Racism: The End of the German Dream

With a patchy smile and flowing Aladdin pants she jumps on me and says, she now knows why I would have gotten a job interview. "MIGRANTS BONUS!" Like a pipe, she slaps me in the face. She and I are interns at a major German TV station. For six weeks we try to make an impression on the editors, because we want to be journalists. But in truth nobody can remember our names here.

"What do YOU ​​have for a QUALIFICATION?", She had already asked me during the lunch break, when I nervously told that I had a job interview for a traineeship at a newspaper. Now she nibbles on her lower lip. It gnaws at her. Although an invitation is far from being a traineeship and a traineeship, it is far from being a real job, but just another precarious training situation. Although she prefers to go to "National Geographic or something". But now she went crazy and found the invitation to work as a trainee: "We prefer applicants with a migration background! That's not exactly fair," she says.

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Work in the metal workshop (symbol image)

"What's fair?" I should have asked and slapped her back. Instead, I started talking even more nervously. I did not get the job. No matter. Still, I found the call good because it implied that there was an imbalance that hurt the industry. That another white German volunteer does not necessarily offer added value. And maybe the word immigrant bonus is not so wrong. Only that it is not a bonus we receive , but one that we forgive : Perhaps attentive employers now simply know that they will get more from us for the same money.

No idea if there is such a thing as a typical German property. But what strikes me again and again on trips abroad is how perverted the picture is that one has of the Germans: "The Germans always only think about working." Yes, it may be that the retirement age is higher here than in other countries. And yes, diligence as a Prussian virtue at least rhetorically still has a high priority in this rich export world championland. To be honest, when I look around, I see no one in this country working as hard as migrants. Anyone. However, only the Germans suffer from burn-out. Funny.

You think that's a fucking bad comment? Right. An extremely dangerous assumption? Also true. But do you know what is at least as dangerous? Being unable to get sick even with the worst flu due to fear of unemployment. There are many statistics on burnout, but unfortunately not one that captures the numbers of those with a migrant background. This is remarkable, where the "widespread disease burn-out" has been one of the most popular headlines of the German media for years. In migrant communities, the disease is strangely, compared to the German dominance culture, little issue - even though the symptoms are clearly present. Perhaps the constant state of exhaustion for many is just so much normality, even across generations, that hardly any diagnoses are made. Maybe talking about mental crises is also considered a weakness, especially among those who had to learn to be extra strong in order to survive in this society. As can be seen from the statistics above, with less respect for the employee, the risk of burnout increases immensely. And whose work is valued less in this country than by migrants? Just.

I grew up in Germany in the 1990s, where the contradictory slogans "Foreigners are lazy" and "Foreigners are taking our jobs away" partly from the same mouths. In my own family, which immigrated through the recruitment agreement between the FRG and Turkey in the early 1970s, neither could anyone afford to be lazy, nor to take anyone's work away. Everyone always worked in the jobs that were not meant for Germans but for them. People like my grandfather were recruited because they could be exploited more easily than domestic workers: barely organized, flexible, grateful for any Sunday allowance. So while most of the affluent society was playing minigolf and driving fancy cars starting in the sixties, it was the "guests" from southern Europe, North Africa, and Turkey who toiled in the factories under unworthy conditions to generate that wealth. The fact that the migrant workers did not speak German and barely "integrated" was not of interest at the time. On the contrary, they were better off, staying among themselves, living in the same neighborhoods, cultivating their own culture and religion. It was easier to control them and send them back when needed.

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55 Turkish guest workers on 27.11.1961 in Dusseldorf

The "hospitality", which was given to the migrant workers in Germany at that time, described the poet and guest worker's daughter Semra Ertan very impressively in her poem "My name is foreigner". While this poem was printed in textbooks at times in Turkey, Ertan's work and her tragic fate in Germany are unfortunately barely known. In 1982, when racism reached a new, visible climax in Germany, Ertan, 25, called NDR radio to read the poem and announce her suicide a few days later as a protest against racism in Germany designated. The starting lines go like this:

At about the same time, my grandfather was told to go back to his homeland. Where "said" something is understated. With the so-called "return premium", the German government lured him down to the second oil crisis in the early 1980s. He should get 10,500 marks if he was willing to leave Germany forever. In addition, 1500 D-Mark extra were offered for each child he took with him. The FRG wanted to get rid of him after spending seven days a week in a steel factory whose chemical residues are so unpredictably poisonous that the area is still undercast and fenced off, almost thirty years after the closure of the factory, like a stain in the middle City. Grandfather left, my parents stayed (güle güle, 1500 marks) - and continued to work.

I was just able to write my name when my mother did three jobs at the same time: bakery in the morning, cardboard factory at noon, laundry at night. My father worked in factories for almost forty years in the glaring halogen light of factories and recently fell into a crisis because he was unemployed for the first time in his life. His employer had dismissed him in the course of a job reduction. But my dad did not spend three months at home. Then he was sent by a temporary employment agency to another factory, for half the wage and less holiday entitlement. He is still satisfied. Because he can not work anymore.

