Press Interpreter

03/31/06 -- The day after the call for help from the teachers – how the pupils react to the public commotion and what makes this city district into a flashpoint. -- Berlin, 31 March –- If one wants to understand how a wave emerges that towers up into something of a Tsunami real quickly, one can visit the Rütli School in Berlin-Neukölln. Nothing much happens here, on normal days; the street is short and traffic is shut out, blocked by colourful sculptures. There are a few allotment gardens and a new youth club. And there is this freshly painted school building from the Emperor’s times, from which erupts, on Friday morning, a furious flood.

Youths come running through the school yard, and throng from the inside against the grated gate that separates the garden of the Rütli School from the street. "Massacre! Terror!", one roars out loudly, and laughs. "And now we’re going to beat up the teachers." Some youths now let loose noisily and raise their middle fingers in the air, girls cautiously peep from underneath their headscarves at the mob that lies in wait in front of the school gate since the morning. Journalists and flocks of photographers are standing there, cameras at the ready, and now finally they are getting the images that they waited for so long. School kids with black locks of hair, who holler and heckle and push each other around. Dark-skinned children faces behind bars, locked inside an inaccessible world. "You are the monkeys, not we", one yells out. A tot throws an empty plastic bottle, another hurls an Arabic insult at a woman standing in front of the gate. "Daughter of a whore", he said. At which she spits in his face. Welcome to the Rütli School.

The big shots show up

Berlin-Neukölln on day two after the first wave is a scene that’s fit for a film about the horrors of Berlin’s vocational schools. Except that these agitated scenes would likely not have taken place if there hadn’t been so many reporters here, and if half of the country hadn’t been watching a school that now, after a dramatic letter and call for help from the faculty, is fighting against its reputation as a "terror school". In some media there was talk of weapons and stabbings, of excesses of violence and spooked teachers who feared their students.

The reality of the Rütli School in Berlin is not quite that spectacular, and one could say that it was a small, but fierce wave that swelled up into a surging breaker. For what the commissioned headmaster described in a letter to the School Senator of Berlin was not a murder-and-manslaughter scenario. It was an everyday school life in which young people have lost respect for their teachers, call them names, laugh at them, ignore their instructions. On the hallways the furniture goes to pieces, the letter said, and in the classrooms there’s competing gangs. Arabs against Turks, foreigners against Germans, everyone against the world outside, which has nothing to offer them anyway.

That is approximately the situation at the Rütli School; at least that’s how helpless teachers have perceived it. And because by now ever more colleagues have registered sick, because the director went into early retirement, and for years already nobody has applied for the vacant position of deputy head, they wrote this letter. Without suspecting that their anger about the situation would catch on so quickly and now would sweep back into their school building with such tumult.

Now, since Thursday, the school has been beleaguered by the press, and every hour an important guest comes who wants to help - and every one of them, when they emerge outside again, makes an effort to even out the scales a little again. There is now no more talk of weapons, and the police patrol that was set up outside the school building is taken off again after a few hours. "It does not appear that there are permanent violent conflicts here", says Berlin’s Education senator Klaus Böger after a lightning visit to the building. He has also conjured up a new rector for the Rütli School, two social workers with Turkish and Arabic background will come, and also two psychologists, to stimulate the process of mutual acquaintance, so to say. The school is "up on its way", he assures. And disappears.

The next one to arrive is the migration commissioner of the federal government. Maria Böhmer is a friendly, petite lady, who is guided through the school hallways and to a few youths, past meters-high wall paintings where pupils have gone all out with their painting skills. Wild creatures of fables one can see there, and a woman with burning hair; a dilapidated school building this is, in any case, not, and when the commissioner leaves the building again she must conclude somewhat helplessly that the problems of this school lie "much deeper" than one thinks.

Bilal is sixteen years old and his parents are from Palestine. Mohsen is fourteen, and his family, too, comes from the Palestinian lands, and migrated to Berlin-Neukölln via Lebanon. Bilal and Mohsen go to the Rütli School, theoretically anyway, because now they are walking arm in arm down the street, trying to, somehow, get on TV. "He don’t feel like school", says Bilal about Mohsen. He should himself really be at his traineeship, filling shelves in a supermarket. But he decided to take the day off, "because my body’s hurting". Back, neck, all in trouble, since the acrobatics training.

