Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany

4. The Progeny of Guest Workers as Leftover Bodies: Post-Wall West German Schools and the Administration of Failure

95 The Progeny of Guest Workers as Leftover Bodies 95 FOUR The Progeny of Guest Workers as Leftover Bodies: Post-Wall West German Schools and the Administration of Failure What does one do with these people? One has to force them to learn German . . . to speak German. . . . This is the critical basis for employment success. Lots of mistakes were made . . . because [the politicians] were thinking humanistically. In some Oriental ways of thinking this can’t be understood. People, we are now here! There are laws here! For the past two years, there’s been an attempt to catch up. Even [Otto] Schily [the minister of the interior at the time] is trying to catch up. It’s too late. One can’t get them there. The third generation speaks much worse German than the first and second generations. The school has to have space for different ways. It has to have the financial ability. . . . One has to build new schools that are more practice-oriented . . . ones that emphasize working with one’s head much less. Lots of these kids aren’t in the position to do cognitive work. They have to learn through practice. —Kreuzberg elementary school principal who had recently left his job for a school in a different neighborhood with a different student population Alongside hypersexuality, another way to examine noncitizenship and processes of exclusionary incorporation is to investigate the position of Muslim, Turkish German, and Turkish youth. In Germany and Europe, the rights of a citizen are intimately connected to expectations of protection and care. While one might assume, as Soysal (1994) does, that Turkish students in German schools are being protected and cared for based on their universal humanity, the ambivalence and resignation of German teachers, administrators, and the broader public about the futures of Turkish and Muslim students reveal something quite the contrary. 96 Hypersexuality and Headscarves The apparent post-Wall and post-unification possibility of the naturalization of people of Turkish descent in Germany, a perceived inclusion, is undercut by substandard schools that reinforce the centrality of speaking perfect German, the official and unofficial disapproval of women and girls wearing headscarves, and an institutionalized neglect of the children. They are not desired subjects, but the progeny and reproduction of leftover bodies.1 Most of these students end up in the lowest level of the three-tiered school system, where the possibility of obtaining skilled jobs is severely limited. Their bodies represent both an extra unskilled labor force and an undesired presence, but primarily the latter. In conversations at a Kreuzberg secondary school (Haupt/Realschule), where 80 percent of the students are from Turkish- and Arabic-speaking families, one teacher tells me that these are the Restkinder—leftover children. Another says that he isn’t sure for what purpose he is training his students. A number of teachers are explicit about the fact that they are preparing students for unemployment . One teacher smiles ironically as he tells me that I have come to the center of Elend—distress, misery, and poverty. Most of the teachers, who are White Germans and do not speak Turkish, express concern for the “German” students, who are a “minority” in the school. The parents of most of the students are unemployed, or they work as cleaning people or in factories. Many Turkish and Muslim children were born in this district or have lived here most of their lives. The teachers are from other parts of Germany, and a few are from Turkey; they used to be very active in advocating a politics of social transformation, but they are tired now, waiting for retirement, not sure about their purpose, teaching old syllabi, hanging on. The Berlin government has opted to increase the numbers of Gesamtschulen (mixed-level schools), but to keep many of the distinguishing features of separated schooling in place. Even though Kreuzberg is almost universally hip when one is in his/her twenties or early thirties, White Germans who have kids change neighborhoods in order to put their children into less “troubled” schools, which happen (perhaps not coincidentally) to also be less diverse. Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, formerly districts in East Berlin, have become particularly trendy for young parents, many of whom have only recently moved to Berlin. The teachers who couldn’t get jobs elsewhere came to Kreuzberg, without any special training, maybe with ideas that turned into frustration, then with other ideas, but without the power or the resources to implement them. They have...