I do not tell this because I want to praise my parents as "hard-working" people. "Diligence" is already taught us in elementary school as a positive trait. But this one-sided connotation obscures the most common cause that makes working people hard-working workers: existential fear. It is always there, even if it is no longer reasonably rational. All working-class families know that, or people who grew up in such. The sweet slacker life, which consists of strolling and drinking coffee in hip big city girls, can only treat oneself who - in case of doubt - falls softly. The rest of us use every spare minute to spend a few extra bucks for worse times. But what German colleagues do not have to live with is racial hostility, structural discrimination and the loss of residence status or the constant fear of it. Germans are not deported to distant lands because they do not earn enough. Migrants already.

Hired labor is the only justification for many people to live in this country. The residence status depends on a clean certificate of good conduct the strongest on the income ratio. And social benefits are one of the biggest hurdles to naturalization in German citizenship. A few years ago, I applied for naturalization as the first (and so far only) member in my family. After a year of paperwork, it was finally time. But still on the day of the official naturalization with certificate and Tamtam in the city hall Neukölln I again had to show my current wage proof - to prove that I was still employed indefinitely. Still worthy of the German passport.

Hartz IV and social benefits are quickly becoming a problem, and socially they are the eternal stigma of others. "Mass immigration into the German social system", "economic refugees", "asylum tourism" - more and more right-wing concepts of struggle are being normalized. Meanwhile, they dominate politics and the media. This fosters fear of those who have come to take something away from the Germans. But the only plausible explanation for this fear of loss is racism. Then nothing. Germany has always benefited from immigration and still does today, no matter what worried citizens and home ministers want to fool us into. Migration is always labor migration. Nobody comes here with the hope that there are free hammocks in Germany.

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For example, about a quarter of those who immigrated in 2015 as part of the Syrian war were already subject to social security contributions three years later. The unreported numbers of informally employed persons on construction sites, in the retail trade or in the catering trade should be much higher. "But they do not pay any taxes and collect Hartz IV!", Now one may revolt. Right. That certainly applies to some. I just wonder why this argument is used so inflationary, while a party such as the AfD 400 million euros taxpayer receives only for four years, it runs hostile policy in the Bundestag. A not inconsiderable part of our gross salary flows into the accounts of previously convicted right-wing extremists, so that they can sit around as employees in AFD parliamentary offices and deny us the right to exist. But of course, the main thing, you step down. Plus, if the authorities actually had an interest in regulating unannounced work in the above-mentioned industries, the workers would certainly not say no to work injury insurance and minimum wages.

But even for immigrant children of the second or third generation born here, such as myself, and People of Color in general, the German job market is an exhausting hurdle. It is nice that there are more and more of us who make it through the racist school system and enjoy the privilege of having seen a university from the inside. Nevertheless, the coveted posts usually go to our white classmates. Or is it a coincidence that staff in public institutions and in the media industry are at best as diverse as the cast of a Lena Dunham series?

Those of us who somehow made it into a "cosmopolitan", if white-dominated business unfortunately too often experience the effect of the tokenism: "Of course we are diverse, we have Fatma!" Yes, but every fourth person in Germany has a migration history. So unless this fictitious operation consists of four people, Fatma only acts as a token - as a representative of a minority that simulates equal opportunities and deceives strategies for the maintenance of power structures. The question of whether Fatma earns at least the same as her colleagues, often remains unanswered, because money after racism is the second largest taboo topic of the Germans. At the same time Fatma may most likely still unpaid educational work in addition to their wage work, when in the coffee kitchen once again ignited an integration debate. Thanks for nothing.

"You always have to work twice as hard as the Germans if you want to do something." We all know this sentence. We have internalized it and are as hard to get rid of it as the catchy tune of an Ariana Grande song. On the one hand, that's a good thing, because our parents thought a little bit about it when they prayed up and down. On the other hand, the sentence fits in wonderfully with the neo-liberal narrative, according to which we can do anything if we make enough effort. As if there were no racist and patriarchal structures. No vitamin B.

Job advertisements explicitly asking "people with discrimination experience" or "migration background" to apply were once a good start. But they do not solve the problem. It is true that an injustice is found here that must be counteracted. But without fixed rules such as quotas, such tenders eventually ended up as a symbolic gesture. In the end, it is not the well-intentioned wording that counts, but who gets hired. And who is not.

Migration is always a promise of a better life, a German Dream. My grandparents' German Dream was to put some money aside and buy a piece of land in Turkey. My parents' German Dream was to enable their children to study and drive a large German car. And what is mine? Quite simply: I want to take the Germans away from their work. I do not want the jobs that are meant for me, but the ones that they want to reserve for themselves - with the same pay, the same conditions and the same opportunities for advancement. My German Dream is that we can all finally take what we deserve - without us dying. Rest in power, Semra Ertan.

Disclosure: Enrico Ippolito, head of the cultural department of SPIEGEL ONLINE, has written a chapter for the anthology "Your home is our nightmare".