Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany 9780822389026

Citation preview

COSMOPOLITAN ANXIETIES

COSMOPOLITAN ANXIETIES Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany

RUTH MANDEL

l Duke University Press

Durham and London 2008

∫ 2008 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Katy Clove Typeset in Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data and republication acknowledgments appear on the last printed pages of this book.

Dedication This book is dedicated to the cherished memory of three incomparable teachers, mentors, friends: Kostas Kazazis, David Schneider, and James Spradley, each of whom has had lasting influences on me and my work.

It is also dedicated to my parents, who have shown unending concern and love. I only wish that my late mother, Lois Silvertrust Mandel, were able to take pleasure in its publication. Richard and Joan Mandel have been unlimited and gracious in their enthusiasm, interest, and support, for which I will always be grateful.

Contents List of Illustrations

ix

Preface and Acknowledgments Note on Language

xi

xxiii

Introduction: Germany, Turkey, and the Space In-Between Berlin: A Prelude

1

23

1.

Shifting Cosmopolitics

2.

‘‘We Called for Labor, but People Came Instead’’

3.

Making Ausländer

4.

Haunted Jewish Spaces and Turkish

27

80

Phantasms of the Present

109

5.

Berlin’s Kreuzberg: Topographies of Infraction

6.

Beyond the Bridge: Two Banks of the River

155

7.

Minor Literatures and Professional Ethnics

184

8.

Practicing German Citizenship

9.

Deracination to Diaspora: Leave and Leaving

10.

Reimagining Islams in Berlin

11.

Veiling Modernities

Notes

327

329

Works Cited Index

403

359

141

206

248

294

Conclusion: Reluctant Cosmopolitans Glossary

51

311

232

List of Illustrations 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Author at Wall, 1980s 25 Wall hackers, 1990 44 Wall for sale, 1990 45 As if I were chattel 52 Integration? 76 King of Kebab 106 Döneria 107 Nazi street-naming law 114 Auerbacher Strasse 116 Nazi law regulating shopping hours of Jews 121 Nazi law mandating racial studies 122 Nazi law regulating gardening 123 Nazi law regarding the conversion of Jews 132 Commerce in Kreuzberg 144 Commerce in Kreuzberg 145 Commerce in Kreuzberg 145 Moving prohibited 147 Illiterate in Two Languages 165 Summer visit home with Mercedes 235 Soul voyages, nonstop bus to Turkey 236 Waiting for customs clearance, Kapıkule 240 ‘‘Killed Passport’’: Back to the Homeland 246 Children in Qur’an school, Berlin 268 Kızıl Yol (Alevi) publication 273 Berlin Alevi cem 281

Preface and Acknowledgments It took myriad individuals, villages, and institutions to raise this book. The ‘‘villages’’—from urban neighborhoods and homes, to Anatolian hamlets, to Eastern European transit routes—portrayed in these pages contain the amorphous stu√ of anthropological fieldwork. The fieldwork was shaped by circuitous and lengthy pathways, replete with countless detours in the peregrinations. My routes through these often unconventional fields described a patchworked sensorium: the years in Turkey and Germany were punctuated by ongoing conversations with migrants, sharing flats with some of them, enduring cloudy smoke and painful fatigue, making exhilarating discoveries, and developing cherished intimacies. It entailed endless hours of simply hanging out, watching and waiting for nothing or something to happen; loitering at demonstrations, markets, mosques, street corners, playgrounds, cafes, and grocers; being squeezed into many an ancient Istanbul dolmu¸s seemingly held together with rubber bands and prayer, propelled by liquid petroleum ‘‘aygaz’’ bombs in the boot. Fieldwork meant the myriad trips through the Bosphorus, suspended between continents, providing the consummate antidote to the stimulations and trials of quotidian Istanbul; the distinctive smell and sight of coal dust on Berlin’s snowy winter streets that never quite reached full daylight; finding refuge in Kachelofen-infused cold-water flats, whose primary olfactory memory is smoky coal fused with simmering mutton. Collections of saved articles, pamphlets, reports, statistics, brochures, flyers, and concert programs had to be distilled into a mere handful of references mentioned in this book. Countless scraps of semi-legible scrawls complement the stacks of filled notebooks, carbon-copied typed notes, floppy disks, and random thoughts and snippets that only years later developed into fully digested patterns and meanings. All this relied on meeting scores of people, and in an array of contexts. Many generously invited me into their homes, tolerated my questions and observations, as they shared food, drink, rituals, hopes, disappointments, and confidences. Without these people, necessarily nameless here, I could

not have written this book. I only hope I have portrayed the excerpts of their lives in a manner consistent with their visions. Above all, to Derman, the late Hıdır, Adil, Nurcan and other Arslans, I owe endless saygı ve sevgi, gratitude, respect, and love. MEANDERING TRAJECTORIES

As I am continually asked how I came to this particular configuration of topics, exploring transnational and historical links between Greeks, Turks, Kurds, Germans, and Jews, it may be useful to chart the chronological and intellectual contours of its trajectory. After several years immersed in Modern Greek studies, I initially assumed I would carry out conventional ethnographic field work in Greece. An undergraduate semester in Athens had spurred my interest in the Black Sea Pontic minority, and I considered working in a Pontic area. However, while studying Greek grammar and literature at the University of Chicago, under the exacting tutelage of the Balkan linguist Kostas Kazazis, I began to see Greece in its wider Balkan context, as he regaled me with more information than I thought possible about this region, from its syntaxes and folklore to its political history and humor. A minor detour, taken thanks to Leften Stavrianos, led me into Albanian. A generous host, inspiring mentor, preeminent Balkanist and swimmer in frigid waters, Lefty encouraged me to expand my research purview to include Albanian; we sketched out a Ph.D. project on the Greek-Albanian borderlands. This plan was short-lived, as the closest I was able to get in the 1980s was Kosova, where I spent a fascinating summer studying Albanian in Peje, thanks to a Yugoslav Government Grant for Albanian Studies. The more deeply I delved into Greek anthropology, the more evident it was that a great deal of what constituted Greekness was its highly charged structural opposition to Turkishness. Lest I adopt too much of this emotionally laden perspective, and unwilling to have Turkishness mediated solely through neo-Hellenic eyes, I decided to take on Turkish as a second field and language area. At this juncture in my studies, Danny Danforth and Michael Herzfeld, the two young turks of Modern Greek studies at the time, enthusiastically supported my decision, unlike some colleagues who saw it as a defection to the enemy camp. I am grateful to Danny and Michael for their encouragement, quite important to a young, insecure graduate student. My subsequent doctoral project, designed to transpose parts of the l xii

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

failed Albanian-Greek venture, would address issues of identity, ethnicity, and history by comparing Turkey’s Greek minority with the Turkish minority in northern Greece. To that end, after a year studying Turkish in Chicago, I had the good fortune to receive a Fulbright grant for preliminary research in Istanbul. There, I carried out a pilot study of the Greek community and dipped into northern Greek waters as well. It quickly became clear that research permission to study this sensitive minority near two troublesome international borders would not be forthcoming. Moreover, on the other side of the border, Istanbul’s once enormous Greek population was so diminished—only a couple thousand remained—that it would have been an ethnographic account of a vanished community. Fortuitously, that year I attended a conference in West Berlin, a trip that had a profound impact, inspiring me to redirect my research. Staying in Kreuzberg, I was overcome by the intensity of Greekness and Turkishness deracinated and recontextualized, once removed. Since then, I have not looked back (only sideways, to Central Asia; but that’s another story), and this book represents my encounters over two and a half decades with migrants, returnees, and natives of many types. To complete the chronology: after the year in Istanbul, I returned to Chicago to reconfigure my doctoral project. It became a project meant to explore changes in Turkish and Greek representations of self and other in Germany, and the subsequent consequences of repatriation. The following three years were divided between Turkey and Germany (with numerous forays into Greece), generously supported by Fulbright-Hayes and daad (German Academic Exchange Service). While in Berlin I was fortunate to meet Mirjiana Morokvaˇsi´c-Müller, who incorporated me into her research on migrants in the European garment trade. As part of her larger, comparative project, I carried out research in Paris and Berlin, among Turkish garment workers in Parisian sweatshops and Änderungsschneiderei (alterations tailors) in Berlin. It was an unconventional introduction to Parisian life, to say the least. I remain ever grateful for this opportunity, both for enabling me to learn the spaces defining clandestine Paris and for opening my eyes to the often ignored mechanisms and meanings of horizontal links of transnational migration. Several postdoctoral grants allowed me to continue the research, critical for a time-sensitive project of this nature, as I watched history overtake ethnography at what felt like cyclonic force. I was privileged to have witnessed the final Walled period of Berlin followed by the profound changes PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xiii l

brought about by German unification in the radically altered geopolitical space. Part of the aim of this book is to show the connections between these global events and the e√ects on individuals within changed and changing neighborhoods and nations. INSTITUTIONAL AND INFRASTRUCTURAL SUPPORTS

The research and writing shaping this project have been sustained, fostered, and facilitated by numerous foundations, libraries, institutions, and grant-giving bodies. In addition to those already mentioned, I am grateful for the confidence invested in my work by grant reviewers and grantmaking institutions. The International Research Exchange Board provided funding for research in Berlin on the e√ects of German unification on Turkish community; I was the fortunate recipient of a Social Science Research Council postdoctoral grant for research in Berlin, a joint venture with Berlin’s Free University. The Center for Middle East Studies, University of Chicago, provided much-appreciated funding for writing, as did the Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Institute of Turkish Studies. The German Academic Exchange Service (daad) supported research in Berlin as well as language study at a Goethe Institute. A Fulbright grant facilitated advanced Greek studies at the Institute of Balkan Studies, Thessaloniki. I would also like to express my appreciation, even veneration, for the incomparable resources of the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the Joseph P. Regenstein Library. In the Reg I learned what research means, complemented by specialist librarians happy to order any books I needed, regardless of how rarified. It provided the complete range of facilities, from timed lights in freezing stacks to overly comfortable armchairs for catnaps to the austerely productive private study (thank you, Arthur). The year I worked in a study at the loc, alongside a wonderfully congenial o≈cemate, Louise Levathes, and was granted open-stack privileges was a scholar’s dream. The new British Library has been a valued resource in my London neighborhood. Heartfelt thanks also to the American Academy in Berlin, and the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Washington) for creating idyllic, collegial environments, perfectly suited for research and writing. My thanks to Gary Smith, Blair Ruble, Maggie Paxson, and Lee Hamilton for fostering and nurturing communities of

l xiv

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

scholars, artists, and policy activists. These institutions are treasures; it was a privilege to be a part of them. PEOPLE AND PLACES

Though writing is a solitary endeavor, the book was vastly improved by the help of many others. Communities of friends, relatives, mentors, colleagues, and places all contributed in their own ways. In Ingrid Müller (Berlin) and Caitlin Ryan (Washington) I found eager, proactive research assistants, as delightful as they were resourceful. In addition, both of them read and commented on drafts of the manuscript, and I thank them for sharing my enthusiasm and sometimes arcane interests. At the American Academy in Berlin I met Sander Gilman, whose enormous body of work, larger-than-life personality, and consistent generosity have been truly inspiring. I feel lucky to count him as a friend. Parts of chapter 4 in particular owe a great deal to discussions with him. I always appreciate his accessibility; wherever he is in the world, his e-response time is in the single digits. Thanks also to Carol and Joel Levy, who pointed me in useful directions in Jewish Berlin, and who read part of the manuscript. At an earlier stage, I was fortunate to have found friends who eased my way many times through their generosity, kindness, and support. In particular, I thank Paula Franke von Bechtolsheim, Madeline Zilfi, Evelyn Early, and Donna Lee Bowen. My first friend in Turkey, Gülen Akta¸s, later took me in when I was living in di≈cult straits in Istanbul. She insisted that I move in and share her flat, but she was far more than a roommate. Not only her living space but Gülen’s boundless generosity included sharing her family, her friends, and her time. So much of what I came to know and love about Istanbul evolved through her eyes and experience. That first year in Istanbul in large part came to be defined by Gülen, as well as Tony and Joanne Greenwood, of whose warm hospitality I so often availed myself in the tense and troubled days of martial law and curfews. These are debts I cannot hope to repay. Thanks also to Anne and Cem Kozlu for lending me their home in the early days of fieldwork. Countless people in Istanbul lent me their time and expertise. My research included ongoing conversations and relationships, as well as one-o√ interviews. I spoke with academics, journalists, government o≈cials, taxi drivers, as well as numerous returnee families who, having accepted the

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xv l

‘‘go-home premiums’’ o√ered by the German government, had ‘‘killed’’ their passports and felt trapped. Many returned migrants entrusted their life stories to me, insisting that I write them, so others might know of their struggles. Dilek Cindo˘glu was a perfect comrade in the days of trekking to the outermost reaches of Istanbul’s not-quite-urban periphery, as we sought out newly returned migrants from Germany. Profound thanks and respect to the person, work, and music of Irene Marko√, who introduced me to the world of Alevilik. She sharpened my sensibilities with the addictive poetry and music of the saz, as together we often enjoyed private concerts in the enchanting incarnation of the late Ali Ekber Çiçek. Other anthropologists of Turkey, particularly Altan Gökalp, Alan Duben, and Michael Meeker, pro√ered much appreciated advice, and I thank them, as well as Nur Yalman, for some memorable and insightful conversations. Martin van Bruinessen taught me much about the politics of research, Islam, Alevis, and Kurds. In Greece Mimi Toufexi’s hospitality was remarkable, and much formative time was spent in her home, eating her father’s lovingly prepared food, delivered daily, and serving as an informal apprentice to the stressful but heady life of an Athenian journalist. Mimi’s endless contacts opened many doors for me while I was doing research there. She also had perfected the art of finding deserted beaches for much-needed breaks. Alexander Kitroe√ translated with inimitable humor hitherto elusive elements of Greek society. Then to Berlin, initially funded by a daad research grant. The search for scarce accommodation that first month was eased by sleeping on the sofa in Carol Pfa√ ’s apartment, perched high in the lush green forests of Grunewald. Carol’s research on language use among Turkish children had brought her into contact with a diverse group of people, many of whom became my friends as well. Her generosity set the stage for an energizing introduction to Berlin. Later, she kindly hired me as a research assistant at the Free University. Colleagues and friends in Berlin enriched my experience enormously. Lessons I have learned from those named here, and many more unmentioned, find their way into the following pages. I gained much from attending various seminars, such as those organized by Czarina Wilpert at the Technical University Berlin (tub) and Friedemann Büttner at the Free University Berlin. Kerim Edinsel’s finely honed critical sensibility opened my eyes to much of what came to be second nature in my understanding of l xvi

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Turkish Berlin. I learned much from him, working late hours together translating his poetry and prose, engaged in heated discussions, in our Schöneberg Wohngemeinschaft. I am grateful to him for permitting my translation of his short story to be reproduced here. Similarly, I value my time spent with Sema Poyraz, who taught me a great deal about important segments of Turkish German life. Twenty years of talks and walks with Hans Thomä-Venske were pleasurable and enlightening. Ay¸se and Arif Ça˘glar were always gracious and stimulating hosts, colleagues, and interlocutors. As we interviewed Turkish mothers and daughters together as part of Czarina’s tub project, Zekiye Sarpyel and Çi˘gdem Eren revealed new aspects of Turkish Berlin to me; later, they shared their families in Turkey. Anita Rehm introduced me to the role and influence of media in shaping German Turkish dynamics. I have so valued the decades-long friendship of Eser Kutay Sauerborn, an early friend from Berlin, as we’ve reconnected across various countries, cities, and familial configurations. Her formidable intelligence and acute perception have continually influenced and challenged me; she surely will find herself in these pages. There cannot be many people like Czarina Huerta Wilpert. Introduced long ago through mutual friends from Istanbul, we became fast friends and colleagues. Her family took me in when I was away from mine; she and the late Bernhard, sorely missed, welcomed me in their home when I was otherwise homeless. Czarina included me on numerous research grants, providing the opportunity to collaborate with her and extend my stay in Berlin. She is a joyous companion and thoughtful interlocutor, and the depth and breadth of her intellectual and political engagement and commitment are awe inspiring. The public recognition she received as Berlin’s Woman of the Year of 2006 was as long overdue as it was well deserved. She has served as a teacher, role model, advisor, confidant, and much more besides. My life and work are far richer thanks to her friendship and selfless generosity. And Chicago: many veterans of the University of Chicago will agree that it is sui generis to a fault. One of the benefits of being situated at a great university is the possibility of drawing on its vast array of human resources, especially in Hyde Park, where knowledge, teaching, and learning thrive unhampered by arbitrary disciplinary borders. Thus, I am grateful to Ari Zolberg in Political Science (at the time, the only member of the faculty with experience in European migration); as well as Fred Donner, Bob PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xvii l

Danko√, Halil Inalcik, and Fazlur Rahman, from Near East Languages and Civilizations. The classical historiographer Arnaldo Momigliano had an early and deep influence on a path not taken. The linguist and Balkan scholar Kostas Kazazis became a close friend as well as a formidable teacher whose intimidatingly high standards in language complemented his catholic grasp of humor. His love of language proved infectious; the world is a smaller, grayer place since his unexpected death. Within the Department of Anthropology, going deeply against the grain (along with fellow students Martha Lampland and Jud Newborn), I chose to work outside the dominant ‘‘primitivist’’ paradigm then in vogue. Though the department has made a radical about-turn in the intervening years, this was not readily accepted or acceptable at the time. Still, despite my unconventional research sites, teachers such as Paul Friedrich, David Schneider, John Comaro√, and James Fernandez helped pave my intellectual way through an often changing and complex project. Caroline Brettell, then at the Newberry Library, also provided guidance and generously shared her expertise in European migration. I learned immensely from fellow students such as Fernando Coronil, Cindy Guy, Carol Hendrickson, Martha Lampland, Jud Newborn, Dan Segal, Julie Skurski, Bonnie Urciouli, and the sorely missed Sharon Stephens. I would like to thank as well Dale Eickelman. At early stages in this project he showed genuine interest and provided a wonderful intellectual entrée into comparative Islamic studies seminars at the ssrc. In the writing of the book, numerous people kindly took time to read parts of the manuscript and o√er suggestions. I am grateful to Sallie Marston, who provided much-appreciated comments. Thanks to Danny Miller and Scott Newton, who read and commented on early drafts. Susan Pattie read parts and o√ered welcome feedback. Despite any still uncorrected errors and omissions, this surely would have been a far inferior work had I not been so fortunate to have captured the critical eye, mind, and philosophical sensibility of Luca D’Isanto. One could not wish for a more engaged interlocutor and critic, sharing his techniques of editing and refining not only wordcraft but thoughtcraft. The days and nights of discussion and debate, in Cambridge and London, helped me to imagine and visualize the hitherto illusive forest for the often distracting trees. The evenings were all the more enjoyable thanks to the splendid dinners cooked and shared with Mariane. Mariane Ferme’s thoughtful, considered input added a dynamic intellectual triangulation to l xviii

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

our discussions, enriching both the time spent together and the final manuscript. I am grateful to them for their hospitality, patience, and friendship. At a critical juncture in the writing, Patricia Spyer came through heroically. The introductory chapter’s final iteration owes much to her thoughtful and engaged input. Patsy’s and Rafael Sanchez’s intellectual and moral support has been steadfast and I am fortunate to count them as friends and colleagues. Many friends have contributed to this project; I can only name a few. I gained much over years of lively discussions with Robin Ostow, Michal Bodemann, John Bornemann, and Uli Linke, all fellow researchers in Berlin. Thanks to Robin and to Michal for showing me Jewish Berlins, east and west, and for including me in conferences and publications. Talks through the years with Riva Kastoryano always have been enlightening and enjoyable; I have been grateful for the supportive energy and friendship of Susan Woodward, whose sage advice that ‘‘a book is never finished, always abandoned’’ has proved painfully true. In London, Susan Pattie, comrade and colleague, more than anyone has o√ered steady support, selfless friendship, and a much-valued insightful and critical eye. I continue to benefit enormously from her wise, judicious advice, as she, Levon, and Stepan and my family have merged as expatriated kin. Discussions over the years with friend and colleague Deniz Kandiyoti have been as enjoyable as they have been helpful on every possible level. Bhavna Dave’s friendship over the years, from Kazakhstan to London, has provided a balance and reality check to the stresses of London academic life. Thanks also to Andy Finkel for sharing his extensive knowledge about contemporary Turkey. For a quarter-century, Claire Kohrman (an unwitting shadchen) has provided much needed sustenance, in the form of sage advice and hot soup, lovingly shared with Art. Her sociological insight, calm sanity, moral and emotional support have nourished me for years. How fortunate that our kinship reckoning includes one another! Early versions of some of the chapters have found audiences at talks too numerous to list. I have been grateful for the opportunity to interact with colleagues at conferences and invited lectures in Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Kazakhstan, Norway, Greece, Ireland, and the United States. The feedback from these talks has been generous and useful, finding its way into subsequent revisions. Earlier versions of some sections and passages have appeared elsewhere, PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xix l

in journals and books (listed in the republication acknowledgments at the end of the book). The current iterations benefited greatly from a series of anonymous readers of the manuscript, and I would like to acknowledge the powerful influence of several of them. Two in particular compelled me to rethink assumptions and approaches. The many back-and-forth revisions, additional rewrites following replacement readers’ suggestions, and the attempts to accommodate competing visions have meant that this book is seeing the light of day considerably later than initially envisioned. Despite any flaws and oversights that undoubtedly still mar these pages, it is unquestionably much improved thanks to their careful reading. Above all, the confidence in the value of this book shown by Ken Wissoker of Duke University Press has meant more than I can express and I thank him for his support. I am extremely grateful to the artists and authors who generously have permitted me to use their work. They include: Kerim Edinsel, for his story in chapter 7; Hanefi Yeter for the numerous reproductions of his paintings visually enhancing the book; Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, for the images from their Places of Remembrance ∫ Stih & Schnock, Berlin, ars, New York / vg BildKunst, Bonn, http://www.stih-schnock.de; Ste√en Blandzinski, Hesse Blandzinski Design, for Döner Berlin; and Jana Döhnel, www.basteltuete.de, for her King of Kebab. Thanks also are due my colleagues at University College London, who tolerated my intermittent absences, and to the successive department heads —Bruce Kapferer, Paul Richards, Mike Rowlands, Leslie Aiello, and Katherine Homewood—who approved research leaves. ucl has been my academic home, supplying welcome intellectual challenges as well as the infrastructure that supports collegiality and research. Our department is fortunate in that it has consistently attracted bright and challenging students, providing the opportunity to experiment with ideas in teaching. It has been a remarkable privilege to live and work in central London and to draw on its wider academic community. Friends and relatives have served as refuges over the years. I especially wish to mention Joan Neiberg, David Mandel, Susan Scott, Mollie Sandock, Jodi Enda, Rachel Lehr, Diane Stern Smith, Caroline Harney, Deborah Rich, Gregg and Christina Gaymont, Eden Clorfene Elie√, MarieTherese Connolly, Kate Shchechter, Sam Borowitz, and Sharon and Richard Friedman. Michael surely did not realize that when we married, he also wed a l xx

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

monkey on my back that became this book, long after its anticipated due date. Michael has lived with this project nearly as long as I have, in its many iterations, distractions, postponed holidays, its background white noises following us from Chicago to Washington, London, Kazakhstan, Berlin, and many backs and forths. The journey, not always easy (though usually ‘‘interesting’’), has been balanced by my vicarious education in health economics, often a welcome respite. I continue to be grateful for his companionship, patience, and support through it all. My love, and much more, to him and to our precious Zara, who has been obliged, often against her very strong will, to share me with the writings and rewritings of this work.

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xxi l

Note on Language The use of Turkish follows the orthography of modern Turkish. The pronunciation is as follows:

Turkish C Ç SD S g˘ Ö O Ü U I I˙

English j as in jaw ch as in chuck sh as in shoe s as in English silent-to-gutteral, depending on dialect similar to German ö like oh similar to German ü or French u like oo in fool similar to the i in if like ee in eek

Plurals generally are given in the English. Thus, hoca (pron. ‘‘ho-ja’’), cami (pron. ‘‘ja-mi’’), and cem (pron. ‘‘gem’’) are not rendered hocalar, camiler, or cemler according to the Turkish system of pluralization, but as hocas, camis, and cems. Turkish, an agglutinative language, uses a system of vowel harmony; this accounts for what may appear to be inconsistencies in orthography (e.g., as above, the plural su≈x can be -lar or -ler). An infix whose vowel does not change governs the spelling of following syllables of a word, which otherwise would be spelled di√erently (i.e., without the infix). Furthermore, loan words from Persian or Arabic typically violate the rules of vowel harmony. ‘‘Turk’’ and ‘‘Turkish’’ Throughout the book I use the two words liberally, primarily as shorthand for ‘‘people who have moved from Turkey to Germany,’’ or for ‘‘Türk-

yeli’’—a person from Turkey (i.e., regardless of ‘‘ethnicity’’). My usage is not meant to confer an ethnicized identity. I do this despite the arguments I make about migrants and immigrants from Turkey being typically objectified, stigmatized, classified, and marked by precisely these words, excluding them from shifting into a more neutral German citizenship. Often, instead of ‘‘Turk,’’ I opt for ‘‘Turkish German’’ (with its implied hyphen). Since the colloquial and academic forms of the language have not yet produced a widely accepted alternative, I have felt constrained and compelled to write in this way. (On the other hand, the writer Zaimo˘glu speaks of ‘‘foreign Germans.’’) ‘‘Migrant’’ and ‘‘Immigrant’’ Likewise, I use the terms ‘‘immigrant’’ as well as ‘‘migrant,’’ sometimes interchangeably. Other places the usage reflects their slightly di√erent semantic inflection. These usages, needless to say, do not mirror the insistent rejection of the term ‘‘immigrant’’ in German discourse, most often heard in the phrase ‘‘Germany is not an immigration country.’’

l xxiv

NOTE ON LANGUAGE

Introduction Germany, Turkey, and the Space In-Between At first, I could not look at Cologne Cathedral. Whenever the train arrived in Cologne, I always shut my eyes. Once however I opened an eye, and then I saw it: the cathedral was watching me. At that moment a razor blade entered my body, ran through me and there was no more pain. I opened my other eye. Perhaps I lost my mother tongue there, then, that time.∞

l The coming of age of the Turkish diaspora in Germany has not been painless, as the Turkish German writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar bears witness in the epigraph above.≤ It has involved the loss of the mother tongue, especially for the generations born in Germany, and the radical questioning of attachment to the homeland. Coming of age has been a lengthy process of self-redefinition culminating in an emergent subjectivity, namely, Deutsch-Türken, Almanyalı, or Turkish German. Coming of age has not meant, as many would have preferred, the peaceful ‘‘bridging’’ of two distinct cultures. Rather, it implies a coming to terms with both the consequences of deracination and the refashioning of assumptions about ‘‘our culture.’’ This has entailed Germany’s recognition of the multiple links to Turkey, or, more generally, between Europe and its fantasies of Orient. Rather than look at a Turkish diaspora in Germany as a bounded social community, I follow the multiple references of belonging across several decades and places. In lieu of reviving the tired bridge metaphor, either linking or separating two distinct cultures or peoples—ever notional at best—I find it more productive to explore the novel and not-so-novel spaces defined by contestation and other performances, of interaction and mutual influencing. The bridge metaphor inadequately separates somewhat arbitrary entities; focusing on the shifting spaces in-between captures a more nuanced picture of the complex dynamics at work. On a sociopolitical level, too, we can point to a radical questioning of the

very presupposition of a dialogue between distinct, bounded entities— between Germans and Turks. To reject this rigidity is to accept not only the loss of language but the invention of new languages, idioms, and practices with the aim of confounding the cultural hegemony that assumes dialogue between distinct cultures. Turkish German theorists such as Özdamar and D Zafer Senocak have questioned the ubiquitous leitmotif of the ‘‘bridge’’—at many levels of German political and social discourse—linking two di√erent but, according to a certain interpretation of German political discourse, ultimately irreconcilable visions of sociality. The writer-rapper Feridun Zaimo˘glu exploded the premises of an intercultural mediation between these ostensibly di√erent cultural worlds by styling a new, ironized inflection of an ethnicized language, Kanak Sprak, interrupting ‘‘the statesanctioned dialogue between ‘Germans’ and ‘Turks’ ’’ (Cheesman 2002: 2). In his performances and writing, Zaimo˘glu has appropriated the pejorative term Kanak and transformed it into an indirect moniker of subaltern power. Other practices of subversion of the dominant motifs have generated di√erent forms of cultural renewal, as we will see below, though these cannot be reduced to claims of ethnicity and authenticity. Indeed, one aim here is to challenge the often cursory invocation of ethnic categories sometimes assumed in social science literature. I attempt this by demonstrating to what extent ‘‘ethnic’’ identifications follow class, racialized, or other agendas (thus I prefer to speak of processes of ethnicization rather than ethnicity). Furthermore, I explore the extent to which categories are reappropriated by contemporary social actors in their e√orts to redefine themselves from other perspectives. Whereas the dominant German narrative of ethnicizing Turkishness would often homogenize Turks into a monolithic unit, when examined from the perspective of these ethnicized subjects, a fundamentally di√erent picture appears, one of contestation, complexity, and diversity. Deconstructing the bounded notions of Turkishness, already inaugurated D by Senocak, Özdamar, and others, has led to explorations of di√erent kinds of migratory experience from Turkey. These may encompass the conventional identitary oppositions: rural, urban; elites, workingclass; Sunnis, Alevis; Turks, Kurds; Islamist, secular; or naturalized Germans, Turkish nationals. All point as much to the divisions within the category ‘‘Turkish’’ as to the otherness that this represents to the host German society. In other l 2

INTRODUCTION

words, ‘‘Turk’’ is shown to have become a signifier of instability and anxiety, in national, subnational, and transnational narrations. These narrations are also invested with competing ideologies, whether nationalist, religionist, or secularist.≥ Thus the ideological referents of the nationalist perspective can evoke symbols of patriotism or fascism, imperialism or its opposite; the subnational implications equally connote political or religious minority organizations in Germany and civil war in Kurdistan; the ideologies of transnationalism imply social mobility as well as social and political marginalization outside the homeland. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, the intimate cohabitation of host and guest communities—predominantly in large mining and industrial regions such as the Ruhr and cities such as Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, Hamburg, and Berlin—has resulted in mutual transformations, making it imperative for an analysis of immigrant, transnational experiences in Germany to encompass elements of German society as well. Hence the need to look at the ways in which German representations of Turkish di√erence are deployed and appropriated—or rejected—by the actors themselves. The German context serves as a critical mirror through which Turkish subjects can recognize the characteristics of a variety of interpretations of their selfhood and confront them in di√erent ways. On the one hand, common projections of Turks, often reducing them to tropes of abjection, do not do justice to the myriad alternatives lived out in practice. On the other hand, the processes of self-creation and cultural renewal that are taking place among di√erent segments of the diasporic population are not totally unrelated to the mechanism of projections of Turkishness available in the German public sphere. Zaimo˘glu’s Kanak Sprak (1995), for example, appropriates the unambiguously derogatory term Kanak and playfully tosses it back to its would-be users. Through a subversive lexical device, abusive speech is challenged as is, by extension, the basis of the discriminatory act and ideology. The early chapters of the book try to identify and describe the contours of the social spaces being redefined and reclaimed. Sometimes the claimants are the children of immigrants who could not speak for themselves, who may have felt a degree of safety along with the pain of invisibility. Some adopted the muteness of migration, unable to answer or assert, fearful of those who controlled the foreign terms of reference. Thus Zaimo˘glu opens up a new discursive space where the politics of language can be refashioned to confer transformed meanings and connotations. This INTRODUCTION

3 l

new space located in the social margins originally was represented by alternative publishers, provocative bloggers, and rap artists. Though initially marginal, the space is expanding to include new iterations of novel forms of visibility, be they sartorial or literary.∂ Processes of mimetism are found in the variety of assertions of visibility. Taussig insists on the ‘‘necessary collaboration between copy and contact, on ‘the magical power of replication’ whereby the image a√ects—or even contaminates—what it is an image of ’’;∑ this is particularly pertinent in shifting spaces of Turkish German entanglements. An argument running through the book insists on a continual process of reflexive mirroring, of the imagining of self and other. These imaginings and practices are entailed in rejections of, desires for, and insistences on alterity or convergence in unexpected ways and sources: for instance, Turkish women might opt for cosmetic surgery, aspiring to a ‘‘Germanic’’ look; and German men choose to eat ‘‘Turkish’’ garlic. Given mutually contaminating perceptions and practices on the one hand, juxtaposed with occasionally transgressive desires and acts on the other, alleged categorical fixity loses its bearings. Thus, though I have found it near impossible to dispense with otherwise constricting terms—German: Turkish—nevertheless one intention of this book is to contribute to the destabilizing of ‘‘German’’ and ‘‘Turkish’’ as unproblematic categories. REVAMPING GERMAN

The German-German unification following the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had profound e√ects on the myriad expressions of ‘‘Turkish German’’ identities. In describing this, I build on research carried out by Berdahl, Borneman, Linke, and other anthropologists of contemporary Germany, work examining the critical Wende period. (The term Wende, lit. ‘‘turning point,’’ synthesizes the monumental transformations brought on by unification.) Ideas of mimicry emerge from Borneman’s work on the fracturing of German identity in both divided and unified Germany. He uses the imagery of a distorted mirror to aid in the understanding of EastWest German relations and has also directed attention to issues of retribution in post-unification Germany. Taking themes of east-west personal-topolitical relations that Borneman addresses, but applied to the ethnography of borders—national, regional, cultural, social—Berdahl’s study of an eastern German village on the frontier of western Germany raises important l 4

INTRODUCTION

questions about German identity, history, and memory, showing how identities are renegotiated at the borders, both of time and space (Berdahl 1999a; see also 1999b). Linke’s influence (1999a, 1999b) is evident here as well, in the analysis of modes and expectations of Germanness, of ideologies of blood and belonging, and the historical continuities implied. Cognizant of these discussions, in this book I demonstrate how the new, conspicuous presence of Aussiedler—those ‘‘ethnic Germans’’ from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who arrived in the 1990s—adds yet another layer to the complex of historically charged projections of identity. At one end of the spectrum reside those resentful about the painfully high economic costs of unification, much of which was devoted to the support of ‘‘repatriating’’ this Russian German population. Still more distressing to many was the discovery that their ‘‘co-ethnics’’ arriving in Germany spoke Russian and were imbued with Soviet cultural dispositions; moreover, they also appeared uninterested in ‘‘becoming’’ Germans. In other words, they did not wish to appropriate the ready-made models and roles of Germanness. At the other end of the spectrum are the left-liberal intellectuals and activists who have been struggling with issues of national identity, questioning the universal validity of such models and roles. Not wishing to envision German identity as part of an exclusivist national agenda, something they see as having been discredited by the legacy of National Socialism, they nonetheless realize that a new national or postnational narrative is necessary for a democratic development of civil society. The playing out of these competing narratives of German identity arguably can best be observed in the symbolically, historically, and politically overloaded citystate of Berlin. It is to this highly charged, often overdetermined space of Berlin that we now turn. BERLIN ENSEMBLES

The city of Berlin serves as a protagonist of this ethnographic narrative. It represents an experiment in the making of a distinctive German national narrative through the (re)constitution of a late- or even postmodern cosmopolitan city. The ethnography is localized around urban spaces of Berlin; the old/new capital provides a laboratory of social relations within Germany. Berlin symbolizes both the fissures of the Cold War and the Allied postwar e√ort to reconstruct (West) Germany. The postwar boom economy had expanded faster than its labor force. With the erection of the INTRODUCTION

5 l

Berlin Wall, West Germany’s and West Berlin’s labor source vanished overnight, as East Germans no longer could cross over to the West as day laborers upon whom West Berlin’s economy had become dependent. This conjuncture—boom economy plus labor shortage—gave birth to the Gastarbeiter, guestworker program. Within less than a decade, over one million foreign workers were recruited to West Germany. A disproportionate share was lured to Berlin, for a massive urban renewal e√ort, and to fuel the industrial economic miracle, but also to repopulate the city, replacing frightened Berliners who had fled to West Germany following the construction of the Wall. Among foreigners in Europe, Berlin acquired a cachet, attracting yet more workers and their families. Today some seven million immigrants live in Germany, close to half of them from Turkey or ‘‘of Turkish heritage.’’ Berlin also has held a special appeal for self-ascribed domestic and international cosmopolitans, being a long-time bastion of left-wing intellectuals, bohemians, and the German culture industry. Intellectuals and artists from Turkey were no exception, drawn to the dynamic arts scene as well as to West Berlin’s well-regarded universities. And, thanks to the high numbers of guestworkers, West Berlin also became a highly visible Turkish center as well, making it attractive to those workers wishing to live in a Turkish-speaking environment. Yet herein lies the contradiction discussed throughout this book: it is precisely the high visibility of Turkishness in nearly all districts of Berlin—whether an alteration tailor, a döner kebab kiosk, or schoolgirls wearing headscarves—that challenges many Berliners’ image of themselves as cosmopolitan. If to be cosmopolitan implies multicultural fluency, the acceptance, even celebration of di√erence, many German Berliners, perfectly at home with the French countryside, Chinese cuisine, or Italian film, still fail the test spectacularly when it comes to speaking the language of tolerance toward those next door. The separate chapters of this book each deal with aspects and interpretations of this paradox: the di√erentiation of di√erence. IDENTITIES, MIMETISM AND THE VIOLENCE OF HISTORY

Transnational experiences of life in Germany prove as diverse as the regional, religious, and class origins. For example, urban middle-class Istanbulites who migrated for professional training have discovered their life trajectories altered as a result of the ethnicized constraints on foreigners in l 6

INTRODUCTION

Germany. Some have learned that the only way to succeed is by mirroring ready-made expectations for them: transforming themselves into the spokespeople for their working-class compatriots—a stance that never would have emerged had they remained in Turkey. For some migrants and their children, having arrived in Germany from a Turkey that disallowed many Islamic expressions, the German experience presented the possibility of refashioning themselves as explicitly nonsecular in a diasporic existence. This may have been partly a reaction to the fear of an unfamiliar Christian culture that might threaten their own and their children’s attachments to their homeland, culture, and religion, but also a reaction to newly discovered freedoms of religious expression o√ered by liberal German society. Equally significant is the focus on mechanisms of di√erentiation on the part of migrants from Turkey, as well as self-di√erentiation within German society itself. These issues reverberate in concerns about what it means to become German, to be the bearers of specific values, languages, rights, and social practices. Such questions result in a dominant German national narrative evoked across the German public sphere, encompassing realms political to moral, economic to aesthetic. This discourse is intimately entangled with a vision of alterity, specifically with the perception of Turkishness as a threat to a supposedly stable German essence. Though such a vision might be unacceptable to a significant portion of the German population, it nevertheless emerges in a variety of discursive fields (legal, moral, political, aesthetic). The leitmotif framing this book, the Ausländerproblematik—the foreigner question or problem, having divided the German public sphere over the past decades, does not concern simply the di√erent ways in which the ‘‘others’’ have been construed in Germany. Rather, it has to do as well with the ways in which Germans in a variety of realms have dealt with the ‘‘otherness’’ that characterizes some of their ‘‘own’’ people (for example, the so-called ethnic German Aussiedler settlers from the former Soviet Union) and ultimately themselves.∏ German society has entered into an internal debate about what constitutes German identity. Germans now must ask, in a very real sense, ‘‘who is a German’’ and, echoing Walter Abish, ‘‘how German is it?’’ It is a question that has perplexed Germany since its inception in the nineteenth century and bears troubling references to the anxieties and uncertainties surrounding German right-wing ideology at the turn of the century. More importantly, the question of what INTRODUCTION

7 l

constitutes German identity poses the problem of mimetism, as LacoueLabarthe and Nancy recently have demonstrated. Mimetism for these authors consists of the search for models or types on the basis of which to identify and reinforce a national identity. The various e√orts over the century to secure a coherent and consistent narrative about German identity demonstrate its elusive qualities. The darkest episode within German national discourse is linked to the Nazi identification with the specific myth of the Aryan as the pure origin of a glorious German past to be ritually reenacted through collective forms of participation in the body politic. While the contemporary debate on German identity does not mirror the repressed gesture of Nazi ideology, insofar as it is not grounded in a discourse of racialist exclusivity, it does on one level provide a dangerous evocation of its negative appeal. As with all mimetism, any attempt to identify Turkishness or Germanness with a specific genetic myth of national origin constitutes a violent misunderstanding of what identity is. Its danger lies in presupposing that identity must be given a priori, either as a model to be imitated or as a model to be created allowing a community to embody it as its collective re-presentation. Thus the creation of national fictions or myths supplements the lack of certainty and the anxiety concerning the identitary origin of given communities. These questions about German identity and memories of the past have been the focus of the work of many anthropologists and other cultural critics of Germany. Most importantly, Santner (1990) has demonstrated that Germany, despite its obsession over the past several decades with producing memorials, narratives, and political debates about the Nazi past, has not fully worked through the significance of the loss incurred as a consequence of its World War II defeat. Building on the thesis developed by the Mitscherlichs, in their Inability to Mourn (1975), Santner shows why the necessary processes of mourning have not fully occurred. For example, in part, this is because the actors in this process of mourning have been centrally concerned with describing an ideal German Heimat—homeland. Like the film that bears this name, Heimat is both innocent and evocative of a relation to the land and the emotional investment in it, where the tragedy of the Nazi Holocaust played itself out as an epiphenomenon. Furthermore, the constant e√orts in these gestures of appropriation of a pre-Nazi, prewar German identity are often accompanied by the search for a different scapegoat, for a di√erent construction of an ‘‘enemy’’ who might be responsible for the misfortune that befell Germany. This conveniently l 8

INTRODUCTION

positions the lead characters in a narrative that precludes empathy and solidarity with the Jewish victims in favor of identification with the su√ering experienced by ordinary Germans. Similarly, Saul Friedländer has posed the question about the relationship between traumatic su√ering of the Shoah and the necessity of working through the incalculable loss, on the part of both Jewish and German historians. He criticizes an ambivalence of certain segments of historiography in addressing the intractable and unbearable aspects of the Shoah in a scientific manner. In particular, he points to the partial failure of contemporary projects of memorialization of the past insofar as they are perceived as e√orts to come to a definite closure, in order to open a new untainted era in the history of Germany (1992). This book pursues these and related themes, in an attempt to come to terms with the problematic meanings of Jewishness and its conspicuous invisibilities in contemporary Germany. CREATIVE TRANSNATIONALISM AND VISIBLE DENIZENS

The nature of transnational movements between Turkey and Germany has changed throughout the years, no longer following a ‘‘traditional’’ pattern of migration with a unilinear trajectory. The dynamics of migration from Turkey were such that not only did people move both ways, to and sometimes fro, and sideways to other diasporic spaces, but also such movement was frequently accompanied by the flow of commodities, information, fashions, children, marriage partners, and politics. The place that comes directly under scrutiny here is Berlin, but specifically, the complex spaces of Kreuzberg, examining the politics of spatiality in this famous city quarter, bearing the telltale moniker ‘‘Little Istanbul.’’ In looking at the ways migrants have appropriated multiple spaces, it becomes evident that Turkish Germans continually reposition themselves as part of increasingly complex transnational networks. Furthermore, the very idea of ‘‘diaspora’’ comes to assume new connotations, just as it embodies contradictions, as many Turks who grew up in Germany consider it their de facto natal land—and not Turkey. Kreuzberg has retained an alluring appeal in the imagination of many Turks, who have transformed it into a privileged site for expressing visibly political and religious a≈liations.π An important characteristic of the Turkish population in Kreuzberg lies in a creative transnationalism, revising the attachment to the home- and host lands and developing new forms of social interaction and entrepreneurialINTRODUCTION

9 l

ism. As de Certeau maintains, minorities’ experience in adapting themselves to host societies entails a ‘‘sudden acceleration in the transformations of a cultural ground’’ and ‘‘displays creativity at the limit of its capacities’’ (de Certeau 1998: 160). This acceleration might be conceived by staging Turkish Germans as a legitimate national minority with valuable contributions to o√er, instead of as Ausländer—foreigner-outsider—as is more common in German political discourse. Thus, from the perspective of the urban organization of the landscape the positioning of Turkish Germans can be read either as foreigners or locals. In the cityscape that is Kreuzberg the establishment of mosques located in unlikely venues, such as vacant warehouses, points to the ambivalence of the roles of Islam and of Turkish Germans. Sometimes these mosques shape the shared visual landscape, but often they are hidden from view. More controversial is the audible call to prayer in Arabic punctuating the temporal and aural rhythms of the city. The book’s sections on Islam and Kreuzberg take on various aspects of Islam in Germany, examining the causes and consequences of the myriad of Islamic expressions. Another marker of the visible materialization of the Turkish presence in Berlin is the creative medium of wall gra≈ti. Depicting conflicting national and transnational political visions of the homeland and diaspora, Kreuzberg’s walls are amply decorated with competing inscriptions highlighted by color encoding, explicitly marking di√erent political messages ranging from the initials of specific parties and their slogans to names of community martyrs who died for their beliefs. Legitimizing the illegitimate, now many of Kreuzberg’s walls and public spaces display artwork created by local Turkish German artists, commissioned by local arts councils. The local government even has sponsored gra≈ti workshops for Turkish youth.∫ A closer look at expressive culture adds an important dimension to the analysis of the space of German Turkish interactions at a number of levels, dealt with in chapter 5, in the context of Kreuzberg, but also in chapter 7 focusing specifically on migrant elites. Some German locals have perceived the appropriation of numerous areas in Berlin, from the run-down buildings in Kreuzberg to the audible signs of Islam and the writing on walls, as confirmation of their worst fears of the e√ects of Überfremdung (generally understood as ‘‘over-foreignization’’). Writing about space and the immigrant experience, de Certeau claims that the ‘‘true nature of ethnic confrontations lies in ‘‘violent allergies,’’ the reactions of natives against foreign ways of using the natives’ space. Difl 10

INTRODUCTION

ferent uses of native territory can be perceived as ‘‘errors’’ or ‘‘barbarisms committed by immigrants’’ (1998: 176; emphasis mine). Perhaps the most ‘‘violent of allergies’’ has been the near obsessive objection on the part of many Germans to what they see as the trespassing into their moral and aesthetic sensibilities of headscarved women in public space. The headscarf has become a fetishistic signifier of Turkish intractability. This overdetermined symbol has been associated with the Turkish patriarchal oppression of women, an unwillingness to integrate and adopt German modernity, and a persistent Islamic presence. It has become the essential bearer of contrastive visions of national and transnational identities, as I discuss at length throughout the book (particularly in chapter 11). The ubiquitous proliferation of headscarved women in urban spaces, from the cleaner to the grocery store, from the university classroom to the cinema, is seen by many as the signal of a stubborn defiance of Western modes of being, as the antagonistic hardening of an already troubling identity. It troubles many Germans to confront something they believe their secular society has overcome—though of course, to non-Germans the hegemonically Christian rhythms and rituals in Germany appear anything but secular. Frightened by such a display of alterity, many are blinded by the nature of their own society and their own narrowly delimited ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ (i.e., Enlightenment) morality. To those troubled or o√ended by the headscarf, these social actors are permanent outsiders, inhabiting an illegitimate moral space beyond the limits of the German nation. EUROPE: A CHRISTIAN CLUB

‘‘An Undersecretary of State said to me: ‘Herr Özdemir, you should tell your compatriots . . .’ And I told him: ‘Herr Lintner, you are my compatriot.’ ’’Ω This interchange between State Secretary Lintner and Cem Özdemir, a German-born member of Parliament, after Özdemir’s election in 1994, describes a parallel between the permanently outsider status of scarved women and the inescapable alterity experienced by a man so ‘‘integrated’’ that he has won a seat in Parliament. Regardless of having been born and raised in Germany and a member of Parliament elected through the German electoral process, Özdemir’s Turkish parental background indelibly marks him as ‘‘other.’’ At stake in this stigmatization of Turkishness is a contest over prevailing visions of the moral self, trapping the Turkish other into an atemporal INTRODUCTION

11 l

history, eclipsing internal di√erentiation within this population. Hence the failure to understand Turkish heterogeneous expressions as part of a transnational vision of the diaspora linked to related global processes and networks. These range, as shown later, from Islamic global networks to business to media links. The e√ects of these global politics are felt in contemporary debates over the nature of democracy in Germany and Europe. Still, Adelson has argued that Turkish organizations have played a pivotal role in the German public sphere, having become a critical mirror of the degree to which postwar (West) German society is deemed civilized, democratic, and European (2000: 96). In other words, the appearance of tolerance of di√erence, of minorities, reflects positively onto postwar, democratic Germany. Turkey, perennially concerned with its deferred application for membership in the European Union, has been particularly sensitive to European criticism for being ‘‘insu≈ciently committed to human rights and, hence, not civilized enough to be fully welcomed into Europe’s warm embrace, unlike a fully Western democratic Germany’’ (97). In recent years the tensions have escalated, as the precariousness of freedom of speech and the press has attracted unwelcome attention, with the trials of Orhan Pamuk and other writers charged with insulting the Turkish state. Yet the same Turkish state, maintaining a consistent interest in its foreign nationals throughout the decades, for its part has issued complaints to Germany about the poor treatment of immigrants there. These tensions play out in the contradictions of borders, crossings, and the loaded interpretations of them. This book explores, for example, how the German state increasingly represents itself as cosmopolitan yet ultimately marginalizes the transnational experience of Turkish German migrants. The changing status of Turkey within EU geopolitics, currently at the margins of acceptable consideration for membership, implies a transformation of Turkish German relations. Moreover, an increasingly essentialist vision of culture—‘‘Islamic vs. Christian’’—arguably plays a key role. This reductive view of civilizational clash has kept Turkey from being fully understood and appreciated for its diversity; ultimately membership is continually deferred in the EU, what often is seen as the Christian Club of Europe. Turkey’s status as Islamic rather than Christian has caused it to waver at the geographic, economic, and social borders of Europe. Whereas for many years the immigrants were simply marginalized guestworkers, now they are more likely to be seen as Muslims in an unwelcoming environment. l 12

INTRODUCTION

The danger of essentialism can be seen in the comparative analysis of how di√erent cultural or national groups have settled in Germany. Some have argued that the reason behind the easier integration of other foreign groups such as Greeks, Italians, and Spaniards has to do not only with their common relationship to the EU but also more deeply to their unquestioned assumption of the sharing of a Christian religious heritage. According to this logic the figure of the Islamic Turks—like Jews in certain historical periods—has played the role of the quintessential and nonassimilable outsider to German and European identity and culture. This vision of a monolithic Muslim group has prevented a more nuanced understanding of the heterogeneous constitution of these ‘‘outsiders’’ and, indeed, of Islam in general. It is arguable that the discursive place taken by the Turks in contemporary Germany bears troubling resemblance, though it is far from identical, to the place occupied in German political rhetoric by the tropes of the unassimilable and nonconvertible Jew, dating back to the Reformation (Gilman 1990). Chapter 4 takes up this theme, as well as the parallel between tropes of Turks and Jews (e.g., Adelson 2000). Some in Germany have voiced the facile phrase ‘‘the Turks are the new Jews.’’ However, underlying this provocative generalization—itself a denial of the incomparability of the Shoah with the predicament of Turks in Germany— there may be a noteworthy identitary mechanism at work. The reification of the other as irredeemably outsider and antagonistic to the host country restages a gesture of repression of the other. Such a gesture by definition was and is oblivious and insensitive to a population that has by now penetrated nearly every stratum of German society yet nevertheless is treated as an alterity that often must be kept beyond the possibility of domestication and integration. This is especially the case in the socialization of children, highlighting the unequal pedagogic entitlements enjoyed by mainstream Germans. Such contradictions suggest the need for an examination of competing German notions and practices of inclusion, exclusion, and cosmopolitanism. I argue that this is particularly vital in light of the heightened self-consciousness of German e√orts to be seen as a ‘‘normal nation among nations.’’ BRANDING NORMAL

In 1999 a debate arose within the German public sphere about the portrayal of Germany’s image abroad. The need for a new unequivocally positive INTRODUCTION

13 l

German national brand was identified; one result was the Markenmanifest für Deutschland—‘‘branding campaign for Germany.’’∞≠ The project was designed to turn around what was seen as the stigmatizing negative associations and reputation Germany has been unable to shed since the Second World War. The final report observed that the country no longer shared a clear identity, its symbols having lost their former power. The branding campaign also addressed German cosmopolitanism, presenting Germany as a cosmopolitan society—‘‘world-open’’ (welto√en)— tolerant, humanist, and universalist. It may be worth noting that at one point the city of Berlin chose a British Jewish conductor to represent ‘‘world-openness’’ on its website. But Germany’s world-openness is a selective cosmopolitanism. Understanding the mechanisms of how and why this is so is one of the explicit aims guiding this book. As Cli√ord has argued, the claim that one society is more cosmopolitan than another is an ideological aberration on the part of the powerful. Referring to diasporic articulations as ‘‘unresolved historical dialogues,’’ he writes: Such cultures of displacement and transplantation are inseparable from specific, often violent, histories of economic, political and cultural interaction— histories that generate what might be called discrepant cosmopolitanisms. . . . And in this perspective the notion that certain classes of people are cosmopolitan (travelers) while the rest are local (natives) appears as the ideology of one (very powerful) traveling culture. (1997: 37)∞∞

Almost ironically, in the present instance the structural inverse still proves the same point. Here, the Germans take the role of ‘‘local’’ and the Turkish immigrants assume that of ‘‘traveler,’’ yet the powerful locals claim a cosmopolitanism overshadowing the worldly competence achieved by the traveling Turks, whose cosmopolitanism is too demotic to compete. As I show in chapter 1, the classic identification of bourgeois travelers with an enlightenment vision of cosmopolitanism has distorted a more nuanced understanding of translocal cultural life in Germany. According to this vision the experiences of the Turkish German immigrants or other minorities would be too local to be included in a more transcendent vision of metropolitan culture. Issues of locality and cultural identity are subordinated to the more transcendent question concerning the power of the nation-state and its l 14

INTRODUCTION

ability to control the territory from threatening outsiders; moreover, the threat increases when outsiders have penetrated inside, as some rhetoric in Germany implies. Alongside such perceived threats is the declining role and sovereignty of nation-states, the increasing emergence of supranational and transnational organizations and players, and a strong competition among them. In light of this new configuration it no longer is possible to strictly identify national cultures with the bounded territoriality of the old European nation-states, challenging some of the assumptions around the issues of citizenship and participation in civil society. Yet what are the reasons behind the German government’s endemic reluctance to open domestic politics to a redefinition of the meanings of national citizenship that no longer dwells on issues of loyalty to a single nation-state? I propose that the answer lies in the persistence of an aestheticist, elitist vision that conflates essentialist ideas of belonging. POLITICS OF CITIZENSHIP

Advocates of civil rights and integrationist policies have made considerable e√ort over the past two decades in challenging this essentialist vision of belonging. A significant increase in numbers of naturalizations points to this; yet the new legislation does not fully enfranchise the Ausländer population. The landmark decision in 1999 to grant German citizenship to certain categories of children of immigrants born in Germany paves the way for a new generation of enfranchised citizens. However, critically, even punitively, the new law stops short of o√ering dual nationality: upon reaching the age of majority one must make a choice of national a≈liation. Although some have written enthusiastically of the possibilities o√ered by ‘‘postnational’’ citizenship in our era, in the long run rendering the fiction of the nation-state obsolete (Soysal 1994), I suggest that the gap separating national and postnational rights is too wide to disregard the experience of alienation and discrimination among minorities. The model of postnational citizenship—where supranational identities and organizations (e.g., EU) emerge as more important than national—does not su≈ciently account for the existential anguish caused by persistent legal and bureaucratic hurdles and procedures. The frustration and humiliation inherent in restrictive visa regimes, traumas of denied family reunion, and di√erent sets of rights for resident aliens will be with us for some time. I argue that the protective reach of supranational bodies is limited because, INTRODUCTION

15 l

in general, only those who already enjoy the freedoms and rights entailed in national citizenship in their place of residence benefit from their protective reach. TURKEY AND EUROPE: TURKEY IN EUROPE

Though popular perception construes Turkish intractable di√erence as belonging to a di√erent political, religious, and sociocultural spectrum, it should be recalled that for centuries Turkey has played a consistently important and complex role within European social history. Highlighting certain historical parallels, Perry Anderson observed: ‘‘The Ottoman State, occupant of South-eastern Europe for five hundred years, camped in the continent without ever becoming naturalized into its social or political system. It always remained largely a stranger to European culture, as an Islamic intrusion into Christendom, and has posed intractable problems of presentation to unitary histories of the continent to this day’’ (1979: 397; my emphasis).∞≤ There are those today in Germany, France, and elsewhere in Europe who would concur with one implication of Anderson’s comments —that Turks still have not managed to ‘‘become naturalized into Europe’s social or political systems.’’ Throughout this book I hope to make a case for the contrary—that though the contemporary post-Ottoman Turks have been ‘‘camping’’ for close to fifty years, unlike their Ottoman fore-parents they now are deeply engaged in naturalizations—some might even claim they are ‘‘naturalizing’’ the Europeans. Anderson further suggests that attempts at European ‘‘unitary’’ historiography have been destabilized by a Turkish and/or Islamic presence, past and present; in the following chapters I extend this idea to realms of sociology, culture, and literature. The history of Ottoman Turkish—and later Republican Turkish—European entanglements is such that it makes little sense to posit a sharp distinction between a false dichotomization of ‘‘east and west’’ since they share a history of mutual constitution (Navaro-Yashin 2002). More importantly, the presence of diasporic Turks in the heart of Europe since 1960 has had a tremendous impact on shaping German culture and society. As will be shown, this has occurred in part by introducing a new culinary culture,∞≥ a non-Orientalist aesthetics, Islamic rituals and practices, and by infusing a multicultural sensibility and visibility onto the German landscape. Ultimately, writing a history of transnational Turkish practices, aesthetic sensibilities, and movements across time and space amounts to writing the l 16

INTRODUCTION

very history of contemporary Germany. But one should be wary of identifying strictly ethnic appropriations. Turkish German authors have appealed to multiple realities, inter-references, and social contexts in order to account for their own experiences in Germany. In other words, an obsession with ‘‘ethnic’’ di√erentiation among Turkish German actors leads in the opposite direction from what this book attempts. Instead I try to show that a process of reciprocal transformation and social di√erentiation has taken place in German society to such an extent that in many realms it already is impossible to distinguish two distant, bounded totalities. TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF DE / RACINATION AND MOVEMENT

This book aims to contribute to an anthropology of movement and change, of deracination, displacement, and emplacement. In recent years, similar studies have fallen under rubrics such as diaspora or transnationalism, thus moving away from limited visions of earlier migration studies. These latter often were envisioned through the lens of problematic modernization theories. Instead, I try to paint a picture of migration illustrating it with nuanced shades defining how the lives of immigrants have been forever marked by having left the natal home and relocated to Germany. But others have been equally a√ected by change though having never left home; instead, home abandoned them: their natal country vanished, to be replaced by the once adversarial neighbor. Can we think of former East Germans nostalgic for their old, seemingly certain lives, as living in a psychological or social diaspora, of having been deracinated from their homeland only to find themselves living an alien life on the self-same street? And what about a Turkish German, born in West Berlin, but finding himself at odds with the radically altered street politics after unification in 1991? Similarly, entire Anatolian villages have been transformed thanks to social and economic remittances.∞∂ Certainly comparisons with experiences of Turkish immigrants and their o√spring might be suggestive, but how far can these analogies be pushed? Though not the central thrust of this book, these questions do animate debates on diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and deracination. The literature addressing migrations, transnationalisms, diasporas, and ethnicity aids in the analyses of these questions. Some ground-breaking works over the past generation opened the way to paradigm shifts in how migration was conceptualized. Shifts from the mechanistic ‘‘push-pull’’ models explaining immigrants’ motivations—unemployment and poverty INTRODUCTION

17 l

at home, new opportunity abroad—to theories that anticipated globalization helped to challenge the beliefs about the roles and contributions of immigrants in interconnected global political economies. Furthermore, ideas about bounded communities come under scrutiny. Given that ‘‘the transnational and territorial cultures of the world are entangled with one another in manifold ways’’ (Hannerz 1996: 107), these interconnections render the closure of bounded communities impossible. Likewise, those advocating a transnational approach have been critical of locating transnationalism within a too narrowly defined concept of community, concealing the more complex issues of power and political economy (Glick Schiller et al., 1994, 2001). Moreover, the critical and often problematic factor of the sending—and returning—country, city, or village has been approached in a variety of ways over the past generation of migration studies. Bourdieu and Wacquant caution that since migration needs to be understood as emerging from historical and international relations, both material and symbolic, its sociology must begin from the sending communities complete with their historical and structural contradictions (2000). Cognizant of this, material presented here centers on relations and contradictions transpiring over the years between ‘‘homeland’’ and ‘‘host land’’; for example, sometimes a subtle reversal in the referents of the two is experienced, when the ‘‘homeland’’ gradually assumes the status of a foreign, vacation destination. While delving into these questions, it becomes apparent that the Turkish Germans, wherever they might have been at a particular time (e.g., Turkey or Germany), remain acutely aware of the place they are not. This double negation of place suggests that the possibility of reterritorialization is continually out of reach, ever remote. To misquote Gertrude Stein, their ‘‘there’’ is always elsewhere; it is temporally and spatially perpetually displaced. This temporal multi-sitedness has assumed a significance in the very making of contemporary German history, shaping current practice and ideology. Both axes—the spatial and the temporal—are essential to an understanding of the polysemic forms of transnational living in Germany today. In addition to experiences of transnationalism, I argue that traumas of displacement, deracination, and loss, as well as eager participation in new opportunities abroad, require an understanding of diasporic existence. A glance through recent literature shows that ‘‘diaspora,’’ summoned in a myriad of contexts, serves as many purposes. Though I draw on this word l 18

INTRODUCTION

throughout the book, it is in the connotative, not denotative sense that I find it useful. I concur with Cli√ord, who argues for a disconnection of a teleology of return from the master narratives of diasporism, underscoring that ‘‘decentered, lateral connections may be as important as those formed around a teleology of origin/return. And a shared, ongoing history of displacement, su√ering, adaptation, or resistance may be as important as the projection of a specific origin’’ (1997: 250). This echoes the experience of many immigrants whose voices are heard in these pages. This instance of migration has continually resisted comfortable periodization. Though much of the literature takes for granted first-, second-, and third-generation migrants, I reject this generalization and avoid reference to the ‘‘second generation’’ as an unproblematic given. This is an important point, supported by anecdotal, ethnographic, and demographic evidence. For example, some of my informants have described the endlessly iterative dynamic of a first generation continually repeating itself along with its significant social problems. Spouses (predominantly but not exclusively women) still are sought in the Anatolian villages and brought to Germany with little education or understanding of German society. Thus do parallel streams of ‘‘Turkish Germans’’ coexist in Germany: on the one hand are the monolingual isolated newcomers often reproducing bilingual illiterates, living disenfranchised and marginalized lives in Germany. But on the other hand are those who have ‘‘made it’’ through the legal, economic, and educational hoops, and who have entered a middle-class lifestyle similar to their German neighbors. This situation belies a simple periodization of second-third-fourth-generation immigrants, as it introduces a more complex sociocultural configuration. DREAMS DEFERRED: ISLAM, EXILE, ETHNICITY

Thanks to the cultivation of transnational networks, increasing access to global media, and investment in its future, Turkish Germans maintain a strong sense of attachment to the Turkish homeland. After years abroad, many claim that one day they will return to their homeland. But the dream of return is indefinitely deferred, having acquired new symbolic valence. Equally, many children who have been born or reared in Germany nurture strong ties with the Turkish homeland and reiterate the same myth of return voiced by their parents. However, whereas in the 1980s this homeward recitation of eventual repatriation was ubiquitous, today it no longer INTRODUCTION

19 l

is the norm. One surprising outcome of the Turkish diasporic existence is that for some, the homeland and the host land become mutually constitutive, feeding the imaginary attachment to both places, further complicating the idea of a pure teleology of return. Indeed, population statistics reveal that relatively few actually repatriate. Ultimately, an implicitly diasporic purview is an enabling one. If many Turkish Germans indeed are in Germany to stay, an acknowledged diasporic social space permits them to develop new articulations of attenuated transnational identifications while localizing themselves within narratives of a positively inflected diaspora.∞∑ This inflection is reflected in the desire among Turkish Germans to select and identify with an array of models and roles available to them. It is well documented in the diasporic ‘‘revival’’ of Alevis in Germany, variously understood by observers as a religious, political, or cultural expression of emerging identity politics. Later chapters elaborate on this, focusing on di√erent forms and expressions of Islam. Alevis, the most populous Muslim minority in Turkey, making up perhaps 15 to 20 percent of the population, are widely considered by the dominant Sunni population to practice a heterodox and heretical version of Islam. A fundamental aspect of Alevi existence is the technique of dissimulating the self, by emphasizing inner spirituality rather than outward manifestations. A critical di√erence from religious Sunnis is their rejection of the ultravisible and overdetermined headscarf. This manifestation of the self enables Alevis to live at relative ease with Germans and to be better accepted by Germans, in return. The resurgence of Alevilik—Alevi-ism—sheds light not only on the complex entanglement of secular and religious practices but also on the forms of di√erentiation among social actors from Turkey. As Castles and Davidson have observed, the phenomenon of revival, in this case an alternative form of Islamicization, should not be viewed exclusively as a ‘‘religious phenomenon, but also as a specific way of inventing group culture and of ethnicity construction in a situation of disempowerment’’ (2000: 137). Much contemporary literature on migration depends on a vision of ethnicity in the description of immigrant experience, often placing it as a stable given in the wider debates over identity, agency, and authenticity. Ethnicity too often is taken as an unquestioned cultural ‘‘fact,’’ a given as part of an immutable social ontology. Here I argue, following Comaro√, that processes of ethnicization must be understood as systems of relations and di√erentiation: ‘‘Ethnicity, far from being a unitary [thing], describes both a set of relations and a mode of consciousness; moreover, its meaning l 20

INTRODUCTION

and practical salience varies for di√erent social groupings according to their position in the social order’’ (1992: 54). I look in particular at the ways in which the Turkish Germans themselves employ, contest, and transgress ascribed and assumed ‘‘ethnicities,’’ just as they subvert the techniques of classification taken for granted by many Germans. As described already, an extreme case of the unsettling of ethnic ascription is the invention of the ‘‘ethnicity’’ Kanak by the author Feridun Zaimo˘glu. Zaimo˘glu plays with power and language, ultimately opposing Kanak with Turk, destabilizing the ways in which the German state, and popular culture as a whole, classify their others (Cheesman 2002). In response to the ethnicization of foreigners some foreign groups choose to express themselves by means of auto-ethnicization. In no way an isolated process, it stems from observing the ways in which other groups both described themselves and were classified by the wider German public. Perhaps not unlike the processes at work that mutually shape the colonizer and the colonized, the ethnicizers and the ethnicized enter into a dialogue of social relations.∞∏ Yet, and here is the key point, ethnicization is a process in all instances, a mutually entailing, mimetic play of mirrors. In this process images of self and community held up for scrutiny by outsiders and insiders to those communities are reflected but also countered with alternative images by the subjects of these reflections. In this mirroring back and forth, deformations emerge, so that as Homi Bhabha has argued about colonial mimicry, irony, displacements, and other features enter the identitary picture and what results usually diverges from initial image. Thus throughout this book, I prefer the language that privileges process (ethnicization, deethnicization) to the idioms of fixity often linked to ‘‘ethnicity’’—something economistically held, accumulated, constructed, structured, circulated, and ultimately essentialized. This introduction opened with Özdamar’s eloquent reflections on the loss of self, of language, of mother tongue. These tropes of abjection and trauma define part of the diasporic discourse, dependent upon the inhospitability of the encompassing space. However, alternative discourses challenge the abjection paradigm, in increasing force and creativity, unconcerned with hospitality. Ultimately the book poses questions about the resulting tensions, as well as those entailed in the receptivity and ambivalence on the part of the German public in welcoming the Turkish population in accorINTRODUCTION

21 l

dance with an ‘‘ethics of hospitality’’ (Derrida 2001). The following chapters query the contours shaping competing modes of identification and differentiation that might preclude—or advance—the full realization of such an ethos of hospitality. This has political and legal as well as historical and moral implications, both for the German body politic and its internal alters. A consideration of specific conditions that impinge upon a call for the state’s unconditional responsibility toward its guests (Derrida 2001) serves as a subtextual thread tying together the pieces of this book. Thus, as well as the violent sense of mute invisibility suggested by Özdamar, counterpoints of subversion and resistance, accommodation and acceptance will expand the story that is the complex world of Turkish Germany.

l 22

INTRODUCTION

Berlin A Prelude l One of my personal reasons for confronting the phantasmatic space occupied by Jews and Turks in the German imaginary was driven by the experience of frequently being (mis)taken for a Turk by Germans and Turks alike. My living situation in 1980s Berlin over a course of years, divided between several very di√erent neighborhoods (Kreuzberg, Schöneberg, Grunewald, Lichterfelde),∞ o√ered me tastes of numerous aspects of Berlin life. Alternately, I shared living quarters with Turks and Germans (and briefly with Americans), first in a markedly Turkish neighborhood, then a mixed area, and finally a predominantly German one. Only in the last did I manifestly stand out. Here I experienced daily the sense of transgression, of trespassing, as straight-backed Spießbürger≤ German women on bicycles would turn and stare as I walked down the street in this leafy area of tasteful apartment blocks and detached German villas, many (including the one whose attic I occupied) constructed to Nazi specifications, complete with requisite flag-holder molded into the flawlessly rendered stucco facade. One day at the local neighborhood outdoor market, a German man hawking potatoes called out to me, ‘‘schwarze Frau’’ (black woman), when asking for my order. Frequently I sat alone on buses in this part of Berlin, my temporary neighbors preferring either to sit beside their compatriots or to stand, rather than sit by me, the local schwarze Frau. To Germans who only wished to see me as a Turk it made no di√erence who I thought or felt I was. They already had categorized me, transforming me into an object of their imaginary projection. I became part of that process as well, because of the critical conjuncture of my own self-image, and who the Germans—and Turks—presumed I was. Later I came to see that these identities were not totally distinct, any more for me than for the people whom I was studying. At a very basic level I discovered that who the

