“We called for workers, but humans came,” the oft-quoted Max Fritsch statement (cf, Chin, 2007; Mandel, 2008 etc) has long become a truism. The German state refused to acknowledge that it had become an immigration country a long time ago, holding on to policies and ideas about ‘return-migrants’ until it could no longer deny the truth. The debates about the policies and practices towards these settled migrants have persisted for many years. But discourses about integration failed to address the underlying issue of ethno-cultural German national self-understanding, and instead shifted the debate into the seemingly less problematic realm of the cultural.
Considering Germany’s dark past, and the atrocities that followed a misguided understanding of “race”, it is perhaps not surprising that the debate shifted into the cultural realm, but shifting the issue fails to recognize and address the true problems. In this cultural debate, the German state shied away from actually defining ‘integration’, leaving it open to interpretation what integration means.
Apparently, vaguely, it means education and proficiency in German. In 1977 Wilpert already wrote that “proficiency in German is an absolute necessity for these children (1977:481)”. ‘These children’ are adults now, the third generation is growing up, and integration still remains problematic. The German model of integration seems to be the one that Frankfurt am Main espouses: a peaceful side-by-side, rather than living
together in a community. Basically that means that the ethno-cultural understanding of ‘Germanness’ need not be challenged, and the discourse on integration can continue on a cultural level, while the media vilifies ‘foreigners’ and ‘migrant children’ who are uneducated, violent and criminal.
Wilpert (1977) predicted that missed opportunities “can only lead to social unrest, deviancy and disillusionment among the majority of disadvantaged migrant youth in the future (1977:483).” Looking at the crime statistics of the Kriminologisches
Forschungsinstitut Niedersachsen (KFN), her predictions seem to have come true. Although the KFN points out the parity between youths of the same familial and social circumstances, it would appear that violent and criminal migrant youths –considering the size of Germany’s migrant population- are disproportionally represented. And the
image the media represents is anything but flattering, feeding into existing stereotypes of ‘other’ men that present a danger. Education and language fluency do not guard against “discrimination, institutionalised racism and they do not blur ‘the sharp edges of ethnicities’” (Hyung, 2008:139).
But the kyopos are an unproblematic second generation for the German state and majority society. They don’t figure in crime statistics, speak fluent German and are educated. The majority society considers kyopo women ‘reserved and humble’ and
kyopo men aren’t perceived as a threat the same way that Turkish youths are. They have
fulfilled the requirements for integration. They are the model for what Deutsche mit
Migrationshintergrund look like, literally.
While this relatively new term is meant to be inclusive, it is typical for the helpless discourse that refuses to take into account its structural racism. Seemingly trying to include those citizens who were possibly not born German, or whose parents migrated to Germany, it still denies full inclusion by pointing out that a particular German is not part of the national myth of shared blood and history, and therefore is othered. Such and other well-intended attempts, like the misguided studies about “Negermischlinge” in the 1950s, create the conditions for the prophesy of an eventual ‘identity crisis’. In practice, in everyday life, the term becomes even more problematic, since the majority society applies it to those who, as Stolcke (1995) put it, “carry their foreignness in their faces” (1995:8). In the current discourse on integration in Germany “phenotype tends now to be employed as a marker of immigrant origin rather than ‘race’, being construed as the justification for anti-immigrant resentment” (1995:8).
The ‘sharp edges of ethnicity’ are precisely what the German discourse on integration needs to address. Words like ‘integration’ and ‘multiculturalism’, are meaningless in a discourse that refuses to recognize discrimination and institutionalized racism, while blithely using words like Mischlingskind and Neger, speaking to those who are
supposed to –somehow- integrate, signalling that they’re not members, and by virtue of phenotype never can be. In Germany, being an Ausländer is hereditary. And it is this discourse that creates “identity crises” and identity conflicts. Being ‘German’ with a different phenotype is not a readily available form of identification for second generations.
