The right and wrong kind of 'hallo'

What does it take to assimilate in Germany?

(this one properly attired)

Parvin said she realised she was becoming a local because of her behaviour in the sauna. When another user accidentally left the door slightly ajar on leaving, Parvin bellowed at her: ‘HALLO’. That’s the German form. This can be expressed in several ways - from the friendly greeting to the pass-agg admonition ‘HAAAA-LLO’, uttered loudly and with a frown to alert someone to a misdemeanour.

This was one of many gems in a recent podcast called The New Germans in which the BBC’s Berlin Correspondent, Damien McGuinness talks to younger members of the migrant community about life in the country. The excellent documentary ranges from the serious (everyday racism among not just AfD voters) to the quirky and cultural.

This anecdote reminded me of something that had happened to me in the sauna a few weeks ago. To rewind a little for the uninitiated: for Germans (as for Austrians), sauna etiquette is sacrosanct. It begins with: no clothes. The reason, which I’ve never fully fathomed – if any reader wishes to enlighten me, I’d be delighted – is that textiles get in the way of clean aromas. However, flip flops or plastic shoes are required.

I had just joined a new gym, a huge, swanky but reasonably priced place (by London standards) that includes two saunas and a steam room. After a good work out and swim, my wife and I headed for the restful bit. Just as I was starting to relax, enjoying the heat in my birthday suit, a woman started to bark at us. Why had we brought such flimsy towels with us? Didn’t we know that was unhygienic? I politely asked why, to which the response was I was leaving too much sweat on the wooden boards. I wanted to retort that I thought that the whole point of saunas was to sweat, but I just smiled and told her I’d do better next time…

What intrigued me about this busy-body and what linked her to the documentary was her Eastern European accent. I wanted to ask her where she was, actually, from. But as we all know that kind of question is strictly off limits.

It made me ponder the phenomenon of new migrants - anywhere and in any century - going to extremes to try to fit in. It also made me wonder wistfully whether in German terms that meant reminding strangers brusquely of the rules.

Thanks to the huge influx of ‘New Germans’ over the past two decades and more, this country is changing fast, but it is moving in an uncertain direction. Underlying so much of the country’s angst is the question about what it means to be German.

Most of those interviewed in the BBC documentary came during the influx of one million refugees in 2015. This weekend I took some friends to the Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation. You could spend days in this highly impressive but little known museum, which was opened during the pandemic by Angela Merkel.

One half looks at the contentious history of the 10 million Germans who were forced to leave the eastern lands – mainly Poland and Czechoslovakia – at the end of World War Two.For years the issue was seen as the preserve of the nationalists and arch conservatives before it was given the treatment it deserves.

The other floor of the museum links the issue to the displacement of peoples around the world, most recently the Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis and now Ukrainians, many of whom have made Germany their new home. What makes this museum a particularly useful resource is its contextualisation. There has rarely been a time when the world has not been on the move.  

Germany’s post-war record on immigration was patchy. It was also based on a traditional definition of citizenship through bloodlines. Unlike France with its colonial links to the Maghreb and West Africa, and Britain’s with the Subcontinent, Caribbean and other parts of Africa, Germany has not had similar societal ties with lands it once ruled. Yes, it’s going through a vigorous reassessment of its colonial past and crimes (particularly in southwest Africa), but discussion feels more abstract

From the 1960s to the 1990s, the country became increasingly reliant economically on hundreds of thousands of Gastarbeiter, guest workers, mainly from Turkey. They ran shops and cafes. They did menial jobs, worked in heavy industries such as coal and steel. They had few rights. There was little integration, even less representation.

Germans of second- and third-generation Turkish heritage forced changes, but it’s been a hard slog. It’s harder still for the new migrants, but as the World Service documentary points out, there is a renewed determination to speed up the citizenship process, including the right to vote.

All this is coming up against the upsurge in support for the AfD and other ant-immigrant groups. As I wrote in my last post, when talking about the former president, Joachim Gauck, politicians would do well to talk more about their own countries’ ability to match immigration with infrastructure and public services rather than so-called ‘cultural’ issues.

And, as I wrote in the Independent last weekend, the German government’s fraught approach to Israel, Gaza and now Lebanon is inflaming tensions further. The sometimes subliminal, often open, question to its ethnic minorities is: which side are you on? This plays into the AfD’s agenda. Its support for Israel is specious, driven with the sole aim of stoking hostility to immigration in general and Muslims in particular.

One of the saddest aspects of the past year is that local authorities report a steady increase in anti-Semitic and Islamophobic incidents. Yet alongside this, a new generation is emerging, people like Parvin and other first post-2015 migrants who have gone through school and university and who want to change the country for the better. Their efforts are less reported.