The bad migrant. The crisis of democratic education and the decolonization of the curriculum in French and German school dramas

Abstract

The high school drama is a popular genre in France and Germany that often portrays the integration of young migrants into society. This essay compares the French film La journée de la jupe (Skirt Day, 2009) and its German adaptation for the stage, Verrücktes Blut (Crazy Blood, 2010), in which the civic education intended to turn young migrants into model citizens and form their democratic subjectivity fails. The analysis of La journée de la jupe focuses on the republican ideal of citizenship presented in the film. As this essay will show, there is a contradiction between the racist stereotypes reproduced in the film and its plea for a new liberal republicanism that reflects the diversity of society. Verrücktes Blut is more of a critical reworking of the film rather than an adaptation. The comedy reveals the neocolonial nature of current debates on migration, in which migrants become the object of othering, thus ascribing to them the position that previously belonged to the colonized. In the film and the play, genre comes into play in opposite ways. In La journée de la jupe, the genre of the republican tragedy, on which the film is based, serves to stage the young people, who are read as migrants, as the Other of French culture. In turn, Verrücktes Blut uses the genre of the school drama to create an emphatic attitude towards the young people in the audience. Verrücktes Blut underlines the importance of decolonizing the curriculum. This analysis of the film and the play shows that a democratic education to become a republican citoyenne and citoyen or liberal citizen remains incomplete without the self-decolonization of Western society and culture.