STEVE INSKEEP, Host:
The election of Barack Obama got people thinking in Europe. It forced Europeans to ask if minorities in their countries could ever reach such prominence. This week, we'll examine the way that Europe treats its minority groups, and we begin in central Berlin. NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports from a country where your identity is closely linked to your ethnicity.
SYLVIA POGGIOLI: This is a small theater club in the Neukoln district. White and black young people sit on assorted chairs and stools. Tonight's reading is a work about the lives of black people in Germany. Author Sharon Otoo stands on the small stage.
(SOUNDBITE OF TALKING AND LAUGHTER)
POGGIOLI: The daughter of Ghanaian parents, Otoo is angered that German society labels her and the estimated half-million Afro-Germans as foreigners or treats them as non-existent.
SHARON OTOO: When you take white as the norm and everything else as deviant from that, and your advertising is always targeted at white people, or when you write school books, and they're targeted at white children, this is for me a racist experience.
POGGIOLI: Another member is Carl Camurca, son of a German mother and an African-American father. He identifies culturally with the land of the poet Goethe but says he is repeatedly stopped by police demanding to see his permit to be in Germany.
CARL CAMURCA: White Germans do not perceive themselves as racist at all. Basically, the idea is, there are no other races in Germany. Germany is a monoracial country, so we can't be racist. It's pretty easy.
POGGIOLI: There are hardly any minorities in the mainstream media, police, judiciary, or politics. One of the few elected officials is 23-year-old Green Party member Sinan Senyurt, whose grandparents came from Turkey. Councilor of a Berlin district, he slams his fist on the table, insisting he's fully German.
SINAN SENYURT: (Through translator) Calling me of migrant descent is a subtle way to separate me from them. It's discrimination. I was born here, so why do people tell me I'm disadvantaged just because my grandparents were migrants? Maybe I am not a pure German, so call me a new German.
POGGIOLI: John Matip Eichler was born in Leipzig, son of a German woman and an exchange student from Cameroon, a father he hardly knew. He says racism was as intense in communist East Germany as in the West.
JOHN MATIP EICHLER: After World War II, it was difficult for our mothers because we had this word which was called rassenschande. It's a shame of race. That means a woman who was engaging with especially a black guy, that was a shame for the family. So sometimes these women were also forced to give their children into orphanage.
POGGIOLI: And throughout Germany, people still ask him, where are you from? With the unspoken follow-up, when are you going back? All minorities wonder when will we finally be considered Germans?
JAN TECHAU: I have no idea. That's the one big question that nobody has an answer to.
POGGIOLI: Jan Techau of the German Council on Foreign Relations says the German concept of identity is based on exclusion.
TECHAU: For hundreds and thousands of years, identities were created by excluding those who were not part of the crowd, by drawing up borders. And this is why becoming a German when you are from Africa or Asia or Turkey or elsewhere is such a difficult thing because not only do you have to subscribe to everything that's normal here, you also have to overcome this exclusion barrier.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSICAL "THE STREETS OF WEDDING")
INSKEEP: I can just imagine to flip the switch and turn on the light. Could this be my chance?
POGGIOLI: The musical was a runaway success and toured throughout the country. It's an examination of life in Wedding seen through the eyes of the students themselves, nearly all of migrant origin, socially disadvantaged kids with few prospects in German society.
(SOUNDBITE OF RINGING BELL)
POGGIOLI: At the Ernst-Schering School, young performers gather to discuss how the musical transformed them. Jennifer Hunze is of Polish origin.
JENNIFER HUNZE, Host:
(Through translator) Before, to many people, I wasn't visible. I didn't speak out either, but I felt like a ghost, you know? They didn't take any notice of me. But now, I know that I have to, you know, speak out, and then they will take notice of me.
POGGIOLI: The man responsible for motivating the kids is musician and composer Todd Fletcher, an African-American. Long before the Obama campaign chose its slogan, Fletcher helped the kids write a song with the refrain, yes we can. He says it had a real impact.
TODD FLETCHER: Because the yes we can attitude is crucial. Without that, there's no hope for these kids. And they need someone saying, you can do things because their entire lives they are told, you can't do it. You're not going to succeed. You're not going to make it out of this ghetto.
POGGIOLI: John Eichler, the Afro-German from Leipzig, says just as the musical's message empowered the kids in Wedding, the election of Barack Obama is giving all minorities more self confidence. He hopes German society will finally wake up.
MATIP EICHLER: The perceptions will change because we have all these stereotypes about people of African descent - of course, sportsmen, entertainers, all this. And now, we have a first family, and we talk about Harvard, and we talk about taking over responsibility in a country, and this is completely new, and that opens the eyes.
POGGIOLI: Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News.
INSKEEP: Unidentified Man: We are considered as ghosts, something just less than human beings. No one is interested in your condition, your future, your past - no one at all.