The eternal fear of the parallel society

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Controversial topic of language acquisition: "Every fifth daycare child hardly speaks German at home"

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I can still remember the first time I noticed that the language I speak with my parents at home seemed somehow of national importance for politics.

At that time, the promoting and demanding debate was being held in Germany.

To this day, vague sentences like "Integration is not a one-way street" and words like "Multi-Kulti" or "Parallelgesellschaft" reverberate, which wafted from the loud tube TV from the living room to the children's room and whose meaning I have not yet fully understood.

The sound of my childhood has always been multilingual and discussions about whether this is a problem as a supposedly disintegrative moment are part of this cacophony.

Samira El Ouassil Right Arrow

Photo: Stefan Klüter

Born in Munich in 1984, is an actress and author.

In 2016 her book "The 100 most important things" (with Timon Kaleyta and Martin Schlesinger) was published by Hatje Cantz Verlag.

In 2009 she was candidate for chancellor of the PARTY, which at that time was not admitted to the federal election.

She was recently awarded the Bert Donnepp ​​Prize for media journalism for her media critical column "Wochenschau" (uebermedien.de).

Since I grew up in a bilingual household, I realized that my private language is political, and to a certain extent also bilingual: "La language that tu parle at home is important for the gens out there".

No, sorry, as an adult, and even more so as a German, I have to correct that, of course, it has to say: "The language you speak at home is important for the people out there".

At the beginning of this week, the Tagesschau broadcast the message in very funny German: "Every fifth child in daycare speaks hardly any German at home".

A sentence as gracefully onomatopoeic as a typewriter thrown down a flight of stairs.

Its content emerged from the response of the Federal Family Ministry to a request from the FDP.

It was also learned that the proportion of these children has increased by a good two percent.

One could also have written: "Four out of five kindergarten children hardly speak English".

And wait, stop before you give me a "But we're in Germany and not in English, Miss!"

moaning in the comments, with this comparison I just want to make it clear how mendacious it is to deal with multilingualism in the German public.

Because while one laments in this cultural and socio-political debate about the linguistically constructed identity and social strengthening through verbal integration, there is of course a habitus-dependent ranking of the qualities of multilingualism.

Imputed refusal to lead culture

On the one hand, there is good multilingualism.

"Yes, we now have a British au pair who only talks Oxford-English with Atticus-Leon all day, isn't it, Atticus-Leon?".

And on the other, the bad one, because anyone who speaks Turkish, Arabic or Vietnamese with their parents at home, because this is literally their mother and father tongue, has long been one of those foreign children who are unwilling to integrate and whose parents are secretly anti-German and / or hostile to teachers Assumed refusal to lead culture.

I don't even know whether this perception and idea that some languages ​​are worth more to be spoken is racist or, due to the neoliberal dispositive that evaluates languages ​​according to their market suitability, classical.

The fear of private rooms in which German is not spoken, disguised as concern for the well-being of the child, reflects the eternal fear of an alleged parallel society and fails to recognize the already heterogeneous structure and pluralistic dynamics of German society.

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The integrative strength of Germany does not lie in the sociologically somewhat unkind staging of German core culture, but in the lighthearted endurance that differences and, accordingly, multilingualism are part of the German present.

In addition, this cardboard-like problematization of language acquisition also testifies to a surprisingly little trust in the educational structures of our society and in its social forces.

If every second German who returns from a one-week stay in Rome and from then on can only order in Sicilian for the rest of his life and inexorably correct the "Gnotschis" and "Schiantis" of the ignorant people around him, why should a five-year-old willing to learn not? Cope with the fact that he speaks German with his playmates and not with his parents.

Neurotic relationship between Germans and themselves as a nation

And I know, I know, the melancholy that publicly complained that the Duden suddenly cut 300 words (because nobody really uses "baker's boy" or "Hackenporsche" anymore) or the semantic existential panic of expressions like "person of color" convey to me, of course, how connected some Germans are to their mother tongue.

It is the sound of a cultural identity that Germany always struggles with.

Because of this neurotic relationship to oneself as a nation, language represents the one, seemingly innocuous, because it goes without saying, constant that one can socially agree on as the lowest denominator.

That is the reason why she almost overcompensates for compliance with the German-language Din standard in her private life.

But what is perceived as a problem here, these 20 percent children who speak little or no German at home, should be thought the other way round: at least every fifth child in Germany has the opportunity to teach their parents a second language - like I did that with mine too.

Pfiat eich, chers parents!

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