Germany was, when looking at the numbers, an immigration country until World War I. After that it had very restrictive asylum laws (Kleist, 2017). After the Second World War, millions of people from the former eastern parts of Germany (East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia) came to the western parts, in particular Northern Germany, and the Allies decided where those so-called displaced people were resettled. Until the 1990s, the biggest group of refugees came from Eastern Germany or other socialist countries, and it was part of Cold War policies to take them in. From the 1990s onwards, refugees from various crisis areas came to Germany to apply for asylum (Oltmer, 2017). There was always a significant number of under agers, but until today there is no uniform legal regulation on the right to education and compulsory education (BAMF, 2019). Voices of adolescent refugees from a recent interview-study in Germany will be contrasted with those of adolescent refugees of two historical time slots, when refugees were also seen as a major issue, namely from the late 1940s and from the 1990s. The voices will be contrasted with a focus on education and educational needs. The paper is based on a discourse analysis of qualitative interviews informed by Foucault’s (1982) ideas around the “threatening-producing” and “controlling-limiting” functions of discourses as part of dispositives, resulting from the relationships between knowledge, power and subjectivity and the work of Arendt (1943) and Butler (2006) on the specific situation of refugees and their vulnerability. The qualitative interviews are taken from a study on newly arrived adolescent immigrants aged between 14 and 18, who attend compulsory education in Germany.

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