Germans believed I was had a profound e√ect on my public presentation of self: how I behaved, dressed, and reacted, even what I ate. Likewise, I could play with it and could a√ect how they interpreted me. If I dressed following the conventional code of German students or intellectuals, I would be presumed to belong to an elevated rank of Ausländer—perhaps Italian or Greek. On such occasions, the presumptions were so strong that I was made to feel blameworthy, even mistaken, for not conforming to the projected identity desired. Prior to moving to Berlin, I had spent over two years in Turkey in the early 1980s and had a di√erent sort of experience of identifications while carrying out research there. In Turkey I often could ‘‘pass’’—cultural, religious, and national boundaries notwithstanding, I did not usually stick out as foreign, thanks to my looks and comportment. I became accustomed to this ability to melt into Turkish crowds, though usually aware of varying degrees of separation. Later, as an American in Germany, at one level perhaps I might have found a common culture and practices much more readily accessible than those I had encountered in Turkey. Compared to Turkey, after all, Germany and the United States shared Western neoliberal values and ideologies of major industrialized superpowers. The educational systems have more in common with one another, as do tastes, styles, class relations, beliefs about the autonomous self, gender relations, and civil spheres. But, paradoxically, the ‘‘natural’’ identification I might have felt, and, indeed that many other Americans have felt in Germany, was complicated by two factors. First, although there was—and is—a great deal that I admired about German society, civil life, and culture, I discovered that as a Jew I could not completely feel at ease with certain expressions of German identity. Some di√erences genuinely do matter. Certainly, they might be renegotiated and might shift depending on the situation, but di√erence, nonetheless could not be denied in this case—be me, or by many Germans with whom I came in contact. Also, reinforcing my perception of German Turkish relations was the element of social and linguistic communication. When I first arrived in Berlin I could speak Turkish with much greater ease and fluency than German. Unlike many Germans, who avoided Turkish neighborhoods, finding them dangerous in how threatening, mysterious—di√erent —they appeared, these were the parts of the city where I felt most comfortable, and it was here that I chose to live. Unlike the Germans who warned me against living in the ‘‘Turkish ghetto,’’ I was able to decode the social l 24

BERLIN: A PRELUDE

FIGURE 1. Author at Wall, 1980s

semiotics of these areas much more readily than I could those characteristic of the predominantly German residential quarters. Soon after arriving in West Berlin from Istanbul in 1984 to continue my research about Turkish migrants,≥ I dreamt that I was putting on a ba¸s örtüsü, the large headscarf worn by many rural and/or religious women in Turkey. It took place in my neighborhood, Kreuzberg, but I was wondering about whether or not I should wrap it around my head and tie it in one of the conventional Turkish styles, or a bit di√erently, so as to distinguish me from them, to mark the fact that I am not them, not Turkish; that I am di√erent, something else. In retrospect, I can see how this dream fragment reveals many of the complexities of the fluctuations in identities and self-presentations I was to experience in the coming years while living in Berlin. The transition from living in Istanbul to Berlin carried one such irony with it: I went from frequently passing as a local in Turkey to becoming foreign in Germany. But in this case, it was a matter of passing, or rather, of passing as marked. I was to learn what it felt like to stand out unwittingly. BERLIN: A PRELUDE

25 l

Some of the dreams I recorded in my journal from early on in my Berlin stay confused many issues, fears, and experiences. They have one common element: discomfort with identity, my identity. The headscarf dream speaks to this.∂ Later, after having lived some time in West Berlin, I recorded dreams about the Wall—I found myself unsure which side was which, and was often caught on the ‘‘wrong’’ one. I also remembered the humorous anxiety produced when reading Peter Schneider’s The Wall Jumper. One of the vignettes centers on a man who repeatedly jumped the Wall—but in the wrong direction, from west to east. The confused soldiers in the east usually gave him tea and sent him back. The jumper had no particular explanation; not unlike the reasons sometimes given for climbing mountains, he jumped simply because it was there. Even in my subconscious it seemed that I feared and played with borders and their transgression, much like Peter Schneider’s jumper. After over two decades of being a sometime denizen of Berlin, I have come to identify with it, defects and all. Now when I go there, specific and otherwise dormant sensibilities are inevitably evoked. Yet this problematic though elective second, third, or fourth home has, nevertheless, penetrated to a place deep within and I cherish my relationship with it—as an especially fond critic.

l 26

BERLIN: A PRELUDE

1. Shifting Cosmopolitics l The city of Berlin plays the role of a protagonist in this chapter. Its centrality is unavoidable when exploring the interplay of local and global identities at the margins of changing nation-states. It is precisely when the nation-state becomes a questionable unit of analysis that the interplay of local and global can be understood. As Ulrich Beck has written, ‘‘Globality means that the unity of national state and national society comes unstuck; new relations of power and competition, conflict and intersection, take shape between, on the one hand, national states and actors, and on the other hand, transnational actors, identities, social spaces, situations and processes’’ (2000: 21). An important aspect of globality for Beck is the role of technology in the service of transnational connections and networks. Televisual technology in particular dissimulates presence, communion, and immediacy, giving a deceptive sense of participating in a singular global-local event. In the case of East Berlin, this was the technology that both joined and disjoined the two parts of the city, producing an anxiety of an unresolvable distance. This was always contradictory, perceived as an impossible proximity—in other words, two sites that might topologically lay two hundred meters apart were, quite literally, of two separate worlds, east and west, both bridged and severed by radio and televisual signals. (It is not, then, by mere chance that the dismantling of the long traumatic era of a divided Germany was captured as a global televisual local event.) The workers from Turkey who arrived in Berlin in the early 1960s entered into a radically changed and changing historical and political landscape. This was a place where the symbols and technologies of antinomian ideologies became instantiated around the Berlin Wall. Moreover, the workers from Turkey were entering into the di√erent rhythms of two Western modernities. On the one hand their arrival into Berlin was marked by the fixed territorial boundaries delimiting the Federal Republic of Germany from the German Democratic Republic. On the other they were to be participants, even catalysts of the unmaking of the German national land-

scape, as they unwittingly were swept up in the repercussions of the dissolution of the boundaries of the nation-state. The first impact of unification, this grandiose experiment in reconstruction, was a traumatic one, exposing a disjointed cityscape that was at once becoming delocalized and deterritorialized while at the same time giving rise to novel reterritorializations. These forms of reterritorialization were intimately tied to the transformation of German subjectivity and the tectonic shifts a√ecting national identity. Decades of dealing with processes of localization and delocalization of identity governed by the dictates of the Cold War have raised significant questions about German identity and its global aspirations. These aspirations of the Federal Republic during the Cold War, articulated in terms of a specific political lexicon of modernity, focused on the reality of the nation-state, and on the protection of its borders. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the accelerated di√usion of globalization over the following decade have radically altered the frame of the question. As Beck has observed, with the emergence of a global political culture the relationship between territory and nationhood has come ‘‘unstuck.’’ This suggests new possibilities of thinking around cultural, national, and global identities. Elsewhere Malkki has shown ‘‘that state and territory are not su≈cient to make a nation and that citizenship does not amount to a true nativeness’’ (1996: 446), thus challenging conventional assumptions about the relationship between national consciousness and place of nativity. The identities of a place, as García Canclini has argued (with reference to another city defined by a border—Tijuana), are forged by the ‘‘relationship to other places: the rest of Mexico, North America, the wider world—it is a ‘delocalized locality’ ’’ (1995: 239). Similarly the mutual reflections of Berlins East and West continually shifted according to a perspectival positioning which, in Berlin, was frequently marked by distorted geopolitical projections. Just as individuals, groups, and nations define their own identities by relating themselves to others, often through processes of mimetic reflection, given localities assume similar identifications by being placed in changing maps of meaning. As de Certeau reminds us, cities are ‘‘constellations that hierarchize and semantically order the surface . . . operating chronological arrangements and historical justifications’’ (1988: 104). The city can be radically transformed through diverse practices of making and marking spaces. De Certeau goes on to argue that names (speaking here of the proper names of and within cities) are characterized l 28

SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

by their ability to transcend their signification (ibid.). Nowhere has this been truer than for Berlin. In relation to Berlin, Borneman has shown to what extent this process is evident; ‘‘in an e√ort to create new forms of authority, the state improvised, continuously redrawing borders and boundaries, renaming persons and things, endowing them with an aura of provisionality (1998: 164). For most connoisseurs of Berlin the city was metonymically associated with the Wall. Even before the dramatic fall of the Wall in November 1989, Berlin occupied a bizarre historical and symbolic location, representing the firing line frontier of the Cold War. Doubtless more than any other concrete slab in the world, throughout its quarter-century life the Berlin Wall became overinvested in meaning. Inscribed in it was a politics signaling practices of exclusion and the severing of places and localized identities. Yet for many Berliners, the Wall was not merely an abstract symbol of vision and division but the visible inscription of a wound to be alternately ignored and confronted daily. Thus an ethnography of Berlin will have to work though its material scar, its traumatic division, and ultimately its multireferential associations. THE LOCAL LANDSCAPE OF A CITY THAT WAS

An island unmoored to its mainland, West Berlin flaunted its wealth and might to the surrounding East, equally through airwaves and architecture. The vistas of the cityscape, when seen from far o√, united the twin cities by making indistinguishable the outlines of buildings, church steeples, and towers from both Berlins. Especially pronounced stood two unmistakable symbols of the fractured cities, competing for prominence. In the east loomed the Radio Tower, said to be the tallest structure this side of Moscow. In the west, the familiar Mercedes insignia spun twenty-four hours a day high above Europa-Center, symbolically shielding the ruptured halfcity from the ideologies emanating out of Marx and Engels Platz, East Berlin’s central square, only a couple kilometers away. Just as the American military’s colossal satellite dish in Dahlem ensured excellent reception of its propaganda broadcast over the Wall, the Mercedes logo served as West Berlin’s revolving response to the GDR’s dominating obelisk in the eastward skyline. They each were, for the Manichean world orders of the Cold War, their respective centers, tourist attractions with competing cachets. The Wall imposed new spaces, often in absurdly arbitrary ways. Streetcar SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

29 l

tracks, blocks of houses, and alleys were interrupted by the concrete slabs that broke the city in half. As it delimited space, it assumed the status of an urban horizon line, or circle, the impenetrable edge both uniting and separating the two sides of a coin. It was an implicit reference point for the inhabitants of both sides, albeit with di√erent semantic referents. And it played optical tricks. From any open point in the city o√ering a vista, the juxtaposition of all the cities’ tall distinguishing structures appeared to be the skyline of an uninterrupted urban landscape. But then, walking east or west, inevitably the Wall interfered with one’s vision, mediating and distorting the depth of field. Only when approaching the Wall did the realization hit: that unremarkable building over there actually was a di√erent country, and an enforced myopia imposed itself. On the Wall, a dividing line between East and West, a partition between neighborhoods and nations, were a wide variety of gra≈ti-encoded messages. Ranging from the political to the personal, this transcript remained hidden to the East Germans, to whom it was addressed, capturing anxieties and aspirations of the West Berliners trapped within their island outpost. Some of these West Berliners were relative newcomers from Turkey and other labor-sending countries. Upon their arrival they found a city divided not only according to Cold War geopolitical categories, but, more meaningfully, divided by haves and have-nots, the latter often synonymous with Turkish. When I first lived in West Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, the so-called Turkish Ghetto, in the mid-1980s, one phrase written on the Wall near my flat, lettered in deliberate green, read: die Welt ist kein Ausland—es gibt keine Ausländer; the world is not a foreign land—there are no foreigners. The green lettering marked a political a≈liation: West Germany’s leftist ecology party, concerned with issues ranging from acid rain to the closing of nuclear power plants to civil rights for the resident foreign community.∞ This gra≈ti, on the Wall bordering Kreuzberg, faced the district of West Berlin with the city’s largest foreign immigrant population. Perhaps it was not unfitting that the Wall essentially surrounded the eastern-most bit of Kreuzberg, as the Wall’s very existence determined their presence in Germany and their absence from Turkey. The Wall’s construction blocked access to the East German labor pool upon which West German industry had become dependent. The cutting o√ of East German labor created a need for West German industry to search elsewhere in order to fuel the growing postwar boom economy. It was intended that the l 30

SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

imported workers would assuage West Germany’s labor shortage and fill the lacuna partially created by the freezing of East-West Cold War relations. The Wall e√ectively helped to forge two very separate political, social, economic, and national entities over a nearly thirty-year period. Its subsequent demise meant that entire Weltanschauungen essentially needed to be dismantled overnight. These suddenly obsolete worldviews, deliberately crafted by the two respective states, whose quiet warring ‘‘with one another from their inception, each half of Germany, West and East—like the opposing sides in the forty-five year Cold War—worked hard to mold its resident population into a distinct and cohesive nation,’’ writes Borneman (1991).≤ In the West, for the duration of the Cold War, as a result of the national refocusing of a common culture, language, and history, these considerable attempts at molding the citizenry excluded a large portion of the population from this exercise at nation building: namely, the several-millionstrong non-German resident Turks and other Ausländer. Though having been proscribed from the historical processes shaping postwar and postWall politics, eastern and western, the Ausländer nevertheless found themselves very much a√ected by the opening of the Wall. Considered more fully below, after the initial euphoria had waned, Turks in Germany began uttering the phrase duvar bizim üstümüze dü¸stü—the Wall fell on us— reflecting new tensions, anxieties, and violence for which they were ready targets. The signs they discovered around them were much more ideologically overcoded than those perceived by the Berliner population at large. To Turkish Germans unification signaled increased competition in the labor market from unemployed eastern Germans, threats by growing neo-Nazi groups, the generalized fallout from the unification taxes of increased Ausländerfeindlichkeit, xenophobia, and so on. Thus, the conflation of neofascism and an aggressive transition to a capitalist market economy in the eastern states represented the political overcoding which characterized the changing foreigner policy, Ausländerpolitik, over these two periods. The Berlin Wall, then, was a harbinger for the Ausländerproblematik that was to follow, the ‘‘foreigner problem’’ that implicitly frames this book. Over the past decades, the ‘‘foreigner problem’’ in Germany has been massmediated, analyzed, rationalized, its focus always outward, other-oriented. Indeed, the ‘‘foreigner problem’’ tends to euphemize certain vexing aspects of German attitudes toward others in the midst. For example, the very word Ausländer quite often has been used as a politically more correct gloss for the obvious but unstated Turkish referent. The ostensibly neutral deSHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

31 l

nominator Ausländer enunciates an entire ideological discourse of programs, policies, and their implementation. As described in later chapters, community workers might choose to do Ausländerarbeit, a literary critic might write on Ausländerliteratur, the government makes clear its Ausländerpolitik, and so on. My argument is that behind the seemingly innocent use of the idiom of Ausländer lies both a clear ideological agenda and an explicit expression of social discontent,≥ where questions of belonging and exclusion, of diaspora and di√erence, come to the fore. REVISING BERLIN

Berlin defines a place where tenses converge, as past, present, and future collide. In this overdelimited place, Berliners converge, collude, act out collisions, in lived space and in memory. Here I chart a particular axis of these convergences of time, space, and peoples. Drawing from Bakhtin, one might think of Berlin as a synthetic moment of chronotopicity. Bakhtin confined his use of chronotope to its metaphoric potency in his masterful study of representation and narrative in the novel. Chronotopicity he in turn borrowed from Einstein and wrote, ‘‘[We] will give the name ‘‘chronotopie’’ (literally ‘time-space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’’ (1981: 84). Berlin as chronotopos: its stratified layers of historical geography revealing postmodern, decontextualized, fossilized survivals, recast in a dramatically altered polity. Berlin, as a site of memory, projected and still projects its past on the present, selling its present/past to itself and others as a selfconsciously transgressive chronotope. Nazi prisons are presented as tastefully provocative tourist attractions; remnants of a Wall frontier metamorphose into art gallery happenings. The inverse occurs as well, as modern buildings are destroyed solely due to distasteful denotations, as if by disappearing the glass and steel structure, so would the recent historical contaminants vanish. In a di√erent context Borneman has spoken of the need to understand the specific disjunction of Berlin’s temporality from the hegemony of the past, thus enabling a description of a more contested present. As an example of the new temporal concern with the present within the very sites of memory, Borneman cites the case of tourists who, in visiting the sites undergoing reconstruction such as Potsdamer Platz and other such historically overloaded places, express little interest in the legacy of the ‘‘shadows of the past’’ (Schatten der Vergangenheit ) but instead l 32

SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

are concerned with questions about their provisional character. ‘‘Visitors are less concerned with ‘Schatten der Vergangenheit’ (although many ask where was Hitler’s bunker) than with the unsettling and resettling of this space of the capital. They ask about dates of completion, number of cranes, costs, parking capacity. The popular places . . . are popular precisely because they are incomplete’’ (Borneman 2002: 26). According to Daphne Berdahl, this failure to maintain an interest in the past has been accompanied by a process of ‘‘organized forgetting’’;∂ specifically by ‘‘an erasure of certain memory symbols and the creation and contestation of new ones’’ (1999: 220). For example, Berlin’s Palace of the Republic, the edifice formerly housing East Germany’s parliament, has been a hotly contested site. A modernist/brutalist piece of architecture dating from 1976, steel and dark glass, ‘‘regarded as an architectural monstrosity by many in the city’s western districts,’’∑ it was, for a time in the 1990s hidden from view, with a Christo-like covering shielding it. But unlike Christo’s generally sheetlike wrappings, this one was painted in a trompe-l’oeil palace scene, representing the prewar palace, the Baroque Hohenzollern Schloss that once stood here but was destroyed in 1950 by the communist government. Many former East Germans wanted to reopen and rehabilitate the building, arguing that it was one of the few positively connoted public structures in the capital, the site of bowling alleys, restaurants, theaters, bars, and other civic pleasures. ‘‘Wessis’’ argued for its destruction, associated as it is with GDR governance; they wanted it to be replaced with the ‘‘true’’ palatial architectural tenant of the site, a rebuilt Schloss. ‘‘Ossis’’ responded that by destroying the GDR modernist palace, part of their history—problematic though it might be—would disappear, and they wished to claim this bit of it.∏ Closed for much of the first decade following unification for asbestos abatement, it reopened in 2003 and has since become a popular party venue. The controversy continued after the German parliament voted for its demolition, with its eventual replacement by a museum wearing the facade of the reconstructed Berlin city palace based on the home of the last German Kaiser. The German Historical Museum has provided continually updated minute-by-minute photographic documentation of the demolition (see http://www.dhm.de/zcam/). These competing forms of dealing with the memory of the past seem to be caught between an escapist ideology of organized forgetting, selective remembering, and reconstructing and a phenomenology of incompleteness. It is unclear whether these two simply represent contestations of the past or a more troubling refusal to SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

33 l

enter into a dialectical confrontation and engagement with this particular urban legacy. Berlin, as much an idea as a geographic place, was over the top, in a newly contrived and reconstructed manner deliberately attempting to reproduce the diluted memory of a selected slice of its past; but of course only a revision was possible. Postunification, it portrayed a retrospective chronotope, refracted through the lens of united Berlin. No longer postwar longing glances back at the selective memory of prewar glorified decadence, but instead, new post-Wall fond remembrances of the excesses, easy living, and e√ortless indulgences and subsidies of the Walled period. To call Berlin the quintessential postmodern city already has become cliché, as the pastiched nature of its cityscape has become ever more inscribed as its paramount feature. This can be exemplified in critical sites such as Potsdamer Platz. Before the war the Platz (city square, piazza) enjoyed the status of one of Europe’s busiest and most sophisticated intersections. After having been bombed into placelessness, once its rubble had been removed it was left for an empty, nameless lot on the western side of a raw, new border. In the early 1990s it became the site of commerce once again, but in this new incarnation it took the form of an unintentional parody of the haute bourgeois commercial center of the past. This time round it was as the ‘‘Polish Market,’’ a weekend event where Poles, having driven the short distance over the border to a newly unified Germany, hawked counterfeit cigarettes and other cheap goods. The hard currency they retrieved in exchange went far in a Poland experiencing shock therapy.π The Platz has been revitalized once again, albeit bearing little resemblance either to its prewar or immediate post-Wall identities. City planners, intent on authenticity in their re-creations, hoped to restore the original axes of the various streets that once converged on this square. This would have meant moving existing structures or boring costly tunnels under postwar buildings (such as Scharoun’s dramatic Staatsbibliotek, the State Library). In the way perhaps only architecture in Berlin has occupied political pride of place, the raging controversies about the future of Potsdamer Platz were always firmly entrenched in its past. Eventually, as a major part of the world’s largest construction site, the area was divvied up to multinationals such as sony and Mercedes, which subsequently financed skyscrapers boldly advertising their logos, and housing generic shopping malls, cinemas, o≈ce space and expensive condominiums, aimed at attracting young wealth into the newly reconstructed city center. The pastiche that l 34

SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

is Berlin has become the subject of postmodern experiments in restructuring historic sites of memory through the complicity of global capital. IMPETUS OF PLACE

Perhaps it can be claimed that each city, town, or hamlet projects a recognizable sensibility as well as the sense of the phantasmagoric, as de Certeau has observed (1988). In those years prior to unification West Berlin most resembled a hothouse, self-consciously bursting at its joints. The glass house image refers at once to its enclosed, protected nature, but also to its sense of overdetermined artificiality and fragility. This calculated creation of West Berlin expresses the confluence of its physical and historical situatedness, the one determinant of the other. Not unlike de Certeau’s vision of New York, Berlin struggles with ‘‘the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future’’ (1988: 91). As a chronotope, the time of Berlin continually is stretched, pulled between an unbearable memory and contested visions of its future—contested precisely because of its troubling memory.∫ Berlin’s troubled memories can be read like a palimpsest. Whichever layer one looks at, be it the Weimar political polarization and artistic eΔorescence, the thirteen years of serving as the National Socialist capital, or as the puppetlike city-state of the Allied powers in the dangerous games of the Cold War, it is ultimately impossible to escape these multiple temporalities when imagining the future. Since West Berlin, a place like none other before, is a place that no longer exists, relegated to memories and relics, neither can its urbanness, its location in mittel-Europa be taken for granted. Prior to unification, West Berlin looked well-groomed, orderly, and prosperous; it felt self-satisfied and smug, thanks to what amounted to enormous ‘‘ideology subsidies’’ from the federal government in Bonn. Ubiquitous public art, commissioned by the city, spoke of a high regard for itself. A stroll down the Kurfürstendamm, Ku’damm for short, and its adjacent streets was enough to make the most hardened antimaterialist drool. Here, ornately contrived storefront window dressings and displays did not su≈ce; down the length of the Ku’damm giant glass exhibit cases jutted upright. These glittering, upended glazed stelae, interrupting the horizontal planes of the broad sidewalks, brought the inside out, as they exposed and flaunted still more luxury commodities available in the nearby shops. SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

35 l

In Berlin one sometimes felt like one was transgressing norms and behaviors acceptable only there. In many realms, Berliners seemed to push at the envelope—and get away with it. Transgressive sexuality of every persuasion was on o√er alongside petty bourgeois co√eehouses.Ω ‘‘Normal’’ life stages were usurped, as the student lifestyle, generously subsidized by the state, habitually extended for years, becoming an end in itself rather than part of the traditional, bourgeois transition to adulthood and a secure job. Many of the perpetual students frequented the cafes, kneipes, and clubs, ensuring the improbability of attendance of daytime (at least morning) classes, since these venues were the crux of Berlin’s notorious nightlife. Along with all-day breakfast service, some served a special hangover breakfast: two aspirin and black co√ee. West Berlin, a cultural cul-de-sac, o√ered the space to transgress the social and temporal dispositions that characterized West Germany. The chronotopicity of Berlin ensured that not only was this an upside-down world, a slice of west in the east that by all rights and logics of geography should not exist, but time also was inverted with its afternoon, even evening, breakfasts; time and space at once were transgressed. Even Berliner body art transgressed norms. Already in the 1980s earrings in Berlin were sold individually, as ‘‘Stücke.’’ To buy an identical pair would have been tantamount to an uncool, bourgeois act, for in Berlin a local fashion statement was the studious avoidance of symmetry. Symbolic of the zeitgeist permeating the city, this was an antifashion statement, but in its subversion, it created an alternative, even more fashionable declaration of its own. One needn’t be overly cynical to interpret the seriousness with which this asymmetrical accessorizing was undertaken, ultimately just as conformist as the symmetrical codes against which it was implicitly counterposed.∞≠ Counterposed as well was West Germany’s ostentatious showcase to its poorer eastern cousin. West Berlin’s very existence signified a provocation in the midst of Cold War geopolitics, for it challenged the norms, values, and propaganda of the German Democratic Republic in its physical and ideological positioning. West Berlin at that time was something of an overdetermined city-state, heavily invested with an array of contrasting significations. This multi-sectored island stubbornly stood for the ‘‘free world’’ and Western liberal democracy but also fostered Western decadence, promiscuous consumption. Encoded in innumerable ways, these Western ideals were broadcast from the American sector to the communist east twenty-four hours a day on the U.S. military’s Armed Forces l 36

SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

Radio, as well as the national West German television channels and radio stations. Yet most West Berliners accepted the Wall as an inevitable fact of life and had little concern with or interest in what went on beyond it. Despite the indi√erence shown it, the Wall shaped the contours of the preciousness of the zeitgeist and culture that for many represented West Berlin. West Berlin described the quintessential delocalized urban space. Divided into three sectors, the British, French, and U.S. American, West Berlin was ruled by a bizarre set of laws, customs, and regulations, devised by the Allies after World War II; the fourth, Soviet sector, defined East Berlin—the sole meaningful division. Just as most East Berliners never ventured to the West, most West Berliners never, or rarely, ventured East—that is, physically. Though the Wall separated them categorically and politically, they were quite aware of each other thanks to technology that transcended walls, dependent only on airwaves. East Berliners avidly watched West German television and listened to Western radio broadcasts, and West Berliners watched news and old movies on their screens, broadcast from across the Wall. The same news events would be covered by stations and channels on both sides, but in entirely di√erent interpretive fashion, emphasis, and jargons. In part, mass-mediated technology made the Wall prematurely redundant, uniting East and West Berliners. At a popular level technological creativity in both Berlins overcame walled divisions in an e√ort to communicate with each other. Televisual technology o√ered a transgressive sense of simultaneity, of participating in the same event together, penetrating the Wall.∞∞ However, once the television was switched o√, disconnecting the two parts of the city, a tremendous anxiety remained, together with an awareness of profound social and political divisions. THE SCENIC AND THE SZENE

Beneath its exterior elegance West Berlin also could be frenetic and anxious. This split personality was reflected in both an inward and outward gaze. Inward, since this was the place to be, self-consciously cool, defined by numerous and notorious Szene, the scenes. It boasted the most elaborated countercultural Alternative scene; the home to avant-garde film and art, the site of the international Berlin Film Festival; a truly impressive twenty-four-hour cafe, restaurant, and club scene; the most famous Ausländer, Turkish scene; vibrant and renowned literary and academic scenes. SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

37 l

Underpinning all this was the sense of adventure fathomed in gazing out, in living on the very edge of the safe, first world, in a transgressive border outpost, courting danger. West Berlin was a hugely desirable destination, testified to by the fact that nearly everyone one met was a native of somewhere else, having elected to live there. Self-consciously cosmopolitan—more sensitive to the distinctive privileges of a modern traveler’s habitus, open to registers of otherness, such as place, food, peoples—it wore this cosmopolitanism uneasily, as though it needed narcissistically to keep checking its reflection in every shiny surface. As such, West Berlin was that much more novel and less provincial than other cities of West Germany. Unlike Berlin, those cities were propped up by a considerable amount of precedent, organized by old, conservatively comfortable closed social networks. West Berlin, being a city of relative newcomers—some newer than others, but all looking for a niche—defined itself by an openness not found elsewhere. It simply felt di√erent, full of novel potential. It was, in the words of a keen observer of urban spaces, Richard Sennett, a place ‘‘where strangers meet’’ (1974). West Berlin, a city without immediate precedent, remained locked in a historical memory, a variant of the Sally Bowles tradition famously documented by Christopher Isherwood and others. It was as though the decadent ambience and artistic fervor of 1920s Berlin had been the genuinely authentic, ‘‘real’’ Berlin. If West Berlin was inward looking, back-patting, self-congratulatory on the one hand, on the other hand, its residents also experienced a chronic claustrophobia, bred by the Wall. Not that residents of Hamburg, Munich, or Düsseldorf necessarily left their cities any more often than West Berliners, but the background knowledge that the Wall surrounded them served as a kind of psychological white noise of vertical concrete engendering what appeared to be an obsession with leaving the city as often as was possible. DEFINING SEMANTICS

With the building of the Wall came the development of two distinct Berlin identities, East and West. No less symbolic constructions than the Wall containing and defining them, these two mutually referential identities were expressed by competing symbols within a contested urban whole. The o≈cial name of East Berlin was simply Berlin, or actually ‘‘Berlin, Capital of the Workers and Peasants State.’’ One quickly learned that when speakl 38

SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

ing to an East German o≈cial or border guard, the term ‘‘East Berlin’’ was never used; the guard would nastily respond that ‘‘there is no such place.’’ Semantic tangles were not the exclusive domain of the communist state, however; the way one referred to West Berlin in West Berlin and West Germany also was politically marked. For to write ‘‘West Berlin’’ (two words, both capitalized) acknowledged the existence and legitimacy of the eastern capital of the German Democratic Republic, and could be interpreted as a leftist statement. In contrast, right-wing newspapers hyphenated the two words, turning them into a compound single word; others wrote ‘‘Berlin (west),’’ conceding Berlin’s division as a lexical afterthought. The o≈cial policy of the Federal Republic of Germany was not to recognize the legitimacy of the Berlin Wall, which had, after all, been a nonconsensual, unilateral construction in an o≈cially four-sectored city. This policy of nonrecognition meant that no West German police, soldiers, border guards, or immigration o≈cials stood guard at any of the border crossings shared with East Berlin. Thus came into being a whole set of paradoxical consequences resulting from the o≈cial stance of the Wall’s nonexistence clashing with its concrete and asbestos materiality. TRAVERSING THE CORRIDORS

For many, if not most West Berliners, the only times they ventured east across the border were those occasions when they were leaving, either to visit West Germany over land, or else in order to fly west to locations with guaranteed sunshine such as Tenerife or Malta. The most economical way to leave was via one of the Eastern European airlines, such as the GDR’s Interflug, Romania’s Tarom, Poland’s Lot, or Hungary’s Malev. The departure point, Schönefeld, East Berlin’s airport, lay just over the border of West Berlin’s southeasternmost portion. The flights were so competitive that young ‘‘Wessis’’ (residents of the West German mainland) often made the long trip from the Bundesrepublik to Berlin purely to take advantage of these bargain fares. It was no simple matter to fly away from an East Berlin air terminal. One needed first to board a special bus for this purpose, in a large parking lot in the far west of the city, many hours in advance of the flight. Once arriving at the airport, it was quite unlike those in the West, as anyone familiar with Soviet-era transport will recall. Often the flights were inexplicably delayed for hours on end, without explanations or amenities o√ered. SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

39 l

The other occasion when West Berliners passed through East Germany, headed westward, would be on one of the three permitted highways, appropriately known as ‘‘corridors.’’ These corridors extended vertically, to the airspace linking West Berlin with West Germany; the three air corridors defined the permissible flight patterns. The corridors spread out like westward pointing spokes, traversing the GDR landscape and airscape between Berlin and West Germany. When flying to West Berlin from West Germany, one knew immediately when the West-East border had been traversed, as the plane rapidly lost altitude and dropped to the mandatory 10,000 feet flying height. Alternatively, driving through a land corridor, one could choose to head north, toward Hamburg, Denmark, or Holland; drive the southward route toward Munich, Italy, or Austria; or aim fairly due west, if the goal were Frankfurt or France. Among West Germans, these roads were the topic of much verbal abuse, for they could not compare with the state-of-the-art conditions of West Germany’s notorious, speed-limitless Autobahn. The real problem, as most people saw it, though, was the unfairly restrictive speed limit of 100 kilometers per hour—roughly equivalent to 60 miles per hour. These GDR highways were frequently punctuated by subtle speedtraps, and if caught, the driver had to pay cash (hard currency) on the spot. In the way that stereotyped Texans value at any cost their right to bear arms, many West Germans just as zealously valued their right to drive unencumbered by a speed limit. I remember well the blockade of West Berlin’s arteries by thousands of vehicles driven by incensed owners protesting the threat of an imposition of a speed limit by the local government. The only other time I recall seeing so many cars in one place in Berlin would have been at the westward border crossing Drei Linden, on a midsummer’s Friday afternoon in the late 1980s. That day it took us ninety minutes to cross through the various stages of this checkpoint. That was the occasion when the East German border guard, after suspiciously studying our car, an enormous old Citroen station wagon, complete with three banks of seats, remarked sarcastically ‘‘und wo sind die Kinder?’’ (so where are the children?). It was inconceivable that a mere two people could drive such a vehicle—huge, gas-guzzling, empty. Our car looked like it easily could have held at least two East German–produced Trabants, stu√ed with four East German adults apiece. Cars this size simply did not exist in East Germany. The guard’s remark, typical of the pervasive humor capable of transcending concrete walls and barbed wire, known as ‘‘Berliner Schnauze,’’ l 40

SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

elicited our response: ‘‘noch nicht,’’ not yet. Satisfied with our reply, he suppressed a smile and waved us through. OVERTAKING HISTORY

Tourists to Berlin were o√ered a political-historical panoply, including transgressive encounters with anything from exotic Turkish ghettos, to viewing stations along the Berlin Wall, to very public displays of pornography. The more daring took organized day trips in tour buses to East Germany, traversing the Cold War barrier to visit the Hohenzollern Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam as well as Marx-Engels Platz. While engaged in elaborated processes of auto-memorialization, drawing on well-recognized imagery, thus did Berlin impose its selectively revised pasts onto contemporary inflections of a reworked identity. As Jane Kramer wryly put it, West Berliners ‘‘were excused from history’’ (1999: 52).∞≤ West Berlin purchased East German land for its rubbish disposal. The image and the memory of the East as a waste dump, literal and figurative, has been di≈cult to eradicate from a western German collective subconscious. No doubt this powerful metaphor has remained a perceptual stumbling block in the continued symbolic vision and division of the city after unification. The mental maps of many Berliners do not perceive the city unmarked by the traces of its vanished concrete cleavage. Berlin narratives compete with the ideological force of the national narratives about German identity. The o≈cial West German imagining of its own people included the inhabitants of the GDR within its own national narrative, as virtual West German citizens—thought to be just temporarily outside the frontier’s fray. Yet with the realization of this national myth of unity, the unimagined consequences of the international merger—actually, ‘‘buyout’’ might be more appropriate—cut deep indeed, and the once-imagined united community proved profoundly divided, even contested. Borneman argues that the perception of a lack of unity has to do with the disintegration of the mirror image in which East and West saw themselves reflected throughout the Cold War. He writes, Perhaps one reason why unity is so di≈cult, from the West German perspective, lay in resentment at the disintegration of their mirror-image, and the collapse of a moral order that always ascribed to them superiority—at least over the Ossis. And perhaps, from the East German perspective, the di≈culty lay in SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

41 l

their ignorance of and inability to decipher and manipulate a sign system . . . in other words, on the very inferiority they bring with them into every interaction with West Germans. (1992: 334)

As traces of the Wall and the strip of no man’s land alongside it were being erased at breakneck speed, in the most massive of urban renewal projects, Berlin was perhaps the one spot in the Western world where the construction industry was not devastated by the worldwide recession. Two separate countries fused together, not so much as equals but, as a local expression put it, as West Germany’s colonization of East Germany. In many respects, East German society and political culture forcibly have been eliminated. In the ‘‘five new states’’ as the former GDR came to be called, this fusion precipitated a national identity crisis, collective cognitive dissonance on an unprecedented scale. THE WALL IN THE MIND / THE MIND’S WALL

‘‘That’s the Wall in your mind.’’ This was a German friend’s response to me after I had finished describing to him the peculiar feeling I had just experienced, driving back and forth into and out of territory that for so many years was out of bounds. I explained that the sensation of driving at will back and forth, in and out, was disconcerting. It was March 1990: the new Wall-less reality was only months old. It felt as though I were trespassing over an immutable limit, over the brink of which was the other side of the looking glass. Somehow I was cheating and eventually would be caught, found out. It was over the boundary of some bizarre game. Nowhere, perhaps, was it more remarkable than that spot which formerly had been a narrow path through a forest of concrete and masonry— now a wide open space. I knew a particular spot in Kreuzberg quite well from frequent Wall walks, where the space between the Wall and an adjacent building was only wide enough for a small strip of pavement. Colourful gra≈ti always embellished the Wall here. Now, looking over to this spot from the other side made me feel as if special powers gave me enhanced sight that could penetrate walls, or a Wall. As my friend and I had wound our way in and out of the east-west nolonger border-zone, delving into what felt like the perilous unknown territory, we found ourselves breathing sighs of relief each time we recognized the sturdy calligraphic markings of western streets. These western streets l 42

SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

were not immediately recognizable, since we were approaching them from novel directions, through the once out-of-bounds. But a landmark building, a billboard, a church or theater, told us that yes, we were back in the west. That day we were on a quest to find the East Berlin central train station— the Hauptbahnhof—we had been told of an exhibit of Wall art still standing there. The pursuit was hampered by one of those formerly typical experiences, the trivial instantiation of Cold War politics and games. Our map, the comprehensive, spiral-bound old West Berlin auto map of the entire city, with the thick pink line demarcating the east-west city border sliced through the middle, had no Hauptbahnhof in the index. Try as we might, we were unable to locate it. But the map listed an Ostbahnhof—East-train station—in the area; a bit confused, we thought we would head toward it. As we neared what our map told us was the Ostbahnhof, an enormous sign reading Hauptbahnhof loomed ahead. The mapmakers, refusing to recognize the symbolic importance of the possibility of a Haupt, Central, train station located in the eastern sector, simply renamed it Ost-, East; nominal/linguistic hegemony thereby reducing its geo-topo-transportographic significance. The combination of nervousness bred from our unfamiliarity, the anxiety of losing our way in an ostensibly familiar spot, and the sheer amazement that we even could be doing this at all contributed to a floating sense of disorientation. In this case, the bizarre dissonance of the experience was amplified by the sudden realization that the unfamiliar Hauptbahnhof was directly opposite, only a few steps beyond my former neighborhood in Kreuzberg. One friend aptly described this sensation: ‘‘it’s like suddenly living in a new city without ever having moved.’’ As Gupta and Ferguson have put it, ‘‘Where ‘here’ and ‘there’ become blurred in this way, the cultural certainties and fixities of the metropole are upset. . . . it is not only the displaced who experience a displacement’’ (1992: 10). WALL HACKERS, WALL HAWKERS

In autumn 1989, following a series of momentous marches in Leipzig, and amid internal political shake-ups at the highest echelons, the confused East German border guards did not know which orders to obey, and so obeyed none. This ensured that the ninth of November would go down in history as the day the Cold War ended. But November 9, 1989, also happened to be SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

43 l

FIGURE 2. Turkish Wall hacker, 1990

the fifty-first anniversary of what has come to be known as Kristallnacht (Crystal night), the day memorializing a period in 1938 when organized bands of Germans, led by Nazis, carried out pogroms throughout Germany, setting fire to synagogues, looting Jewish shops, and spreading terror among German Jews.∞≥ Some have wondered aloud about the alleged coincidental nature of the two events; if the 1990 celebrations on the first anniversary were any indication, it would seem that this more recent November 9 event presumably will facilitate German historical memory to turn a sharp corner, diverting attention away from the earlier event, even eclipsing it. For some Germans, this is a welcome departure, since to them the historical obsession and focus on the thirteen years of National Socialism, to the neglect of all that came before, represents a distorted view of German history. November 9 brought with it new business for petty entrepreneurs: selling pieces of the Berlin Wall. Once it was clear that the Wall was fair game, Berliners rushed to claim their own piece. The city’s hardware stores soon ran out of chisels. The chisellers found that their task was not an easy one— the Wall was very well constructed indeed and neither easily nor readily l 44

SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

FIGURE 3. Wall for sale: communism commodified, 1990

deconstructed. In the areas around heavily touristic spots such as the Brandenburg Gate and Checkpoint Charlie, hawkers sold the most expensive chunks of the colorful concrete. In Kreuzberg, o√ the tourist track, Turkish boys sold their pieces of chiselled Wall discounted. The Wall was for sale not only in Berlin but worldwide. For example, the New York Times ran advertisements with addresses where one could, for ten dollars, buy a chunk of the Wall, complete with authenticating certificate. This last-ditch e√ort by East Germany to raise hard currency was, in a sense, the ultimate commodification of communism. The most desirable Wall pieces were those with Wall art. But the very act of collecting it in itself destroyed an art form that by definition was processual and transitory. The art of the Wall had never lasted long, even the portions painted by world-famous artists such as Keith Haring brought in by the arts councils of West Berlin to make their marks. During its dismantling in 1990, some noted Berlin Wall artists, undeterred by the chisellers, painted and repainted the chiselled-out rough surfaces of the Wall, a≈rming the ephemeral nature of their work. The passing of the art of the Wall was memorialized in an alternative art SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

45 l

gallery in Kreuzberg. The exhibition opening was replete with speeches and praise for the artists and the photographers who had documented the Wall art over the years. The floor of the vast gallery space was punctuated by huge chunks of the wall, complete with the rusty sustaining metal inner reinforcement girders and struts. Paintings by a half dozen wall artists hung on the surrounding walls. But this vernissage was more unusual than most. First, the soundtrack: an audiotape, quite nearly becoming white noise, ran the entire evening; it was a recording of the sound of chisellers tapping, pounding, chipping, chiselling. Next, an inner courtyard led out of the gallery space, and there, perched high on a ladder, was one of the most famous Wall artists, spray-painting his familiar logo on the courtyard wall, in front of an enthusiastic crowd. It was a particular type of Berlin gathering, representing the ‘‘Schickeria,’’ the chic ‘‘beautiful people’’ of the arts community; but they were there as Berliners, seeking a≈rmation of an identity slipping away as fast as the chisellers could chisel. In their attempt to salvage the Wall art, and with it to create a uniquely Berlin experience, the organizers of the installation had decontextualized something that inherently could not countenance this dissociation; the physical and conceptual displacement of the fragments of the Wall rendered it forced. It was pure imitation, despite the clever background drone of chisels at work. It was, in e√ect, relegated to the level of any other gallery opening. The Schickeria at the gallery sensed that they were on the cusp of disenfranchisement. It seemed that the preciousness of their lifestyle was in fact limited to the bounded, controlled, and necessarily Walled Berlin that had provided license not found elsewhere. It had begun to slip away in the face of speculation and capital investment from the West, and the masses of new immigrants from the East. The excitement at this display of pieces and processes of Wall art o√ered the ultimate breath of an instance also of collective e√ervescence of the collective consciousness—however displaced it may have been. Bookshops sold calendars with glossy color photos of Wall art; all over, colorful framed photographs and posters of Wall gra≈ti were displayed. These nostalgic impulses were symptomatic of a more profound sense of longing for the good old days of Manichean simplicity. In those days, all knew who they were, whom they supported, and where demarcation lines were drawn. And all this was instantiated by the strident visibility of the Wall, just as it was in the process of disappearing, becoming re-marked in its invisibility. l 46

SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

In the 1990s the ‘‘reprieve was over’’ as Berlin’s critic and commentator Jane Kramer put it; Berliners became ‘‘amateur semiologists, tracking the signs of a terrible zeitgeist that they worry will replace their own. They are preoccupied with the state of their German souls, with being German, after fifty years of what may have been a healthy vacation from themselves’’ (1999: 54). Living in a city obsessed with its own symbols, Berliners have come to terms with the notion that perhaps Berlin ‘‘isn’t a symbol. Like the Wall ten years ago, it’s there. Live with it’’ (64). Perhaps the symbolism of Berlin has come to clash with an altered, intractable reality, one that no longer lends itself to the fantasies encompassing both escapism and ultimate unity. Berliners are constantly reminded of the unfinished project of their city as well as of its provisional place within an ultimately unrealizable national narrative of identity. Part of the celebration of unification anticipated a much-desired return to ‘‘normality’’ with all its attendant aspirations to a transparent, democratic institutional culture.∞∂ These confusing sentiments, conflating exuberance of the present with a fear and excitement for the future, but mediated by a yearning for the past, together characterized the entering into the destabilized new era of unification. THE CONUNDRUM OF COSMOPOLITICS

Throughout the 1990s, many Berliner politicians strived to achieve full recognition of their new place within geopolitics. They hope to celebrate a more democratic strand of German republicanism, emphasizing its cosmopolitan Welto√enheit—world-openness—inclusiveness. The selfascribed cosmopolitanism raises interesting questions about its relationship to global modernity, history, and wider social processes in Germany. The rhetoric of cosmopolitanism enables entrée into altered temporal and spatial configurations envisioned by German political discourse and popular culture. Some contemporary theorists have questioned the use of an enlightenment notion of cosmopolitanism, too complicit with the urban experience of modern European travelers. Others have tried to explore the potential application of the heterogeneous discourse of cosmopolitanism.∞∑ In particular, critics conversant with German social theory and cultural politics have pointed out the shifting meanings of cosmopolitanism, as it traverses di√erent spatio-temporal dimensions of modernity. However, the kind of cosmopolitanism reflected in the political discourse of Berlin politicians, SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

47 l

and more broadly of German political rhetoric, shares a global sensibility for discourses on supranational and transnational politics. This is especially true in the way members of the European community share matters of economics and law, but crucially it does not extend in practice to applying these new sensibilities toward other cultures as equal partners. We should be aware of the dangerous assumptions behind a cosmopolitan tradition that is still grounded in elitist, hierarchical visions of culture. The cosmopolitan mission has underpinned the need of Germany to demonstrate to the world that it is ready to help others (beleaguered nations, victims of violence and ethnic conflicts, etc.). The entanglement of cosmopolitan discourses with the conflicting realities of empire, of globalization, and of war throws into doubt the unquestioned neutrality of appeals to a benign, enlightenment notion of cosmopolitanism.∞∏ The contestation of the enlightenment notion of cosmopolitanism has been at the center of the work of critics such as Cli√ord, Hannerz, Benhabib, and others writing over the past decade. Cli√ord in particular ‘‘has been calling on anthropologists to bring back into their ethnographies their ‘cosmopolitan intermediaries’ who intervene in and help constitute them, and to focus on hybrid, cosmopolitan experiences as much as on rooted, native ones’’ (Robbins 1998: 258). He has challenged the division of social actors as either cosmopolitans or authentic natives. In contrast to the ideological discrimination implied by this opposition Cli√ord accentuates a zone of hybridity where multiple identities, outlooks, and practices remain in a state of flux: they are continuously subject to redefinition, renegotiation, and contestation and therefore can never be taken for granted. Under the banner of ‘‘discrepant cosmopolitanism’’ Cli√ord aims at rescuing the transnational movements across several forms of a≈liation and belonging, whether in the ‘‘local valleys and neighborhoods’’ or in ‘‘denser urban sites of encounter and relative anonymity’’ (1998: 367). By contrast, Ulf Hannerz has written that ‘‘the cosmopolitan can to some extent be channelled into the local; and precisely because these are on the whole separate spheres the cosmopolitan can become a broker, an entrepreneur who makes a profit’’ (1996: 110). The danger of such entrepreneurial activity, I would argue, is that it often results in a trivializing exercise of cultural commodification. Hannerz’s distinction between travelers and locals seems to exclude immigrants from an active cosmopolitanism. Thus he argues that most ‘‘ordinary labor migrants do not become cosmopolitans . . . for them going away may be, ideally, home plus higher income; l 48

SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

often the involvement with another culture is not a fringe benefit but a necessary cost to be kept as low as possible. A surrogate home is again created with the help of compatriots, in whose circle one becomes encapsulated’’ (107). Implicit in his argument is a conviction that a true cosmopolitan is capable of encountering a set of di√erent experiences and cultures, developing not only an aesthetic appreciation of it but also a competence in their management: ‘‘It is not a way of becoming a local, but rather of simulating local knowledge’’ (109). The implication of this line of thought is that the traveling cosmopolitan remains culturally privileged above and against the native, who remains excluded from the openness and flexibility of cosmopolitan culture. This can be seen in Hannerz’s argument that exiles are incapable of achieving an authentic cosmopolitanism, in-sofar as their lives are characterized by an element of coercion, separation, and encapsulation. For the exile, ‘‘Life in another country may be home plus safety, or home plus freedom, but often it is just not home at all. He is surrounded by the foreign culture but does not often immerse himself in it. Sometimes his imperfections as a cosmopolitan may be the opposite of those of the tourist: he may reluctantly build up a competence, but he does not enjoy it’’ (105). Hannerz’s model of exile would also apply to a rather problematic understanding of an anthropology of transnational migration. According to this model, immigrants too would be seen as being incapable of living pleasurably; the separation from their homelands is due to their not having the option of choosing between a homeland and diasporic existence (105). Here, local knowledge would seem to be best appreciated by the transnational cosmopolitan sojourner who lives across multiple boundaries and crossings and temporal rhythms, without commitment or immediate participation in local processes. Once again, the issue of aesthetic pleasure derived from the cosmopolitan encounter with others provides the standard for judging who is able to exercise the cosmopolitan option. Ultimately Hannerz’s model tends toward an elitist notion of cosmopolitanism privileging bourgeois cultural capital and taste in-so-far as it is able to enjoy otherness (the diacritics of other peoples, cultures, places) while remaining separated from it and separable in principle. Hannerz’s anthropology of migration bears troubling resemblance to the elitist vision of cosmopolitanism shared by the city of Berlin and by segments of the German public who overemphasize its metropolitan character as a site of Hochkultur. There is no inherent reason why, for example, on the city’s o≈cial website, the image of a British Jewish conductor directSHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

49 l

ing a state-sponsored Berlin orchestra should be chosen to characterize the Welto√enheit (world-openness) of Berlin, and not, for example, a local minority artist who has acquired multiple cultural competencies and may have mastered a variety of aesthetic tastes and expressions. Instead some German institutions that associate cosmopolitanism with minority discourse do so almost exclusively with the more sophisticated frames produced by the cultural elites, whether locally bounded or transnational. In doing so, this political and cultural discourse excludes the experiences of the local minorities who do not fit with a vision of metropolitan culture. As becomes clear throughout the next chapters, behind the definition of a metropolitan culture lie unquestioned assumptions of what qualifies as high culture (Hochkultur) as well as views of the translocal as incapable of participating fully in its mainstream. In particular the role of translocals emerges as mediating between Hochkultur and ‘‘foreign’’ minority cultures. What makes this relationship problematic is that these mediators are encouraged, even forced to conform to the projections of their German sponsors in what and how they produce. (Chapter 7 explores this more fully.) From the point of view of Cli√ord’s interpretation of cosmopolitanism, this elitist model is complicit with modernist visions of the bourgeois urban sojourner. Instead, following Cli√ord, one might emphasize the cosmopolitan qualities of the translocals themselves (transnational immigrants, diasporic settlers, refugees, etc.) whose ability to inhabit multilocalities points toward a di√erent sort of cosmopolitan identity. Hence cosmopolitanism need not be associated with the privilege of social class and aesthetic taste. In the following chapters I suggest that it is imperative in the German context to invert the hierarchical ranking of cosmopolitanism in order to acknowledge and legitimize what I dub the demotic cosmopolitan practices of Cli√ord’s ‘‘relatively anonymous’’ transnational peoples (ibid.). It would be demotic in a sense of accentuating the society’s anonymous, whose contributions are implicitly disvalued for a cosmopolitical project eclipsed by the hegemony of arbiters of cultural production. Demotic as well envisages an impulse toward democratizing the cosmopolitical. In order to redress the restricted vision of cosmopolitanism the next chapter will more radically question the mechanism of social and political occlusion at work in the German public sphere, challenging its implicit aestheticism and ideological narrowness.

l 50

SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS

2. ‘‘We Called for Labor, but People Came Instead’’ l This chapter interrogates the ways foreign subjects in Germany are represented. Semantic inscriptions of foreignness reveal how Turkish subjects are exposed, humiliated, and deposed through a consistent social logic that finds its symbolic referent in the lowest site of the social body and the social hierarchy. In turn, many Turkish social actors have internalized this negative symbolism of social inferiority, sometimes in ironic, playful ways as in Feridun Zaimo˘glu’s work, through the production and reproduction of the language of jokes and the idiom of work and leisure. The focus here is the way this negative symbolism enters into a cultural dialogue that often places only the German collective body, with its imagined homogeneity, at the apex of social hierarchies. The deployment of these divergent symbolisms has deep roots in everyday uses of language. An important indication of some German perceptions that Ausländer do not belong to their own social sphere is concealed in the compound German word—Überfremdung—most simply, ‘‘over-foreignization,’’ also the title of a short essay by the Swiss writer Max Frisch. He opens with: Man hat Arbeitskräfte gerufen, und es kommen Menschen. We called for labor, but people came instead.∞

Frisch captures the sense of surprise of the West German nation as a whole, faced by the unprecedented scale of immigration over the last half-century. Initially the West German government had recruited manpower—hat Arbeitskräfte gerufen—but it discovered instead that the Menschen who came as short-term Konjunktur were increasingly remaining for the long term. Furthermore, as Menschen, these incomers began claiming the same political and social rights enjoyed by Germans citizens. Fremd, the midmorpheme in Frisch’s title, carries other meanings such as alien, strange, odd, unknown, peculiar. The term’s historical resonance recalls the Third Reich, when Fremd was half of the compound word Fremdarbeiter; these were slave laborers imported by the Nazis.≤

FIGURE 4. As if I were chattel / Als wäre ich Ware. Hanefi Yeter, 1982, oil on wood.

From the late 1970s onward, the German media increasingly expressed concern about Überfremdung, understood as the perception that the ‘‘German boat is full.’’ In the wake of unification in the 1990s, the word began to be applied to second and third generations of immigrant families who wished to claim their belongingness to the German state. This created more dramatic forms of social panic expressed in xenophobic violence, along with a resurgence of anti-Semitism (Habermas 1994b). This was due, according to Habermas, to a wide perception across the German population that unification has not delivered the economic prosperity it had promised. The economic crash experienced by the former GDR states exacerbated social tensions, especially among disa√ected youth, easy targets of extremist right propaganda, transforming them ‘‘into projection figures of social fantasies of violence’’ (ibid.: 136). Throughout the 1990s in now-famous sites such as Mölln and Solingen, Turkish and other minority populations became the targets and victims of extremist neo-Nazi youth groups calling for the elimination of ‘‘parasites’’ who were feeding on the German welfare system. HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS OF ÜBERFREMDUNG

Überfremdung has a long-standing problematic status in German history. The term was used widely at the turn of the century to describe the Polish migration to the eastern provinces—a migration which at the time was perceived as excessive. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, between 1870 and 1914, industrialization in the west encouraged migration from the east (Bade 1987). German agricultural laborers from Junker landed estates in the eastern regions moved to newly industrialized western areas. Consequently, Poles began to move en masse to fill the agricultural jobs, and this period was marked by dramatic demographic shifts in the agricultural and industrial sectors. Whereas the German economy had been primarily agricultural until the mid-nineteenth century, by 1871 the rural segment dropped to 64 percent of the population; by 1900 it was 46 percent, and the decrease continued thereafter. Between 1882 and 1907 the number of workers employed in industry increased from 4.1 million to 8.6 million, or by 110 percent, while the actual population only increased from 45.2 million to 61.7 million, or by 37 percent (Rhoades 1978: 556). The first wave of Polish migrants came for seasonal, agricultural work. Similar to expectations in the early years of the guestworker migration, these ‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

53 l

workers were expected to work only on a temporary, seasonal basis. They were obliged to register with police, not unlike the postwar Gastarbeiter ; many failed to register, remaining illegally (ibid). Later, Poles moved into industrial sectors further west, many working in mining areas. By 1913 in the Ruhr region (Germany’s central industrial area, then as now) there were 1,177 Polish associations. Polish banks, churches, newspapers, and trade unions flourished, to the point that, as early as 1886, ‘‘cries of Überfremdung arising from nationalist sentiment brought Bismarck to expel thirty thousand Polish workers and temporarily halt immigration’’ (ibid: 557; see also Brubaker 1992). In 1908 public use of the Polish language was banned, which led to the bizarre phenomenon of ‘‘ ‘dumb assemblies’ . . . in which nobody said a word, but [at which] leaflets in Polish were read communally’’ (Castles and Kosack 1973: 20). The influx of Poles did not escape the purview of Max Weber, who, in his inaugural address of 1885, upon his appointment as professor of economics in Freiburg, asserted that the influx of Polish workers from the east threatened the hegemony of German culture where it had been strongest, among the Junker landowners. He called for the immigration to cease and the borders to be secured (Giddens 1972: 11). In the 1910 census 1,259,880 foreigners and 64,935,993 Germans lived in Germany (Krane 1975: 65). The o≈cial term for the foreigners, Reichsausländer—‘‘foreigners of the German Empire’’—indicated they were residents, not citizens. Though there was a significant repatriation of Poles, many did remain and assimilate into the surrounding population; in Germany today it is common to encounter Polish surnames. This historical precedent has been summoned in revisionist arguments frequently made about Turkish immigrants. Ignorant of the true di≈culties encountered by the Poles a century ago, complaints made about the high Turkish profile have been expressed in terms of the Poles: ‘‘Why can’t the Turks just settle in and assimilate like the Poles did?’’ However, with the new wave of immigrating ethnic Polish ‘‘German’’ Aussiedler,≥ the xenophobia has become more complex, and Poles, part of the contemporary ‘‘flood’’ of new immigrants, no longer are seen as the virtuous exemplars of a successful assimilation. Finally, less than a half-century after the earlier Polish migration, Nazis used the term Überfremdung when describing Jews and other undesirables in the Third Reich. And still today, that historical circumstance is evoked in debates over the nature and legitimacy of the Turkish presence in Germany. l 54

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

GUESTS AT WORK

The very term Gastarbeiter, guestworkers, underlines the ambiguity of the migrants’ status. Its wide currency (in the first decades of the migration) strengthened the linguistic leverage exercised against the foreigners, for the term itself carries with it specific connotations. For example, guests are, by definition, temporary and expected to return home. Guests are bound to the rules and regulations of the hosts. Whatever the intentions, guests rarely feel ‘‘at home’’ in foreign environs. The prevailing discourse is particularly loaded with denotative and connotative meaning. The word Arbeit—work, labor—also appears in the compound word by which the migrant workers have been best known, Gastarbeiter, guestworker. In our present epoch, the word Arbeit has been inhabited by another association as well. It appears in the horrifically ironic Arbeit macht frei (work makes free) in what we now know to have been an unparalleled perversion of the word, emblazoned on the gates and arches over the entrances to Nazi concentration camps. The victims of the camps did perform ‘‘Arbeit’’ as prisoners and slave labor as long as their bodies could manage it. But more important was the fact that they were themselves ver-arbeitet (worked, worked over, processed).∂ Another type of worker was used by the Nazis: the Fremdarbeiter, foreign workers of the forced labor program.∑ Due to the National Socialist connotations, this word has not been used in the FRG since the end of World War Two.∏ Though the word Gast- and not Fremd- is a≈xed onto the word Arbeiter, and the word used to describe their foreignness is Ausländer, and rarely Fremd, the unfortunate association with the foreign workers of former times remains. This becomes clearer when compared to Switzerland: there, the historical markedness of the word is absent and the term Fremdarbeiter rather than Gastarbeiter has gained colloquial currency. Arbeiter refers to the economic and use value of the migrant determined solely in relation to her or his labor—Arbeitskraft—manpower, as Max Frisch has said (1967: 100). Their identity, then, defined by the German term, reduces migrants to their function. A powerful term, it marginalizes and objectifies migrants, leaving limited conceptual, social, or linguistic space for meaningful incorporation into the society. Ultimately, the term virtually precludes a transformation from guestworker to immigrant— guests always go home again. In the 1980s the term Ausländer began to replace the original Gastarbeiter ‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

55 l

moniker. Its references are more existential than Gastarbeiter, reducing persons to manpower, function, and temporal restrictions. The former term is often considered less derogatory than the latter, though that is not always the case. For example, when a Turkish man in Berlin asked me rhetorically, ‘‘Why is it that only the Turks are the Ausländer?’’ his meaning was unambiguous. Echoing George Orwell’s famous statement about relative equality in Animal Farm in this case as well,π some Ausländer are more ‘‘ausländisch’’ than others. The word is part of the o≈cial designation (‘‘foreign employees and their dependents’’) but if one digs a bit deeper, the word’s connotations become still more complex. As in French, where étranger can be rendered as either ‘‘stranger,’’ ‘‘foreigner,’’ or ‘‘outsider,’’ Ausländer does not only mean ‘‘foreigner.’’ Though it can mean simply ‘‘foreigner,’’ particularly when counterpoised to Inländer, native (such as in the book Ausländerbuch für Inländer), it can also mean ‘‘outsider,’’ or ‘‘alien.’’ The Federal Republic of Germany o≈cially has defined itself as a ‘‘non-immigration land’’ (one often hears politicians and generic citizens asserting that ‘‘Wir sind kein Einwanderungsland,’’ we are not an immigration country). It follows logically that the migrant workers might neither be considered nor treated as immigrants. It is the migrant workers’ potential manpower that defines their presence in Germany—originally a welcome nostrum to the labor shortage—and their absence from Turkey, content to export its under- and unemployment problems, receiving in return hard currency in remittances. Thus, for most parties concerned it is, as Max Frisch points out with poignant irony, this very manpower (Arbeitskräfte) that justifies, rationalizes, and defines the migrants’ presence in Germany (1967: 100). The epithet Gastarbeiter immediately refers to the nonpermanence implicit in the word ‘‘guest.’’ Additionally, guests are subject to rules and conventions of hospitality, conventions defined and determined by the hosts. The term Gastarbeiter is a painful one for Turks. On occasion I have seen it translated literally as guest workers: konuk (new Turkish)—or misafir (old Turkish) for guest—i¸sçiler, workers. However, there is always an ironic twist to this usage, since ‘‘guest’’ carries with it in Turkish a whole host of connotations, implications, a ritualized code for conduct, and carefully prescribed behavior. The Turkish ‘‘guests’’ feel that their treatment in Germany violates every tenet of this set of expectations; they in turn judge the Germans by these violated standards and are pained by what they see as an insulting appellation. As such, guests are privileged and l 56

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

marked in their liminal status, a status of residing in one place but being of another.∫ In Greek, filoksenia, literally the love of the foreigner/stranger/outsider, is an essential component of Greek identity.Ω When the migrants refer to themselves in German, the word Gastarbeiter is often mixed with bitter sarcasm, feeling the ‘‘guest-’’ part of the compound word to be an oxymoron. The only contexts in which I heard or saw the literal translations of Gastarbeiter (Greek: filoksenoumeni ergates) were either in awkward, formal translations or in self-ironic conversation. The more common selfreferential Turkish expressions are not translations of ‘‘guest’’ but simply ‘‘worker,’’ i¸sçi, or ‘‘German-like, German-ish’’ (alamanyalı, almanyalı, or almancı ), also referring implicitly to the migrant’s identity as a worker. The representations of self are self-deprecatory, ironic, and humbling. A joke told among Turks in the 1970s and 1980s points to this and other issues as well: Three workers, a Turk, a Greek, and an Italian, are employed in a small German factory in Berlin, where each operates a small machine. The Turk works harder than the others, so the boss decides that he can run two machines by himself. So he dismisses the Italian. By using two hands, the Turk not only manages to operate both machines, but increases the productivity. So the owner reduces his expenses by getting rid of the Greek and giving the Turk the job of operating all three machines. The Turk succeeds, but he has to use his feet, and he has to rush back and forth from one machine to another. One day the owner comes in and is surprised to see the Turkish worker with a broomstick thrust into his anus. When asked about it, the Turk replies that his anus was the only part of his body not working for the boss. Now, while running from machine to machine he can also sweep the floor. (Toelken 1985: 158–59)

The joke contains several layers of meaning: it describes the success of German capitalism in dividing the foreign working population; treated thus, they turn against one another rather than uniting in solidarity. There is also the exploitation of the foreign worker and the worker’s body—a foreign body. The work demands placed on the worker turn his body into a machine of synchronized parts, no longer an organic whole. Similar to the machines, his body is treated as an object in the service of German production. The male Turkish worker is feminized: the joke’s transgressive nature suggests connected themes of homosexuality and subordination. In Turk‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

57 l

ish culture, as well as elsewhere in the Middle East and Mediterranean region, male homosexuality is not a single category but rather divided into two component parts, passive and active, each highly charged and differently associated and valorized. In this joke, the broomstick in the worker’s anus reduces him to the lowest of the low, the feminized passive receptacle. The Turkish words for the passive sexual partner, the catamite, ibne (from Arabic), or pu¸st (from Persian, for back), are opposed to the active partner, kulampara (from Persian). The former, the passive, constitutes one of the most serious invectives that can be dealt to a Turkish man. That the broomstick is inserted voluntarily by the Turk indicates a degree of ironic complicity in the humiliating situation. The Turk in a sense is saying to the German boss, ‘‘I can out-do you; I can exploit myself to degrees that exceed even you.’’ In addition, he is symbolizing to himself that his condition is one of total subordination, suggested by the sexual metaphor. For Turkish tellers of this joke, it can be understood as the crystallization of the hierarchical relations of domination and subordination which they feel pertain to them as Gastarbeiter. ELABORATIONS OF EXCLUSION

Debates about policies and practices toward these ‘‘guests’’ have persisted for decades. Some of the diverse expressions are illustrated in the following texts, drafted at di√erent times and targeting specific constituencies. Many of the texts, written or spoken, share a concern with the purity of social, geographic, and discursive space and its transgression; they also point to di√erent ways of elaborating the foreigner problem by o√ering a subtle representation of outsiders as either the enemy of Western culture or ‘‘cocitizens’’ to be tolerated. The first document presented, a private charter that became known as the Heidelberg Manifesto, was produced by a group of German intellectuals and professionals, nationalist by persuasion, xenophobic in outlook. The second set of texts, published for the public by the Federal Government, targeting in particular the foreign community, is an exercise in social representation by the governing Christian Democratic Party. Parts of a speech by former chancellor Helmut Kohl also are analyzed, raising questions about social hierarchies among discrete groups of foreigners. The publications of the o≈ce of Berlin’s Commissioner of Foreigners’ A√airs illustrate a vastly di√erent multicultural agenda embracing di√erence and putting a positive spin on Berlin’s plurality of cultures. l 58

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

Finally, a set of newspaper columns meant as light humor reveal controversial and surprising reactions from readers. These debates about foreigner relations can be articulated through three main positions: closure, culture, and coexistence. First, the closure position reinforces a logic of belonging through exaggerated emphasis on race and ethnicity, ‘‘represented by the slogans ‘Germany for the Germans’ and ‘out with foreigners’ ’’ (Barbieri 1998: 73). This position characterizes the anxieties of some segments of German society in the face of perceived threats by the presence of alien subjects. The second is the culture position, distancing itself from any overt reference to ethnicity and race, privileging instead the willingness or unwillingness of foreigners ‘‘to transfer their national loyalty and to take on a German cultural identity’’ (74). The third position, that of the Berlin Foreigner Commissioner, emphasizes the possibility of Germans coexisting with others, where ‘‘the basis for inclusion is membership in the state society (that is, involvement and participation in the economic and social structure of the community)’’ (75).∞≠ OUTLANDISH FEARS: THE HEIDELBERG MANIFESTO

A group of German professors, some of whom were also medical doctors, circulated the ‘‘Heidelberger Manifest vom 17 Juni 1981.’’ An inflammatory document, it claimed that Germans were beginning to feel foreign in their own land, in their neighborhoods and workplaces. The signatories were motivated by the implicit threat to a desired and perceived natural homogeneity. The text, based on the assertion of fundamental di√erences between peoples’ (Völker) genetic makeups, and traditions, discussed the potential eugenic disaster that would result from the integration of nonGerman foreigners and the ‘‘known ethnic catastrophe of a multicultural society.’’ This ‘‘known catastrophe’’ is left unidentified. Phrases such as ‘‘the foundation of our western, Christian patrimony’’ abound, as the Manifesto expresses concern for the education of their German children in classes dominated by ‘‘illiterate foreigners,’’ clearly referring to the non-Christian Turks in the German midst. The ‘‘illiterate foreigners,’’ the children of migrant workers speaking non-German languages, were depicted as a trespassing Muslim peril. Definite convictions about place and space emerge as underlying concerns of the drafters of this Manifesto. The authors believe the physical space of German society has been overtaken, undermined by the increas‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

59 l

ingly unbearable number of outsiders (hence the rhetoric of Überfremdung). This space in their vision should remain an unsullied German Christian space, unviolated and inviolable by un-Germanic non-Christian denizens. In its alarmism, this position expresses an essentialist envisaging of Germany. The document recommends that development aid be o√ered to the Gastarbeiter in their homelands, claiming that the monetary expenditure would be well worth the cost of cleansing the Heimat of undesirables. It suggests that the German policy be changed ‘‘to bring the machines to the people, not the people to the machines.’’ While calling for the repatriation of foreigners and proposing public expenditure for their expulsion, at the same time the Federal Republic quietly was spending large sums to buy, quite literally, ethnic Germans, bringing them into the body politic as Übersiedler, the emigrants from East Germany.∞∞ The Manifesto states how the expulsion of foreigners would bring ‘‘social and ecological relief ’’ to Germany. This needs to be placed in the context of the German government’s concern about the negative population growth among ethnic Germans in Germany, countervailed against by the high, positive Turkish birthrate; hence Germany’s strongly pronatalist policies. Finally, with the malice of foresight, the framers of the Manifesto dissociated themselves from racism, ideological nationalism, and both left and right extremism. The Manifesto proved to be hugely controversial; vocal and angry public reaction to the document questioned its underlying agenda of a desire for a sacrosanct, social space, deploring its resonances with National Socialist rhetoric and ideology. The fact that such a document was composed and supported by leading members of Germany’s elite proved highly troubling for many. STATISTICS AND THE STATE

