Friedrich Merz, then leader of the Christian-Democratic CDU in the Bundestag wrote an article for Die Welt, rejecting multiculturalism, and advocated controls on immigration and compulsory assimilation in a German core culture.
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Theo Sommer, then publisher of Die Zeit, was one of the first to use the term 'German core culture', as part of a debate about the assimilation of immigrants in Germany, and national core values: "Integration necessarily implies a far-reaching assimilation onto the German guiding culture and its core values" („Der Kopf zählt, nicht das Tuch“, Zeit 30/1998).