View onto Germany

America, you’re (slightly) better off

By James Angelos

Are the United States a utopia for immigrants, whilst being German is still a question of skin colour? The experiences of an American journalist with Greek roots in Berlin.

One evening in Bonn last summer, a friend and I boarded a local train and headed towards the city centre for dinner. On the train, we sat across from a friendly man with an easy smile, and his young son, who stood holding on to his father’s legs, smiling too and gazing at us with large brown eyes. We struck up conversation with the man, who wore a long, pointy beard and looked to me like he might be of Middle Eastern descent.
“Where are you from?” I asked him at one point, eager to use a bit of the German I had recently learned.
“From Palestine,” he said.
“How long have you lived in Germany?” I asked.
“I was born here,” he answered.

A few months earlier, I had arrived in Germany as a German Chancellor Fellow to write stories about immigrant communities in Berlin. During this moment on the train, I received one of my first lessons on the complexities of immigration matters in Germany. Why, I asked myself, would a man born and raised in Germany say he is from somewhere else?

Since I arrived in Berlin last fall, I have had several similar conversations with people of immigrant backgrounds. Once, while I was waiting for my dinner at an Indian restaurant in Kreuzberg; the proprietor, a young man who was born in Berlin and spoke perfect German, told me he was from India. In a youth centre in Neukoelln, a teenage boy who was playing a game of cards with his friends told me he was from Lebanon, though he too was born and raised in Berlin. After I questioned him about this, he gave a more nuanced answer. “I tell people I’m Lebanese,” he said, “but that I come from Germany."

Life in the ethnic microcosm

These conversations showed me a glimpse of a phenomenon often referred to in Germany as the emergence of “parallel societies”, in which residents of the country who have immigrant backgrounds – by some counts, nearly 20 percent of the population – though sometimes part of families that have lived in Germany for generations, remain in their own ethnic, social and economic microcosms. This circumstance is a cause of great concern in Germany, and in the German news media one can witness an almost daily debate about the manifold reasons for the nation’s difficulties integrating many of its immigrants.

"Don’t Greeks worship Zeus?” the local boy asked me."

When I meet people of immigrant backgrounds in Germany, I compare their experience to my own. I too am the son of immigrants. My parents immigrated to America from Greece, and I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, where most of the friends I played with on the street and went to school with did not know much about Greek culture. But when I came home in the evenings, I spoke Greek with my family, ate Greek food, heard Greek music, and on Sundays, my family and I attended a Greek Orthodox Church. The society inside my house and the one outside were in many ways quite different, and for some of our neighbours, we Greeks may have seemed a little alien. When one of the boys from my middle school, for instance, learned that my family attended a Christian church, he was astonished. “Don’t Greeks worship Zeus?” he asked me earnestly.

I imagine the experience for children of immigrants in Germany is in many ways quite similar. But despite the persistent feeling that I inhabited two different cultural worlds, I never felt that I was not American. On patriotic holidays like Memorial Day and Independence Day, my father would carefully hang the American flag next to the front door of the house. “Being American is a state of mind, a set of ideals,” he told me. In other words, no ethnic or cultural affiliation was required. I was an American as long as I identified with what I saw as American ideals.

America caught between openness and caution

Despite its repute as a land of opportunity, America is by no means a sheer utopia for all immigrants. As a reporter working in New York City, I encountered bigotry targeted at new Americans who had come from places like India and China. And for all its openness to immigration, the United States continues to struggle with how to deal with its large population of illegal immigrants. But when it comes to the integration of immigrants, one advantage America has over European countries is that there is no ethnicity that defines being an American. The teenager I met in Neukoelln, the restaurant owner from Kreuzberg and the man on the train in Bonn don’t see themselves as German, in large part because they are not ethnically German. And many in the society around them don’t see them as German either. In fact, I asked them where they were from because I cursorily assumed they were from somewhere else. Their skin tone or manner of wearing a beard did not appear to me to be German. By asking them where they were from, I was saying, “You don’t seem to be from here."

"The teenager I met in Neukoelln, the restaurant owner from Kreuzberg and the man on the train in Bonn – none of them sees themselves as German."

As I undertake my fellowship project over the next year, I hope to gain more insight into Germany’s integration dilemmas, but on first impression, I believe the heart of the matter is a question of what it means to be German. Is being German solely a question of blood, or ethnic identity? Or, as my father would say, can it also be a state of mind? Can it also be, put otherwise, a set of ideas – a sense of equal opportunity and shared participation in a just society – with which people of immigrant backgrounds would wish to identify?

At stake may be not only Germany’s concept of itself, but also its future stability, as it seems unsustainable for so large a portion of the population to continue perceiving that it lacks a share in German society.

At stake too is how the smiling boy standing beside his father on the train in Bonn that summer evening will identify himself when he grows up. Will he say, despite the fact that his family has lived in Germany for generations, that he is from Palestine? Or may he one day, proud as he is of his Palestinian heritage, also proudly identify himself as a German?

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