The crumbling of the Eastern European regimes not only brought the two Germanies together but opened the door to hundreds of thousands of westward-bound Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Romanians, Russians, and Gypsies. Along with the Turks, it was particularly the latter groups, including the Sinti and Roma, who absorbed the xenophobic hatred and violence. Rather than dealing with the root causes of the social problems of xenophobia, and rather than isolating the perpetrators of the crimes, the government instead opted to focus on the victims, by recasting the status of certain foreigners and amending legal rights. The sense of being overl 60

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

whelmed by foreigners provided the impetus for constitutional reform of Germany’s asylum law. Germany’s reformed asylum law fundamentally changed the nature and practice of asylum in Europe. Prior to the constitutional changes in 1993, Germany served as the country with the most liberal asylum policy in Europe, accepting 60 percent of all asylum applicants in the EU. No doubt a remnant of the post–World War II moral reparations, in a sense it was a recognition of collective culpability for the ethnic cleansing carried out by the German National Socialist state. However, one consequence of the political unification of the two German states was a retrenchment of this liberal stance. Thus, despite what on paper appeared to be a liberal asylum policy, most applications for asylum were denied. For example, the figures in early 1993 showed that 1,516,000 persons had taken refuge in Germany, of whom 1,286,000 remained in that liminal status of stateless foreigners, de facto refugees under threat of being sent away, or asylum applicants. Of the more than 1.5 million foreign refugees, only 100,000, or 6.6 percent, had been granted asylum. Not only did the conservative Christian Democrats adopt this policy; the Social Democratic Party supported it as well. This took them a long way from the halcyon days of the 1960s and early 1970s, in the height of guestworker recruitment, when the spd had even proposed the radical idea that the Turks be given communal voting rights—and this prior to the 1973 Anwerbestopp, the recruitment halt, thus at a time when the guestworkers were still seen as temporary workers/sojourners. The amendments have generated an entirely new set of problems, of third country liability, by creating what has been called a cordon sanitaire. According to this new law, no one who has passed through any country sharing a German border qualifies for asylum in Germany. And those who have passed through a border country, for example, Poland, are returned there.∞≤ But what if Poland decides not to accept them back? Most likely this remains only a remote possibility, considering the size and strength of the muscle Germany might choose to flex toward Poland, in terms of economic and trade pressure and the like. One can, therefore, envision a lively trade for those dealing in the business of smuggling persons—Europe’s answer to the coyotes of the Rio Grande. The law needs to be seen against the backdrop of the growth of rightist extremist violence against foreigners. Though scores of incidents are reported throughout Germany weekly, the most famous have been the arson attacks in the 1990s, killing eight Turkish Germans, first in Mölln, then in ‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

61 l

Solingen. In light of this, it is significant to note that the sizable Turkish population of 2.5 million is not part of the recent wave of persons seeking asylum. The latter are the refugees considered so threatening that the German constitution was felt in need of radical alterations to ensure that future attempts at asylum claims legally would be thwarted. What does it mean that as part of the growing xenophobic violence the new, needy refugees are seen by the perpetrators in the same light as the Turkish Germans, the vast majority of whom are employed and tax-paying, and increasing numbers of whom are German citizens? To better appreciate this, it may be helpful to look at some postunification documents released by the German government addressing violence toward foreigners. A report published in 1993 entitled Hostility toward Foreigners in Germany: Facts, Analyses, Arguments, as well as its sequel two years later, prove revealing. First, the key word in the title, ‘‘foreigners,’’ includes not only recent refugees applying for asylum but also the second- and third-generation o√spring of migrant workers, many born in Germany to parents or grandparents recruited as workers over thirty years ago. It also includes German Jews. O√e, in Varieties of Transition: The East European and East German Experience, writes that ‘‘given the genocidal crimes that have been committed by Germans and the fact they are remembered as such both abroad and domestically. . . . acts that betray racist attitudes and are even remotely reminiscent of such crimes [are] bound to inflict substantial damage not only upon the victims, but upon the international credibility and reputation of everything the united German state has so far rather successfully pretended to stand for’’ (1997: 69). Indeed, Germany’s image abroad has been particularly worrisome and is taken seriously, certainly due in part to the fear of a loss in foreign investment. The underlying concern regarding the image problem is any reference to Germany’s past, as the 1993 report states: It (is) necessary to examine the background to this phenomenon and gauge its extent and possible development. It requires a major public relations campaign, especially as the wave of xenophobic aggression almost inevitably evoked sensitive comparisons with the days of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era in Germany. Where such feelings are confirmed or reinforced there is a danger of permanent damage to Germany’s image, which has once again proved fragile. (Bundesrepublik 1993: 3)

l 62

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

A few pages later, this issue comes up once more, as it states unequivocally, ‘‘there is no reason whatever to compare the post-unification situation in Germany with that existing at the time of the Weimar Republic’’ (Bundesrepublik 1993: 5). Thirty pages are devoted to ‘‘integrative measures,’’ though ‘‘integration’’ is never defined. One problem contributing to the ideological intransigence of the government’s position lies in the implied meaning of the very terms that deliberately are used and those avoided. The report mentions two campaigns coordinated by the government’s Ombudsman for Foreigners, the first, an appeal ‘‘For Human Dignity and an Open Society, against Hostility towards Foreigners,’’ and second, a publicity campaign with the slogan: ‘‘Foreigners Need Friends. So Do We.’’ There is another slogan, advanced by ‘‘alternative’’ and foreigner advocacy groups, seen occasionally on buttons, bumper stickers, posters, and the like, which goes: Ich bin ein Ausländer—fast überall (I am a foreigner—nearly everywhere). While flying on Lufthansa the year following the publication of this report, I noticed several flight attendants sporting badges pinned to their uniforms, reading wir sind Ausländer jeden Tag, we are foreigners every day. These slogans reinforce the hierarchy of social relations. Some place the alien other into the lowest stratum, according to which the foreigner (read Turk) does not inhabit an elevated status of immigrant but rather remains foreign, Ausländer—literally, outlander, whence the English word ‘‘outlandish’’—foreigners, at best; Gastarbeiter, guestworkers, at worst. Chancellor Kohl stressed in an interview: ‘‘We need our foreign guests . . . without guestworkers the present level of economic prosperity in Germany would be unimaginable’’ (quoted in Bundesrepublik 1993 report: 85). An o≈cial government line is that the German economy is dependent on them, therefore they should be valued for service to the German economy. But, as Kohl said, they are valued as guestworkers—the word ‘‘immigrant’’ remains conspicuous in its absence. In the 1993 report, statistics play a convincing role—particularly regarding the image question. The government is extremely concerned that Germany and Germans not be perceived as xenophobic, ausländerfeindlich (foreigner-hating, xenophobic). The report states that the German people’s ‘‘concern at the sharp, uncontrolled influx of asylum-seekers wrongly has been described as ‘xenophobia,’ ’’ asserting instead a ‘‘generally friendly public attitude towards foreigners.’’ They find proof of this in surveys

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

63 l

showing that ‘‘94% (of Germans) condemn violence against asylumseekers’’ and ‘‘60% of Germans’’ felt that ‘‘the large number of foreigners in the country was no problem’’—although admittedly this is down from 72 percent (Bundesrepublik 1993 report: 24). The report attempts to manipulate perception with the half-full/halfempty trick by neglecting to state the obvious. According to their figures, if 60 percent of the population surveyed believe foreigners unproblematic, an alarming 40 percent of the German population believed the presence of foreigners in the country was a significant problem—of still greater concern when compared to the former figure of 28 percent. In addition, the government plays down any anti-Semitism, claiming ‘‘anti-Semitic vandalism and swastikas painted in Jewish cemeteries not only created an impression of hostility towards foreigners: Such outrageous acts were also bound to evoke memories of anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews.’’ Through the use of this language the anonymous authors of the report imply that the anti-Semitic acts were not quite real; instead, they were evocative instances of impression-management. To support this view, they point to the absence of anti-Semitism in a survey which listed fifteen di√erent sorts of people, including Gypsies, right-wing extremists, homosexuals, people with aids, and Jews, and asked presumably random Germans for a ranking of any who would be undesirable neighbors. Jews were at the bottom, as the least undesirable; only 7 percent of the respondents did not want Jewish neighbors. For the purposes of the report, this constituted su≈cient evidence of the lack of anti-Semitism.∞≥ Basically, the report’s conclusions converge in calls for a stricter lawand-order state. It recommends that Section 86 of the Penal Code prohibiting the use of Nazi symbols be extended. Furthermore, it a≈rms the position that ‘‘there has been no evidence to suggest that racially motivated violence is centrally organized’’ (Bundesrepublik 1993 report: 12–13), and that ‘‘surges of extremist violence stemming from hostility towards foreigners occur impulsively in specific situations’’ (1993 report: 23). This emphasis on exceptionalism is barely plausible, in light of the fact that in 1992 alone there were more than 2,300 acts of violence traceable to extreme right-wing groups (1993 report). Many concurred with Kohl’s insistence that the attacks were unrelated, isolated incidents of hooliganism, at best patently absurd, at worst, dangerously criminal. By disregarding the powerful networks of violent skinheads and other extremists supported, armed, and in some cases organized by international right-wing l 64

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

organizations, many observers believe that the German security forces tacitly have permitted them to grow unchecked. Evidence is not lacking; rather, the interest and will to pursue has been absent.∞∂ Two years after the government published the report cited above, it released another one, with a subtly altered title: The Situation of Foreigners in Germany: Facts, Analyses, Arguments on Hostility towards Foreigners.∞∑ Here, ‘‘hostility’’ no longer enjoys precedence in the main title but instead finds itself buried in the small print of the subtitle. When ‘‘hostility’’ does appear, it has been rendered neutral by numerous qualifying modifiers, implying that any remaining perception of hostility might be mediated by the actual facts and serious analyses provided in the report. In 1995, the same year of the publication of this second report, elections in Berlin took place. A brief glance at applied political geography of campaign posters illustrates the calculated and calculating understanding of place and space by Kohl’s party. The Christian Democrats carefully tailored their campaign posters to the demographics of di√erent neighborhoods. To take just two—Grunewald and Kreuzberg—among the wealthiest and the poorest, the most German and the least, one can gauge the party’s projections of the persuasions of the respective electorate vis-à-vis Ausländer. Grunewald is an area inhabited by haute bourgeois residents, carefully coi√ed and impeccably groomed, who live in stunningly elegant nineteenth-century mansions blanketed by the rich shade of towering and densely tree-lined streets, picture-postcard lakes and forests.∞∏ The cdu (Christian Democratic Party) election campaign posters in this most tasteful and tranquil of neighborhoods used equally tasteful graphics, employing the city’s iconic lion rampant gracing the posters, ‘‘Christlich, Demokratisch, Deutsch—Zukunft Berlin cdu’’ (Christian, Democratic, German—The Future Berlin). An exclusivist vision of the cdu reflected this most exclusive of neighborhoods, as it tried to appeal to any baser, xenophobic predispositions residing here. The presence of Christian, Democratic, and German implied, to be sure, the absence of a future Berlin characterized by Islamic, non-Democratic, Turkish. A slow bus ride across town to Kreuzberg found the same cdu party’s posters had become ‘‘multi-kulti’’: ‘‘Berlin für alle . . .’’ (Berlin for all). In this often self-consciously colorful, alternative city quarter, boasting the highest proportion of foreigners of any neighborhood in Berlin (and more Turks among them than any other group), along with squatters, artists, punks, and pensioners, an inclusivist message was conveyed to those most ‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

65 l

excluded from society. ‘‘You too,’’ implied the poster to the least orthodox denizens, ‘‘can be stakeholders.’’ Another cdu poster, reflecting the heady days after the move from Bonn had been announced, played on civic pride, as Berlin was awash with excitement about its new status as Germany’s new/old capital. This poster, seen throughout the city, undi√erentiated by demographic-residential profile, proclaimed ‘‘Berlin: hauptstadt mit zukunft’’—Berlin: capital with a future. The ambiguous message, unclear what audience it addressed, begged the unspoken questions about ‘‘Berlin: capital with a (Nazi) past.’’ Would a focus on the future deny or reject the past, the so-called Historikerstreit, the confrontation with history that so preoccupies Germans, particularly historians? In a vivid rejoinder to the Janus-faced cdu election campaign, the Republikaner Party—borderline fascist, outspoken in its antiforeigner stance —advertised in its campaign posters: ‘‘Eine richtige opposition . . . wir sagen was wir meinen’’ (a real opposition, we say what we mean). An ominous warning indeed, but also clearly an insult to cdu, trying to have it all ways in all neighborhoods. In the run-up to this election, both the Republikaner and the cdu were acutely aware of the meanings of space and its articulation with notions of nation and ethnonationalism, echoing Skursky’s observation that ‘‘while nationalism represents itself as an equalizing project, it is engendered by and constitutive of social hierarchies’’ (1996: 392). Social hierarchies again rose to the fore in the final election of the millennium, when the campaign posters revealed still another modality. Ingeborg Junge-Reye, standing for the spd in Kreuzberg, was pictured in front of the Oberbaum Bridge over the Spree. On one side of the poster was a message written in Turkish ‘‘Köprü kuralım’’ (let’s build bridges); the reverse side had its German gloss, ‘‘Brücken bauen.’’ Of limited originality in its unsubtle bilingualism, it reads di√erently to Turkish and German viewers. To Germans, it speaks of Ossi-Wessi entente, the Oberbaum Bridge symbolizing the former East-West Berlin and German border, the bridge metaphor of a crossing over, through, to, toward, and numerous other prepositional implications of meeting as conationals, as partners. The bridge’s newly restored distinctive tower represented new German investment, rebuilding an earlier, prewar, pre-Wall era. To Turks, her placement in front of the bridge recalls the thirty years when it marked the

l 66

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

physical and national limit of Kreuzberg; a German politician reaching out to the Turkish community—in the Turkish language—feels like a huge step, possibly a cynical stunt, but impressive nonetheless. Completing the campaign was the Green, Alternative Liste poster. Here a stereotypically imaged young Turkish man also employs a play on words. ‘‘Ich bin’s Mutlu!’’ appears to be a code-switched phrase, until it is clear that Mutlu, ‘‘happy’’ in Turkish, is also the name of this candidate. At the bottom of the placard, next to ‘‘your candidate for education and respect’’ in both Turkish and German, was printed Mutlu’s website address: www.mutlu.de. Meanwhile, across the city in the Wilmersdorf precinct, including Grunewald, Christian Democrats invoked religious and arboreal allusions to lure voters. The placard reading ‘‘Die Wurzel trägt dich,’’ an ambiguous phrase invoking roots, proved controversial due to its questionable implications and political incorrectness. Another cdu poster in this area, ‘‘Oh Land höre des Herrn Wort,’’ implored voters to listen to God. When observing how hierarchies of di√erence are expressed and practiced, it becomes clear how Ausländer serve as a political touchstone, demonstrating stances and structures of inequality. As Skursky posits, if ‘‘we regard relations of domination as formative of conceptions of community rather than as external to them, we may better understand the complex ways that the nation is constructed and in which it mediates identities’’ (392). The deliberate wordcraft and siting of these campaign posters illuminates this very mediation and its potential appeal to a realizable political community. MIT-GERMANS

Several years on, in June 1998, Helmut Kohl, soon to be the former chancellor, spoke to a fraternal organization representing an important new constituency: the so-called Russlanddeutsch, Russian Germans (June 6, 1998), known commonly as Aussiedler, the resettlers from the former Soviet Union and East Bloc countries. The antecedents of this population arrived in Russia in the mid-eighteenth century, recruited from southwest Germany by Catherine the Great.∞π Deported from the Volga region by Stalin during World War II, of approximately two million, half ended up in Kazakhstan, the rest scattered throughout Central Asia and Siberian Rus-

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

67 l

sia. Some were settled in what became nearly exclusively German areas (for example, large regions in north-central Kazakhstan), though others, no longer living in isolation, for the first time began to intermarry. Kohl insisted a priority of his government should be to induce this population to ‘‘settle’’ (the word ‘‘immigrate’’ was avoided, in accordance with Germany’s policy of no immigration), and then, quite generously, to subsidize the newcomers, at enormous cost. Throughout the 1990s some 220,000 per annum immigrated to Germany, primarily from Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. They were met with access to German naturalization, German language and citizenship classes, generous housing and living allowances, assistance in seeking employment and training, all from the government. Yet many in Germany began to resent the taxing drain on Germany’s once robust economy. The text of Kohl’s speech, consistent with this welcome-home policy, opens: ‘‘Dear Compatriots . . . for [you] the Russian-Germans the borders are open. A long desired dream has been fulfilled . . . dear compatriots, in the name of the Federal Government, I proclaim to you: we are happy and thankful that you were able to come to us! You all are a profit to our German fatherland’’ (1998; emphasis added). An ironic word choice, ‘‘profit,’’ since much of the popular criticism of the government’s Aussiedler policy rests not so much on an ‘‘anti-pan-German-unity’’ sentiment but rather on the fact that German taxpayers have felt the sting in their budgets, beginning with the ‘‘unification tax.’’ Public spending in many areas—health, education, arts—has su√ered severe cutbacks in order to subsidize the weighty Aussiedler financial burden and that of unification. In the speech Kohl commends the Aussiedler for providing a human bridge to the former Soviet Union, which Germany can use for its economic and cultural benefit. Such interpersonal relationships, he posits, constitute a solid basis for the future cooperation of the peoples of Europe. Implying the potential of the former Soviet Union as a valuable emerging market, strategic use of the huge population of up to two million Russian Germans as mediators in the worlds of retail and wholesale business, marketing, and finance might give Germany a definite advantage relative to the rest of Western Europe, lacking this ‘‘natural’’ bridge. The speech betrays a positive bias toward accepting this ‘‘German’’ population from foreign lands. Although they hail from Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, or Uzbekistan, all former Soviet citizens, not once are they re-

l 68

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

ferred to as Ausländer. Instead, they inhabit a di√erent taxonomic tier altogether: Aussiedler, or Russian Germans. Both terms express the zionistlike policy of Germany, the essential ideology of an ingathering of peoples, the recruitment of members of the tribe. Yet their reception has been problematic: ‘‘German from the standpoint of their country of origin, foreign from the standpoint of many Germans. They are anomalies— Germans who are not Germans’’ (Forsythe 1989: 147). In Israel the act of Zionist immigration from the diaspora is profoundly marked by the term aliya, associated with a spiritual ascent.∞∫ Like the new immigrants to Israel, be they from Russia, Yemen, or Canada, the German government welcomes its Aussiedler as participants in a historical manifest destiny returning to the rightful homeland. However, they, like some Israeli immigrants, often are discomfited by the lack of fit between the sanctified ideology marked by ingathering and its secular practices. Likewise, Aussiedler, by definition returning ‘‘home,’’ repatriating from the Ausland, from diaspora, in theory are not of the Ausland. Instead, they possess the critical criterion of Deutschstämmigkeit, German kinship or heritage. This crucial distinction di√erentiates them from the true Ausländer, particularly in postsettlement social positioning. As diasporic Germans they always, even in their absence, ‘‘belonged’’ to the fatherland, just as Zionists believe in the necessity of diasporic Jews returning to the historic homeland. Furthermore, to be labeled ‘‘Russian German’’ marks them as a variety of German, entirely legitimate and thus able to claim a right of return, a right to belong. Accordingly, these Russian Germans find themselves—and their often non-German spouses—transported across centuries and a continent, shedding previous citizenships for their new-yet-old, their essentialized identity. German citizenship law looks favorably on those who can claim German kinship. Though rarely discussed frankly, the ideology underlying Germany’s Aussiedler policy parallels, indeed bolsters its strong pronatalist policy.∞Ω Nationalist alarmists express grave concern about the high Turkish birthrate, contrasted to the negative population growth among ethnic Germans. Given this disparity, Aussiedler are seen by some as a happy medium-term solution, a welcome watershed of the ‘‘right’’ sort of population increase. The trope of past su√ering for one’s Germanness is paramount in their social and legal acceptance into Germany. Kohl refers in his speech to the explicit rationale for importing ethnic Germans:

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

69 l

Still today many Russian-Germans and their children su√er from the consequences of exile, forced labour, misery imposed by communist dictatorship. . . . Stalinist terror [in] 1941 had the Russian-Germans banished overnight to the Asian part of the former ussr. They were oppressed, kept in closed cities,≤≠ not released—a hard fate, while they were Germans and wished to remain so. The Russian-Germans through no fault of their own did penance for a war unleashed by a criminal regime in Germany. (Kohl 1998)

As leader of the successor state to the Third Reich, Kohl plays the historical sympathy card to this population, taking no responsibility for German complicity but, rather, distancing himself and his government from the ‘‘criminal’’ practices of the Nazi regime. He acknowledges the su√ering dealt to the Russian Germans, in a style reminiscent of the GDR interpretation of World War II: Nazism/fascism came from the West and was inflicted upon victimized ‘‘east’’ Germans. Later in the speech, Kohl reiterates the critical necessity of learning to speak German, exhorting the Russian Germans to speak German daily with one another, asserting that it is only a lack of fluency in German that stands in the way of their integration into German society: ‘‘Without speaking German, you often are not recognized as [our] compatriots. Understandably, Russian-Germans are o√ended by this. You want to be accepted as Germans. To this end, you can do a lot yourselves!’’ Despite Kohl’s emphasis that they are ‘‘Russian Germans,’’ in everyday speech they often are called ‘‘Russians,’’ to their dismay. This is a continuation of markedness, for in the former Soviet Union they were Nemtsy, Germans. The chancellor boasts of his government’s support of Aussiedler assistance, quoting a figure of 1.5 billion dm spent on German courses and ‘‘integration assistance.’’ He acknowledges the controversial nature of this generous support, repudiating the opinion that Aussiedler received too much financial assistance. Kohl specifies three areas of critical support and pledges to continue them, despite popular opposition to the cost. These are (1) German-language courses; (2) integration assistance and welfare support; (3) reimbursement for those who su√ered in Soviet work-camps or prison. Kohl also focuses on Russian German youth: the move for them was traumatic and di≈cult, but his government’s priority is to help them adapt to life in Germany, asserting, ‘‘We all must take care to assure that they soon feel at home here and that they are adopted (as Germans) by their new Mitbürger, and that they put down roots in our society.’’ Toward this end l 70

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

numerous initiatives were established, for example, ‘‘sports with Aussiedler.’’ A striking aspect of the government’s agenda to integrate Aussiedler is its persistence in the objectification of them. The label Aussiedler is as marked as ‘‘Ausländer,’’ though carrying contrasting valorization. Though the process of creating an ‘‘other’’ may bear similarities—it remains clear that some others are more privileged than (other) others: these others, the Russian Germans, possess the potential to shed their otherness. A last point of sociolexical interest emerges from Kohl’s statements: the word Mitbürger. In the 1993 report Mitbürger is used in its restrictive sense referring to Turks, to mean precisely the opposite—foreign denizens who are not ‘‘fellow-citizens.’’ In Kohl’s speech Russian Germans are the true Mitbürger he wishes to include in the body politic. The final irony, that unlike many Turkish ‘‘co-citizens,’’ many of the ‘‘co-citizens’’ in the audience of the Russian German fraternal organization likely did not possess su≈cient mastery of German to comprehend the message. PUBLIC RELATIONS IN THE CITY-STATE: FROM XENOPHOBIC TO XENOPHILIC

Throughout the long reign of the Christian Democratic Party o≈cial discourse regarding foreigners could be summed up as ‘‘Germany is not an immigration country.’’ Nonetheless, throughout this period, an early cdu Berlin appointee, Dr. Barbara John, began to work at cross-purposes in her capacity as Germany’s first Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats, Berlin—the Commissioner for Foreigners of the Berlin Senate. Dr. John, who served until May 2003, after some two decades in the post became something of a hero to many in the foreigner community, positioning herself as an advocate of foreigners’ rights—not as an adversary to foreigners, as the state and its judicial and civil bureaucracy have often been seen. Hers may have been the sole o≈cial organ of the state that used the word ‘‘immigrant’’ synonymously with Ausländer. That she survived numerous changes in local government was testimony to the high regard paid her across parties and factions. In part thanks to her work, Berlin has long been a leader as a model of tolerance and enlightenment in the context of Germany with regard to its foreigner policies. Hers was the first such position in Germany; eventually most cities and regions appointed such commissioners. The mission of the o≈ce states: ‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

71 l

We want a cosmopolitan, tolerant and liberal Berlin. For this reason, the integration of the foreigners who are permanently resident in our city is an important social task. The Berlin Senate’s policy on foreigners aims at a lively and mutually beneficial coexistence of Germans and foreigners in our city. The process of integration can only succeed if it is implemented in a spirit of mutual respect.≤∞

The o≈ce, with a sta√ of over twenty-five, maintains a high profile in many realms of Berlin life. John maintained a visible public presence delivering numerous speeches to political, sectarian, educational, and other groups, as well as attending innumerable meetings, conferences, and the like. During her tenure her o≈ce launched a frontal attack against Ausländerfeindlichkeit, xenophobia, initiated a high-profile public relations campaign promoting ‘‘integration’’ of foreigners; and she personally encouraged all who qualified to apply for German citizenship. In addition, the o≈ce sponsors various research and arts projects involving minority communities. Hundreds of pamphlets, booklets, reports, and posters in several languages have been published, first, to educate the foreigners themselves about their rights and responsibilities in Germany, and second, as public relations didactic exercises aimed at the German public. One of the commission’s publications, Türkische Berliner—Eine Minderheit stellt sich vor / Berlinli Türkler (Turkish Berliners—A minority presents itself ) (Ausländerbeauftragte 1992b; numerous similar subsequent editions have been published), a seventy-page bilingual booklet, covers a wide range of issues about contemporary Turkish life in Berlin. Amply illustrated with photographs, it also emphasizes the historical significance of the Turkish Republican period, pre-Turkic Asia Minor, the Ottoman Empire, and the role of Turkey as a shelter for German Jews during World War II. This last point, particularly poignant, levels an implicit criticism at German governmental policy, considering the problems thousands of Turks have confronted while attempting to claim political asylum in Germany. The booklet describes (Sunni) Turkish religious life in Berlin, Turkish family life, Turkish entrepreneurs, relations with the homeland, Turkish fraternal and social service organizations, Turkish publishing houses in Berlin, and what it calls the ‘‘Kulturszene,’’ the cultural scene. This last section contains a number of frank interviews with some of the most well-known Turkish artists living in Berlin. The discussion about the homeland is entitled ‘‘Does losing the mother l 72

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

tongue mean losing the homeland?’’ The final section, ‘‘Das Bild der Anderen / Türkler ve Almanlar hakkında çesitli görü¸sler’’ (The image of the others / Di√erent views about Turks and Germans), asks what Turks say about Turks and about Germans, and Germans say about Turks. It asks as well what Berlin Turks say about Turks in Turkey—and the other way round. Here, the expected stereotypical statements are put forth, such as the frequently heard formulaic: ‘‘I have nothing against foreigners, but . . .’’ It describes the almancılar phenomenon in Turkey (in German, Deutschländer) as ‘‘a little Turkish, a little German, but neither one nor the other.’’ Finally, quoting the oft-heard ‘‘we’ll return to Turkey to live later, perhaps to retire,’’ it o√ers what is meant to be a positive integrative statement, ‘‘Biz de Berlinli sayılırız artık—wir sind doch eigentlich Berliner’’ (But actually, we consider ourselves Berliners by now). Berliners, yes; Germans, no. ‘‘Integration’’ is the key word and theme in this publication, as it is in another, provocatively entitled ‘‘Ich hab’ nichts gegen Ausländer, aber . . .’’ (I have nothing against foreigners, but . . . ). This one proceeds to take issue with many of the common stereotypes: they are flooding the country; they are taking our housing and our jobs; they lower our educational standards; they are criminals; there is only Ausländerfeindlichkeit, xenophobia, since there are too many foreigners; they don’t want to integrate; and they are ‘‘over-foreignizing’’ us (Ausländer überfremden uns). The booklet is punctuated liberally with statistics describing numerically the changing numbers of foreign nationals. While the federal government, particularly the judicial branch, was devising obstacles to further complicate and disallow the settlement of foreigners (including asylum seekers), John’s o≈ce o√ered free advice to Turks and Kurds, Nigerians and Bosnians, deciphering for them the intricacies of the foreigner law. Contradicting what issued from Bonn, in Berlin John was an outspoken advocate for integration through naturalization of foreigners and to that e√ect waged a campaign aimed particularly at foreign youth. As an advocate of foreigners’ causes, John claimed that the government engaged in positive discrimination: ‘‘We practice a≈rmative action here— because the cost of educating a Turkish child is higher than a German, they are receiving in essence extra subsidies; the bilingual education, etc.’’ In addition, she expressed pride in the fact that more foreigners have been naturalized in Berlin than in any other German state.≤≤ Though she did not personally take credit for this, her ceaseless public appearances at meetings, ‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

73 l

street-fairs, on television and radio programs, along with the mass marketing and public relations campaigns, spread the word e√ectively. Her integration strategy often has been cast in a civil rights type of rhetoric. Until foreigners attain citizenship, they will lack equality under the law; thus, the ultimate aim is as much naturalization as possible. And, following naturalization comes integration. To advertise and disseminate this agenda, the o≈ce has relied heavily on a blitz of the printed word. The campaign ‘‘Miteinander leben in Berlin’’ (Living with each other in Berlin), used by the Foreigner Commission’s o≈ce as its motto, has published a wide range of informative booklets. Many of them have assumed a didactic inflection, occasionally provocatively, some directed at foreigners, some aimed at Germans. Some of the booklets fall into the ‘‘good citizenship’’ category, teaching foreigners the subtleties of German apartment living, including details such as when not to run the bathwater, how to arrange the household garbage, to respect low noise levels, or how to use a toilet properly. The literature and placards aimed at the German audience di√er in subject and tone. Some of the posters introduce foreigners to a German audience. Typically, photographs of dark-complected foreigners are accompanied by text, describing these high achievers and upwardly mobile individuals, and in the attempt, personalizing them. They are given names, hobbies, interests. The public relations program has included eye-catching posters in public spaces such as city trains, many pushing the integration message. One set of posters introduced individual foreigners with di√erent national origins, often interacting with Germans. One showed a small smiling boy with two smiling women—a blonde German and a darkhaired woman, dressed in Western-style clothing. Entitled ‘‘Mornings Germany, evenings Turkey,’’ it explained how the little boy goes to German school every day, does well in his courses, and then in the evening returns to his Turkish home, speaks and eats Turkish, and is very happy and well adjusted. Another, ‘‘Gemeinsam schmeckt es besser,’’ Together, it tastes better, again shows two smiling women, one dark and Turkish the other blonde and German, drinking co√ee together. Dressed in identical uniforms, they are ‘‘Heike and Sundus,’’ co-workers in a Berlin company that has paired foreigners and Germans together in training programs. The text reads: ‘‘Sundus has better marks. Heike has made a new friend, and now better understands her foreign Mitbürger, co-citizens. . . . The Berlin Senate supports work training programs for foreign youth.’’ Advertising caml 74

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

paigns such as this try to neutralize and humanize the representation of the Ausländer, presenting the feared foreigners as individuals—attractive, interesting, dignified—people with whom Germans can identify here in their common everyday practices. Other attempts of the miteinander leben campaign challenge German notions of self, identity, Germanness. A large poster interrogatively entitled ‘‘Was ist deutsch?’’ (What Is German?) teases the reader to examine and reconsider the long list of hundreds of lowercase, nearly micrographic possibilities, for example, ‘‘Ossis gegen Wessis? Heimatliebe? Tannenbäume? Ausländerhass? Schinkenhäger? Rostock? Wirtschaftswunder? Sentimentalität? Zweiter Weltkrieg? Die Mauer? Auswanderungsland? Einwanderungsland? Sauerkraut? (Eastern Germans against western Germans? love of homeland? Christmas tree? Foreigner hate? Rostock [site of anti-Turkish arson attack]? economic miracle? Sentimentality? Second World War? The Wall? Emigration country? Immigration country? Sauerkraut?). The o≈ce also published a series of quite academic, informative booklets, one of which is the eighty-page Alla Turca: Music from Turkey in Berlin (Greve 1997). Its cover is striking in an understated and subtle way, as shades of mauve, deep teal, and ecru harmoniously work as e√ective background framing for the unusual instrument in the center, seeming to fly out of the cover. At first glance it recalls a saz, the Anatolian folk instrument resembling a long-necked lute, with the characteristic neck and seven pegs. Upon closer inspection the body appears transformed—an electronic addition, a black knob, and a black cord lead to a microphone; on the face of the saz, the part that is struck and strummed, dance small blackened shadows of figures. Thus the favored dichotomies of ‘‘us and them,’’ here and there, Orient and Occident merge and synthesize with old and new. But there is more: the ‘‘saz’’ is placed at a suggestive angle, as though soaring out of a sheet of music, suspended in space—the instrumental equivalent of a flying carpet. When examined closely, the music is entitled with Arabic (Ottoman) script—the old, presumably representative of the classical tradition in Turkish/Ottoman music as opposed to the folk origins symbolized by the saz. This impressive publication, in addition to a user-friendly bibliography and directory of Turkish musical venues in Berlin, provides extensive, thoughtful articles covering a wide range of music from Turkey. Unlike many more superficial works on Turks in Germany, the author here has ‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

75 l

FIGURE 5. Integration? Hanefi Yeter, 1983, mixed technique on canvas.

been careful to include the Alevi musical traditions and provides ample context.≤≥ Catholic in approach, and cognizant of popular culture as well as the range of taste and tradition, the concise chapters deal with pop music, hip-hop, restaurant music, experimental syntheses, classical music, Sufi music, the popular Arabesk,≤∂ and the use of music in Turkish media. In addition, in the spirit of multiculturalism so mindfully nourished by John’s o≈ce, the publication also includes information on Jewish Turkish Sephardic as well as Pontic Greek music stemming from the Black Sea region. John’s introduction to the work is emphatic about the global significance of Turkish music production in Berlin. Comparing it to Bhangra brought by South Indian youth in London and Rai-Pop of Maghreb youth in France, she sees Berlin’s young migrants’ contribution as part of a larger creolized expressive culture. Not only in France, she writes, but also here l 76

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

‘‘in Berlin [immigrants provide] a local cultural fusion in the music scene, with a Turkish accent, [which] by no means appeals only to the young immigrant generation. Recently, this development has bounced back to Turkey, where the German-Turkish hip-hop and rap bands have been feted as stars and amazed the local scene’’ (John 1997: 2). By extending the local to the global, this emergent phenomenon not only is legitimized but Berlin is located on the cosmopolitan map, equal to Paris and London. THE LITTLE TURKISH COURSE: AN EXPERIMENT IN COEXISTENCE

The final text I consider here is of a very di√erent nature. Though not initially intended by the producers, it came to comprise a textually interactive narrative. The story began when Suzan Gülfırat, a young Turkish Berlin journalist, recently unemployed, was hired by Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel—a liberal daily, generally considered the most serious of the capital’s newspapers. In the summer of 1998, within a fortnight of beginning work, she suggested to her editors that they run a daily, three-week ‘‘little Turkish lesson’’ column, introducing the German readers to basic words, expressions, pronunciation, with the relevant cultural contexts. It was meant to be a light-hearted, amusing, one-o√ series. Suzan explained that initially she had given it little thought—it was simply an idea that would macht Spaß—be fun for the readers. Each day the column took a di√erent theme: one day it examined the social behaviors surrounding drinking, including words for ‘‘cheers,’’ ‘‘drunken,’’ and ‘‘mineral water,’’ along with an explanation about how rakı (an anise-flavored drink similar to Pernod or ouzo) often is imbibed along with kleine Leckereien, small savory morsels. Another column took Turkish grammar as its theme, attempting to simplify its principles and introducing a handful of terms of politesse. Weather, football, shopping and bargaining, food, flirting, politics, and a no-holds-barred lesson in swearing served as foci for other columns. The lesson one day took a genealogical turn, describing the complex nuances of Turkish kinship terms and their usage. The ‘‘lessons’’ set o√ a virtual tidal wave of letters and calls from readers, reacting to the columns. The series had touched many unsuspected raw nerves, provoking responses both pro and con. After excerpts from this first set of letters had been published, a second torrent of letters, mostly of support, flooded in. A common theme was the surprise and shock that ‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

77 l

their fellow Tagesspiegel readers could possibly be such unabashed, outspoken racists. The enormous reaction astonished journalists at the paper; until this incident they had presumed a readership sharing their own liberal-left outlook. The world press latched onto the story; Suzan found herself, not her lessons, in the spotlight. The bbc, Turkish papers and television, and radio and print journalists from throughout Europe and western Germany clamored to interview her and report the story: the ‘‘story’’ that a fun, innocent series, meant as good-natured, had evolved into a cause célèbre and ‘‘exposed’’ even ostensibly liberal Germans as the ‘‘foreigner-hating racists they really were.’’ One Tagesspiegel journalist bemoaned the incident, saying, ‘‘The image of the hateful German is again going out to the world.’’ ‘‘I am of the opinion,’’ a disgruntled reader wrote, ‘‘that it is not the task of a daily newspaper to impose a daily Turkish course for its readers,’’ to which the editor responded, agreeing that the paper’s task was not to ‘‘impose’’ the course, merely to o√er it. Other negative letters were not nearly this polite. One read ‘‘Nie wieder Tagesspiegel. Hier ist Deutschland!!!!’’ (Never again Tagesspiegel. This is Germany!!!!). In a published response, Suzan Gülfırat wrote, [The letters were] so angry and hateful. Most were not anonymous. And from dead normal Germans, who might even be my neighbors. I had expected that some readers might shake their heads about the Turkish course. But I never thought that what in my Turkish German eyes was so harmless an act, could provoke such strong rage. It is painful for me, alternating between frustration, fury, and sometimes fear. And, ultimately, these people are voters. I ask myself what would happen if they would gain the majority? (1998: 15; my translation)

This hate mail was o√set for Suzan by the many letters of support that poured in. In addition to the readers who expressed solidarity with her and outrage against the hate mail, one reader related. ‘‘This morning I greeted our Turkish cleaner in Turkish; it pleased him so much.’’ Another: ‘‘Now I understand why it is so di≈cult for Turks to learn German.’’ One reader encouraged the paper to o√er similar courses in the languages of all of Berlin’s minorities. A month after the series concluded, the paper sponsored a party inviting all readers who had written letters to come and meet Suzan and share in a Turkish meal, catered by a local Turkish restaurant. A ‘‘Turkish-Kurdishl 78

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

German’’ band provided music. The following day, pictures from the party accompanied the story. Barbara John spoke at the party and was quoted saying she felt the ‘‘little Turkish course’’ was an ‘‘appropriate antidote. A city such as Berlin must support this sort of thing’’ (Der Tagesspiegel, September 24, 1998: 14). The surprising reactions from readers indicated for all involved that something was dreadfully amiss. Suzan explained: ‘‘We were in shock. If these were our readers, then who was reading the right wing press?’’ Suzan wanted to cancel the series after a week; the unexpected pressures of the international press became too much. Her editors convinced her that they stood behind her, and that she should see it through. She did, and became an unwitting hero and pioneering role model to Turks throughout Germany. She occupies the symbolic and physical space no other Turk had achieved; at the time, she believed she was the sole Turk working on a major German daily. Thus, many of the hate letters focused on the imposition of Turkishness—even in the form of a humorous column—into what they felt should be a German-only realm, the column space of a prestigious Berlin newspaper. The deep-seated wrath and o√ense expressed by some readers conveyed their sense of having had their personal, private space violated: ‘‘It is bad enough that we have to see Turks on the street, but to be confronted at our breakfast table with them—well that is simply too much.’’ For them, this was one transgression too many; Turkishness had infiltrated into the ‘‘wrong place.’’ By contrast, there are individuals and segments within Germany committed to dismantling the representations of the outsider as an enemy, searching for an alternative vision of shared space. This would be indeed a space-in-the-making where varieties of Germans can contribute to society in the realm of labor and economic and social life. The focus of the following chapter continues these themes of coming to terms with others. It asks questions about the perennial concern of ascribed and achieved identities, and the more problematic terrain of ‘‘ethnic’’ and ethnicized representation.

‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’

79 l

3. Making Ausländer ‘‘We already have a multicultural society,’’ say some. By this they presumably mean cultures and perspectives existing side by side without touching each other. Everyone should be blissful as he sees fit, keep his eye on his own plate, and make himself comfortable in the ghetto. ‘‘Integrate,’’ say the others. By this they mean nothing short of absolute assimilation, the disappearance of Anatolian faces behind German masks.1

l This chapter explores processes of ethnicization and racialization. It asks how a set of people distributed across transnational spaces perceive themselves and are perceived by di√erent sectors of German society. Given the extent to which German society prefigures its encounter with the foreigner, the place of Germany is critical to the techniques by which these people are named, socially and physically placed, and legally corralled. These processes become all the more evident if we were to imagine these same immigrants living in, say, the United States, where they might unremarkably be called ‘‘Turkish Americans,’’ or ‘‘Kurdish Americans.’’ There they would fit quite easily into a ready-made ‘‘hyphenated’’ vocabulary of ethnic group (albeit minus the actual hyphen, as has become recent practice).≤ In Berlin, Ausländer is a gloss for ‘‘ethnic’’ in the ‘‘other’’ sense. It begs the question: Ausländer means much more than merely foreigner; it implies the unwanted foreigner who does not belong. It means unintegratable outsider, alien, rather than any neutral rendering of the English ‘‘foreigner.’’ The widespread currency of the term in Germany has served the agenda of the state: had the persons to whom the term refers been called ‘‘immigrant’’ instead, a whole host of rights and obligations—political, social, and economic—would have adhered.≥ An alien, outsider status marks and distances them, setting them apart from the unmarked ‘‘native’’ citizenry. The very power in naming and its preclusion (e.g., Ausländer, not ‘‘immigrant’’) reflects ‘‘the definitional dependence of hegemonic majorities vis-à-vis minorities they may well oppress and ghettoize [which is] an

important and enduring theme of nationalism’’ (Handler and Segal 1993: 5–6). This nationalist legacy can be felt in the German over-preoccupation with its own identity, culture, and land. Wilpert (1991) points out the uniqueness of Germany’s discourse on migration whose variety of expressions betray numerous social categories, exposing the extreme diversity of legal rights and access to membership: Gastarbeiter, Ausländer, Ausländische Arbeitnehmer, Migranten aus den ehemahligen Anwerbeländern, ausländische Mitbürger, Aussiedler, Übersiedler, Flüchtling, Asylanten, wirtschafts Asylanten [guest worker, foreigner, foreign employee, migrant from former recruitment land, foreign co-citizen, re-settler, over-settler, refugee, asylum-seeker, economic refugee]. (49)

This array of categories is revealing: despite the plethora of terms, there are no glosses for ‘‘immigration’’ or ‘‘ethnic minority,’’ because ‘‘there are no such concepts’’ (ibid.).∂ The very terms themselves represent ‘‘age old beliefs about who is qualified to belong and who is not’’ (ibid). As an ontologically distinct other, it is a short step to the generalized belief that Ausländer ‘‘lack the civilization or culture which is taken as the defining characteristic of the hegemonic nation’’ (Handler and Segal 1993: 5–6); the ensuing logic can be reduced to the argument that in this instance, di√erence necessarily implies social inferiority. In other words ‘‘ethnicity’’ reproduces the stu√ of social hierarchy. MAKING ETHNICS: GENEALOGY AND CRITIQUE

Much academic writing on ethnicity originates in older debates about race and social relations in North America from the 1920s onward. The intellectual precursors to ethnicity studies were the sociologists and anthropologists who became known as the ‘‘Chicago School,’’ revolving around Robert Park, his colleagues, and their first generation of students. Influenced by Thomas and Znaniecki’s study of Polish immigrants, they pioneered applying anthropological methods to contemporary urban problems such as race relations, gangs, violence, and social inequalities. Park’s influential essay on the ‘‘marginal man’’ (1928) proved critical in the understanding of immigrants, ethnicity, and, indirectly, even hybridity, insofar as marginal men bridged two worlds and took from both of them, eventually progressing to novel social terrain. MAKING AUSLÄNDER

81 l

The Chicago School’s theories about urban sociology posited an organic urban ecology as the subject of study. It was a somewhat limiting approach in that its organizing filter was race relations which implied radical, even caste-like divisions between groups. It did make important breakthroughs in understanding the social life of cities including, for the first time, studies of gangs and the poor. A later generation of the Chicago School was represented by the urban sociologist Gerald Suttles’s The Social Order of a Slum (1968), which continued the trajectory already set in motion. What characterized Chicago sociology was the weight given to social structural and social mobility issues, often at the expense of the symbolic investment in shaping selves and communities, which came to the fore in later iterations of urban anthropology.∑ In anthropology arguably it was Fredrik Barth who put ethnicity on the map. His landmark introduction to the slim edited volume Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969) proposed that ethnic groups were more appropriately defined not just by boundaries but by boundaries that could shift rather than be delineated by the ‘‘cultural stu√ ’’ they contained. Published at the height of the ethnic awareness and Black Power movements, the academic zeitgeist was poised; the volume could not have been timelier. Subsequent to its publication, it has been virtually impossible to write about ethnicity without acknowledging Barth’s work. Many of Barth’s premises have been challenged; for example, his liberal model of ethnic pluralism cannot adequately explain issues having to do with inequalities of power and the distribution of resources (see, e.g., Banks 1996: 76). Related processes of urbanization were studied by a group of Lusakabased anthropologists who eventually were a≈liated with the University of Manchester, taught by Max Gluckman. His students (and later colleagues), Mitchell, Cohen, Epstein, and Wilson, focused on issues of social change and migration in the Copperbelt (now Zambia) and began to write about ‘‘detribalization’’ and ‘‘retribalization’’—some of which influenced later writing on ‘‘ethnicity’’ (Eriksen 1993: 21). Abner Cohen (1974) transposed some of his African work on tribalism to London City stockbrokers, arguing that in some respects they met the criteria for ‘‘ethnic group,’’ as they shared basic values and social and political goals, hence ‘‘belonging’’ together. Thus were questions raised about the appropriateness or not of ‘‘ethnic’’ as the logical substitute for ‘‘tribe’’ in the urban setting. Scores of books followed, explicitly debating ‘‘What is ethnicity?’’ Various permutations led into questions of ‘‘ethnicity and race,’’ ‘‘ethnicity and l 82

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

history,’’ ‘‘ethnicity and migration,’’ all attempting to further refine and define ‘‘ethnicity.’’ Glazer and Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot (1963) showed the discontinuity in ethnic self-understanding between homeland and immigration land; their later Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (1975) suggested that ethnicity in America, to the extent that it was an emergent and powerful phenomenon, now occupied a privileged position over previous relations of class. They proposed moving beyond analyses restricted to race, nationality, and minority groups which would not account for what they presumed would be an enduring phenomenon. Studies of ethnicity by anthropologists ranged from the fairly static, bounded ‘‘tribal’’ paradigm and urban villagers approaches to more dynamic work, expanding the purview. Over the following decades the work exemplified by Urban Villagers (Gans 1962) underwent a major shift, to studies such as The Transnational Villagers (Levitt 2001) that place in question the utility of bounded studies. Furthermore, in some quarters ethnicity studies have given way to explorations into hybridity, cultural syncretism, transnationalism (Appadurai 1991; Stewart 1994; Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994). With transnational studies attention has shifted from bounded units of study—neighborhood or ghetto—as culturally homogeneous, toward a more flexible understanding of delocalized, deterritorialized, and culturally heterogeneous processes. Hence the emphasis on the new ethnoscapes (Appadurai 1991) where the tension between imagined life and deterritorialized life cannot be contained within the former units of analysis. The terms of the negotiation between imagined lives and deterritorialized worlds are complex, and they surely cannot be captured by the localising strategies of traditional ethnography alone. . . . the task of ethnography now becomes the unravelling of a conundrum: what is the nature of locality, as a lived experience, in a globalized, deterritorialized world? (Appadurai 1991: 196)

Likewise Michael Fischer’s suggestive theorization of ethnicity as mimetic confrontation accommodates ethnicity as continual reinvention, at both an individual and generational level. It is transmitted through language and learning but more so through abstract processes ‘‘analogous to the dreaming and transferences of psychoanalytic encounters’’ (1986: 173). Though referring specifically to what is sometimes called ‘‘ethnic literature’’ in America (cf. Ausländerliteratur discussed in chapter 7), Fischer’s MAKING AUSLÄNDER

83 l

discussion equally applies to the critique of ‘‘ethnicity’’ proposed here, as an example of a textually derived ‘‘ethno-ethnicity.’’ It is the tension Appadurai identifies, in living out localized deterritorialization, along with the reinvention described by Fischer, that this book explores. In Germany, immigrants from Turkey access, and are of, the global and local simultaneously and synergetically via a whole host of resources. As I try to show, such complicating lifeways preclude simplistic ethnic categorization employed as an analytic exigetical tool. DESTABILIZING ETHNICITY

Some of the classic and conventional theories mentioned above which retain a vision of a stable ‘‘ethnicity,’’ whether bound to an individual, group, or nation, do not su≈ciently distinguish between, first, their theories and, second, the process that I call ‘‘ethno-ethnicization.’’ This refers to an auto-definition of ethnicity by the group in question, reflecting a native theory. A problem arises when there is a failure to discern analytically between the ‘‘ethnicity’’ of popular discourse and that of social scientific analysis, thus confusing a folk theory for an analytic one. Too often social scientists have accepted and appropriated the native boundaries and categorizations, elevating them to assumed givens and analytic constructs, rather than questioning the ideological—and changing—bases for such groupings. Such a mode of analysis implies an essentialist bias, suggesting a belief in a reified group-out-there that exists apart from their selfdefinition, or, indeed, ‘‘apart from our interpretation of them’’ (Handler and Linnekin 1984: 273). The reification of ethnicity has proceeded hand in hand with its mystification, creating an illusion about the ine√ability of ethnic phenomena (Steinberg 1982). The notion of ‘‘primordial ethnic feeling’’ and the like certainly reflects this illusion. To conceptualize the issue in more organic metaphors, one of the central problems with many ethnicity theories is that an a priori assumption regarding the ontological significance and primacy of ethnicity says little about the particulars of its history, or ‘‘onto[ethno]genesis.’’ Thus, the result is a situation where ethnic ontogeny is reduced to (essentialist) ontology, each assumed, not explained. Furthermore, since such theories deal with ethnicities as generic, even fungible phenomena, they run the risk of treating change at a ‘‘phylogenetic’’ level, that is, presuming that a part, such as a single instance or a specific socio-cultural configuration, can l 84

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

answer for or represent a whole, such as an era or a cross-culturally comparative pattern. Taking liberties with the famous phrase, many ethnicity theories would indeed have ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. The analytic category ‘‘ethnicity’’ has been and continues to be used in a myriad of contexts referring to as many di√erent processes and phenomena. Often it is assumed to be an objective given—of a natural kind with an obvious essence. In the attempt to reduce it to its necessary and su≈cient conditions, the result might be a mere listing of attributes such as religious practices, linguistic styles, food habits, costume, or some vaguely articulated and mystified primordial feeling about what we are presumed to agree is clearly ‘‘ethnic.’’ Neither coherent nor consistent criteria delineate an ‘‘ethnic’’ domain. Instead, it is treated as a reified aspect of culture, falling victim to what has been called the ‘‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’’ (Whitehead 1978: 7). Ascribed to it are prepotent powers to ‘‘arise, interweave, transmit, foster, inspire, and mobilize,’’ to name but a few of its alleged characteristics. The anthropological literature has treated ethnic groups as ‘‘cult-units’’ (Narroll 1964); as vessels defined by boundaries (Barth 1969); as political interest groups (Cohen 1974); as a ‘‘set of relations, a product of specifiable historical forces’’ (Comaro√ 1992: 66); and, as part of the social ‘‘mapping enterprise’’ (Banks 1996). It may be useful to conceive of the canalization of social life (Barth 1969: 15) by boundaries, but need they be ‘‘ethnic’’ boundaries? Boundaries, delimiters of social and geographic spatial arrangements, cannot in and of themselves create ethnicity, and many theories fall short of explaining what makes a group of individuals an ‘‘ethnic group’’ at a particular point in time and in space, yet not so in other spatio-temporal configurations. (This problem is addressed later, in the context of return migration to Turkey.) It is not my aim here to pro√er an extended critique of ethnicity theories. Others have assumed that task, though to my mind few have deconstructed it to what should be, perforce its conclusion (cf. Nash, Banks, Fischer, Sollars, Erikson). My position is closer to that of Comaro√, who has inveighed against the paucity of useful theorization of ethnicity, most of which has been unable to extricate itself from the ‘‘bedrock of essentialism’’: ‘‘It is di≈cult not to be struck by the banality of theory in conceptual discussions of ethnicity . . . the sheer tenacity of this theoretical repertoire: it has changed little in the past two decades, despite the fact that existing approaches have repeatedly been discredited’’ (1996: 165, 164). Surely, new ways and means of conceptualizing this set of social processes and identities MAKING AUSLÄNDER

85 l

are overdue. One intentional strand of the total fabric that makes up the theoretical objective of this book is to engage critically, through ethnographic examples and analysis, with some of the prevailing thinking on ethnicity. I attempt to situate it in the more generalized relations of class, race, gender, and generation in Germany, to relate it to the mimetic properties of the creation and recreation of groups, individuals, and transnational movements. In other words, I explore how groups and persons re-imagine themselves in situations of profound deterritorialization, where the past relations with the homeland in some instances have provoked ruptured subjectivities. Mimetic identifications allow the uprooted a ready-made way to transform di√erence into similarity through the process of ethnicization. The mimetic project can be produced through a conflict between multiple groups and the adoption of rhetorical or narrative strategies.∏ An example of this heightened and productive mimetism is Zaimo˘glu’s Kanaksprak, already noted, and more about which later. In particular, mimetic processes are at work in the act of ethnicization, in the production of cultural brokers whom I call ‘‘ethnic professionals’’ and ‘‘professional ethnics.’’ In a sense, their work is doubly mimetic, in that at once they stage a representation of the collectivity of Turkish migrants, just as they model themselves on native German elites. This renders them complicit in ethnic stereotyping, a kind of mimetic staging in order to target specific audiences and cater to explicit tastes (chapter 7 engages with these processes). THE PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION OF ETHNIC PLACES

The intersubjective relationship between Germans and Turks in their specular relation to each other cannot be isolated from wider networks of production and consumption of culture pervasive in Europe. Similarly the geographic locations they inhabit are not to be confined to their immediate surroundings. Turks do not only inhabit the dilapidated housing of the poor city quarters, but they can be associated as well, in the German imaginary, with the production of leisure, namely, the tourist resorts for German consumption on the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts. There are multiple ways in which the space inhabited by Turks also can be imagined and understood in pure ideological forms, as Lefebvre (1991) sets out. Lefebvre writes of a neocolonization of the Mediterranean as part of a new division of labor; indeed, the initial trajectory of the labor migration cycle has, to an extent, reversed. Initially, poorer Mediterranean nations l 86

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

shipped their unemployment problems northward to Germany; this imported labor force begat an economic boom, giving birth to a new German middle class, a class with newly acquired money and time for leisure activities in corresponding leisure places—most often the countries whence the Gastarbeiter came. The coasts of these Mediterranean countries were developed into lucrative tourist sites, attracting the disposable income of the very Germans benefiting from the wealth the Turks helped bring to Germany’s co√ers. To complete the cycle, many of the proprietors of the leisure places acquired their hotels, taxis, and restaurants from accumulated savings earned from arduous years on German assembly lines. Where they once serviced the German economy anonymously behind the scenes, living in the Heime (segregated workers housing in the early migratory days), or later in run-down Turkish neighborhoods, now in leisure sites they serve Germans more directly, accept their money, and sometimes even treat them as visiting guests, in accordance with their norms of hospitality. Entrepreneurial former Gastarbeiter now host the former taskmasters who have become paying guests, frequently in search of an ‘‘authentic’’ encounter with the natives. For some Germans, when Turks are found in situ, they assume quaint, exotic, and, most of all, authentic qualities. By contrast, in Berlin, when scarves cover their heads, when they read Turkish newspapers on busses, send children to Qur’an school, smell of garlic, or refuse to eat pork, they are ‘‘too di√erent,’’ ‘‘unintegratable’’; transgressing German norms, they become Ausländer. Place, then, helps define the nature of interaction and meaning, the space where intersubjective selves are shaped. The same persons who are seen as authentic natives in one instance emerge as undesirable Ausländer in another. ALL FOREIGNERS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL

The space of Kreuzberg, in Germany the ultimate ‘‘ethnic’’ neighborhood, as we have already seen, at once claimed by German Alternativen and Turkish immigrants, has become a keenly contested place.π Having been exposed as quintessentially polysemic, a place described by politicians’ impassioned projections and having entered the German public’s imaginary, it also remains a highly marked site. Most particularly marked for its foreignness, Kreuzberg has evoked strong reactions from many. In a statement that has been attributed (possiMAKING AUSLÄNDER

87 l

bly erroneously) to Richard von Weizsäcker, the former mayor of West Berlin and later president of the Federal Republic, he avowed, presumably expressing the views of many compatriots: There are di√erent grades of foreignness; and living together with certain of them is natural—more precisely: culturally appropriate—with the east and southern Europeans [one] gets on rather well. However, Turks in particular, along with some others, such as Palestinians and Maghrebians, who come from foreign ‘‘Kulturkreisen’’—these and only these constitute the foreigner problem. They are un-integratable—subjectively they do not wish to integrate and objectively they are not capable of integrating. They have built a ghetto, and at least one of West Berlin’s districts has been allowed to develop into a Turkish town, one that in reality has become virtually unlivable for Germans.∫

Though in a narrowly literal sense all non-Germans are equally Ausländer, von Weizsacker confirms that some Ausländer are more ausländisch than others, as he di√erentiates between foreigner identities. Sometimes the distinctions belie class identity.Ω But often, spatial metaphors apply, distinguishing those foreigners who are closer or further from the German cultural and moral center—the Kulturkreis. To the author of the text, Turks would seem to pose a threat both to inherently German space and to German indigenes. Ironically but e√ectively, they are assigned a power seemingly well beyond their means. Disenfranchised and powerless people—incapable of casting a vote against von Weizsacker—nevertheless are deemed strong enough to dominate an entire city district, resulting in the virtual exclusion of the native Germans. Yet, while bestowed with such potent agency, it simultaneously is removed since they cannot speak for themselves. The author asserts that the Turks do not wish to integrate. But this is a moot point, since, even if they did wish to integrate they ‘‘objectively are not capable’’ of it. The tone of speech along with the charged lexical choice—‘‘ghetto, unlivable, incapable of integrating, foreign Kulturkreisen’’—betray engagement in a desperate struggle for control of German Lebensraum, that fundamental axiom also invoked during the Third Reich. Lebensraum, a quintessentially hegemonic notion of place, here is threatened by others. By no means can such comments be equated with national socialist rhetoric. Indeed, in some respects the current situation is the precise inverse from the Nazi Nuremberg Laws: the Nazis forced Jews to live in l 88

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

ghettos, separately from Germans, in city quarters where it was also virtually impossible for non-Jewish Germans to live, though for entirely different reasons. German Jews, many of whom easily could pass for generic Germans, threatened Nazi ideology which sought to isolate them racially. Since their distinctiveness—their ‘‘ethnicity’’ in today’s terms—was not publicly evident, it had to be invented, with the help of a six-pointed cloth star stitched to a garment, and forced physical relocation to controlled urban ghetto environments. Thus, Jews who saw themselves as unmarked Germans, found themselves marked as Jewish, stripped of their self-ascribed Germanness. This new identity allowed them to be stigmatized, isolated, and eventually exterminated thanks to supporting legislation and the complicity of enough unmarked Germans.∞≠ Whereas during the Third Reich Jews were made to live in ghettos, postwar Berlin residence policy prohibited Turks from living in dense clusters. Instead, Turks have been compelled to seek housing in predominantly German areas where it was virtually impossible for them to find willing landlords in an absence of equal housing policy. While the Nazis forced segregation on already integrated Jews, many in Germany have criticized Turks for ghettoization but leave them little choice, since at the same time they have often been denied the possibility to integrate. Both Nazis and the Germans in whose name von Weizsacker/the author is speaking, however, saw their respective others encroaching into inherently German space. Essential di√erences remain: where the Nazis implemented annihilation in order to regain that space, the author of the statement merely proposed that immigration from Kulturkreisen beyond his ken should cease. But referring to Kreuzberg as a non-German living space distorted the statistical reality of the residents’ identities. In the year of this speech (1982), Turks made up approximately 19 percent, and all foreigners 28 percent, of Kreuzberg’s population; that is, an overwhelming majority, or 72 percent, of the district was German. Labeling Kreuzberg a ‘‘Turkish town’’ commits symbolic violence, the violence of omission, to the 72 percent. Through word choice Kreuzberg is excommunicated, its residents no longer ‘‘real’’ Germans. Since Kreuzberg has become a Turkish town, its German residents, by virtue of their residence in Kreuzberg, cannot therefore be ‘‘authentic’’ or ‘‘representative’’ Germans. If, as is asserted, it was virtually impossible for Germans to live there, then by reverse syllogistic reasoning, they either were not Germans, or were not living there, both clearly absurd, but symbolically potent in terms of political rhetoric. As the author imMAKING AUSLÄNDER

89 l

plicitly identifies clear divisions between segments of the German population, in this case by social erasure, di√erences between foreigners also are isolated, based on a problematic theory of Kulturkreis. As applied to foreigners, this theory shifts the discussion from biologically based racism to racism derived from cultural determinism. KREUZBERG IN THE GERMAN COLLECTIVE IMAGINARY

Who are these Germans for whom the author had deemed it ‘‘impossible’’ to live in Kreuzberg? Though these ‘‘alternative’’ Germans predominantly keep to themselves, the foreignness of Kreuzberg has been an attractive draw. It represents a preexisting territory resistant to conventional expressions and definitions of the Germanness the counterculture Alternativen wished to reject. Known as a Turkish enclave, it already by definition was transgressive of this Germanness. Kreuzberg embodied an alluring and ‘‘a very powerful symbolic domain despite and because of actual social marginalization’’ of the Turks (Stallybrass and White 1986: 24). Like medieval fairs and carnivals, occupying a demonized, extraterritorial yet idealized place in the social imaginary (ibid.), Kreuzberg assumed analogous qualities for many Germans (including those who never had set foot in it). Like the fair, Kreuzberg was the enactment of a dangerous transposed world upside down, where the unthinkable might occur. Turks might slaughter sheep in their bathtubs, without a butcher’s license; girls might be kidnapped, forced into arranged marriages against their will; daughters and sisters could be beaten, even killed for violation of the sexual mores of their brothers and fathers; Islamic fundamentalist rage could shock this ostensibly secular society; sectarian violence could erupt, transposed from eastern Anatolian civil wars. Moreover, bread and pork-free sausages could be purchased in Turkish, and garlic consumed. Kreuzberg stimulated new tastes and desires for some Germans here who fancied themselves daring, even transgressive. The basis of much of the fantasies was rooted in a vitiated reification of the Turkish other. REPRODUCING HIERARCHIES

According to a predominant vision of German society, foreign nationals are classified within a hierarchally ordered scheme.∞∞ The raison d’être of this hierarchy has to do with specific modes of cultural appropriation. l 90

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

European Gastarbeiter are seen as more integratable within German society, thought to share basic Christian heritage and values. However, within Europe there is also an internal classification of high and low by means of which Italians, then Greeks and Christian (former) Yugoslavs are ranked according to a more complex system of di√erentiation deriving from class, history, and religious a≈liation. Spaniards and Portuguese, though less numerous, also would be ranked here. Within this Christian space, Italians dominate the top of the pecking order, sharing as they do Catholicism (Germany is largely divided between Catholicism and Protestantism) and a solidly European heritage, which includes opera, the Renaissance, the Pope, Vivaldi, Armani, classical antiquity, pizza and gelato, and other symbols with which Germans might express a≈nity. Greeks, though Christian, are of the exotically inflected Eastern Orthodox persuasion and of a culture far less accessible to Germans. The more distant and di√erent from German society—in terms of social, cultural, and physical proxemics, and also in terms of cultural, economic, and symbolic capital—the lower a group finds itself.∞≤ This latter scale is the reflected status a group senses itself occupying, the internalized projection of the hegemonic culture. That the Turks occupy the lowest rung is indicated linguistically—the word ‘‘Turk’’ has come to be synonymous with Ausländer, foreigner, and outsider.∞≥ We might understand this as a proxemics of transgression: from a generalized German perspective the more a group is perceived to transgress the norms, symbols, values of German society, the lower it is placed on the ladder. That the foreigners themselves reproduce this hierarchical ordering shows an internalization of their symbolic capital—or lack thereof. Bourdieu describes this process: Dominated agents, who assess the value of their position and their characteristics by applying a system of schemes of perception and appreciation which is the embodiment of the objective laws whereby their value is objectively constituted, tend to attribute to themselves what the distribution attributes to them, refusing what they are refused. (1984: 471)

These projected and appropriated refusals assume many forms. Turks regularly have been refused entry into certain real estate markets; predicting such refusal, many prefer to live, even illegally, in neighborhoods with other Turks, thus reinforcing German-assigned attributes of antisocial, antiintegrative, and criminal. Places in the more academic secondary school, MAKING AUSLÄNDER

91 l

Gymnasium, commonly have been directly or indirectly refused to Turkish children. Many Turkish parents unschooled in the German system in e√ect conspire unknowingly with the educational authorities to deny their children the necessary tools to assure their future social, educational, and vocational security and success in Germany. The parents’ lack of fluency in German educational techniques perpetuates the continuity of a ‘‘dominated’’ (ibid.) underclass of Turks in Germany who remain outsiders to mainstream middle-class society—again reinforcing perceptions of nonintegrated Turks. To be sure, this generalized scenario is not always the case. There are those of Turkish parentage who complete Gymnasium, attend university, and succeed in any number of professions. Thus, education is one means of social division within the Turkish German population. Others also are evident. For example, urban Turks from Western Turkey often feel little if any kinship with poorer rural compatriots. Worse yet, from the perspective of some Turks, are the Kurds from Eastern Anatolia, whom they regard as little better than primitive. The self-designated ‘‘Westernized’’ urban Turks often feel shame and resentment toward their ‘‘backward, embarrassing’’ compatriots, who, they say, give all Turks, ‘‘even the well-integrated, modern ones,’’ a bad name. Some also blame rural Kurds, sometimes dressed in ‘‘traditional’’ garb, for the considerable yabancı dü¸smanlı˘gı—Ausländerfeindlichkeit (xenophobia) most migrants claim to experience. Additionally, I have observed Turks in Berlin acting disparagingly toward Gypsies (primarily Roma and Sinti), from whom they take great pains to dissociate. Knowing that Germans sometimes mistake Gypsies for Turks, some Turks fault the Gypsies for contributing to the xenophobia. Among immigrants from Turkey, the urban-rural divide commands such symbolic capital that those hailing from Anatolian villages often claim to be from Istanbul or Ankara. Children are instructed to declare they are from Istanbul, but when pressed, display complete unfamiliarity with the city. Alevi migrants practice similar dissimulation. Since many regions and towns in Turkey are characterized by the predominance of Alevis, when abroad many try to pass as unmarked among the dominant Sunni community. They resort to replacing themselves, claiming to have migrated from unmarked, Sunni regions, or simply, from the catch-all, Istanbul. Echoing Bourdieu’s observations, parallels emerge within the larger foreign population. It is not just the question of reproducing the social hierarchy embedded into the system of domination but rather there is an elel 92

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

ment of creative di√erentiation involved in the process. Just as many urban Turks are eager to disown their rural compatriots, migrants from Greece can become distressed when mistaken for Turkish. A notch down from Italians, Greeks stand in a superior position to Turks, in part due to Germans tracing their intellectual heritage to ancient Greece. Germany produced important schools of classical Greek philology; Goethe, much enamored with Greece, idealized it, translated and promoted modern (nineteenth-century) Greek folk songs. Furthermore, after Italy, Greece has been a favorite vacation spot for Germans for many years, small numbers of whom own property, returning annually. Greek music and food have become well known and appreciated in Germany. Returning German vacationers enjoy trying out their holiday Greek in Berlin tavernas. Turkey’s vacation potential was discovered later by German tourists, remaining less accessible and more exotic. Moreover, Greece is a member of that most exclusive club at whose tightly barred doors Turkey has been knocking for decades. In the 1980s Greece entered the European Community (now the European Union).∞∂ Despite Greece’s violations, occasional isolation, and bellicose threats,∞∑ the economic links and freedom of movement symbolize a vital sense of inclusion into Europe that Turkey lacks and direly desires.∞∏ In Greece the most salient ‘‘other’’ nearly always has been the Turk, to the extent that Greekness often is conceived in direct opposition to imagined, feared Turkishness. But in Germany the labels, treatment, and concept of Ausländer and ‘‘Turk’’ frequently are used synonymously and interchangeably; it can be, therefore, surprising and confusing, if not highly upsetting, for Greeks to be mistaken for Turks. The situation elicits novel reactions and responses, from a critical rethinking and reevaluation of the traditional nationalist, acutely anti-Turkish animosity, to the Greeks’ wholesale appropriation of the dominant culture’s values and attitudes about Turks (cf. Herzfeld 1987: 107). Herzfeld has written extensively about the relationship of modern Greece to its often-reconstructed ancient past (1981 and 1987, passim). Consistent with this, one way in which Greek entrepreneurs reinforce not solely their di√erence and distance from Turks and Turkishness but their proximity to high-status classical antiquity is through the iconography of restaurant names and decors. Moutsou, who conducted research among Greek and Turkish restaurateurs in Brussels, concurs: ‘‘The names of Greek restaurants are frequently inspired by Ancient Greek mythology and history. ‘The MAKING AUSLÄNDER