Totally exaggerated, is what Bilal and Mohsen call the news reports about their school. Things are going totally normally here, they say – at least, not differently than elsewhere in the neighbourhood. "If there’s aggro, they bash each other’s head in", says Bilal. Sure, every few weeks there’s a fight in the school yard, he says, but not every day. "And when the boys from other schools look in some time and look at us with an attitude, we just solve it with the fists", another notes.

And the teachers, what do they say to this? They try to find out who’s to blame. And because they usually don’t get very far with that, nothing much happens, generally. "Some teachers are pretty afraid", says Mohsen and laughs. When a student is sent from the class because he is disturbing the lesson, often he doesn’t even get up from his chair. Instead the teacher goes off, then. And the other day a teacher came back crying, after she had tried to impose some calm and quiet in the hallway.

If you ask Bilal and Mohsen why it is, really, that it seems there’s so few useful things to be learned here, they will talk about how there’s "too many foreigners" on the school. "The Germans are sorted out from here, so they get a better education". The vocational school, for them, is the kind of place where those have to remain who are left behind.

The school gate opens, flocks of students come out, and as they see the many cameras, they start to howl and yell and try to look dangerous. Bilal takes his friend Mohsen by the shoulders, other boys walk up and join in. Then they stamp off in a long chain and dance a "Dabka", a Palestinian men’s round dance that involves plenty of sound and fury. Of course a circle immediately gathers around the group, first of the press people and then of Rütli students. Veiled girls clap along to the rhythm and the Turkish boys edge them on. The circle is now closed, nobody can pass through here anymore.

Finally, now they are again wholly among themselves.

"This is the future"

It’s two o’clock, a bright afternoon in Neukölln. On the second floor of the school at Boddinstreet 34, city school councillor Wolfgang Schimmang talks of what else will all come to pass, if action is not taken immediately. Of the city’s 850 schools, 150 are located in so-called social flashpoints. This here is one of them. He already has the police go to fetch the first-year students, when all pleading to parents to regularly send their children to school in the morning goes ignored. When they don’t come voluntarily, now two policemen will be at the door in the morning. "If momma doesn’t do anything, we have to do it," says Simmering.

The man is agitated. For years he has submitted papers, fought for smaller classes, identified statistics. The elementary schools here have a share of foreigners of 78,2% - on average. Leader of the list is the Boddin School – with 91,7%. The vocational schools have an average of 77,9% foreigners, with at the top of the list the Rütli School with 81,4%. "This is spreading", Schimmang says. "This is the future".

Down in the street, the future is already in full swing. Three Turkish girls pull their jackets a bit closer and retreat into the entryway. They’d just wanted to go out for a cigarette break. But now they bound back into the safe school. "Careful", a German woman whispers to one of them, "it could be dangerous." They very cautiously peer around the corner. Screams are heard from the street, loud screams. Five, six young men are running up the street toward them. They are chasing after a boy with a white baseball cap. He is crisscrossing between the parked cars, pressing his cell phone to his ear, running. Right in front of a woman with a stroller they catch him and push him to the sidewalk, pulling at his jacket and yelling. The young, blond woman with the stroller makes a dead stop, then quickly shoves by the brawling heap of men. "Man, they gone crazy, beating each other up right on the street", she says to the three Turkish girls at the school gate. They take a last drag of their cigarette and quickly go back inside.

The boys have set the whole street in an uproar. Two little girls hold on to their mother. Two, perhaps ten-year old boys pick up their football and run after the big ones, their eyes lit-up. Then the group curves off onto a playground. "Lets cut off before the police comes", one yells.

A few streets down, at the playground on the Reuterplatz, is Henryk Cwiklinski. He is the playground guard that the district affords itself now. Cwiklinski also talks with the guys who just distrained the playground at the Rütli School. Has negotiated with them that there’s no smoking of joints there, and that there’s no needles lying around. "And they can’t hit the smaller kids", he says. It’s a kind of standstill agreement that the friendly Cwiklinski and the boys from Neukölln have made. "And they keep to that?", Karola Richter asks sceptically. The young educator is just guiding her group from the day care centre onto the playground. It’s a pretty place, fenced in so the dogs won’t walk into the sand box, with brushes and well-maintained seesaws and climbing frames. "The playground is the prettiest place in Neukölln", says five-year old Ceyda. The little Turkish girl stands there in her little pink coat, waves shyly and looks a little sad.

