No. 112/2021

30 HUMBOLDT KOSMOS 112/2021 ing. After all, as the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, put it so succinctly: it is all a question of subtle differ- ences. But these subtle differences are not taught by the state education system, they are acquired through family back- ground. In her polemic “Die Elenden” (The Wretched), the German journalist, Anna Mayr, who herself grew up as the child of long-term unemployed parents, pinpoints the difference: it lies in middle-class children’s innate certainty and almost inherent conviction that they are entitled to an elevated place on the career ladder and in society. So, it all boils down to a question of attitude to life, self-con- fidence. But this is precisely the confidence that gifted young people, who want to embark on an academic career, lack if they come from educationally disadvantaged fam- ilies. It is partly responsible for them being filtered out at the decisive transitional points in the German educational system: Gymnasialempfehlung (recommendation for uni- versity-track schooling), Abitur (university entrance qual- ification), Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree, research assistant jobs, doctorate, postdoc, Habilitation , appoint- ment to a professorship – this is an almost insuperable obstacle course for a working-class child on the path to a professorship in Germany. But the crux is this: other people do not think they are up to it because they themselves do not believe it. The result of this is the so-called educational funnel: out of every hundred first-generation students from non- academic backgrounds in Germany, only one manages to take a doctorate whilst ten out of every hundred children from academic backgrounds go on to acquire the title. The path from there to a professorship continues to be stony: once again, only ten percent of all professors have a working-class background. And the majority of them, moreover, tend to be employed at Fachhochschulen or technical colleges rather than universities. Furthermore, at the latter, they are more likely to hold lower paid extraordinary professorships instead of tenured chairs equipped with financial resources that enjoy social and professional recognition. Amongst junior professors, a status introduced in Germany as a springboard to full professorships, working-class children only account for seven percent. Particularly in prestigious subjects like medicine, law and music, first-generation academics are the exception. Disciplines like mathematics and education, on the other hand, are much more open to social background. But nevertheless, the entire situation speaks to the poverty of Germany’s educational policy. AT UNIVERSITY, EVERYTHING SUDDENLY CHANGED I recognised myself, in many ways, in the findings of “Vom Arbeiterkind zur Professur”. But not in all. Grow- ing up in the 1970s and 1980s, the German school system did not put any obstacles in my way; not even when I was a day pupil at a prestigious Bavarian boarding school. As a student of German literature at LMUMunich, however, everything changed. In the overcrowded seminars it was immediately obvious which students knew how to conduct themselves in order to attract the professors’ attention. The latter, in turn, made no secret of favouring the stu- dents with surnames that identified them as aristocratic or as relatives of well-known intellectuals. Agreements were quite openly made between tutors and students sup- ported by the Studienstiftung (German Academic Schol- FOCUS ON GERMANY THE PROFESSORS FAVOURED THE STUDENTS WITH SURNAMES THAT IDENTIFIED THEM AS ARISTOCRATIC.” “