93 l

Trojan Horse,’ ‘The Heel of Achilles,’ ‘Great Alexander,’ ‘Poseidon’ and many others directly refer to an imagined Greece’s ancient past . . . associated with the construction of a Greek ideal image’’ (1998: 140). One Berlin restaurant I frequented, ‘‘Akropolis,’’∞π advertised and presented itself as a Greek cafe. It was equipped with the requisite attributes of Berlin’s other Greek restaurants: blue and white decor with ornamental meander motif, touristic posters of Aegean islands, Greek-style lettering, a menu with Germanicized Greek food, Greek wines and spirits, and tapes of music by Theodorakis ; yet there remained a crucial di√erence from the other Greek restaurants. The owner and several of the waiters, while presenting themselves publicly as ‘‘Yiannis’’ or ‘‘Yiorgos,’’ addressed each other as ‘‘Mehmet’’ and ‘‘Yusuf.’’ Though it was only audible in low tones, they spoke Turkish to one another. A bit of probing revealed that the owner and waiters were from a village in Western Thrace, the northeasternmost region of Greece, bordering Bulgaria and Turkey. This region is the home of a large Turkish-speaking Muslim minority,∞∫ a continual thorn in the side of the Greek government.∞Ω The ethnography of restaurant going in Berlin reveals that most Turkish restaurants are patronized predominantly by Turks. Some exceptions are the handful of more expensive, strategically designed and located Turkish restaurants catering to Germans or tourists. Italian, Greek, and Yugoslav restaurants, on the other hand, do an excellent business with German customers. Some of the Italian restaurants in particular, are very upscale. Clearly, ‘‘Yiannis/Mehmet’’ was hoping that he and his restaurant would ‘‘pass’’ for Greek—at least vis-à-vis German restaurant goers. This presents an interesting twist to questions of the presentation of the self and the interpretation of the meaning of place. A restaurant can be read as the configuration of Greek or Turkish space depending on the eyes (and ears) of the beholder. As such, it is suggestive for its deliberate subversion and questioning of ‘‘ethnic’’ boundaries. This instance is particularly intriguing since Greeks and Turks often serve as the salient other for each other, though more the Turks for the Greeks than vice-versa. Otherness in the self is a categorical confusion, ‘‘matter out of place’’ (Herzfeld 1987: 15).≤≠ The example of ‘‘Akropolis’’ certainly represents a categorical confusion, a culinary and representational variant of ethnic transpositioning and transgressions; one would be hard pressed indeed to assign a cursory ethnic appellation to the ‘‘Akropolis’’ restaurant or to its owners. It is an example of what Herzfeld calls ‘‘domestic alterity’’ (42), here perhaps reflecting a single, idiosyncratic case but indicating as well l 94

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

that the foreign context o√ers a wider range of possibilities for expression of alternative identities, not easily captured by restrictive ethnic labels. COMMODITIZED ETHNICITY: CONSUMING ETHNIC CHIC

The ‘‘ethnic’’ boundary-bending performed by the restaurateur Yanni/ Mehmet≤∞ suggests a consideration of ethnicity—not merely what it is and isn’t, and to whom, but the disaggregation of its popular from its academic forms. Ethnicity, in both its guises as, first, a colloquial, and then, a social scientific term, remains a perennially frustrating concept. It is at once slippery and elusive yet obvious and self-evident. As seen, an underlying problem with its academic deployment is that ubiquitous folk models unselfconsciously are appropriated by social scientific theorizing. Furthermore, the academic use of ‘‘ethnicity’’ parades a panoply of inconsistent theories and examples muddling the models. Terms such as ‘‘ethnic restaurants,’’ ‘‘ethnic studies,’’ ‘‘ethnic groups’’ long since have entered popular discourse, implying a consensual understanding of their referents. Yet the underlying assumption that ethnic groups are ostensively referential, even equivalent cross-cultural operators, lies at the crux of the ethnicity conundrum. The tacit agreement or presumption propping up this usage is that ethnics are society’s others; depending on the context, they might be African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, or Jews but rarely the unmarked white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, known colloquially as wasps. An ‘‘ethnic’’ restaurant in the United States might be Mexican, Thai, Chinese, or Ethiopian; in Berlin, it could be Turkish, Serbian, or Portuguese; often it is located in an ‘‘ethnic’’ neighborhood. In neither place is it likely to be French or English. Though inklings of change can be noted, conventionally in the glossy pages of home decorating magazines, cyclically fashionable ‘‘ethnic décor’’ does not include Louis XIV furnishing but rather projects a sensibility far from the prestige of ‘‘genuine’’ antiques; ethnic garb generally does not grace the catwalks of Paris— unless, of course, ‘‘Russian peasant’’ happens to be ‘‘in’’ for a season. But this may be changing. ‘‘Ethnic’’ holds a particular place in Western culture; in recent years the ways ‘‘ethnic’’ is fetishized and consumed have shifted along with visions of style. Notwithstanding quotidian notions of ‘‘ethnic’’ as euphemistic for racialist categories, it is becoming consumably chic. In recent seasons haute couture has appropriated and interpreted the MAKING AUSLÄNDER

95 l

‘‘ethnic’’ look—Christian Lacroix is known for incorporating it in his haute couture collections. The trend has begun to appear in luxurious home decorating magazines, as the interiors of the style-setting wealthy now might juxtapose the studied-yet-casual look of an embroidered Uzbek textile tossed over a sofa ‘‘for e√ect,’’ alongside African baskets dangling above Navajo pottery, placed on a Moroccan brass table, atop a Turkish kilim rug. ‘‘Ethnic’’ jewelry and casual clothing have gained popularity in Europe and North America over the past couple of decades. Even ‘‘ethnic’’ body art has come of age: Madonna appropriated and transposed North African and Indian women’s henna painting to North America. Now American teens can have their bodies henna-ed in their local shopping malls. A step removed from segmenting a multiply ethnicized body, ethnic chic is synthetic bricolage of an Orientalist vision and Orientalizing objects. Dependent on a paradigmatic ethnic other, such artifactual ethnicization attempts to achieve the desired ‘‘authentic,’’ ‘‘ethnic’’ e√ect. The highest prestige value is attached to the material culture one collects during the course of travels, accompanied by priceless personal stories about the mask from a visit to a longhouse in New Guinea, or the authentic souvenir from a wedding attended in Bali. However, most bricoleur consumers take shortcuts, paying elevated sums to the purveyors of ritual masks; handwoven silks, rugs, or baskets; or ‘‘primitive’’ carvings, in New York or Los Angeles, Düsseldorf or Milan—now, increasingly appearing at auction. To the consumers of ‘‘ethnic’’ commodities, be they pashmina shawls or Berber carpets, Turkoman necklaces or aboriginal instruments, ‘‘ethnic’’ becomes a genericized term and product. Thoroughly decontextualized and recontextualized, such articles assume the status of desired objets d’art. In short, ethnic is ‘‘in’’; that is, when it does not extend beyond the friendly sta√ of the quaint and colorful ethnic restaurant, when it remains touristfriendly in a native village, when it stays in its safe, commodified place. Thus do ethnic bricoleurs depend on a genericized, Orientalized, ethnicized other; as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has described, it represents the ethnographic as art, but in a restaged version (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). ALTERNATIVES AND CONSEQUENCE

For several decades, sharing Kreuzberg’s turf with the Turkish and other immigrants have been German Alternativen, the countercultural leftist anarchists, engaged in their own form of ethnic chic. Not only do the conl 96

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

summate consumers of New York’s Upper West Side adorn their homes with ethnic artifacts, but the Alternativen of Kreuzberg have long practiced it as well, among whom generic third world ethnic represents good taste, part of a konsequent lifestyle. Here, konsequent glosses not simply as ‘‘consistent’’ but assumes politically correct moral dimensions as well. The requisite uniform, in the 1980s, for example, included a long scarf wrapped numerous times around the neck. A prized neckscarf was a ka≈ya, the unambiguously marked symbol of the Palestinians. Otherwise an Indian scarf would do, draped over a large ill-shapen bulky sweater, hand knit in Peru or another South or Central American location, preferably by a women’s collective. The ubiquitous cigarettes were the fashionably hand-rolled variety—perceived as more ‘‘natural.’’ Men frequently sported a single pierced ear. For women the pierced earrings—often ‘‘ethnic’’—dangling from left and right ears generally would not match each other. Some of the konsequent with vegetarian bents never wore animal products; with them, jute and hemp provided favorite substitutes. Where and what one consumed also mattered. Overtly engaged with third world activities, Alternativen in towns throughout Germany supported the local Dritte Welt Laden—Third World Shop. Here one could buy politically correct organic fabric with natural dyes, as well as politically correct co√ee from Nicaragua, ‘‘native’’ arts and crafts, as well as books on Cuban and Sandinista peasants. A Third World Shop in West Berlin was located in the Gedächtniskirche complex on the Ku’damm, downtown’s main boulevard. Complementing this, a vast cooperative network, operating between and among numerous large and small coops, dealt in barter, avoiding monetary exchange and thereby the controls, taxes, and gaze of the state. Behind my Kreuzberg block of flats, in a complex of interconnected fore- and Hinterhäuser, front, mid-, and back buildings and courtyards, originally a nineteenth-century factory and workers’ residence, lived and worked a large cooperative community. The residents owned and ran a number of establishments, such as an architectural firm, a shop producing surfboards, a carpentry shop, an auto-repair garage for taxis, an alternative language school, and a health food shop. I enrolled for a German course at the language school—singular, in that grammar was considered a bourgeois constraint to speech and was, therefore, disregarded in favor of faltering ungrammatical discussions of radical politics. One day our teacher took us on a tour of the complex. At the health food shop we were told MAKING AUSLÄNDER

97 l

about organic food and how nutrition played an important role in the shop’s inventory. I wondered if I might shop there, as I lived around the corner; they were hesitant but thought that it just might be possible. When I asked if they opened their doors to the neighbors, the scores, no, hundreds of Turks in the adjacent buildings, they said absolutely not, it was not open to them. I pursued it, suggesting that perhaps the neighbors, economically stretched, might benefit as well from healthy foodstu√s at notfor-profit prices. No, they adamantly insisted, ‘‘We cannot deal with them. They are much too backwards. They are a patriarchal culture and we have no basis for communication with them.’’ Hanging on the walls in the room in which we were seated were posters of Central American Sandinista peasants. Apparently those third worlders were not as patriarchal and backward as Berlin’s Turks. The unevenness and inconsistency (‘‘nicht konsequent ’’) of this Alternative subculture was pervasive in Kreuzberg, that hothouse of squatted buildings, punks, pensioners, Turkish immigrants, Alternative nonmonetary cooperatives and communes, cluttered with smoky Alternative cafes, and Alternative Kinderladen (daycare centers—literally, ‘‘child-shops’’). For the most part the Alternative Germans and the Turkish immigrants, neighbors, lived their lives nearly oblivious to one another, passing daily on the streets without encounters or engagement. Certainly, not all alternative coops and establishments have maintained the same degree of disengagement with their ‘‘third world’’ neighbors resident in Germany. Many individuals and groups actively engage in Ausländerarbeit, foreigner work—ranging from social work, education, legal aid, to art projects—often subsidized by municipal authorities. PERFORMING ETHNICITY, RE-FORMING RACE

Compare the Alternative in Kreuzberg with Gisela Welz’s description of the Frankfurt performance scene, where managers and producers of cultural events promoted Ethnokultur, a homogenized vision of music and dance; again, genericizing others. Local Ausländer complained that city support for Ethnokultur meant there no longer was funding for their productions. The municipality’s programmers responded that the immigrants’ cultural events were merely ‘‘folklore,’’ not ‘‘foreign’’ enough, boring, and, most notably, did not meet the standards of a cosmopolitan art scene (1993). The

l 98

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

disvalued ‘‘authentic’’ could not compete with the mediated and domesticated Ethnokultur. The ethnic straightjacket approach demands that the ‘‘ethnics’’ represent themselves in ways amenable to German stereotypes of them. The cultural politics Welz describes are such that on the one hand the Department of Cultural A√airs vigorously promotes cultural di√erence, willing to fund mono-ethnic cultural associations, earmarked for activities narrowly defined as cultural whose emphasis is authenticity and continuity. Yet in the Ausländerstadtteil (foreigner neighborhood) Welz identifies an emergent genre of ‘‘folk forms and e√ectively transcultural practices of everyday life’’ (87); rap, hip-hop, and gra≈ti, borrowed from the urban United States have emerged. Welz claims that such hybrid forms would be excluded from city cultural funding, incongruent with the funders’ imaginary authentic. This is not the case throughout Germany. In Berlin o≈cial municipal sponsorship supports such forms of creative expression. Berlin authorities interpret them as an attempt to ‘‘globalize’’ the local, to legitimize the art forms of the oppressed and marginal, celebrating them as ‘‘hybrid.’’ In this way the state legitimizes itself as cosmopolitan, celebrating its own version of authentic di√erence. This version, however, is a form of appropriation of the counterculture paying scant attention, and assigning minimal value, to the unperformed local Turkish cultures denied a state-sponsored stage.≤≤ The cosmopolitanism and cultural aesthetic seek authentic and original foreign artistic expressions. In many North American and European contexts, ‘‘ethnic’’ is deployed to equalize and relativize peoples, groups, and statuses. Instead, such deployment backfires, as ‘‘ethnic’’ becomes the euphemism for what a generation ago would have been called ‘‘race.’’ In many cases, race, no longer a politically correct term, yields to ethnicity, the latter still enjoying a façade of relativity and neutrality. In Germany ‘‘race’’ is more marked than in most places, thanks to the historical baggage and connotations conjured up from the Third Reich. Thus, with reference to the Turks, a nonracialized terminology explicitly is deployed: Ausländer, or Mitbürger have become acceptable terms, replacing the now embarrassing Gastarbeiter. Cumbersome and rarely used is ethnische Minderheiten (ethnic minorities). The term denoting xenophobia or racism, Ausländerfeindlichkeit—literally ‘‘enmity or hostility toward foreigners’’—itself obviates a manifest discussion of race. Avoidance of a

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

99 l

misplaced racialization may at first glance appear to be a positive move; however, it equally avoids acknowledging the pervasive racialized discourse. Not only extremists such as the framers of the Heidelberg Manifesto resort to racialist ideologies but the widespread use of the term Ausländerfeindlichkeit (instead of Rassismus) reinforces the conceit that racism does not exist in Germany. Kalpak and Räthzel have dealt with this problem, explaining why the use of ‘‘race’’ is taboo. Their interpretation, that since in politics and the academy the term ‘‘racism’’ is taboo, so is its referent—the ‘‘reality’’ of racism taboo (1991). A common German defense against Ausländerfeindlichkeit being a form of racism, that it would ‘‘trivialize the su√ering of the Jewish people during German fascism,’’ makes impossible an analysis of racism in its current or previous incarnations. Nazis ‘‘claimed that Jews were of a di√erent race, although they had the same skin colour and looked no di√erent from other Germans. Although a whole pseudo-science was invented to measure those pretended physical di√erences, a yellow star had to be used in order to make the ‘di√erence’ ‘visible’ ’’ (1991: 151). The rationalization about why any discussion of race is suppressed is itself based in racialist ideology, for another reason given why Ausländerfeindlichkeit is not racism, is that ‘‘Turks are not a di√erent race, the way African Americans are.’’ This is itself grounded in a flawed belief in the scientific validity of meaningful racial di√erences judged by skin color. Despite the general avoidance of the term ‘‘racism’’ in activist and academic discussions it has nevertheless occasionally been applied both by and about Germans.≤≥ In honor of the European Union’s declaration of 1997 as ‘‘The European Year against Racism,’’ a sixty-four-page booklet was published, Vielfalt statt Einfalt: Strategien gegen Rassismus und Fremdenfeindlichkeit (Diversity instead of Simplicity: Strategies against Racism and Xenophobia)( Micksch 1997). Written by the Intercultural Commissioner for the Protestant Church in Hessen and Nassau, it discusses definitions and practices; unsubtle photographs of dark-skinned children playing with pale, blond playmates illustrate possibilities of diversity. It o√ers suggestions about how to wage an intercultural o√ensive against racism— through music, sports, and the like. Balibar attacks European racism as well. In a persuasive argument, he relates racism to institutionalized practices of the state—it is not merely prejudice against or hatred of an other that causes racism:

l 100

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

In essence modern racism is never simply a ‘‘relationship to the Other’’ based upon a perversion of cultural or sociological di√erence; it is a relationship to the Other mediated by the intervention of the state. Better still—and it is here that a fundamentally unconscious dimension needs to be conceptualized—it is a conflictual relationship to the state which is ‘‘lived’’ distortedly and ‘‘projected’’ as a relationship to the Other. (1990: 15; emphasis in original)

Balibar cautions that any discussion of European racism must first contend with definitions of ‘‘European.’’ The definitions of self and other, European and non-European, have always been codependent and mutually constitutive: ‘‘Europe is not something that is ‘constructed’ . . . it is a historical problem without any pre-established solution. ‘Migrations’ and ‘racism’ form part of the elements of this problem’’ (7).≤∂ For Balibar, legacies of colonialism are the necessary historical context through which contemporary relations between the state and minorities must be examined. Experiences of legal, state-sponsored discrimination, of its treatment of certain people as ‘‘ ‘subjects’ rather than ‘citizens’ by the functioning of the state administration, the educational system, the political machine’’ (15) all collude in the creation of minorities. ‘‘Minorities (ethnic, cultural, occupational) only exist in actuality from the moment when they are codified and controlled’’ (15). MIMETISM AND THE MAKING OF A TURK / KURD / ALEVI / ZAZA

One of the best cases for demonstrating the mutability of ‘‘ethnicity’’ and the mimetic process is the case of an Alevi friend I will call Gül. An articulate young woman who completed university and now works as a professional, her trajectory was anything but certain. Gül grew up in the far reaches of West Berlin in the late 1970s and 1980s, in a largely German neighborhood. Having arrived at age six to join her parents and several siblings already in Berlin, she was the only child from Turkey in her class. Gül readily picked up German. Extremely studious and bright, she was always at the top of her class, despite the inability of her parents to speak German, much less help with homework. A friendly, generous, and sociable person, Gül easily made friends with her German classmates. It was a happy time for her, and she thrived in this academic and social environment. At home, her Alevi family did little to educate her into the esoterica of

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

101 l

their belief system. However, she was aware that she and her extended family and most of their friends also were Alevi. The only other family from Turkey in the area were Sunni neighbors, with whom they had friendly relations. Occasionally she went with her family to cems (Alevi communal ceremonies) or other Alevi events. She heard Alevi saz music at home, where she spoke primarily Zaza, her mother’s and her mother tongue. At the time, she did not know it was Zaza; it simply was called ‘‘our language.’’ However, it was an unmarked, unspoken, tacit sort of identification—in Gül’s life, revolving around her family and her German school friends, there was no dominant Sunni Turkish ‘‘other’’ that would mark Alevilik as deviant or heterodox. Yet still, her parents always told her to lie about where she was from, ‘‘to protect us,’’ they explained. If asked, she was to say she was ‘‘from Istanbul,’’ not the small hamlet near the very marked Alevi city of Tunceli in the Kurdish region of eastern Anatolia. They never explained why she should dissimulate, but the message conveyed was that their origins were secret, perhaps even something to be ashamed about. Everything changed when Gül was thirteen and the family moved to the heart of Neukölln, one of the epicenters of Berlin Turkish life. Until then, Gül’s Turkish was limited. Though she had heard it all her life—her siblings spoke it among themselves, she heard radio and music in Turkish, and some family friends spoke it—she had never studied it and was not terribly comfortable using it. From one day to the next, Gül found herself transported from an unproblematic German environment to a dominant Turkish one, and a polarized one besides. It was a shock to be surrounded by Turkishness. She missed her old home, school, and friends. Once we moved to Neukölln, when I was in public with my mother, I was embarrassed that she didn’t speak Turkish. She would speak to me in ‘‘our language’’ and I would answer her in Turkish. I felt it was humiliating that she didn’t know proper Turkish. So one day when we went to the Turkish street market in Kreuzberg, she tried to speak Turkish, but that only made it worse, since from the way she speaks it is so obvious that she is not a Turkish speaker, so I told her not to bother. I don’t know why it upset me, but they had always made our identity into a secret, as though we should be ashamed of it. And with so many Turks around, it made me insecure to speak Zaza.

Gül had no formal educational guidance. None of her teachers had suggested that she enter a Gymnasium or had instructed her how to apply l 102

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

for secondary school. Her parents had no sense of the school protocols whatsoever. It was a chance encounter with a German woman for whom she was baby-sitting that found her a place in her new secondary school, a nonacademic Realschule that ended after tenth grade, after which the graduates hoped to find vocational training. It was about 30 percent Turkish, drawn for the most part from students from Kreuzberg and Neukölln who had come from ‘‘Ausländer classes’’ so were fluent and literate in Turkish. Gül felt self-conscious about her halting Turkish, and initially made friends with German girls. ‘‘The Turkish girls all knew each other from before,’’ she explained, ‘‘and were a close group.’’ Her teachers as well as her German and Turkish classmates were astonished at her absolute fluency in German. They had never heard a ‘‘Turk’’ speak in unaccented, grammatically perfect, fluent German. Nevertheless, her Turkish improved rapidly in this setting, and gradually she found herself compelled to act di√erently and think of herself in new ways. In the second year in this school, tensions between Turks and Germans arose. Turks blamed Germans in the school for discriminating against them and became more militant. Gradually, feeling the increasing polarization, Gül began to socialize with the Turkish girls, as she reduced her contact with the Germans. It was no longer possible to socially be part of both groups. However, of the ‘‘Turks,’’ Gül was the sole Alevi. She explained: In my old school, I participated in everything everyone else did. My parents didn’t mind and thought it was normal. But in the new school, there was this pressure to do what the Turkish girls did, even if I didn’t want to. I remember once playing a game in the classroom where sometimes boys’ and girls’ shoulders rubbed against each other in the activity. The teacher tried to be sensitive and said the Turkish girls would be excused from it, only the German girls in the class would be allowed to play. I didn’t think of myself as one of those ‘‘Turkish girls,’’ and I really wanted to play. I thought it was ridiculous that the other Turkish girls wouldn’t play. But I realized then that the teacher thought I was like them, so she wouldn’t let me play. I couldn’t tell her otherwise. Another time, there was a field trip away from Berlin for several days. In the past my parents had always permitted me to go on these excursions, and I was looking forward to it. But the Turkish girls were forbidden by their families from going. It would have been very awkward for me to have gone—I would have been the only ‘‘Turk’’ in the group. By then all my friends were the Turkish girls, who MAKING AUSLÄNDER

103 l

would have looked down on me for having gone with the Germans. So I felt trapped, and didn’t go, but was really sad about it. All these things, and many, many others like them, started to turn me into a ‘‘Turk.’’ Partly it was the other Turkish girls, but also a lot of it was the expectations and ignorance of my teachers, who never bothered to find out that all Turks are not ‘‘Turks’’—there are big di√erences they couldn’t even imagine. So from both sides, I was pushed into this other identity that I had never thought about before. Eventually the other girls suspected that I might be Alevi. During the Ramadan fast, one of them asked me if my mother was fasting. I said no, but it was very embarrassing. I told my mother, and asked her what I should say. She said ‘‘Tell them your mother is ill with a headache, so doesn’t need to fast.’’ The next day I told the girl who had asked me about it, and she said that her mother was ill, too, and despite that, was observing the fast. But it was very uncomfortable for me to eat while they all were fasting during the school days. One of my friends came from a very religious family. She wore a headscarf, but took it o√ at school. She said that her father had suggested that she do this, so she wouldn’t stand out and possibly be thought badly of. One day she gave me a book to read. It was in Turkish, about Islam. I was sitting in the living room at home reading it, thinking that my brother would be pleased that I was reading a book in Turkish. He came in, saw it and got very angry. He yelled ‘‘Why are you reading things from those dogs!!??’’ and insisted I return it the following day, and not read it. In those days I was curious about things. I wanted to go to a mosque—just to see what it was like. My father gave me permission, and said of course, it is a house of God, so you can go there. However, my siblings didn’t let me. I was at Realschule for four years. By the end, I was friendly with the other Turkish girls, and we had just begun to be more open about Alevi and Sunni things. After that, I went to a mixed school for three years, where I was able to do the Abitur [matriculation exam, necessary for university entrance]. At that school someone asked what language my family spoke—I hadn’t known it was Kurdish, but they told me it was. Until then I didn’t know how to name it; I didn’t have the names for these things then. There were Alevi students at that school, but the more important distinction was Kurdish-Turkish. It was at that school that I became Kurdish. Some of the students were very militant pkk supporters. There were also very right-wing Turkish nationalist students who supported the Grey Wolves. People had to take sides, and I had to argue for things I didn’t necessarily believe, just to counter the nationalist Turks. It was a

l 104

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

time when there was more and more open discussion about separatism, Kurdish identity and things like that. After my Abitur [university entrance exam] I went abroad to work as an au pair. When I returned to Berlin after a year I was shocked. Everyone was talking about Alevi this, Alevi that. That is when I first heard the name of our language, ‘‘Zaza.’’ This was so new—it had always been something unspoken, something hidden. It was such a big change. Then, later, at university things really opened up. Discussions were much more free and comfortable. It was such a di√erence from how I had grown up.

Because she had grown up implicitly Alevi and simultaneously socialized into a German social and academic environment, it was not until Gül moved into the Turkish neighborhood that she felt forced into procrustean identity politics. Only then did she feel compelled to adapt to others’ expectations of normative Turkish behavior. Today, in her mid-thirties, after having lived most of her life in Berlin and holding a German passport for over a decade, she recoils at the suggestion that she is ‘‘German.’’ Oh no, never. Maybe I am a Berliner. But I can’t be a German. First of all, they won’t have me, they wouldn’t let me call myself that. They think about ‘‘blood’’; they are so racist how they think of these things. So I can’t think of myself as a German. Sometimes, though, I do say ‘‘I’m German’’ but only to provoke people. These days I call myself Zaza. But in Germany when people ask ‘‘where are you from’’ it is very negative. I might say ‘‘I’m from Turkey’’ and they say, ‘‘Oh, you’re Turkish,’’ and I tell them no, I’m not. Then some of them might know enough to say, ‘‘Then you’re Kurdish . . .’’ No one has ever heard of Zaza, or of Alevi. The Germans talk about ‘‘integration’’ all the time, and that now Turks can be citizens. But it is nonsense, since when people ask you who you are, they don’t care about the passport you hold. They see me and know that I am not German. They won’t let me be German.

Gül’s experience of changing identifications might be grasped best through the lens of mimetism. Continually the object of others’ projections, Gül learned, as a survival mechanism, how to mold herself in order to meet these expectations. In doing so, she became alternately Turkish, Kurdish, Alevi, Zaza; still, she was excluded from the one thing that, in some respects, she may have felt most comfortable assuming had it been available:

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

105 l

FIGURE 6. King of Kebab: do-it-yourself paper doll kebab shop, complete with character biographies. Jana Döhnel, www.basteltuete.de.

German. The encompassing social and political environments created social borders and delimited the range of her interactions. She has been highly successful in the mimetic staging of her identities, echoing others’ definitions and classifications in her behavior and social expressions. In many instances, the conflicts between groups that she experienced—Germans vs. Turks; Alevis vs. Sunnis; Turks vs. Kurds—led Gül to adopt rhetorical, mimetic strategies. Balibar has suggested that minority groups emerge only through the codification and control of others (1990: 15). Gül’s experiences give voice to this in powerful ways. I would extend Balibar’s proposition to those Germans holding the mimetic mirror, for the rigidity of their projected definitions, expectations, and images of others rebounds profoundly back onto themselves. Germans can no longer simply be ‘‘Germans’’; the very act of codifying and controlling ultimately proves a reflective one. l 106

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

FIGURE 7. Amalgamation: Döneria, synthesis of döner and pizzeria. Ste√en Blandzinski, Hesse Blandzinski Design.

MARKETING ETHNICITY WITH ‘‘GOOD ETHNICS’’

What pass for ethnic processes can also be implicated in processes of production, consumption, representation, and appropriation—self and otherwise. The Turkish kebab shop owners who feel obliged to represent their businesses visually in a manner consistent with their projections of assumed German stereotypical images—a raven-haired man, smiling under his amply moustachioed face waving a large knife, ready to slice the döner kebab revolving on the spit—no longer occupy the sole food niche open to Turks. By the late 1990s Turkish Germans had begun to imagine other possibilities for themselves. No longer content to limit themselves to catering clichés, a rash of new enterprises such as Ay¸se’s Pizzeria, Oregano-PizzaWok-Kebab, a Turkish organic food shop, sit alongside Schnell Imbiss— Döner Kebab. We can speculate about what this represents: a new cosmopolitanism, a wave of creolized catering, ‘‘integration’’ in the terms of the Foreigner MAKING AUSLÄNDER

107 l

Commissioner, or simply an organic, inevitable Kreuzberg phenomenon? This is, after all, a highly self-conscious neighborhood with its own website. Although the state may not o≈cially recognize the positive contribution of this newly indigenous, demotic version of cosmopolitanism, Turkish German presence and creativity points in this direction, as later chapters further elaborate. The next chapter continues the theme of confronting a problematic other—but this time, a Jewish other.

l 108

MAKING AUSLÄNDER

4. Haunted Jewish Spaces and Turkish Phantasms of the Present l As a Jewish American with attenuated genealogical ties to Berlin stretching back more than four generations, with ancestors who perished in eastern European pogroms and in the Shoah, for me the experience of living and working in close proximity to places that had been at the heart of Nazi Germany never could be neutral or generic. Instead, it often produced a sense of at least the uncanny, occasionally evoking a silent revulsion and historically displaced horror. It was not possible either inadvertently or deliberately to avoid the city’s pervasive topographies of terror that echoed the Nazi grandiose experiment with its Millennial Capital.∞ I frequently found myself crossing Strasse des 17 Juni, the extensions of Bismarckstrasse, Kaiserdamm to the west, and Unter den Linden to the east, separated—or united—by the iconic Brandenburg Gate: it recalled that the wide boulevard easily could, and formerly did, accommodate a massive parade of tanks and goose-stepping soldiers. Thus I fell victim to something akin to what Germans call unheimlich, but even more so. Unheimlichkeit includes both defamiliarization with a place and a confrontation with the unknown, an uncanniness. For me it resonated as a sensation of historically immoral trespassing. Had it been a mere four decades earlier, this would have been a nonplace for me—in all probability I would have been banished, either to exile abroad or certain death closer to home. It is not possible to forget one’s Jewishness in Germany. Jews simply cannot be an unmarked other among others. In personal relations with some Germans it seemed to hang in the air like an unacknowledged interlocutor. But then again, I found that sometimes when it was acknowledged, perhaps it might have been better had it not been. A German friend felt it his duty to inform me that his father had been a Hitler Youth. He also told me that, despite his very self-consciously raised consciousness, he still

could not be sure whether, were it he who had been there, he also might have joined up. I never knew if he felt that by having divulged this painful secret he felt expiated: had he erased that silent interlocutor who invisibly stood between us, in the name of his honesty? I was not alone in feeling deeply invested in the sense of marked misplacement; Jewish visitors from Israel, Europe, and North America regularly came to Germany and on occasion I met some of them, sharing our responses generated by encounters with haunted places. Some were there to follow up on personal relationships established through o≈cial German programs sending young people to work in Jewish and Israeli institutions. Others came on pilgrimages to witness the transformed places of their personal past. Survivors of vanished Jewish communities had been invited by their former towns as part of local programs of reconciliation. Countless such sponsored trips have been taken by elderly Jews now living in the United States or the UK, often representing the survivors’ first return to Germany. Some of my first experiences with being Jewish in Germany brought out the anomalous situation of Jewishness in this relatively ‘‘Jew-free’’ society. The skeletal demographic profile of the Jewish population pointed to this anomaly. In the early 1980s West Berlin had circa six thousand registered Jews; all of West Germany had a Jewish population of some twenty thousand. In East Berlin only a couple hundred willingly had registered as Jews. Many of East and West Germany’s Jews were themselves, or else the descendants of, displaced people who ended up in Germany after the war. West Germany and West Berlin had o≈cially recognized Jewish communities, analogous to the corporate model of the Protestant and Catholic communities, complete with community taxation and with elected leadership that represented Jewish concerns to the local and federal governments. Since unification, the basic structure has not changed; however, it has now incorporated the former East German regions, as well as the huge influx of Russian Jews.≤ In the years following unification, Jewishness has acquired a new visibility, what has been called a ‘‘Jewish Renaissance.’’ Jewish-related books line bookshop windows throughout Berlin; Jewish artists have celebrated exhibitions; Jewish-identified cafes are chic and popular venues in newly gentrified, once-Jewish neighborhoods of eastern Berlin. How can we understand this phenomenon? I suggest that attention needs to be directed at two contradictory yet correlated phenomena: first, l 110

HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

the explicit project of memorialization of Jewish and German victims; second, the systematic concealment in urban and rural landscapes of the material symbols of the Nazi past. The tension and ambivalence evidenced in these two impulses—one to confront, the other to conceal—characterize the conflicting attitudes and practices surrounding sites of memory where the distinction between victims and perpetrators tends to blur.≥ The focus on concealing or repressing the Nazi inheritance—moral conception of the self, objectivity, aesthetics, and so on—reveals a fundamental ambivalence behind these projects of memorialization and renaissance. Despite this Jewish ‘‘renaissance’’ in Berlin and other localities, on a federal level there has been a consistent failure on the part of the German government to address what the Mitscherlichs have called the inability to mourn for the loss of the fundamental symbols of the German nation (1975). This specifically refers to the psychic investment in the father figure of the Fuhrer with whose numinous image much of the German population identified.∂ The loss of a powerful image of identification has left its trace in the psychopathology of everyday life in Germany, touching the cultural, psychological, and political symbols of authority, family, community, and national identity. As Santner explains, ‘‘Nazism had promised a so-called utopian world in which alterity in its multiple forms and dimensions could be experienced as a dangerous Semitic supplement that one was free to push to the margins and finally destroy. This was a utopia in which a mature self could never really develop’’ (1990: 32). The banishment of nationalist symbols of the Nazi utopia has not been replaced by a new process of symbolization of German identity that might have been able to confront and come to terms with the seductive power of the Nazi symbolism.∑ As discussed elsewhere, the German government’s launch of a slick branding campaign for a Germany ultimately in search of new symbols provides further evidence that the country has yet to successfully work through the lacuna within the symbolization of German identity. Indeed, for Santner the process of transmission of the psychological legacy of Nazi artifacts to later generations has taken place within a ‘‘certain psychopathology of the post-war family. The second and third generations faced the task of saying ‘we’ in the knowledge that the social mechanisms and rituals in and through which the significations of this ‘we’ was stabilized in the generation of the elders had catastrophic consequences that continued to resonate in that little pronoun’’ (35). The past markers of identity—the paternal authority figure, the cohesive national ideology— HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

111 l

once enjoyed by their parents obviously were not and could not be transmitted intact to the younger generation. Instead, the legacy of these past associations was concealed, and ultimately it was only this shameful concealment—and deadening silence—that was bequeathed to the postwar generation. Having inherited not a positive set of identifications but rather an absence, a silence that hid horrors, created an insecure subjectivity across a generation; it predisposed them ‘‘to respond to new postmodern uncertainties and disorientations in the same ways—according to the same patterns of childhood—that their elders responded to the economic and political instabilities of the 20s and 30s’’ (38). Santner suggests that the consequences can extend to a situation in which, in the postmodern period, confrontations with alterity produce a retrenchment to a security defined by the search for origin, community, the Volksgemeinschaft. Thus the repression or banishment of the personal and collective symbols of the Nazi past has deeply a√ected not only the family structure of the postwar generations but also the capacity of contemporary generations to deal with anxieties and insecurities bequeathed to them unresolved. LANDSCAPES OF CONCEALMENT

In 1982 I was a student at Schwäbisch Hall’s Goethe-Institut. It was in this storybook town nestled in the Swabian countryside that I first witnessed a pervasive form of concealment of the Nazi legacy behind or underneath the local landscapes. The Goethe-Institut teachers were for the most part a self-selecting group, bright young people interested in foreign places and persons; Goethe-Institut teachers regularly are sent to international outposts to serve as emissaries of German culture around the world. In our local tours and cultural curriculum no mention was made of a former deportation camp on the outskirts of town. One of the teachers, knowing I was Jewish, told me about it privately and one day took me there and to the local Jewish cemetery; I found the sorry condition of the overgrown weeds and crumbling gravestones profoundly disturbing. In the town’s quaint museum the tour guide said matter-of-factly, ‘‘Wir haben hier keine Juden mehr’’—we don’t have Jews here any more—as the group passed a reconstructed eighteenth-century synagogue. She had no wish to elaborate on the once thriving community. Instead, she quickly moved on to the next room where she expounded at great length about the intricacies of a nineteenth-century mousetrap. l 112

HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

Several years later I visited the charming spa town of Baden-Baden. There, the small plaque commemorating a site of former Jewish worship was nearly obscured, shaded as it was by uncut shrubbery. These incidents I would see iterated throughout Germany—what appeared to be an e√ort at the almost total concealment of embarrassing artifacts of the Jewish German heritage and the Nazi past in order to avoid the pain and discomfort of a national wound. Similar examples of concealment were evident in East and West Berlin. In the mid-1980s a Jewish friend of a friend in East Berlin, ‘‘Peter,’’ took a few of us on a tour of some of the key Jewish spots in his city. Dismissed from his journalism job after applying to immigrate to the West, he was at that time unemployed, isolated, and living in political limbo. As a potential defector to the enemy camp, he had become a risky liability for his East German friends. While waiting to leave, he volunteered at the East Berlin Jewish community center. He took us to see a number of former synagogues, disguised by their current secular functions. One served as a warehouse. The largest one, the Neue Synagoge, however, was undergoing renovation, thanks to the patronage of Honecker, the long-time leader of the GDR.∏ In Berlin the Jewish community had continually outgrown its burial spaces; once filled, a new one would be established. Not far from the city center Peter took us to an old cemetery, overflowing with graves, on Schönhauser Allee. We wandered through it, observing its dishevelled condition, overrun with weeds. Peter bemoaned that only a handful of people maintained all the city’s Jewish cemeteries; this was seriously inadequate. We began to notice that quite a few of the gravestones had been vandalized; he pointed out that most of these had the name ‘‘Levi’’ or ‘‘Levy.’’ He explained that teenagers climbed over the wall to steal these trophies, since they did not have access to the genuine article they desired—Levi-Strauss blue jeans. The modern-day gravestone robbers, perhaps ignorant about their city’s former Jewish community, coveted the preeminent symbol of Western capitalist youth culture, blue jeans. In their quest, they managed to commit an atrociously anti-Semitic act while, ironically, identifying with a valued commodity invented by a German Jewish émigré to the United States. On the other side of the Wall, neither did West Berlin actively seek to acknowledge openly its unfortunate past. In 1988 I attended a ceremony in West Berlin at the anniversary of Kristallnacht;π a plaque was unveiled at the Grunewald train station where Berlin’s Jews had been loaded onto the HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

113 l

FIGURES 8A & 8B. ‘‘Streets named after Jews are to be renamed. Haberland Strasse—after the developer of the Quarter—will be renamed Treuchtlinger and Nördlinger Strasse.’’ July 27, 1938. ∫ Stih and Schnock, Berlin / vg BildKunst, Bonn.

infamous cattle cars and taken for a fatal, final journey to the death camps. That day I was astounded to observe that the spot at which the bronze plaque was mounted happened to be about fifty meters out of sight of anyone using the train station. Had the plaque been hung just slightly to the south, it would not only have been in plain sight of local commuters living in this leafy, elegant part of the city full of stately mansions (before the war Grunewald was a neighborhood associated with wealthy Jews) but would also have been seen by people alighting from the S-Bahn (Berlin’s overland train system) to walk, bicycle, or ride horses through Grunewald’s forest. I found it disturbing, but this was not to be the end of the story. In the years following its unveiling the new plaque came under threat. The Deutsche Bahn, the national railroad, wished to build an automobile loading ramp for transporting cars onto trains. Their plans would have entailed removing the plaque. After heated discussions with leaders in the Jewish community, a compromise was reached, and the plaque remains. Later, a sculptural wall relief was erected there in memory of the deported Jews. The erasure of the Jewishness of prominent Berlin figures and the manipulation of everyday inanimate objects such as street signs: these were more troubling relics of the denegation of the Nazi shadow. For a time I lived on a street named after the renowned conductor Bruno Walter, who was Jewish. As with all streets in Berlin named after famous deceased persons, on the street sign itself, under the person’s name, are written in small letters the dates of birth and death. Adjacent to the date of death, regardless of the dead person’s religious persuasion, is a small, black cross. Each day I confronted this minute icon of insensitivity labeling BrunoWalter-Straße, and like a tiny pebble in my shoe, it rubbed just enough to be a continual bother, disallowing me to forget the insult. Similarly, around the corner from the house of some friends with whom I often stayed over the years was Auerbacherstraße, named after a Jewish writer, as was micrographically explained on the street sign (see figure 9). Each time I walked that block from the train to their house, I came to anticipate the irritation produced by the inscription of his death date memorialized on the sign with that quintessentially non-Jewish symbol, the cross. The irritation was amplified once I learned that originally the street had been called ‘‘Auerbach Straße’’ and had been adjectivalized by street-namers during the Third Reich.∫ With the additional ‘‘-er’’ the name of the street no longer sounded like a Jewish surname but rather more like a street called after a small town (Paris-er Straße; Düsseldorf-er Straße). One might wonder why HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

115 l

FIGURE 9. ‘‘Auerbacher Strasse: After Moses Baruch Auerbacher, pen name Berthold Auerbach, Jewish author 28.2.1812-8.2.1882.’’ Date of death marked by a cross symbol.

the municipality chose not to restore it to its original name and, in so doing, to honor the Berlin Jewish writer in an unsu≈xed form. These forms of manipulation of the visible landscape point to an ambivalent desire to expunge, transform, or to neutralize uncomfortable elements of the past. COUNTERMEMORIES AND THE DISPUTE OF THE ‘‘PRESENT’’ IN BERLIN

Berlin’s anamnestic relationship to its ideological past—from the birth of German ideology, to the social democratic experiments of Weimar, to national socialism, to postwar socialism—has taken many, sometimes contradictory, forms. In the initial period of research for this book, the 1980s, dealing openly with Holocaust-related issues in Germany was relatively novel and at times characterized by a frisson of the taboo. The landmark and controversial docudrama Holocaust had only recently been broadcast (1979), leading some right-wing representatives to accuse it of fostering l 116

HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

anti-German sentiment in the name of American imperialism. Furthermore, the consequence of the escalation of Cold War nuclear politics was seen by many leftists in Germany to spell a new ‘‘nuclear holocaust, a nuclear Auschwitz,’’ the terms of which implicitly were meant to neutralize the uniqueness of the Holocaust (Herf 1997: 350). Then, in 1985, Reagan’s notorious visit to Bitburg provoked outrage on the part of U.S. and Allied veterans as well as Jewish communities. To them, this commemorative act appeared to be a near sacrilegious inversion of the perpetrator and the victim, relativizing the dead Nazi soldiers with the murdered Jews and the fallen Allied soldiers. That this could be done in the name of Cold War realpolitik infuriated the left, in particular. Critical observers interpreted Reagan’s visit to Bitburg as the decisive moment where the ‘‘seeds were sown’’ (Young 2000) that made possible an era in which the legacy of the German past needed to be scrutinized, reckoned with, and demystified. Eventually this led to contested projects of memorialization, reflecting contrasting visions of the past. A national debate took place about whether one should memorialize both ‘‘innocent’’ fallen German soldiers (thus making a distinction between conscripts and the ss) and the many murdered victims of the Nazi regime, including Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and communists. Coinciding with Bitburg, the Historikerstreit set historians debating about how the German past might be approached without prejudice of any sort, and from the perspective of those who had lost the war.Ω Focusing on historical questions and approaches concerning the issue of German preand postwar identity, it addressed Nazi policy toward the Jews in the context of a wider struggle against totalitarian regimes (i.e., a comparison between the totalitarian regimes of Stalin and Hitler). It has been summed up as an ‘‘intentionalist’’ versus ‘‘functionalist’’ debate, over ‘‘the uniqueness and moral meaning of the Holocaust’’ (Nolan 1988). Habermas, as a key participant in the debate, also took an important critical position toward what he perceived as a widespread movement of memorialization on the part of neoconservatives. This is especially clear when, under the banner of memorialization, both the victims and perpetrators of Nazi crimes were seen as equally worthy of remembrance. He saw this as part of a wider, insidious agenda, eliding the negatively charged moment in Germany’s troubled history by inserting Auschwitz as just one more totalitarian chapter. In addition, he was suspicious of Germany’s attempts to position itself as a respectable nation worthy of equal partnership with HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

117 l

Western powers by softening its past image and crimes, displacing responsibilities for its past upon di√erent kinds of enemies defined by a Cold War Manichaean world (Habermas 1989).∞≠ With the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification came new attempts at finding ways to symbolize German patriotism. How could this be acceptable to a newly found and precarious normalization among the community of Western nation-states? Some pointed to the politics of memorials as a means to cultivate such patriotism, seeking generalized, universal symbols commemorating all victims of all wars and repressions that had a√ected the German population. Such an impulse would no longer distinguish between victims and perpetrators; it would envelope them all together into a vague sentimentalism. Chancellor Kohl’s proposal for such a monument to all victims of tyranny and oppression was a Käthe Kollwitz Pietà sculpture of a mother mourning her son, to be placed inside Schinkel’s Neue Wache, the nineteenth-century structure used by both ‘‘Nazis and the communists as a national memorial and wreath-laying site during their respective regimes in Berlin’’ (Young 2000: 186). Such a gesture for Kohl would perform ideological work in the service of national reconciliation, a polysemic symbol accommodating multiple processes of mourning of fallen Nazi soldiers and victims of communist tyranny alike. Critics pointed out that the obvious association of the Pietà, a quintessential Christian symbol, precluded it from serving as a universally accessible memorial. It blocked the possibility, first, of Jews mourning their dead, just as it precluded collective mourning for the murdered Jewish Holocaust victims.∞∞ Equally disturbing was that the language of sacrifice implied by a Pietà could be interpreted as legitimizing the Nazis’ transformation of the Christian symbol of sacrifice of one’s life into a heroic duty to their millennial cause. This Pietà, constructed in 1993, contributed another layer of materiality to this historically potent palimpsest of mourning. In the early years of unification, while some disputed using a Christian symbol to represent shared mourning, others called for a specifically Jewish memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe. Mediating between these two camps, still others called into question the very possibility of memorializing the past, questioning ‘‘whether su√ering might be redeemed by its aesthetic reflection or that the terrible void left behind by the murder of Europe’s Jews might be compensated by a nation’s memorial forms is simply intolerable on both ethical and historical grounds . . . squeezing beauty or pleasure from such events . . . is not so much a benign reflection l 118

HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

of the crime as it is an extension of it’’ (Young 2000: 2). Thus the creation of a memorial was challenged: by inappropriately aesthetisizing the crime, it would have anesthetized the memory of the Holocaust. This line of thought gave rise to the rejectionists, proposing ‘‘countermonuments’’— ‘‘memorial spaces [that] conceive to challenge the very premise of the monument’’ (96). An example of this rejectionist tendency was the project envisioned by Hoheisel—blowing up the Brandenburg Gate and burying its ashes in the same spot, on top of which would be placed a tombstone inscribed with the names of the concentration camps. A strikingly di√erent form of memorialization was developed by Renate Stih and Frieder Schnock, two historically minded conceptual artists, part of this ‘‘rejectionist’’ trend.∞≤ Having won the competition set by Berlin’s district of Schöneberg to design a memorial to the murdered Jews of this district, they procured local public funds to support its creation. Stih’s and Schnock’s ‘‘monument’’ radically transforms the contours of the everyday by juxtaposing it to the horrors of the Holocaust. Named Orte des Errinerns im Bayerischen Viertel—Places of Remembrance in the Bavarian Quarter—it is a decentralized memorial to the Quarter’s former Jewish residents (see figures 8, 10–13). Consisting of eighty metal shields, signs a≈xed to lampposts bearing colorful stylized images on one side and the texts of Nazi laws and decrees on the other, it recreates ‘‘on linguistic and pictorial levels the political violence that had gone on in everyday life . . . together the words and images force passers-by to remember the almost forgotten history of this neighbourhood’’ (Wiedmer 1998: 11, 13). For pedestrians walking through the neighborhood, the work entails a temporal confusion. The anachronistic Nazi decrees spelled out artfully in word and picture nearly subvert their very basic simplicity; the horror is confronted with the realization that these very decrees, in this very place, observed and condoned by previous passers-by, gradually and systematically led many of the former Jewish residents into oblivion. The deliberate siting of the signs renders the work still more e√ective. For example, the sign near a present-day public telephone bears the image of a simple black and white telephone dial, on the back of which reads, ‘‘Telephone lines to Jewish households will be cut o√. July 29, 1940; Use of public telephones is forbidden December 21, 1941.’’ For Jews living in an increasingly frightening and restrictive environment, subject to the Nuremberg Laws by which their very movements and actions were curtailed, forbidden, and under surveillance, the inability to make and receive teleHAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

119 l

phone calls could be a life-and-death matter. Some signs in this permanent outdoor exhibit note the seemingly quotidian—such as the date from which Jews no longer could attend cinema, opera, or concerts (November 12, 1938) and were ‘‘no longer allowed to own household pets’’ (May 15, 1942). Others describe the symbolic expulsion of Jews from the neighborhood through the renaming of streets formerly named for Jews, an act anticipating their physical expulsion, their deportation. The stark, Warholian images project a hypernormality—that is, until the texts on the reverse sides are noted. This display of the everyday reveals the Nazis’ techniques deployed in the process of ostracizing and eventually exterminating Germany’s Jewish population, just as it implicitly indicts the complicit neighbors. It takes compliant clients and patients to refuse to patronize Jewish lawyers or doctors; it demands unquestioning neighbors to not notice the absence of Jews in shops and cinemas, or Jewish children in the playground and schools. Thus the calculated Nazi-designed transformation of the urban and social space is provocatively recalled, reimaged, and reimagined through these iconic and textual juxtapositionings, through an aesthetics of ostensible normality. In the context of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—the project of working through, coming to terms with, overcoming the past∞≥ —the memorial provides a critical site for evaluating the politics of postwar normalization. Still more crucially, it o√ers a de-mystification of the past (Wiedmer 1998: 15) while subverting claims to incomprehensibility of the Holocaust. A further instance of countermonumentality was conceived by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalef Gerz. Located in a suburb of Hamburg with a large Turkish and German blue-collar population, it was entitled Against Fascism, War and Violence—and for Peace and Human Rights. This piece took the form of a forty-foot high, three-foot square lead-clad aluminum pillar designed to be written on by viewers. The act of writing transformed passive viewers into active participants in not only the pursuit of memory but the commitment to future action, not inaction, in the face of fascism and injustice. As increasing numbers of people inscribed their names on the pillar, it gradually was lowered deeper and deeper into a purpose-built shaft beneath it. After seven years it disappeared entirely; a burial stone covers the top surface of the pillar. ‘‘How better to remember forever a vanished people than by the perpetually unfinished, ever-vanishing monument’’ (Young 2000: 131).∞∂ A similar example of dealing with the anguish of perpetual vanishing is l 120

HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

FIGURES 10A & 10B. ‘‘Jews in Berlin are only allowed to buy food between four and five o’clock in the afternoon.’’ July 4, 1940. ∫ Stih and Schnock, Berlin / vg BildKunst, Bonn.

FIGURES 11A & 11B. ‘‘The subjects ‘Genetic Heredity’ and ‘Race’ are examination fields at all schools.’’ September 13, 1933. ∫ Stih and Schnock, Berlin / vg BildKunst, Bonn.

FIGURES 12A & 12B. ‘‘Only honorable comrades of German blood, or related descent may become allotmentgardeners.’’ March 22, 1938. ∫ Stih and Schnock, Berlin / vg BildKunst, Bonn.

found within the architectonics of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. Quoting from Young, The building is as complex as the history of Berlin . . . the interior . . . interrupted by smaller, individual structures, shells housing the voids running throughout the structure, each painted graphite black. They completely alter any sense of continuity or narrative flow and suggest instead architectural, spatial and thematic gaps in the presentation of Jewish history in Berlin. The absence of Berlin’s Jews as embodied by this void, is meant to haunt any retrospective presentation of the past here. (2000: 175–78)

Furthermore, as Young points out, Libeskind’s focus on architectural voids portrays the present as a façade for the absence of Jewish life, ‘‘an aggressively anti-redemptory design, built literally around an absence of meaning and history, an absence of the people who would have given meaning to their history’’ (179). The presence of these absences, the construction of these voids, is not meant to reassure visitors. Rather, its purpose is to disturb (180).∞∑ The voids communicate a tension between a sense of duty to come to terms with the past, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and the understanding that its sheer memorialization contains an unfillable lacuna. In other words, memory will remain unfinished because that which is remembered cannot be made present. Thus the creators of countermonuments are faced with the paradox of how to fill a permanent lacuna. Perhaps the project of building a monument to that which has already vanished is like the paradox of a testimony when there is no one left to speak. In this vein, Primo Levi described himself as a pseudowitness, a survivor who escaped the ultimate place of testimony, the place of its impossibility. As Agamben points out, not even the survivor can bear witness completely, can speak his own lacuna, since the only true authority is voiceless, vanished to the realm of the dead. He writes, ‘‘Whoever assumes the charge of bearing witness in the name (of the drowned) knows that he or she must bear witness in the name of the impossibility of bearing witness’’ (1999: 34). URBAN RENEWAL

The urban renewal of Berlin manifests itself as a search for a palpable presence of the past. Unselfconsciously kitsch autocommodification can be l 124

HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

seen in the marked naming of commercial sites. Rather than preserving the void, as Libeskind and the other artists have powerfully attempted, others fetishize the absence of the Jews and the void left by their vanishing history by invoking Jewish names and associations in the service of commercial enterprises. Thus have the post-Wall blossoming and gentrification of East Berlin’s Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg districts—the prewar city quarters of Ost-Juden—become the sites of trendy cafes, shops, and restaurants bearing names such as ‘‘Jüdische Café’’ and ‘‘Silberstein.’’∞∏ Prenzlauer Berg served as the center of 1980s avant-garde artists, writers, and other bohemians in the waning East German socialist period, radiating out from Käthe Kollwitz Platz. Following unification the district became a favored site of artists, especially from West Berlin, attracted to the alternative ethos, transgressive geography, and cheap rents. Gradually, it acquired a Jewish inflection as the Rykestraße Synagoge expanded, its adjacent buildings housing the Eastern European Jewish revivalist Lauder Foundation and rabbinical school. A few meters away an explicitly marked popular cafe serves Jewish-inspired food. East Berlin’s famous Mitte neighborhood, on the other hand, houses the Centrum Judaicum, in one of the buildings of the nineteenth-century, grand neo-Moorish-style Neue Synagogue on Oranienburger Straße. Its streetside façade was meant to celebrate a second Golden Age of Jewry.∞π The Federal Jewish Social Welfare Agency, dealing with the needs of the Russian Jewish immigrants to Germany, occupies an adjacent building in the complex. These neighborhoods are included in many of the city’s organized Jewish Walks.∞∫ I happened to notice, while leafing through the Berliner fortnightly tip∞Ω in the mid-1990s that on a single Sunday five separate walking tours had to do with Jewish-related themes: —Paths through Jewish Berlin —Jewish life in Berlin Mitte: when ‘‘goy’’ was not a foreign word —On the trail of Jewish life —Jewish women and resistance [anti-Nazi] —All round the synagogue —Jewish Berlin

The reconstruction of an ersatz Jewish neighborhood with few Jewish residents is striking—a paradoxical instance of the demands of historical memory clashing with the demographic realities of the present, transformHAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

125 l

ing what was once a thriving Jewish center into phantasmagoria, which some have called a ‘‘Jewish Disneyland.’’≤≠ THE POLITICS OF NAMING

When I first lived in Berlin in the mid-1980s I attended some meetings of the leftist, alternative ‘‘Jüdische Gruppe,’’ the Jewish Group, made up of Jews who did not identify with the conservative, Zionist establishment represented by the o≈cial body, the Jüdische Gemeinde. On the way to a monthly meeting, held at a popular Greek kneipe not far from trendy Savignyplatz, a North American Jewish friend, active in the group, warned me about what was to come. She told me to expect to meet ‘‘philosemites.’’ This was a new concept and struck me immediately as odd, but then of course logical, in its morphological and semantic opposition to antiSemite. When queried, my friend explained: ‘‘You’ll know one when you meet one. They make you feel a bit uncomfortable. And their philosemitism has more to do with their own problems and unresolved feelings about their parents’ and grandparents’ roles in the war, than with their feelings about or understanding of Jews.’’ In other words, this would be still more Vergangenheitsbewältigung in practice. Sure enough, a few minutes later, I met Manfred. His overly sympathetic and solicitous intensely blueeyed gaze searching deep into my dark eyes could not help but evoke immediate discomfort and suspicion on my part. The queasiness I felt recalled the sense Turkish friends had described to me, when confronted by, in Mustafa’s phrase, the ‘‘Ausländer-sevenler,’’ the foreigner-lovers. An ironic take-o√ on ‘‘animal lovers,’’ it also perhaps served as a less charged displacement of the Jew-lovers, the philosemites. It evoked a sense of being objectified, albeit with the best of intentions, and, in the process, depersonalized. It is often the self-declared philosemites who use the term jüdische Mitbürger, Jewish fellow-citizens. I would argue that the use of the term actually performs the opposite symbolic task from what is intended. The users of the word seem not to understand that Mitbürger, in its explicit markedness, betrays layers of contradictions. For it serves to call attention to and separate, to exclude from proper burger-ness, those whom they ostensibly wish to include in the new German body politic. For Jews, however, Mitbürger stings with the pain of further markedness, a semantic yellow star laden with patronizingly good intentions. Likewise for Turks and other l 126

HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

Ausländer, Mitbürger points to the malice of euphemisms. The prefix mithere connotes its opposite, since in most cases the Turks are anything but burgers; the good intentions of inclusion point instead to their political disenfranchisement. For, ultimately, true Mitbürgers would be burgers minus the prefix.≤∞ Another way in which the use of German language can a√ect everyday pragmatics of communication is through rendering the very word ‘‘Jew’’ unpronounceable. Lexically, the referent ‘‘Jew’’ has proven to be quite difficult for many Germans, who prefer to exercise a troubling religiouslike silence on matters Jewish. One legacy of the Nazi abuse of the word has been a near taboo on the postwar usage. Instead, descriptive alternatives are deployed, such as describing someone as possessing ‘‘Jewish heritage,’’ ‘‘Jewish background,’’ or the conflation of Israeli with Jewish. This euphemistic tendency showed itself in a conversation with a German woman, born the last year of the war, in 1945. Inge, a nurse, upon hearing my marked Jewish surname, could not contain herself; she attempted to arouse a response in me to her very deliberate hints about what I was, ‘‘nationalitywise.’’ Not in the mood to engage in a confrontation about Jewish identity politics, I insisted that I was American—as were my parents and grandparents, I hastened to add. Unable to stifle her curiosity any longer, ‘‘Yes, yes,’’ she said impatiently, ‘‘you have an American passport, but aren’t you really an Israelite?’’ Stunned, I relented and responded, ‘‘Oh, perhaps you mean to ask me if I am a Jew?’’ She immediately registered extreme discomfort, unable to pronounce the word—Jew. Instead, she explained, ‘‘No, no, that is a very bad word, you mustn’t use it. We do not use it any longer, because of the terrible things that happened here in the 1940s.’’ After this confused response, I tried to explain that on the contrary there was no stigma attached to the word, and that Israeli was a nationality, not a religion, whereas Jew simply denoted a person of the Jewish faith, or heritage, or other inflection of secular identity, and that I was a Jew, Jewish, but certainly not Israeli or Israelite. She took issue with this and refused to separate the categories, preferring the conflation of religion and nationality. Agamben has shown the problematic nature of conferring upon a name the attribute of unspeakability, which he understands as a contradictory process of deification. Referring to the widespread discourse of the unspeakability of Auschwitz, he writes: ‘‘To say that Auschwitz is ‘unsayable or incomprehensible’ is equivalent to euphemein, to adoring in silence, as one does with a god. Regardless of one’s intentions, this contributes to its HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

127 l

glory’’ (1999: 32–33). Given that Inge’s reluctance to pronounce ‘‘Jew’’ derived from the memory of Auschwitz, she was lapsing into a mystification and repression of a history too painful to acknowledge. One could argue that her strategy was not dissimilar to Agamben’s notions of deification of the unsayable or incomprehensible. By elevating Auschwitz beyond the level of comprehension, and by deploying a term resonant of religious sacrifice—holocaust≤≤ —the event is removed from the realm of human, personal, and political responsibility.≤≥ It is also removed from the realm of the speakable, as Adelson remarks that ‘‘absence, silence and unspeakability have been contested staples of German and Jewish discourses about the Holocaust for over fifty years’’ (2005: 91). Echoing my encounter with Inge, Neiman noted similar di≈culties with the unpronounceability of ‘‘Jew.’’ Something Americans no longer imagine: Not being able to say one is Jewish without producing a bombshell. Not even knowing which words to use. Germans say ‘‘Jüdische Herkunft,’’ or ‘‘Jüdische Abstammung.’’ ‘‘Are you of Jewish extraction?’’ The simple word ‘‘Jew’’ gets stuck in their throats. (1992: 302)

Confirming this, Reisigl and Wodak argued that ‘‘the blatant anti-Semitic abuse of the anthroponym ‘Jew’ still continues today to have the e√ect that quite a few, particularly German, non-Jews seem to have problems even to articulate the word ‘Jew’ or ‘Jews’ at all. For them, the word is still inseparably associated with massive negative associations and connotations’’ (2001: 61). A German Jewish friend, Joel, had a similar experience with the conflation of religion and nationality. After a long and complicated process he received permission from the German government to retain his German citizenship while becoming naturalized in a second country where he had lived and worked for decades—an extraordinarily rare exception. At the formal ceremony granting him a certificate of German nationality, the German Consul General felt compelled to ask him if he belonged to the ‘‘Israeli belief.’’ Joel remains convinced that the primary reason he was granted this truly exceptional status had to do with his Jewishness. ‘‘They didn’t want to lose one of the few German Jews they still had,’’ he commented. The ambivalent process of mourning at work in the German projects of memorializing the past and the concealment and redressing of the urban l 128

HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

landscape point to the problematic place of the Jewish legacy in German society and culture today. Koshar cautions that ‘‘if the recycling of historic urban fragments in Germany is to be more than a self-indulgent and forgetful play with ‘stranded objects,’ it must be done under the sign of mourning’’ (1998: 50). Despite numerous debates about the ways the past might best be fitted into the present, a true process of mourning, as Santner points out, has been ‘‘undermined by various reinscriptions of discourses of exclusion’’ (1993: 151). In the recent past in Berlin, a tendency has been to displace blame for past and present troubles on the new minorities, in particular the Turkish population, despite campaigns of awareness about the consequences of social exclusion practiced during the Shoah. As shown below, a certain social discourse surrounding fantasies of the Turkish body dangerously place Turkish subjects into a place of abjection and victimization that deprives them of agency, power, and social responsibility.≤∂ PHANTASMATIC MONTAGES: JEWISH AND TURKISH OVERLAY

‘‘You know, we are the new Jews of Germany.’’ The words of Arma˘gan, a young Turkish university student, spoke volumes, amplified in his bitter tone. We were at Café Einstein, a chic venue near the center of West Berlin, housed in a beautiful old mansion. A frisson emanated from there, possibly deriving from an urban myth then circulating, that the house had been the headquarters of Goebbels. The tall surly waiters in ill-fitting, nearly formal wear, with the pleasing decor of Old World, worn-velvet elegance, conveyed a bohemian ambiance from the past, one accentuated by nouvelle Central European cuisine with a Viennese inflection, where generous dollops of thick cream—Schlag—accompanied desserts. Schlag even could be ordered on its own. The scene was punctuated by elements of studied casualness such as the newspaper rack with international papers dangling from dark wooden rods, an art gallery, and an extensive list of co√ees. The co√ee I was drinking, ‘‘Melange,’’ arrived in a tall glass, much too hot to handle till the drink cooled to nearly tepid, but was still tempting, if only to watch the milk and co√ee swirling together—passing through a stage not unlike a Turkish ebru marble paper—before it blended to a uniform deep tan color. An appealing garden in back was just the thing in the summer. But this day was in early spring, still cold and rainy, so the garden was not yet open. HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

129 l

Arma˘gan and I were discussing the predicament of the so-called secondgeneration Turkish youth. The second generation has generally been considered to be those either born in Germany of Turkish migrant parents or those who came as children and were raised in Germany. Prior to the citizenship reforms, their legal predicament was tenuous at best, as they had little hope of attaining German citizenship, despite having only attenuated ties to their putative homeland. The trope ‘‘Turks are the new Jews’’ is an easy, if not facile, parallel, and I heard it often from a variety of quarters. It was never clear if the parallels were meant to be anything but as provocative as they were superficial. Some Turks do construe themselves as the new Jews and see their responsibility in taking over the Jewish memory of exclusion, in other words, critically assuming the place of the outsider within German society. There was of course an obvious comparison: Germany’s age-old ‘‘problem’’ with stereotypically short dark persons in its midst, horrifyingly ‘‘solved’’ a halfcentury ago, had only come back to haunt in a new form, this time as Turks. But what exactly do these suggestive claims imply? In economic, social, and historical terms the parallel is rather weak; in cultural or ideological terms, however, there may be something worthy of inquiry.≤∑ On an abstract level, certain defense mechanisms might be at work in a segment of the German imaginary when confronted by what is perceived as an other that is so other that it is incapable of sharing in a common essence, just as in the past, certain anti-Semitic segments saw the idea of a converted Jew as an aberration. In the present, similar accusations, already discussed, have been leveled at the migrants from Turkey: ‘‘They are unintegratable.’’ Indeed the comparison might have to do with the way in which some in Germany retreat to past paradigms of exclusion and retrenchment into discourses of Heimat and Volksgemeinschaft (folk/‘‘ethnic’’ community) when faced with new situations of social instability and identitary anxieties. Arma˘gan kept with the analogy, as he stressed the increasingly tense situation. He described the changes in Berlin due to the rise of Ausländerfeindlichkeit. In the early 1990s, as a result, many of his Turkish friends preferred to avoid public transport, fearing violent attacks. They no longer read Turkish newspapers in public. ‘‘Even though it is only a minority of Germans who do commit these violent acts, the majority stand by silently watching, doing nothing. And that’s the frightening part. I know just how the Jews must have felt in the 1930s.’’ In Germany, Turks frequently are criticized for failing to abandon their l 130

HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

own distinctive signs of identity—for keeping their distance, for refusing German foods, for wearing their headscarves—yet the Jews in the Third Reich were blamed for the precise opposite. To Nazis, many Jews had assimilated with a vengeance; as Bauman has put it, they were the unnerving foreigners inside (1989). They were insidious since they could pass— they held positions of authority and prominence in politics, the arts, and sciences; they dressed and spoke like Germans, they even worshipped alike. Some German Jews had converted to Christianity; still others were part of the German Reform Synagogue Movement, drawing heavily in form from German Protestantism. To Nazi propagandists, these were the true danger —Jews ‘‘passing,’’ masquerading as Germans. Nazi propaganda demonized them as dangerous traitors and finally as vermin in need of extermination.≤∏ The Jewish other, by having virtually succeeded in becoming German, had overstepped, transgressed the boundary, and nearly had appropriated the German: a threatening reversal. Some perceived the rate of assimilation into Christian Germany as a form of deterioration of the German essence. It was a vision that Jews could not share fully in a German essence that made visible their ultimate non-integratability.≤π Yet by contrast the Ost-Juden living in Germany, unlike their middle-class coreligionists, had been accused of failure to assimilate, of continuing to stand out in their shtetl garments and lifestyles, conforming to old stereotypes. Thus regardless of whether Jews in Germany assimilated, converted, or maintained shtetl ways, they were seen as dangerous outsiders, di√ering only in the degree of penetration. A similar ambivalence in German discourse about Turks can be identified. Turks are seen simultaneously as wrongful insiders and unintegratable outsiders. Turkish Germans sometimes complain that they feel the weight of Jewish exclusion in their own experiences in contemporary German society. On the one hand, Turks are thought to reinforce their originary cultural, linguistic, and religious a≈liations. On the other hand, sometimes Turks who have ‘‘succeeded’’ in German society are seen at worst as traitors or at best as hybrid, unable to achieve a genuine status. This paradox warrants further analysis and is revisited in the next part of this book. Thus nationalist populist rhetoric complains that, like Jews before them, Turks are potentially disloyal to Germany. Both are believed to be possessed by inherently divided loyalties, therefore necessarily disloyal to Germany. Jews by definition, it is believed, are Zionists, with international contacts throughout the diaspora. Turks first of all are seen to be loyal to Turkey HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

131 l

FIGURES 13A & 13B. ‘‘Baptism and the conversion of Jews to Christianity have no bearing on the issue of race.’’ October 4, 1936. ∫ Stih and Schnock, Berlin / vg BildKunst, Bonn.

and, second, as Muslims they are suspected of fostering their own transnational Islamic a≈liations and allegiances, embodying loci of exclusion, at once insiders and outsiders. POSING THE ‘‘RIDDLE OF REFERENTIALITY’’

When analyzing the ‘‘Turkish turn’’ in German literature, Adelson describes a ‘‘Turkish riddle of referentiality’’ that figures throughout (2005: 89). For some, the role of the Turk in German culture is that of a placeholder for other phenomena such as ‘‘migrant minorities in a global arena, national cultures in a transnational age, or post-Wall specters of the Nazi past’’ (90). Attempting to situate the Turk and migrant literature in a postwar context dominated by Auschwitz, Adelson nevertheless rejects this premise, asserting that even if references to ‘‘Turkish figures in German culture of the 1990s at times bear traumatic traces of genocidal history in Germany . . . Turkish figures do not merely stand in for Jewish ones. To say that something about the past is being negotiated in the present does not yet tell us what it means for reorientation in the 1990s or beyond’’ (88). Perhaps we can extend the analysis from literature to a more general discursive realm when tackling the Turkish-Jewish-German nexus. On the one hand, moving beyond the ostensibly referential ‘‘past is the present’’ is not meant to dismiss phenomena such as the underground games whose goal is to ‘‘send the Turks to Auschwitz,’’ or the widely circulating jokes proposing that ‘‘the Jews have it behind them, the Turks have it coming to them,’’ and similar things that explicitly juxtapose Jew:Turk. However, the postwar, post-Wall contingencies of Germany have moved in unforeseen directions, accumulating new actors, relationships, and contradictions. PIGS, GARLIC, AND JEWS

