–125, 139, 140, 159–181, 197–220, 233, 236, 237 to free movement, 30 to heritage, 128, 133, 203 to identity, 22, 23, 34, 52, 56, 68 to mother language, 203, 224n32, 236 to the mother tongue, 202, 204, 205, 208, 223n18 to nationality, 19 native language, 202
INDEX
to personhood, 2, 10, 27, 32, 53, 60, 68, 89, 130, 199, 201–203, 233, 234, 237 to political participation, 233 to residence, 84, 91, 124, 210, 215 to resources, 4, 9 social, 233 to social mobility, 233 to social participation, 10 to work, 2, 52–54, 118 Ruhr region, 3, 26 Russia, see Soviet Union (USSR) S Saarland, 72n19 Sayad, Abdelmalek, 3 Schleswig-Holstein, 8, 13n30, 48n84, 87, 168 Schmidt, Helmut, 214 Schoolbooks, see Teaching material(s) School equivalency, 86 Schooling, 31, 59, 90, 96, 128, 135, 165, 180, 208 1973 Denkendorf Model for Language Assistance, 136 access, 237 certificates, 26, 28, 66, 81n88, 81–82n89, 94, 123, 136, 145n33, 170, 178 comprehensive (Gesamtschule), 43n49 curricula, 20, 25, 66, 83, 91, 102, 176, 177, 238 diploma, 65, 66, 86, 94, 145n33 graduation, 20, 120, 123, 130, 137, 138, 142n10, 178 preschooling, 33, 47n80, 64, 119, 134–140, 165 primary, 1, 19, 20, 22, 25, 28, 35, 43n50, 44n58, 52, 53, 57, 61,
257
63, 64, 66, 68, 83, 86, 94, 99, 120–122, 124, 128, 135, 136, 149n61, 170, 178, 212, 213, 218, 227n50 private school(s), 31, 238; Greek, 83, 85, 94–96, 98, 108n28, 177, 238; Polish, 33, 47n80, 47n81 public, 24, 26, 35, 118, 123, 134, 135, 141, 233, 235 secondary, 1, 27, 53, 63, 64, 66, 67, 86, 118–122, 124, 135–137, 154n93, 161, 176, 178, 212, 213; certificates, 121; lower (Hauptschule), 28, 66, 68, 94, 140, 143n19, 170, 172, 180, 218; middle (Realschule), 27, 61, 66, 68, 121–123, 135, 136, 140, 170, 188n55, 197, 227n50; upper (Gymnasium), 27, 61, 64, 66, 68, 120, 121, 135, 136, 139, 140, 170, 189n63, 197 structure, 178 transition to secondary school, 28 School law(s), 19, 24, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 44n55, 44n57, 44n62, 52, 55, 73n29, 87, 90, 112n57, 112n58, 120, 160, 213, 216, 222n9, 235, 237 School materials, see Teaching material(s) School program(s), 5, 8, 10, 24, 37n8, 103, 134, 135, 137, 178, 237, 241 homework help (Silentien), 119, 134–140, 167 inter-European, 240 pilot program(s), Second or third generation(s), 10n4, 134, 136, 161, 162, 166, 170, 174–179, 193n87, 211
258
INDEX
Second World War, 2, 18, 23, 36, 76n53, 86, 92, 113n65, 123, 147n50, 170, 188n54, 232, 235 Secularism, 101, 128, 131, 167 Security, 2, 118, 234, 240 Segregation, 124, 165, 166, 168–174, 180 Self-determination, 87, 201 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 64, 97, 98, 116n86, 154n88, 155n97, 163, 165, 166, 180, 184n27, 215, 218 Social order, 54, 65, 118, 124, 130, 140, 238 Social rights, 165 Socio-economic status, 118–120, 123, 124, 126–128, 136, 138, 167, 172 Soviet Union (USSR), 34, 119, 198, 209, 210, 212 Spain, 85, 122, 224n25 Special