In the past few weeks, four of her friends have moved out of the day care centre of Neukölln. They’ve left the neighbourhood, and for good reasons. Because just before the children in Berlin first go to school, the big trek out starts. Parents who are concerned about the opportunities for their children, move out of the social flashpoints – they go to Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, Schöneberg. Because there, the classrooms are still half-filled with Germans, and with the children of those foreigners who consider education important. It is exactly those foreign families who could have been a pillar for the neighbourhood community, who leave. "They all make sure that they get out in time", says educator Richter.

Trouble in the Sonnenallee

"It must have been really pretty here before", says Henryk Cwiklinski. But now the kids just don’t have respect anymore. When he is arguing with the kids on the playground, he has to take real care, sometimes clenches his fists in his pockets. "When they start to argue, it escalates real fast into insults. Then suddenly someone is: Fuck your mother" – and that from such a tot", Cwiklinski says, holding his hand at hip-height.

Karola Richter hasn’t gone to the playground at the Rütli school anymore for a few months now [..]. "Sometime you just resign yourself to it", she says. Ever more often, she goes with the children to Treptow, in the former East. "There you have a nice multicultural mix", she says. "Alternatives and bourgeois. That’s not so aggressive."

In the Boddinstreet, city school councillor Schimmang browses through his papers. Neukölln-North, that’s the flashpoint. 150,000 people live there, 40% of them are unemployed, 40% have an income below poverty level. Even Hertie has now shut its shop, because people don’t have the money to buy things. Both of the main streets running through the district are fully in foreign hands: the Sonnenallee belongs to the Arabs, the Karl-Marx Allee to the Turks. There’s little German to be heard. And so it comes to pass that over 60% of the five-year olds in Neukölln-North fail the language test that is now compulsory in Berlin, before a child can enter school.

City school councillor Schimmang says: "I carry part of the guilt for what has happened here." He saw it coming, he was a teacher in the neighbourhood since 1970, then a school councillor, then city school councillor, then even head of the state school office of Berlin. Thirty years ago it started already. Then it was already a political act to send his two children to schools in Neukölln-North. He says astounding things: "I have sacrificed my children to integration politics. I did not want to be reproached that I was sending my own children to the safe world of schools in the South. He, the Social-Democrat, knew what he had to do. At the time, the share of foreign students was just 30%. Schimmang’s children are now 34 and 28. And if he should get grandchildren, then they will not automatically go to a school in Neukölln. "The way the schools are now – no, just no. Perhaps on the Dürer School, but just blindly to a school here – that I would not do." So speaks the city school councillor of Neukölln.

Children with children

It’s not that nothing good happens in the neighbourhood. There are language courses for the mothers of elementary school pupils, who learn German while their sprouts are sitting in the classroom. There’s a neighbourhood management that works to attract businesspeople and bring neighbours together. There are social workers who go to the flashpoint-schools. There is even a parents’ initiative, which wants to persuade parents to intervene when youths are fighting. "That is not self-evident", says Ilse Wolter, who has been managing the neighbourhood around the Rütli School, that is: trying to get neighbours to foster real neighbourship. Now, the parents have agreed to go to a playground on the Karl Marx Allee every Sunday afternoon, just to be there, to establish themselves against the youths who want to push their children out. "It’s about setting boundaries, and doing that well early."

City school councillor Schimmang is now writing papers again, and the Social-Democratic party assembly has also approved them almost without modification. He wants more teachers, better facilities – good enough ones that the people from Charlottenburg would come in and bring their children too. But one such teacher costs 50,000 Euro a year. If every of Berlin’s 850 schools just got one additional teacher, then that alone would be over 40 million Euro a year. And one would need hundreds. It’s an illusion.

And what is needed is not just teachers: parents have to be taught to raise their children. Often children come into school and can’t tie their own shoe laces, don’t know how to use scissors. And then again the really young themselves start to have children again. In Karola Richter’s day care centre, a new child just joined – of a 17-year old mother. "She didn’t have an apprentice place, no apartment, still lived with her parents. Everything was awful, she wanted out, so she quickly got herself a baby – then she too will get an apartment." The next generation, that will make Neukölln into a flashpoint.

[Remaining text untranslated]

By Constanze von Bullion and Annette Ramelsberger

--Translated By no-itsme

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http://www.sueddeutsche.de/sz/2006-04-01/seitedrei/artikel/HMG-2006-04-01-003-QH6aO7WCm9OOr6eu2CsjGw/