The girl is pale-skinned and green-eyed with blond hair cut to frame her face. Now 12, she arrived in Germany from Kosovo almost two years ago; her German is now near perfect. At home in her adoptive land, she seems a model immigrant, bright and integrated.
But Lumturije Bytyqi is to be expelled from Germany on Monday. She must leave with her two brothers, 15 and 9, and her parents. They have been told to gather outside their Munich asylum-seekers' home for transport to the airport, where a special flight to Pristina, Kosovo's capital, awaits the family and others like them.
"I like my life here," the girl says, sitting in a room where half-packed suitcases are piled in a corner. "German was not difficult to learn. But now I am being sent back and I don't understand why." Her father, Zymber, a crumpled unshaven figure, says the family's only plan once in Kosovo is "somehow to survive the winter."
For German authorities, this is a clear-cut case. The Bytyqi family, like about 160,000 other Kosovo Albanians, was admitted to Germany as a refugee family because of persecution and a war; the war is now over, so the Kosovars must return home. "Legal alternatives are exhausted," said Stefanie Weber, a Bavarian Interior Ministry official. "They must go."
Deportation has become a non-word in German since Hitler and no official here would ever use the term, "deportieren." But departures, forced or not, have been proceeding briskly in the southern state of Bavaria, where about 22,000 Kosovo Albanians remained at the start of the year.
Of these, 16,000 have now left, said Hermann Weishaupt, an official dealing with foreigners. About 12,000 flew out "voluntarily," another 3,000 chose freely to go overland, and 1,000 were "sent back."
That drastic measure, and the linguistic contortions dictated by history that surround it, illustrate the highly charged nature of an intensifying debate about immigration in Germany, the European country with the largest population, and, at seven million, the largest number of foreigners.
As elsewhere in Europe, that debate centers on whether foreigners like the Bytyqis should be allowed to stay, and -- if so -- how far they should adapt to the local culture. The discussion goes deeper: should Germany, where nationhood has long been associated with blood lines and where it was more traditional to emigrate than to integrate strangers, view itself as a "land of immigration" at all?
These questions reflect what is now the fundamental divide in many European countries, accentuated in Germany both by its past and the size of the foreign minority.
On one side stands a resurgent band of patriots angered by what they see as the dilution of German national identity through an influx of foreigners; on the other, the German "Europeans" forged by postwar culture who say the German nation state died with Hitler and the only future for the country is as a multi-cultural unit of the European Union.
This month, Bavaria's dominant Christian Social Union, a sister party to the opposition Christian Democrats, made its position clear. "Germany is not a classical country of immigration and must not be in the future," it stated.
The party added that any foreigner in Germany must adapt to a "Leitkultur," or "guiding culture" it defined as having a "European western foundation of values rooted in Christianity, the Enlightenment and Humanism."
Given that the more than two million Turks in Germany are Muslims, as are most Kosovars (albeit few of them very religious), the reference to a western and Christian guiding culture was provocative.
But similar language has been used recently by several Christian Democratic politicians. Laurenz Meyer, the new party secretary general, declared this month that, "I am proud to be a German" -- the exact language used on many badges of far-right parties.
The reactions have been vigorous and included an extraordinarily angry outburst this month by the leader of the largest association of German Jews.
'What is all this talk about guiding culture?" Paul Spiegel demanded. "Is it German guiding culture to hunt down strangers, set fire to synagogues, and kill homeless people? What is the point of turning the immigration question into a campaign theme, of babbling about so-called 'useful' and 'useless' foreigners?" Mr. Spiegel was referring to the tiny fringe of rightist Germans who have this year committed the acts he described, and to discussion about how to prevent the entry of unqualified foreigners like the Bytyqis while promoting that of educated immigrants able to spur high-tech industries. But his fury reflected Germany's growing unease.
Danijela Karic, the daughter of immigrants who came to Germany from Yugoslavia in the 1960's under the country's former gastarbeiter (or guest worker) program, now works for the Interior Ministry in Bavaria, the most conservative and Roman Catholic of Germany's states. She has no doubts about her current mission to send Kosovo Albanians home.
