No Communists at Deutsche Welle, Please, but they may Train your Future Teachers

A guest post by Tai De

The Great Instructor

In February, Mr. Rudolph, who plays or played a role at Deutsche Welle as a “montitor” for the Chinese department,  tackled a thorny issue of German educational politics, which´- out of budget considerations, possibly  –  draws on the services of of an institution  which is operated by the People’s Republic of China,  a totalitarian state. Tackling this issue is commendable. That Deutschlandradio, in an interview with him, dared to pick this hot potato (hot by German standards, anyway) up at all is commendable, too. But the feeling seems to creep over the listener or reader – even a willing one like Tai De -, that Mr. Rudolph views the matter of universities’ cooperation with China’s Hanban from a position of taste, rather than from a matter-of-fact one. The latter would be a matter of constitutionality. When it comes to Hanban activity at the University of Göttingen, for example, neither Mr. Rudolph nor the moderator  address the issue that prospective Chinese-language teachers for Lower-Saxonian schools are trained by this university, in cooperation with Hanban.

A distinctive German feature needs to be highlighted here. Most of these teachers from Göttingen will not become a municipality’s or private school’s employee, but the federal state’s civil servants, in advanced positions. They will vow to be faithful to the federal state, and to the Federal Republic of Germany. From the Lower Saxonian oath’s wording:

I swear to dedicate my efforts to the people and the federal state, in accordance with the republican, democratic and social constitutional state, that I will preserve and defend the Federal Republic of Germany’s basic law and the Lower Saxonian constitution […].

Ich schwöre, dass ich, getreu den Grundsätzen des republikanischen, demokratischen und sozialen Rechtsstaates, meine Kraft dem Volke und dem Lande widmen, das Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland und die Niedersächsische Verfassung wahren und verteidigen […] werde.

Trained in cooperation with the Communist Party of China.

The four former contributors to or employees of Deutsche Welle’s Chinese department were no civil servants, and in decisions by a labor court,  at least two of them were reportedly put under suspicion of „Communism“.  Some of these former employees weren’t even working full-time. Noone of them had taken an oath.

And there one has to ask Mr. Rudolph why he would work as a monitor at Deutsche Welle – without the law really exacting that kind of toil on him –, and why he would only tastefully sniff when it’s about colleagues from his own league.

Are these constitutional, or are these power issues, Mr. Rudolph?

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Previously by Tai De:

» Helmut Schmidt and the Korean War, March 1, 2012

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