Tales from Germany

W e as a family had to this week painfully experience how an intercultural, inter-regional pupil exchange between our daughter and a pupil in the northern French region of Lorraine, barely 60 kilometres from Trier completely collapsed. For 12 days in September, we played hosts to a homesick 12-year old French pupil from a migrant family in Loraine. We thought we did our best: investing time, energy and money to make her time in Germany special. Every day there was an activity: an outing with French and German pupils or visiting some of our eight UNESCO World Heritage Sites. One day they had a home-made pizza and film party with 12 French and German girls here in our house. On the Saturday we did a day-trip to Eltz Castle, 100 kilometres away. (c) Anli Serfontein 2009 Eltz Castle After receiving no thank you note from her, she deemed it fit to write my daughter an email this week, less than a week before my daughter was to go to France to tell her how she hated her time with us, that...

We are living in the land of Goethe and Schiller and more recently Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass – both worthy Nobel Laureates in Literature. But there is no official body saying that a child should have been introduced to certain authors by a certain stage. Recently an Irish mother told me how her daughter's German class full of 17-year olds, was asked who Goethe was and 75% of them have never heard of him. I am not even shocked anymore by the ignorance of pupils who selected German as their main subject. After ten years at school, my daughter had read one poem by Goethe and one play by Schiller. Pandering to the needs of the youth, some teachers try to read modern German texts that in many cases disappear again after a few years. A nation of ignoramuses is waiting to be let loose on the world. When I was getting worked up about the ignorance about Goethe – my daughter was in the tenth grade and sixty percent of young people never get beyond that grade, my husband admitted that h...