The long path to a
 “new German identity”

 

Germany was late in accepting its role as an immigration country, writes Naika Foroutan. Today, diversity is perfectly normal.

 

Approximately 437,000 immigrants came to Germany in 2013 – the highest number for 20 years. Today, 16 million people with a so-called migration background live here. That is 20% of the population. Roughly 
9 million of them have German citizenship.

The numbers speak for themselves: Germany is an immigration country. That has been the case for some time, although the politicians denied it until the beginning of the 2000s – despite the fact that until the official end of recruitment abroad in 1973 roughly 14 million people had come to Germany to work. The first reference to Germany as an immigration country finally appeared in a statement of government policy by the SPD and Alliance 90/The Greens coalition in 1999.

 

Before that became possible, Germany went through a number of different phases. Recruitment, migration and the economic integration of the people 
involved characterised the time of the first guest­workers. It began in 1955 with the recruitment agreement between Germany and Italy, which was followed by treaties with Spain, Greece, Turkey, 
Portugal, Tunisia, Morocco and the former Yugoslavia, and continued roughly until the end of the 1960s. The following years were strongly marked by the oil 
crises of 1973 and 1979/80 and the end of labour 
recruitment abroad. This period saw the beginning of German “foreigners’ policy”, which was motivated by the realisation that many of the “guestworkers” had moved the centres of their lives to Germany and would not be returning to their countries of origin. The 1980s were influenced by the beginnings of an integration policy. The foundation for this was the 1979 Kühn Memorandum, which was presented by Heinz Kühn, the first Federal Government Commissioner for Foreigners, and outlined ideas on the education and the political participation of migrants. Also typical of the 1980s was the idea of multi­culturalism as the peaceful coexistence of different 
cultural and ethnic groups, whereby the emphasis lay on coexistence as “living side by side”.

 

After the fall of the Wall, this – rather slow – trend towards integration suffered serious setbacks. 
Racially motivated attacks, such as those in Hoyerswerda, Solingen and Rostock, and the massive restriction of immigration from 1993 onwards presented the picture of a country that was deeply occupied with its own reunification and finding its collective identity – in part, at the expense of an imagined “other”. Migrants remember that period as one of strong xenophobia. As the second generation of immigrants reached adulthood and solidarity increased from political and civil society representatives without migrant backgrounds, the opportun­ities also grew for actively shaping immigration policy. At the same time, discussion took place on the question of what is actually “German” – for example, as part of the debate on Leitkultur, a predominant or leading culture. Even during this phase, Germany did not regard itself emotionally as an immigration country – even if this status had already been politically formulated.