Germans still struggling to resolve issues of race; The country has no xenophobic far-right party,

[pampango]

yet a book arguing that Turks have inferior genes is a runaway bestseller.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/15/germans-struggling-resolve-issues-race

On 18 February 1943, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, took to the stage at Berlin's sports palace calling for "total war". "Two thousand years of western civilisation are in danger," he said, before going on to blame his favourite scapegoat. "Things have gone so far in Europe that one cannot call a danger a danger when it is caused by the Jews."

For most of the postwar period, a more complex conversation was stunted by the country's contradictory attitude to immigration. On the one hand, like most European countries, Germany invited and accepted large numbers of migrant workers after the war – mostly from Turkey. But unlike others, it took Germans several decades to come to terms with the notion that they might stay. So even as the labour force and cities were transformed by migration, the official line was that Germany was not an "immigration country" and that these were only gastarbeiter – guestworkers. This was enshrined in its immigration law, based on jus sanguinis (the right of blood) rather than jus soli (the right of soil): only those with German parents could become German, leaving the children and grandchildren of immigrants, who were born in Germany, foreigners in the only country they knew.

"Integration is supposed to be give and take," says Baba, who is of Kurdish and Aramaean descent. "But they just want us to give up our culture. It doesn't matter how long you've lived here – whether you were born here or whether you speak German – you're always a foreigner. They talk about us, but they never talk with us."

These issues were further complicated by reunification, which brought with it a spike in racial violence in the east - which still has "no-go zones" where non-white people fear to venture - and yet more national introspection...."It's no coincidence that this debate broke out around the 20th anniversary of reunification," said Patrick Bahners, features editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and author of The Panic Makers, which offers a critique of Sarrazin's book in particular and Germany's paranoid attitude to Islam in general. "Today you hear people saying we should finally show some self-confidence again and that it is only a sense of guilt regarding our history that keeps us in bondage. That used to be reserved for the extreme rightwing. Now it is mainstream. In many ways this debate tells you more about Germany than it does about immigrants."