German citizenship quiz includes 600 hours of German language instruction

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the NYTimes, March 29, 2006

A Quiz for Would-Be Citizens Tests Germans' Attitudes
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

BERLIN, March 28  What's the capital of Germany? Well, pretty much
everybody knows that one. It's Berlin, of course.

But how about these questions: "Which convention gathered at St. Paul's
Church in Frankfurt in 1848?" "Name three mountains in Germany." "Which
German physicist revolutionized medical diagnosis in 1895?" If you are a
foreigner living in Germany and do not know that the National Assembly was
the convention that gathered in 1848, or that the 1895 scientist was
Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, you might not be able to become a German citizen
not, at least, if a new citizenship test for foreigners is adopted by the
national government. Lately it seems that just about everybody in this
country is talking about the proposed citizenship test, which would add to
an already fairly long list of requirements to become a German citizen.
The test is favored by Chancellor Angela Merkel and the country's main
conservative parties but opposed by many on the left, as well as some
experts on immigration.

The 100-question test, drawn up by the state of Hesse but being considered
for nationwide use, has received a lot of comment, in part because of the
widespread belief that many German university students would have trouble
passing it, so how fair would it be to impose it on immigrants relatively
unschooled in German culture? But at a deeper level the debate about the
test, echoing the immigration debate in other European countries,
illustrates the difficulty that Europe has with the immigration question.
And the plain fact now is that the prevalence of Muslims among the
immigrants and fears that Islamic extremism is infiltrating Europe has
given the usual immigration debate a special edge. The world certainly
took note a couple of weeks ago when a new Dutch law came into effect
requiring all would-be immigrants to take a Dutch citizenship test, based
largely on a two-hour videotape that immigrants are strongly encouraged to
view. The test costs $420 each time it is taken, and the kit to study for
it, including the video, an additional $80.

The video is certainly a general introduction to the Dutch way of life,
including how to open a bank account and register for the national health
service. But there are also much-discussed scenes of nude bathing at North
Sea beaches and of gay men kissing in public, presumably to give
immigrants a sense of the prevailing Dutch cultural and moral values. But
what critics of the video are saying is that the underlying and
discriminatory message is this: Do not come to the Netherlands if your
religion makes you so socially conservative that you would be
uncomfortable with the Dutch way of life. Or, as the narrator of the video
puts it: "You have to start all over again. You have to realize what this
means before you decide to come here."

Germany, though home to roughly 2.3 million guest workers of Turkish
origin, has been particularly slow in grappling with the immigration
issue. It was only in 2000, for example, that Parliament passed a law
allowing people born in Germany of foreign parents to become citizens if
they so choose, and if they meet some fairly stringent criteria. The law
was expanded in 2005 to provide for the cultural and linguistic education
of would-be immigrants, each of whom is required to take 600 class hours
of German language instruction and an additional 30 hours on the country's
history, culture and way of life. To its advocates, a nationwide
citizenship test would just be a way of ensuring that applicants are truly
ready to be German. "The state is allowed to ask whether citizenship is a
conscious decision," Mrs. Merkel said, arguing for a national citizenship
test. "Citizenship can't be granted with a wink and a nod."

But citizenship is not given with just a wink and a nod, opponents of the
test say, citing a list of requirements that are already stiff enough:
fluency in German, economic independence, a renunciation of extremist
groups. Besides, the critics argue, the test would be a poor way to screen
out extremists or terrorists, because people would find ways to pass it
whether they really accepted the principles of German democracy or not.
"The villains will be clever enough to pass it, and the ones you will hit
with such a procedure are the ones who really ought to have a chance at
citizenship," Sebastian Edathy, chairman of the home affairs committee of
the left-of-center Social Democratic Party, said in a telephone interview.
"Anyway, the hurdles are high enough as it is."

To prove that the proposed test is just a way of sending a "don't bother
to apply" message to Muslims, critics point to a test that is already
administered in the southwestern state of Baden-Wrttemberg and is
unofficially called the Muslim test. The debate about the proposed
national test began just about the time that the German Statistical Office
announced that the country's birthrate had plunged to its lowest level
since World War II. In fact, the Statistical Office found that there were
fewer births in Germany last year 680,000 to 690,000 than there were in
the last year of World War II, when 700,000 babies were born. Moreover, in
what may be the most arresting statistic of all, one-quarter of the births
last year were to foreign women.

Clearly, in other words, a demographic crisis is in the works, made up of
an aging and a shrinking population and a foreign-born community that
reproduces faster than the ethnic German community. The debate about the
proposed citizenship test shows that Germany, like other countries in
Europe in similar circumstances, is in a quandary about what to do. "I
think the signal is completely wrong," Steffen Angenendt, director of the
International Migration Program at the German Council on Foreign
Relations, said in an interview. "We need immigrants, and we desperately
need to develop another way of perceiving immigrants. "There is a
completely wrong idea of what is an immigrant in Germany," he said. "The
success stories, the stories of upward mobility of immigrants, are ignored
in Germany. None of these politicians are saying: 'We are proud of having
immigrants in Germany. We are proud of those who have done well and are
moving up in German society.' This language is completely missing from
German politics."



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