GERMANY: Bleak prospects for immigrants have drawn police to one Berlin school, writes Derek Scally
The cry for help was accusing and desperate. "Our teaching is met with flat rejection. The mood in the classroom is one of aggression," wrote the Berlin headmistress to the local school authority. "Doors are kicked-in, bins are used as footballs, fireworks are lit indoors and picture frames ripped from walls.
"Many of us will only enter a lesson with a mobile phone in order to call for help when necessary."
The letter of capitulation ended with a plea for the Rütli school in Berlin's Neukölln neighbourhood to be shut down.
It was a rude awakening for German politicians who remarked smugly that last year's riots in the deprived outer suburbs of Paris couldn't happen here. Police now stand guard at the Rütli school, where 80 per cent of the students are from immigrant families, primarily of Arab, Palestinian, Lebanese and Turkish background.
It has triggered an emotional discussion about why Germany's education system is the start of the road to nowhere for the grandchildren of immigrants who began arriving to work in Germany four decades ago. Driving the discussion is Germany's 40-year left/right ideological feud.
There are about seven million non-Germans in Germany today, comprising 9 per cent of the total population, with the two-million- strong Turkish community by far the largest group. By and large, there is little more than superficial contact between Germans and their immigrant neighbours, and large Turkish- and Arab-speaking ghettos are a feature of every German city.
Another feature of German cities is schools where 40 per cent of students are non-German, rising to 80 and even 100 per cent in some Berlin neighbourhoods.
Large numbers of these children are doomed to the lowest rung of the three-tier secondary school system, where university education is impossible, and even a job is unlikely. One in five children of immigrant families depart school without a leaving certificate, only one-quarter complete an apprenticeship, and unemployment among young people from immigrant families is running at over 20 per cent, twice the national average.
The frustration of disillusioned immigrant youth - and the growing attraction of young Muslims to Islamic extremism - has led to greater demands across Europe for immigrants to integrate and accept secular western society.
But no country feels more uncomfortable making demands on foreigners than Germany, tainted by its Nazi past.
For German conservatives, the immigrants who began arriving 40 years ago were "guest workers" who would one day leave. However, left-wingers were attracted to the multicultural idea of "tolerance of difference".
Right-wingers see the Rütli school as the bitter harvest of the anti-authoritarian, multicultural seeds sown by the 1968 student revolutionaries. The left has hit back, saying that today's immigrant tower blocks with eastward-pointing satellite dishes bolted to their balconies are the product of the 16-year Kohl era that ignored the reality of immigration. It was the Schröder government that abolished citizenship laws based on ethnic origin.
That conservative denial continues today, say left-wingers, in CDU's calls to deport criminal "foreigners" who were born and raised in Germany. With the Greens now in opposition and the CDU in power in Berlin, there is a wind of change. CDU-ruled federal states are drafting tests on German history and culture for citizenship applicants.
In Baden-Württemburg, officials can decline a citizenship application if there is concern about the applicant's tolerance of women, homosexuals or secular values.
Neighbouring Bavaria will soon implement a law to keep children from immigrant families out of the school system until they can speak German.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has called an "integration summit" to try and end the ideological cat-fight caused by the Rütli school. Praised for her problem-solving skills, she will need them to make clear that Germany's immigrant integration problem is as much the product of intolerant right-wing denial as its complementary cousin, patronising left-wing multiculturalism.