schools for the disabled, 61, 169–172, 180 Standing Conference of European Ministers of Education, 89 Standing Conference of Länder Ministers of Education, see Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK) State language(s), 57, 68, 135, 199, 202–204, 206, 207, 212, 224–225n32 Stateless person(s), 16, 17, 19, 22, 23, 26, 30–32, 35, 122, 123, 213, 235 children, 203 State loyalty, 3, 20, 86, 88, 96–104, 141, 175, 176, 180, 232, 233, 236 Stereotype(s), 4, 9, 58, 76n53, 127, 148n55, 159, 167, 169, 174 Stereotyping, 127, 161 Storz, Gerhard, 54, 65, 66
Stuttgart, 20, 61, 83, 85, 90, 104n1, 118, 170, 189n60 Bad Cannstatt, 83, 89, 90, 96 Success, 1, 5, 25, 60, 139, 140, 154n93, 174, 197 Supranational, 2, 6, 8, 16–18, 24, 35, 55, 120, 160, 198, 213, 233, 235, 237, 240 Syria, 200 T Teachers, 99, 102, 103, 202, 219 German, 65, 90, 94, 97, 99–101, 118, 121, 131, 136, 139, 140, 169, 170, 172, 189n60, 218 Greek, 83, 90, 91, 93, 97, 99 Italian, 65, 170, 172 Polish, 47n81 Portuguese, 99 Turkish, 129–133, 149n61 Teaching material(s), 4, 21, 35, 99, 100, 102, 219 certificates, 111n53 German, 29, 135, 139, 176, 177 Greek, 90–96, 100, 177 Italian, 56, 176, 193n87 Kurdish, 224n32 Polish, 33 Turkish, 101 See also Resource(s) Third Countries, 165, 169, 239, 240 Third generations, see School program(s), pilot program(s), Second or third generation(s) Third Reich, see National Socialists (Nazis) Three Rs, 98 Treaty of Maastricht (1992), 198, 232, 241n4 Treaty of Rome (1957), 50, 51, 54, 73n31
INDEX
Tunisia, 85, 224n25 Turkey, 101, 161, 165, 177, 200 1968 student movements, 130, 131 1971 military coup, 101, 131 Kemalism, 128, 131 legations, 131, 178 Ministry of Culture, 101 schooling, 128, 131, 132, 151n74 state, 22, 39n31, 85, 101, 125, 126, 128–133, 167, 177, 179, 205, 237 Turkish children, see Children, with Turkish citizenship Turkishness, 125–133, 166, 167, 175, 200 U UNESCO, 2, 10n5, 34, 51, 53–56, 62, 63, 66, 67, 77n55, 87, 89, 120, 137, 202, 203, 217, 237 United Nations (UN), 2, 6, 17–23, 29, 34, 37n15, 41n40, 55, 213, 234 United States (US), 4, 16, 26, 33, 36n4, 104n2, 109n43, 117, 119, 189n59, 214 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948), 2, 6, 19, 20, 22, 25, 28, 37n17, 105n9, 234 University, 17, 28, 120, 121, 139, 177, 178, 197, 238 Upper secondary school, 64, 66, 120, 121, 139, 140, 197
259
Us and them, 3, 174, 181, 239 V Vietnam War, 214 Vocational school(s), see Vocational training Vocational training, 28, 53, 54, 63, 73n31, 84, 86, 96, 121, 122, 130, 144n23, 155n102, 165, 177, 178, 197, 212, 242n6 school law, 29, 30 Volksschule, 27, 28, 143n19, 218 See also Public school(s) Voluntary attendance or schooling, 30, 33, 53, 214, 218 W Weimar Republic, 29, 44n55 Welfare state, 6, 118, 127, 139, 140, 204, 214, 235 Working class, see Socio-economic status X Xenophobia, see Discrimination Y Yugoslav, 85, 175, 198, 204, 215, 217, 218, 224n25