German in context

Around 130 million people worldwide speak German as their mother tongue. German is the most widely spoken mother language and an official language in four countries in the European Union: Germany, Austria, Belgium and Luxembourg. German is also an official language in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Moreover, around 7.5 million people in 42 countries worldwide belong to a German-speaking minority.

A few examples:

• In the immigration country USA, more than 45 million people give “German” as their heritage of origin. German is the mother tongue of around 1.4 million of them.

• 800,000 people with German roots live in Russia, some of whom still speak German. In the eighteenth century, their ancestors accepted an invitation from Russian Tsarina Catherine the Great, who came from Germany.

• 20,000 German Namibians, who speak German as their mother tongue, live in Namibia in southwest Africa. They are descendants of German colonists (the colony of German Southwest Africa existed from 1884 to 1915).

• The Transylvanian Saxons settled in Romania in the twelfth century and and Banat Swabians in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In 2011, 36,000 Romanian Germans lived in the country.

 (From: https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/knowledge/mother-tongue-german-in-42-countries-around-the-world)

Germany has been a founding member of the European Union and is nowadays a member of strategic international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), NATO (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization), the United Nations (UN), G7, the World Trade Organization (WTO), G20. In 2004 and 2007, the EU was expanded to include ten new member countries from Central and Eastern Europe (initially the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia; then Bulgaria and Romania). After a seven-year transition period, Germany granted citizens of these countries full access to its labor markets (in 2011 and 2014 respectively). This mobility increased the diversity of the country. You can read further about this on the blog entitled Expanding German Studies Blog – EGS (expandinggermanstudies.com)

Nowadays, Germany is the site of a number of multilingual and multi-ethnic groups: German Jewish, German Turkish, German Romanian, German Iranian, Asian German etc. While the Jews had been a minority in Germany since Medieval times, other migrant and minority groups are the result of socio-political phenomena such as migration, resettlement for work purposes, repatriation of German ethnics from the territories of the former Eastern Bloc during Communism and in its aftermath.

Germany has diversified its population especially after opening itself to foreign labor forces, the so-called Guestworkers (Gastarbeiter). The Guestworker recruitment practice dates back to Imperial Germany in the late 19^th century, when labor forces were recruited from places like Russia, Austria and Italy. During the Imperial period, Germany established colonies in East and West Africa, as well as in the Pacific and in the Shandong Province (China). The practice of Guestworker recruitment resumed after World War II, in order to facilitate the reconstruction of the country. In 1955, the Federal Republic of Germany signed labor agreements with Italy (1955), later with Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia and Yugoslavia. By 1974, Germany comprised over 4 million non-German residents, which was 5 percent of its population. On the other hand, the German Democratic Republic signed contracts with countries from the Eastern bloc, such as Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, as well as Cuba, Mozambique and Vietnam. The Turkish Guestworkers became the most numerous Guestworker population, and even after the ending of the agreements, most of them decided to stay in Germany, although they did not receive a path to citizenship until 2000. You can read further about this phenomenon in the Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture, edited by Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der Will.

Germany decided to accept a large number of refugees in the aftermath of the civil war in Syria and the 1914-1917 war in Iraq. By 2018, there were more than a million refugees living in Germany. Angela Merkel’s migration and integration policies have served as a model for other countries.