Why is it that, in German, the word 'home' cannot be plural?
Growing up between cultures
Imagine a girl who learned how to read and write in Poland and came to Germany when she was eight. It was only here that she learned the language that she turned into her profession. Is she really Polish? Or a child that lived in Turkey for three years, and then grew up in Flensburg, in northern Germany, in a world that was half Turkish and half German. And a German who looks Vietnamese, who lives Germany and has only visited Vietnam during summer holidays?
Does she even have a native country? The fractured histories of our families make it difficult to clearly say where we come from. We look like our parents, but we're different. We're also different from the people we work or went to school with. In our case, the link between biography and geography is broken. We aren't what we look like.
We don't know what percentage of us is Polish and what percentage is German because we don't think in those terms. We have often asked ourselves whether our sense of humor, our sense of family, our pride and our emotionality comes from one country or the other. Did we learn these things from our parents?
Or in our German schools? Or by watching our friends? We wrote about the dichotomy in our diaries, asking ourselves: Who am I, if I don't know where I come from? We lack something that our German friends, acquaintances and coworkers have: We, on the other hand, come from nowhere and belong nowhere. There is no place where we can overcome our dichotomy because it lies in the no-man's-land between German and foreign culture.
When we're together with our German acquaintances and colleagues, we often ask ourselves: Do I really belong?
And yet, when we're sitting with our Polish, Turkish and Vietnamese acquaintances and relatives, we ask ourselves the same thing. We yearn for a place where we can simply be, without having to simulate it. But we also know that this isn't a place, but rather a state of mind. Our attitude toward life is characterized by alienation, accompanied by the fear of disturbing others in the harmony of their sameness. We are afraid that others will perceive us as foreign objects.
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It isn't a feeling we talk about very much. After all, who would understand us? We want to be normal. And, if that's not possible, at least we want to pretend as if we were. We are tense people in a tense country. Germans are also familiar with this feeling of alienation. We sense their shame about the past -- and sometimes even their fear of themselves. It's an old fear, and it's changing. The more the country changes, the weaker this fear becomes.
But being German still means having to endure jokes about Nazis in other countries, holding one's head low and only pulling out the flag for the World Cup. This, too, is a feeling we only know secondhand. We don't hear Nazi jokes when we're abroad, and no matter how often we say that we're from Germany, others don't believe that Germany's history is also our history. Until , being German meant having German parents.
Citizenship precisely and genetically shaped the community, which was defined by the principle of ius sanguinis , or the right of blood, instead of citizenship determined by ius soli , one's place of birth. Although that has since changed, many still cannot believe that there is such a thing as a German with non-German parents. They don't believe that a woman with black hair and a foreign-sounding name could be one of them. They would never use the word "race. So where are your roots? They also reflect the taboos in the German language of words like "national origin," "identity" and "patriotism.
And who would use words like "race," "genetics" and "fatherland"? In German, these words are loaded because of the country's difficult history. Nevertheless, they are necessary to gain a better understanding of the German fear of self and the German unease with all things foreign. There is a connection between the rejection of the German and the rejection of the foreigner. How can a country that hasn't loved itself for so long learn to love its immigrants?
It seems to us that the German identity is traumatized, tortured with self-doubt and searching for itself.
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We find it difficult to pin down what constitutes German identity. It's actually easier to say what it isn't. It is no longer fascist, as it was during the Nazi era, nor is it socialist the way it was in East Germany. And, today, it is supposedly neither multicultural nor xenophobic.
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So what is it? By staking a claim to a broader imagination of what it means to be German, their book also challenges us to re-imagine education in a multicultural society. As long as schools are the domains of the imaginary mainstream, migrant children will always have to contend with experiences of being left out. Growing up Lebanese Muslim in Australia. My name is Jorge: On both sides of the river. Wer wir sind, was wir wollen [Us new Germans: Who we are, what we want].
When our non-Japanese child was part of Japanese school communities, methods of discipline or regulation of behaviour that involved isolating him for long periods or shaming were particularly difficult to accept. However, in the example you describe of giving awards to encourage desirable behaviour, I am not sure that the majority of mainstream parents wholeheartedly agree with this practice or attach any real significance to it.
Older parents raised within the same culture, for example, may find it hard to appreciate the value of such recognition, as may parents with other and varied non-migrant home backgrounds. Dear Ingrid, What a fascinating post! With simple wording but deep undertones, it tacitly implies the relations of power between cultures and that how migrant children and parents are treated unfairly, still stigmatised for getting disengaged from schools. Notify me of follow-up comments by email.
Excerpt from 'We New Germans' - SPIEGEL ONLINE
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