Transracial adoptive families in Munich

Hello,
My family is moving to Munich in a few months. Two summer's ago we were fortunate enough to spend 6 weeks in Munich. To my delight, my family-made up of our African American daughter and my Caucasian husband and myself, seemed to blend in to city life quite nicely. People were interested in our family, as they are here in the US, but in a very polite way! Actually, Munich felt like more of a melting pot than the US ever has to me. So, I'm delighted that we are getting the chance to move to Munich for the next few years. Are there any other adoptive families out on these message boards? Any transracial adoptive families? If so, what have your experiences in Munich been like?
Thanks,
HCnRhismummy

Hi HCnRhismummy,
nobody seems to have an idea what to reply, so let me be the first to do so :-)

I don't fall into any of your above-mentioned categories, but what the heck. Due to my work I know quite a few transracial families here in Munich. Well, in most cases it's single mums with their African-German kid, because mostly the relationship didnt work out and so they got divorced. But thats beside the point.

Here in Munich people are still not too familiar with people from other cultural backgrounds. Even the Turks, who are the largest minority group here, are often misunderstood and faced with rejection. (right now there's a big debate going on whether to allow Muslims to build a new mosque or not!)

What you experienced in Munich is certainly very possible, depending on who you meet of course, because the "left-wing portion" of our society is generally very interested in people and their backgrounds, other languages, food from all over the place etc.
People are usually keen on speaking English if the opportunity arises (to an extent that I've heard English speakers complain that they can't learn German because everybody wants to speak English :-) ). So you'll probably wont find it too difficult to make friends once you're here.

On the flipside though many people haven't quite understood that it's not necessary to be Caucasian to qualify as German. Many of those Afro-Germans (that's what they're called here) experience some racism, even if it's only that people talk to them in broken German. How stupid is that?

Well, I think in your case it'll be perfectly OK to assume that you don't speak German :-) but to generally assume this based on skin colour is plain stupid. But there you go. Germans don't have a long history with black people in their society, unlike the US, UK, France etc, who all had "their" African colonies.

Dunno if this makes sense, but that's it in a nutshell. Be prepared to find some stupid people, but that's like everywhere I suppose. Chances are however that you find way more nice people than stupid ones :-)