Integration

Comment: Germany! – What, please?

Who’s afraid of the New? Apparently a lot of. Angela Merkel knows this, and calms down The Land will stay what it is. But what is it? A country that has changed and transformed, writes Volker Wagener.

It is you, this reassurance is rates. “Everything is good” is one of them. It suggests Confidence. Just like that, without giving reasons. “Germany will remain Germany” is also a Tranquilizer. Anxiety will definitely affect expectorant and relaxing. And was it not so that we felt caressed, somehow, as the Chancellor said this week in the Bundestag these simple main clause? The message is: Yes, this country will not change so that we feel foreign in it. Almost no matter how many refugees are yet to come.

Yes, Germany is changing. That’s about it. And this change makes many fear. But has not changed the country again and again? And how! For the last Time in 1989. What were doing for horror scenarios for the round of The greater Germany will now turn back to greater Germany or the East will ruin the prosperity of the West. Particularly, according to the peak-to-Left, such as Oskar Lafontaine, or Günter Grass, in the Canon of the alarmists were like at the time. You would have left everything as it was: separated.

Always a Stranger came to Germany

And how did (West)Germany changed in the 1960/70s, the “guest workers”. On knees, we have created you, the Italians, the Portuguese, and especially the (Muslim!) Turks and Kurds, in order to work everywhere, to find what a German was. Even then, everything was on time. Therefore, the “guest” in front of the workers. Of stay there was no talk Yes. But they remained. The ruin of the Republic?

Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of poles in the 19th century. Century your plaice in the East of Europe left to toil in Gelsenkirchen or Herne “coal” (that is, in mining jargon). Also noticed there is a historic change that has altered German society – at least in the Ruhr area – complete: to be your Best.

DW-editor Volker Wagener

And then all the creeping, social changes, about which nobody talks, because they are not events or political decisions. How, for example, the Internet, the entire structure of trade in the country and in small towns changed? Where there are still shops in the villages? Country life today is often a life under the Old. Instead, a Swinger or sauna club in every second village, but without it someone would be upset. The churches that had mobilized against it 50 years ago, are only attended by a minority – the whole talk of the Christian evening country, in Spite of.

Although the change is so the rule seems to change to be the big fear club of our time. Most directly, we experience the not on the stage of the main political and state actions, but in our workplace. For parts of the 40 – to 55-Year-old, the “Generation Mitte”, the pace of further “optimization” in the office and production disturbing. This is not only a bad mood, makes you sick.

The red thread in our life

The permanent reinvention has long been the red thread in our life. For each Individual, for each enterprise, for the local authorities, the Christian churches, the state. The arrival of the refugees fired now, these fundamental Fears to diffuse. to do feeling foreign in your own country but has little to do with the newcomers. This discomfort is older and compressed, because parts of our society believe, to have an enemy image found.

The snapshot is. Actually, what has changed since the summer of 2015 in Germany is a task for a Generation and not for a term. If Angela Merkel is your sentence “Germany will remain Germany” has meant that we have experienced German has always been change and this also have mastered that, then you agree that It will continue to be dynamic in the country, because standstill is (mostly) harmful.

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