By Jeff Black Sep 3, 2010, 16:59 GMT
Berlin - In the beginning was the word, and it was a difficult word: Migrationshintergrund. Five days after Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin launched his rage-inducing book, Germany is trying, again to figure out its meaning.
People with a 'migration background' is what it literally means, and according to the Federal Statistics Office it denotes anyone living in Germany who was not born there, people with foreign nationalities who were born there, or those with at least one parent of either category.
In total, the term encompasses about 16 million people, or just under a fifth of the population.
But after the launch of Sarrazin's book, Germany Abolishes Itself, on Monday, which made the taboo-busting claim that undereducated, over-fecund migrants - specifically Muslim migrants - and their families were dragging the country down, the political elite has been in uproar.
'All major cultural and economic problems have concentrated themselves in the group of 5-6 million migrants from Muslim countries,' he said Monday.
Sarrazin's thesis, which was served with a side-helping of puzzling genetics claims (the existence of a 'Jewish gene,' something he later half retracted) has problematized a whole area of public life most didn't want to think about.
His views were again dismissed Friday by Chancellor Angela Merkel as 'absurd.'
He has been condemned by the left and the right, will probably lose his job in the central bank (despite, by most accounts, being good at it) and is persona non grata amongst the leadership of his own party, the Social Democrats (SPD).
But there is mounting evidence that the Sarrazin story is more than just a brouhaha, aside from the fact that TV opinion polls over the past week have been broadly in support of his anti-immigrant stance.
As Necla Kelek, a Turkish-German intellectual who has incensed her own community by saying Muslim culture has impeded integration said, 'this book, despite the reaction, will change politics in this country.
Sarrazin is, despite his unconventional ideas, an establishment figure, which has meant his theories have received infinitely more play than they would have done had he been a right-wing radical.
He was the finance minister for the city of Berlin for 7 years, and once played an instrumental role in introducing Germany's currency union after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Klaus Bade, of the German Insitute for Integration and Migration, says that any attempt by the SPD, the largest opposition party, to push Sarrazin out will only create a martyr for those, even from the centre-left, who are disgruntled with the established welfare state and immigration policy.
'He should be refuted as an author and not stripped of his party membership,' Bade said.
Then come a small but growing number of voices who, whilst doubting the soundness of some of Sarrazin's ideas, agree with him as far as saying that the integration of some minorities leaves a lot to be desired.
In an interview in the conservative Die Welt newspaper, writer Monika Maron claims that 'Sarrazin presents a situation that the majority perceives as well as lives ... that Muslim migrants are the only group that even after three generations show severe integration problems.
The political class has been so outraged by Sarrazin because, to single out one particular group as being intrinsically responsible for their own cultural incompatibility with life in Germany, is very hard to distinguish from racism.
But in a detailed response to the affair in an interview with the Turkish daily Hurriyet on Friday, Chancellor Merkel acknowledged that there was a problem, even if it wasn't restricted to one particular group.
Merkel was asked what she saw in the districts of Berlin such as Kreuzberg or Neukoelln, where in places over half the population is of Turkish or Arab descent.
After praising the majority of the inhabitants who 'speak good German, send their kids to school, have businesses,' the chancellor said that nevertheless 'in education and social issues, we have still a long way to go.'
There has been the fear that the Sarrazin uproar would make Germany's integration process even harder, by stoking resentment and alienation.
'Migration background' is a label that involves a lot of people, and it isn't always welcome. Cem Ozdemir, a high-profile Green Party politician has often bemoaned that he is always being labelled as 'of Turkish descent.'
Speaking on a TV talk show on Thursday night, he argued that, in order to move forward with the integration process as a whole, everybody needed to stop talking about 'The Turks' or 'The Arabs'.
'This sort of tribal talk really belongs in the stone age,' he said.
Your Talkback on this Story