COFFRA in der Presse . FAZ Weekly
Good neighbors but not yet friends
The Franco-German relationship has become closer over the years, but still lacks depth
Kurt Brenner is well versed in Franco-German relations. The head of the Heidelberg House in Montpellier in southern France since 1969, he has been observing declining interest in the language of his native country for some years now, which prompted him to initiate the “DeutschMobil,“ several small buses driven by young German teachers and filled with books and material that stop at schools all over France. The success of his project has impressed the French so much that now a “FranceMobile“ is touring Germany. Campaigns like these are sometimes more effective than any lofty speech by a politician.
“Only every tenth pupil in France learns German,“ Brenner notes. “In Germany, almost every fifth student learns at least some French. But the importance of French is declining.“ The relationship is one-sided in more ways than one: From Germany, 15 million visitors came to France last year, but only 1.5 million French people traveled in the other direction. An astonishingly high number of institutions and associations deal with Franco-German relations: More than 2,000 organizations exist today, though the approximately 2,100 twinning partnerships between French and German communities remain the heart and soul of the relationship. “I find the Germans from Gröbenzell very charming,“ says Nathalie Oliviero of Garches, a small town in southern France that has been maintaining relations with the Bavarian town since 1994. The towns maintain their ties through sports, art exhibitions and performances by theater groups, alongside the many private contacts that have been established over the years. “Older people in Garches, especially, often speak German,“ says Klaus Coy of the Gröbenzell City Council. “The younger ones, on the other hand, are hard to motivate at times. And when the kids from Garches and Gröbenzell get together, they often speak English with one another.“
Heidelberg and Montpellier, both quaint old university towns, found each other decades ago, and the Heidelberg House that Brenner heads is a respected cultural institution where some 350 language students are taught every year. Brenner isn't uncritical about the French-German relationship. “In the past 15 years it has become quite trivial,“ he says. He blames the French media in particular for either ignoring Germany or reporting only negatively so that the young people in France have lost all interest in Germany. Asked if they can name a famous German, many still name Adolf Hitler. Yet Brenner remains optimistic. “The closer political ties will conjure up renewed public interest,“ he forecasts.
Karla Jaurequis, the head of Montpellier House in Heidelberg, also tries to see the bright side, although she says with a laugh that “Many people in southern France think it always rains in Germany.“ The image of the industrious German also still exists on the other side of the border. Still, Jaurequis observes, the quality of the relationship has changed. “We see a decline in private exchanges, in part because of the deteriorating language abilities,“ says the Frenchwoman, who has been in Heidelberg since 1990. “And young women don't want to go to France anymore as an au pair, either.“ But school exchanges have become more frequent, and ever since a no-frills airline began offering a flight from Frankfurt to Montpellier, more tourists have been traveling there.
Schools are one of the main fixtures in the two countries' relationship. Several German-French kindergartens and schools exist on both sides of the Rhine, and the advantage of these institutions go far beyond the language abilities acquired there. Students gain insight into the culture, history and savoir vivre of their neighbors.
Over the years France has also opened up its elite schools to foreigners, including Germans. Joachim Bitterlich, a former diplomat, for example, went to the renowned ENA school of administration in the 1970's and formed a network from which he still profits today. Bitterlich, once former Chancellor Helmut Kohl's closest foreign policy adviser, is now in charge of international business at a large French utility. “Back then I encountered open doors and made many friends,“ Bitterlich recalls.
Isabelle Hoffman was in her mid-20's when she left Saarbrücken to spend a year studying political science in Paris, only to end up spending three years on the Seine. In the beginning she found it very difficult to adapt to the more regimented French university system. “Watch, listen, copy, cram,“ is how Hoffmann, who now works for the German parliament, describes her daily schedule in Paris.
Contacts with her French fellow students were hard to make, and not only because of French aloofness. “Studying at Science Po is so demanding that people learn to fight for themselves,“ she says. That there is a transnational culture shock in university life is also acknowledged by Karla Jaurequis. “The French students who come to Heidelberg are taken with the collegiate atmosphere,“ Jaurequis says. The freedom offered by German universities, though, attracts mainly “alternative students.“ That the supposedly so freedom-loving and self-confident French submit themselves without complaint to a university discipline reminiscent of a boys' private school while the allegedly so strict Germans value the freedom that characterizes their universities is one of the many paradoxes in the way the two countries see each other.
The close business ties between France and Germany are another bond; large German companies and many medium-sized companies have set up shop in France over the past decades. But although all large French companies are represented in Germany, smaller businesses are still more domestically oriented.
The Paris-based German personnel consultant Klaus W. Herterich has been observing German companies in France for three decades. “A disillusionment in the managerial relationships is distinctive,“ he says, citing a change in generations in many Germany subsidiaries as one of the main reasons. In the 1960's and 1970's a generation of pioneers came to France that had to first discover the country and were given a lot of leeway from their German headquarters. Now young managers, influenced by the Anglo-Saxon business culture, have arrived and have to start from scratch. “In many companies the cultural memory is missing,“ says Herterich.
Another German who has worked in Paris for 30 years, Kurt Schlotthauer, thinks that “nothing has changed“ in the way people in these two neighboring countries see each other. “The Germans only think they know the French,“ says Schlotthauer, who works in an auditing firm. “And the French don't understand the Germans.“
By Gerald Braunberger, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
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