Description
GOOD LUCK IN GERMANY
Guten Tag (Episode 26)
Tipps für den Alltag II, Ausländische Arbeitnehmer im Industriebetrieb
Viel Glück in Deutschland (Episode 2)
Zu Gast in unserem Land: Kemal
“I am a stranger here,” “I am a foreigner,” “I don't speak German” are all phrases that can be learned in the Goethe Institute’s elaborately produced 26-part language course series, Guten Tag (Good Day). With a great deal of artistic imagination, scenes around “Language, Culture, Germany” are staged and slowly intoned in an effort to bring the newly arrived closer. Viel Glück in Deutschland (Good Luck in Germany), on the other hand, prepares employees for everyday life in the workplace with vocabulary such as “time card,” “personnel office” and “the foreman is waiting”. In Tipps für den Alltag (Everyday Tips), the portrayal of what is characterized as typically German and represented as the ideal norm also has a comic effect, while the depictions of foreign workers can certainly be perceived as problematic. Similar patterns can be found in the educational film series produced by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, Zu Gast in unserem Land (A Guest in our Country). Here, younger generations belonging to the social majority are prepared for confrontations with the so-called “guests”. Following the screening, there will be a discussion in which we dissect the persistent stereotypes unreflectively projected onto later generations of people with an immigration history and the racist behaviors that are subsequently internalized. (ML)
Event series
They were invited to rebuild the country; a fact often overlooked regarding the migrant workers who came to West Germany as a result of the recruitment agreement. Over the years, a culture of remembrance largely based on inherited assumptions has developed around the history of the so-called “guest workers”, thus making a nuanced understanding of past and present events difficult. Against this backdrop, The Invitees takes the 60th anniversary of the recruitment agreement between Turkey and Germany as a call to rethink the history of labor migration. Films, discussions and lectures, alongside informal knowledge and post-migrant perspectives, will allow for a critical examination of the recurring narratives and persistent image politics relating to the so-called guest workers. Over eight evenings, the programme will bring together invited experts, feature and documentary films, educational films, and film material from the DOMiD archive (Documentation Center and Museum of Migration to Germany) and other archives. In these ways an important contribution to the process of transnational remembrance will be made, one that does justice to the significance of interwoven cultures of remembrance and presents identificatory ties that go beyond the nation-state.
