In Germany, an open letter calls for quotas for people from Eastern Europe
Actors and writers from eastern Germany are calling on cultural and media institutions to recruit more talent from the former GDR states. They have published an open letter, which was analyzed by the conservative newspaper “Die Welt.”
"Are quotas necessary to defend East German interests?" This question, posed by the conservative newspaper Die Welt , is once again topical in Germany following the publication of an open letter signed by actors Milan Peschel, Fritzi Haberlandt and Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss, as well as writers Jakob Hein and Torsten Schulz.
These artists are demanding, among other things, the obligation to hire 20% East Germans “in positions of responsibility in the film and television sector” and “more fictional productions actually made in the east of the country.” According to them, interlocutors for East Germans to be appointed to cultural institutions and commissions to be set up to promote their hiring.
In the cultural sector, the profile of employees is important, argue the authors of the article. Writers, screenwriters, and even journalists are likely to convey clichés and fantasies that do not correspond to the complexity of reality.
For example, the one that “all of East Germany is riddled with neo-Nazis, cliques of former Stasi members, and so on,” Torsten Schulz lists in a long interview with the Berlin daily. “There is no way to get rid of [these clichés], which is not surprising when a writer from Cologne [in the west] spends three weeks in Dessau [a city between Magdeburg and Leipzig] doing research, then writes a screenplay that takes place in Saxony-Anhalt [in another state].”
Torsten Schulz points out that similar policies are being implemented to increase the proportion of women in certain sectors. While he has been critical of these measures in the past, he believes that "the injustices here seem sufficiently massive and entrenched to remove his skepticism about quotas."
According to the authors of the open letter, only 8% of the leaders in the cultural and media sectors can be considered East Germans, while they represent 20% of the population. For them, “an East German is a [German] person who was not born, or one of whose parents was not born, with the nationality granted by the Federal Republic of Germany.”
