It's a little-known, almost forgotten story that we can only reconstruct using impressionistic touches. These outline a relationship between two countries, forged in the depths of the Cold War, built in the name of socialist friendship and which has persisted in the hearts of men until today. It is a love story between the image of a nation and the inhabitants of a town in the Algerian highlands, Tiaret, for which destiny has reserved neither opulence nor fame.
In the streets of this city located at the gateway to the Sahara, 230 kilometers southeast of Oran, in a wilaya (region) of nearly 900,000 inhabitants, people have been dreaming of Germany for fifty years. In the stands of the stadium where young people go to support the local team, JSM Tiaret, the German flag is waved with passion. On the supporters' scarves, the blue and white of the city mix with the black, red and yellow of the Team, the German national football team.
On a wall in the center, the imperial eagle has been drawn. He wears the Algerian crescent moon and star on his chest. In neighborhood shops, televisions broadcast channels where Goethe's language is spoken. A unique situation in the country. For the idle youth of this grain-producing region, El Dorado is not French. It is called Frankfurt, Stuttgart or Berlin.
Put an end to emigration towards the former colonizer
From their earliest childhood, Tiaretians have tasted its evocation through the figure of a cousin who comes at the wheel of his gleaming BMW to spend the summer in the country, that of a neighbor who we have heard praising these regions where “you have rights, you can make your life, have a job and housing”. But also through the words of the elders who tell of this distant past, when it all began and when hundreds of them went to train in the steel or chemical professions in the Democratic Republic of Germany (GDR) and returned rich in an experience capable of arousing a thousand desires.
At the time, Houari Boumédiène (1932-1978) presided over the young democratic and popular Algerian Republic. A non-aligned figure, he aims to make his country an industrial power by relying on its oil resources. Determined to establish its economic autonomy with regard to France, it contributes to putting an end to the emigration of labor towards the former colonizer, by denouncing the climate of racism and the poor employment conditions which there reign. A position which coincides, in France, with the end of the “thirty glorious years” and the establishment of a restrictive immigration policy.
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