A documentary about rapper Haftbefehl, released on a streaming platform at the end of October, has sparked enormous interest – not only among young viewers. The Offenbach Student Council has urged that his lyrics and life be discussed in school lessons, but the Hessian Ministry of Education rejected the proposal. Two educational researchers from Frankfurt are critical of this decision.
UniReport: Ms. Gilgen, Mr. Güngör, what are your personal thoughts on the documentary about Haftbefehl?
Lara Gilgen: I was disappointed, both while consuming media surrounding the documentary and then watching it, that the documentary failed to utilize its full potential – by which I mean contextualizing Haftbefehl’s biography and embedding it within societal and historical frameworks. Murat Güngör and I are both involved in teacher training and are very familiar with schools. Given that topics like educational inequality, racism, and difference are highly present in schoolyards and classrooms, we naturally felt that this portrayal lacked substance.
Murat Güngör: I agree with my colleague. The film “Babo” about Haftbefehl is not a documentary in the traditional sense but rather a fictionalized autobiography that heavily relies on effects and voyeurism. It employs the classic narrative of a rock star’s rise and fall, with his drug use taking center stage – an engaging portrayal for an audience focused on consumption and entertainment. From an educational science perspective, this film would have been more compelling if it had addressed issues that are controversial and relevant from a student’s point of view, including aspects like the visibility of social realities, migration society, the exploration of proletarian poetry, and negotiating gender roles. The Hessian Ministry of Education’s rejection of the Offenbach Student Council’s proposal, citing antisemitic and sexist themes among other reasons, is puzzling. After all, an openly antisemitic composer like Richard Wagner is not excluded from music lessons either. This is not about relativizing antisemitism but about engaging critically with the work and the artist. It’s also worth noting that Haftbefehl apologized for his antisemitic lyrics years ago.
So you would argue that the contradictory and questionable passages should be discussed in school lessons.
M.G.: Absolutely. Controversial topics in society need to be addressed in schools as well. The Beutelsbach Consensus can serve as a reference here. [Editor’s Note: Established in the 1970s, the Beutelsbacher Konsens is a guideline for political education in Germany that requires teachers to avoid indoctrination, present controversial issues fairly, and empower students to form their own opinions.] After all, where else can students learn to critically engage with antisemitism, racism, classism, and gender issues? This is where student-centered learning, skill development, and the educational mission converge.
L.G.: The proposal from the city’s student council primarily focuses on Haftbefehl’s lyrics. The rejection “from above” is truly a missed opportunity. These topics are being talked about in schoolyards, but there’s no educational forum to critically and reflectively address them. The decision essentially constitutes an official ban on such a discussion, even though instructors should be trusted to design their lessons in a way that meets the educational and teaching mission.
Many consider Haftbefehl to be a voice for a generation of migrants, but he is also very popular among Germans without a migration background. What, in your view, sets him apart?
M.G.: Starting in 2010, Haftbefehl introduced a turning point into popular culture: the previously dominant monolingual approach to music shifted to a multilingual one. This is linguistically fascinating because language is fluid and always engaged in a dialectical process with societal trends. Migration acts as a catalyst for hybrid linguistic processes. At the same time, language is also identity. It’s therefore not surprising that the hybrid identities of artists are reflected linguistically in their work. This, incidentally, sets them apart from the Hamburg rapper Jan Delay, who also appears in the film “Babo” and who raps and sings in monolingual standard German. The linguistic virtuosity of Haftbefehl and other rappers is evident in their use of fragments from languages often considered marginal, such as Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, and Romani. High school students and even university students suddenly want to speak in a similar way. In my seminars, for instance, I no longer need to explain the word “Para” (meaning money). What we’re seeing here is a bridge being built: from a working-class context to the center of society. This would be excellent material to address in German lessons from pedagogical, grammatical, and contextual perspectives.
L.G.: The (rejected) request from the Offenbach Student Council has now brought a discourse into the public eye that has always been present in schools. Yet the reality of migration remains invisible – something that is also reflected in a language-ideological discourse: Multilingualism in German schools consists of an officially recognized form of multilingualism featuring languages like English, Spanish, and French, and an unrecognized multilingualism rooted in students‘ everyday lives.
Authors like Feridun Zaimoglu paid literary tribute to migration-influenced multilingualism many years ago in works like “Kanak Sprak” and other texts. It’s surprising that schools still struggle so much with this concept.
M.G.: Our schools are guided by the language of education, which is considered the norm. Other languages, dialects, or sociolects are positioned hierarchically below this educational language. Haftbefehl’s language is often viewed as an inferior derivative of the standard language. And there’s still more missing in schools: For the past three years, I’ve been offering a seminar at Goethe University where we explore hip-hop culture from an educational science perspective. Cross-cutting themes include migration society and memory culture – topics my students rarely encountered during their school years, even though a significant portion of contemporary German society has a migration background. The narrative of a shared history is the foundation for fostering societal cohesion. This aspect is crucial for future instructors, who will encounter the diversity of a migration society in their professional practice. It is essential to both recognize and value the reality of our society.
Lara Gilgen and Murat Güngör are members of the “School and Youth” working group, led by Prof. Dr. Merle Hummrich at Goethe University’s Faculty of Educational Sciences.
Recommended Reading: REMIX ALMANYA – Eine postmigrantische HipHop-Geschichte von Murat Güngör und Hannes Loh [REMIX ALMANYA – A Post-Migrant Hip-Hop Story by Murat Güngör and Hannes Loh], published by Hannibal Verlag in 2024. On January 13, 2026, a Hip-Hop show inspired by the book will take place at Mousonturm in Frankfurt.