Another terrain articulating social attitudes toward Turks and Jews involves the consumption of meat and garlic. Here ancient stereotypes about Jewish identity and practices are, consciously or unconsciously, assigned to Turks. What to most Germans is a highly valued form of meat is doctrinally prohibited to Muslims and Jews. Beliefs and practices about pork reveal ideas about the moral self. These morality-linked beliefs are not known among Germans, who assume that all Turks do not eat pork—Schweinefleisch, pig-meat—simply because of a religious injunction. Refusal to eat HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

133 l

pork has become a stereotypical attribute, to the extent that many butchers carry a beef sausage, ‘‘Türkische Wurst.’’ Does marking out ‘‘Türkische Wurst’’ as di√erent imply that non-pork sausage is non-German, by extension becoming Ausländerwurst? It is ironic that today some Turks associate pork with German promiscuity—in medieval Germany the two did in a sense come together at the great pig-feasts at pre-Lenten carnival. At that time, however, the pig was associated with the Jew. Stallybrass and White have analyzed the German medieval fantastic association of Jews with pigs, particularly at carnival time. By eliding the Jew with the pig the carnival crowd produced a grotesque hybridization of terms expressly antithetical to each other according to the dietary rules of their victims, who at carnival would self-exclude from the great pig-feasts (1986: 53). In contexts other than carnival, antiSemitic images juxtaposed Jews and pigs, particularly sows. The conjunction of Jew and pig is particularly prominent in popular German anti-Semitic prints. A late-fifteenth-century print from Nuremberg entitled ‘‘The Jewish Sow’’ depicts a pig surrounded by Jews. . . . A Frankfurt print of 1600, ‘‘The Jewish Bathing House,’’ shows an old Jew riding backwards on a sow, whilst one man sucks her teats and another eats her excrement. . . . All these prints adapt carnivalesque rituals and symbolism to anti-semitic purposes. . . . riding backwards on a lowly animal, a ‘‘skimington ride,’’ was also a carnivalesque form of ritual humiliation sometimes used in charivaris. (54)

In his controversial study of German folklore, Dundes (1984) also noted the German association made between Jews and pigs, and beyond that, to feces, specifically, pig feces. Having spent the previous hundred pages of his book attempting to convince the reader of the persistent and generalized German obsession with feces,≤∫ he then makes the association to antiSemitism. With reference to the classic ‘‘Judensau’’ image, that of a mother pig nursing her Jewish o√spring, ‘‘one of the commonest caricatures of the Jew in the middle ages’’ (121), he writes, ‘‘Pigs eat shit and Jews suckle from pigs. Hence Jews indirectly nurse from feces. . . . While a few Jews suckle, others are depicted as kneeling behind the mother sow and eating the sow’s feces’’ (123). Thus the Jews, well known for abstaining from the eating of pork, found themselves associated with the quintessentially epitomizing symbol of transgressive filth, the pig that ingests its own excrement.

l 134

HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

Dundes’s controversial analysis of the nature, source, and metaphorical expressions of Nazi genocide derived from the German symbolic nexus of fecal, filth, and Jew. Some of the daily torture methods in Nazi concentration camps revived the association of Jews with filth, pigs, and, at least by extension, with ingestion of fecal matter. One notorious example, of course, is the transformation of dirty Jewish flesh into cleansing soap (127). Unthinkably sadistic practices occurred in the camps, juxtaposing signs for the prisoners admonishing them to keep clean and tidy with the actuality of only a single latrine for the use of thousands of inmates, forcing prisoners to wallow in excrement. On many occasions concentration camp prisoners were forced to eat their own excrement (127). This troubling association between cleanliness and filth was employed by the Nazis in order to transform the Jewish body, indeed to ‘‘work’’ it; the Jewish body was verarbeitet, as Newborn describes (1994), in a process of recycling of bare life. Though not possessing the same moral or doctrinal associations of pork, in contemporary Germany garlic also is highly marked—now, perhaps unsurprisingly, as a hyper-foreign food.≤Ω In casual conversation one can hear criticisms of foreigners, and especially Turks, as stinking of garlic, or worse, as Knoblauchfresser, which means, literally, ‘‘garlic eaters,’’ but the phrase deliberately employs the verb fressen—used for animals eating—rather than essen, the verb used when people eat. In many segments of German society garlic is considered a characteristically antisocial food. It being further associated with Turks reinforces a set of stereotypical images about Turks as outsiders within German society. Turks are well aware of this stereotype, and consequently many have changed their cooking and eating habits. When I noticed that some Turkish acquaintances and friends made a point of avoiding food with garlic, they explained that only on Friday night and Saturday would they eat it, so as not to o√end their German colleagues on Monday morning with any lingering odor. One Turkish German friend went on at length about how much the German antigarlic prejudice annoyed her, claiming that it had more to do with anti-Turkish sentiment than with garlic. ‘‘The Germans always complain that Turkish restaurants serve too much garlic, that Turks stink of garlic. But no one ever complains about French restaurants and how much garlic is used in French cuisine. I suppose that kind of garlic is

HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

135 l

di√erent, acceptable. Maybe if they pay a lot of money for the garlic, then it doesn’t smell.’’ On the other hand, the inverse can be noted as well. As a culinary challenge, alternative Germans flaunt their preference for garlic. Alternative cafes a√ord garlic pride of place on their menus. The dual message sent is clear: a renunciation of the Spießbürgerlich (petty bourgeois) values, at the same time claiming symbolic solidarity with the Ausländer. But in rejecting the culinary values of their parents, are these alternative Germans not expressing this rejection in an emblematic form that implicitly appropriates the ‘‘natural’’ other, the Turk, and makes it their own? Garlic consumption (whether actual or presumed) became the locus of an aberration of Nazi Germany’s obsession with the Jewish body as the repository of garlic smells. A contemporary account described this: ‘‘Buttons with a picture of the garlic plant . . . are worn by many Hitlerites to prove their ardent hatred of the people garlic is meant to symbolize. The mere mention of garlic by a Nazi orator causes the crowd to howl with fury and hatred’’ (Graubard 1943: 142).≥≠ While many contemporary Germans do cook with and consume garlic, it is nonetheless true that garlic remains the fetishistic repository of cultural stereotypes about foreign populations in Germany.≥∞ HEIMAT AND ITS VIOLATION

Food consumption reinforces troubling notions of Heimat, the homeland. The notion of Heimat is a powerful one, emotionally charged in German culture and history, especially because it has been placed in an opposition to Fremde, the foreign.≥≤ Peck shows how the dialectic of home and foreignness plays out at di√erent ideological levels in the German public sphere (1996). On the one hand it establishes a common national idiom around the question of German identity set in discontinuity with Nazi debates on identity. On the other hand its internal debate has been deployed to draw boundaries between Germans and foreigners, specifically between Germans and Turks. Peck observes, ‘‘What must be seen is that if Germany is the home for some, then it is at the same time exile for others . . . if heimat is about security and belonging, fremde evokes feelings of isolation and alienation’’ (473). Whereas both Jews and Turks have been portrayed as diasporic rootless migrants, they have di√erent relations to Heimat and Heimatlosig-

l 136

HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

keit (homelandlessness). Turks ostensibly can return to a Heimat; this is not as obvious for Jews. Yet for some purposes, both are transgressors of the essence of Heimat: Jews as representatives of the archetypal diaspora, Turks as an emergent diaspora, but incarnated as attenuated denizens—migrants.≥≥ Migrants defy that German sense of an ideal and ideology of rootedness.≥∂ Turks transgress bourgeois notions of home, nation, race, and ethnicity that for many Germans are integrally conflated; for many their presence inflates the sense of violation of Heimat.≥∑ Questions concerning the ideology of rootedness are intensified when the issue of Turkey’s membership in the European Union is raised. In the context of fortress Europe, Turks find themselves twice displaced, both ideologically—in their perceived violation of social and cultural norms—and religiously, as they embody an anti- or at least non-Christian ethos. The paramount transgressors of Heimat, Gypsies, are represented in Germany by Roma and Sinti. In the early days after the collapse of the Wall, they came to Germany in the thousands from Romania. Escaping mounting persecution at home, many applied for political asylum. Widely despised, in Germany they were subject to popular and state violence; ultimately the German government extradited many by paying Romania a capitated sum to repatriate them.≥∏ Germany carried this out precisely because no state o√ered refuge or rose to defend the Gypsies—a defense some thought would be overly justified, considering more than one hundred thousand Gypsies were murdered by Nazis. In what might appear as an overtly racialized, Janus-faced policy, Germany at the same time deported Gypsies just as it welcomed Russian Jews and ‘‘ethnic Germans’’ from the former Soviet Union. Many have commented on the relationship between territoriality and anti-Semitism (and, equally, anti-Gypsy sentiment). Heimat is rooted, basically coterminous, with territory, place, a particular space. ‘‘It is the emphasis on territoriality that made non-territorial groups such as Jews and Gypsies . . . seem so anomalous in modern Europe; they appeared to have all the characteristics of nations, but lacked geographical integrity (Comaro√ 1996: 183). Extending this correlation to the new Turkish diaspora, the several generations born and reared in Germany resemble prewar German Jews insofar as they have assumed the ‘‘unnerving status of foreigners inside, thereby striding a vital boundary which ought to be . . . kept intact and impregnable’’ (Bauman 1989: 34).≥π

HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

137 l

ANTI-SEMITISM AND XENOPHOBIA

In the years following unification many observers have pointed to the resurgence of xenophobia in general and anti-Semitism in particular, reflected at both political and social levels. In 1998 Kuno Böse, Berlin’s Christian Democratic Undersecretary of State, when asked about the increase in anti-Semitic incidents, responded that there were three reasons: first, there had been an increase of Jews in Berlin; second, there was an ongoing public discussion of the new, as yet unbuilt Holocaust memorial for the city; and third, he said, ‘‘Berlin’s a big city, so it’s normal.’’ In addition to pointing to the Russian Jews entering the city, his response highlighted the problematic memory of the Nazi past. However, his statement was interpreted by some to be an excessive justification for rightist-extremists hijacking the national debates on the meaning of German identity, implicitly rejecting the increasingly diverse, transnational population of Germany. His three points evoked outraged reactions; some called for a criminal indictment, citing his violation of the law forbidding incitement to violence against a minority. Public figures also spoke out against Böse. The Protestant bishop, in his speech opening up that year’s annual Brotherhood Week, referred to Böse.≥∫ Berlin’s mayor, Diepgen, caught in an embarrassing position, declared Böse’s ‘‘an intolerable position, but we should not over-interpret what he meant.’’ The Greens raised it in Parliament, demanding that an o≈cial question be put to the Berlin senate. Writing soon after unification, Gilman noted the revival among East German skinheads of a centuries-old anti-Semitic cry. Describing these skinheads’ particular variation of xenophobia, Ausländerfeindlichkeit, calling all foreigners ‘‘Fitschis’’ (Fijians—regardless of whether they hailed from Cuba, Angola, or Vietnam), Gilman interprets this as ‘‘a grotesque reversal of their own sense of isolation; [they] see every foreigner as the inhabitant of some exotic island. But this rhetoric is not that of the German colonies, it is the rhetoric of anti-Semitism. The skinheads in ‘the new federal states’ not only shout ‘foreigners out’ but follow it up by crying ‘Juda verrecke’—the call of anti-Semites from the middle of the 19th century’’ (1991: 188).≥Ω The skinheads are themselves called ‘‘Ossis’’ or ‘‘Zonis,’’ their virulent xenophobia an overreaction to their predicament: the totality of all they had known had disappeared overnight. Their world, their state, their lifestyle, their economy, their history—in short, their identity—had been

l 138

HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

proved wrong. Moreover, they were painfully aware of being seen as backward, inferior losers by their new West German compatriots. As Gilman records, just as the cry ‘‘Juda verrecke’’ recalls past horrors, the historically marked physical structures of Berlin also summon such memories. Gilman poignantly observes that ‘‘each day during the fall of 1990, a few Jews arrive in the newly reunited Berlin. They line up before the former Nazi Ministry of Propaganda, now the Advisory Center for Foreign Jews, to wait and see if they will be granted asylum’’ (188). Judaism perforce is marked in Germany in ways it cannot be elsewhere. The nature and trajectory of the markedness, however, may be changing, evidenced by the controversial public discussion and Bundestag enactment of a Shoah memorial in Berlin, along with the erection of Libeskind’s Holocaust Museum (in Kreuzberg)—‘‘the most powerful building to go up in Berlin in the past ten years . . . a literally shattering structure’’ (Kramer 1999: 63). The direction appears to be toward openness with the past while at the same time examining the present and paving the way toward a more ‘‘normalized’’ future. In 1999 Der Spiegel ran an article called ‘‘Young, Jewish, German,’’ in which Julia, a young Jewish Berliner, was presented as a normalizing vehicle for the new and continued German Jewish presence, albeit not without di≈culties and uncomfortable encounters. A guide at the renovated synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse in East Berlin’s old Jewish ‘‘Mitte’’ district, Julia, in response to the question posed by American Jewish visitors— ‘‘How can you live here as a Jew?’’—replied that she felt fine in Berlin. ‘‘Germany needs its Jews—as proof of its purification and as an involuntary moral authority.’’ Furthermore, she said, ‘‘Germany is my homeland, my language is spoken here, my friends are here.’’∂≠ Betraying this optimistic identification with a Jewish German synthesis, virtually every Jewish edifice in Berlin is under constant armed surveillance. In front of each synagogue, school, and community center, heavily armed Berlin city police maintain a constant vigil. When we lived in Berlin in 2000, my daughter attended the Jewish kindergarten in Grunewald. Its high level of security included three-meter-tall steel fences, entry through a steel turnstile only with a specially issued security card, cctv cameras monitoring the front, back, and side of the grounds, and numerous armed, plainclothes Israeli security guards supplementing the uniformed German policeman keeping conspicuous vigil with his machine gun. This scene de-

HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

139 l

fined one layer of the new ‘‘normal’’ of a Jewish German synthesis through which hundreds of small children entered and exited school each day. D If we take seriously the question posed by Senocak and Tulay, ‘‘Doesn’t immigrating to Germany also mean immigrating to, entering into, the arena of German’s recent past?’’ (2000: 6), the entanglements of the TurkishJewish-German nexus must continue to re-form one another and the shared spaces they inhabit. Adelson proposes that ‘‘the literature of Turkish migration becomes part of an evolving national tradition of Holocaust memory in Germany (2005: 84). Likewise, the Turkish migration itself challenges Germany and Germans to confront taboos surrounding the Holocaust and memory creation and to face the attendant awkwardness, pain, and possibilities. The fit between Jewish and German in contemporary Berlin is often awkward, and usually self-consciously so. All places and events deemed Jewish are, by definition, forefronted by a highly visible police presence, even military security (tanks) posing a sadly ironic inverse to this relationship six to seven decades ago. By contrast, Turkish Berlin remains unfortified, often ignored, and, in some cases, hidden from view. While the Jews are highly visible in their miniscule numbers and generous public support, Turks are often invisible, their quarter-million-strong population ignored and underfunded. The following chapter explores some of the subtleties and consequences of this invisibility.

l 140

HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS

5. Berlin’s Kreuzberg Topographies of Infraction l Kreuzberg for many Germans remains beyond the pale. Prior to German unification, it sat on the geographic periphery of West Berlin and on the social and economic periphery as well. Still, the ‘‘socially peripheral may be symbolically central’’ (Stallybrass and White 1986: 23). Indeed, this aptly describes Kreuzberg’s double status: on the one hand it was the epitome of cool and the epicenter of counterculture, a desired destination for Turks, anarchists, and punks; on the other hand it defined the socioeconomic out-of-bounds, the back-of-beyond. Kreuzberg: at once central to society’s periphery and peripheral to society’s center. How did Kreuzberg land squarely on the map as a site of struggle and resistance?∞ This chapter examines the relations and tensions between the discursive and physical spaces of Kreuzberg, exploring the ways in which relations of power have been produced and reproduced. CENTERING PERIPHERIES

With the division of the city determined by the Allied Powers just after World War II, Kreuzberg not only abutted East Berlin but was surrounded on three sides by it, the border defined in part by the River Spree. In the same way that West Berlin assumed a disproportionately powerful symbolic centrality thanks to its Cold War positioning, Kreuzberg enjoyed this double identity as well. In the 1980s Kreuzberg became a famous, even notorious European countercultural scene, the Szene, from which many Kreuzbergers derived a selectively envied identity. Ideas of periphery and center involve the ways people categorize themselves and others and establish rhizomatic identifications with particular places. This can entail a transformative process, where negative, even pejorative characterizations of displacement are replaced by positive, socially acceptable categories. The specific social space where this occurs casts the

contours and sets the direction—in short, delimits the identities—of the emergent shoots and roots of legitimizing future generations. This chapter explores the struggle for legitimacy of new diasporic communities. It addresses the ways they might be transformed into favorably sanctioned rhizomatic groups. The focus here is on how concepts of marginality and center (and, indeed, their infraction) govern practices of spatialization, redefining peoples, places, and their meanings.≤ The opposition between periphery and center belongs to a system of binary oppositions reproducing hierarchical relations of domination. Ausländer and Inländer (outsiders-insiders; foreigners-natives), common expressions of social alterity in Germany, exemplify such oppositions. Some of these oppositions are categorical, intransigent, and nontraversable; others allow flexibility. Focusing on the nontraversable terrain of infraction, their topography could be characterized as tracing the ‘‘lines of desire and phobic contours which are produced and reproduced through one another’’ (Stallybrass and White 1986: 25). The intersection of desire and phobia transforms these sites into domains of transgression, of the ‘‘infraction of binary structures’’ (17). In Berlin’s Kreuzberg in particular, the Turkish ‘‘ghetto’’ has grown as a liminal site between the licit and the illicit, violating German rules of exclusion while simultaneously reinforcing them. Turkish actors violate much that is meant to be acceptably German and modern; as spatial violators they are relegated to the realm of the illicit. Thus Kreuzberg has been caught between German fears of, first, the foreigner, overforeignization, and, second, the desire to share in the creativity of minor cultures. Another site of opposition between marginality and center can be seen in north-south distinctions. Center-industrial-core vs. poor-periphery often underpins heavily valorized north-south distinctions. Yet neither is this written in stone, for one country’s periphery can become another country’s center. Turkey, Europe’s peripheral partner, is a case in point: witness on the one hand the long-running struggles to join the EU, along with the perennial rejections and very tentative agreement for protracted accession discussions. On the other hand, Turkey invested extensively in the Turkicspeaking countries of Central Asia, carving out a central niche for itself in the former Soviet periphery. Attempting to replace and displace Moscow as the primary reference point to these former Soviet, newly independent Turkic republics, many in Turkey see these lands as Turkey’s ‘‘natural’’ domain, all the more attractive in light of the threat of European rejection. l 142

BERLIN’S KREUZBERG

The German state intrudes into the physical and temporal organization of everyday immigrant life, regulating living arrangements, schooling, and transnational movements of relatives. The introjection of these German norms of inclusion and exclusion has contradictory repercussions for the people who move between them. The following discussion examines di√erent ways in which these norms are alternatively internalized and challenged. Speaking in an interview, the first Turkish German representative in the Bundestag, from the Green Party, drew a clear relationship between his identity as a Turk and his place in German society, politics, and culture.≥ When asked how his parents felt about his success, and if they ever had imagined he would one day enter the Parliament, he answered, ‘‘No, of course not.’’ He went on to add that his parents were ordinary workers and to them the only conceivable way a Turk could enter Parliament would be as a janitor. If anyone had told them that their son would grow up to be a member of the Bundestag, they ‘‘would have laughed,’’ he said. In other words, they knew their place.∂ In the eyes of these immigrants, German space is self-contained; it is ‘‘restricted’’ in the exclusive real-estate sense of the word. Certain places such as the Parliament are simply beyond the realm of possibility. Similarly, for many Turkish Germans of Kreuzberg, other places in Berlin remain unplotted on their cognitive maps. Exceptions may be workplaces or the homes of friends or relatives, but for the most part life and living occur within Kreuzberg’s borders; for them, this has become a quintessentially Turkish space. They have successfully transformed it: it has become their place as well, a Turkish space in the German and Turkish collective imaginaries. Alternately, Kreuzberg represents abject poverty, the essence of cool, or ‘‘Little Istanbul,’’ allowing multiple, polysemic readings of this single place.∑ AN ISLAND WITHIN AN ISLAND: A NEIGHBORHOOD OF DEAD-ENDS

Prior to unification, in the easternmost borders of Kreuzberg 36 near the River Spree and the abrupt termination of U-Bahn Line 1—nicknamed ‘‘Orient Express’’—few cars traversed the streets.∏ All streets were deadends here. The whole neighborhood operated as a sort of social and topographic cul-de-sac. The neighborhood of Kreuzberg lay in a peripheral, border area of the former West Berlin’s American sector.π On a map of BERLIN’S KREUZBERG

143 l

FIGURE 14. Commerce in Kreuzberg

Berlin, Kreuzberg, though cartographically central to greater Berlin, occupied a jaggedly peninsular space on the edge of West Berlin. The unplanned and unprecedented transformation of a generic Berlin workers’ neighborhood into one with a decidedly Turkic inflection discomforted the municipal authorities. The discomfort exceeded tolerable limits; the law stepped in, exercising strict control over who could live there. That an isolated place on the border should conjure such significance and sanctions warrants interest. It is no accident that Kreuzberg, sometimes described as a ‘‘Turkish ghetto,’’ assumed imagery reinforcing its insular nature, an island within the island of West Berlin. Within this controlled and marked environment, migrants from Turkey created a viable community, beginning in the 1960s, living among the bohemian and other marginal elements of the city, in one of the least renovated districts. That this neighborhood should continue to be desirable to the migrants who, despite legal sanctions, continued to find ways to move there brings into sharp relief the highly charged meaning invested in this particular place by both Turks and Germans. l 144

BERLIN’S KREUZBERG

FIGURES 15 & 16. Commerce in Kreuzberg

The nonforeigner, non-Turks who over the years have made up between 65 and 75 percent of Kreuzberg’s population are Germans described by Turks as ino√ensive, who ‘‘leave us alone, don’t bother us.’’ These Germans are themselves in positions of powerlessness vis-à-vis the powers that be, being either elderly pensioners lacking the means to leave; alcoholics and others who have been forced to the economic and social margins; or punks and countercultural Alternativen. Recalling von Weizsacker’s admonition, despite the fact that at least two-thirds of Kreuzberg’s residents are Germans, its reputation as ‘‘Little Istanbul’’ can be interpreted as a linguistic assimilation of the marginal German residents into the category of the lowest, most marginal social denominator—the Turks. PLACING PEOPLE AND PEOPLING PLACES

Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Kreuzberg became well known as Europe’s preeminent ‘‘Turkish ghetto’’ and at the same time the most dynamic alternative scene. West German and other European tourists whose faces peered through the safety of thick shatterproof windows on the tour buses that occasionally cruised through Kreuzberg were seeking the authenticity characterized by a colorful alternative/ethnic enclave. They found it: restaurants, cafes, and shops of all sorts framed by signs in Turkish; women in long coats and headscarves; dark, moustached men swinging worry beads; street markets with peddlers of unfamiliar items emitting alien scents; children playing in the streets or emerging from Qur’an school, the girls’ heads draped in large scarves. Indeed, it was unnecessary to know German to get by in Kreuzberg. One could buy bread and pastries, shop at a helal butcher, a grocery store, a green grocer, a newsstand, buy insurance or an airplane ticket, rent a video, drink co√ee at a cafe, and eat in a restaurant, all in Turkish. Amid the Anatolian exotica walked the native exotics, the punks and alternatives, multiply pierced, sporting unconventional hairstyles and colors, bedecked in the requisite garb, either leather or baggy, shabby attire. The tourists left satisfied. Despite Kreuzberg’s demographic diversity, the Turkish reputation predominated: constituting only 18 percent of a neighborhood su≈ced for it to be stigmatized as the Turkish ghetto.∫ This is understandable in light of the social hierarchy within German society, where Turks have long stood at the bottom of the social ladder.Ω From the mid-1970s, o≈cial policy governing the Turkification of Kreuzberg, along with two other major Turkish l 146

BERLIN’S KREUZBERG

FIGURE 17. Moving prohibited. Stamp in passport banning immigrants from residing in Kreuzberg, Tiergarten, and Wedding. Hanefi Yeter, Zuzugssperre, 1978, mixed technique on canvas.

quarters, Tiergarten and Wedding, betrayed the government’s alarm (Turks constituted 19 percent, 14 percent, and 10 percent, respectively). From 1975 to 1990, many otherwise legal Turks in Berlin were subjected to the Zuzugssperre: they bore indelible stamps in their passports, forbidding them from living in these three areas (see figure 17). This restrictive regulation was only partially successful. By proscribing these three districts, the law legislated that Turks must live elsewhere. However, due to an absence of antidiscrimination legislation, informal restrictive covenants e√ectively prevented foreigners from moving in, and Turks often found it di≈cult to rent housing outside these three forbidden neighborhoods. This has forced them to circumvent the zoning laws, entering into complicated arrangements allowing them to reside de facto at a location other than the one where they reside de jure. Housing reBERLIN’S KREUZBERG

147 l

mains a perpetual problem; for many, moving has become a way of life, a semi-nomadic existence, shifting between several occasional and illegal residences. Another obstacle is the option exercised by some landlords to write addenda to leases aiming to prevent the settling of large, extended Turkish families. Some friends, a professional Turkish couple living in an enormous six-room flat, wished to share the space with a friend. They complained that this was forbidden, as the lease stipulated it was a two-person apartment; their landlord refused to renegotiate. Such conditions were enforceable since part of the process of mandatory residence registration with the police includes obtaining the landlord’s signature. EXPOSING TURKISH INTERIORS

An additional problem for Turks, aside from the topographies of prohibition—the restrictions in areas of the city where they may and may not legally reside—is the question of personal, familial space. A required minimum number of square meters per inhabitant must be met. The BundLänder-Kommission (the Federal-State Commission) issued a 1977 report (cited in Castles et al. 1984), in which it reiterated ‘‘the old assertion that the ‘German Federal Republic is not a country of immigration’ ’’ and called for ‘‘the continuation of the ban on further labour immigration, and for measures to encourage repatriation,’’ suggesting ‘‘steps for the integration of those foreign residents who wished to stay, and for policies to improve the position of second-generation migrants’’ (ibid.: 74). These steps included easing of restrictions controlling the granting of residence permits and giving greater protection against deportation. ‘‘However, these [residence] permits were to be conditional on possession of long-term work permits, proof of school attendance of the migrants’ children, and having an ‘adequate’ dwelling (generally defined as at least 12 square meters of living space per grown-up and eight per child)’’ (ibid). Turkish families commonly have failed to meet this requirement, again gerrymandering their ways around the law with false residency registration. The acceptable minimum amount of space required by the German law, while comfortable and reasonable for Germans, frequently proves unsatisfactory for Turkish Germans. In the 1970s and 1980s it was not uncommon for a Turkish family of seven, perhaps including three generations, to live, eat, and sleep in two rooms. Dö¸sek, futon-like mattresses, were laid l 148

BERLIN’S KREUZBERG

side by side each night, folded up and stacked in a corner by day, when the room would became a salon, the all-purpose living/dining room. The sofa, used for sitting upon during the day, could be transformed into a sleepersofa by night; or the cushions might be removed to become a bed. Typically in front of the sofa was a long, low table, around which the family could gather for meals. Adults and children could sleep side by side on the floor of one such room.This was considered reasonable and not overcrowded; guests could be accommodated easily. When visiting a Turkish immigrant’s home, the presence of the telltale alarm clock often placed on a low shelf of the requisite huge breakfront in the salon made clear that indeed this was the sleeping arrangement. The breakfront, considered a highly desirable piece of furniture for every Turkish home, could be used for storage but also for displaying china, souvenirs, brightly colored flowers (often plastic), family photographs—particularly wedding photos—and countless knickknacks. Such items occupied pride of place, in this multipurpose room. Many variations on this theme exist, to be sure. However, it is not common for children, parents, or married children to be able to claim their own private space.∞≠ Clearly, the German and Turkish modes of division and meaningful apportionment of living and sleeping space vastly di√er. No attempt is made to adapt German legal specifications to culturally specific notions of proper proxemics; rather, the German norms are legally imposed upon the Turks. Reactions from the Turks range from confusion to embarrassment, as they realize that they are being legally—and morally —sanctioned for what they take to be acceptable behavior. Not unexpectedly, the years have brought changes. As families accumulate savings, children mature, marry, and find jobs, living patterns that were thought normal ten, twenty, or thirty years ago have begun to erode. The criteria of normative acceptability found in one family from eastern Turkey, the members having arrived in a fragmented pattern from 1963 to 1990, have undergone profound transformations. In 1985 the twenty-five-year-old son Ali decided to move out of his family’s damp, two-room basement apartment, in a far corner of the city. He shared it with his parents and three other siblings, younger sisters. They had been living in this place for over a decade. Ali wished to live in a central, convenient area, easier for his work, and to be freer in his social life. It was unthinkable for him to bring home a girlfriend overnight to his parents’ flat. When he announced BERLIN’S KREUZBERG

149 l

his decision to his family, his mother lapsed into a severe depression. She cried for days, and the son felt deeply guilty for months afterward. The very notion of leaving one’s family prior to marriage simply was inconceivable. Ten years later, in 1995, the family had moved to a larger, modernized apartment in a heavily Turkish neighborhood, but the three younger sisters had each moved out and were in their own apartments. The eldest of them, recently single after a divorce, had chosen to live on her own rather than move back with her parents after the split. The next younger sister, the mother of two young children, and separated from an abusive husband, had just been granted a three-room apartment from the city’s social welfare o≈ce, as an emergency need case. The youngest of the three daughters, the only high school graduate in the family and a university student, left her parents’ apartment to move in with this sister, ostensibly to help out with her niece and nephew. Though they lived in separate districts, the daughters frequently visited their parents. Another brother had arrived from Turkey illegally in 1990; he had moved in with his parents and now had a wife and new baby. Meanwhile, Ali married in 1992 and lived within walking distance from the apartment of his two sisters. By 1995, recently separated from his wife, he increasingly opted to stay overnight with his sisters, rather than return to his empty apartment, alone. Fast forward ten years, to 2005. The father of the family has died, leaving financial debts. The mother now has moved into the flat of her divorced daughter, who has been living with her boyfriend for the past three years—unmarried. She met him on the assembly line of a factory where they both work. The youngest daughter graduated from university and has been working, supporting herself and her own small apartment. She hopes to move to London, possibly for graduate work (she is fluent in English and spent a year there as an au pair). This move comes at the perfect time for Ali, recently evicted from his own flat when the landlord decided to move back; he’s moved in with his sister, and will remain there indefinitely.

These shifting arrangements reflect changing familial roles, financial situations, and expectations. Ali initially had lived in a cramped, two-room flat with six family members, clearly in violation of the city’s minimum square metric limitations. Eventually he moved to a new spacious three-room accommodation with his new wife, only to find himself more comfortable, once his marital situation changed, living with two sisters, a niece, and nephew in another three-room flat. Once again, the five of them did not l 150

BERLIN’S KREUZBERG

meet the allowed square meter minimum. To Ali and his sisters, it made perfect sense for him to move in with members of his natal family—even five people, sharing four beds, in three rooms—rather than living alone, for what might have been just a temporary period of spousal separation. Ali was escaping aloneness. The concept of individual privacy as a positive value is alien to many people from Turkey. Aloneness can be akin to loneliness, unequivocally negative and to be avoided at all costs. The word for lonely is simply ‘‘alone’’ with a su≈x: yalnız—yalnızlık. Though similar in linguistic derivation to the English relationship between ‘‘lonely’’ and ‘‘alone,’’ the moral and cultural values diverge in the meanings and usages. In addition, this core value, shared by many migrants from Turkey, comes into direct conflict with German laws, grounded in antithetical practices and beliefs about the individual and space.∞∞ Space assumes a moral dimension in the ways Turks use it, share it, sleep in it. Germans see the sleeping arrangements of many Turkish families to be transgressive of their ethical and moral norms. Enforcing a German morality onto the meaning and use of space, extending from city quarter to the bedroom, makes Turks the unwitting targets of legal hegemony. They are ultimately vulnerable to victimization, since in their attempt to cope with the legal strictures they are forced to occupy unlawful precincts, abodes, and beds. This insertion of mechanisms of the state into the private lives of individuals exemplifies an inherent vicious circle: namely, the state exercises control only when it feels out of control. In feeling overrun by foreigners, the state expresses a sense of powerlessness, assigning this ghettoizing power to the other. As Agamben has argued, the state includes the other through a process of exclusion. As an exception, the other serves to reinforce ‘‘the rule’’ (1998). ARCHITECTONICS OF SOCIAL LIFE

Kreuzberg’s notoriety already was established long before the Turks’ arrival in the 1960s, for the area has been politically marked for centuries. Seventeenth-century Huguenot refugees found asylum there, nineteenthcentury landless immigrants from Silesia, Pomerania, and Eastern Prussia came in search of work and settled in Kreuzberg. They soon became the industrial proletariat. At the end of the nineteenth century the district served as home to industrial workshops and small factories, as well as to the workers employed in these shops. The emergence of these new forms of BERLIN’S KREUZBERG

151 l

work and workers, combined with urbanization, gave rise to a new form of architecture. With the growth and expansion of small industry at the end of the last century, a particular form of building structure was erected to serve the redefined working and living needs. This multilayered configuration was known as the Hinterhaus (back/rear-house or building), designed around a series of Hinterhöfe (back/rear-courtyards, sing. -hof, enclosed by Hinterhäuser, sing. -haus). This typically Berliner architectural building style is ubiquitous in Kreuzberg, consisting of a stately building facing the street, perhaps adorned with architectural ornamentation. A large entry— sometimes wide enough for a vehicle—opens to an inner square courtyard surrounded on all sides by extensions of the front building. The rear portion of the building may lead into a further courtyard or set of several similar courtyards, each enclosed in turn by buildings. Some such complexes have proper driveways leading to inner courtyards, occasionally with recessed steel tracks, recalling their former industrial use. Once, wealthy industrialists lived in the streetfront buildings, enjoying the natural light they a√orded (otherwise blocked from the inner buildings). The original flats were immense, often wrapping around the four sides of a building, framing the courtyard. Beyond these lived the workers in the smaller, darker flats behind, adjacent to their workshops and small factories. Though typical of working-class and manufacturing neighborhoods of Berlin, this living/working arrangement was distinctive of a highly stratified social ordering, in brick, mortar, and rendering, of classes and functions. Protocols of spatialization governed social structures, inscribed in architectural plans, the physical instantiation of the division of labor and residence according to social class. These are the buildings housing many of Berlin’s immigrants, as well as their mosques and community and political organizations. Few of the flats remain in their original size and state but instead have been multiply subdivided and allowed to fall into disrepair. A glance past and a stroll through the main entrances through the courtyard to the inner Hinterhaus in back often reveals run-down, dank buildings. When I first lived in Kreuzberg, some of these buildings were still pockmarked with bullet holes from battles late in World War II. For many residents the space of the inner courtyards defines their social life. Here, children spend many of their waking hours playing. Their parents can easily supervise by looking out the window; the fortunate ones l 152

BERLIN’S KREUZBERG

may watch their children from balconies. This arrangement is conducive to extensive adult socializing and social control as well, since often in this type of structure the windows of separate apartments look directly into others. Urban renewal has begun to make inroads, as enlightened public renovation projects have beautified some street façades and modernized their interiors.∞≤ As part of the renovations artists occasionally were commissioned to decorate the façades with murals and reliefs. Some apartment houses are known for the regional homogeneity of the residents. For example, a large proportion of one Kurdish village all lived in several such contiguous buildings. In another Kreuzberg building I became acquainted with five families, all relatives. Their televisions were connected by jury-rigged wiring to a single, shared vcr. Despite this, they preferred to watch it together, gathered in one or another’s apartment where the act of watching together had become central to their lives, just as they cooked, ate together, and watched one another’s children. FROM ISLAND TO MAINLAND: A WANING SCENE

A further transformation would strike Kreuzberg. With the erasure of the German-German border, pedestrian tra≈c, formerly the primary sort, has given way to the constant roar of vehicular, traversing to and from formerly mutually forbidden parts of the city. Since 1990 its geographic centrality has asserted itself, reflected in escalating property values. With the unification of the Berlins, Kreuzberg began to lose both of its peripheral statuses. No longer was it the end of the proverbial line, ‘‘Linie 1’’; rather, it became an important transfer point to parts eastward. Dead-ended cul-desacs suddenly revived, and anonymous tra≈c flowed through once sleepy streets that had led nowhere. In addition, having already been subject to renovation, speculation, and investment, the housing market became more competitive. The trendy Szene began to scatter as urban pioneers navigated their way across the recently untraversable border, where spacious lofts and studios could be leased for a pittance. These urban pioneers gravitated particularly to eastern Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg. What Kreuzberg was to the 1980s Szene, Prenzlauer Berg became to the 1990s Szene. With these changes, Kreuzberg experienced a cartographic and transportational shift. Line One is linked to transport hubs in the east, and the once defunct bridge conveys major tra≈c flows. Some of the frisson it once knew, as a conjuncture of the alternative, the political, and the BERLIN’S KREUZBERG

153 l

punk, the artistic and the engaged, has faded. It has become physically central, a geographically unmarked urban crossroads, borderless, and readily traversable. This chapter has expanded upon a number of ideas, including spatialized practices, the relationship between place and hierarchies, and perception and transgression. Perception plays a central role in the meanings assigned to spatialized practices; the German stereotypes of run-down, overcrowded Turkish apartments, inside which occur any number of suspect and illegal activities, contributed to the perception of Kreuzberg as a Turkish ghetto. The practices associated with these lived-in spaces, Kreuzberg’s run-down flats and buildings occupied by co-villagers from Kurdish eastern Anatolia, deviate considerably from the normative German practices. Despite the fact that the ‘‘ghetto’’ is belied by statistics, revealing the majority of Kreuzberg’s population to be German, the synergetic force of the combination of perception and spatial semiotics proves powerful indeed.

l 154

BERLIN’S KREUZBERG

6. Beyond the Bridge Two Banks of the River Yabancılar derler bize burada Almancılar derler bize orada Anadolum biz kalmı¸sız arada Ba˘grımıza hançer vurma ne olur

They call us strangers, foreigners here They call us Germans there. Oh, my Anatolia, we are left mid-way between— Just do not pierce us through the heart1

l Over the decades the notional ‘‘second generation’’ has been assigned any number of titles: second generation, involuntary migrants, descendants of migrants, Turks, guestworker children. Many children of migrants and their children in turn have internalized the discursive processes of exclusion produced within the German public sphere. The psychological violence triggered by German discourse produces a vacant space, an empty signifier of belonging.≤ They are assumed to feel left midway between a place of exclusion and a denuded social space. Notably, none of these discursive categories includes terms such as ‘‘immigrant’’ or ‘‘ethnic,’’ as in, for example, ‘‘ethnic Turks’’ in a relativizing sense. This absence of terminology, far from accidental or incidental, reflects the macropolitical denial of the immigration phenomenon on the part of the Federal Republic of Germany. This denial translates symbolically and economically into a policy of selective investment, of training a labor force as well as a commitment to the fashioning of a nationally homogeneous community. As observed already, such selective investment is especially evident in the case of the Aussiedler, the ‘‘ethnic Germans’’ from the former Soviet Union, where the state invests heavily in its project of Germanizing them.

The everyday psychology of exclusion internalized by some o√spring of Turkish migrants living in Germany has been molded by these aggressive cultural politics of the two di√erent nation-states, Germany and Turkey, as well as by individuals and groups who express alternative visions of transnationalism. The Turkish state, concerned that its subjects abroad do not sever relations with the homeland, even beyond the original migrant generation, has tightened its tether by ensuring that its state televisual signals reach satellite dishes in Berlin and Bavaria; it sponsors public, festive events; its Ministry of Education places emissaries in German schools targeting the Turkish children; and most importantly, it has bent over backwards in an e√ort not to lose citizens, even manufacturing a novel ersatz passport, the ‘‘pink card’’ (discussed in chapter 8). The cultural politics of Turkey reinforces the message that there is a homeland that wants to include them to a certain extent, desiring from them the economic remittances that boost its persistently problematic economy. Unlike its neighbor Greece, for example, which has provided major incentives for its migrants in northern Europe to repatriate, Turkey has made few allowances for facilitating repatriation; rather, it is the economic remittances that it seeks, as well as strengthened political muscle in Europe, particularly given the complex politics and history of its applications to join the EU.≥ This ensures that the children of repatriated migrants remain at the social margins of Turkish society. Their stories of displacement are recounted in this chapter. Immigrants’ children, often socially pathologized in melodramatic terms as ‘‘caught between two cultures but part of neither,’’ negotiate identities in a social field where the ‘‘myth of the final return’’ has served as a guiding orientation. Many children reiterate the belief expressed by their parents that they occupy a temporary displacement; they try to make sense of this fractured trajectory as well as the alienation that so deeply characterizes many of them.∂ During the course of fieldwork during the 1980s, I heard nearly identical declarations voiced by both migrant adults and their children. The latter often were born and chiefly raised in Germany. What I came to understand as a dominant narrative, repeated endlessly by parents and children, helps to situate the dilemma they faced. Variants went like this: ‘‘We don’t belong here in Germany, it is better to live in one’s own country.’’ ‘‘We are foreigners, strangers here.’’ ‘‘In Germany we are not at home; Turkey is our home; we are Turks.’’ ‘‘It’s better to be in one’s own homeland—we’ll be returning there soon.’’ l 156

BEYOND THE BRIDGE

Any attempt to comprehend this ubiquitous recitation must heed the fact that the youthful narrators seldom if ever had seen this homeland, or, if so only as a distant dreamlike vacation land. Often times they are far more fluent and literate in German, the language of the host country, than in their native Turkish. What does it mean that these children share in this dominant narrative, perpetuate it, and consequently remain, in some sense, caught in its web of contradictions? The capacity to transcend the contradictions begins to make sense when examining the role assigned to them by the German state and by the larger society around them. The Kreuzberg rap artist Hakan Durmu¸s echoes such paradoxical sentiments: ‘‘One feels homeless, doesn’t know where one belongs. In Turkey I’m a Deutschtürke, here I’m a Turk. I’ve lived in Kreuzberg twenty-four years, so I’m a Kreuzberger. My real homeland is Turkey, that’s clear. But if I go to Turkey now, I’ll need another twenty-four years to find friends.’’∑ Much has changed—most critically, reformed citizenship legislation—since Wilpert perceptively pointed out that ‘‘the Federal Republic of Germany does not recognize itself as a country of immigration, and thus there are neither first- nor second-generation immigrants, but strictly speaking either migrants or foreigners’’ (1988: 3). Nevertheless there remains a kernel of continuity in cultural perceptions. The experience of the Turkish Germans is shaped in part by an overt policy of the German government. Here a linguistic failure translates into an existential experience of loss, alienation, and placelessness. Many young people, like Hakan Durmu¸s, come of age in the margins of Germany’s social fabric and have carved for themselves a niche of de facto permanence experimenting with modes of identification less attached to ethnonational categories. Many who hold German citizenship, although feeling unable to claim the label ‘‘German’’ for themselves, feel perfectly at ease wearing the moniker ‘‘Berliner.’’ The terms ‘‘second’’ or ‘‘third’’ generation serve linguistically to delimit the social and symbolic field they inhabit. Despite a desire to homogenize them, this ‘‘population’’ comprises extremely diverse individuals and groups with widely varied experiences, based on class, regions of both origin and present residence, religion, gender, politics, and age. For a striking example of such diasporic provenance, consider the Kurdish-speaking children whose parents migrated from eastern Anatolia. Kurdish community workers in Berlin related incidents whereby monolingual Kurdish-speaking children, due to their Turkish citizenship, have been put in Turkish-language classes. Knowing no BEYOND THE BRIDGE

157 l

Turkish, they were labeled as retarded and placed in remedial courses. Thus, in some cases, the Kurds, escaping repression and persecution in Turkey, have met insensitivity and discrimination of a di√erent sort in Germany. For many self-ascribed Kurds, this identification with Turkey as a place of national origin is highly problematic in light of their history of oppression, and what many see as a legacy of ethnocide in the Republican period. Just as these generations born and raised in Germany are seen as a social and political problem by German society—to the extent that they are perceived as unintegratable and incapable of deepening their attachments to Germany and to German national sentiment—they exemplify the Ausländerfrage, the foreigner problem, par excellence; as such, they have been targeted by writers and researchers. Sometimes works about them focus on specific traits, practices, or customs deemed by the authors to have either poetic or essential qualities. Many choose to focus on their putative Muslimness, reifying this as an ascribed given, marked simply as undi√erentiated outsiders or foreigners characterized only by the ubiquitous reference of Islam. Titles within the social sciences and journalistic articles and books on this subject include: ‘‘Foreign Children in German Schools’’ ‘‘Children without future’’ ‘‘Oya: Foreign homeland Turkey’’ ‘‘Respect the elders, love the younger’’ ‘‘Foreigners or Germans—Integration problems of Greek, ‘‘Yugoslav, and Turkish population groups’’ ‘‘Role conflicts of foreign worker children between family and school’’ ‘‘Factors that influence school behaviour of foreign youth’’ ‘‘Criminal foreign worker children? Structural determinants of delinquency’’ ‘‘Turkish youth—no vocational opportunities in Germany?’’ ‘‘School problems of foreign children’’ ‘‘The bartered bride’’ ‘‘Endlessly Disadvantaged? Towards the social integration of foreign children’’ ‘‘Education of foreign children: Educational goals and cultural outlook of Turkish worker families’’ ‘‘Young Turks as perpetrators and victims of violence’’ ‘‘Diseased integration: socialization problems of guestworkers and their children’’ l 158

BEYOND THE BRIDGE

The list could go on for scores of pages; recall, though, that the ‘‘foreigners’’ and ‘‘Turks’’ to whom these titles refer have resided in Germany most, if not all of their lives. Although over the past decade the term ‘‘migrant’’ has replaced ‘‘foreigner’’ in much of the academic and policy literature, it nevertheless is germane that the more permanent and arguably inclusive term ‘‘immigrant’’ still has not made headway. Without formal acknowledgment of their racination they will not lose their foreign stigma. Thus, it is arguable that until they lose their prescribed foreignness, the cultural and political integration advocated by many of these books and articles cannot be achieved. An alternative approach to the Turkish presence in Germany might acknowledge the resourcefulness and creativity of a potentially highly successful group, with much to contribute to the society. The perceived failure to integrate, particularly in the realms of education and the labor market, is frequently interpreted as a result of bad luck and poor timing, of having been shuttled back and forth throughout their childhoods and adolescent lives, between Turkey and Germany. But sometimes the distance traveled is no further than a few train stops, a journey that takes a child between the heart of Kreuzberg and a German public school. To many, these environments are irreconcilable, and this alleged misfortune is seen as the cause of their predicament. And it is this predicament that is used as an excuse for their presumed inability to integrate. Contact with Turkey, having spent too much time in Turkish environments, have ill prepared them for successful lives in Germany. Tainted with the stain of what is often portrayed as the romantic ‘‘Morgenland’’ (the Orient, the land of the morning or the east), they are by association identified with pre-enlightenment backwardness, patriarchal despotism, and fundamentalism. An underlying assumption permeating much of the public discourse about foreigners reasserts a fundamental di√erence between the foreigners’ worlds and ‘‘ours.’’ The belief that a cultural wall ultimately divides those coming from Turkey from the authentic German citizens, however, has been undermined by the arrival of the Russian German Aussiedler, whose cultural competence has been called into question by their evident failure to ‘‘integrate’’ as planned into German society. Indeed, the presentation of Turkey as the virtual outsider to Europe is one of the pervasive myths circulating in the West over the past centuries, kept alive by leading French politicians and Pope Benedict. Again, the us-them dichotomy is not limited to right-wing politicians, BEYOND THE BRIDGE

159 l

neo-Nazis, and the Pope but finds echoes in liberal quarters as well, among those who see themselves in the forefront of pro-foreigner, civil rights groups. For example, an ecumenical coalition of progressive Protestant groups in Berlin annually sponsors ‘‘Intercultural Week.’’ Oblivious to the built-in ironies and questionable implications, in some places the event is called: ‘‘Woche der ausländischen Mitbürger,’’ week of foreign cocitizens.∏ As mentioned previously, the collocation ‘‘foreign co-citizen/ fellow-citizen,’’ oxymoronic at best, further marks an already marked population in a way that full, unmarked citizens are not. Thus, a simple prefix, deployed to denote innocent inclusion, instead brings attention to the fact that these are not true citizens, only ersatz, further excluding them from recognition as ‘‘generic’’ citizens, without the need of prepositional modifiers.π As part of the annual foreign co-citizen week, scores of social events, lectures, films, readings, exhibitions, concerts, street fairs, and worship services might be held. Events from past years have included an exhibit of paintings by children, Are You Really So Di√erent?; a social afternoon ‘‘tea with foreigners’’; lectures such as ‘‘Is the Boat Full?’’ and ‘‘Children with No Future?’’; readings by ‘‘foreign’’ authors, entitled ‘‘How I Feel under the Germans’’ and ‘‘Those Lost between Two Worlds’’; a discussion about ‘‘war in the cities: Turkish youth gangs in West Berlin’’; and, in the spirit of progressive controversy, a radio program dealing with the increased violence against foreigners, called Terror, Totschlag, Türkenjagd ’’ (Terror, Murder, and Turk-hunting).∫ Again, as with the academic and social work literature, it is notable that the word ‘‘immigrant’’ is avoided. Despite wellintentioned e√orts on the part of the media, researchers, or the clergy, it often appears that through the very rhetoric of di√erence deployed, an implicitly reifying discourse is set in place. Furthermore, this discourse reflects the o≈cial ideology and policy that, apart from those exceptions who qualify for citizenship, the German ‘‘boat is full.’’Ω However well meaning, these popular e√orts barely camouflage the underlying social and legal structures serving to separate them from the encompassing host society. A Turk who is a naturalized German citizen is, socially, still a Turk. The local Turkish Germans know very well that to Germans, ‘‘once a Turk, always a Turk.’’ One recently naturalized German, a student who had lived in Germany twenty years, joked that no longer would Germans be able to express their xenophobia with the common ‘‘Türken raus!’’ (Turks out!)—they would have to amend it, the new expresl 160

BEYOND THE BRIDGE

sion would be ‘‘Germans with Turkish origins out!’’ Another Turkish student, barely out of his teens and bitter before his years, had secured for himself a German passport. He told me, ‘‘I want all the rights of everyone else. However, even though I now have a German passport, to them I am still a Turk. Because of German ideas about nationality, I cannot say that I am a German—I’m not. I’m still a Turk, second-generation.’’ INTEGRATING NATURALIZATION

In the succeeding decades much has changed, some of it dramatic and unpredictable. Now, if the entire boat is not too full for Turks, perhaps only the upper decks and cabins are out of bounds. Steady support for liberalization of nationality laws has been e√ective: first in the passage of a slightly liberalized naturalization law in 1991, and then in 1999 with an overhaul of the law (see chapter 8). In addition to encouraging taking the necessary steps toward obtaining citizenship, the Berlin government has supported a host of programs and activities to assist young people to ‘‘integrate.’’ The o≈ce of the Berlin Senator for Labor and Industry produced a series of bilingual Turkish German cassette tapes, distributed gratis. Designed for radio broadcast and for parents and children to listen to together, they employed dramatically didactic methods, through minidramas focusing on di√erent issues and goals. Some were oriented toward conveying the importance of mastering the German language. In one, entitled ‘‘In order to learn, it is necessary to understand,’’ a young Turkish man applies for a job but his German is too poor to get through the interview; he is unable to tell the employer what qualifications he has. His anguish and frustration at his language disability are palpable. Other minidramas o√er information about entry into professional lives: ‘‘Restaurateur—job or profession?’’ and other sorts of training. HOMELAND TURKEY?

During summer journeys to Turkey, vacationing children often treat the ‘‘homeland’’ as a sort of holiday village. This contrasts sharply with the alienation experienced by many of the ‘‘second-generation’’ youth upon permanent repatriation. Among these repatriates, the problems only increase. The high expectations of a happy homecoming are generally shattered, as the repatriates are labeled upon their return alamancı, or alaBEYOND THE BRIDGE

161 l

manyalı (German-ish). After years of living with the stigma of Ausländer, this is a painful appellation. Children regularly are taunted by their peers and find it di≈cult to fit in and to be accepted. Many in Turkey share a feeling that Turkish authenticity, real Turkishness, has been lost, tainted, or at least diluted in the German diaspora, and returnees are stigmatized as attenuated Turks. Returned teenagers have a particularly di≈cult time adapting to the mores and rigid hierarchical system prevalent in Turkish schools. They are punished for infractions unknowingly committed, such as not wearing their prescribed uniform properly, or leaving a hand in a pocket when a teacher walks in the room instead of standing to attention with hands at their sides. A twelve-year-old boy in a provincial Anatolian town, ‘‘returned’’ the previous year, told me about his troubles. He had done very well in school in Germany, had been at the top of his class, excelled especially in mathematics, and had found his young ‘‘alternative’’ teachers friendly and supportive. He boasted that he had even used the grammatically informal vocative ‘‘you’’ with them (‘‘du,’’ not ‘‘Sie’’). In Turkey, on the other hand, he repeatedly found himself in trouble with his teachers, who beat him for unwitting insubordination; he was not accustomed to standing at attention in the formal, paramilitary atmosphere common in many Turkish state schools. As a result of his ignorance in the ways of Turkish classroom behavior, his teachers, whom I interviewed, accused him of arrogance (‘‘He thinks he’s better than the rest; that he does not have to conform to the same rules’’) and labeled him a troublemaker. To make matters worse, the older brother of a girl in his class to whom he had spoken several times gave him a thrashing and warned him never to approach his sister again. In southwest Turkey, a teenager I met had hoped to be a computer programmer in Germany. Now, newly illiterate in Turkey, rather than attend school with seven-year-olds, he had decided to drop out of high school and apprentice himself to a barber. In a nearby town an eighteenyear-old girl working in a tourist area, having arrived two years previously, told me her story. Though thanks to her German fluency she was very lucky to have found a job at a luxury hotel not far from her village, she was troubled that no one in her village would associate with her. ‘‘They all assume that I am a loose woman, that because I lived in Germany I am like the Germans. They think that I am not a virgin, so people won’t talk to me. I’ll never find a husband; they think I’m a fallen woman—but I’m not,’’ she l 162

BEYOND THE BRIDGE

assured me sadly. Her experience of guilt by spatial association was not unusual, and many young women I interviewed described similar problems. After having lived in Germany, a land associated with immorality, the girls are presumed no longer to be virgins, a status carrying with it serious consequences in some parts of Turkey.∞≠ Returnee families in Istanbul have often had problems with their children in schools, in part due to Turkey’s inadequate infrastructure. The handful of special schools cannot cope with the thousands needing language and other help. Desperate parents do not know where to turn and thus su√er along with their children. Parents have their own troubles readjusting to life in Turkey after decades away;∞∞ they lack native know-how and networks. One of the most common complaints I heard from returnees, along with their sense of disorientation, was the lack of torpil—clout, or connections—crucial in order to oil the gears of the local bureaucracies. The situation for Kurdish immigrants from Turkey di√ers significantly— few have returned. For them, Turkey is anything but a welcoming homeland. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s many simply could not return, as their home regions were under martial law, due to the virtual civil war conditions. Many Kurdish migrants in Germany related stories about entering Turkish state schools, sta√ed by nationalist teachers from the capital, Ankara, where they routinely experienced painful negative assimilationist conditioning.∞≤ Common stories included being made to hold hot coals or being beaten or having hair pulled, in an attempt to convince them to speak Turkish. For many Kurds, then, Germany, with all its contradictory assimilationist and segregationist measures still represents a freedom from the ethnonationalist policies of the Turkish state. Granted, many of the more egregious anti-Kurdish policies have been lifted—in part thanks to EU pressures—but the decades of systematic underdevelopment of Kurdish regions and decimation of many villages translates into few opportunities back home. KILLING PASSPORTS AND DISORIENTATIONS: A HEREDITARY LANDSCAPE?

Returnee children intimately know the phrase ‘‘killing passports.’’ Many repatriated children recounted sadly that their passports had been killed; they felt trapped, unable to return to Germany where they felt more at ease. Their parents’ decisions had sealed their fate.∞≥ In order to qualify for ‘‘goBEYOND THE BRIDGE

163 l

home premiums’’ and early pensions o√ered by the German government, migrants agreed to sign away all work and residence rights for themselves and their families—thus ‘‘killing’’ their German passports.∞∂ While in Germany, through stories and aspirations, songs, and occasional vacation trips, the migrants bequeathed an ideal typical landscape of home to their children. In Germany, the children inhabit this inherited Anatolian landscape, refashioning it for themselves in light of their spatiotemporal distance from it. For some of them, Anatolia is their central a√ective topos, albeit chimerical, which orients a diasporic cartography not of their choosing. Many of them can make the same generalizing claims about how much better life is in Anatolia: the water, the food, the air, and, most of all, the homeland, vatan. They believe that in Anatolia they are not condemned to be Ausländer forever but rather will enjoy the full status of insider belonging. Once the return trip has been made, however, the other side of the looking glass is forever distorted. STRUCTURAL INEQUALITIES: EDUCATION AND THE FAMILY IN GERMANY

The lives of Turkish children in Germany are marked particularly by the changed parent-child relationship they are compelled to master. A role reversal occurs in that the parents frequently enter into a partial dependency relationship with their children, due to the children’s better mastery of the language and ways of Germany (see, for example, Wilpert 1988: 145). Children are depended upon to serve their parents in novel ways, with profound ramifications on familial hierarchies. Parents sometimes find themselves powerless to prevent their authority from being undermined. Incidents that in other circumstances would be considered severely disobedient and threatening of authority, now, in the German context, happen with significantly greater frequency. For example, young people may convince their parents that their school requires something of them—such as extra afternoon classes—in order to socialize with persons of whom their parents may not approve. Especially with regard to education, the parents frequently have little control or knowledge. They often cannot and do not communicate with the teachers. Moreover, they sometimes see the teachers as antagonists, the symbolic gatepost separating them from their children. The teachers are perceived as being the ones tempting their o√spring away from Turkishness, from Islam and Qur’an schools, or whatever the salient value or issue might be. l 164

BEYOND THE BRIDGE

FIGURE 18. Illiterate in Two Languages / Analphabeten in zwei Sprachen. Hanefi Yeter, 1978, oil on canvas.

Though Turkish students have widely varying experience in the German school system, certain patterns can be identified. The teachers, who represent a movement away from the values, practices, and language of the parents, can simultaneously stand in the way of the children advancing in the system, for the deeply tracked German school system culls at a young age those promising students who will be earmarked for the prestigious university-oriented, academic Gymnasium. Those not identified early on as academic will either attend a Realschule, graduating at sixteen with a vocational diploma (such as a kindergarten teacher, nurse’s aid, or medical technician) or will be guided into the Hauptschule track, leaving school even earlier with an all but worthless school-leaving certificate.∞∑ In order to enter the academic Gymnasium track, the child must have the support and recommendation of the teacher. Parents who are aware of the system can play a crucial role in the higher tracking of their children. However, not only are Turkish parents often unaware of the intricacies and pressure that must be levied on the school and teachers but some do not BEYOND THE BRIDGE

165 l

want their children to enter the university track, thinking instead that a vocation will be much more useful, particularly in light of the family’s intention to repatriate. Technical skills are thought to be transposable back to Turkey, whereas higher education might be thought to be of little use.∞∏ Parents often invoke the proverb ‘‘a vocation is like a golden bracelet’’ when explaining this preference.∞π Fatma, the mother of two children whom she brought up in Germany, related to me the trouble she had had placing her son in the Gymnasium track. At the time, they were one of the only Turkish families living in a small town in West Germany. She and her husband, a small businessman in Turkey, had moved to Germany in hopes of greater financial success. She felt that education was the most important means of upward mobility, and she was determined that her children would have every chance to achieve what she herself had not. Despite the fact that her son was a good student, she struggled in order to place him in the Gymnasium track. She met with resistance from teachers, who wondered, ‘‘What good is a Gymnasium education to a Turk?’’ Moreover, there had never been a Turk in the local Gymnasium. Only with a great deal of persistence did she succeed in winning a place for him. Needless to say, most Turkish parents do not have the know-how required to place their o√spring in this track. Interestingly, it has been shown that ‘‘the presence of foreigners in German schools has contributed to an apparent educational mobility among native [German] pupils’’ (Wilpert 1988: 119). Although the proportion and numbers of foreigners in schools have increased, this increase has been smallest in the Gymnasium, ‘‘where . . . foreigners contributed to about 8 percent of the student body. However, almost one-half (49.8 percent) of German young people eligible for secondary school attended [Gymnasium].’’ Wilpert continues, ‘‘[The] Hauptschule, already losing its former importance as the normal prerequisite for obtaining apprenticeships, declined the furthest in its absolute numbers of pupils. Once more, it was the German pupils who profited the most. Today, only 8 percent of German pupils but 35 percent of the Turks in secondary school in Berlin are likely to attend the Hauptschule’’ (ibid.). Wilpert cites figures from the mid-late 1980s, which showed that foreign youth comprised a full ‘‘40 percent of pupils in this least favoured type of school,’’ and discusses the controversial role of the newer Gesamtschule, the comprehensive school. Though about 30 percent of foreign youth attend these internally tracked comprehensive schools, it is arguable that they are, ‘‘with [their] internal l 166

BEYOND THE BRIDGE

streaming . . . in reality replacing the function of the Hauptschule.’’ Wilpert writes, ‘‘Currently about one-third of the foreign youngsters leave the Hauptschule without a qualifying certificate. In the comprehensive Gesamtschule, however, at most about one-half of the children who enroll complete the middle-school certificate, and this is much less for foreigners (14%)’’ (ibid.). A decade later, according to the Kreuzberg municipality’s figures, foreigners made up between 36 and 45 percent of students in the comprehensive Gesamtschulen, less than 25 percent at the elite Gymnasium, and up to 63 percent of the inferior Hauptschulen, where students are provided with no qualifications. The German school system has had a policy whereby not more than 20 percent of any class may be non-German (though exceptions have been made for Berlin). In cases where the numbers exceed the 20 percent quota, the extra children are sent to special schools, Sonderschulen. Once a student is enrolled in these schools, which are typically designed for students with learning problems, it is di≈cult to place out of it into mainstream education. As Kaya put it, ‘‘The hierarchical structure of the German educational system, in a way, tends to imprison the children of immigrants who are in rather disadvantageous positions’’ (2001: 133). Compared with Wilpert’s data from the 1980s, it is noteworthy how little the situation has changed, twenty years on. According to the German government’s statistics, a full 17 percent of foreign youth left school with no qualifying certificate in 2004–2005; compare this with 7.2 percent of German students. According to some research, ‘‘three times as many foreign children (meaning Bildungsinländer—pupils who do not hold German passports but who pursued their education in Germany) as German children only go on to enter Hauptschule after primary school, with no further or higher education after that’’ (Mühe: 26). Among immigrant children, according to government statistics, 41.7 percent left school after only the Hauptschule leaving certificate, compared to 23.2 percent of Germans. Furthermore, only 8.2 percent of foreign students versus 25.7 percent of German students took the university entrance exam, the Abitur, after completing Gymnasium (ibid.).∞∫ To what can the school-leavers look forward? The postschooling stage provides little relief. This is due in part to an inadequate number of places in apprenticeships, in part to inadequate qualifications, but other reasons crop up as well. Proportionately, the number of young migrants in vocational training has been about one-third that of the corresponding group BEYOND THE BRIDGE

167 l

of Germans. In addition, the percentage of out-of-school, unemployed youth between the ages of fifteen and eighteen has risen over the past two decades and has been estimated at 37 percent. Moreover, for those foreign youth who do complete a vocational training course, their chances of employment are only half that of the equivalent group of Germans. Thus, in addition to social marginalization, economic marginalization occurs as well. In general, then, beginning from their restricted educational experience, the children of immigrants do not achieve integration into the labor market due to this configuration of structural obstacles. RITUAL REPRODUCTION AND RESISTANCE

One area where children’s and parents’ aspirations often, though not always, converge is marriage. Relationships, engagement, marriage, and weddings occupy a central role, no less in Berlin than in Anatolia. However, the choices and alternatives available in the latter setting present a changing discourse and set of practices governing relationships, marriage partners, and wedding celebrations in the former. The political economy of marriage has undergone change as well, both in the contractual aspect and in the celebration of the wedding party itself. Young people raised in Germany in Turkish immigrant families have been endowed with an array of cultural complexities and practices that can be played out in any number of ways. While carrying out research in Turkey among return migrants I was told time and again of the disgraceful wedding celebrations among the Turks in Germany. One particular narrative arose repeatedly: the story that food was sold to the invited guests, not provided for them as hospitality and honor required. The criticism of this practice was as unanimous as it was harsh and all who mentioned it thought it regrettable that Turks had adopted what they felt to be a German trait of stinginess; they considered this terribly shameful. Once in Berlin, I made a point of attending as many wedding parties, dü˘günler, as I could. This was not di≈cult, since attending dü˘günler turned out to be a focal point of Turkish social life in Berlin.∞Ω Generally paid for by the groom’s family, in Berlin wedding celebrations are held in large rented halls, filled with long tables covered in white paper sheets and metal folding chairs. Typically, several hundred people attend a dü˘gün. They are family a√airs, filled with children running about, dancing, and falling asleep on chairs, laps, and tables. Often the guests are treated to refreshl 168

BEYOND THE BRIDGE

ments of soft drinks, some liquor (though at weddings of religiously conservative families no liquor is served), and finger food such as pretzels and nuts. I was particularly interested to note that indeed, as I had been warned, often a snack bar operated by the hall sells food for the guests to purchase. In Berlin, I never heard anyone remark either critically or otherwise on this common practice at weddings. Gifts are publicly given and announced at weddings, where an emcee organizes the gift giving. The bride (gelin) and groom (damat ) stand together with their families, and the gift-giving guests line up. One by one they tell the emcee what the gift is. He then announces it over a microphone saying, in a tone of voice not unlike that of an auctioneer, ‘‘The brother-in-law of the groom is giving him 100 Euros, and let’s applaud for it . . . the maternal aunt of the groom is giving the bride a gold bracelet, let’s hear the applause!’’ The significance of the precise social relationship of the giver to the recipient and his/her family is expressed in the importance shown to this by the emcee. The giver is specified not so much by name as by relationship; for example, he or she might be referred to as a neighbor, a fellow villager from Turkey, from a particular side of the family, a so-called ‘‘ritual’’ kin, kirve, such as a circumcision sponsor, and so on. The gift giver gives the couple the gift, for example by placing a gold necklace over the bride’s head, slipping a bracelet onto her arm, or, quite often, pinning a bill to the groom’s lapel or the bride’s dress. The amount of the bill is announced, or the type of gold jewelry described. The gifts are of great interest to the guests, who discuss them at length. By the end of the gift giving, the bride is covered with gold necklaces, earrings, bracelets, coins, and paper money, and pinned to the groom’s suit are dozens of paper bills. An Alevi variant might include gifts with explicit Alevi symbolism, such as gold jewelry in the shape of Ali’s sword (Kaya 2001: 164). No wedding is complete without the entire event being videotaped, often by multiple cameras, the blinding lights of the videorecorder a standard feature of all wedding celebrations. At some weddings roaming photographers sell Polaroid snapshots to guests. An important function of wedding celebrations is the opportunity they provide for young people to meet their own potential marriage partners. The young people take this quite seriously and look forward to such events. For it is here that the young men and women display for each other—as well as for the respective families—their attractiveness and their grace or prowess on the dance floor. The girls dress up ostentatiously in the height BEYOND THE BRIDGE

169 l

of immigrant fashion, which synthesizes certain contemporary German styles with conventional Turkish concepts of beauty, such as gold jewelry and heavy eye makeup. Both boys and girls are very conscious of being conspicuous and on display. Dancing is central at these events, where selfconscious, awkward girls dance with each other, giggle and whisper, and most of all notice and are noticed by teenaged boys and their families. Good dancing is valued in both men and women, and the dancers flirt with the limits of taste, particularly for the mildly erotic belly dancing, where men generally are much more daring than women in mixed company. Often a professional singer, hired for the event, sings popular Turkish songs. The weddings usually last late into the night.≤≠ Not all girls live happily ever after in a perfect marriage. Some choose not to marry; others divorce. Divorce or delaying marriage most likely would be impossible in the regions of Anatolia whence their families hailed. While some girls postpone marriage for education and career, still others find themselves involved in inauspicious relationships, and consequently forced into arranged marriages by their families. The following accounts describe chapters of the stories of girls of this generation who have for one or another reason not taken the stereotypic course. l ELIF I met Elif in the mid-1980s and watched her grow from a naive, idealistic teenager into a slightly jaded, sometimes defeated but still fundamentally motivated adult. Elif had been promised to Metin as a baby through an institution known as be¸sik kertmesi, a ritual where infants are ‘‘engaged,’’ promised to one another by their parents, who wish to cement familial links. They were cousins who had grown up in the same small eastern Anatolian hamlet. Though generationally they di√ered by a step— Metin was Elif ’s father’s father’s brother’s son—they nevertheless were the same age. Elif joined her parents and two siblings in Berlin when she was eleven and had only been back to the village twice in the succeeding eight years. The family’s extensive debts and a long series of financial problems precluded more frequent visits back to Turkey. Through the years, she and Metin infrequently exchanged letters and pictures. The summer she was twenty, she returned to the village with her mother and several siblings. Prior to her leaving Berlin, Elif ’s father had said to her: ‘‘My daughter, do whatever you wish, but I want you to know that if you and Metin decide to get engaged, it will make me very happy.’’ Elif felt that direct pressure never was exerted on her to marry Metin, and she saw it as a marriage for love. l 170

