Last Friday much of the world woke to the news of two shootings at two separate mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. Those shootings left 50 worshippers dead and 40 injured. Of the three men and woman arrested in relation to the shootings, 28 year old Australian man, Brenton Harrison Tarrant, has been…
Public broadcasters’ political talk shows are a staple of the German television landscape, routinely racking up top spots in TV ratings. Yet although there are a large number of competing programmes on offer, these shows have been criticised for being monothematic. As journalist Dunja Ramadan wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, programming abides by the principle:…
In 2018, German sociologist Aladin El-Mafaalani scored a somewhat surprising best-seller: his book Das Integrationsparadox (‘The Integration Paradox’) shot into the top ten of German book sales, providing a counterweight to gloomy and populist pamphlets on immigrants’ failure to ‘integrate’ and of Germany’s impending ‘Islamisation’ otherwise dominating the commanding heights of the book market. Successes…
In 1961, the West German government signed a ‘recruitment agreement’ (Anwerbeabkommen) with its Turkish counterpart, paving the way for the migration of Turkish workers to the booming Federal Republic. Today, the vast majority of the three million men and women of Turkish heritage living in Germany can trace at least parts of their family history…
For years, ‘integration’ has been an omnipresent concept in Germany’s public debates on immigration and Islam. Even more so than in other European countries, this notion reigns hegemonic in the German context – even if it is mobilized for a range of very different political diagnoses and projects. Public broadcaster ZDF brought together two of…
