Uncovering the Face of Germany
By Alma Freeman

Over the course of two weeks in June, 13 Emory professors – non-experts in German-related issues and many of whom traveling to Germany for the first time – visited Freiberg, Dresden, Hamburg, Meissen, Berlin, and Frankfurt on The Claus M. Halle Institute’s seventh Study Trip to Germany.

Representing a diverse range of fields from medicine to theology and the arts & sciences, participants met with leaders in government, education, manufacturing, business, culture, and the media. The group’s diverse background, combined with an engaging schedule created by Atlantik-Brücke, guaranteed a broad range of questions and discussions throughout the trip.

REMEMBERING THE PAST, MOVING TOWARDS THE FUTURE
Beginning the trip in former East Germany, our group quickly gained an awareness of a collective energy to revitalize an area struggling to recover from an oppressive history. On our first day, we drove to the town of Hellerau near Dresden. The bus pulled into a gravel side road and parked in front of an ominous building of exposed brick and stucco. Founded by local furniture designer Karl Schmidt, the building was considered the home of indigenous avant-garde art from 1911 to 1914, but was converted into a police station during the German Democratic Republic (GDR) era. The site reopened last year as the European Centre of Arts with its first dance show. An interesting choice was made to leave a few of the propagandistic Soviet police paintings that covered the walls before unification – a deliberate choice to preserve the memory of the era.
Although the Centre seemed to still be settling into itself, it was apparent how much the community supported its attempts to become an international destination.

That evening we drove to Dresden for dinner at a restaurant situated along the Elbe River. Although the group was feeling tired by now, we were all delighted to be sitting with a view of the river to one side and the Semper Opera House and museum square to the other. It was drizzling most of the day, and the cobblestones outside were slick and shiny. Realizing it was the season for white asparagus, most of us ordered the national delicacy – it seemed a sin not to indulge. Around the time our desserts arrived, opera-goers started pouring out of the hall into the square and slowly disappeared. After dinner, we took a small walk around. Many of us had read about the total destruction of Dresden during the fire bombings in the war and it was eerie to be surrounded by buildings reconstructed from burnt rubble.

The next day, we traveled to Ronnenburg to visit the site of the Wismut Exhibition, a historical presentation of Germany’s largest revitalization project and the location of this year’s National Garden Show. After the war, the Russians founded the Wismut Mining Company and from 1946 to 1952, proceeded to mine the land for uranium as fast as possible with no concern for environmental factors or the health of the workers. Land reclamation is now underway to contain the hazards of the entire area – a project that calls for the largest fleet of earthmovers in Europe. When completed, 30 million cubic meters of earth will have been relocated. After walking through a successfully refurbished area now home to a blanket of flowers and trees, we drove to the top of a closed mine still undergoing reclamation. From the bald, grey hill where we stood, we gazed over a landscape scarred from mining. It was a relief to walk back down through the bright gardens and to witness such effort invested into transforming a contaminated landscape with a bleak history into a bright garden of the future.

In Hamburg we met with Torsten-Jörn Klein, president and CEO of Gruner + Jahr International, Europe’s largest magazine publishing house. The company’s headquarters inhabit a modern gray building that stretches over an entire block along the harbor. Like many of the modern spaces we had visited, the building seemed a model of efficiency, sustainability, and spatial harmony. After the meeting, Klein invited the group to the building cafeteria – an airy room abuzz with staff chatting over lunch. Klein shared his experience growing up in former East Germany where he began his career at the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. He spoke proudly of the recent World Cup celebrations in Germany and of the rare sight of German flags hanging ubiquitously out of car and apartment windows. Klein, one of very few former East Germans serving as president and CEO of a major West German company, explained that although he hated the communist system, “life in East Germany wasn’t that bad – as long as you weren’t clearly opposed to the government you could survive.” However, one always felt like a second-class citizen, a feeling that still resonates for many East Germans today, he said. East Germans were conditioned to be less competitive and analytical than their Western counterparts, which, in the journalism industry, means there are still fewer working journalists who come from the East. Klein expects this to change, however, and noted that although Hamburg is Germany’s second largest city, Berlin is emerging as the more cosmopolitan of the two cities. He expects that the publishing industry will soon move to Berlin.