BEYOND THE BRIDGE

Had she not wanted to marry him, she claimed, her family would have accepted it. However, the unconscious socialization and conditioning from childhood no doubt influenced their feelings for each other as they grew up, as evidenced in her romantic sentiments for him in the years prior to this trip to Turkey. She had shown me a photograph of him, and though she barely knew him, she spoke of him with the enthusiasm and excitement typical of a young girl in love. That summer Elif not only became engaged to Metin but they were married. In the eyes of the community, the ceremony was an engagement (ni¸san), not a marriage. For German regulations, however, they decided for the record to marry legally with the justice of the peace. The following summer they would have the ‘‘real’’ wedding celebration in Berlin, but since in the eyes of the law they would have been married already a year, Metin would have a better chance at having his petition to come to Berlin accepted. According to Elif ’s mother, a couple is considered ‘‘really’’ married when the husband and wife have sexually consummated the relationship; she assured me that Elif and Metin were still technically unmarried. While in Turkey, in the vicinity of the village and provincial city, the two of them had considerable freedom to spend time together unchaperoned and, in addition to being able to hold hands in public, to take walks together, go on picnics, and the like.They behaved as a couple in public. Elif explained to me that Metin would not be able to live with her and her family in Berlin because the legal square metric limit of their damp, two-room, cold-water basement flat was already far exceeded by the six of them (she, two sisters, a brother, and her parents). She was worried that in a year’s time she would not be able to accumulate enough money from her factory job to pay for a flat for the two of them and also continue to contribute to the family’s household needs. But that, indeed, was what she was determined to do, if need be by working overtime. In addition to her concerns about housing availability and costs, Elif had to contend with the prospect of Metin’s total dependency on her for language—he knew not a word of German—and all that implied in terms of daily social life, prospects for employment, and so on. This case is not at all unusual; many immigrants experience similar situations or variations on the same theme. When I asked Elif where they would hold the wedding celebration, she wistfully replied, ‘‘We’ll have it in Berlin, although it would be much more beautiful in the village. But my family cannot a√ord it, and Metin’s mother is only a poor widow.’’ Like Elif and Metin, many Turks have chosen to get BEYOND THE BRIDGE

171 l

married and have wedding celebrations in Germany rather than in Turkey. They explain that the expense of a village wedding far exceeds that of a German one. In Turkey, the family would be expected to produce an extravagant celebration, sometimes lasting for several days, for the entire village. Everyone in the village would be fed meat, the sheep for which would cost a small fortune. Though Metin and Elif could not expect an extravagant celebration with opulent gifts, the following year they held a dü˘gün. She and her family did not expect much in the way of ba¸slık parası, bride wealth; they were pleased that she was marrying an honorable young man to whom she had been promised from the cradle, and who was, after all, no stranger, but an akraba, a relative—highly valued in their region. Metin’s mother o√ered Elif süt parası, milk money. This is said to symbolically compensate the bride’s family, particularly the mother who breast-fed her, for the loss of the daughter. Elif, modest and generous in equal measure, refused the money, saying that it embarrassed her; she did not like the feeling of ‘‘being bought.’’ Her mother-in-law insisted, and eventually the money was given to Elif ’s older brother, at whose home in the regional city the engagement festivities took place. Elif and her husband Metin moved into a one-room cold-water flat in Reinekedorf, where the sound of jets landing and taking o√ became a constant background drone. She left the house by five thirty each morning to be at her factory job by six. Metin attended two German classes and hoped eventually to pass a high school equivalency exam and qualify for a vocational school of some sort. Several times a week they traveled across the city to Neu Kölln, where her parents and siblings lived, in order to bathe and wash their clothes. After they endured several years of this stressful life—Metin was eventually able to find work loading trucks—I returned to Berlin and found them in the process of divorce. Elif ’s siblings explained to me that Metin never ‘‘adapted’’ to German life; he was unhappy in Germany. He had found Elif ’s daily behavior, social life, attitudes, and practices di≈cult to accept. His lack of ‘‘adaptation’’ expressed itself in frequent bouts of physical violence against his wife. Once divorced, Elif rented a small flat of her own, close to her parents. After years of waiting, while she toiled on the assembly line, she finally found a place in a vocational training course and was studying to be a preschool teacher. The strategies employed in her case illustrate certain social and legal complexities issuing from the Germanyl 172

BEYOND THE BRIDGE

imposed marriage constraints. Also, the case involved a variation on ‘‘arranged marriage,’’ an institution of problematic definition in any case, as what it refers to probably should be understood as a continuum rather than a statically defined practice. l CANAN When discussing marriage strategies, it is equally as pertinent to discuss the strategies employed to stay unmarried. This brings us to Canan, twenty, a university student. She and her boyfriend had been carrying on their a√air for nearly four years, in secret. Her younger sister had been included in the secret and served as an alibi for the sake of their parents. Such a situation, though possible in Berlin, would not be possible in the Black Sea village from which her family emigrated. In the village, they would have been forced either to elope or to marry. When she became pregnant, the fact that she was in Berlin and fluent in the language and mechanics of the health insurance bureaucracy allowed her to have an abortion. In the village, there would have been no choice but to marry. Thus, Berlin o√ered a social field with new options. However, these new options can have heavy costs. Canan, under constant stress, felt tremendous guilt toward her parents, from whom she gradually was becoming disa√ected. She told me: ‘‘I always have a guilty conscience and feel like I lead a double life. I’m not happy like this, but I don’t know what to do. I am often ill and I’ve been to many doctors about it, but they say that my problems are psychosomatic. I’m sure that if I moved out on my own I wouldn’t be sick any longer.’’ She was reluctant to move out of her parents’ apartment; to do so would be dishonorable and shameful in the eyes of the community. It would, she believed, irreparably stain her parents’ reputation not only in Berlin but also back in their Black Sea village, where the news of compatriots in Berlin, adulterated and unadulterated, seemed to arrive as soon as it happened. Though she felt committed to the relationship, she was not prepared to marry at this time. She said, ‘‘I don’t want to move directly from my parents’ house to my husband’s. First I need to live on my own; it would do me good, and allow me to live like an independent adult. I think it’s important to develop myself and be independent in order to really be a mature adult.’’ Canan is an articulate young woman whose attitude and level of selfconsciousness were, admittedly, somewhat exceptional among Turkish girls, particularly those who grow up in a heavily Turkish environment, as she did in the heart of Kreuzberg. However, she was one of the ‘‘successful’’ BEYOND THE BRIDGE

173 l

foreigners who attended a Gymnasium and took the Abitur exam, thus qualifying for entry at a German university.≤∞ Canan, in her educational setting, had always had many German friends and had been particularly influenced by a feminist high school teacher who looked out for her and helped her on many occasions. This teacher had even gone to her home several times and had spoken to her parents to explain, for instance, why Canan had to stay late at school to participate in various activities. Thus Canan’s worldview had been shaped by more and di√erent influences than was the case for many of her Turkish peers, and her expectations for herself di√ered from theirs. However, she felt truly caught between conflicting and competing value systems and codes for behavior that in her mind were incompatible. Unable to overcome the contradictions, she internalized them. As her home situation became intolerable, she no longer was on speaking terms with her father, who could not understand why a girl should go to the university. She became alienated from her mother as well, who, for her part, sensed her daughter withdrawing. It was not particularly surprising that Canan somatized her stress, complaining of aches and pains of unknown origin.≤≤ Canan felt she knew what would cure her— living independently. When we last spoke she and a sister were looking in earnest for a flat of their own. In light of their parents planning to repatriate, they took this as justification to act on their wish to move out on their own. TURNING TO TURKISH

Impressionistic observations, bolstered by discussions with others with local expertise, suggest that a profound change in attitudes toward Turkishness occurred between the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1980s Berlin sported few places exclusively catering to Turkish youth culture. The numerous Turkish-oriented cafes and restaurants tended to be more folkloric, with o√erings such as Turkish folk and classical music, belly dancing, and arabesk (Ça˘glar 1998).≤≥ These establishments generally attracted middleaged and older first-generation immigrants, along with adventurous Germans (ibid.). In the 1990s new clubs and discos opened, o√ering Turkish pop music and appealing almost exclusively to second- and third-generation youth. The decor was more in keeping with styles of other Berlin clubs. Ça˘glar’s keen observations of some of these clubs show how they are designed l 174

BEYOND THE BRIDGE

deliberately with the most trendy Istanbul clubs in mind, yet with a nonsectarian approach (1998). The owners did not see themselves as part of a ‘‘traditional Turkish culture’’; rather, they believed what they o√ered was an urban modernity whose referents looked equally to Istanbul and to New York. Both the owners and the customers felt they were well integrated into Germany, yet not at the expense of the Turkish facet of their identity. It was a Turkish-style modernity they embodied, but one consciously linked to global styles and fashions. Patronizing these new establishments were young people who, curiously, made an increasing e√ort to speak Turkish. Ça˘glar quotes the second-generation proprietor of one such club: In these bars Turkish is spoken. You should have seen these girls. If you had seen them two years ago, you would not have recognized them as Turkish. They walked around listening [to] their walkmans. They watched only mtv and did not speak Turkish with each other. Now they all speak Turkish here, listen [to] Turkish pop all the time and they are our regular customers. (ibid.: 11–12)

The neighborhoods that are consciously chosen for these venues only add to their allure: not Turkish ‘‘ghettos’’ but rather in the city center (ibid.). The symbolic message portrayed to the young people was that these were worthy competitors to the German clubs, competing on German turf, not relegated to the city’s social and geographic margins. Likewise, at a birthday party I attended in the late 1990s at the Berlin flat of a Turkish university student, where the average age was perhaps twentyfour, I heard very little German. One young man clearly was uncomfortable with Turkish and continually switched to German, though he made valiant e√orts to speak his ostensibly mother tongue. Many of the cleancut, stylishly dressed young men and women sported the latest status symbol, ‘‘handis’’—mobile phones. The mood was reserved and very polite, as the group munched identifiably Turkish food, homemade and attractively set out in copious amounts. The guests were first-generation university students or recent graduates; some had been born in Turkey but raised in Germany; others had been born in Germany. They worked or hoped to work in white-collar jobs—such as computer technology, engineering, pharmacy, and teaching. The hostess’ older brother, a well-known musician who had moved to Germany at eighteen, came to celebrate his sister’s birthday and was persuaded to play his saz and sing for the gathering. I had BEYOND THE BRIDGE

175 l

heard him perform in numerous private homes and public events throughout the 1980s; he always commanded a great deal of respect and admiration, but this evening’s impromptu performance diverged from those earlier ones. The Anatolian and Alevi folk music he played was all but unknown to this audience. Other than his sisters, only one weak-voiced girl joined in the singing. The others sat politely for the first piece, but by the second and third began to treat it as background music and behaved much the way one would at a cafe with musicians providing ambience. Some ten to fifteen years in age separated him from most of them, but a world of experience and orientation divided them. These guests lived most of their lives in Germany and their relationship with Turkish performance culture was fairly distant, excepting the few who had participated in Turkish folk dance groups when they were younger. Now they tended to listen to the music at the new clubs described above, not the folk music of Anatolia. ORGANIC INTELLECTUALS

Already in the 1980s numerous Turkish street gangs roamed the roads and parks of Kreuzberg, Wedding, and Neukölln. Their respective turfs were claimed by traditional means: gra≈ti markings. During this period many of them were engaged in petty crime, such as car break-ins. Some also were connected with larger drug mafias. By chance, I learned about their workings the hard way—as a victim.≤∂ But in the 1990s after German-German unification, the gangs assumed a more politicized nature as they mobilized against growing violent xenophobia. Reports of frequent clashes with fascist, neo-Nazi eastern German youth became commonplace. Incidents such as the arson attacks and deaths of Turks at Solingen and Mölln at the hands of xenophobic Germans only served to justify the gangs’ existence as defenders of the community. As well as physical defense of the community through occasional violence—actual or threatened—the gangs continued to stake out their own turf through other means, including gra≈ti. This is a powerful symbolic expression, attesting to their intention and right to this specific place and, more generally, to their place in German society. In the 1990s another outlet emerged for Turkish youth: rap and hip-hop. Çaglar examines the genealogy of the German Turkish rap scene and its relationship to that of the United States. Rap as an outsider art was of central importance to the founders of these groups—among them ‘‘White Nigger Posse’’ and ‘‘Islamic Force.’’ Whereas a half-generation ago some Turks l 176

BEYOND THE BRIDGE

opined that ‘‘we are the new Jews of Germany,’’ these rappers have shifted referential focus; ‘‘remarks such as ‘we are the Blacks of Germany’ or ‘we are the niggers of Germany’ are quite common’’ (1998: 5). While in the 1980s Turkish youth acquired the reputation for excelling in break dance, often performing as street theater in central West Berlin plazas and boulevards, in the 1990s German social and youth workers, working at city-sponsored youth centers, accelerated the process of integrating, in e√ect, these youth into a global hip-hop culture. They initiated and organized ‘‘performances for the youngsters a≈liated with their centers. They o√ered . . . breakdance and hip-hop courses . . . and gra≈ti workshops’’ (ibid.: 5–6). An implicit discourse of hybridity and multiculturalism guided these activities, such as the o≈cially sponsored ‘‘Disco and Döner’’ (ibid.). Soysal describes a citysponsored festival in Kreuzberg, during which movies such as Juice, New Jack City, Menace II Society, and Boyz in the Hood were screened to the predominantly young Turkish audience (n.d.: 21). Clearly, the intended messages were: (1) Turkish youth are meant to identify with other global creative counterhegemonic forces; (2) they should celebrate their marginality by means of globally acceptable creative forms; and (3) as long as they accepted prescribed cultural hybridity, the Germans would in turn accept them. Soysal stresses the pivotal role of the institutional structures behind these expressive forms: ‘‘When we see young Turkish rappers and gra≈ti writers in Berlin . . . we conveniently forget the social workers who supervise their artistic progress, government grants which provide for the sound equipment and spray paint, and tv stations which canvass neighborhoods for migrant, multicultural works of art’’ (24). For the Turkish German youth, engaging in painting high-risk gra≈ti (‘‘tagging’’), break dance, rap, and ‘‘cool’’ dressing together constituted their entry into their own emergent hip-hop culture. As a part of global hip-hop trends, Turkish German youth in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany have experimented with their own variant. Kaya calls it a ‘‘syncretic third culture, or ‘third space,’ ’’ [deriving from] their multicultural competence, which enables them to switch between various cultures such as minority culture, majority culture and global culture. To put it di√erently, they form their cultural identity through the hybridity of ‘‘tradition’’ and ‘‘translation,’’ authenticity and syncretism, heritage and politics . . . acquired by means of transnational communications and transportation, sustaining the pace and density of relationships of the diasporic youth with the homeland and the entire world. (2001: 175) BEYOND THE BRIDGE

177 l

Rap lyrics of hip-hop groups and artists such as Islamic Force, Cartel (later, Kan-Ak—‘‘blood flows’’), Boe-B, Killa Hakan, Ünal, Gangsta Rap, and many others incorporate contemporary Turkish and German political events and sensibilities. Ünal: ‘‘In a sense we Turkify the rap. We are, for instance, trying to mix zurna and rock in our own melodies. . . . We must create a Turkish Community in rap like the East-Coast or WestCoast.’’ These Turkish German hip-hop rappers have consciously indigenized this global medium; they have become Gramscian ‘‘organic intellectuals,’’ rejecting the metaphors of loss and culturelessness, of being intractably caught in-between (Kaya 2001: 201). Their unqualified rejection of the discourse of having fallen between two stools, the ubiquitous in-betweenness, corresponds to Adelson’s ‘‘Against Between: A Manifesto’’ (2003). Primarily concerned with the Turkish German literature that so often has been understood through the lens of an inapt positivism, the manifesto persuasively argues that such positivist approaches to literary criticism are ‘‘holdovers from the late 1970s and 1980s, when an emergent ‘guest worker’ literature focused on the economic exploitation of and xenophobic disdain for the underprivileged. These tropes still circulate in the reception of migrants’ literature today, especially when it is written by someone presumed to represent the culture of Turkey’’ (ibid.: 21). A bridge metaphor is often invoked when describing the predicament of the ‘‘second-generation youth’’ as well as ‘‘guestworker literature.’’ Provocatively, Adelson suggests that ‘‘[this] imaginary bridge ‘between two worlds’ is designed to keep discrete worlds apart as much as it pretends to bring them together. Migrants are at best imagined as suspended on the bridge in perpetuity; critics do not seem to have enough imagination to picture them actually crossing the bridge and landing anywhere new’’ (ibid.). The manifesto questions the fundamental suppositions supporting the bridge, claiming that its purported stability is anything but stable and static. Home, Heimat, has become a relative and relativizable notion and practice—not simply territorialized banks on either side of the bridge. Nor is home confined to language, as Zaimo˘glu powerfully shows in Kanak Sprak (1995; see next chapter). How can a Turkish German writer entrenched in and engaged with Germany represent Turkish national culture, as she or he is assumed to do? Likewise, Germany has changed irrevocably in a direction that now, willy-nilly, includes a wide range of immigrant, Turkish, and Turkish German expressive culture. The following chapter further illustrates this move. Where Kaya freely employed nol 178

BEYOND THE BRIDGE

tions of hybridity, syncretism and multicultural identity, Adelson (2003) cautions against some of these usages. Discussing the work of the Turkish D German writer Senocak, she sees his work as breaking the ‘‘spell that an obsession with multicultural identity ‘between two worlds’ continues to cast on cultural studies of the Other’’ (ibid.: 33). ˘˙IZ’’: PASSING TO GERMAN ‘‘GEÇECE G

In 2000, in a small town in southwest Germany, I spoke with Mehmet, a middle-aged Turkish man and the father of four who himself had arrived in Germany from a Black Sea town as an eighteen-year-old in 1972. He told me that he and his family probably would acquire German nationality. He used the Turkish geçmek, a verb most commonly meaning ‘‘to pass’’ as in to traverse, or to cross.≤∑ He said that for his children’s future it would be beneficial to have German passports; with Turkish passports intraEuropean travel was nigh impossible. Mehmet explained that his oldest son was now beginning university, would study business, and as a result perhaps would need to work in another part of Europe or travel for his job. ‘‘Even if we have to kill our Turkish passports, we’ll do it,’’ he asserted. He said that they no longer even thought of returning to Turkey—‘‘Artık dü¸sünmüyoruz dönmeyi . . . Our home is here, our lives are here. The children are all in school here. I have been here most of my life. No, we don’t talk about returning any more. No one does.’’≤∏ While we were talking, his son called him on his mobile phone, and Mehmet tried, in Turkish, to explain a set of instructions to him. As his son clearly was not comprehending him, Mehmet switched to German— heavily accented and ungrammatical, but comprehensible nonetheless. After hanging up, Mehmet shrugged and a bit sheepishly explained that his son did not understand very much Turkish. ‘‘Ay¸se knows more Turkish than my son does,’’ he said, referring to his nine-year-old daughter seated with us. But by the time Ay¸se begins university, no doubt she also will have ‘‘passed over.’’ GERMAN TURKS’ ‘‘ETHNICITY’’: SEIZED AND DENIED

It sometimes appears that the Turkish children, who, through the 1980s described themselves as outsiders in Germany, were reproducing both the stereotypes they heard about themselves and their parents’ visions of fuBEYOND THE BRIDGE

179 l

tures in Turkey. Far from ‘‘cultureless’’ or ‘‘caught between two cultures and part of neither,’’ instead, they lacked the recognition due them, as Adelson so eloquently describes. Oftentimes, powerless to stake a claim in German society, they clung to the only categories available, those stereotypical images just enumerated. Yet few have returned or will return to Turkey; most will remain in Germany. Even two decades later, parallel but interconnected trends can be noted: on the one hand are the ‘‘success stories,’’ those who have made it into universities or white-collar professional training courses. The trajectories of the others remain less certain. But all of them appear to wear their Turkishness with much greater ease, and do so either as lawyers, rap artists, or grocers. This has been noticed by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the research and policy arm of the German Social Democratic Party. One of the most prolific sites of research on foreigners for the past several decades, the fes produces scores of publications annually about a wide range of Ausländer-relevant topics. A mid-nineties booklet, The Third Generation: Integrated, Adapted or Excluded? (1995), looks at a variety of indicators that lead to integration. One such is intermarriage, and the publication has two charts displaying the percentages of children of mixed parentage over a ten-year period. The low percent and statistically insignificant change in German-Turkish marriage is attributed predominantly to religious di√erences. When addressing social exclusion, the author of the study cites examples of full mosques and the increase in girls wearing headscarves— ‘‘some even in primary schools’’—the preference of third-generation youth for Islamic marriage partners, and the perception of Germans as immoral and their parents’ forbidding them to associate with Germans (ibid.: 40). A series of policy recommendations designed to overcome these ‘‘sociocultural deficits’’ is o√ered: career counseling, social-pedagogic help, intercultural education, integration through sports, bilingual vocational training, internships in the homeland, mother tongue education, antiracist training (ibid.: 43). Despite some misleading generalizations and mistaken assumptions pro√ered in the booklet, the explicit integrationist aim here is a far cry from the separatist perspective that informed some of the earlier texts. The assumption is that most of these children will remain in Germany, and that it is incumbent upon German schools to ease their way. Perhaps it will be their children, or their children’s children, who finally will win the acknowledgment denied to them. They are experimenting with identities, a l 180

BEYOND THE BRIDGE

process that in other countries might not be particularly problematic. For example, in the United States, presumably they would be incorporated, ideally, into the millions of what once were called ‘‘hyphenated’’ Americans, their ‘‘ethnic’’ identity accepted unquestionably in the inventory of admittedly taxonomically disparate groups such as Greek Americans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans.≤π But in Germany rather than being permitted an ostensibly equalizing symbolic hyphen, they all too often are seen as a separate nationality, outside the margins of social acceptability. Some, such as the rappers and other expressive artists, have put the contradictions to creative use. As with the situation regulating citizenship and naturalization, a double standard inscribed in law shaped the present realities and future prospects of the o√spring of labor migrants. As such, the migrants’ children’s innocent phrase produced as if by reflex, ‘‘Turkey is our homeland . . . we are not at home here in Germany,’’ highlighted a predicament they may very well have felt powerless to transform. Rather than reflecting a realistic assessment, perhaps this should be viewed as a defensive statement to strategically empower the powerless. It asserts a putative inclusion with this far-away place, and counteracts the exclusion these children experience in their daily lives. One way the conceptual categories are being questioned is through the introduction of a new term that has entered this discourse, often referring to the third generation: ‘‘German Turk.’’ Used occasionally in the media, as in this example from Der Spiegel—‘‘Das neue Selbstbewusstsein der jungen Deutschtürken ist die Sonnenseite einer ansonsten gescheiterten Integration’’ (the new self-consciousness of the young German Turks is the sunnier side of an otherwise failed integration [September 6, 1999: 97])— but also used increasingly by analysts of the scene (e.g., Çaglar), the term is striking. For it is always compounded in this order, implying that ‘‘German’’ is the adjectival modifier of ‘‘Turk.’’ The people referred to as Deutschtürken, or German Turks, are rendered a variant of Turk, not a variant of German. At the risk of over-interpretation, it could be argued that the grammatical ordering in this term still precludes full participation into Germanness, attesting to an unchangeable essence: once a Turk, always a Turk. Though he did not employ the term German Turk about himself, twentyfive-year-old Erdal did think of himself as something other than simply a ‘‘Turk.’’ Having arrived in Germany at age twelve, he had many German BEYOND THE BRIDGE

181 l

friends: ‘‘Alman arkada¸slarımız bizi kabul ediyor artık; our German friends have accepted us at last. They say ‘Okay, you’re not German, but you’re ‘‘almanyalı’’; you are a Berliner.’ I get along fine with my German friends, and I don’t feel separate from them. I’m a Berliner, so are they.’’ While on one level Erdal can claim this a≈nity with his German friends, he also speaks of a perilous tension that exists with Germans, though presumably not ‘‘his’’ friends. ‘‘A German will never yell a cat call at Turkish girls in public; they’re afraid. They know how proud Turks are. They know the girl’s brother will immediately take a knife to them—that it might even result in a killing. Because we live for our honor. Of course, Germans can’t possibly understand what this means.’’≤∫ On the contrary, Erdal felt that he understands them, though the essence of Turkishness lay beyond the powers of Germans’ comprehension. The poem serving as this chapter’s epigraph, though melodramatic in its tone, sums up the emotions, conflicts, and anxieties of displacement experienced by the young poet as well as many of her peers, typical of the 1980s. An artifact of the internalized ‘‘in-between’’ metaphor, she laments the awkwardness of not belonging, of being ‘‘strangers, foreigners’’ here in Germany, and ‘‘Germans’’ there, in Turkey. D The writer Zafer Senocak echoes the sentiment and describes poetically the contradiction Erdal expresses: I carry two worlds within me but neither one whole they’re constantly bleeding the border runs right through my tongue. (Suhr 1989: 103)

Suhr writes of the ‘‘bifocality’’ inherent in this situation but also suggests D optimism. Senocak continues, ‘‘The split can give rise to a double identity. This identity lives on the tension. One’s feet learn to walk on both banks of the river at the same time’’ (ibid.). The pain of double identity finds some relief in the very process of writing, as explored in the following chapter. Bifocal or increasingly multifocal existence is also experienced by immigrant Turks who have struggled between di√erent geographies defining divergently structured worlds. They have become in part deracinated in the process of movement, to the point of losing their own sense of belonging to l 182

BEYOND THE BRIDGE

a stable center; rather, their center often haunts them, remaining the elusive site where they cannot be. For their children living in Germany, this elusive center emerges more deeply in discourse and in the negotiation of sometimes contradictory demands of competing institutions, be they familial, educational, or vocational. Ultimately their experience adds an existential dimension to that of their parents, dominated as it was by ostensibly economic and political concerns and oriented toward the homeland. More importantly, the capacity of the later generations of Turkish Germans to express themselves in German has contributed to the formation of a new minor literature through which some might recollect or grapple with an attachment to a foreign ‘‘homeland,’’ just as they achieve the realization that Germany, despite it all, if not exactly a homeland, certainly is no longer a foreign land. This impulse is economically expressed by the Turkish German poet Nevfel Cumart: About the homeland II by Nevfel Cumart my father is returning to turkey he does not want to die in a foreign land nor do I want to die in a foreign land and so decide to stay in Bamberg≤Ω

BEYOND THE BRIDGE

183 l

7. Minor Literatures and Professional Ethnics l In Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow, a discussion takes place among a diverse group of people opposed to a staged coup d’état in their city. They are debating the merits of symbolically associating with, or distancing themselves from, Europe and ‘‘the West’’ and the implications this would have on their own identities and culture. A Kurdish youth, whose mother’s brother lived in Germany, was the most outspoken on this point. ‘‘When they write poems or sing songs in the West, they speak for all humanity. They’re human beings—but we’re just Muslims. When we write something, it’s just called ethnic poetry.’’ (2004: 279)

Ka, Snow’s tragic poet protagonist who lived in Frankfurt for many years, is asked ‘‘Was it hard for you in Germany?’’ ‘‘The thing that saved me was not learning German,’’ said Ka. ‘‘My body rejected the language, so I was able to preserve my purity and my soul.’’ (33)

Ka’s response poses a paradox. On the one hand, he is an intellectual, so a natural candidate for the local German elite to appropriate as one of the successfully integrated Turks. Yet he has rejected a fundamental basis of integration: the means to communicate in the local vernacular. He opts instead to live a solitary existence, albeit with a pure soul. But crucially, he has rejected as well the possibility of being labeled an ‘‘ethnic poet.’’ Unlike Ka, the poets and artists whose stories come to light in these pages chose a di√erent path. Though often uneasy with assigned labels, they found the means to communicate their art through given, acquired, or improvised language. Some assumed as well the abjection paradigm in their artistic expression. The symbol of the abject Turk, frequently used to explain Turks’ position in Germany, is as problematic as it is contested in light of the increasing visibility of a Turkish cultural elite and the associated minority literature. This corpus connects the experience of deterritorial-

ization (of language, land, and tradition) with e√orts at reterritorialization of the Turkish self in the diaspora, often refashioning contradictory visions of self and community. The abjection model upholds the stereotype of Turk-as-victim, be it oppressed, veiled woman, arranged marriage, or voiceless exploited worker. By now this clichéd image, iterated endlessly in film and other media, has been naturalized. Such an image poses problems for the issue of authenticity. But as Göktürk observed, any theory of diaspora needs to confront the risk of avoiding ‘‘falling into the trap of reinforcing fictions of cultural purity’’ and contest the ‘‘diasporic positions determined by the marketing politics of ethnicity and otherness’’ (n.d.: 4). Here, I attend to this theoretical issue by observing how the intertwining of cultural politics and migration experience have led to the reconfiguration of relations of power and cultural status in contemporary Germany. Furthermore, a diasporically aware minority literature has challenged the fixity of ethnic and cultural representations of the homeland. Instead, a more complex repertoire of sociocultural representations has developed, where ‘‘homeland’’ and ‘‘guest land’’ become conflated.∞ Sometimes this has led to a clash between those Germans who fantasize about a Turkish authenticity—to which some professional ethnics are especially susceptible—and the awareness on the part of other groups of minor literati that the ‘‘authentic’’ remains permanently elusive, even intractable (ibid). However, the emerging corpus of minority literatures and fractured experiences within this di√erentiated diasporic milieu might contribute not to the formation of a national narrative of Turkish origin but rather to the fashioning of a genuine, sometimes bilingual, transnational consciousness.≤ We might ask, to what sorts of uses do Turkish writers and artists put the German language and narration? What kind of national and transnational consciousness do they express in their own writing, inhabiting transgressively the space of the nation as well as its others? MINORITY CONSCIOUSNESS AND SOCIAL STRUCTURING

The general social structure of Germany’s migrants finds definition in part within the encompassing German social structure. Yet the social stratification among migrants from Turkey, while carefully demarcated, remains nonetheless still much more flexible than the analogous structure in urban Turkey—particularly Istanbul. There, an old elite with connections to MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

185 l

Ottoman aristocracy, diplomats, intellectuals, and elites in the early Republican period still retain prominence and are known by old urbanites. In Turkey, the economic and social hierarchical structures are such that upward mobility assumes a number of specific historical forms. However, it is important to note that a traditional means of upward mobility from rural areas has long been possible for males through the military. In more recent decades, religious orders as well have o√ered a leg-up through educational opportunities to rural youth. By contrast, in Germany those sorts of connections lose their salience. For some raised in the diaspora, it is easier to move upward in Germany than it might have been in Turkey, thus defying the ideological and cultural stereotypes and constraints that have generally hindered success in the arts, sciences, or business. The Turkish cultural elite in Berlin comprises more of a social amalgam than its equivalent in Turkey, where much of the elite has been produced at a very few highly selective schools, which teach in foreign languages (the German, Austrian, British, American, and French schools). Many of these schools are located in Istanbul and date to the nineteenth century, such as the prestigious Robert College, founded by American missionaries. Some of the Berlin-based elites have indeed arrived via the same channels as elites in Turkey, having come for advanced training from Germanlanguage schools. Others, however, are the children of labor migrants who excelled in the German school system and have pursued higher degrees. Once the elites realize they have become interpreters for the working class, they begin to see themselves and the ethnicized world around them in di√erent terms. Their situation is paradoxical, since for some it is only in their association with their worker/peasant compatriots that they are able to di√erentiate themselves successfully from them. They often find that in Germany they are accepted as cultural and intellectual elites (artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, professionals, politicians, academics) only if they reinvent themselves as ethnic elites. Many of them willy-nilly become cultural brokers and spokespeople for the workers, as they write about, film, paint, represent, and study them. They begin to acquire an autonomous and legitimate space in Germany especially by appropriating and retelling the narratives of displacement of the migrant diaspora, sometimes romanticizing the myths of origins. At the same time they are aware that their acceptance by German arbiters of culture depends on conforming to expectations of what a Turkish or Ausländer elite might look and act l 186

MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

like. Not always accepted merely on the merits of being good artists, poets, or sociologists, rather, they find themselves playing to both sides of the cultural spectrum at once and often producing for the consumption of their German colleagues. Yet many reject this categorization, seeing in it an attempt to degrade minority cultural production. For example, Aysel Özakın, writing in German, has refused the label Gastarbeiterliteratur as being merely a ‘‘secondrate genre created by German literary critics for foreign authors’’ (Kenkel 1989: 183). Teraoka, elaborating on this rejectionist tendency among authors such as Özakın, argued that these labels ‘‘hold the power to constrain not only what can be experienced and artistically expressed but also how what is expressed is received by the dominant culture. Özakın recognized that descriptive labels become proscriptive, categorizing artistic production in exclusionary ways’’ (ibid.: 183–84). Similarly, writing of Turkish filmmakers in Germany, Göktürk speaks of ‘‘a cinema of duty,’’ in order to criticize the cultural subordination and subnational positioning of Turkish subjects vis-à-vis German institutional ideologies of the nation. These cultural producers are expected to produce an art that must confront the ‘‘problems of their people. To receive funding, filmmakers have been almost driven to represent the ‘other’ culture in terms of common assumptions and popular misconceptions’’ (Göktürk 2001: 8). Göktürk’s characterization perfectly reflected Sevgi’s situation, a filmmaker I knew in Berlin. She had been educated in West Germany as a child of the initial wave of migrants in the 1960s, had been encouraged to achieve academically by ambitious parents, and after high school came to Berlin to study filmmaking. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s she frequently was unemployed, living on the dole. ‘‘I have such trouble getting funding for the films I want to make,’’ she complained one day in 2000. ‘‘I wanted to make some films in Africa, but was told ‘What can a Turkish woman know about Africa?—why don’t you stick to Turkish subjects?’ ’’ To make ends meet she occasionally has found work as an actress. Turks are now in lots of German movies and tv shows—they are the bad guy, the mafia, the drug pusher, the cleaning woman—I sometimes put on a headscarf and sweep a floor in tv shows. But things are changing a bit, and now there are even a few good-guy Turks—a policeman and a policewoman are Turks on a German show. MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

187 l

Through some colleagues, in 2002 she was o√ered a short-term teaching job at a Turkish university. She was surprised how much she enjoyed it, at how accepted and respected she felt, and she began working in Turkey on a more regular basis. Likewise, Ay¸se, an out-of-work actress in her late thirties who had lived most of her life in Germany, having migrated with her parents at age nine, complained bitterly about her stalled career. It had been a series of disappointments, and she was fed up with the same tired response that met her at auditions: ‘‘We have no Ausländer characters; there are no Turks in this play [film, commercial].’’ The only acting parts she found were as foreign cleaning women.≥ I kept up with Ay¸se over a period of nearly two decades, and she saw very little change during this time. Long since a German national (albeit with an illegal Turkish passport), she spoke thoroughly colloquial German; not so her Turkish, which she spoke only haltingly. Her social life, the books she read, and films she saw, all were German. Apart from her family, people and things Turkish played nearly no role in her life. Eventually she retrained as an it specialist—all the while hanging on to her equity card. Sibel Kekilli, the star of Fatih Akın’s award-winning film Head-On, shared Ay¸se’s assessment. A hit at the 2004 Berlin film festival, taking the Golden Bear, Kekilli was named best actress. She told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a prominent German daily, ‘‘In Germany, Turks can only ever play Turks, and then it’s always the same old clichés, the same old subjects.’’ What Ay¸se had related to me in the late 1980s, Sibel reiterated in 2004. Some filmmakers of a younger generation than Sevgi have been able to succeed in Germany—and by and large on their own terms. Though they openly have begun to resist the stereotyping, they still struggle with the same issues of ethnic labels and pigeonholes. Fatih Akın delves into Turkish subjects in his film but has always maintained that he is a German director who makes German films. Likewise for Neco Çelik, described by the New York Times as ‘‘the Spike Lee of Germany’’ for his film Urban Guerillas depicting the Turkish urban underground hip-hop milieu. He told an interviewer, ‘‘I don’t always want to be described as ‘the Turkish film director Neco Celik’ . . . Turkish issues aren’t the main focus of my films’’ (Paulick 2004). Still, while critics in Germany celebrate the new immigrant cultural productions ‘‘shaking up the country’s stagnant cultural life,’’ some of those Turkish Germans being singled out resent such notice (ibid). As l 188

MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

Turkish German community leader Kenan Kolat put it, ‘‘The second generation was born and raised here and they therefore take an active part in Germany’s cultural life. It’s simply a very normal development.’’ In other words, they do not appreciate the perpetuation of markedness. Deniz, a successful Turkish professional woman who had spent most of her life in Germany, described how di≈cult it often was for her to be accepted by German women of equivalent professional status. In the late 1990s, she related an incident that had occurred at a party where she, along with two Turkish female friends (a doctor and a businesswoman), were made to feel so uncomfortable by some German women that they left early. ‘‘These German women have no problem if we are oppressed, beaten by our husbands or fathers, headscarved; then they run to our side to save and emancipate us. But if we are uncovered [unscarved], independent, successful professional women, free, and even single, then they can’t cope with us and they resent us. They don’t accept us as equals, they are threatened by us.’’ Here, by not conforming to stereotypes of oppressed women and transgressing the role assigned them, Deniz and her friends subverted the abjection paradigm. Likewise, Göktürk reminds us that the emancipatory character of Turkish lived experience has not been su≈ciently addressed by media and cinematic representations that instead have opted for the more conventional trope of the victim. Grateful for and dependent on German patronage, the professional ethnics often endure patronizing attitudes. For example, shortly before the Wall came down, at the gala gallery opening of an enormous retrospective exhibition of a successful Turkish German artist, a well-known German Alternative writer gave the opening talk to hundreds of people gathered. As part of her laudatory speech, she asked passionately and rhetorically: ‘‘When I first heard of Güler I wanted very much to meet her . . . I wondered and was curious about this phenomenon of a Turkish artist . . . I wanted an answer to my question ‘How does a Turkish woman become an artist? What kind of a Turkish woman can become an artist? What must she overcome? In a society like Turkey how can this possibly happen?’ ’’ At that, some Turkish German friends of the artist reacted to what they felt was the speaker’s insulting, patronizing tone. A few of them began to mock her, and in audible, sarcastic voices they responded aloud: ‘‘Gosh, how does a Turkish woman become an artist? Could it be similar to how a German woman becomes an artist? How ever could a Turk become a doctor, or a computer programmer!?’’ MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

189 l

This example illustrates the ambivalence experienced by some Turkish elites who are continually forced to look back to their Turkish roots and experiences in order to be granted their special status in this particular conjuncture of identity cultural politics. Pressured to exploit this reified ‘‘ethnic’’ and victim identity, they sometimes uncritically appropriate it into their media as they look to the Germans for notice and legitimacy. Many find it di≈cult to escape the emulation of German aesthetic canons and the desire for German approval and funding, only forthcoming when displayed in Turkish ‘‘ethnic’’ garb. Thus representations of ‘‘Anatolia’’ must be transposed and romanticized for a German public in search of an exotic space where di√erence reigns supreme and unviolated. By contrast, strong linkages, exchanges, and mutual influencing between Europe and Turkey have existed since the mid–Ottoman Empire, rendering the radical alterity presumed by this search for di√erence historically debatable. A stronger recognition of the historical interpenetration might challenge some of the presuppositions of the cultural producers. PROFESSIONALLY ETHNIC

Other professionals adopt similar complicit strategies as they try to win over Germans to their cause. The irony of their predicament, then, is that they feel compelled to play the ‘‘professional ethnic’’ card while they had hoped to transcend ethnic ascription and find acceptance as part of an undi√erentiated cosmopolitanism. Ultimately, despite their best intentions, they become the quintessential ethnics, since the circumstance of their birth overrides the color of their EU passports, class aspirations, achievements, and their relationship to Turkish workers. A further paradox is that while immigrant workers find it demeaning to be labeled and assigned an identity solely on the basis of their labor, such as Gastarbeiter, the elites strive precisely for this, yet are denied it—unless the work is dressed in ethnic garb. Theirs is an anomalous position. Germans whose only contact with Turks is guestworkers sometimes experience cognitive dissonance upon meeting nonworking class, intellectual Turks who defy stereotypes. One friend, Kemal, then a doctoral student, related to me his experience while he was hospitalized for a minor injury. He was reading a book of German philosophy when a nurse saw him and stared in disbelief. He asked if something was wrong. She stammered, ‘‘I never saw a Turk with eyeglasses l 190

MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

before.’’ In impeccable German, he replied, ‘‘You mean you never saw a Turkish intellectual?’’ Throughout the duration of his stay members of the hospital sta√ continually stopped by his room, ‘‘just to get a look.’’ While this occurred in the late 1980s, more recent encounters suggest that though perhaps such attitudes have faded, they are not yet obsolete. The overly curious medical sta√ in the Berlin hospital, unable to contain themselves, peeking through the doorway to view my bespectacled friend reading in German, were in mild shock. This experience can evoke the kind of alienation felt by colonized people in relation to the colonizers. Concerning a very di√erent time and place, but referring to similar social dynamics, Spyer notes, ‘‘At the high point of colonial racism in the Dutch East Indies, the physical fact of being confronted with native bodies in one’s own colonizer clothes and the sheer materiality of this form of ‘‘contact’’ may have had profound, unsettling e√ects’’ (1998: 9). Both instances are, from the points of view of the German nurses and doctors and the Dutch colonizers, examples of troubling, transgressive behavior. It represents a double bind: Turks must adapt to German habits and customs with respect to public behavior in order to fit in; yet when they proceed too far down the German road, they enter forbidden territory, trespassing beyond their assigned place. As Spyer aptly puts it, ‘‘E√orts to stabilize the boundaries between persons and things thus also often entail an assertion of the distinctions between di√erently valued persons’’ (8). MANIPULATING WORK

The inability of some Germans to move away from ethnicizing identifications in the workplace—and elsewhere—was evident in the experience of Riva and Emel. Both of them came from urban, elite backgrounds in Turkey (one the daughter of a Turkish diplomat, the other a member of a non-Muslim minority). They had met studying medicine in Germany, training in pediatrics. Fed up with working in others’ o≈ces, they decided to open a pediatric practice together. After years of searching, they finally found a German sole practioner on the verge of retirement, ready to sell his practice. His patients were Germans and Turks, the latter of whom included both recent migrants as well as Turks who had been working in Germany for many years. The two women saw it as an ideal setup. In one of their final meetings with the retiring physician, he mentioned to them that he had let it be known to his German patients that he had sold the practice MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

191 l

to ‘‘two German doctors who speak Turkish.’’ When Riva and Emel registered surprise, he explained, ‘‘I have been telling them that you are Germans whose fathers were diplomats and posted to Ankara, that you spent time in Turkey while growing up, and therefore you speak Turkish.’’ Both of the women had married Germans and no longer had Turkish surnames—lending potential credence to his tale. While Riva interpreted this dissimulating gesture as well intentioned and fairly unproblematic—even helpful—Emel, on the contrary, felt insulted. She fumed, ‘‘I think he feels embarrassed in front of his German patients for ‘letting the side down’— that they would be angry or disappointed if they knew he was selling his business to two Turks.’’ Emel knew very well that Germans might choose to go to a German doctor, away from them if they were ‘‘outed’’ as Turks. Nevertheless, she insisted that his gesture was demeaning. Likewise, Alex found the fixity of such views disappointing and demeaning as well. Originally from Greece, he had become a naturalized German and had passed the di≈cult qualifying examination to become a Gymnasium teacher, a prestigious post. He told me sorrowfully, after recounting his achievements, ‘‘Though I’m now a German citizen, a German Gymnasium teacher, my students still call me ‘Ausländer.’ Germans will never accept me; I think I would like to go to America—I hear they have no ‘Ausländer’ there.’’ What Alex was bemoaning was the lack of fit between his newly achieved professional position and the cultural capital denied him as a nonnative German. Being perceived by pupils as an Ausländer lowered his social status in relation to them and within German society more broadly. Though arriving there from di√erent perspectives, Emel’s and Alex’s objections converge when confronted with a stigma of markedness, regardless of their own biographies, social achievements, and structural positions within the system. In an interview with Hakkı Keskin in the German magazine Der Spiegel (1993), the high-profile Turkish community activist spoke of his own identity: ‘‘I feel a little German and a little Turkish, like many migrants. We always have two identities . . . we are as Turkish as we are German.’’ He discussed German prejudice against Turks, and implied that there was an idée fixe that all Turks were underclass workers, and therefore, like Kemal’s experience in the hospital, it was inconceivable to imagine Turks as teachers, policemen, or politicians. He mentioned a recently attended conference on ‘‘intercultural dialogue,’’ sponsored by the spd’s Friedrich-Ebert Foundation. There he had met a Turkish German woman who worked at l 192

MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

the foundation; she told him that of four hundred employees, she was the sole Turk. ‘‘Germans,’’ he continued, do not believe that a non-German, even having lived in Germany for years, could ever feel German or represent their interests. Thus there is distrust of minorities. The Turks are kept outside, behind a border; they are even unwelcome in the Mölln voluntary fire brigade. They are second class humans. They live under a Special Law, a Foreigner Law with fewer rights. One third of all 6.5 million foreigners in Germany was either born or grew up here. . . . It is nearly the same as South Africa; Germany is ruled by apartheid.

The reformed citizenship law, discussed in chapter 8, has laid the groundwork for fundamental legal changes identified by Keskin. The accompanying social changes, transforming distrust into acceptance from both sides, will prove still more challenging. AUSLÄNDER-SEVEN AND THE INFIDEL’S TONGUE

One evening I met up with Mustafa, at the time also a graduate student, to attend a screening of a new Turkish film. I asked who would be there: ‘‘Everyone will be there,’’ he asserted confidently, meaning our group of friends. This was the mid-1980s, and ‘‘everyone’’ defined a tight, cohesive group of Turkish intellectuals, professionals, and artists. ‘‘And Germans,’’ I asked? ‘‘Yes, the Ausländer-seven, foreigner-lovers, will be there too.’’ He enjoyed his spontaneous wording and played with the phrase. ‘‘You know, the ‘hayvan seven almanlar,’ the animal-loving Germans. It’s the same thing, Turk-seven, hayvan-seven—the Germans pity them both.’’ Noting how protective Germans are of their dogs, he joked about establishing a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Foreigners. Then his banter turned to Germans doing research about Turks, and Mustafa suggested, playing on the antivivisectionists, that we found a Society for the Prevention of Using Ausländer as Research Subjects. He would bring it up with a mutual friend who shared his sense of humor; in our respective future books, he said, we all should claim that such an organization exists— that would confuse them! Often, the Turks who mocked the Turk-lovers nevertheless were pleased to spend time with them, grateful for their attention; they needed and sought legitimation in the eyes of Germans, professionally and personally. MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

193 l

Their sarcasm expressed the restricting discomfort in the ways in which foreigner-lovers turned them into professional ethnics—they knew they were staging a part for these Germans, playing to projected stereotypes. Ali was part of the group Mustafa had referred to. One night too many of us were crowded into a forgiving old Mercedes, having just bid goodnight to some German friends after a gathering. We were o√ to a favorite Turkish cafe for a late night round of drinks and snacks. Ali, an articulate, well-read man, who was fluent in the most esoteric aspects of German language, history, and philosophy and had received his doctorate at a prestigious German university, had been on ultrapolite behavior all evening; solicitous, generous, charming. Now, despite the obvious physical discomfort of the overcrowded car, he breathed an audible sigh of relief, signifying a di√erent sort of comfort that transcended the awkwardness of a knee in his ribs, and a bulky frame seated on his lap. ‘‘Aman! At last we need not speak gavurca [infidel’s language—‘infidelian’] any more!’’ Though neither he nor anyone else in the car was a practicing or believing Muslim, his lexical choice echoed with redolence of secularized Islamic righteousness, as gavur is a heavily pejorative word for non-Muslim. In the vernacular, ‘‘infidel’’ bore with it a history and an anger that stood out in sharp contrast to Ali’s easy-going behavior with his German friends. Ali’s personality seemed to change, as he proceeded to criticize the German friends with whom we had spent the evening. They were, he claimed, insincere and patronizing. ‘‘For them we are a vehicle to their konsequent [politically correct] politics; they want to feel virtuous; now they can tell their friends that they spent an evening with an Ali, with a Mehmet.’’ The Germans, he said, felt good slumming with the Turks, to earn their politically correct points. In the 1980s many Turks in the academy and the arts either had been professionals first in Turkey or had come to Germany for advanced education and training. A fundamental shift has occurred in the intervening years, as new generations reared and educated entirely in Germany have begun to remap the social and professional landscape of ethnic elites. TURKISH BONUS

As part of a public relations program sponsored by the Commissioner for Foreigner A√airs of the Senate of Berlin, a number of leading Turkish artists were interviewed about their work. One of the interviewees, Zehra Çırak, is known as a ‘‘Turkish second-generation poet.’’ l 194

MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

Çırak: Personally, I find the nationality background of an artist irrelevant. When a painter is good, when he paints well, what does it matter where he comes from? . . . why is it always the same Turkish artists who win the commissions, again and again, who get all the publicity as ‘‘Turkish artists’’; is it their work, or is that they present to the Germans the Germans’ images of what Turks are? Interviewer: Germans often see your poetry and say that yours is not a typically Turkish text; that your poetry is as good as a German’s; but Turks also find your work not Turkish enough. Çırak: Naturally, I would like to be known only as a poet; and not to be asked about my origin or nationality. I believe all artists want this. But surely there are works from which one can immediately understand the nationality behind them, but it becomes annoying, when there is such strong public pressure to be recognized [as an artist] in the same breath as one’s nationality. In my texts the Germans look for things they can point to, and say ‘‘this and that are the Oriental aspects of her poetry . . .’’ but I don’t see it at all. And Turks ask me why I don’t write in Turkish. [Since I write in German], there is a strong urge to force me into a little drawer of ‘‘foreigner artist; or typical Gastarbeiterkind [guestworker child] without much knowledge of Turkish. Interviewer: There is a view that Germans view Turkish works as inferior; as a result, one hears talk of a ‘‘Turkish bonus.’’ Çırak: Yes there is a Turkish bonus, but I don’t wish to believe that all the Turkish art is second-rate . . . the o≈cial German view often put forward is ‘‘Look how much we are doing for our Turks’’ . . . this certainly promotes lower quality . . . I am aware that when I began, I also would swim along with this wave. . . . It simply was, for me, the best way to get my work published. If I had not, perhaps today I’d still be an ‘‘undiscovered talent.’’ . . . But now I am trying to lose the image of ‘‘Zehra Çırak, the Turkish second-generation poet.’’

Çırak’s desire to be known ‘‘only as a poet, irrespective of nationality’’ is understandable in the German context, where attitudes toward Turkish artists tend to be condescending and paternalistic. The composer Tayfun, interviewed in the same publication, accused Germans of setting up the ‘‘Turkish bonus’’—that is, the consistently positive reviews given by German critics. These reviews did not operate by the same criteria for Germans, he claimed, partly due to the German critics’ ignorance of the background contexts and their lack of appropriate comparisons. He also laid some of the blame on Turkish artists: ‘‘For years they have written, painted, and composed the same theme: ‘Mehmet came from Anatolia!’ ’’∂ MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

195 l

Many artists, like Çırak, have taken advantage of the ‘‘bonus’’ as it often provides the only opportunity and means to perform, paint, write, photograph, or sculpt. They often have felt obliged to identify with ‘‘guestworkerart/guestworker-literature,’’ working within the parameters of German aesthetic canons of what constitutes otherness. An alternative German view of aestheticization of otherness and critique of the German obsession with treating local others as rarities can be found in a publication of the House of World Culture. In the catalog of their exhibition Heimat Kunst—Homeland Art (2000), Sabine Vogel’s essay questions, ‘‘How foreign must one be to take part in the Homeland Art Program of the House of World Cultures?’’ She questions whether there is ‘‘eine Ästhetik des Fremdseins’’—a single aesthetic of foreignness (2000: 5). Her irony pinpoints numerous issues, such as the dangers of reifying otherness and the procrustean nature of identity politics, whether in an aestheticizing framework or otherwise. TOWARD A MINOR LITERATURE

Over the last decades a variously labeled literature produced by immigrants and their children—Guestworker-literature, Foreigner-literature, Migrantliterature, Literature-of-foreigners-writing-in-German—has been growing into a significant corpus. Fischer and McGowan have studied the genre and are critical of these labels: ‘‘All are either too narrow, potentially patronizing, or indeed racist (in implying that these texts are inferior appendages to some culturally homogeneous ‘real’ German literature)’’ (1996: 42).∑ Among the most successful writers of the initial wave was Aras Ören, the first recipient of the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, with the publication of his Berlin Trilogy, What’s Niyazi Doing in Naunynstraße? (1973), The Fleeting Dream of Ka˘githane (1974), A Foreign Country is a Home Too (1980). In an analysis of Ören’s work, Chin (2002) juxtaposed his writing with the political manifesto of the German New Left. Thus, while the German avant-garde (Fassbinder, Wallra√, and Böll) ultimately began to include Turkish characters, emplotments, and issues within their own writing, cinema, and other artistic expression, it often did so by caricaturing the Turkish experience through the conventional tropes of abjection. By contrast, Chin argues, ‘‘Ören’s narrative . . . begins from within the multiethnic world of workers—giving them agency, even as he documented their exploitation—and envisions a radical transformation of society emerging

l 196

MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

from below in the form of a united Turkish-German proletariat’’ (27). While sharing with the New Left a belief in the revolutionary power of the proletariat, Ören complicates its models by articulating the experience of the workers from Turkey, questioning the ‘‘ethnic essentialism of exploited workers unable to recognize their common plight’’ (31). Ören gives agency to Turkish subjects without essentializing them as ethnically marked. Other commentators have pointed out the extent to which Ören’s later publications shatter the dream of a multiculturally unified working class in the face of deteriorating economic conditions, rising unemployment, and ubiquitous xenophobia. Consequently, themes expressing melancholia, depression, and loneliness began to inhabit Ören’s literary landscape (Suhr 1989: 87). For Ören, the potential once invested in the bridge metaphor no longer sustained the cultural crossings; instead of linking together, the bridge served to separate. The utopian dream of uniting the two working classes was destined to collapse once the German working class dissociated itself from any identification with Gastarbeiter counterparts as Ören graphically describes. Another theme follows from the shattering of the bridging dream metaphor in the consciousness of Turkish German intellectuals over the last D decade. As Senocak has observed, the sense of loss on the part of the younger generation of Turks must be reckoned with in order to understand the new conflicts and terrains of contestation open to Turkish intellectuals. Thus instead of cultivating new symbolic attachments to Anatolia, Turkish intellectuals and the youth in particular cannot cling ‘‘to the phantasm of D the lost homeland’’ (Senocak and Tulay 2000: 4). Instead they need to create a language in order to communicate their experience of living contemporaneously in a synthetic reality embracing multiple languages, cultural traditions, and landscapes. The contemporary Turkish youth ‘‘are writing an endless book of memories, using the shreds of childhood, in lost or not yet found languages, and the pages remain empty. They have not yet found a language to translate this book in order to communicate it to others. . . . Will they be the speechless half-truths?’’ (3). One writer who does not fit in the conventional critique or a≈rmation of Turkish women’s position within the traditional family model, while experimenting with the thematic of mourning and loss, is Emine Sevgi Özdamar. One of her novels, Mutterzunge, Mother Tongue (1990), is a literary search for the lost alphabet, language, and tradition of the mother.

MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

197 l

Her autobiographical writing interweaves humor and gender politics, literary descriptions and implicit critique of authoritarianism, women’s relationships, and alienation, often seen through the eyes of a child. The experience of loneliness, loss, and anonymity in modern Germany is also the setting for the literary experiment of another writer, Kerim Edinsel. During his time in Germany he primarily was a student but found employment as a youth worker, social worker, political activist, teacher, academic researcher, foreign ‘‘consultant,’’ and also part-time writer. While relatively unknown, his writing in both Turkish and in German is emblematic of a sensibility among diasporic writers who articulate the sense of alienation, loss, and destruction of the individual migrant due to extreme homesickness as well as marginalization in Germany. What follows is one of his short stories in full, translated from the Turkish. Whisky, Ayran, City Buses and a Park by Kerim Edinsel Just as Mehmet Ali came, he left; yes, he just came and went. We can never know what dreams brought him here nor can we know what troubles he took away with him. We did not know his problems. It was our shallowness that did not ask, or look . . . ‘‘I was busy as the devil, and never realized . . .’’ There simply aren’t many people with whom we share our problems . . . and besides, on the surface he looked alright, seemed fine, no visible signs . . . nothing you could put your finger on, really . . . But still, now he’s gone. Didn’t he know one is not allowed to take away what God has given? Was he afraid, did he tremble, as he did away with himself ? Perhaps he muttered to himself ‘‘Scheissegal’’ (‘‘What the hell does it matter, anyway.’’) We will never know. Mehmet Ali had seven children. As his family increased so did its expenses. More and more, thoughts seemed to be turning to arithmetic and calculations. But still, somehow ends would never meet. Figures seemed to reign supreme: additions sitting down, subtractions rising up, multiplications at the dinner table, dividing portions and feelings to the nth degree. And each morning the incessant ringing of the alarm clock disturbing slumber. The same time each morning cutting the same slice of bread, tearing o√ aluminum foil to wrap it, packing it for the same daily noon-time meal. Arriving at work each morning promptly, at the same time, punching in to begin the job, each day at the same time, from the same place, without a moment to

l 198

MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

spare. And each evening obliged to sever conversations at their sweetest moments, lest the morning’s beckoning alarm clock ring unheeded due to excess fatigue; lest he be late to work. Time always had a way of encroaching, in delimiting moments of pleasure, restricting relaxation—never granting the chance to simply sit and gaze into space. ‘‘Time is money—get a move on!!’’ Time is money—he’d heard it far too often, and felt cheated by the phrase. It mocked him in its falseness, for, try as he might, his work time never added up to enough money. In his village Mehmet Ali used to drive a tractor. Here, when he first began driving the city bus he’d felt very proud indeed. True, the tractor in the village was not his own, but as he drove it through the fields he felt nature spread herself out to him, belonging to him, as he o√ered songs to the sun, composing his own rhythms; the timing was his. Soon he found his cramped corner of the bus confining. It crowded him as he drove: the passengers streaming in toward him, at him, past him, su√ocating him in his narrow space. He was no longer driving the bus; it was driving him, overtaking him. If the schedule preceded him, if he reached a bus stop a few minutes late, time waved its finger at him, scolded him, its second hand pointing accusingly. Mehmet Ali bought himself a wristwatch, one with large numerals on its face— but this he began tossing around carelessly, its face glared at him if he pulled into bus stops late and was flooded by waves of scowling soured faces. Maybe he swore at those times; at whom, at what? We don’t know. In his village Mehmet Ali usually drank ayran, occasionally rakı. Last night he drank whisky. He told his wife: ‘‘We can’t make it on the money I earn; I’m sick of this life, I can’t take it anymore!’’ and he grabbed a bottle of tablets, sleeping tablets, and fled from their home. He left on foot, did not take the car. His wife was in no position to telephone, so the neighbor called me. Breathlessly she explained: ‘‘We haven’t heard a thing for twenty-four hours—what should we do?’’ ‘‘We need to inform the police,’’ I said. We did so, they put out a search call but did not find Mehmet Ali. The neighbor suggested we phone the consulate— perhaps they had news of his passport. Nothing there, either. A few days later the police phoned. They had discovered Mehmet Ali’s corpse in a park. Mehmet Ali had chosen the time of night and the space of a park for his death. In the dark green surroundings he had bid his angry farewell to the world of men, to city busses, to tra≈c lights. MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

199 l

There was not enough money to fly the co≈n back to his village, so his body was buried here, by the side of a road where city busses pass.∏

The narrator in the story only has indirect involvement with the suicide victim, and only after the fact. His repetitive reference to the lack of knowledge (‘‘we don’t know’’) places him at a safe although regrettable distance from the protagonist, yet it articulates an extreme experience of negation constitutive of diasporic existence. Other literary signs of distantiation are found in the romanticizing elements of this tragedy about a bus-driving peasant from Anatolia versus a mighty state apparatus. Unconcerned with details (e.g., did he commit suicide so that his family could reap the benefits of his life insurance policy—thinking he would be worth more dead than alive? why did they have a car?), the author evokes the sense of alienation of the immigrant experience by showing the multiple pressures of work, family, and money caricaturizing the life of a migrant, oppressed by life in exile, longing for home. The vocabulary of alienation is substantiated by verbs denoting the overcrowding of existence, a kind of alternative Überfremdung experienced by the migrant. He is being overtaken, surrounded by the German crowd. His space-time contracts under an encompassing Germany. It is taken over by the rhythm of modern factory clocks, punching in and out of work, so that reckoning with the exorbitant deficit in his existence leaves him at a loss with himself. A paranoiac trail unfolds: even the clock accuses him, people around him are soured to such an extent that he needs the anonymity of the time of night, the neutral space of a park in order to bid farewell to the intolerable pain of gurbet life in exile. Reasserting some of the clichés about migrant life in Germany already criticized by the more established writers and critics, Edinsel lapses into the conventional tropes of abjectivity and the Turkish victim who, exploited by the oppressive and demanding rhythms of modernity, finds fleeting moments of relief only in romanticized memories of his village. Edinsel contrasts the romantic trope of an uncorrupted Anatolia with metropolitan life, ultimately deferring the possibility of realized homecoming. Whereas he envisions the melancholic disintegration of the Turkish subject in exile and seems apparently unwillD ing to conceive of deracinated life as authentic, alternatively, to Senocak, Turkish German existence depends on the possibility of softening such symbolic attachments to the homeland, Anatolia, especially by owning up to one’s own diasporic language and its referents. l 200

MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

Given the centrality of themes such as alienation, loneliness, anonymity, and melancholia throughout much minority writing, one might ask if political action can emerge in the ruins of the melancholic subject. On the contrary I would argue that it is precisely a subject that has come to terms with its experience of loss (of language, homeland, children) that can move on to envision a new trajectory with a landscape no longer shadowed by the quest for an originary authenticity. In Edinsel’s story, as in Özdamar’s work, there is nothing essentially ‘‘Turkish’’ or ‘‘ethnic.’’ What emerges is a desire to escape marginality, to discover a more human sense of time, though the protagonists’ lives find di√ering answers to their existential journeys. Where Edinsel’s protagonist is unable to abandon his search for authenticity to the point of being annihilated by it, Özdamar’s continuous search for the lost grandmother tongue leads her protagonist to discover new ways of relating herself to her past by acquiring a new/old language (Arabic) and by speaking with ‘‘the dead.’’ Others share similar conclusions about the political import of minor literatures. As Naficy suggests, ‘‘To ‘become minor’ . . . means to move out of liminality. It does not mean, however, subscribing to ethnic or racial essentialism or to originary nationalism; rather, it implies engagement in strategic essentialism and alliance politics so as to articulate a collective political position vis-à-vis the dominant forces of the host society’’ (1993a: 196–97). One could argue that in the stories discussed above, becoming minor occurs only through an extreme act of negation and self-negation. Suggesting the need for comparisons and collaborations between minority literatures and critical theorists of the political, JanMohamed and Lloyd argue that the power of minority discourses consists in producing an antagonistic literature challenging assumptions of the dominant culture (1990: 1). They identify a need to assemble a minority corpus, namely, a strategy not just reacting to structures of domination but rather articulating the experience of alienation and displacement by searching for different kinds of narrative and historical mediations. However, the problem with a subaltern vision of minorities is that it is overly dependent on a dialectical version of history separating the cultures of the dominant from those of the dominated. Such a vision cannot escape the need for reconciliation and mediation, creating connections between the one and the other. An alternative vision of minor literatures, one that views the interpenetration of dominant and dominated, is o√ered by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

201 l

As the preeminent theorists of minor literature Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out, ‘‘The first characteristic of minor literature . . . is that in it language is a√ected with a high coe≈cient of deterritorialization’’ (1986: 16). They observe that the conflict inherent in Kafka’s experience of deterritorialization within the German language embodies ‘‘a deterritorialized language, appropriate for strange and minor uses’’ (16–17). The peculiarity of minor literature would consist in making a strange use of dominant languages, altering them in order to express an antagonistic, minor consciousness. Perpetuating and articulating minority consciousness—and humor—is precisely what one Turkish German author has chosen to do in his work. Turning the trope of the abject Turk on its head, Feridun Zaimo˘glu burst onto the scene with his 1995 book Kanak Sprak. An in-their-face literary attack, it appropriated the derogatory term for foreigners, Kanak, pairing it with the deliberately misspelled German word for language (or talk, speech, speak). Sprache for Zaimo˘glu became Sprak, a usage that in its transparent assertiveness had the power both to enrage and amuse as it exposed this previously invisible underclass rapping youth. Until he codified this German dialect—or ethnolect, as linguists call it—it had been a spoken vernacular. It now entered an alternative canon; the term captured the imagination of thousands, as spin-o√s proliferated in various media, including rap poetry, tv, blogs, and film. Powerful in myriad ways, Kanak Sprak simultaneously subverted the liberal discourse of ‘‘integration’’ just as it legitimated this speech register for the socially marginalized: a German Ebonics. Spurred by Kanak Sprak and the subsequent anti-racist Kanak Attak movement, a forceful visibility imposed itself in the German public sphere. The political appeal of this literature depends on its capacity to avoid the cultural reproduction of dominant and dominated, as well as the conventional tropes of abjection, speechlessness, and exploitation. Zaimo˘glu’s work performs all these functions. Minor literature ultimately gives agency to minorities, a sense of active participation in their own history. Elizabeth Loentz has produced a fascinating comparison of Kanak Sprak (and the associated hip-hop) and klezmer. Both hip-hop and klezmer (the synthetic musical form of prewar Eastern European Jews) arrived in Germany from the United States in the 1980s; in the years since unification they have ‘‘become the soundtrack of German anti-racism, anti-Nazism, and multiculturalism’’ (2006: 32). Furthermore, she shows the contentious nature l 202

MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

of the appropriation by nonmigrant minority and non-Jewish Germans of these musical and speech forms. Both the klezmer revival and Kanak Sprak/hip-hop are implicated as well in aspects of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the German project of confronting the past. Some authors have recently argued that even minor cinema has been characterized by its subordination to the stereotypical representations of the migrant as a downtrodden and speechless victim within the modern story of the Western world (Göktürk 2001). Instead a ‘‘cinema of delight’’ no longer would underscore the stifling enclosure, claustrophobia, and imprisonment of migrants’ imaginations. Göktürk proposes an experiment with hybridities and cultural mixing, collapsing binary oppositions and boundaries. Calling for a new space where the cinematic might challenge the dominant establishment views of national cinema, she asks, ‘‘How does cinema rework peoples’ fantasies of unsettling infiltrations into an imagined community?’’ Pointing to the Turkish German production of Berlinin-Berlin, she sees this as a positive example of a cinema that playfully challenges the diegetic elements of cinema, by inverting the Western gaze. Whereas the story begins with a young German man who follows a Turkish woman everywhere with his camera, objectifying her through his ubiquitous lens, the film allows the Turkish gaze eventually to entrap him, subverting the apparently fixed position of the viewing subject.π SOUTHWARD GAZE

Is it inevitable that writers and artists will not be accepted outside the diacritical markings of their heritage? Some have become resigned to this and turned southward with their cultural production, seeking connections among colleagues in Turkey. Thus, to a degree, they share with the workers a habit of looking southeast to Turkey in search of a repertoire of authenticity. In the 1980s a shared fantasy about returning could be heard. However, return was feasible only if a new government would take the place of the right-wing regime in power at that time, and if a job could be found commensurate with their skills and whose salary would provide the middleclass lifestyle to which many had become accustomed in Germany. This changed beginning in the 1990s with increased contact and more travel between Turkey and Germany. With the military out of power and considerable social and political liberalization, some of the elites returned, usually with German passports. For example, a Berlin-based Turkish musiMINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

203 l

cian might perform in concerts in Ankara and Istanbul, collaborating there with colleagues for weeks or months at a time, just as an Istanbul painter might have an exhibition in Berlin. A tour operator might spend six months of the year in Bodrum, the rest in Berlin. A new transnational elite has emerged from decades of waiting, in better positions to write their own tickets. Particularly critical has been the easier access to German citizenship many now enjoy. A passport becomes the crucial document— the permanence such a return decision once held is no longer that; German citizenship contains untold possibilities for professional and transnational mobility. A variety of sensibilities toward experiences of accommodation and displacement, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, as well as the intertwining of German institutional politics with the politics of the professional ethnics are revealed in the Turkish German diaspora. Having become the representatives of the working-class immigrants, the cultural and intellectual elites often reproduce German stereotypes about Turkish culture, while at the same time successfully contributing to the formation of an ‘‘ethnic’’ canon. An open question is whether the new transnational subjects will succeed in challenging the hegemonic representations, restyling themselves in their own terms. In cases such as some of the artists discussed here, it appears that from this transnational culture a powerful minor politics is evident already. Kanak Sprak caught hold of the imagination of a group of activists who have indeed begun to politicize their project through the mass media. Kanak tv emerged in Cologne in 1998 in reaction to the popular media images of ‘‘migrants.’’ The group hoped to intervene in larger discussions about migration and multiculturalism. From its website: Kanak Attak clearly dissociates itself from common ideas of ‘‘mültikültüralizm’’ and a ‘‘post-modern concept of Interculturalism.’’ Using the politically incorrect and outdated word ‘‘Kanak’’—sort of an equivalent to the American ‘‘nigger’’—as a name . . . they describe their objectives as follows: ‘‘Kanak Attak’’ is a community of di√erent people from diverse backgrounds who share a commitment to eradicate racism from German society. Kanak Attak is not interested in questions about your passport or heritage, in fact it challenges such questions in the first place. Kanak Attak challenges the conservative and liberal orthodoxy that good ‘‘race relations’’ is simply a matter of tighter immigration control. Our common position consists of an attack against the ‘‘Kanal 204

MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

kisation’’ of specific groups of people through racist ascriptions which deny people their social, legal and political rights.∫

Conjoining humor, irony, and political and cultural critique, Kanak tv has produced a number of short features. ‘‘The Tale of Integration’’ highlights the story of a girl being given o≈cial government tests on her degree of integration. The tasks include holding a conversation with a German person for at least four minutes and eating a typical German dish and finishing it all. Other features turn the tables on issues such as segregation and ghettoization; in ‘‘White Ghetto’’ reporters examine a wealthy all-‘‘white’’ German neighborhood. Again, from the Kanak Attak website: ‘‘When talking about identity and the sense of belonging to a certain group, migrants are often lumped together in ethnic entities and find themselves labelled as ‘others,’ migrant activities and the maintenance of their original culture are euphemistically celebrated in ‘multikulti-festivals.’ As they describe it: ‘we don’t want to be reduced to our ethnicity. . . .’ ’’ Zaimo˘glu’s work, Kanak tv, and other, similar ventures showcase the profound transformation from the early migrant elites, who often conformed to procrustean German expectations, to a new generation of cultural producers, who take for granted the challenging of hegemonic forms and assumptions and who refuse to play the part of professional ethnics in the old sense.

MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS

205 l

8. Practicing German Citizenship ‘‘wir sind kein Einwanderungsland’’ (we are not an immigration country)

jus solis: law of the land: citizenship reckoning according to place of birth jus sanguinis: law of the blood: citizenship reckoning by one’s parentage

l Citizenship is inscribed on the German body politic in complex ways. Contrasting attitudes about citizenship in Germany come to the fore in mechanisms of inclusion or exclusion of outsiders. In light of changing juridical landscapes, ‘‘outsiders’’ range from ‘‘ethnic Germans’’ or Russian Jews from the former Soviet Union to the larger group of ‘‘foreigners’’ often exemplified by Turks. As already discussed, despite the economic participation of Turkish and other minorities in the German market, the cultural representation of them as essentially unintegratable into the German homeland, the Heimat, prevents their full political and social enfranchisement. A major hindrance to the cultural and political enfranchisement of these minority groups lies in a continued attachment to the ideal of an organic community, that is, of belonging to a common people bound by language, history, and tradition. Although the very model of descent either from a common ancestry or a common people has been highly contested in much academic, political, and juridical discourse, the language of descent remains an enduring element in the legal identification of who can make claims to authentic Germanness (Brubaker 1992). This criticism is levied from the perspective of the changes to naturalization law a√ecting Turks and other migrants, juxtaposed with the constitutional guarantees o√ered the Russian German ‘‘settlers.’’ Comparisons between these groups are highlighted by debates over what constitutes a rightful German but also the right to become a German citizen—as opposed to becoming or being a German. It is noteworthy that ‘‘Turks’’ born in Germany have fewer rights in claiming to be accepted as Germans than do the so-called ethnic Germans born abroad. Hence a hindrance to politi-

cal enfranchisement rests in the implicit acceptance of mimetic models of Germanness, that is, to prevailing correspondences with ‘‘images’’ of a common people bound by language, history, and tradition, regardless of geography. This pervasive cultural mimetism available to the ‘‘ethnic Germans’’ banishes the minorities from the center of the political spectrum in the name of the exclusivist laws of the Heimat. THE CITIZENSHIP CONUNDRUM: ROMANTIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL ROOTS AND CONSEQUENCES

Constitutional changes in citizenship and immigration laws have been at the center of political debates for decades. In the 1980s many advocates of minorities began to demand changes to anachronistic laws—some inherited from the Third Reich—governing foreign denizens’ rights to reside, travel, reunite families, and naturalize. Most of these citizenship debates surrounded various interpretations of Article 116a of the Grundgesetz, Germany’s ‘‘Basic Law,’’ containing the classic definition of German citizenship, the crucial paragraph of which is: A German in the sense of this constitution, unless stipulated di√erently by other legal regulations, is a holder of German citizenship [Staatsangehörigkeit ], or a refugee or exiled person of German ethnicity [Volkszugehörigkeit ], or his spouse or descendant, who was admitted to the territory of the German Reich according to its borders of December 31, 1937.

More than defining who is a citizen of the Federal Republic, Article 116 spells out exactly who has the right—and who does not have the right—to be considered a German, expressed in the term Volkszugehörigkeit, literally, folk- or people-belongingness (often inadequately glossed as ‘‘ethnicity’’). The constitutional reference to the fiction of the German Volk constitutes the conundrum of citizenship, providing the criterion for including or excluding the foreign body. The genealogy of Volkszugehörigkeit can shed some light on its meaning for contemporary political discourse. The reference to the Volk is a problematic remnant of the romantic belief that the origin of the Germans is an organic, supra-individual, and sometimes ethnicized concept of political community bound by common language, history, and culture. Carl Schmitt observed that the idea of ascribing special Volksgeist to people was not a specifically German phenomenon in PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

207 l

itself but rather appeared already in French political thought.∞ According to Schmitt, the specificity of German political thought—political romanticism in particular—is the view that the spirit (Geist ) of the people is produced by a unique historical trajectory: ‘‘The new element was this: Now the people becomes the objective reality; historical development, however, which produces the Volksgeist, becomes the superhuman creator’’ (1985: 63).≤ This shift from the origin of community to the dream of producing a politically homogeneous body, a community, is at the heart of German political thought, including National Socialism. This logic was extended beyond the theoretical and philosophical implications of romanticism in the perverse interpretations and appropriations by National Socialists, whose vision of community was achieved by annihilating those who did not share in the Aryan essence. Agamben has observed that though the shift toward the production of the political body has concerned the fate of biopolitical modernity since the seventeenth century, it assumed catastrophic proportions under National Socialism (1999).≥ In other words it characterizes the political project of modern nation-states to subsume the bare life of their citizens under a common recognizable sovereign body. By contrast, Räthzel argues that ‘‘this pre-political German nation, this nation in search of a state, was conceived not as a bearer of universal political values, but as an organic cultural, linguistic, or racial community —as a Volksgemeinschaft ’’ (1991: 8). Whereas German romanticism had merely based the idea of the uniqueness of the German people in a metaphysical theory, the later biological construction of ‘‘race’’ not only maintained the idea of the specialness (or exceptionalism) of the German people (and likewise the specialness of all traditions, nations, communities); it reinforced this uniqueness, grounding it on the biological principle of racial superiority (Hodzic 2002: 32).∂ BLOOD, PROXIMITY, AND RACIALIZATION

The Aryan cult was based on the idea of an authentic, pure German essence reflected in the bloodline. The emphasis on symbolic blood heritage together with popular eugenics theories, consciously promoted ‘‘the fertility of the healthiest bearers of the nation’’ (Burleigh and Wipperman 1991: 40). Representations of blood were associated with the a≈rmation ‘‘of the genealogical ordering of society, in which blood functions as a verbal signifier of l 208

PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

descent and citizenship’’ (Brubaker 1992), and through the violence inflicted upon subaltern bodies thereby a√ecting the transfiguration of the linguistic construct ‘‘race’’ into its physical signs: blood, pain, and contagion (Linke 1999b: 119). Linke has shown that representations of the pure German people in current political discourse in Germany are tied to a metaphorics of blood and discourse of liquidation: the historical thread joining the politics of blood with the discourse of liquidation, equating blood with race, and therefore a concern with racial purity. This problematic legacy, she claims, remains unquestioned in the politics of postwar Germany; in particular it ‘‘has analogues in the postwar German understanding of alterity, an understanding shaped by a deep-seated revulsion to racial di√erence and facilitated by a vocabulary of race that originated during the Nazi period’’ (Linke 1999a: 217). Documenting numerous instances of contemporary usages of these metaphors in the political and social spectrum, Linke cites the example of Bjoern Engholm, prime minister of the state of Schleswig-Holstein. This Social Democrat referred to asylum seekers ‘‘as a threatening ‘counter race’ (Gegenrasse) whose continued existence ‘had become a question of survival for Germany.’’ In 1988 a former Bavarian head of state, Edmund Stoiber, ‘‘claimed that Germans were becoming ‘hybridized and racially infested’ (durchmischt und durchrasst ).’’ A councilman from Dormagen in 1991 remarked, ‘‘Some people talk about integration, others about amalgamation. I speak about the adulteration and filthy mishmashing of blood (Blutverpanschung und–vermanschung)’’ (ibid).∑ Themes of infestation and pollution travel beyond political rhetoric and trickle down to quotidian levels. An example of how a ‘‘foreigner’’ might perceive the reaction of a German to physical proximity was related to me by a Turkish German friend, Meral. A sophisticated professional woman, impeccably groomed and middle-aged, she had immigrated to Germany as a child in the 1960s. Meral saw herself as a quintessential Berliner, with as many if not more German friends and colleagues than Turkish. She long ago had received German citizenship. One day, in the late 1990s, we were meeting in a favorite cafe; she arrived visibly upset, having lost her usual nonchalance. She related what she had just experienced on the U-Bahn, the Berlin underground train. Meral had been flicking her long straight black hair behind her shoulder, pushing it out of her face. Suddenly the German woman seated beside her recoiled in disgust and let out a shriek. A few PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

209 l

strands of Meral’s hair apparently had made contact with the woman’s arm; the woman, unable to contain herself, let out the spontaneous cry. ‘‘She thought I would contaminate her, that she would be infected somehow by me,’’ Meral said, shaken. Meral saw herself as a Berlin insider; this incident struck a powerful blow at her sense of self and belonging. She only half-jokingly remarked that perhaps she would be better o√ in Turkey, a place she had not lived for over thirty years, but perhaps a place where her physical person would not cause o√ense. On one occasion a Turkish German musician friend brought me along to a chamber music event at the spacious, elegant home of one of his German colleagues. With the exception of the two of us, all assembled were Germans, refined, genteel, classical music lovers. An elderly woman eagerly approached the two of us and began a conversation. She put her hand on my arm, explaining, ‘‘I wanted to speak with you, you see, since I’ve never touched a Turk before!’’ These two instances, though contrasting reactions to the proximity, nonetheless converge in the unquestioned assumption of ontological difference. In Meral’s episode, the proximity of perceived racialized di√erence threatened the U-Bahn passenger; by contrast, the frisson experienced by the intrigued and excited German woman was equally animated by the notion of proximity to racialized di√erence, albeit positively inflected. JUS SOLIS, JUS SANGUINIS: AUSSIEDLER, MIMESIS, AND SUFFERING FOR GERMANNESS

The legal tradition of jus sanguinis, inclusion based on ‘‘law of the blood’’ and genealogy, with citizenship justified through ancestry, contrasts with jus solis, inclusion derived from place, with citizenship by virtue of where one is born.∏ The permanence of this model and this legal tradition constitutes a violent act of exclusion of the foreign body from the German body politic. Indeed, it represents a dangerous entanglement of identitary thinking in the national construction of Volkszugehörigkeit. Consider, for instance, that Article 116a of the constitution mentions the possibility of losing the right to German citizenship while making it clear that it is impossible to disown oneself as a German person. It states: Former German citizens whose citizenship was withdrawn [entzogen] on political, racial, or religious grounds between January 30, 1933, and May 8, 1945, and l 210

PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

their descendants, shall be renaturalized [einzubürgen] on application. They shall not be considered as expatriated [ausgebürgert ], if they took up residence in Germany after May 8, 1945, and have not expressed a di√erent will.

The law sets in relief the legal demand that original citizenship status be withdrawn or requested to be withdrawn, as usually occurs in the case of naturalizing foreigners. While paragraph 2 of the constitution was written in order to account for the ‘‘ethnic Germans’’ who had been forced either to migrate away from German territory or from whom the German territory receded (in the radically recast borders before, during, and following World War II), these ‘‘exilic’’ Germans always were acknowledged as belonging to the ideal German community of destiny.π While this is not comparable, from a strictly legal point of view, to the situation of Turkish Germans, it does pose questions concerning the biopolitical division of people and citizens.∫ Some authors, taking a critical view of the ideology of descent, have argued that it is based not on genealogy but ideology. Thus Senders finds the emphasis on the rules of descent secondary to a more complicated notion of representation. He argues that descent is not a biological or genealogical relation, but is an ideology used to legitimate identification. It is a narrative strategy for designating a degree of likeness, of similarity, seen as necessary for full membership in the German nation. Such relationships of similarity and reproduction can be characterized in terms of mimesis or representation. More particularly, in the context of identity law, mimesis can be analyzed in terms of the organization and evaluation of identification and perceived resemblances among people and between people and identity categories. (1999: 178)

His argument derives from the specific case of the ‘‘ethnic Germans’’ living outside the Federal Republic whose claims to German ancestry need to be proven through a complex set of tests. Indeed, the entire discourse of their repatriation is permeated by mimesis, insofar as the repatriates must present themselves ‘‘publicly, freely, and truly as Germans, and . . . when Aussiedler express that which within them is German; they manifest their ‘true’ identities as Germans’’ (92). Since the 1990s it is increasingly the display of German cultural norms, proven in an ‘‘ethnicity’’ test administered by consular o≈cials in the emiPRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

211 l

gration countries, that comes to define who has the right to claim Germanness and hence German citizenship. However, with the awareness that close to two million ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union might claim costly repatriation privileges, German authorities reconsidered the initial indiscriminant policies of acceptance of any and all claiming German descent. It became insu≈cient merely to be German on the basis of one’s Soviet-defined ‘‘ethnicity’’ (natsionalnost ’) stamped in an internal passport, as in the early postunification days, but additionally one had to prove a≈nity with and knowledge of German culture, tradition, and language. Applicants for repatriation were subjected to interviews in which they were quizzed, among other things, about their observance of holidays, such as the dates they celebrated Christmas (Russian Orthodoxy, the dominant religion in the former Soviet Union, follows a di√erent calendar) and their knowledge of Christmas and Easter songs and foods. Furthermore, in accordance with the law on the persecution of exiled Germans, ethnic Germans had to have su√ered as a direct result of their Germanness to qualify for repatriation. In a sense, the experience of su√ering came to define Germanness. Having su√ered for one’s ethnicity, for one’s German identity, became an essential part of the staged performance at the interview but also of one’s identity. It was this experience of having su√ered at the hands of the Soviets, of having proved one’s mettle, having been tested and passed the exam of Germanness, having tenaciously held onto Germanness and not denying or relinquishing it in times of adversity, that enabled one to ‘‘repatriate’’ to Germany. Past su√ering justified the huge state expenditure on their behalf. All new Aussiedler had the right of two years of full state support in this initial adjustment period. Housing, monthly stipends, language classes, free health care, employment assistance, and other social services all represented an enormous commitment on the part of the state and its taxpayers. Indeed, the newly imported Germans who arrived in the 1990s brought narratives of su√ering and victimization. In some senses they were seen as the representation of the nation, having su√ered for its sins. But they also carried the burden of the projected, idealized ur-German ancestor temporarily transposed to modernity. For the nostalgic, they represented authentic Germanness, untainted, uncorrupted, and pure. Animated artifacts, they increasingly were expected to infuse a hybridized Germany with its lost essence. Those who could spoke a quaint ancient vernacular and inil 212

PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

tially were welcomed as distant relatives. Yet this discourse of purity was entangled with the awareness that fraud might occur: as Senders observes, the Aussiedler have to perform their identity ‘‘in an institutional context that is based on the assumption that some applicants will try to act like Germans,’’ that some will try to defraud the German government to acquire full benefits of German society (1999: 92). In addition, a major component of this institutional performance is the shock on the part of the German authorities and the population at large, when those who had romanticized these ‘‘ur-kinspeople’’ discover the ugly truth—the German authenticity the Aussiedler were assumed to have carried with them looked, sounded, and acted like foreign Russians. This shock cannot be accounted for by a simple idea of mimesis that seems to presuppose the notion of a German essence that can be replicated or reproduced. To make sense of the shock experienced by the Aussiedler (as well as by the Ausländer) one needs to move away from the idea of resemblance and similarity to that of radical di√erence.Ω Mimesis does not reflect a stable essence; rather, it is a creative and recreative process of self-making. This general mimesis, while supplementing the ‘‘real’’ instead of reflecting an image, can be understood as a more generative, creative process. Similarly, Senders speaks of mimesis as augmentation of the real: ‘‘mimesis by augmentation in which the real is improved, heightened or corrected in representation. The figure (of Germanness) is o√ered as a prototype, a point from which to take measure, a model after which to pattern’’ (1999: 101). On the one hand Aussiedler are expected to conform to a given and stable prototype and try to pattern their own behavior after this given model. On the other hand, the dismay registered by the German authorities and population at large demonstrates that the prototype is recreated in the context of the mimetic performance itself. Aussiedler, in the very act of conforming to German standards of identity, present themselves with their own acquired characteristics. The German evaluators eventually base the judgment on whether or not such a self-presentation possesses the requisite German identity. What is dangerous in this apparently benign gesture of recognition is that mimetism is always already bound up with a troubling identity, supposed to be stable, essential, and authentic.∞≠ The problem is that identity (whether ‘‘German’’ or other) is never given as such; rather it is performed, hence unstable. In other words, the problem with mimetism is that a stable identity is presupposed which needs only to be reproduced through an act of representation. Any e√ort to demonstrate the mimetic PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

213 l

signifiers of German identity (the sign of one’s membership in the German folk is generally understood in the ability to speak the German language and the awareness of the folk traditions—religion, culture, ethics) comes down to questions of ideology. Political mimetism consists in the forced inscription of ethnos on the natural body of the citizen. Yet the inscription of ethnos is e√ective even when language is lacking. The sign of one’s membership in the German Volk (Volkszugehörigkeit ) generally is constituted by fluency in German. Yet one of the most interesting cases discussed by the German courts concerns the problem of those repatriates who do not speak the language. In the case of the German minority from the USSR, the German court decided that the narrative of loss, dispossession, deportation, death, and repression was ‘‘more important in determining authentic identity claims than language. Identity was seen instead as a matter of ‘consciousness,’ ‘identification,’ and ‘experience.’ One of the primary experiences pointed to by the court as associated with Russian-German identity was the linguistic and cultural repression practiced by the Soviets upon the Germans. That is, a German’s inability to speak German, as a sign of repression, is in itself a sign of ‘German’ identity.’’ Behind the court’s recognition of German identity despite the absence of language facility lies an idea that ‘‘to be German is to su√er for it’’ (Senders 1999: 133, 148). The repatriates’ self-presentation puts on stage the fragmentary remainders of another German body, namely, that of Germans as a victimized oppressed people. This discourse of victimization harkens back to the question of Jews, as the people who have historically undergone ignominious su√ering, precisely at the hands of Germans. The reduction of the Jews to the subhuman, to bare life, was also a legal, constitutional act through which they were stripped of all nationality, and of all the rights of citizenship. If, as Senders seems to argue, the new citizenship law has made progress in expanding its idea of membership in the German Volk, by giving priority to cultural identifications rather than to descent claims, the question remains, to what ‘‘image’’ of Germany are the cultural identifications attached? What is the German essence that has to be ‘‘produced’’ as community? One which a priori excludes its outsiders? Another contradiction in the appeal to common descent has been shown by Wilpert. Pointing out the inherent injustice of the descent principle, she compares the cases of the Aussiedler whose accepted proof of Germanness (for purposes of ‘‘repatriation’’ to Germany from Eastern Europe) is ‘‘meml 214

PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

bership of an ancestor’’ in the Nazi Party. Thus, persons whose fathers or grandfathers were Nazi Party members ‘‘are in a sense more privileged than those whose parents had nothing to do with these organizations. Inadvertently or not, this process could be considered a form of positive compensation for identification with the Nazi movement’’ (Wilpert 1995: 73; see also Wilpert 2003). Comparing such cases to one brought to the Berlin courts in 1991, whereby a Romanian Jew ‘‘claimed German language and culture and wanted to be recognized as a German with rights to German citizenship,’’ he was obliged by the court to prove the cultural Germanness of his ancestors, as well as their having been Bekenntnisdeutsche, or having a sense of consciousness of national belonging. However, when the court learned that the claimant’s father had been condemned to Zwangsarbeit (Nazi forced labor) from 1941 to 1944, he was deemed to be a member of the Jewish ethnic group and therefore could not be considered of German ethnicity (Volkszugehörigkeit ). Thus, ‘‘the claimant could present his ancestors as Germans in practically all aspects, language, culture and education, but a Jew can never prove membership in the ss, the most common proof to be recognized as an Aussiedler’’ (Scheidges 1992: 3; quoted in Wilpert 1995: 74). Jewishness and Germanness in the eyes of the court were mutually exclusive, as, in e√ect, the court implicitly acknowledged the continued legitimacy of the Nazi Nuremberg racial laws. Wilpert concludes, stating that the ‘‘racist rationale, central to the system which Hitler exploited, remains a major principle for determining access to privileged rights within German society.’’ Furthermore, it ‘‘supplies the logic for access to membership and provides legitimacy for racist ideologies and institutional discrimination toward the collective of foreign workers and their descendants, who are not recognized as having accumulated similar rights within German society’’ (ibid.: 74). As this case makes clear, German identity is not assigned on the basis of common language but rather on the problematic idea of descent. The ability to speak German alone is not su≈cient to establish proof of German ancestry. The same criteria that prove e√ective in including Aussiedler ultimately exclude those who are deemed non-ethnic Germans. In other words, one does not become German by speaking the language; rather one is born a German. In determining the rights to Germanness and membership in the German body politic, the German courts explicitly have recognized the primacy of descent over other attributes, such as language; they also have determined that, all else being equal, Jewish heritage can make PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

215 l

the crucial, disqualifying di√erence. Therefore, if descent is the sign of an immediately communal belonging, those people unable to make this claim remain radically excluded. Similarly, where the courts ruled in favor of the Aussiedler woman who spoke no German, she was pronounced to be an ethnic German based on principles of inherited su√ering and victimization —the descent principle at work once again. The implication is that had the Romanian Jew based his claim of rightful inclusion on having suffered, the court would have dismissed it, since he had su√ered as a Jew, not as a German. These court rulings beg uncomfortable and troublesome questions. THE POLITICS OF RACE

The politics of exclusion of foreigners from the nation’s body points to a vision of the non-German as unchangeable in nature. Gilman suggests that the doctrine of the nonconvertibility of the Jews, espoused by Reformation authors, constitutes the basis for discrimination. Behind this doctrine is the idea that there cannot be a true convert to Christianity; by extension there cannot be a true convert to a dominant culture. A story from Reuchlin’s Letters of Obscure Men expresses doubt that the faith of the new convert to Christianity will persevere over time (cited in Gilman 1990: 49). Central to the story is the idea that the Jew cannot change his nature and thus reveals his true nature in moments of crisis. Hence the lesson that one can never trust a Jew—converted or not (50).∞∞ In one of Luther’s harshest statements, from Against the Jews and their Lies, he argues that Jews are liars and therefore dangerous to the social fabric (ibid.: 59). The significance of this is that these views reappear throughout the history of German attitudes toward Jews (57). The aim here is not to argue that Luther was an anti-Semite but rather to show how a theological doctrine could end up in the hands of ideologists and of the political proponents of Hitlerism. In addition to the racialism, the doctrine of the nonconvertibility of the Jews reflects an essentialist vision of the self and the community. Jews could be expelled from Hitler’s German community of belonging because they could not truly be ‘‘changed’’ into ethnically pure German people. Views of the unchangeable nature of foreign groups survive in contemporary Germany, albeit in less virulent forms. This is reflected in the rationale behind the distribution of entitlements to various minorities. While

l 216

PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

the Federal Republic’s stretched budget commited enormous resources (e.g., nearly one-half billion dm per year in the 1990s) to teaching recently arrived Aussiedler to speak German as part of its ‘‘integration’’ policy, it spends virtually nothing assisting Turkish immigrants, for example, who have lived in the Federal Republic for decades, to speak German. Does it mean that the Turks’ essential status as non-German prevents them from mastering the language, and thus from becoming full members of German culture, whereas the Russian-speaking post-Soviet incomers, categorized as German, do possess this capacity? Labeling them ‘‘settlers,’’ not ‘‘foreigners,’’ and treating them as repatriates buttresses this view. Political and cultural classifications play roles in determining and justifying budgetary expenditures. In most if not all of the o≈cial literature published by the interior ministry’s department of overseas migration, the demographically inflected Zuwanderung is the operative term—not the overdetermined Einwanderung, immigration. The prefixitive di√erence insists that the former term, a more neutral rendering of migrant minus the intention to permanently settle, dominates the discourse. Notionally, if Turks are not permitted to be immigrants—and the decades-old slogan ‘‘We are not an immigration country’’ precludes the opening of a social and political space for immigrant status—then presumably they will return to Turkey at some point and are not in need of integration via language. Such beliefs are an indication of the dangers still present in any appeal to common culture and tradition on the basis of genealogy. CITIZENSHIP REVISITED

The debates accompanying the passage of the reformed citizenship law that took e√ect January 1, 2000, center on new definitions of belonging without resorting to the principle of genealogy. Indeed, as the German foreign ministry declared in an o≈cial statement, ‘‘With the reform of the citizenship law Germany recognizes itself by means of a realistic concept of the nation. The idea that it was possible to ground the idea of a nation on ethnic homogeneity was already an illusion. The definition of such a homogeneous society was and is a construct, and a representation of the nation defined by blood ties belongs to the tragic evils of our past’’ (1999).∞≤ The text continues to acknowledge that some progress has been made in the very enlightenment of the German nation.∞≥ This is because

PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

217 l

what binds a society together cannot be reached only by a common language, geographic demarcation of borders or a common religion. A modern enlightened understanding of nation can only be built with a common will for peaceful living together, and a common shaping of the future and an understanding of the basic values of a free society. In this sense the new citizenship law sets the basis for a peaceful and mutually enriching living together of di√erent culture forms.

And, furthermore: With the modernization of the citizenship law Germany finally meets European standards accentuating the vision of a united Europe understood as a place of freedom, rights and security. Thus in the new citizenship law Germany appears as tolerant and open to the world.∞∂

Despite the lofty language, this vision of a tolerant Germany does not answer anxieties about the demands placed upon foreigners to comply with the new citizenship law, as applicants for citizenship are required to renounce their prior nationality. In doing so, they are expected to renounce their language and culture as well. How would this act embrace the tolerance and multiculturalism espoused? The suggestion by the Minister of Education of Baden-Württemberg that imams in mosques throughout Germany preach in German is a further iteration of such an expectation.∞∑ The harshness of such expectations raises questions about the kind of society foreigners are called to embrace. In June 1998 a Berlin Senator of the Interior complained publicly about ‘‘the detrimental influences’’ of the multicultural society he saw around him. Claiming that integration policies had failed, pointing to the excessive unemployment figures among the foreign population, ghettoization in urban areas, their poor mastery of German, and finally to Islam, he contended that this population was ‘‘alien to the majority culture’’ (John 2001: 45). This provoked a public debate first in Berlin and then nationally, calling for the mainstream German culture to be based on traditional and dominant German values. A year later, a debate on culture and tradition entered into the public arena under the banner of Leitkultur, a term referring to a guiding, dominant culture (cf. leitmotif ). Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democrat Union-Christian Social Union parliamentary group, invoked l 218

PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

the term, bemoaning its loss in the context of the immigration debate. Merz’s use touched a national raw nerve as major exponents of German Hochkultur entered the discussion, dominating nightly talk shows and other media debates. Vigorous defenses and attacks of the notion and definition provided an outlet for many to discuss feelings and attitudes about foreigners in Germany and, by extension, menacing visions of Germanness. Some questioned the validity of a single dominant high culture, Hochkultur, in its exclusivity and rejection of other cultural forms. For many, the term was deployed as a convenient euphemism for ‘‘xenophobia,’’ as debate ensued on cultural pluralism versus the hegemonic implications of the term. Some tried to contort the compound word into a charter for an inclusive and plural civil society. Finally a bit of humorous closure was found: a linguistic-political contest declared Leitkultur to be the year’s winning Unwort, the non-word of the year. The closure proved incomplete. Several years later, in late 2004, Leitkultur reemerged. Reacting to the killing of the controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo von Gogh by an irate Muslim, conservative politicians in Germany resorted to Huntington’s ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ model to explain the murder, voicing concern that such violence easily could occur next in Germany. Markus Söder, the leader of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union party, took this event as justification for the urgent need of Leitkultur in Germany. He declared, ‘‘When we look at the recent events in the Netherlands, we see a clash of civilizations in full, and we must prevent anything similar from evolving here. We need a change in our integration policy which ought to be based strictly on the values and notion of a modern Christian society’’ (Deutsche Welle, November 16, 2004). To Soeder and his supporters, expressions of pluralism and cultural relativism have no role to play in Germany. DUAL NATIONALITY = DIVIDED LOYALTY?

The debate about dual nationality evokes strong emotions and political action on both sides of the question. It often has been discussed within the debate on tradition and culture, identity and entitlement. On one side has been the Green Party, the foremost supporter of dual nationality. On the other, Christian Democrats remain vehemently opposed, generally citing their conviction that it inevitably would produce irreconcilable divided loyalties. The Social Democrats, in the middle, have tended to mediate and strike compromise positions. On the Green side, in the 1990s a highly PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

219 l

˙ publicized campaign was spearheaded by Ismail Ko¸san, a naturalized German from Turkey and a Green Party (Bündnis 90) member of the Berlin Parliament. The campaign gathered one million signatures supporting legalization of dual nationality. The statement cited other European and North American examples where dual nationality is legal and called the German law anachronistic, a ‘‘folk relic.’’ It demanded the repeal of Article 116 and of the legality of jus sanguinis. Bauböck interprets such demands for dual citizenship as an indication of ‘‘the emergence of a new model of membership that breaks away with both ethnic and republican traditions of nationalism’’ (1994: ix). Though Bauböck sees Germany as more tolerant about the idea of dual citizenship than previously, he may have been overly optimistic. Though in public policy rhetoric, dual nationality does not exist, in practice, even in legal fact, it does, and in all sorts of unexpected forms. An obscure example was that throughout the forty-five years of the GDR (East Germany: the German Democratic Republic), all its citizens were virtual citizens of the Federal Republic (West Germany). The nature of their citizenship was known as a ‘‘sleeping nationality,’’ ruhende Staatsangehörigkeit. However, though GDR citizens had the right, from the perspective of West Germany, to ‘‘awaken’’ this recumbent nationality at any time, they were restricted by the contingencies of political geographies. If they could manage to get there, they could make their claim in West Germany (Hofmann 1998: 16). These sleeping conationals, unactivated West Germans, were unproblematically dual citizens for the duration of the GDR. They were, after all, not Blutsfremd—foreign-blooded—but ‘‘co-blooded’’ Germans. Of course, once the GDR no longer existed and merged into the FRG, neither did GDR citizenship exist, and the former GDR nationals automatically became FRG mononationals. Furthermore, conceptually and legally the sleeping citizenry was only a half-step removed from the several millionstrong Aussiedler population scattered throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, who also could claim West German and then German citizenship. Despite the paradoxical precedent dual nationality did not become the law of the land. A diluted reform was passed instead. In May 1999, the Bundestag approved an ‘‘option model,’’ fundamentally amending its citizenship law and, by implication, challenging some of the inherited German ideologies of blood and soil.∞∏ To many observers, this legislation has been the most important feat of the Social Democratic– l 220

PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

Green Party coalition government, elected in 1998. The new citizenship legislation went into e√ect January 1, 2000, and provided for a temporary dual nationality to children born of foreign parents. The new law stipulated that these dual-national children, upon reaching their majority, were compelled to choose between nationalities; also, it reduced the minimum waiting time that a foreigner must reside in Germany in order to qualify to apply for naturalization. The law stopped far short of what some would have liked, that is, full rights of dual nationality. However, to others it was a shift of seismic proportions. After the law’s passage the Bavarian Christian Social Union (csu), historically right wing and antiforeigner, announced that it would challenge its constitutionality in Germany’s highest constitutional court. The phrase Null-Tarif became popular among those opposed to any change in the law. Null-Tarif, glossed as ‘‘for free’’ or ‘‘for nothing,’’ assumed the status of a catchword, its immediately pejorative implication obvious in the hearing. ‘‘The acquisition of citizenship ‘for free’ without comprehensive integration attacks the principles of identity of the people of the German state,’’ wrote Wolfgang Zeitlmann in 1999 for the cdu/csu: Inner peace and integration in Germany are seriously at risk if spd and the Greens insist on their ideological plans . . . [t]he meaning of German citizenship will be changed radically and surrendering the principles of the German National State. . . . culture and history are consciously put at stake as the basis for community . . . the inner peace of Germany is threatened by privileges for persons with dual citizenship.∞π

In a similar vein, at an informal gathering in Berlin in November 2000, a distinguished German professor of international and human rights law noted with puzzlement, ‘‘Isn’t it curious how in other countries, they are pleased, even flattered, when foreigners want to take on citizenship? But here we do everything to make it di≈cult if not impossible. We don’t want them to become German.’’ He went on to explain to me how things had changed dramatically since the days of Gastarbeiter migration. ‘‘But there are di√erences between the migrants. Now, Greece, Italy, Spain, are all part of the EU; there are no problems any more with these European migrants— the Yugoslavs, all the others—they get along fine here. It is only the Turks who do not seem to wish to integrate. They are the real problem,’’ insisted the jurist, who considered himself to be an enlightened intellectual and politically progressive. PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

221 l

The issue is highly charged; documents such as Zeitlmann’s encourage anxiety about threats to the ‘‘principles, culture, history and inner peace’’ of Germany. From this perspective the only way to maintain the integrity of German culture is to demand the total renunciation on the part of Ausländer of both their original Staatsangehörigkeit and their Volkszugehörigkeit. Dual nationality would be cognitive dissonance, a violation of an accepted logic. The conventional excuses such as ‘‘Where would one’s loyalty really lie?’’ or ‘‘It would prevent true integration’’ are iterated endlessly. Martin writes, ‘‘The persistence of a symbolic discourse on the perils of non-renunciation in the German public sphere reinforces a culture of exclusion, xenophobia and mistrust’’ (2002: 41). COMMISSIONING GERMANS FROM FOREIGNERS

As dual citizenship has been a nonstarter, some critics have focused on naturalization as a solution to the ‘‘foreigner problem.’’ An example of this e√ort is the modest leaflet produced by Berlin’s foreigner commissioner, entitled Erleichterte Einbürgerung junger Ausländer (Simplified Naturalization for Young Foreigners). On its front is an illustration of a German passport, on which, above the ‘‘Bundesrepublik Deutschland,’’ reads ‘‘Europäische Gemeinschaft,’’ providing a visual reminder that a German passport serves at the same time as a pan–European Union passport. Published under the auspices of ‘‘Miteinander Leben in Berlin’’ (Living with each other in Berlin), the over-arching program of the commissioner’s o≈ce, the leaflet opens up, asks catchy questions cast in advertising-speak. Have you ever thought of becoming a citizen? Why should you do this?! Quite simply: You were brought up in Germany and belong here. Why shouldn’t you be treated like a citizen?

It continues with a long list of the advantages to German citizenship, followed by the legal conditions: —freedom of movement through eu —visa-fee travel in many countries also outside of Europe —free employment choice (e.g., civil service) and right to establish a business, private practice (e.g., doctor or pharmacist) —right of a German to take up independent employment l 222

PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

—protection against deportation —protection against extradition to another country —the right to vote and run for o≈ce —your non-German spouse may join you and immediately receive a work permit when you have fulfilled the following legal conditions . . . —must apply between your 16th and 23rd birthdays —give up or have lost your previous citizenship —must have resided in Germany for eight years with legal residence permission —must have attended school for six years in Germany, of which at least four years at a comprehensive, basic school —must not have committed a criminal o√ence then you have the legal claim to a simplified naturalization.

The brochure’s intention is straightforward: Berlin, Germany, and Europe is foreigners’ rightful place, whether by birth or by adoption, and they should become naturalized stakeholders in it. As commissioner for foreigners, Barbara John set the precedent for using her role as an advocate for increased naturalization. She expressed pride in the fact that ‘‘more foreigners have been naturalized in Berlin than in any other German state.’’∞∫ Until foreigners attain citizenship, they will lack equality under the law; thus, the ultimate aim is as much naturalization as possible. And, following from naturalization presumably comes integration. Still, it may be somewhat disingenuous to promote citizenship as a panacea that will improve lives and solve problems overnight. It is clear that even if the newly German Turks gain su√rage, the color of their new passports is no guarantee of overcoming prejudice, discrimination, and social marginality. PASSPORT STORIES AND PINK CARDS

The remarkable change in citizenship practice has occurred over the past several decades. When I first lived in West Berlin in the 1980s, virtually none of the Turks I knew had German citizenship. By the late 1980s the trend to acquire a German passport had begun, and currently it seems that not to be a naturalized German citizen is the exception. An o≈cial estimate PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

223 l

for 2000 stated that forty thousand Turks had become German citizens.∞Ω Another change is that previously most newly naturalized Germans retained their Turkish citizenship, with the full blessing and assistance of the Turkish government. Now, though many still have both passports, the more recently naturalized citizens have complied with German law, fearful of severe penalties should they be caught with two passports. For example, the consequences for any civil servant—Beamter—would be permanent exclusion from future public-sector employment, and given the ubiquity of the civil service this could be serious indeed. One friend, a Turkish German professional, married to a German man, and the mother of four German and Turkish binational children, learned her lesson the hard way and had her German passport revoked. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, after relinquishing their Turkish passports to the German authorities, the newly minted German citizens simply fetched their Turkish passports from the local Turkish consulate. The German government was helpless in stopping this, though the practice was illegal, and Germany did not recognize Mehrstaatigkeit, multiple citizenship. Turkey, however, was not anxious to lose its citizens—they sent valuable remittances, for one thing, an important part of the Turkish economy. Furthermore, having over two million Turkish nationals in Germany could be used as political leverage in a whole host of arenas, not least in Turkey’s bid for joining the European Union. At the same time the Turkish government, in response to pressure from Germany, arrived at a creative quasi-citizenship for Turks becoming German citizens but not wishing to cut ties with Turkey. Thus was born the Pembe Kart, Pink Card, in 1995, ushering in a status that one keen observer coined ‘‘citizenship light’’ (Ça˘glar 2004). The bearers of the Pembe Kart possess a slightly compromised citizenship status that allows them most rights of citizens of the Turkish Republic with the exception of su√rage, standing for election, or entering the civil service. Owning and inheriting property remain unrestricted. Nevertheless, news of the Pembe Kart has been slow to percolate through the Turkish population in Germany and many with whom I spoke had not heard of it. Deniz, a generally well informed, sophisticated woman was unaware of such a status. In her late forties, she came to Germany as a child in the 1960s, part of the first wave of Gastarbeiter. Deniz has ‘‘made it,’’ holding a lucrative and responsible position in a German multinational firm. She told me her citizenship story:

l 224

PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

I got my passport in 1980; I could have received it a few years earlier, but I was afraid what my parents would say. So finally I applied: I had to write an autobiography—where I’d been to school, when I’d left the country, where I’d worked. Back then you had to have worked about eight years before getting citizenship, and I had done this. I wrote down all my travel, all my qualifications, and my German was impeccable. But I had to renounce my Turkish citizenship. I couldn’t write the letter in Turkish—formal, written Turkish is so di√erent and di≈cult—so I had some friends help me with that letter. I gave it to the Turkish Consulate, and in the letter had to explain why I wanted to give up my Turkish citizenship—I said for economic reasons, for work, considering my job. But I whispered to them that I really did not want to give up my passport, and they with a wink said ‘‘fine, no problem.’’

Deniz had few Turkish friends. She spoke Turkish somewhat haltingly, though she was fluent in German, French, and English; she read primarily English novels, vacationed in Spain, France, and the United States, and had invested in property in Germany. She did not bother to disguise her complete disinterest in people and things Turkish. Yet when asked if she was German, she reacted powerfully, as though the very idea filled her with distaste. Over several decades, German rhetoric about homogeneity and cultural belonging have succeeded in alienating her from being able to call herself German—despite twenty-five years of citizenship. The phrases ‘‘Deutsche mit türkischer Herkunft’’ or ‘‘Türken mit deutschem Pass’’—German with Turkish background, Turks with German passports—echo an essentialist interpretation of German identity, whereby membership in the Volksgemeinschaft—the folk or ‘‘ethnic’’ community— ultimately is ascribed and not achievable. German citizen, yes; German, no. Deniz explained that it was important to keep the Turkish passport.≤≠ Unaware of the terms of the Pink Card, she mentioned that it was necessary to eventually receive her inheritance in order to own property. She could not expect to inherit much—at most a modest apartment in the outskirts of Istanbul, where her retired parents lived. This middle-aged woman, by certain standards as thoroughly ‘‘integrated’’ as one could be, having lived the bulk of her life in German and in Germany, still felt unequivocal about the desire not to become deracinated from a place she barely knew.

PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

225 l

CONTESTED MEANINGS OF CITIZENSHIP

The citizenship conundrum has led many critics of German politics to revisit citizenship theories from antiquity to the present (e.g., Pocock 1998). Whereas some authors have returned to a Weberian understanding of the changing historical relationship between economic, political, and cultural citizenship (Shafir 1998: 5; Weber 1958: 43); others question the very idea of citizenship or call for a conception acknowledging the collapse of the European nation-states as we know them. Several of these positions try to make sense of the citizenship conundrum in German politics and elsewhere, developing a new vocabulary for what many consider our postnational or cosmopolitan epoch. Recent critics of citizenship theory have observed the obsolescence of classical notions insofar as they recognize a radical shift in the modern invention of citizenship (Agamben 1998; Foucault 1994; Brubaker 1994). As historians of modernity commonly agree, a modern definition and conception of citizenship was the invention of the French Revolution (Brubaker 1994: 35), whereby the individual for the first time was seen as being born into the nation-state, inheriting the attendant rights and obligations. Commenting on Hannah Arendt’s book on imperialism—the chapter on the decline of the nation-state and the end of the rights of men—Agamben observes that ‘‘a simple examination of the text of the declaration of 1789 shows that it is precisely bare natural life—which is to say the pure fact of birth—that appears here as the source and bearer of rights. ‘Men,’ the first article declares, ‘are born and remain free and equal in rights’ ’’ (1998: 127). Agamben argues that ‘‘the very natural life that, inaugurating the biopolitics of modernity, is placed at the foundation of the order, vanishes into the figure of the citizen, in whom rights are preserved’’ (ibid.). Previously, there had been no conflation of individual and state sovereignty; since the individual was not considered the repository of sovereignty, there was no connection between nativity and nationality. It was perfectly possible, in the classic context, to be a nonpolitical being, unconnected to the confines and sovereignty of the polis or state. Modernity’s vision changed this, where the sovereignty into which the individual is born becomes one and the same and appropriated by the state. However, the link between citizenship and nationality was shown to be inadequate after World War II, when millions of stateless people no longer could benefit from the protection of a nation-state and were discriminated l 226

PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

against by the European nations. Arendt’s radical critique of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the human rights tradition in general clearly shows to what lengths nation-states go to expel from their borders people whom they deem as dangerous and threatening to the social fabric (1951). Arendt makes clear that the exclusion of stateless persons, or aliens, from membership in nation-states reduced those persons to the nakedness of being just human beings and nothing else. Without the qualification of national belonging, aliens had no quality whatsoever that could be preserved, protected, and maintained. What then is the status of citizenship today after the experience of statelessness? To what extent should one hold on to the fiction of citizenship, loaded as it is with the ideal of an organic community, bound by common language, history, and tradition? To what political status could one appeal, lacking adequate, heterogeneous citizenship laws? While harking back to the classics of citizenship theory, some have identified the perils of exclusively focusing on civil or political citizenship to the detriment of social citizenship. Thus Young proposed a liberal model of di√erentiated citizenship placing more emphasis on the social (1998: 264). Drawing from Rawls, she recognizes that certain practices of equality can suppress and even create inequalities, arguing that a genuinely heterogeneous concept of culture and citizenship is necessary to meet diverse needs without stigmatizing or marginalizing them. We might think of a≈rmative action or bilingual education as examples, whereby unequal distribution of resources serves the common good in its redressing asymmetrical social balances. Identifying a ‘‘dilemma of di√erence’’ (Shafir 1998: 24), Young shows how groups not yet having achieved the necessary level of universality are pressured into a denial of their di√erence in order to achieve ‘‘equal moral worth of citizens’’ yet find themselves disadvantaged. Thus, ‘‘formal equality, ironically, creates substantive inequality’’ (ibid.: 25). Her call for a reversal of perceptions of mainstream-to-marginal, whereby di√erence becomes embedded within normativity, is suggestive indeed and relevant to Germany. In a similar liberal vein, Kymlicka also theorizes the need for an ethnically di√erentiated citizenship, particularly in the context of a state where ‘‘polyethnic rights and representation rights are primarily demands for inclusion, for full membership in the larger society’’ (1995: 85). He takes the primacy of states as we know them as a given, challenging them to strike a balance whereby they are not threatened by minority demands or rights PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

227 l

but at the same time where the latter do not destabilize the former.≤∞ Here the demand for minority rights must be reconciled with liberal definitions of justice and fairness. However, we might wish to question the assumption on which this is based, namely, the idea that stable ethnic groups can be identified through time and space. There is an inherent danger, both political and theoretical, when what is ultimately changing and unstable is delimited as a bounded, controllable entity. What is seen as a problematic and definable ‘‘ethnic minority’’ in Germany is in fact an unstable category, assuming di√erent guises at di√erent times and in di√erent places. The same Ausländer in Berlin, are almancı, an emergent social group, in Anatolia; in addition, they may be part of other global networks such as an Islamic Sufi organization; or part of transnational casual labor migration based on extended kin from the same village. Furthermore, those who have become naturalized German citizens can lay claim to a vastly di√erent set of rights from those with only Turkish nationality and temporary German visas. In the German case it is not a matter of recognizing the specifically ethnic rights of Turkish actors; rather, what is needed is a more realistic— not dependent on the tropes of ethnicity—and tolerant vision of their place in a society that is also subject to historical changes. Soysal approaches the question of citizenship from the perspective of the supranational configuration of a universalist discourse on human rights. Like Agamben, she suggests that the value of the modern idea of citizenship can be diminished in our postnational epoch due to the growing legitimacy of ‘‘discourses of universalistic personhood, the limits of nationness, or of national citizenship . . . [which have] become inventively irrelevant’’ (1994: 162). Echoing the classic work of Marshall (with his tripartite description of civil, political, and social rights of citizenship), she privileges the social and civic achievements (enshrined by supranational bodies) over legal/ political demands for protection; in other words, disenfranchisement, or non-enfranchisement, takes a back seat to other sorts of identities, a≈liations, and rights. Positing that a contemporary repertoire of extensive memberships within Europe and the United Nations suggests that it is possible to hold on to the same package of universally valued rights without adopting an obsolete nationalistic model, Soysal’s intention ‘‘is to highlight the emergence of membership that is multiple in the sense of spanning local, regional, and global identities, and which accommodates intersecting complexes of rights, duties, and loyalties’’ (166). Recourse to human rights and membership in the European Union she sees as exemplary of postl 228

PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

national citizenship.≤≤ Yet even for those not indoctrinated in a ‘‘no taxation without representation’’ ideology (she cites examples of tax-paying non-citizens), the idealism of postnational citizenship might appear somewhat illusory at present. In a world that continues to resort to often humiliating visa requirements or stigmatizing resident restrictions, citizenship is still inextricably tied to national and state identities, borders, and powers. Though a suggestive notion, a postnational imaginary may not su≈ce for many Turkish German actors who have not yet found a credible hearing in the halls of Brussels. Perhaps the future will open paths for local civil rights disputes to be resolved within the bureaucracies of the EU or un in the name of abstract universal rights. Similarly, Dahrendorf imagines a supranational society based on a fundamental inclusivity, very much like Kant’s world civil society. Adding to the universalistic model, he observes that ‘‘the true test of the strength of citizenship rights is heterogeneity’’ (1994: 17). The same litmus test of heterogeneity should apply as well to any postnational model of citizenship. Julia Kristeva notes that essential to the contemporary discussion of postnational citizenship is the possibility of ‘‘choosing’’ one’s own membership and freedom of action, emphasizing the active voice of transnational migrant experience. This voice is born out of a critique of ethnicity-asascription: ‘‘When I say that I have chosen cosmopolitanism, this means that I have, against origins and starting from them, chosen a transnational or international position situated at the crossing of boundaries’’ (Kristeva 1993: 16). Kristeva invokes the freedom of modern cosmopolitan travelers to redefine the terms of their membership with new national configurations as well as the duty of states to enable that very freedom. ‘‘Beyond the origins that have assigned to us biological identity papers and a linguistic, religious, social, political, historical place, the freedom of contemporary individuals may be gauged according to their ability to choose their membership, while the democratic capability of a nation and social group is revealed by the right it a√ords individuals to exercise that choice’’ (ibid). Alas, many nations and groups deny that democratic choice to large sectors of their denizens. In the European context the Schengen and Maastricht agreements signed by many EU member states need to be considered in terms of their potential for overcoming citizenship constraints for non-nationals living in Germany as well as for enabling the freedom of movement Kristeva aspires to achieve. Some observers have seen EU changes as important steps toward a PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

229 l

postnational, cosmopolitan citizenship that extends state sovereignty beyond state borders, whereby all Schengen passport holders become subject to a new, transnational set of rights and responsibilities (Soysal 1994; Held 1995; and Faulks 2000). However, others pose critical questions about a new sort of exclusivity of a fortress Europe, particularly a√ecting refugees and asylum seekers. O’Leary’s argument disputes EU citizenship as a progressive postnational form; rather, she argues that the recent legal strictures and structures of EU have made it more exclusive. She asks why, since ‘‘European is being defined not as a geographical but as an ideological concept with reference to a shared culture, heritage and history,’’ has there been little regard paid to the ‘‘potentially negative impact which this citizenship might have on the non-Community nationals resident in the Union?’’ (1998: 100). By increasing rights and privileges of the European Union citizens, the noncitizen residents are, at the same time, increasingly restricted and forced into legally second-class status. Recognition of these fundamental contradictions has been one of the motivating factors of Berlin’s Commissioner for Foreigners, in the campaign to convince all who qualify to apply for German citizenship. HUMANS, CITIZENS, EXCEPTIONALISM

The paradoxical link between the human being and citizen inscribed in German legal and political culture reflects changes from its formulation of 1913 up to the amendments of the naturalization law of 1999. The common denominator throughout the modern debates is the unquestioned reference to the model of national belonging, based on the trope of the common people, common culture, and tradition. Sometimes this has linked the tradition of the common culture with the belief in a common ancestry, as under National Socialism; in other periods the two have been disaggregated, such as during the statist Bismarckian regime.≤≥ Thus it should be recognized that not all arguments about common culture are reiterations of arguments about a mythical German ancestry. Despite several attempts to change the constitution in the direction of the inclusion of the ‘‘aliens’’ in German territory, models of organic community have yet to be fully challenged. Though the 1999 citizenship law enables increased numbers of Turks and others to become citizens, it does not bestow on them the full visibility of social and cultural membership in the German nation. This incomplete status of Turkish German citizenship l 230

PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

has been well documented through analysis of the forms of stigmatization and mystification that naturalized Turks have undergone over the past decades (e.g., Wilpert 1995, 2003). While it is now possible for a Turkish German to become a member of the German Parliament, certainly a major victory for the foreigners in Germany, it remains an exceptional case. The law of exception characterizes the German relation to the ‘‘alien’’ (the Turk, the foreigner on its soil), insofar as the process of naturalization and integration of the alien is itself seen as an exceptional event, a process that needs to be examined at the singular level again and again. It seems inevitable to question the status of the aliens in Germany today when they are not fully accepted into German society. What is the space they occupy between the loss of originary national identity (and nostalgia for their country of origin) and the demand for a new political ‘‘home’’? German political rhetoric (especially on the right) at times reduces aliens, Turks in particular, to figures of social misfits, of the threatening enemy from the Orient, despite their participation in German society for close to half a century. Is it possible to destroy the representation of the Turk as an enemy of German culture, history, and tradition? This Orientalist representation proves powerful in a certain part of the German political imaginary, perhaps linked to the persistent fear of a heterogeneous society. So much so that in 2005 a politician from the Free Democrat Party, Daniel Behr, called for more Germans from the educated classes to reproduce. ‘‘The wrong people in Germany are having children,’’ Behr declared, betraying a eugenically informed bias (Deutsche Welle, January 24, 2005). Thus, if German representations of Turks remain bound up with the oppositions of friend and enemy, unproductive vs. overly fecund, what sort of experiences might Turkish Germans expect in their relationships with German politicians, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and people more generally? What sort of rapprochement can emerge from a situation where one is perceived only as ‘‘ethnically’’ Turkish, as if one’s essence were essential and unchangeable? In the words of Kristeva, they need to be allowed to ‘‘choose’’ between alternative forms of cosmopolitan expression, forms that would reflect their capacities as transnational actors in transferring their skills, and even allegiances, across unstable boundaries.

PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP

231 l

9. Deracination to Diaspora Leave and Leaving You’re always nostalgic for the land of your youth . . . and when you go back, it’s all changed. Finally you belong in your own skin.1

l The transnational existence of Turkish German actors exposes paradoxes stretching between life in diaspora and the desire for a better future in the homeland. This is not a matter of tracing migratory movements back and forth between Germany and Turkey but rather of tracking the multiple, transnational imaginaries and localities inhabited by those in the diaspora. But migratory phenomena cannot be reduced to an original, essential identity alienated in the wake of displacement from the homeland. The focus here is on the ways in which social actors mimetically recreate themselves and their social landscapes in relation to their imagined homeland and to diaspora. This is in part also a challenge to the literature that overemphasizes stable configurations of ‘‘centers and peripheries’’ in the migration cycle. The ‘‘center’’ dealt with here in some ways follows the notion of a deterritorialized center. For example, Shils conceives of a center as an ideological construct that can be understood as representing the institutions of a dominant order (1975). Wallerstein’s world systems theory o√ers an additional model for analyzing relations between a ‘‘peripheral’’ Turkish economy and a German ‘‘core,’’ where core and periphery are relational concepts reflecting di√erential cost structures of production manifested by a spatial division of labor (1991). Turkey’s economic peripheralization is further compounded on an ideological level by the increasing centrality of Germany in the worldview of Turks. This process marks the gradual reinterpretation and reversal of the central role Turkey has played in the lives of workers abroad in the past. The center with which I am concerned is at once geographically located but also finds salience in the realm of subjective perception. This centeredness is articulated in terms of a geographic core that becomes, in e√ect, a

metaphor for an ideological core around which migrants identify and revolve. Ultimately, because of the contradictions and feelings of twofold deracination experienced by migrants, the dualism of the center-periphery dichotomy is subverted in their imaginaries. This is due to the impossibility of stable boundaries delimiting one from the other; instead, centers and peripheries assume the role of dueling landscapes assimilated into the psychological experience of the self. Gupta and Ferguson have written about the ‘‘bifocality,’’ describing the sorts of lives lived in a ‘‘globally interconnected world, and the powerful role of place in the ‘near view’ of lived experience’’ (1992: 11). They identify the tensions that come to the fore ‘‘when places that have been imagined at a distance must become lived spaces. For places are always imagined in the context of political-economic determinations that have a logic of their own. Territoriality is thus reinscribed at just the point it threatens to be erased’’ (ibid). As much as anywhere this characterizes the predicament of the social actors from Turkey and their relations to the homeland and the new land. Germany has entered into the consciousness of even nonmigrant Turks in Turkey. It has penetrated the modern-day folklore, popular songs, literature, television and film industries, sensationalizing media, and the daily and annual life cycles of many Turks. In some senses the diaspora gradually has assumed the authority of a legitimate and even desirable ‘‘center’’ visà-vis an increasingly ‘‘peripheral’’ Turkey. The primary point of reference for the transnational self is evident in the encounters between those who left and those who stayed behind. This in turn influences the historical consciousness the transnational actors have of themselves, as they become aware of their emergent diasporic subjectivities. This is not nostalgically attached to a stable referent (as if the only thing the migrant wanted to do was to return to Turkey); rather it increasingly shifts toward the crystallization of a necessarily elusive space. The anxiety arising from living across national boundaries generates fantastic projections in which desires, dreams, and obsessions find an outlet into new narratives of the self. For example, for some Kurds or Alevis living in the German diaspora, the idea of joining the imagined though unrealizable project of a Kurdistan or an Alevistan provides a potent reason for struggling in an antagonistic social space. It also provides a rationale for increased transnational links throughout the European Kurdish and Alevi diaspora. The phenomenological resonance is grounded in the condition of gurbet DERACINATION TO DIASPORA

233 l

and gurbetçi. Gurbet refers to a necessarily sad, melancholic state of living away from home, implying an exilic existence. A trope for displacement, for deracination, a life away from home—be it village, region, nation—it implies that one is away from the place where one truly belongs.≤ The gurbetçi—in exile, diaspora, or away from home or homeland—lives in a state of gurbet. It is a relative term, one that might describe the state of those living in Frankfurt, as well as Turks living in Istanbul who feel their primary identification is with their natal village, as opposed to the city.≥ The emergent literature and musical genres produced by diasporic artists in Western Europe, though addressing this relatively recent phenomenon, actually draw from a long tradition of exile and gurbet experiences.∂ Throughout their history, Turks have known many types of exile and migration. In addition to their nomadic past in Central Asia, they have experienced a series of political sürgüns (deportation) throughout the Ottoman centuries. A variant of political deportation and exile continues today, albeit with di√erent conditions and rationalizations, with expanded concentric circles encompassing Almanya, Germany. This most distant location—Germany—is threatening to break o√, to establish itself as a rival, alternative imaginary center, a viable diaspora. While on the one hand a diaspora can be understood as the axis governing the relations between centers and peripheries, equally, diasporic dynamics can upend hierarchical relations implied by centers and peripheries. In other words diasporas serve as sites for reimagining relations between self and others but also contest formerly taken-for-granted boundaries and relations to them. While for some, diaspora is nearly synonymous with migrant, others restrict the usage to deterritorialized expatriates—either forced or voluntary —who maintain specific types of relations and a√ections with regard to a homeland. Some diaspora theorists insist on an enduring relationship to a homeland, whether or not return is desired, probable, or even possible. Yet such definitions exclude groups such as Roma, for whom homeland is an altogether di√erent concept.∑ Cli√ord has questioned the ‘‘diasporization’’ of minorities, suggesting that it can deflect ‘‘attention from long-standing, structured inequalities of class and race’’ (1994: 313). Bearing this in mind, here I use it in a restricted and processual sense, as a way, first, to depathologize the stereotypical perceptions of this population as a disempowered minority alienated from its place of origin, vacillating between two cultures yet simultaneously part of each and neither; and next, as a

l 234

DERACINATION TO DIASPORA

FIGURE 19. Summer visit home with Mercedes

means to understand the encompassing implications of the process of this very transnational annual ‘‘vacillation’’—the summer ‘‘leave’’ or holiday. An equivocal concept, diaspora refers to a whole host of processes and histories. Plenty of scope remains for it to be further problematized, theorized, and critiqued. Still, a view through the analytic lens of diaspora may facilitate our understanding of the changing relations between core and periphery. The instantiation of diasporic existence highlighting the shifting relations between centers and peripheries is the annual summer izin, the holiday in Turkey undertaken by the gurbetçi. ‘‘Undertake,’’ not the usual verb governing the ‘‘taking’’ of a holiday, describes what for many temporary returnees proves to be quite an ordeal. ˙IZ˙INL˙I AND ˙IZ˙INL˙I: TAKING LEAVE

Turkey looms large in the social life of Turks who work in Germany. Turkish politics not only are discussed but, in the 1980s during the military government, open political engagement was only possible abroad. Then,

DERACINATION TO DIASPORA

235 l

FIGURE 20. Soul voyages, nonstop bus to Turkey

Turks preferred to watch Turkish videos on their vcrs rather than the German television programs, which were a struggle to understand because of language barriers.∏ Most socializing, carried out with other Turks, took place either in private homes, mosques, public restaurants or co√eehouses (the exclusive domain of men), or rented halls celebrating engagements, weddings, and circumcisions. At many of these gatherings the theme of travel to Turkey dominated the conversation. Both the kesin dönü¸s (permanent return, repatriation) and the izin return, the summer vacation, provided grist for endless discussion.π Past trips were compared and future trips subject to speculation. The discussions focused both on the actual trip itself and on the state of things in Turkey. The topics discussed might be: whose car did not make the trip, who was turned back at the Turkish border for what infraction, which side roads were best for avoiding the worst tra≈c, which alternate frontier crossings had the shortest lines or the most easily bribed customs agents, what sorts of material items from Europe the relatives back in Turkey desired (and how unschooled they were in the real costs of such items), or which travel agents could be trusted to arrange legitimate charter flights. Information exchanged included horror l 236

DERACINATION TO DIASPORA

stories from obscure airports, train stations, and bus depots; experiences of those who had recently returned; as well as discussions on topics such as whose investment went bankrupt, who took his German wife back to the village, what sort of real estate to invest in, how Turkish compatriots back home tried to cheat vacationing migrants, how much things cost, how to smuggle valuable contraband, or the devaluation of the Turkish lira. There were also comparative stories about the relative strengths of di√erent sorts of patronage invoked to weed through the endless and exasperating bureaucracy in Turkey. A great deal of planning and shopping went into the extensive preparations for these trips. Much of the preparation was grounded in past experience—what was and was not e≈cacious previously—or recommendations from others. The impending journey was also idealized: fantasies were spun, elaborately weaving the imagined texture of the summer to come. They discussed what they would do, eat, see and with whom; to whom they would give which gifts; which seaside resort they would visit; at what local shrine they would sacrifice a lamb; parties where they would sing, dance, and drink; how much more they would build onto their new house; and so on. The idealized view of returning to Turkey infused the preparations for the annual holiday return trip with mystique. Preparing for the return, the travelers complained about the huge expenditures they felt obliged to make. In the 1980s, a financially secure worker’s family, only moderately in debt, might have spent up to dm 5,000 (equivalent to $3,000 in 1987) for summer preparations, including replenishing the family’s wardrobe, filling requests of all sorts, from Adidas shoes to electronic appliances to silk headscarves. In fact, it became so costly to return for a summer vacation that some families I met claimed that they could not a√ord it more frequently than once every several years. Instead, they chose to vacation in Spain or elsewhere in Europe where they could ultimately spend far less than they would by returning to their own houses and families in Turkey. The idea of trips to Turkey, past and future, to a large extent orients the lives of migrants while they are gurbetçi in Germany, and this is not surprising, since the sorrow, isolation, and di≈culties associated with the state of gurbet cry out to be assuaged. For some, the eleven months of the year working in Europe are endured only to ‘‘really live’’ during the twelfth month. This attitude is a critical facet of the sense of being migrants rather than immigrants, temporary and not permanent, even when appearances DERACINATION TO DIASPORA

237 l

point to the contrary. For decades the vernacular, pejorative term ‘‘guestworker’’ was echoed in the o≈cial term, ‘‘foreign employees’’; there seemed to be no way around permanent temporariness. However, with the reformed citizenship law, the government has begun to reconcile de facto with de jure. Moreover, with the passing decades and the realization that permanent return is, for most, illusory, we can expect that the material and social relations with neighbors and relatives in Anatolia will undergo further transformation. E-5, THE BALKANS, AND BRIBES

In the 1980s, the hundreds of thousands of migrants returning to Turkey each summer faced long, hot, and uncomfortable automobile trips, fraught with di≈culties, hassles, and often day-long delays at international frontiers.∫ It was an aggressive, competitive race among the thousands of drivers; some boasted of the excessive numbers of hours they drove nonstop. Drivers of older vehicles told me of their auto-pilot technique; a brick tied to the accelerator. As Western Europe receded and the Balkans approached—signaling proximity to Turkey—the travelers’ spirits lifted alongside mounting anxieties and expectations. ‘‘e-5’’ is the name of the notorious, accident-ridden road that winds through the Balkans connecting Europe and Turkey. Its notoriety has been such that a Turkish writer, Güney Dal, used it as the title of a book (1979). When I made this journey, the stresses associated with driving worsened along with the roads through the Balkans—particularly the ‘‘e-5’’—but despite this, moods lightened in direct proportion to the distance from Western Europe. Yugoslavia and Bulgaria felt familiar to Turks, aware of the close historical connections between these countries and their own.Ω My companions noted Balkan similarities—peoples, food, architecture, ambience, and landscape—to Turkey; they enjoyed speaking a bit of Turkish with Serbs, Albanians, or Bulgarians along the way, amused by the accents.∞≠ The marked di√erence that could be discerned once the Turks left German-speaking lands behind them was felt and expressed in terms of a burden having been lifted—in their words, ‘‘nihayet, Almanya’dan kurtulduk!’’ (at last, we’re rid of, freed from, liberated from Germany!). Sometimes Gavuristan would be substituted for Almanya, Germany becoming the ‘‘land of the infidels.’’ In addition, in the Balkans, Turks felt a comfortl 238

DERACINATION TO DIASPORA

able ease and relaxation with the local people, something that rarely occurs in Germany. In the Balkans, they are foreigners, but not as foreign as they are in Germany; they still are ‘‘other’’ vis-à-vis the Balkan populations, but, to apply Appadurai’s phrase slightly out of context, ‘‘it has always been true that some others are more other than others’’ (1986: 358).∞∞ The emotional pitch heightened as we finally approached Kapıkule, Europe’s largest international frontier station at the Bulgarian Turkish border. We joined a long line of weary, anxious returnees. It was the first shock of many to come. The next obstacle course, manned by a series of surly civil servants, was a baΔing set of hurdles, designed to impede a smooth homecoming. Often the only way through the obstacles was with the age-old practice of rü¸svet, bribes. Some found themselves caught in a bureaucratic nightmare, informed that the car’s papers were out of order, perhaps found with contraband, or with a visa or passport not updated. Finally, assuming a relatively unhindered passage through the checkpoints, some still faced another twenty-four hours of driving across Anatolia before setting sight on the natal village. TERRA INFIRMA

In many such journeys it was the Turkish border that proved the most perilous. This certainly was the case when I made this trip with Turkish friends. Whereas five deutschmark or a jar of Nescafé was a su≈cient bribe to pass through the borders of the then-socialist Balkan states, in Turkey negotiating the border was no simple matter. Due to a missing portion of our vehicle’s insurance certificate, on our return trip from Turkey to Berlin my friends and I were obliged to spend an extra two days in and around the border area pleading with o≈cials, o√ering alternative documents, feeling overwhelmingly powerless and vulnerable. Our nervous anxiety put us all on edge; as a foreigner, I was both a liability and an asset, though amid the tension and confusion it was di≈cult to gauge which and when. We briefly considered rerouting ourselves and trying to cross over at the nearby Greek border—maybe the guards would not be so strict there, and perhaps my fluency in Greek would ease the way. However, one of our party thought that even if we could get in, we certainly would experience similar problems exiting—passing from Greece to Yugoslavia might not be possible without the requisite certificate. The border area resembled a parking lot the size of a football field, and we waited for six to eight hours at DERACINATION TO DIASPORA

239 l

FIGURE 21. Waiting for customs clearance, Kapıkule

a time in the interminable queues, in unrelenting 100-degree heat, only to be rejected. As we waited, breathing in the exhaust fumes of hundreds of other cars, each time our car neared the control booth we hoped vigorously that this new border guard would take no notice of our deficient paperwork. The pressures mounted with each car-length closer we inched to the decisive moment. Impatient and testy, we would try to assess how long each car took to pass ‘‘go’’; perhaps this time we had finally landed in the line of a more accommodating border guard who, with a benevolent wave of his hand, would release us into Bulgaria. We tried to observe whether money or goods traded hands at the critical moment—would this one be, as the Greeks put it, ladhonete—bribable (literally, greased)? Then we were crushed as border guard after border guard displayed his intractable honesty. In this hub of bribes of enormous dimensions, the stakes were far higher than a jar of instant co√ee. This was, after all, one of the all-time plum jobs for a memur, a civil servant. Here, at Kapıkule, border guards on lowly civil servant wages drove automobiles only the wealthiest in Istanbul could a√ord. Recognizing our predicament, we pooled our remaining funds, leaving aside what we would need for petrol and minimal provisions for l 240

DERACINATION TO DIASPORA

the rest of the trip. Then, after two fruitless and anguished days, Ali, the most self-assured and savvy among us, renewed with the vigor of desperation and carried along with the confidence of cash, disappeared with our deutschmarks. A while later he returned. ‘‘Quick, drive to that last lane, over there,’’ he commanded me. ‘‘That guard is di√erent; I’m sure that he’ll let us through. I’ve worked it out with him. He’ll take care of us.’’ Waiting in that final line, together pushing the car incrementally forward—the ignition was switched o√, car in neutral, to save on petrol money—we didn’t dare to believe that this time we’d make it out of this concrete no-man’sland, this terra infirma. Sure enough, he waved us through. After this ordeal the rest of the borders presented no great problem. Jars of instant co√ee, small German bills, and in one case a flashlight were our tickets across the remaining borders of southeastern Europe. In the coming cold German winter, we would have our own story to tell. HOMECOMINGS AND GOINGS

Once the initial excitement of homecoming begins to wane, the izinli returnees find that the privileged treatment they have received as esteemed, long-lost relatives evolves into something quite di√erent: they have become, willy-nilly, Almancılar, or Alamanyalılar, German-ish, or German[y]-like. Implicitly derogatory, the label bears witness to a combination of marked di√erence, social uncertainty, defensiveness, and rejection. A distancing mechanism, it expresses the ambivalence of those whose outstretched arms greet the returning kin, accepting the prestigious gifts but also keeping the returnees at a socially safe distance. Germany is thought to have fundamentally changed the returnees. Exposure to luxuries is believed to have spoiled them; they might now have become accustomed to plumbing, automobiles, punctuality, businesslike relations with people, e≈ciency, or cleanliness of a Western sort. These attributes are expected of the returnees, and the relatives and neighbors back in the village often respond with defensively apologetic tones. Eventually the novelty of home wears thin. As frequent comparisons are made with Germany (e.g., ‘‘in Germany it’s cleaner; more e≈cient; more modern; the civil servants actually work and are honest’’), annoyance and tensions rise in the daily interactions with friends and relatives. By virtue of their extended residence in Europe, returnees are expected to take on the role of providers, patrons, philanthropists, as well as being financially sucDERACINATION TO DIASPORA

241 l

cessful exhibitionists. As such, they are e√ectively barred from returning to what they remember as their former identities embedded in now altered relationships. The symbolic e≈cacy of commodities in mediating intersubjective relations is of paramount importance during the izin vacation return.∞≤ The awareness of the expectations of their compatriots back in Turkey exerts a strong pressure on the migrants and accordingly there are many ways in which they attempt to fulfill these expectations. For example, in order not to be thought of as ‘‘failures,’’ as ‘‘not having made it in Germany,’’ they might drive to Turkey in a di√erent car each summer (preferably a Mercedes), thus reinforcing the image of the rich foreign uncle. The poor relations back in the Anatolian village, or in the gecekondu shanty town,∞≥ su≈ciently impressed with the great wealth, only see the conspicuously consumable—they have no idea about the debts, the bank loans, the hours worked overtime, the unhealthy, sometimes wretched living conditions, or the cloud of social stigma shading the lives of the ‘‘wealthy’’ relatives abroad. Demands placed upon the returnees undergo rapid inflation. An instance of this was played out in the village house of an izinli returnee family in southwest Turkey with whom I stayed one summer. A steady stream of neighbors trickled in, ostensibly to pay their respects and welcome them back to the village. Elderly widows seemed especially eager to stop by for tea; a few came to read the Qur’an to the family. The reading of the Qur’an was a symbolic countergift, for in each case the visitors left with a gift of some sort, either a trinket, a scarf, or some cash deutschmarks. On the day of the emotionally charged festival of Kurban Bayramı (Feast of the Sacrifice), this returnee family sacrificed three lambs: one for the elderly, sickly grandmother; one for her returned daughter, guiltridden for ‘‘abandoning’’ an invalid parent; and one for the car and the journey. Blood from this latter sacrifice was smeared on the front of the car, to assure a safe trip back to Berlin. After partaking in choice pieces of grilled meat, the family carefully divided and distributed the large portions of meat for the ‘‘poor neighbors.’’ The meat not distributed or eaten that day was cooked slowly all day in kavurma fashion, braised in its own fat. This was packed carefully, cleverly disguised by placing layer upon layer of dried figs and peppers on and around it, to be smuggled past the watchful German border guards and dogs on the lookout for illegal meat. If the camouflauge was successful, in Berlin the family would share this sacred meat with friends and neighl 242

DERACINATION TO DIASPORA

bors unable to make the journey and the sacrifice. Just as the Adidas or Nike shoes and silk scarves are valued by compatriots in Anatolian villages, Turks in Germany prize the foodstu√s and other goods brought back from Turkey. Though increasing amounts and varieties of Turkish goods can be found and purchased in Germany, the local and homemade are especially cherished. Melons and lemon cologne, peppers and figs, and holy water from saints’ shrines travel back to Germany with the families—all highly valued, all to be rationed throughout the year. For an izinli family, typically each trip to Turkey is believed to mark a step closer to eventual repatriation, which is continually reimagined and displaced in the future. Often in the course of a summer the family will add an additional story to their slowly growing apartment building in the provincial town nearest their village. They most likely have taken advantage of their rights as foreign workers to bring appliances and furniture into the country duty-free. Sometimes the houses and apartments they build are themselves marked as Almancı, as they consciously imitate architectural or other features from German constructions; I heard about the installation of indoor toilets in villages lacking any plumbing. As Almancılar, German-like, izinli returnees experience disorientation. Some are convinced that the physical ailments aΔicting them in Northern Europe can be cured with a trip to Turkey.∞∂ They return home to drink the water, feel the sun, and breathe the air. There they rea≈rm their Turkishness, through a dose of collective solidarity, yet they find themselves unaccepted as ‘‘generic Turks,’’ irrevocably marked by virtue of their extended absence from Turkey. Feeling misunderstood and less than appreciated by their compatriots in Turkey, they seek others like themselves. On many occasions in Turkey I saw individuals and families travel considerable distances to visit friends they had made in Germany. With each other they could relax, tell jokes in German, compare experiences. They related to one another without the constraints of material and social expectations and obligations demanded by an uncomfortable social hierarchy. The social asymmetry to which the Alamanyalılar return is a newly forged structure. In order to maintain the prestige they feel is rightfully theirs by virtue of arduous years in gurbet, toiling to improve the family’s lot, they must live up to the role of spendthrifts and benefactors. This has serious consequences, essentially reproducing the necessary conditions for extended residence in gurbet. While, in Germany, the e√ects of ethnicization of a spurious ‘‘Turkishness’’ marginalize them, in Turkey, their stigmaDERACINATION TO DIASPORA

243 l

tization as Almancılar and the inability to merge back into the Turkish mainstream entrap them in a doomed, self-referential quest for an increasingly elusive sense of belonging. Increasingly, returnees look northward, turning to the symbols, persons, and mimetic identifications associated with their transnational lives in Germany to find meaning.∞∑ As well as discussing their lives in Germany, they relate stories about Germans they have known. One family of repatriates I met in Turkey told me ‘‘Biz onları insan yaptık’’ (We humanized them). They had returned to Germany to visit some former neighbors in Hamburg and felt they had been poorly treated. The following year these Germans came to see them in Turkey and were welcomed with extravagant hospitality; in Turkey this was normal, they emphasized. A year later, when the Turkish family again returned on a visit to Hamburg, ‘‘it was like night and day; they treated us royally; we’d shown them what hospitality was, we’d shown them how to be human,’’ they insisted. A sense of agency and transformative power is implicit in the act of welcoming Germans to Turkey; from a Turkish perspective, the host can be hierarchically superior to the guest, demonstrating that Turks are deserving of respect. By the late 1980s some izinli returnees had altered the itineraries of their summer visits, including holiday villages and resorts on Turkey’s Aegean and Mediterranean coasts. Some of the financially more secure, having built retirement homes for themselves in villages, towns, or cities, have invested in resort holiday homes. Along with their children, they have come to see an added dimension of Turkey—as a spot for holiday. Many rarely traveled within Turkey before, for the concept of izin—‘‘permission,’’ ‘‘leave of absence,’’ or ‘‘vacation’’—translated into seeing and spending time with relatives. A vacation in the European sense was until recently an alien concept for many. With the advent of their new European- or Germanstyle vacations, they are in e√ect beginning to appropriate the European concepts of time, work, place, and leisure. Gül’s summer plans describe such changes. A self-reliant unmarried woman of thirty-two, born in eastern Turkey, she has lived most of her life in Germany. As Gül was packing her suitcase for a month’s holiday in Turkey, complaining about the airline’s luggage allowance, she explained that she needed to take two separate wardrobes: one for the eastern Anatolian Kurdish city where she would stay with relatives for a fortnight, and a second set for the Mediterranean resort where she’d booked a beach holi-

l 244

DERACINATION TO DIASPORA

day with her sister. Holding a miniscule bikini in one hand and a long flowing skirt in the other, she joked, ‘‘I need two di√erent things—namuslu for the relatives, and namussuz for the beach!’’ Depending on its context, namus glosses as ‘‘honor,’’ ‘‘shame,’’ or ‘‘modesty.’’ It can also mean ‘‘honest,’’ ‘‘integrity,’’ or ‘‘self-regard.’’ Lu-, the postpositional su≈x for ‘‘with’’ or ‘‘of ’’ something, denotes for Gül modest clothing that will not cause dishonor. Suz-, the grammatical opposite, denotes ‘‘without,’’ implying that her immodest bikini—displaying a fashionably tattooed hip—makes her shameless. Though the extra clothing proved cumbersome to pack, Gül easily accommodated the contrasting clothing, expectations, and mores, looking forward equally to the two parts of her holiday. DISPLACED CENTERS, EMERGENT SUBJECTIVITIES

Immigrant parents soften the daily blows of gurbet by telling stories to their children, painting for them the contours and shades of a land that they will never see since it does not exist outside their tales. They sweeten the bitter present with the elusive saccharin future, which is, to be sure, a revisionist, romanticized projection of a past. A vicious circle of sorts reflects the migratory cycle itself and eventually results in a situation where the imagined center is located wherever one is not, be it Turkey or Germany. No given locus can be the stable, reassuring center for long. Perhaps ambivalent relations to both Turkey and Germany precludes full identification with either place, for wherever one is located, values and symbols of the other locale remain ubiquitous even in their absence. The izin vacation trip to Turkey is the event that crystallizes this conundrum. In the idealization of Turkey and the journey, the crescendo of a southward identification builds, only to be foiled by the anticlimactic reception in the homeland. Then, from the vantage point of Turkey, Germany becomes the salient place of reference—that is, until the trip back. Thus, an undercurrent of melancholic disa√ection and displacement informs the experience. Ultimately, the izin trip ‘‘home’’ does not fully satisfy the desire for feeling at one with compatriots. Rather, it provokes a process of mimetic self-creation resulting from the absence of an attainable center. In a twist to Anderson’s call for a rethinking of our tendency to reify nations (and nationalisms) in our act of imagining them (1983), here the

DERACINATION TO DIASPORA

245 l

FIGURE 22. ‘‘Killed Passport’’: Back to the Homeland / Zurück zur Heimat. Hanefi Yeter, 1976, mixed technique on canvas.