In chapter 4 “Yellow Angels”, I am discussing the particularities of Korean migration to Germany to provide the context for the present situation of the second generation of German-Koreans. Looking at the experiences of the first generation will contextualize the upbringing and experiences of the second generation.
4. ‘Yellow Angels’: South Korean women migrants in Germany
“We came because German hospitals needed staff, and we helped Germany. We are not economic goods. We will return, if and when we want.”
The above quote comes from a flyer handed out by Korean nurses in Berlin, in 1977 (Berner & Choi, 2006). That year the German state decided that the usual 3-year contracts for Korean nurses shouldn’t be renewed, forcing Korean nurses to leave Germany. By that time, many Korean nurses had lived and worked in Germany for many years and wanted to stay. In hospitals, they were known as ‘gentle angels’ or ‘yellow angels’, but in 1977, they decided to fight back. They demanded from the government that they should receive a unbefristete Aufenthaltserlaubnis [leave to remain indefinitely] after five years, and after eight a unbefristete
Aufenthaltsberechtigung [right to remain indefinitely]. They collected signatures and
protested, garnering support from the majority society for their plight. The local
government of Berlin acquiesced to their requests in 1977. The last local government to acquiesce was in Baden-Württemberg, one year later. The Korean nurses had won the right to remain in Germany for themselves, their husbands and their children.
Today, the majority society is largely unaware of these events, and mass media when speaking of migrant women, follows the established trope of oppression of migrant women by migrant men. The first generation of Koreans in Germany does not fit into this narrative. Their stories are different, not least of all because they fought for and won for the right to stay, for themselves and by extension their children, and spouses.
These and the narratives about them among the second generation, form the basis of a narrative myth that is ‘the classic story’ among the second generation. While the migration stories about fathers can vary, it is rare that the mothers weren’t nurses41
. ‘The classic story’ is part of the established narrative of shared experiences among the second generation, in which maternal pioneering courage and sacrifice, are part of the self-production of identity and community.
In this chapter, I will explore Korean migration to Germany, focussing on the women who came as nurses, using two life stories as examples. I will use these and other voices throughout the chapter to analyze. In contrast to the case of other migrant groups, Korean migration to Germany did not consist of mainly male migrant workers. I am focussing on the women in particular since more women came to Germany than men. Roughly 10.000 Korean women came to Germany, and 8000 men (Yoo, 1991:25). Statistically, and in practice the assumption that every Korean nurse married a Korean miner is wrong- many Korean nurses married German men or other Korean nationals who had come to Germany as students, after the first wave of Korean migration to Germany. That is not to say that the experiences of the Korean miners in Germany are negligible, since as a matter of fact their stories of migration have become part of a second-generation narrative that recognizes the parental pairing ‘nurse and miner’ as ‘the classic’. Nonetheless, I am focussing on the women’s lives and experiences as story that has had a greater direct impact on the second generation, as I will explain in chapter 5.
I will look at the particular circumstances of South Korea before and at the time of their migration, drawing out several key issues that contextualize the women’s experiences that constitute the narrative myth of origin among the second generation. Beginning with history, I explain the circumstances leading to migration, before looking at the constitution of religion within a Korean context, and the construction of gender and families. I then discuss the Korean women’s experiences in Germany and the present- day situation. I posit that the experience of gendered migration, which differs from the experiences of other migrant groups to Germany, puts the Korean migrants to Germany in a unique situation with consequences for the second generation. Korean nurses in Germany learned German much more quickly than the Korean miners, and had greater
41 None of my informants had a mother who had not been a nurse, but a few had fathers who had not
contact with the majority society (Yoo, 1991:27-30). I argue that the particularities of Korean migration to Germany made the Korean community in Germany a “poster- child” for integration in a discourse that centres on the perceived backwardness and silence of migrant women. This particular position and the self-representation, and self- production of the first generation, form the basis of kyopo self-narration, and are part of the “memory, fantasy, narrative and myth” (Hall, 1989:71), which are used in the negotiation of identity.