The Rough Guide to Berlin.
by C. Biswas
Non-plussed and choking on the fumes of my inner-city London life, daunted by the after-school bus chatter of 12 year olds speaking standardised Mockney, that bastardised teenage dialect with its "like" and "for real", a hotch-potch of Cockney and Jamaican "cussing" ("blood-klaaat" having reached epidemic proportions in South London), I decided to ferry it across the North Sea to Germany.
Attracted by the prospect of cheaper rent and not having to pay £3.80 for a sexed-up cappuccino, my partner and I decided to live the dream of free passage between the United States of Europe.
Post-reunification East Berlin is a sanitised haven for young professionals and artists from all over the world. The capital of the New Germany is however completely bankrupt, as a result of the corrupt banking scandals of the nineties.
As an English and French teacher I should have been wary of the fact that most of my adult students were
"between jobs", but I came to undertstand what a mess Berlin was facing when chronic unemployment had to be countered with the Hartz IV reforms whereby people are forced to take on "€1 jobs": Yes folks it does just what it says on the tin: Jobs at € 1.50 an hour.
As a film actress and a dancer, I started questioning my sly move to Germany as other dancers were being sacked en masse from their companies as a result of massive arts cutbacks. Every acting job I was cast for turned me down before reheated the offer as an "extra" job, effectively paying at a rate reduced to as little as 30% of the typical industry standard. Meanwhile my German yuppie friends pronounced the German economy dead in the water as they legged it to other states in Germany or even better, abroad.
Faced with this free-for-all version of the free market, I started to question the vibes I was getting as a foreigner...
As a second generation immigrant of mixed heritage, with a Masters' degree from an "elite university"
(as they put it here), I was increasingly taken aback by the race bias that any olive-skinned person may encounter in Germany: you are generally frowned upon and tutted at, thrown half-baked insults such as "Det kennen wir schon..." (accompanied by a knowing nod), roughly translated as " We know your type..." The type being in this case I assumed, foreign, or was it a more "sophisticated" prejudice?
The Germans, we know are very proud of their so-called "multi-kulti" society, loosely based on the fact that you can get a kebab at any time of day or night, or choose from a whole range of foreign restaurants without leaving your area. But there's a world of difference between eating a Doner and living in peace and harmony. I gradually realised that the Turkish population was berated for being "a bunch of good for nothings dollies" and were often openly abused as being "scheiss-macher", even "Kanaken" or "Negern". which I will not abase myself to translate... The sad thing is that these racial epithets are still so much in common use.
Let me explain, fellow Euro-Trash: The Islamic community in Berlin occupies the highest percentage of all Islamic minorities in Germany. They are currently at the heart of the "integration" debate which is raging in every organ of the national press. The problematic loosely revolves around whether the Muslim population has gone too far in its expression of Islam, resulting in young girls' wearing of the hijab as being radical, refusal by the older population to integrate and learn German as a second language and the consistent refusal to teach their children enough German to get their Abitur (A-Levels), causing havoc amongst those of the indigenous population who feel they then have to taxi their kids to a "nicer" part of town for a "better" (or less multi-kulti) schooling....
Judging by the results of the recent European PISA literacy study, it seems that educational standards here are falling, which many Germans would like to blame on foreigners (you can live in this country for years having been born here as a immigrant and still not obtain a passport in your twenties).
Maybe the Germans need to change their perspective on the subject and address the problem from the immigrant's angle: Invited to work as "guests" to help with the German Economic Miracle of the Sixties, many Germans would rather see Turkish immigration as a thing of the past. I hear Berliners complain bitterly at how the working "Gastarbeiter" men-folk invited their families over to join them, something quite natural in England where entire villages where displaced from India in order to contribute to the Host country's economy.
When my educated German friends remarked that theirs was a "Turkish problem" I calmly asked them if they had ever been to London. My friends agreed that London was very multi-cultural, but opined that the foreign population had further integrated themselves into the "Dominant " culture in comparison with Germany. I wondered whether it was the job of the German media to push multi-racial issues beyond the bad joke that was the present state of affairs, where Turkish actors have to resign themselves to a life of on-screen petty criminality reflecting the prejudices of the general public. Hopefully this is changing with the mainstream appeal of Hip-Hop to the younger generation and the success of such films as "Gegen Die Wand" or TV ethno-comedy series like "The King of Kreuzberg". I live and learn...
Haven't these people heard of Equal Opportunities? Obviously an alien term in a city like Berlin where a darker-skinned person gets curious looks when they read the paper in public - I mean, can they really still think all foreigners are illiterate? It seems I've left the nation of the Sun and Daily Mail, swapping it for a country of BZ readers....
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