"You cannot compare the reasons why people like my parents came and why those now here from Kosovo came," she said. "My father came as a guest worker, with the idea that he would work for a few years and then go back. But he had the will to stay and the readiness to learn the language and accept the ground rules of German society. The Kosovars are not working, the war is over, and German society is supporting them."
A colleague, Michael Ziegler, added that Germany itself was a very different place from the country of the 1960's, when the economy was booming. How, he asked, can you have "guest workers" today when there are more than three million Germans unemployed?
In Canada, Australia or the United States, he said, immigrants "were wanted and needed to civilize the country." But Germany, he suggested, was in danger of losing its civilization by becoming a place where people of different cultures lived beside each other with no binding thread.
All the Bytyqis know is their immediate fate: forced return to a Kosovo where their home has been destroyed by the Serbs and no job awaits. Zymber Bytyqi carries a bag full of official correspondence informing him of the repeated rejection of his requests for asylum.
A recent letter, dated Sept. 5, told him that if he was still in Germany after Oct. 5, he and his family must reckon with "Abschiebung" -- that is, "sending away." On appeal, this deadline was extended to Nov. 20.
Mr. Bytyqi has been in Germany, at first illegally, then with temporary papers, for seven years. He fled from Kosovo after the Albanians in his factory in Urosevac were replaced by Serbs and he found himself jobless. Since arriving in Munich, he has worked on building sites and, most recently, at an Italian restaurant, earning about $1,000 a month.
Some of this money was sent home, where his wife and three children remained until the end of 1998. Then, as conflict and killing between Serbs and Albanians intensified, he paid about $4,000 to Albanian people-smugglers to bring the family to Germany.
Under Germany's welfare system, the newly reunited Bytyqi family was housed and fed and, as Lumturije explains, given about $40 a month spending money for each adult and $20 for each child. Her education, and that of her brothers, was paid, as were medical and dental bills.
Mr. Weishaupt of the Bavarian Interior Ministry put the cost to the German taxpayer at about $450 a month per immigrant -- a sum that, together with high unemployment, helps explain German reluctance to embrace mass immigration, although it is a fact of postwar German life.
As in France, the large Muslim presence stirs particular unease. This month, a Dusseldorf court sentenced Muhammad Metin Kaplan, a radical Islamic leader from Turkey often referred to as the "caliph of Cologne," to four years' imprisonment for ordering the killing in Berlin of a rival, more moderate religious leader. Mr. Kaplan heads a Cologne-based group called "Islamic State" that has called for the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate in Anatolia.
Volker Brinkmann, the state prosecutor, said Mr. Kaplan and his followers "believe they live in a state within a state in the Federal Republic of Germany and attempts to adapt, to integrate, are foreign to these fundamentalists."
Mr. Bytyqi, a Muslim in name but not much more, says that he has tried to integrate, although he speaks no German, and would like to become a German citizen. Alexander Schmidt, who runs the asylum-seekers' home where the family has been housed, described him as an honest hard worker who had never given trouble.
"I would at least have liked to stay the winter," said Mr. Bytyqi. "I was even ready to send my family home, if I had been allowed to stay. But it seems there is no way for people like us to get permanent papers or citizenship."
In Germany, as in most of Europe, the uncertain quest for asylum is the only way for a foreigner with no special qualification to be allowed to remain. Because he will not face persecution in a largely Serb-free Kosovo, Mr. Bytyqi's asylum request was refused.
In official terms, he is going willingly -- no police escort will be required to get the family to the airport. So they will be listed among the voluntary departures rather than the deported. As such, they will qualify for a last payment of about $600 from German authorities to help them on their way.
Asked if it was not difficult for her, as the daughter of immigrants, to do this work, Ms. Karic of the Interior Ministry replied, "No, I am a functionary, and as such can only pose myself one question: do they have a right to stay, according to the law, or do they not?'
GRAPHIC: Photo: The German welcome mat for 12-year-old Lumturije Bytyqi has been pulled up. Today she and her family are expected to return to Kosovo. (Peter Schinzler/Agency Anne Hamann, for The New York Times)