I have the work booklet for the German integration course for government and law....one of these classes I'll have to take in the next year. Roughly eighty-odd pages. So I went through it this week.
Generally, I can say five things about the book.
1. It is very limited on German history....basically starting in the 1930s...talking to a fair extent over Nazis, a page to the 1945 to 1960 era, and has a couple of pages to talk over the past thirty years....the Wall, DDR, and the new Germany. Roughly 2,000 years missing but it'd just overwhelm most immigrants I think, if you told the whole story.
The emphasis on Nazis? Well, you tell the Holocaust in thirty lines and throw up a picture of the Berlin Memorial.
2. It's supposed to be 60 hours devoted to this material. The instructor must have a bigger booklet to toss out wisdom and bits of history.....because the booklet is awful limited.
3. There's probably about six hours of material over German law, the Constitution, and basic rights. For some guy from a hard dictatorship...it's like reading a condensed version of Lawrence of Arabia of two pages.
4. Maybe there's some movies or video material attached to this....to enhance the whole theme. I won't discredit the book but it's similar to a fifth-grade government studies book (just with better graphics).
5. I imagine there was some big meeting held, and a lot of arguing going over the amount of material. Some history geeks wanted a 300-hour episode....with Kaiser Wilhelm II, Karl Benz, Max Zorn, and Erwin Rommel featured. The integration guys probably didn't want immigrants weeping away at the complex nature of German history. Oddly, Roman history is barely mentioned in this booklet, yet most of everything about Germany is dependent on the Romans.
The thing is....some type of introduction to Germany is required. Somewhere in the thinking....60 hours is a nice round number.
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