Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

INTEGRATION

Bach vs burka: Germany debates identity ahead of election

What does it mean to be German? A minister close to Chancellor Angela Merkel has kicked off a divisive election-year debate about cultural identity - earning him praise, ridicule and charges of immigrant-bashing.

Published: 16 May 2017 09:21 CEST
Bach vs burka: Germany debates identity ahead of election
A member of the Green party in Bavaria at an installation intended to question ideas about integration. Photo: DPA.

Some say it's high time to define shared values as Germany seeks to integrate more than a million mostly Muslim asylum seekers who arrived since 2015 under Merkel's open-door policy.

Others have slammed the initiative as a grab for right-wing voters who threaten to drift off to the nationalist, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in September elections.

The eye-catching opening salvo was fired by Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere in the top-selling tabloid Bild.   

The front page showed the politician in charge of police and migrant affairs before the national colours black, red and gold, with the grammatically dubious headline “We Are Not Burka”.

In a double-page spread, de Maiziere outlined in ten points what he considers core elements of the German “Leitkultur”, the guiding or dominant national culture.

SEE ALSO: Germans mock government ideals for immigrant integration

He listed a diligent work ethic, respect for others, being an “enlightened patriot”, a belief in Europe and NATO, and in education and the arts, including the works of Bach and Goethe.

The Christian Democrat also said being German means “showing our face” rather than wearing an Islamic full-face burka, and greeting others with handshakes, which some Muslims shun with non-family members of the opposite sex.

'Reject nationalism'

The loaded term “Leitkultur” was first used in German politics by the CDU in 2000 to suggest that immigrants, then mainly from the former Yugoslavia, must follow Germany's customs and traditions as well as its laws.

The word was revived by the AfD, a party now polling around 10 percent, which has urged Germans to rediscover national pride and a Christian-rooted heritage.

Now, four months before elections, de Maiziere has taken ownership of the term.

“Populist, empty and slightly nauseating,” was how Berlin graphic designer Bettina Braun, 37, characterized the phrase, adding that “if Germany needs a Leitkultur, it should be to reject nationalism.”

Retired teacher Gerda Felgner, 68, judged it “problematic”, because “if you want to exclude someone, you define what Leitkultur is”.

Others were more sympathetic, including Thai-born office worker Somkiat, who said “every country has common rules that define day-to-day life”. 

“Foreigners can't just come and do whatever they want, they have to integrate themselves,” said the 62-year-old.

Health care worker Uwe Liebrecht, 61, couldn't agree more, saying he felt ethnic Germans like him were “becoming a minority” and migrants “here should try to fit into our culture”.

Iraqi-born Nora, 28, said the hijab headscarf she wears had “sadly become a symbol” and had led strangers to tell her she looks “like a ghost”.

“Of course that hurts and I think to myself: 'you don't even know me',” she said. “I grew up in Germany and to a degree I can understand it. Many Germans don't know any foreigners and just see terror on TV.

“I think we need to talk to each other more and reduce those prejudices.”

Sandals with socks

On Twitter, outrage and mockery rained down on de Maiziere, garnished with memes of German sauerkraut and garden gnomes.

An alternative “Ten Commandments” suggested adding “towels on deck chairs” and “sandals with tennis socks” as uniquely German traits.

The Berlin daily Tagesspiegel charged “the CDU has discovered the AfD within”, while Greens party politician Juergen Trittin decried “right-wing rabble-rousing”.

Berlin state secretary Sawsan Chebli, the daughter of Palestinian refugees, said she found it “off-putting” to claim virtues such as respect for education as uniquely German.

Former president Christian Wulff – the first public official to proclaim that “Islam is part of Germany” – said the constitution provides all the rules needed for life in an open, democratic society.

Nonetheless, polls by Insa and YouGov found that around half of Germans agreed with the concept of a “Leitkultur”, which has been hotly debated in media columns and TV talk shows.

It is a painful debate in a country that, given its guilt over the Second World War and the Holocaust, long shunned open expressions of patriotism, but which is yet to fully embrace the concept of “multiculturalism”.

One fifth of Germans have a migrant background, and roughly four million of its 80 million people are Muslims, including a large Turkish diaspora, a legacy of post-war Germany's “guest worker” programme.

Yet the word “Multikulti” is still often used as a negative – to evoke urban migrant ghettos, “parallel societies” and no-go areas – rather than a rich, ethnically diverse society.

By Frank Zeller

For members

DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Published: 5 April 2024 10:46 CEST
Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

SHOW COMMENTS