Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [36]
Despite some changes to Germany’s antiquated ‘blood based’ citizenship laws, conservative elements in German society are preventing the introduction of truly modern laws, with state political campaigns having been fought and won at the expense of foreigners, foreigners having to renounce previous citizenship before they can become German, and recurring violence by extreme right-wing groups in eastern Germany directed (mainly) against foreigners – whose numbers rarely rise above a few percent of the population in towns there. Laws that disallow dual nationality for foreigners from Turkey and other non-EU countries are seen as the main reason why so few foreigners take steps to become Germans.
Debate regularly takes place as to whether Germany should promote a German Leitkultur (lead culture) as opposed to multiculturalism. Also frequently discussed are the high proportion of ethnically non-German pupils in some schools (in some Berlin schools 80% of pupils are foreigners) and poor German skills among foreigners in the classroom.
On the whole, Germany, whose citizens achieved the remarkable by coping with up to 500,000 former Yugoslavian refugees each year in the early 1990s, treats foreigners with respect, even if it still has some political catching up to do.
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The Bambi awards – Germany’s annual media awards – see national celebrities such as Düsseldorf-born supermodel Claudia Schiffer proffer statuettes of fawns to showbiz stars and other celebrities.
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MEDIA
Germany’s former chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, the so-called ‘media chancellor’, is reported to have said that all he needed to govern the country were Bild, the Sunday edition of Bild (called Bild am Sonntag; BamS) and die Glotze (the idiot box). If it were that easy, however, we’d all be doing it.
Licence fees subsidise the country’s two public TV broadcasters, ARD (known as the first channel) and ZDF (the second channel). Unlike Mainz-based ZDF, ARD groups together several regional public stations, which contribute to the nationwide programs shown on the first channel, as well as the wholly regional shows transmitted on the so-called third channel. Due to the sheer choice of channels, private ownership is relatively diverse and pay TV low on impact; ProSiebenSat.1 Media and the Bertelsmann AG groups have the largest portfolios.
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For an overview of media ownership in Germany, go to the English pages of www.kek-online.de.
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About six million households are able to receive some form of digital TV (cable, satellite or terrestrial), which is set to replace analogue broadcasting within the next few years. According to plans, this will replace analogue broadcasting in 2010, although it is unlikely to be fully introduced until after that.
For better or worse, it’s still possible to fall asleep reading German newspapers, which have mastered the art of dry, factual reporting. Print media has a strong regional bias, but overt backing for particular political parties by newspapers is rarely at the expense of the hard facts. The most influential newspaper is the aforementioned Bild, whose circulation exceeds four million. The other main politically conservative newspaper choices are the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Welt. In the centre you find the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfürter Rundschau, and left of these is die tageszeitung (taz), founded in West Berlin in 1978. Both the press and broadcasters are independent and free of censorship.
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Old Catholics (www.alt-katholisch.de), of which there are 15,000 in Germany today, rejected papal infallibility to break away from the Catholic Church in 1871. Female priests were ordained from 1996.
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