Welcome to the New Home Country Germany:: Intercultural Projects of the International Youth Library with Refugee Children and Young Adults

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In the early days of September 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made an historic decision: She brought in thousands of refugees to Germany by train who were stranded at the Central Station in Budapest under intolerable conditions and, in their desperation, had started heading north in long marches. The images of exhausted refugees, who were warmly welcomed at Munich Central Station, went around the globe. In the meantime, up to 13,000 more people were following daily; by the end of 2015, the number of refugees in Germany had reached almost one million. Most of them had fled from the wars in Syria, Somalia, and Iraq, but there were also people from Afghanistan, Iran, Morocco, the Balkan States, and other countries. Most refugees were young men or families. But according to estimates of government agencies, there were also thousands of unaccompanied minors, mostly from Afghanistan and Iraq. The refugees were housed in emergency accommodations, schools, gyms, city halls, tents, churches, or empty office buildings. Many of them were heavily traumatized, having lived through terrible experiences either in their home country or during the flight. Many theaters, orchestras, sport clubs, cultural foundations, and private initiatives stepped up to the huge challenge of integrating these people seeking protection in Germany with innovative, imaginative, and remarkable welcome initiatives and projects promoting integration. Libraries, in their vocation as open forums of democratic civic engagement were called upon to take a stand. For the International Youth Library, which has been promoting intercultural dialogue since its foundation, it was clear that this situation called for dedicated commitment to the cause.

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Literacy and literature programs for children and young adults from migrant families have always played an important role in the work of the International Youth Library. This time, the task was much more challenging because the children and young people—who had fled from war, terror, and violence to Germany—were often severely traumatized and still had to learn the German language. This meant that concepts had to be developed to overcome language barriers and avoid retriggering trauma, especially since teachers of literature are not trained as psychologists or therapists; nevertheless, they can open up new perspectives, enable encounters, and spread hope—all of which may have therapeutic effects. Storytelling with words and images can be a helpful tool to release internal pressure. It is possible to forget oneself in fictional adventures, hero's journeys, or superman stories, thus playfully overcoming feelings of helplessness. All forms of literary narratives potentially allow storytellers and listeners to escape from stressful everyday life, to virtually think through life designs, to articulate hopes and dreams, or simply to enjoy carefree childhood moments. We have experimented with this approach in writing, drama, and comic workshops, as well as in poetry slams. I will illustrate our work by presenting a summer school for refugee children and young adults, which we accomplished with financial support of the Binette Schroeder Foundation in 2016.

Under the title "What have you brought with you?" we invited young adults from refugee accommodations in Munich to the International Youth Library. Together with the New York-based artist, performer, theater director, and educator Kaneza Schaal and the New York illustrator and performance artist Chris Myers, they spent three weeks creating an experimental art, drama, and literature workshop. Drawing, painting, filming, or acting—the young people were encouraged to use a range of artistic expressions to tell and visualize stories with autobiographical grounding, thereby building bridges between home and exile or between past, present, and future. We asked the two established New York-based artists to lead this workshop because they had done several artistic projects with people from underprivileged or marginalized groups, bringing together rich and poor or black and white in their performances.

Thirty adolescents between the ages of twelve and eighteen took part in this project. Many of them were newcomers who had fled wars; some of them were stranded in Munich as unaccompanied minors. They hailed...