They had such a nice time together, got along so well during the three weeks they spent getting to know a foreign country that tears of sadness flowed when they had to part. “We wept all night,” Sara tells her dairy on the last day in Germany, “we don’t want to leave”. The 18-year-old from Florence, Italy, is one of 450 scholarship-holders from all over the world participating in one of eight youth courses staged by the Goethe-Institute this summer as part of the “Schools: Partners for the Future” initiative. Together with young students of German from Finland, Thailand, Indonesia and Mongolia, Sara spent three weeks in Vallendar near Koblenz taking part in an intensive course in German and exploring Germany on excursions. And she evidently found it all great fun. She definitely wants to return and continue her German studies and she now has new friends all over the world to whom she will certainly write many e-mails – in German.
And that is exactly how it should be. The partner school initiative, one of the latest cultural and educational initiatives to be launched this year by Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, is aimed at getting young people interested in modern-day Germany. At the same time, it will create a global network of a thousand partner schools offering German language courses. The Goethe-Institut is working on this network in conjunction with three more of the Federal Foreign Office’s cultural mediators: the Central Agency for Schools Abroad (ZfA), the Educational Exchange Service (PAD) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Cultural relations and education policy is considered the “third pillar of German foreign policy”, its mission as wide-ranging as the cultural and educational landscape itself. One objective, for example, is to spread awareness of the German arts scene abroad; another is to promote the German language – a task addressed by the Goethe-Institut and its 134 institutes abroad. The Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) also organizes worldwide touring exhibitions for noted German artists. Another important mediator of education policy is the ZfA, which provides educational, personnel and financial support for more than a hundred German schools abroad. Today, these schools are attended mainly by local students whose parents appreciate the high standard of schooling provided. Some schools even run special programmes for children whose parents cannot afford the school fees: the largest German school abroad, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, for example, offers a scholarship for boys and girls from poor families.
Graduates of German schools abroad have all the educational qualifications needed to study at a German university. Mahmoud Morsy from Egypt, for example, has just completed a degree in computer sciences at the TU Darmstadt. He was one of the top German school graduates of his year and was rewarded for that with a DAAD scholarship for the full duration of a course of undergraduate study in Germany. “A super opportunity,” the 25-year-old says, “the course offered in Darmstadt is great”. Starting 2008, there will actually be 120 of these attractive full scholarships available for students from German schools abroad – twice as many as in the past. But of course it is also possible to study and do research in Germany without German Abitur: international scientific exchange takes place largely under the auspices of the DAAD and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH). The DAAD provides scholarships for more than 35,000 foreign students, graduates, scientists and artists a year; the AvH grants around 600 research fellowships and awards a year to international academics.
Putting people from different countries and cultures in touch with Germany is a goal central to all the efforts of the 13 mediator organizations that implement cultural relations and education policy for the Federal Foreign Office. Their aim is to forge bonds and create networks from which many people worldwide profit. This happens directly, for example, in the media dialogues organized by the ifa. The one with the longest history is the German-Arab media dialogue, which for the last 11 years has provided an annual forum for intense communication between journalists and publicists from Germany and the Arab world. While the earlier meetings mostly addressed matters of stereotyping and prejudice, discussion today focuses on issues such as the position of women, cultural globalization, tolerance and freedom of speech. The programme has now been extended to include Islamic countries outside the Arab world and meetings have been held in Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Central Asia.
As of 2008, Europe’s southern neighbour Africa has been a special focus of cultural relations and education policy. “Action Africa” is a Federal Foreign Office programme aimed especially at young people. A host of initiatives are being launched to strengthen cooperation in higher education and research, two new Goethe Institutes are planned, German cultural weeks are scheduled and shows and performances by German artists will be staged in many African countries. Cultural promotion is also provided in the other direction: Africa figured prominently in the Berlinale Talent Campus 2008, for example, and African writers took centre-stage at the Berlin International Literary Festival in the autumn. For schools and in sport, Action Africa will also create a whole range of new exchange programmes. And if they end in tears because friends don’t want to part, that is acceptable. It means the world has been brought closer together.
