Angela Merkel’s Loyalty Test for German Turks – The New York Times

Worth noting:

To generally question this large and diverse group’s “loyalty” to Germany, as Ms. Merkel did, is as unfair as it is counterproductive. In demanding loyalty from Turkish Germans to the German state, Ms. Merkel is playing along with Mr. Erdogan’s scheme to segregate Turks from the rest of Germany, of making them a Turkish exclave on German soil, deepening the mutual feeling of alienation.

But Ms. Merkel also speaks for a large number of Germans, if not the majority, a fact that is as instructive as it is depressing. Despite the occasional tensions and setbacks, despite the considerably lower-than-average level of education and prosperity among Germans of Turkish descent, the country had just started to portray their integration as a success story.

Even the marches this summer, full of older and largely poor Turkish Germans, were a reminder of what that first generation of immigrants achieved in creating in their offspring, a generation of doctors, journalists, businesspeople — of successful, integrated Germans. But it is harder and harder to see things that way.

The renewed feeling of mutual alienation also gives us a better idea of the minimal requirements for being German. While bias and distrust toward Turks in the past were often driven by criticisms of conservative practices of Islam (and, no less, by racism and Islamophobia), the excessive public support for Mr. Erdogan also repels the German left and liberals. To them, “loyalty” to the German state means loyalty to the German Constitution and its liberal, democratic values — “the decisive marker of German identity,” according to Herfried and Marina Münkler, the authors of “The New Germans.” The pro-Erdogan rallies looked like a thousandfold public rejection of that identity.

All of this is instructive, not just in how Germany relates to its established immigrant communities, but the million refugees who have recently entered the country and are now attempting to build a new life. It is a reminder that, even decades from now, the process will still be continuing, with setbacks and tensions. But it should also be a reason for optimism — that Germany can, and must, make it work.

Source: Angela Merkel’s Loyalty Test for German Turks – The New York Times