Immigration, Integration, and Belonging in German Textbooks for Refugees
Maintaining Germanness and Otherness
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Abstract
Since 2005 most immigrants to Germany have been required to complete integration courses that include language instruction and a concluding orientation course on German history, the political system, and society. The state-approved textbooks for the orientation course are an instructive instance of state-sanctioned discourse about national belonging, immigration, and integration. This article applies a critical perspective to four such textbooks guided by the following questions: How are Germanness and national belonging portrayed? What understandings of immigration and immigrants, cultural differences, and integration do these texts present, and how do these compare to official, academic, and popular understandings?
Contributor Notes
Jason James is professor of anthropology at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. His research focuses on national belonging and cultural memory in Germany. He is the author of Preservation and National Belonging in Eastern Germany: Heritage Fetishism and Redeeming Germanness, published 2012 by Palgrave Macmillan, as well as articles on German and East German identity in the context of historic preservation and popular film.