A land of multiple identities

THE HUNSRÜCK IS a high plateau between the Moselle and Rhine rivers, known for its wind turbines and its burbling accent. Heimat ist da, wo man schwätzt wie mer (home is where people talk like us), as they say in these parts. The German word Heimat can mean landscape, custom, identity, home, family and habit. It is associated with the Hunsrück thanks to a three-part film, “Heimat”, set in this region. An epic tale spanning multiple generations of one rural family from the inter-war era to the post-reunification Germany of the 2000s, it is the focus of the Hunsrück Museum in Simmern, the largest village in the area. The film and the museum are enjoying a renaissance.

Growing divisions in Germany, and the rise of the far right, have recently made Heimat the hottest topic in the country’s politics. “People have a need for comfort and Heimat,” as Jens Spahn, the new health minister from the CDU who is tipped to succeed Angela Merkel, recently put it. Germany’s new government even has a Heimat ministry, part of the interior ministry. A society that is rapidly becoming more open and fragmented is harking back to tradition.

The biggest change in recent years has been large-scale immigration. Germany does not have a long tradition of welcoming people from other cultures. The Italians and Turks imported into West Germany to alleviate labour shortages in the post-war economic boom were called Gastarbeiter (guest workers), implying that their stay would be limited, and few efforts were made to integrate them. In a speech in 1982 Alfred Dregger, a CDU grandee, famously said that “the return of foreigners to their Heimat must be the rule, not the exception.” For decades the only truly accepted immigrants were ethnic Germans from eastern Europe.

That old Germany is becoming more heterogeneous. In 1990 Germany’s football team contained only German names (and one Polish-German one); in the European Cup championship in 2016 it contained a Boateng, an Özil, a Podolski, a Sané and a Gómez, among others. In politics, the share of MPs with a migrant background has tripled since 2009. Dunja Hayali and Cherno Jobatey, Germany’s best-known breakfast-TV personalities, have roots in Iraq and the Gambia respectively. Many of the immigrants who have been integrated are from EU countries in eastern and southern Europe. Germany is increasingly becoming an Einwanderungsland (immigration country).

This has happened gradually. Simmern’s first substantial contact with foreigners was in the 1950s, when American servicemen moved into a nearby airbase. Older locals say this was the first time they met anyone of colour. Then in the 1960s Turkish guest workers started to arrive, followed in the 1990s by Russian-Germans from the Volga. Even the tourists from all over Europe landing at Hahn airport, a cold-war air base turned into a budget airport, contribute to the mix of languages.

Over a dinner of lahmacun (Turkish pizza), baklava and tea in Simmern’s tiny mosque, members of the Turkish community say there is still plenty to do. “It is all about your name: if you’re called Mehmet, you’re Turkish, whatever your passport says,” says Mehmet Ali Kaya, chairman of the mosque’s board. A woman in a headscarf jokes that she should change her name to Hildegard. Such observations—voiced in perfect German—point to the challenges of integrating newcomers into a society as rigid and rule-based as Germany’s.

Around the corner from Simmern’s mosque a much more basic form of integration is under way. Eight new arrivals—three Syrians, two Afghans, two Eritreans and a Pakistani—are taking elementary German lessons in the Café Friends. This is the newest wave of immigration into this quiet corner of the country, set off by the refugee crisis in 2015 and its aftermath. Mrs Merkel’s decision to keep the country open in the face of a huge influx that summer seems to have been based on a mixture of pragmatism (there were no obvious alternatives) and idealism (Mrs Merkel, who came from the east, would later explain: “I grew up behind a wall and have no desire to repeat the experience”). “We’ll manage it,” she told her compatriots. Almost two-thirds of the 1.2m who arrived in 2015-16 have stayed on.

What do we do now?

“For three months the only thing we talked about was, ‘what do we do now?’,” recalls Andreas Nikolay, Simmern’s mayor. The first task was to house the new arrivals. Tents went up at Hahn airport, which at the peak of the crisis accommodated 700 people; then refugees were sent to emergency centres like the nearby Haus Helvetia, a handsome Wilhelmine mansion overlooking the Rhine. It is rented by the municipality and run by a charity, Caritas, whose theme last year was “Together we are Heimat”. As part of this programme locals and refugees have met up on nature walks and at cooking lessons. Angelika Hillingshäuser, the local co-ordinator, reckons that “you can have more than one Heimat…My grandparents came from East Prussia.”

Germany is doing better than most at integrating its immigrants, according to a survey of 5,000 refugees by the European Network Against Racism. It found that 51% of refugees there are taking part in integration programmes, compared with 34% in Sweden and 11% in Greece. Examples of this Willkommenskultur (culture of welcome) can be seen across Germany. At the high school in Simmern, for example, teachers decided to add maths and vocational training to the compulsory language lessons for migrants. In one maths class a small group of teenagers, all relative newcomers, respond in confident German when asked what jobs they would like to do. One wants to become a metalworker, another a computer programmer. A 16-year-old Afghan girl wants to be a painter. “Germany is very calm,” she says.

Volunteers have played a big role. Simmern’s Café Friends is run by locals. The emphasis is on learning the language, “a bridge to the future, to a new Heimat”, says Bernadette Boos, who teaches German there. Encouragingly, many of those helping out are themselves former immigrants, including Russians, Poles, Spaniards and Lebanese, says Tahir Sucubasi, a second-generation Turkish immigrant running Simmern’s integration programme. Ralf Wilhelmi, one of the German volunteers, is upbeat: “You don’t feel polarisation here like you do in big cities.”

In the big cities, it is true, the picture is different. Unaccompanied young men, some traumatised by war, make up a large share of Germany’s refugees, and they tend to gravitate to metropolises. In cities like Berlin applications for asylum and appeals can take years. For those left in limbo, there is not much to do. They are banned from working, and spending money provided by the state is stingy. So tens of thousands of frustrated, poor and sometimes violent young men are at large.

Sometimes the frustration boils over. The mass sexual assault on women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve in 2015, mostly by Arab men, has become a cause célèbre, as has the attack in December 2016 by Anis Amri, a 24-year-old Tunisian who had been denied asylum six months earlier. The truck he drove into a Christmas market in Berlin killed 12 people. In Lower Saxony violent crime in the two years to 2016 rose by over 10%, with more than 90% of the increase attributable to immigrants. Anti-Semitism, too, is on the rise; on December 8th last year a crowd burned a Star of David at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in protest at President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. A recent wave of knife attacks by and among refugees in the eastern city of Cottbus brought local protesters onto the streets.

None of this much affects the life of the average German, but a sense of insecurity has crept in. A country with folk memories of the Gestapo and personal recollections of the Stasi is having to get used to armed police patrolling its markets. In 2015-16 the number of small-arms licences surged by 85%.

The big question is whether a civic form of German-ness—a pluralistic Heimat—is possible. The Christmas party in the Haus Helvetia is encouraging. There is a piano, candles, baskets of clementines, coffee and cake. German and refugee kids run around and sing a Christmas carol, Lasst uns froh und munter sein (let’s be happy and cheerful). Young Pakistani men awkwardly stand round the edge. Shahzad Uddin is looking forward to the summer, and cricket matches on fields by the Rhine. Mahmood Abbas, from Faisalabad in Punjab, is showing pictures on his phone from a recent Ahmadiyya festival in a nearby town where about 1,000 fellow refugees with posters formed a giant German flag. Mr Abbas pauses and explains: “My Heimat is Germany.”