Berlin: City of Migrations
This chapter provides a historical context for the study of contemporary migration in Berlin. The city today is an exemplar of ‘superdiversity’, its population drawn from every country in the world and characterized by many kinds of mobility, but it has a
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Migration Backgrounds Speaking at an event in his official residence, the Schloss Bellevue in Berlin, to celebrate the granting of German citizenship to successful applicants in May 2014, Federal President Joachim Gauck told his audience: Einwanderung wurde zuerst ignoriert, später abgelehnt, noch später ertragen und geduldet, und schließlich als Chance erkannt und bejaht. Und in diesem Stadium befinden wir uns heute. Heute weiß ich: Wir verlieren uns nicht, wenn wir Vielfalt akzeptieren. Wir wollen dieses vielfältige ‘Wir’. Wir wollen es nicht besorgnisbrütend fürchten. Wir wollen es zukunftsorientiert und zukunftsgewiss bejahen. (http://www.bundespraesident.de/ SharedDocs/Reden/DE/Joachim-Gauck/Reden/2014/05/140522Einbuergerung-Integration.html) At first, migration was ignored, later it was rejected, later still it was endured and tolerated, and finally it was recognized as an opportunity and welcomed. And that’s the stage we are at today. Today I know: we won’t disappear if we accept diversity. We want this diverse ‘we’. We don’t want to fear it with a festering feeling of anxiety. We want to look to the future, to feel confident of the future, and embrace it. (My translation) © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 P. Stevenson, Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis, Language and Globalization, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40606-0_2
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Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis
His speech was offered as a reflective and inspirational address, directed ostensibly at the 23 new German citizens in front of him but intended also of course for consumption by a much wider public. Born in 1940 in Rostock on the Baltic coast, Gauck grew up after the war in the GDR, where he later became a Lutheran pastor and a prominent advocate of reform during the Wende (the period of transition in 1989–90) before overseeing public access to the vast collection of private files assembled by the former GDR Ministry of State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, colloquially referred to as the Stasi). In his speech, he acknowledges the challenge he had faced with the idea of a German ‘we’ that could comfortably accommodate both easterners like himself and westerners, not to mention the many categories of incomers from beyond the German borders. The ‘we’ in the lines quoted here is therefore a complex and multilayered emblem that—potentially, at least—both encompasses a diverse range of contemporary constituents and embodies a historical legacy of conflicting experiences and interests. In these few lines he treads delicately through a conceptual minefield, skilfully deploying grammatical resources that permit him to articulate an appropriately statesmanlike message inflected with a personal perspective. Decades of struggle over the idea of immigration are condensed into the most laconic formulation imaginable, a sequence of six verbs in agentless passive constructions, before he freezes his review in the present moment and expressly asserts ‘our’ active presence. He commits himself explicit
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