“Half of myself is—feels German”: Storying Migrationshintergrund teachers’ hybrid identities

Abstract

Romeo Garavaglia (a pseudonym), whose East German mother married his Italian father and later his Bosnian Muslim stepfather, did not look un-German; and, in fact he was German—or a perpetual foreigner—depending on the circumstances of his daily interactions. In this article, the authors story a suite of in-depth interviews to theorize how Garavaglia’s Migrationshintergrund [immigrant background] identity played out in his professional trajectory into teaching. Our analysis suggests that foreignness in a German context does not only entail the color of one’s skin. Rather, the construct of Migrationshintergrund also implies the hereditary impossibility of entering the educated middle class. Leveraging Garavaglia’s story as a synecdoche for the complex experiences of other transnational professionals in and outside Germany, we argue the role of schools and schooling in perpetuating economic marginalization and social imaginaries of difference in “post-racial” contemporary societies.

Keywords:

• Postwar Germany
• hidden curriculum
• Migrationshintergrund teachers
• German teachers