GERMANY: AN IMMIGRATION COUNTRY?
Our first meeting in Berlin was with former Commissioner for Foreigners of the Senate of Berlin Barbara John, who shared her experience with immigration in Germany. “The main difference between Germany and the U.S.,” she argued, “is that Germany holds a stronger national identity which makes it difficult to accept people from other countries.”

“Our leadership needs to stress that Germany is not an immigration country – the best leadership is one that doesn’t send mixed messages,” she said. She recognized that in order to remain a global competitor, Germany needs its immigrants – not so that it can present a multicultural face to the world – but rather so that it can meet labor market needs. As more qualified people move overseas, John explained, there is a growing fear among Germans that the country is steadily losing its most skilled workers.

Matthias Rößler, member of the State Parliament, Free State of Saxony, echoed this sentiment at a lunch meeting in Dresden. “Immigrants who come to Germany are not integrated. … Integration of Hispanics in America is easier because they are Christian and their culture is more similar.” Although Saxony is often dubbed “Silicon Saxony” as the home of a major chip making facility, the unemployment rate hovers at 18 percent, while the widening dearth of skilled workers in the area remains a major challenge.

A visit to BildungsWerk, a vocational training center in the Turkish neighborhood of Kreuzberg, Berlin, provided a sharp contrast to the experience so far: nearly 75 percent of the 750 students at the center are of foreign descent. Our group toured classrooms filled with students from all over the world, including Kosovo, Vietnam, Nigeria, Turkey, and Poland. We visited rooms in which students practiced floral arranging, mechanics, cookery, hairstyling, and sewing.

Özcan Mutlu, an elected member of the Berlin state-local parliament and the education spokesperson for Berlin’s Green party, met us for lunch at the center’s restaurant – a place that also serves as a training site for students interested in the food service industry. He asserted that it is a refusal to accept Germany as an immigration country that has denied immigrants the opportunity to manage immigration or promote successful integration. Mutlu gave up his Turkish citizenship in order to become a German citizen.

Currently there are 2.5 million Turks in Germany, the largest of the immigrant communities, who contribute 35 billion euros per year to the nation’s economy. Although two thirds of the Turks in Germany have lived there for more than 25 years, many encounter great difficulty in obtaining work permits. According to Mutlu, one must have two years of legal residency before one can apply for a work permit and even then, he continued, a German is usually given first dibs on a job vacancy. As a result of such policies, many immigrants remain unemployed, despite their willingness to work.

PROMOTING TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONS
The Berlin leg of the trip came to an end with a dinner sponsored by Atlantik-Brücke that brought together Emory alumni and associates living in Germany, as well as special guest and Halle Distinguished Fellow Wolfgang Huber, Bishop of the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg. Guest speaker Rudolf Adam, president of the Federal Academy for Security Studies, gave a historical perspective on the crisis in the Middle East and offered possible scenarios for the future. In the discussion that followed, the Germans and Americans around the table realized how differently the recent war in Lebanon was framed by the news media in the two countries.

In addition to an understanding of Germany that was deeply enriched through the trip, said trip participant Gerri Lamb, Wesley Woods Chair of Gerontological Nursing, were the relationships that formed with other travel partners and colleagues over dinner, walking around a museum, or sitting on the bus. “I valued the opportunity to get to know faculty at my own university whose paths I probably would never have crossed,” she said.

To read more about the trip, as well as The Halle Institute’s relationship with Atlantik-Brücke, visit www.halleinstitute.emory.edu/sub-study.htm

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Alma Freeman is the communications specialist for the Office of International Affairs.