Friday, July 19

Kreuzberg museum

Today we toured the area of Berlin known as Kreuzberg and visited a museum there.  2.5 million people of Turkish origin live in Germany. Most of them are here as a result of the guest worker program. The guest worker program began after the erection of the Berlin Wall when the government in West Berlin realize they had twice as many job openings as a available workers. Many of the guest workers came from southern and Eastern Europe. They were highly skilled but worked for low wages, thus they frequently settled in the low rent areas near the Wall.  The influx of so many people of different ethnic origins (The term we hear used frequently is "people of migration backgrounds") led to racial tensions in Berlin.  The Kreuzberg project was started by three girls who saw first hand the ethnic tensions that were plaguing Germany around the turn of the century. The goal of the project is to fight prejudice against people of migration backgrounds.  The Kreuzberg area was once encompassed on three sides by the Berlin Wall, and many people left because they didn't want to live near the wall.  But it was inhabited by artists and others and is now a trendy area with cafes and shopping. About 160,000 individuals live in Kreuzberg, 35% of them with migration backgrounds, most of those Turkish.  Recently there has been a lot of Roma migration into the area from other parts of the EU.  Because of prejudices against them, people with migration backgsrounds have not always been accorded full citizenship status.   It is only since 2000 that children born in Germany are automatically given German citizenship.  Germany does not recognize dual citizenship.  We had lunch at a Turkish restaurant in the area.  I actually liked this Turkish meal better than the first one we had a few nights ago.  After lunch, I took a train with a combined group of TOP 5 and TOP 4 Fellows to Potsdam.  Once there we took a bicycle tour of the town, including a self- guided audio tour of Schloss Cecelienhof, where the Potsdam Conference was held near the end of World War 2.  We ended in a Biergarten (doesn't everything here?) before biking back to the train station to return to Berlin for our last night in Germany.