ABSTRACT
The state school has been affected by fundamental changes in Germany1
in the wake of labour immigration and of the national reunification. The post-war labour immigration and more particularly the consolidation of the former guest workers’ stay since the 1970s implicated German schools in the challenge to cope with multinational, multilingual and multi-faith pupils. The German unification made it necessary to redefine collective solidarity. Both of these moments imply tasks of integration that compete with each other – posing societal membership against the national one – but that also interact with each other in practice. School is an excellent place to study such contestations, interactions and learning processes. It is a place of institutionalized communication between the generations, the public and the private, and, last but not least, the national majority and (immigrant as well as other) minorities. School teaches children civil values and propagates norms about the ways in which conflicts of interest between different groups should be solved, in which the public and the private should be balanced and one should participate in wider society. It is hence an important agent in promoting the existing consensus in respect of the social and political order and of the related imagination of a shared community of solidarity. Yet, since democracies are principally open for change, the crucial challenge is not to be seen in the guarantee of a reproductive cycle but in the task of qualifying all pupils for their participation in the democratic argument over defining the consensus and the collective good. What possibilities are foreseen to adapt the existing order and its sense of cohesion to a changing society? What place is suggested for immigrants, and what effects has the German unification had on the definition of crucial common goals?
