Teaching German kids Turkish feels like it has a political motive more than anything else. I can see Kenyans gaining opportunities of improving their lives by learning Chinese. What do Germans have to earn from learning Turkish? Are you sure the backlash was racism and not just a lot of "what a terrible waste of time and public money"?
Turkish has been taught in Germany for quite a while, with little or no controversy. Here's an article from 2014 on this [1], which mentions it started around 30 years earlier.
Germany and Turkey have long had a close economic relationship. Turkey is a major vacation destination for Germans. The largest ethnic minority in Germany is Turks. Germany has promoted Turkish migration to Germany for over 200 years, which really picked up in the mid 20th century to fill the German labor loses from WW II.
Offering Turkish as an elective language in Germany seems roughly equivalent to offering Spanish in the Southwestern United States.
If all those families moved to Germany because there was no future in Turkey, it's highly unlikely that learning Turkish will do any good for them. I think the objective of a public education has to be to improve the lives of people, if they want to learn Turkish or Klingon they should pay for it themselves.
Also I can imagine that adding a new language choice is very expensive.
> If all those families moved to Germany because there was no future in Turkey, it's highly unlikely that learning Turkish will do any good for them
The classes are for people who only speak German. People emigrating from Turkey likely speak Turkish.
It's about understanding other cultures, and the ones most relevent. Just like how in England, along with learning about christianity, we learnt about Islam.
It's like in the US, Spanish is the most popular second language taught in schools, since you're very close to large numbers of spanish speakers, and have a high number of spanish-speaking migrants. In the UK, amongst a load of other reasons, until very recently French was the most poopular second language in schools, since France is pretty close to us.
The typical alternatives for third language are French, Latin, Spanish or Russian, those clearly are much more about practical benefit than a language people around you regionally might actually speak (in parts of the country, I assume closer to the French border French is somewhat more practical than e.g. in Berlin)?