Almancı have been imagined by their compatriots back home, objectified and distanced by expectations and projections; in response, the returnees enter into a mimetic process, performing the role of ‘‘successful migrant.’’∞∏ The significance of place, of a place, and of places has undergone dramatic transformations. After what for many has been the better part of a lifetime spent in Germany, idealized dreams of Turkey distort and blur, giving way to altered realities. Just as they find themselves defined by their absence from one place and their presence in another, they come to feel the same sensibility. How do the doubly estranged shed their disa√ection? Perhaps by their own actions and decisions setting new precedents, projecting an agency of their own design, and reshaping the Kreuzbergs of Europe into novel and heterogeneous communities—increasingly as enfranchised citizens. The longer they remain in the ‘‘peripheral center’’ the greater its prominence and the more of a competing threat it poses to the formerly dominant role played by Turkey. Swapping a Turkish passport for the Pink Card’s diluted version is symbolic of this changing trajectory. Breckenridge and Appadurai have written of the ‘‘new maps of desire and attachment’’ created by diasporas and their ‘‘trail of collective memory about another place and time’’ (Breckenridge and Appadurai 1989: i). l 246

DERACINATION TO DIASPORA

These migrants are devising a new diasporic landscape that includes not only Berlin and Turkey but the connecting roads through which such collective memories of multiple places and times, attachments and desires are forged. Additionally, return migration raises questions about ethnicity. Shortand long-term return discloses the impossibility of describing stable and unchangeable places and relations across time and space. The pejorative epithet almanyalı indicates that the experience of migration cannot be temporally suspended in the fullness of return back to the country of origin. In Germany they fantasized about a remembered homeland, a place from which they drew spiritual and physical sustenance. In Turkey they are forced to rethink their experiences in the diaspora since they cannot cast o√ acquired foreignness: hence the idealization of life in Germany and enactment of a more complex, bifocal existence, even in the country of origin. Another facet of this complexity is explored in the next chapter, where the focus is on the vicissitudes of Islam in the diaspora. The integral mediating relationship between Turkey and Germany emerges in sharp relief as changing expressions and meanings of Islam are negotiated in and between these spaces.

DERACINATION TO DIASPORA

247 l

10. Reimagining Islams in Berlin l The specter of Islam looms large in Germany. Particularly in the wake of 9/11, a new urgency about Muslims in the midst is palpable, leading to increased concern about fundamentalist threats to German democratic values and civic peace. The killing in 2004 of the controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose film Submission dealt with female violence in a Muslim family, received widespread news coverage. This violent act has been used by some as ‘‘proof ’’ of the intractable nature of Europe’s Muslims who will never fit in.∞ However, a nuanced consideration of the multiple expressions of Islam among Turkish Germans belies any such fantasy of unity. Indeed, the manifold experiences of Turks outside the homeland have produced new, transnational iterations of Islam—and secularism—in the diasporic context. After several generations of Atatürk’s wide-ranging secularist reforms, a large share of the Turkish population in Turkey and in the European diaspora, whether Sunni or Alevi, maintains only attenuated, if any, a≈liations with Islamic beliefs and practices. Yet a wide array of modes of a≈liation and di√erentiation within the Turkish German population exemplifies diverse beliefs and practices expressed specifically in terms of Islam. Often related to morality, self, other, and ritual purity, these beliefs and practices also point to an increased scope for politicization. Hence, the historically contingent character of the rituals discussed below both challenges and reinforces some of the common images prevalent within German and Turkish popular discourse. In particular, this poses challenges to the representation of the Turkish other as a figure of abjection informed by an overly simplistic idea of Islam. Such a projection distorts the explicit doctrinal divergences within the diasporic population, as well as the multiple meanings assigned to given practices. For example, the same ritual might be seen as a sacred rite for some but a radical political statement for others. This representation precludes the understanding of the creative trans-

formations of practice and associated meanings. It especially obscures the mimetic self-creation and self-di√erentiation of Turkish social actors, as they re-create themselves through multiple performances in the diaspora. Much of the focus here is on specifically Alevi belief, ritual, and practice, attempting to make visible parts of a population that had until recently been relatively unknown to the outside world. In part this is due to a distinctive aspect of Alevilik—Alevi-ness—in part shaped by practices of dissimulation, which historically have facilitated the invisibility of this group. ISLAMIC IN-VISIBILITIES

In a mosque in Berlin, located in a former textile factory, shared by a dozen migrant families, a Turkish Sunni hoca (religious leader, pron. ‘‘hoja’’) told me that he intended to remain in Europe until the last European Christian converted to Islam. However, this vision of the transformation of Europe from a land of infidels to a new Dar al Islam, world of Islam, is not the only one, and it contrasts vividly with the outlook of the minority Alevis, who extol the virtues and tolerance of their newfound European homes. These two radically divergent visions of diasporic space have created in Kreuzberg a highly variegated topography of Muslim experience. Hence the need to dismantle a set of generalizations about the ostensibly monolithic life-worlds of immigrants from Turkey living in Berlin, since for some, their presence in Christian Europe is most certainly a religious hardship, whereas for others it is not a land of infidels but rather a land of acceptance and opportunity and an end to discrimination. Attention to Islam has been accompanied by a widespread interest in the so-called Islamic Revival in Europe. Public and private moneys are allocated to identify the extent, types, degree, and nature of what is commonly misperceived as a monolithic nascent European Islam. France’s focus is aimed at its postcolonial North African Muslim minorities, whose controversial presence in a self-consciously laicist state has been divisive and explosive in public policy discourse (e.g., Kastoryano 1986, 2002; Kepel 1997; Fetzer and Soper 2004; Ossman and Terrio, 2006). The government of the Netherlands committed approximately ten million Euros (over five years) to establish the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, in Leiden. The Economic and Social Research Council in

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

249 l

Britain has funded numerous research projects focused on Islamic minorities in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.≤ In Britain, especially since the attacks of July 7, 2005, the large number of British Muslims has constantly made the headlines, as government commissions, studies, and talking heads debate publicly their levels of integration and loyalty.≥ In Berlin, the Museum of European Migration staged an exhibit in the mid-1990s entitled Islam in Europa: Birmingham, Marseille, Berlin. The first page of the catalog opens to two maps in black, white, and tones of gray. Above them in large bold lettering reads ‘‘The Spread of Islam.’’ The first map—of Europe, Africa, and Asia—shows two types of countries, di√erentiated by shades of gray, delineating those countries that are predominantly Muslim and those with Muslim minorities. Most astonishing, considering the thrust of the exhibit, is that Britain, France, and Germany are white; the Muslim minorities there presumably are too new, transient, or problematic to merit their particular pale shade of gray. Beneath the first map is a second, outlining the three countries in question, with three large arrows intersecting the black borders, pointing to the countries’ hinterlands. Under each arrow is written the areas of origin sending Muslims to the three countries: Bangladesh and Pakistan for the UK, Turkey for Germany, and the Maghreb for France. Though surely meant as informative and comparative, this initial image of an invasive Islam cannot help but startle. The remainder of the exhibit includes dozens of black-andwhite photographs of scarved women, praying men, and a wide variety of mosques. Though many of the faces looking out of the photographs are friendly and smiling, they nevertheless project a confidence, even tenacity. The group of laughing girls, all wearing tightly wrapped headscarves, standing with their Qur’an school teacher look perfectly at ease. In the same tenor as the alarmist maps, one possible reading of these images might be ‘‘Look at us; this is who we are, and we are here to stay.’’ Only one page suggests that Islam might not be monolithic. ‘‘One Islam—many faces’’ contains nine small photographs and pictures representing ‘‘sects and brotherhoods’’ depicting Ali, Hacı Betka¸s, and whirling dervishes. Alevis are given no mention. Nor are nominal, even secular ‘‘Muslims’’; the assumption that all migrants from Muslim-marked countries by definition are religiously observant is misleading at best. Many hundreds of thousands of migrants only on the most cursory of levels identify with Islam, not unlike many if not most European ‘‘Christians’ ’’ connections with ‘‘Christianity.’’ l 250

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

ISLAMIC STRATIFICATIONS

Alevi and Sunni describe the two dominant modes of Islam practiced among Turks within and outside of Turkey. The majority of practicing Turkish Sunni Muslims adhere to the Hanefi legal code, one of the four branches of Sunni Islam; small pockets of followers of Shafi Islam— another branch of Sunnism—are found in Turkey as well. Estimates of the Alevi population in Turkey range widely, anywhere from five to fifteen million—at most, between 15 and 20 percent of the total population. However, informed observers in Germany believe they are disproportionately overrepresented in the diaspora. One reason might be that Alevis have su√ered systematic discrimination, even persecution, in Turkey; Germany o√ers relief. Some Kurdish-speaking Alevis hail from the most underdeveloped regions of Anatolia, plagued by years of political unrest—further motivation for emigration. Alevis follow a mystical ‘‘Sufi’’ belief system, loosely sharing many tenets with Shi’ism.∂ Scholars speculate about their origins and influences: they are believed by some to have descended from Zoroastrians; others have proposed they originate from Gnostic, Manichaeanist, neo-Platonist, pantheist, or even early Anatolian Christian cults. Some theories link them closely to Kurdish and Iranian influences. Others (propounded by some nationalist Turkish politicians, as well as Alevi leaders) would connect Alevilik with pre-Islamic Turkic shamanic belief systems. Van Bruinnessen convincingly argues that the so-called Kurdish Alevis most likely descend from Kurdish- and Zaza-speaking followers of a variety of ‘‘syncretist, ghulat-influenced sects’’ (1997). The Kurdish-Alevi relationship is far from straightforward. Some scholars claim that the Kurmanji and Sorani Kurdish languages are so close as to be considered dialects, while the Gurani (primarily spoken in Iran) and Zaza/Kurmanc/Dimile (various names for one language) are distant enough from the former to be considered di√erent languages. All stem from the Iranian language family, though origins and historical relations of their speakers remain subject to competing theories.∑ ALEVIS: MORALITY AND MARTYRDOM

One characteristic of the Alevis, but certainly not unique to them, is takiye, usually glossed as ‘‘dissimulation,’’ a permitted practice for Shi’ite Muslims. REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

251 l

In addition to concealing their beliefs, Alevis point to their hearts when discussing their faith, privileging the esoteric, inner purity of spirit over more tangible and stereotypic Sunni demonstrations of faith—attendance at the mosque, five-times-daily prayer, observance of Ramadan. Alevis understand and justify this practice as a direct and defensive response, first to the centuries of persecution su√ered at the hands of the Ottoman Sunni hegemony and later to exclusion during the Republican period. It is consonant with their essentially dualist cosmology and theological belief system privileging the hidden dimension—the inwardness, the personal inner spirit and purity—over external superficialities. Such a theology has been conducive to more general antinomianism, and at certain points in history—distant and recent—Alevis have taken strongly counterhegemonic positions. Alevis are painfully aware of their critical role within the cartography of power, of the negative image of them conjured among the Sunnis. The most common term used by Sunnis for Alevis is kızıl ba¸s (also kızılba¸s; lit. ‘‘red head’’). This unambiguously pejorative epithet derives from Alevis’ identification with the followers of the founder of the Shi’ite Safavid Dynasty, Shah Isma’il, ruling from 1501 to 1524, whose empire, in present-day Iran and Azerbaijan, posed a threat to the Ottoman Sultanate. Continual invasions and skirmishes took place in contested terrain occupied by Alevi and Kurdish tribes (sometimes the two dovetailed). The Safavids, marked by their red turbans (the Ottoman army wore white), competed for the loyalty of the Alevi tribal confederations. Indeed, Alevi tribes often threw their allegiance on the side of their coreligionists, against the Ottomans.∏ Thus, kızılba¸s came to have connotations of disloyalty, treason, and immorality. At the same time, Alevis take pride in their di√erence, displaying strong convictions and commitment to values and practices they perceive as antithetical to Sunnis. By the same token, Sunnis point to these practices when making their damning accusations of immorality. Yet Alevis sco√ at the accusations, upholding their separate (and occasionally separatist) orientation. Most points of contention revolve around women and religious observance. Beliefs about Alevi women converge to an extent in Sunni and Alevi descriptions of practices, yet are assigned opposing values. Sunnis speak of women’s promiscuity, citing specific traits and practices. ‘‘Proof ’’ is the fact that Alevis include women in rituals. Alevis proudly boast of how ‘‘democratic, progressive, and tolerant’’ they are, equally highlighting women’s participation in the cem (pron. ‘‘gem’’), their central ritual: l 252

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

‘‘kadınsız cem olmaz’’ (without women there can be no cem). They go on to say ‘‘Kadın toplumun annesidir’’ (woman is the mother of society), sharply criticizing Sunni purdah-like practices, calling them yobaz or tutucu (degenerate, conservative). Furthermore, Alevis answer Sunni charges claiming they are bad Muslims with countercharges, accusing the ostensibly pious Sunnis of hypocrisy: The Sunnis think that hitting their heads against the ground five times a day [in prayer] is enough to make them good Muslims, but they are hypocrites, because then they turn around and lie and cheat. We believe that it is the quality inside, of the heart and soul, that counts—the inside must be clean and pure, that’s what’s important, not the externals, such as praying in the mosque for all to see.

Alevis often quote a maxim, their charter for proper social behavior: ‘‘eline, diline, beline sahip ol ’’ (one should be the master of one’s hands, tongue, and loins); enjoining them not to steal, slander, lie, or commit adultery. This alternative value and worship system is seen as dangerously threatening to many Sunnis, to whom the Alevis represent a menacing, secret cabal, replete with mysterious beliefs and immoral rites.π In addition to believing that Alevis practice orgiastic sexual rituals, Sunnis often assert that ‘‘tav¸san yemiyorlar’’—they don’t eat rabbits. When I put the question to Alevis, they a≈rmed this taboo. Several explanations were o√ered: rabbits are holy (kutsal ) animals and must be respected; Muhammed did not eat rabbits; Ali in an incarnation became a rabbit; rabbits are unique mixtures, having a man’s face, a cat’s ears, the body and feet of yet other animals. However, the consistent exegetic common denominator is that ‘‘rabbits are like us, similar to humans, since rabbits, like women, have monthly menstrual cycles.’’ Thus the Alevis’ association of rabbits with the sedimentation of these historical and biological beliefs for them renders the rabbits liminal, both sacred and taboo, echoing their own liminality, residing in social and moral margins of society. (The bloodiness of rabbits is acknowledged more generally by the expression ‘‘rabbit blood tea,’’ describing a very dark, strong brew.) Sunnis are doctrinally opposed to what they consider the heterodox, renegade version of Islam represented by Alevis. This opposition is reflected in processes of a≈liation and dissociation; conversely, these mutually constitutive processes are embedded within a continual revalorization REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

253 l

and reinterpretation of Islam. Often these processes of moral in- and exclusivity are articulated in manifestly dogmatic terms. To Sunnis, a good Muslim follows the five pillars of Islam and should be judged according to these tenets. Alevis, who consciously, even conscientiously avoid most of these prescribed Sunni practices, become unquestionably the salient ‘‘other.’’ Their very existence challenges the moral integrity of their orthodox Sunni neighbors—even more so than non-Muslims—due to the heretical threat Alevis are seen to pose to Sunni beliefs. This is based on a moral di√erentiation posed by Sunnis, many of whom deny Alevis any Islamic credentials. The accusations of immorality frequently are expressed in the loaded phrase mum söndü, extinguishing the candle (kızılba¸slık, red-headedness, euphemistically means the same thing). The candle metaphor refers to the Alevi communal ritual of ayin-i cem, during which Sunnis believe Alevis engage in incestuous sexual orgies in the dark. Another frequently cited alleged immoral practice is abstinence from abdest, the ritual ablution performed by Sunnis after sexual intercourse. The Sunni belief that the body’s orifices must be ritually cleaned, or purified, in order to achieve separation from the unclean, impure substances emitted from or entering the body, is deemed less important by Alevis. Seen as ritually unclean, Alevis are pushed beyond the pale, to the other side of sociability. The notion of pollution, bodily and social, becomes germane, for just as the body’s pollutants must be purged, so must society’s pollutants—the Alevis. Alevis claim that to Sunnis, killing one Alevi is worth more than killing seventy-two ordinary infidels, gavur (Bumke 1979). Other charges revolve around sexuality as well, particularly female chastity and honor. Rumors that Alevi women wear no underwear might derive from the Alevis’ tendency and preference for gender integration in many domains of social life. This, for disparaging Sunnis, serves as proof of the promiscuity of Alevi women and lack of men’s honor. The Sunni obsession with Alevi immorality is not new. Nineteenth-century sources remark upon these allegations; for example, the nineteenthcentury German traveler Felix von Luschan remarked in his writings on the wild, ecstatic orgies (1891: 32, cited in Grønhaug 1974: 26). The preoccupation with an adversary’s morals is not unique to the Sunnis and Alevis. Anthropologists often cite instances where a salient other, perhaps an enemy, is accused of taboo violations, for example, cannibalism. For their part the Alevis respond to the accusations by arguing that what truly l 254

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

matters is the inner purity, as opposed to conspicuous prayer. This privileging of interiority over outer manifestations is consistent with dissimulation, as is the Alevi saying about mastering one’s hands, tongue, and loins. Both personalize the normative moral code of behavior, reflecting this spirituality of inwardness. Alevis have been subjected to severe repression, deportations, massacres, and executions throughout the Ottoman Empire to the present day. These have evoked an awareness of the past, used to inculcate normative values in a younger generation of Alevis. Massacres in the seventh and twentieth centuries are equated by means of an ethnohistorical ideological conflation, in both of which the Alevis, understandably, view Sunnis as their ‘‘natural’’ enemy. Axiomatic to an Alevi definition of selfhood, both individually and collectively conceived, is a sense of history tragically reproducing itself, glorifying the slain hero-martyrs. To Alevis, historical patterns are remarkably consistent: from the original back-stabbing of Ali, bowed in prayer at the mosque; to the dying of thirst of his son and followers at Kerbala; to Pir Sultan Abdal, the sixteenth-century bard who incited rebellion against the Sultan and was hanged; to recent events in the late-twentieth-century Turkish context. Hence, some might interpret their creative dissimulation as a way of escaping their view of the inevitable predicament of history. ENDOGAMY AND MELODRAMA IN THE DIASPORA

Some repatriated migrants in Turkey I interviewed mentioned that only in Germany did they become religious (dinci, dindar); only in Germany did the women begin wearing a headscarf, ba¸sörtüsü, and attending mosque. Many Sunni informants also related how they met their first Alevi in Germany. Anti-Alevi prejudices had migrated to Germany along with the Sunnis, and, though in some instances the prejudices may have been overcome with direct contact, friendships generally were thought of as exceptional, not applicable to the general group—one would not want one’s daughter to marry an Alevi. The tensions palpable in Alevi-Sunni relations are most evident in the politics of marriage. Young people in Germany appear rarely to marry outside sectarian boundaries, finding partners acceptable to their families. However, friendships and romances do develop across proscribed lines. These are the exceptional, sometimes the extreme. In Berlin, I witnessed a REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

255 l

variety of responses, from tragic love a√airs where families forced the young people apart, sometimes subjecting them to arranged marriages instead; to dangerous threats and kidnapping on the part of concerned male relatives of the girl; to a few cases where intermarriage occurred, generally when the families did not live close to the young couple. The following instance illustrates a not uncommon predicament. A sixteen-year-old Sunni girl, Hatice, was carrying on a clandestine romance with her Alevi boyfriend. I became aware of the secrecy when on several occasions she asked me to cover for her should her mother check with me as to her whereabouts (her father had died soon after the family came to Berlin). She had led her mother to believe that she had been at an extra English class I taught at a center for Turkish girls and women. Hatice and her boyfriend, Cafer, saw each other secretly; she feared her older brother would find out. Two years before this, Hatice’s older sister, Emine, had fallen in love with an Alevi boy and her family forced them apart. ‘‘She grew bitter about it,’’ Hatice explained, ‘‘and now, look what’s happened.’’ Part of Emine’s bitterness no doubt was a result of the frequent and severe beatings she received from her older brother when he learned of the relationship. Emine had recently married a boy from their village during her summer vacation—two weeks after they were introduced. She returned to Berlin pregnant and at the time was looking for a flat for her new family, in accordance with Berlin’s housing space laws. She hoped her husband would be granted permission to come to Berlin in a year. Hatice explained that Emine married ‘‘to get it over with’’—not as a result of love and a√ection for her husband. ‘‘She doesn’t believe in that any more, after what happened with her Alevi boyfriend.’’ Hatice expressed pessimism and fatalism about her own relationship with Cafer, accepting the impossibility of marriage. She said definitively, ‘‘Cafer Alevidir; Annemler beni Alevilere vermez’’ (Cafer is an Alevi; my mother [my family] would never give me to Alevis). Knowing they could not marry without su√ering severe consequences, they flirted with danger as they played out their melodrama. The story certainly is neither unique nor without precedent. Both Sunnis and Alevis are predisposed toward romantic tragedies, the inculcation of these themes reinforced nightly on television screens. Hatice and Cafer both knew that their romance needed to end in order to avoid unfortunate, possibly tragic results. Elopement, played out so often in film, means certain death. For

l 256

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

Hatice and Cafer, escalation of their relationship would have meant, at the very least, family ostracism—a social death—but possibly worse. A similar fate befell Haydar, twenty-one, and Meral, nineteen. They had met at a youth center and fell in love. Haydar was an Alevi, Meral a Sunni. Her parents would not consent to her marrying an Alevi, so they eloped. One day when Haydar returned from work he found her gone. While he had been at his job in a butcher shop, Meral’s father had come and taken her home. Haydar telephoned them but was not permitted to speak to her. Meral was kept locked in a room for several weeks. Finally she managed to phone Haydar but was observed by her father, who that day bought a ticket to send her to Turkey. These two extreme situations are by no means representative. I encountered other cases where Sunni families are accepting of Alevis. From my observations, in such intercommunal marriages the Alevi families tend to be more accepting of the Sunni children-in-law; they repeat, when referring to non-Alevis, ‘‘onlar da insan’’ (after all, they’re people too). Social conflict is not restricted to sectarian di√erences, as illustrated by the following instance, demonstrating a fissure where both sides are from a Sunni background.∫ Hasan, twenty-four, a self-described secular man from a nominally Sunni family, worked as a Turkish folk dance teacher in Berlin. He was taken with sixteen-year-old Ay¸se, a student in his folk dance class. Ay¸se was from what Hasan called a ‘‘backwards’’ family (yobaz, implying Islamist), dressing in the style common to Islamists, wearing long coats, and scarves revealing no hair. Hasan noticed her—one of the better dancers— and learned more about her. Her older brother and her father frequently beat her at a whim. Hasan fancied himself her savior, and they eloped. For several weeks they stayed in a far-o√ neighborhood with friends. Much impressed by German practices, Hasan felt that women should not be covered and should adapt to German ways; he insisted that Ay¸se remove her long coat and headscarf. Ay¸se’s brother spotted her on the street soon after, with her head uncovered, and dragged her home. When Hasan went to retrieve her, Ay¸se’s father was beating her. Hasan grabbed her, a fight ensued, and Hasan was thrown out of the flat. Hasan finally won back his bride when he informed Ay¸se’s family that he was prepared to go to the police and show them Ay¸se’s bruises—he told them that the police would surely take her away from them, since it was illegal to beat one’s child; moreover, they would be imprisoned. Terrified of extradition, they relented.

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

257 l

These several cases exemplify certain segments, surely a minority. Instances like these are, however, mistakenly seen as characteristic of all Turks, all Muslims. Such views have been buttressed by a new genre of literature, emerging from the generation of women who have come of age in Germany, now in their twenties, thirties, and forties. A perusal of popular book stores in Berlin in 2006 and 2007 revealed prominently displayed sections of books with headscarved women and girls gracing the dust jackets. The common subtext of these sensational confessionals, ‘‘I su√ered as a covered Muslim girl, and then escaped my oppressive family,’’ is as profitable as it is popular. In light of the highly publicized ‘‘honor killing’’ of a young Berlin woman by her brothers and the subsequent court case, such works reinforce stereotypical images. In an environment marked by escalating distrust of minorities and Muslims in the midst of society, such treatises fan the flames of the antiforeigner sentiment, confirming the worst beliefs, just as they distort the many and complex reasons and manners girls and women choose to don the headscarf—or, for that matter, remove it.Ω WHITE CHEESE AND POLITICAL STRUGGLE

The Bulgarian a√air of 1985 occurred in the midst of disturbing news about persecutions of Bulgaria’s Turkish minorities. In response, the Islamic Federation in West Berlin staged a march and demonstration through the center of the city. Five thousand people attended, marching with green flags (the color of Islam), banners, and placards in Turkish, Arabic, and German, including Qur’anic quotations, general anticommunist slogans, nationalist Turkish rhetoric, and phrases specific to the situation at hand, such as ‘‘Ismail—nicht Ivan’’ (referring to the forced name changes of Turkish Bulgarians). Apparently Turkish communities were being dismantled and dispersed, and Turks were forbidden from practicing Muslim rites. Large contingents of women marched along with the men, dressed in various degrees of ‘‘Islamist dress,’’ from the typical long, ankle-length coat in bland, muted pastel, beige, or gray, with a large, similarly colored headscarf revealing only the face from forehead to chin, to long skirts and blouses, with di√erent sorts of headscarves. A great many of the men were immediately identifiable as self-consciously observant individuals, evident by the distinctive shape of their beards and skullcaps. In addition to the religious faction was the ultranationalist, right-wing, and fascist element, l 258

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

the Grey Wolves (Bozkurt ). The centrists, leftists, Social Democrats, and other secularists were conspicuously absent. An additional action taken by sympathizers and supporters of the march was an organized boycott among Turkish grocers, bakkal, against Bulgarian white cheese, beyaz peynir (bakkal can mean ‘‘grocery shop’’ or ‘‘grocer’’). Turks, major consumers of white sheep cheese (feta), could buy it at any bakkal. Most Turkish grocery stores, small family-owned and family-managed shops, stocked several varieties, varying in flavor and fat content. The cheese imported from Bulgaria tended to be the tastiest and most popular. Thus, a large portion of the Turkish community began to make do with lesser-quality white cheese, imported from Greece, Denmark, and France. Some grocers placed signs in their windows advertising the boycott. I was surprised one day, while buying groceries, when the bakkal asked what sort of cheese I desired, listing a variety including ‘‘Bulgarian.’’ I registered interest, commenting that I had not seen a bakkal that carried Bulgarian cheese for weeks. He looked at me quizzically and with suspicion, muttering that it was simply high-quality cheese. When I asked him to slice o√ a half kilo of the politically marked cheese he relaxed and asked me what I thought of the situation. When I tentatively mentioned that I was skeptical of the anti-Bulgarian allegations (at that time the news still was unsubstantiated rumor) he swiftly concurred. He expressed his disdain for the other bakkals, whom he labeled as yobaz, the favored epithet of selfdefined ‘‘progressives’’ (ilerici, read politically left), for those considered religious fanatics, right wing, unenlightened. The mere fact that this grocer chose to keep Bulgarian cheese in stock, an unambiguous statement, dissociated him from the majority who were observing the boycott. Later, when I related the incident to a Turkish friend, he knew right away which grocer and commented, ‘‘Oh yes, I know him, he is a good man, ilerici.’’ Under the broad category of ilerici are found dozens of political parties, organizations, orientations, and clubs. In many cases the animosity exhibited between various denominations of ilerci appears at least as vicious, if not more, than that against the yobaz. Only at times of crisis or opportunities for extremely abstract and generalized displays of solidarity do they act in unison. For example, at a demonstration protesting the Turkish military junta in the early 1980s outside Berlin’s Turkish Center (associated with the o≈cial Moscow-linked Turkish Communist Party), a group of violent right-wing Turks came, started a riot, and killed the secretary of the REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

259 l

center. The entire ilerici community united in outrage. The deceased became a martyr for this community and was remembered each year on the anniversary of his death when a memorial commemoration was held. It typically drew participants and observers from the gamut of ilerici groups, each setting up its own table peddling competing literature. STAKING CLAIMS, MARKING PLACES

Turks in Germany support a wide range of organizations, mosques, and groups representing the diverse interests of Turkish Muslims and secularists. Some of these include the Milli Görü¸s, the Refah Party, Süleymancı (Association of Islamic Cultural Centres), the ditib (the Turkish Islamic Union of the Foundation for Religion), the followers of Kaplan (State of the Caliphate), and the more intellectually minded Nurcu community. Though the Islamic Federation has fashioned itself as the umbrella organization under which the others fall, this has not always been a comfortable fit. Falling outside of these groups are Alevi organizations such as the Anatolian Alevi Cultural Center and the Hacı Bekta¸s Veli Cultural Association. They are groups with di√erent orientations: the former is committed to a progressive, leftist political perspective integrated with Alevi ritual, music, and poetry, while the latter follows the line of many adherents of Bekta¸silik; simply put, a more Turkified, codified, and urban variant of Alevilik.∞≠ In the public domain some groups stage a colorful competition in the form of gra≈ti wars. In a struggle for control of their signs and their neighborhood’s spaces, battles have been waged on Kreuzberg’s walls; colorcoded challenges blazon the sides of buildings, representing various organizations, political parties, and gangs. Green lettering of an Islamic party might partially obscure a red spray-painted slogan with the ‘‘m-l’’ tag (Marxist-Leninist, i.e., Maoist). In the 1980s most of the gra≈ti was linked to specific political parties and events. The 1990s saw an added dimension: Alevi gra≈ti. The messages of groups calling themselves ‘‘independent Alevi youth,’’ and ‘‘Alevi youth’’ could be seen spray-painted on Kreuzberg’s walls. Interestingly, the colors include not only the expected red but also green. In appropriating this very marked color, these Alevis consciously and provocatively compete with the Islamists for Muslim legitimacy and recognition—but a legitimacy of their own making.

l 260

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

Staking territorial claim is not limited to wall art but expressed as well in the age-old tradition of co√ee drinking. Turkish men’s political-religious identity is unambiguously expressed by patronage at specific co√ee shops. Each group has a venue; one Kreuzberg neighborhood, in the two-block radius of a U-Bahn station, boasts at least a dozen such informal meeting places. Located side-by-side, on an overpass bridging one of the main thoroughfares, two co√ee shops coexisted. The larger had several billiard tables and many small tables where Turkish men could drink, talk, play cards, and gamble. The clientele here ranged from young to old men, their politics consistently on the right end of the spectrum. Women never graced the premises. The adjacent establishment, a smaller place, unlike the other, was integrated in both gender and nationality, and had earned a reputation as an ‘‘alternative’’ hangout for both Turks and Germans, men and women. Germans, Turks, and others of various ilerci persuasions came to eat cake, drink cappuccino, and read any of the numerous alternative magazines and papers lying about. In warm weather some tables were moved outside; it was the type of place where one might easily sit for hours on end, as friends and acquaintances flowed in and out. Except for the dominant Turkish language heard, the ambience resembled that of the hundreds of similar cafes and kneipes for which Berlin was famous. Nearby was what appeared to be a storefront book shop. The windows were stocked with books and pamphlets with titles such as Marriage and Wedding in Islam or Youth and Marriage: A Marriage Guide, or a how-to booklet for young children, How to Pray. Juxtaposed with this literature were banners and trophies won in sports competitions by the teams sponsored by this group. Upon entering, a few young men milled around drinking tea in the front room, lined with shelves of books in no particular order. A heavy curtain separated the public front room from a private inside room, which was set up for meetings and lectures, with a large Turkish flag in the front. Some of the boys there had lapel pins with the symbol of Turkey’s religious party, Refah, for this o≈ce served as the party’s local headquarters. The Turkish government has sponsored ideological exports. Indeed, through local, institutional networks—schools, cultural centers, and political filials—the Turkish Ministry of Education has both monitored and influenced public opinion among some sectors of the diaspora population. In addition the Turkish government sent Turkish teachers to Ger-

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

261 l

many to teach public school courses in Turkish history, culture, and civics. These teachers tended to be staunch supporters of the military regime and Kemalism—Turkish-style secularists, laicists. A lively competition for control of the indoctrination and education processes of the youth has ensued. In the mid-1980s a scandal broke in Turkey, linking Saudi Arabian money to key o≈cials in the Turkish government, specifically to support the exporting of religious education to Germany. Tying politicians to international Islamic networks called the very basis of Turkey’s adamantly secularist constitution into question. Today, tolerance of religion in the public sphere is of a completely di√erent order. In the years since, Islamic parties in Turkey have grown in numbers and strength, eventually predominating, and thus profoundly altering the balance between the state and Islam.∞∞ Reactions to this transformed relationship resonate in the diasporic space, such as the attempt to influence German policies in the education of Turkish children. Islamic organizations in Germany, whether mosque-based or not, serve a variety of novel diaspora-specific functions. In some instances, Muslim groups have formed as a reaction to the perceived hostile environment, one that does not easily accept or tolerate di√erence. Schi√auer discusses this in terms of the gradual radicalization toward extremist expressions of Islam of young men in Germany (1999). For others, members of smaller sects suppressed in Turkey, the relatively open and tolerant social and political diasporic milieu provides ample room for increased activities. In Turkey, for those in the Sunni Muslim majority, the implicit hegemony of statecontrolled Islam makes their practices and beliefs unremarkable and unmarked. Holidays and festivals, ceremonies and availability of helal products, the cityscapes punctuated by mosques and minarets—all are givens, defining the daily lives of many Turks. However, in Germany such traditions no longer can be taken as given and rise to the surface of consciousness. What had been implicit in Turkey demands negotiation, petition, and struggle in the foreign context. As Wilpert puts it, ‘‘the slaughtering of animals, dietary requirements, respect for prayers during working hours, rights to Islamic religious holidays are issues to negotiate with German authorities. In this negotiation process religious practice becomes a conscious e√ort and is no longer a taken for granted style of life. It also transforms and institutionalizes Islam as a minority religion in Germany’’ (1995: 27). Attempts to further institutionalize Islam in Germany have become pol 262

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

litically charged. This is particularly so since the mid-1990s, when the two dominant Islamic organizations in Berlin, the Islam Culture Center and Milli Görü¸s, began investing in real estate. Though some have claimed that this trend symbolizes a new orientation toward a diasporic permanence (Jonker 2003) bolstered by the liberalized citizenship law, German o≈cials from a variety of political backgrounds have not interpreted it as a positive step toward integration. The attempts by these organizations and local communities to build new mosques have led to ongoing conflicts, legal and judicial challenges, and increased animosity. The problems associated with mosque building are so pervasive throughout Germany that a handbook was produced, meant as a guide through the legal and social quagmire that describes the endeavors (Leggewie, Joost, and Rech 2002). The authors categorize the type and nature of mosque conflicts, including the ‘‘undesired mosque,’’ the ‘‘invisible mosque,’’ and the ‘‘discursive mosque.’’ Using this model, Jonker analyzes the years-long struggle of one of the central and oldest mosques in Berlin, the Mevlana Mosque, illustrating how opposing interpretations—the municipality vs. the religious leaders— of the nature and potential use of space, along with cultural misunderstandings, served to escalate the conflict (2003). Alongside Kreuzberg’s mosques and political organizations, the Alevis have their own venue, the Anatolian Alevi Culture Center. On Waldemarstraße, near the former border with East Berlin, several groups of Alevis collectively rented a church. At the center, on any given day, a dozen or so un- or underemployed men of di√erent ages sit around, drinking tea, watching television, or reading newspapers. A small shop selling Alevi souvenirs operates informally. One can purchase plastic plates with the likeness of the Prophet Ali or Hacı Bekta¸s Veli. T-shirts with Alevi symbols, metal and plastic medallions, pins, taped music, and a variety of books about Alevilik complete the inventory. In sharp contrast to the age-old Alevi habit of dissimulation, this center is striking in its openness. Outside it is clearly marked, visible to all passers-by. Another significant transformation is the elaboration of Alevilik. Formerly, in the 1980s, Berlin’s Alevis from throughout Anatolia came together to worship collectively in rented warehouses, their ceremonies a diasporic agglutination of diverse religious and social strands of Alevi practices. In this new Alevi Center, the briefly collective strands have disaggregated: Sivas Alevis celebrate their own cem, as do Tunceli Alevis, each community reproducing its own style. Though cleavages do separate Alevis, there apREIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

263 l

pears to be enough consensus to make the collective endeavor work for them all. Explicit markedness of places and spaces is not limited to converted warehouses and churches but penetrates the radio and television airwaves as well. The television and radio airspace available to Turks in Germany has increased exponentially and has radically changed since the early days of the migration. In the 1960s the original Gastarbeiter-oriented radio programs were short weekly broadcasts. The focus was public service, to help inform and ease the foreigners’ lives in Germany. Eventually foreigneroriented programming was o√ered by public television.∞≤ Local, Germanproduced segments complemented the pieces imported from the foreigners’ countries of origin (Spain, Greece, Italy, Turkey). The German television host Anita Rehm became well known in the 1980s among immigrants in Germany, who watched her introduce the fortnightly Neighbors in Europe—a patchwork broadcast including snapshot touristic, folkloristic clips exported from the main home countries of migrants. Turkey’s state tv channel, trt, produced Letter from Turkey, anodyne segments for the program; Rehm supplemented these with more well-rounded features on Turks in Germany. As the orientation of such programs took into account increasing xenophobic violence, they attempted to reach German viewers as well, hoping to o√er bridges of tolerance and understanding in the context of a socialworking, public-service mission (Kosnick 2004). However, public service– oriented television for foreigners increasingly has lost its Turkish viewership, in light of widely available satellite television broadcast directly from Turkey and the advent of Open Channels. Initiated in the 1980s, Open Channels aimed to transform ‘‘passive consumers of mass media productions into active producers’’ (Kosnick 2004: 980), giving voice to otherwise unrepresented viewers. Alevis have taken up the challenge, and a variety of inflections of Alevilik are represented on numerous Open Channel programs.∞≥ Again, this reflects the sea change from the period of the mideighties when Alevis of divergent backgrounds converged behind closed doors, to twenty years later when significant di√erences are openly broadcast for any and all to see. Di√erences between the programs and their producers mirror the religiopolitical persuasions found among Alevis abroad. Where the program Al Canlar explicitly takes an anti-Turkish nationalist stance, preferring the term ‘‘Anatolian’’ to ‘‘Turkish’’ and Türkiyeli to Türk (‘‘one from Turkey,’’ l 264

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

more inclusive of Kurds and other minorities), Kırk Budak puts Alevilik forward as simply another variant of Turkish Islam. Kırk Budak aims to reach Sunni Turks, who, the producer feels, need to be educated away from anti-Alevi prejudices and stereotypes (Kosnick 2004: 981–83). Thus have alternative expressions of Alevilik become accessible far beyond the traditional secretive in-group, now they can be accessed simply by selecting a button on a remote receiver. CONSUMING JEALOUSY: PROMISCUITY AND THE HELAL INDUSTRY

The followers of religious parties and organizations such as Refah consciously separate themselves from non-Muslims. In daily life one way this is practiced is by the conscious avoidance of pork. Many Turks take great care to prevent the moral contamination they believe threatens them in the form of haram (forbidden) meat, pork. Helal dietary laws, nearly unconscious in Turkey, have moved to the forefront of concerns in Germany, and clever entrepreneurs, taking advantage of this fear, have successful helal industries, selling everything from helal sausage to helal bread. The explicit association many Turks make between pork and promiscuity lends still greater fervor to the conspicuous avoidance of German food, restaurants, grocery stores, and butchers. Not unlike a consequence of the Jewish kosher laws, Muslims who observe the food taboos in e√ect segregate themselves from a significant part of German social life. From my observations, pork is generally only consumed among members of the Turkish German elite. However, other nonbelievers rarely ate it, explaining that their abstinence was due to habit. In Turkey pork consumption for the most part remains restricted to the tiny foreign and indigenous minority Christian communities in a few major cities, and pork is not readily available.∞∂ When questioned about eating pork, Turks generally say, ‘‘Our religion forbids it; we are Muslims, and Muslims don’t eat pork; it is haram.’’ Alevis and Sunnis alike express adverse reactions to pork. Often they continue, saying that pigs are dirty animals; they are ‘‘pis.’’ Pis is the word for dirty, filthy, and profane. Unlike kirli, also meaning dirty and unclean, pis has additional connotations, implying unclean in immoral, polluted senses. It is no accident that pis is the adjective of choice when referring to domuz, pigs. After having been asked by Turks on numerous occasions whether or not I ate pork, I became more sensitized to its moral connotations. When REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

265 l

the wife of my local bakkal had asked me for the fourth time, I finally pursued the issue. I assured her that I, also, was not an eater of pork and asked her what in fact was so terrible about pigs. She gave me a long, studied look before letting me into the circle of initiates, of those who know the terrible secret of pork and pigs. ‘‘You see, pigs are not jealous’’ (domuz kıskanmaz). For a moment I was baΔed. Pigs are not jealous? She went on, having decided to divulge all: Look at the Germans—they eat nothing but pork, morning-to-night, wurst and more wurst, all pork. And they are not jealous people, they don’t mind if their spouses sleep around. You see all these married German men and women sleeping with others—it’s normal with them. And pigs are the same, just like Germans, pigs don’t get jealous like other animals. Do you understand? We Turks are not like that, we are jealous people, honorable people. The Germans don’t have namus [honor—often associated with sexual honor] like us, it’s not important to them. Anlatabildim mi? Am I making myself clear?

Jealousy and love, sexual relations and honor, pork and promiscuity: all were intricately intertwined. For some Turks jealousy is an appropriate response and intimately part of love and desire.∞∑ Many Turks perceive German society as a degenerate one, where parental authority is all but nonexistent, where children—especially daughters—frequently shame and dishonor their families by not showing proper respect for their elders. Some Turks, o√ended by what they perceive as the slovenly sexual mores tolerated and practiced by Germans, make an explicit association with the consumption of pork, taking great e√orts to avoid consuming it. In this cultural logic, one who partakes of the stu√ becomes like it—adulterous, unjealous, dishonorable pigs—and, by implication, similar to Germans. In Germany I have heard people ask one another, ‘‘Did you ever eat pork?’’ and ‘‘Do you eat pork?’’ Often the answer is ‘‘never’’ or ‘‘no—at least not knowingly,’’ as though if they had eaten it, it was not intentional, and if the intent to eat pork was not present, then it ‘‘did not count.’’ To engage openly in pork consumption signifies a desire to dissociate from the mainstream Turkish community and to identify, in terms of cuisine at least, with Germans. Pork eating is a strong symbolic statement; there is even a tacit expectation among some elite Turkish Germans to serve and eat it as an explicit rejection of their Muslim compatriots. By the same token, it marks

l 266

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

the degree of modernity, secularism, and integration they wish to display in public, to themselves, and to others. VIDEO NASTIES

Reinforcing notions about dishonor are the themes of the films, supplied by a Turkish film industry challenged to keep supplying the constant demand for new videos for export to Germany. In the 1980s, in order to satisfy the demand, films for export were produced in great numbers. One genre of movies popular among migrants is called arabesk (or sometimes à la Turka). For migrants, their themes recall story lines familiar from years of movie going in Turkey.∞∏ Typically a village girl will be the victim (or alleged victim) of a rape or will take part in an illicit love a√air that su≈ciently sullies her honor and that of her male relatives. She escapes, fleeing potential murder (hers, and possibly that of the rapist or lover) by her brother. No longer a virgin, she sees no alternative for herself other than some form of prostitution in a city, the site of crime, corruption, anonymity, and shame. Though she still may fantasize about and long for her family or her beloved, she knows she is no longer worthy of them/him; her fate is sealed. Meanwhile the dishonored male relative or the abandoned lover tracks her down, inevitably the girl dies, either at the hands of her relative, thus purging the stain on the patriline, or by the lover, who might commit suicide as well, realizing that their union will forever be tarnished. Hundreds of variations on this theme have been produced; some include a new twist on the old theme—instead of fleeing from the village to Istanbul, the new cinematic destination is Germany. One of the most popular movies in the mid-1980s, Gurbet, revolved around the daughter of a migrant family in Germany. In the film she befriends Germans who tempt her away from her family. The Germans rape her, introduce her to liquor, drugs, and miniskirts (she had been a religious, obedient daughter who always wore total ‘‘Islamic’’ dress, complete with large headscarves and long coats). Meanwhile, one of her brothers, involved with the mafia, is shot. Another brother tracks down and dramatically chases the wayward sister; the girl, afraid, jumps from the top of a high building, killing herself. The movie is replete with Turkish stereotypes about Germany and Germans: cold, indi√erent, calculating, inhuman, abusive as employers

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

267 l

FIGURE 23. Children in Qur’an school, Berlin

of Turkish workers, immoral, and sexually promiscuous. The close-up camera work focuses on crucifixes, braless disco dancers, thighs of girls in miniskirts. The entire migrant enterprise is fraught with tragedy and shame. The Turks do ultimately return to Turkey but they return either in co≈ns or bitter in mourning for their dead relatives, cursing the day they left their village.∞π Frequent exposure to such movies surely plays a role in the fears and attitudes of Turkish viewers toward Germans. Blatant anti-German propaganda does little to promote understanding and sympathy on the part of many Turks for Germans, just as it increases concerns parents have about their children associating with Germans. QUR’AN SCHOOL AND THE SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION OF ALEV˙IL˙IK

One of the most visible threats migrants fear in Germany is that their children will be seduced away from them. They see their language, mores, and homeland become increasingly distant through time and lack of conl 268

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

tact. To that end, some Turkish parents have sought various means to ensure that their children not fall from the fold. In addition to speaking Turkish at home, many Sunni parents send their children, from age six onward, to private Qur’an schools. Children learn Arabic as well as fear and respect for elders. Many hocas, teachers, practice corporal punishment or make menacing threats to that e√ect. Antipork propaganda is common in the Qur’an schools, where hocas inform frightened Turkish children that to partake of pork will make them akin to the German infidel and may result in their going to hell. The importance of strict conformity with what is called ‘‘Islamic dress’’ and behavior is enforced. Many Turkish parents have received little formal education themselves; they neither understand nor identify with their children’s public schooling. Some parents, suspicious of German education, encourage their children to do the rote memorization required by the hoca rather than the homework assigned at public school. Attendance at Qur’an school separates the children from German classmates. In addition to having to meet time-consuming demands that take up free time after school, students are indoctrinated with strong ideological tracts about their German neighbors. As non-Muslims, Germans are said to be kafir, infidels, whose lives are marked by haram, the realm of the forbidden, reinforcing the perception of German society as threatening and o√ensive to Muslim beliefs. Concepts the children learn in public school, such as evolution, might be unlearned at the Qur’an schools. One day I visited a Qur’an school whose young, dynamic hoca at that time served as the president of Berlin’s Islamic Federation. He spoke some German, dressed like a conservative businessman, and was widely considered to be the most ‘‘modern’’ of hocas. At one point he asked the children if any of them had any questions for him. A little boy, perhaps eight or nine years old, tentatively raised his hand and asked, puzzled, ‘‘Hocam [my teacher], in German school the teacher told us that we came from monkeys. Is that true? How can it be true?’’ The hoca replied, ‘‘This is a good question, and that, like many things you are taught in German schools, is a lie; you came from Adam and Eve.’’ The boy looked relieved and o√ered the observation that each time he went to the zoo the monkeys looked the same; if what he had been taught in school were correct, he should have been able to discern some gradual changes toward human likeness. In some respects the Qur’an schools represent the antithesis of o≈cial Turkish republican education. These schools neither teach about Atatürk nor do they have maps of the REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

269 l

Turkish Republic on the walls, which instead might be decorated with maps of the Ottoman Empire along with pictures of the Ottoman SultanCaliphs. The parents, particularly the fathers, of many of the children attending Qur’an school receive analogous indoctrination by the same preachers in the mosques. Numerous hocas and imams preach at weekly Friday sermons of the dangers of associating with Christian infidels. Some observers claim that increased mosque attendance has direct parallels to the increased unemployment in the years since unification. This increase mirrors the strengthening of the Islamist parties in Turkey and the proliferation of Qur’an schools. The recent rise in Qur’an school attendance might be halted if some Islamic organizations have their way. Leaders in the Turkish (Sunni) Muslim community for years have been advocating the teaching of Islam in public schools. They claim that they should have the right to o√er religious classes to Muslim children as an alternative to the pervasive Christianity classes o√ered. In Germany, the relationship between state education and religion is complex and derives historically from a concordat—an agreement about the terms of the relationship between the two main churches, Catholic and Protestant, and the state. The constitution declares that education is the responsibility of the state, just as it guarantees that religion is o√ered in the public schools. It states that there shall be no state church, though church organizations are legally recognized as public corporations. The two Christian denominations, along with Judaism, have been the only state-recognized religions, each supported by powerful and wealthy organizations and funded by earmarked religion taxes. Each has the right to o√er religious classes in the context of public school education. In recent years, pressure for state recognition of the equivalent Muslim body has been levied on the government. With this model in mind, Berlin’s Islamic Federation, an umbrella organization representing over fifty mosques, set itself up as such a corporate body. A landmark 1998 court decision ruled to include the Islamic Federation (if) into educational decision making, although its inclusion of Milli Görü¸s, associated with Islamic extremism, proved a stumbling block in their discussions with the State School Authority, and the introduction of Islamic religion classes was delayed for several years.∞∫ By 2005, over twenty public schools in Berlin o√ered optional German-language religious courses in Islam, organized by the if and vetted by the state authority. l 270

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

The vetting has been contentious, as the other three denominations are not subject to such oversight. Another issue on the table is whether the teachers must be trained in German institutions or if they may be trained at Turkish religious colleges. The individual German states maintain much autonomy over education, and there are likely to be a range of alternatives emerging in the near future. The issue of religion in the schools has assumed a highly political inflection. Some otherwise antireligious constituencies advocate for allowing Islam to be taught in schools, as a way to preempt nascent Islamic extremism. The German Federal Constitutional Court finds the issue highly sensitive, particularly in the aftermath of the controversy over crucifixes in Bavarian schools. In 1999 the court overturned a Bavarian law stipulating that a crucifix was to hang in all school classrooms. The decision provoked a major controversy, leading the Bavarian state to pass a new law, whereby a crucifix should be hung unless a student’s parent formally objected. The court has since declined to hear appeals on this matter. The incorporation of Islamic religion courses in public schools has been controversial within the Turkish German population, as well. As expected, Alevis are thoroughly excluded from the initiative. Secular Turks as well as others who dissociate from the Islamic Federation condemn it as well. Some of those opposed represent alternative expressions of Islam. Buttressed by an explosion in Islamist print and electronic media, a new generation of Muslim intellectuals competes for the allegiances of potential followers, outside the purview of the Islamic Federation. Having watched the Islamic Federation of Berlin (ifb) gain recognition, activists from the Anatolian Alevi Cultural Center (aakm) made moves in this direction as well. They presented Alevilik as a legitimate religion in its own terms, to be considered on an equal par with Sunni Islam (Massicard 2003: 172). In 2000, not long after they had applied, the aakm was granted religious community status. Despite the absence of a centrally accepted hierarchy analogous to those of the German Christian churches, its speedy recognition most likely was due to political considerations (by comparison the Islamic Federation of Berlin had been contesting serial rejections for years). German decision makers’ awareness of Alevi-Sunni distinctions, of the Alevi reputation as anti-Islamist, surely played a decisive role in granting this status (ibid.).∞Ω For Alevis, the very act of mobilizing themselves into a recognizable entity, one that can make claims on the state’s resources, appears to have REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

271 l

prompted a ‘‘self-transformation . . . into a kind of ‘denomination’ on the Christian model’’ (Massicard 2003: 175), symbolized by the renaming of aakm to Gemeinde der Aleviten in Deutschland (Community of Alevis in Germany). The German word Gemeinde more easily connotes a religious community than do words like ‘‘center’’ or ‘‘federation.’’ Furthermore, in addition to reshaping themselves as taxonomically analogous to established denominations, the process of becoming a Gemeinde has stifled internal debate within Alevi communities, as well as e√ected a restructuring of the very social forms of Alevilik, for example, adapting the role of dede, Alevi ritual leader, to appear more akin to Christian clergy (ibid.).≤≠ In making claims publicly to a rightful Islamic status—and often by activists coming from a politically leftist, secular background—diasporic Alevilik has undergone a profound transformation. Whereas among some Alevis the very term ‘‘Islam’’ was a pejorative gloss for ‘‘Sunni’’ antagonist, a thorough revalorization and appropriation of the same term is suggestive of a newly forged diasporic identity politics. Yet the European diaspora is far from uniform: the wholly di√erent religiopolitical environments distinguishing France from Germany, for instance, have meant divergent trajectories in these modes of expression and incorporation. Given the incongruous natures of the di√erent European social and political systems vis-à-vis the relationship between religion and the state, it is likely that the future will hold alternative elaborations in the very practices and meanings of Alevilik. ALEV˙I OR KURD: CONFLICTUAL IDENTITIES

Along with the proliferation of mosques and Islamic organizations, the numbers and followers of Alevi associations have swelled as well. In addition, Alevi literature has flourished to an unprecedented degree. As the Alevi population gradually has emerged from its historic closet, Alevilik has acquired a trendy popularity—even among non-Alevi youth in some cases. A few Turkish pop stars have sported jewelry with explicit Alevi symbolism, such as the Zülfikar, the sword of Ali. A minority of Alevis in Europe fashion themselves in explicitly political—and nationalist—terms. In the mid-1980s I encountered a group calling itself Kızıl Yol, Red Path, advocating the founding of an independent socialist state, ‘‘Alevistan,’’ a land or nation of Alevis. Appropriating the overdetermined color red of communism and the Turkish flag, they had as well extracted the red from the disvalued Kızılba¸s, revalorizing it. The l 272

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

FIGURE 24. Kızıl Yol / Red Path, Alevi publication, 1984

group took its model from the struggles of Kurdish separatists for the establishment of an independent Kurdistan. Not surprisingly perhaps, its publication’s hand-drawn map of Alevistan curiously looked like a close facsimile of maps of Kurdistan. At the map’s center was Dersim (renamed Tunceli in the 1930s)—a place many Zazaki Alevis consider their a√ective home. Van Bruinessen mentions another group publishing their own journal, Zazaistan. Appealing to Zazaphone Alevis and Sunnis, this group envisions a nationalist alternative to Kurdish, Turkish, and Alevi nationalisms (1997: 16). Other authors have drawn a similar distinction between Zaza speakers and Kurds, including Ebubekir Pamakçu, the first ideologist of the ‘‘Zazaist’’ movement, in the Zaza journal Piya in 1989 and 1990. Some Alevis claiming Alevilik to be a religion, not a nationality, criticized followers of the Red Path. Most Alevis no doubt would not advocate the fairly extremist nationalist expression of Alevilik portrayed by the authors of Kızıl Yol and Zulfikâr, groups far from representative. Nonetheless, the notion of REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

273 l

‘‘Alevistan’’ is compelling, suggesting the emergence in diaspora of a consciously discrete identification with a utopian national space, influenced by the discourse of Western nationalisms and gravitating around a fantastic center. What this contestation implies for theories of identity and ethnicity is suggestive indeed, as the boundaries between self-described ethnicity, identity, and religion resist fixity, remaining porous. Profound changes in how Alevis communicate with each other and with non-Alevis began in the 1990s, thanks to the Internet and other media channels. Alevi magazines are distributed widely. One of these, Alevilerin Sesi (Voice of Alevis), with a large glossy format, is a far cry from the days of the low-tech, underground, homemade Kızıl Yol. Alevilik, transmitted electronically via the Internet, is produced on countless Alevi websites; some are aimed at non-Alevi users, introducing Alevilik in secularized, politicized, user-friendly, multilingual fashion. One spin-o√ site focuses on the essential feminism of Alevilik; another stresses the history of political repression. Others simplify and codify religious tenets. Internal disputations about the nature of Alevilik have occurred not only in cyberspace and political pamphleteering but on the most quotidian of levels as well. A casual conversation I witnessed between two young Alevi women expressed some of the complexities of Alevi identity. Nilüfer, a twenty-one-year-old student, born near Erzincan, had grown up in Berlin. Lâle, whose family hailed from Sivas but had migrated to Istanbul thirty years ago, had been living in northern Europe only a year. When we first met, I asked her where she was from. ‘‘Kurdistan,’’ she replied. After further discussion, it emerged that she not only never was in Sivas (her part of Kurdistan) but she knew no Kurdish—although she had enrolled in a Kurdish-language course. While discussing Alevilik, Nilüfer, surprised at Lâle’s overt Kurdish a≈liation, said, ‘‘When I ask my parents who we are, they say ‘Alevis’; when they say ‘Kurd,’ to them it means Sunni. I don’t even know if we really are Muslims—some of my friends have told me that Alevis are not Muslims.’’ Lâle responded that her father says the same thing: ‘‘I’m always fighting with my father—he doesn’t believe we are Kurdish, he says we are Alevis. But for us, for our generation, religion is not so important, so I don’t know much about Alevilik or care much one way or another about it. My parents and grandparents spoke Kurdish, though, so we are Kurds.’’ Nilüfer jokingly suggested that their fathers meet and ‘‘sort out these problems.’’

l 274

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

I met Haydar and Güne¸s when I became their neighbor in Kreuzberg. Their experience also illustrates tensions that inhere in the identity conundrum. Theirs was an arranged marriage, organized by mutually shared cousins. Haydar had been in love with a woman in Turkey but, having been active in a revolutionary organization, he had been compelled to flee. Marriage to Güne¸s, who had lived in Berlin since the age of twelve and had full residence rights, was a sure way to remain legally and therefore avoid the agonizing and risky process of seeking asylum. She was five years his junior. When I met them they had two young children. He worked in a local bi- and somewhat trilingual day-care center; a German teacher spoke German, and Haydar spoke Turkish and occasionally Kurmanji Kurdish to the children. He was active in several local grassroots ‘‘alternative’’ organizations and was trying to make a go of a Turkish video shop. They lived in a two-bedroom ground-floor apartment for reduced rent, working as the Hauswärte, caretakers. Both were Zaza-speaking Alevis, who freely codeswitched between Turkish, Zaza, and sometimes German (Haydar also spoke Kurmanji).≤∞ One evening I brought Metin, also a Zaza-speaking Alevi from a different province in eastern Turkey, to meet them. Within a short time they were relaxed and joking between Zaza and Turkish, having switched to the more intimate sen, from the formal siz (the Turkish tu/vous personal pronominal forms). Haydar explained their informality to me: ‘‘We speak the same language, we are akraba.’’ Akraba is used to denote kinship relatedness, normally glossed as ‘‘relatives’’; it also connotes feelings of closeness, trust, and acceptance into the salient in-group.≤≤ Later Haydar and Güne¸s, separately, told me that they had felt an immediate solidarity and intimacy with Metin based on the shared language and Alevi identity. When I questioned Güne¸s about Kurdishness and Alevi-ness she admitted she did not agree with her husband. Haydar often worked in Kurdish separatist communist political groups; she strongly opposed this. She elaborated, ‘‘I don’t trust Sunni Kurds. If there were a Kurdistan, it would be controlled by Sunni Kurds, and the first thing they would do would be to annihilate us, the Alevis.’’ Haydar for his part was cynical about Sunnis and hoped a common Kurdishness would overcome religious divisions. In a spirit of ecumenicalism, he kept a dish of candies on the counter of his video shop D during the festival of Seker Bayramı, celebrating the end of Ramadan. Accommodating himself to a Sunni custom, his gesture may have been

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

275 l

meant as an ambiguous, even dissimulating one, consonant with keeping his Alevi-ness under wraps for the sake of business. Like Nilüfer, Metin was unsure of the extent of his Kurdishness. Growing up in an Alevi Zaza-speaking family, he had heard the word ‘‘Kurd’’ used pejoratively for those Kurdish-speaking (usually Kurmanji) Sunnis who looked down on Alevi Zaza speakers. He sometimes asked me whether I thought the Zaza Alevis were Kurdish or not. Since I was ‘‘an educated person who reads about these things,’’ he assumed I should know. It troubled Metin that Alevi friends of his who had tried to work with Kurdish groups ultimately left, feeling the deeply ingrained kızılba¸s stigma they encountered could not be overcome. Echoing the shifting taxonomy of identification and a≈liation reported by van Bruinessen (1997), Metin was somewhat at a loss to know how to classify himself. At the apartment of a Zaza Alevi family, I met a new classificatory challenge. I had been there many times and we were on familiar terms. Before I entered the living room the mother and a daughter took me aside and whispered that a woman I was to meet inside was their kirve≤≥ —and that she was Armenian. Registering surprise and interest, I indicated that I would like to speak with her about Armenians. They immediately said absolutely not: ‘‘ayıp olur!’’ It would be embarrassing, shameful. I asked them whether she spoke Armenian: ‘‘No, no, she speaks Zazaca like us; they are from a village nearby ours.’’ ‘‘But are they Christian?’’ I naively queried. They laughed at me, and said ‘‘No, they are Alevi, like us.’’

This example is emblematic of the ways in which categories that to outsiders appear mutually exclusive are anything but that. Ultimately, ZazaKurd or Armenian, Christian or Muslim Alevi, no longer either/or, are refashioned into synthetic identifications. In former times what may have been exclusive and impenetrable social borders became minor accretions of di√erentiation among members of the single in-group. So closely are they a≈liated with one another that they are kirve, symbolizing trust and expressing the desire for a continued intergenerational relationship. In this instance the tragic historical circumstance of Armenian massacres and deportations facilitated a transformation, even synthesis, of identities, when fleeing Armenians were taken in and protected by Alevis.≤∂

l 276

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

An Armenian Alevi subjectivity suggests units and categories of analysis other than conventional ‘‘ethnic’’ ones, for how fluid can any ethnicity theory be, in order to account for an Armenian Alevi? Neyzi echoes this idea, describing the identity peregrinations of two musicians from Dersim/ Tunceli, who, she observes, ‘‘to become Dersimli . . . had to go to Berlin (while Tunceli itself is denuded due to migration and civil war)’’ (2002: 99). One of the musicians, his childhood characterized by continual displacement and dissimulation, explained that they had shifted between Turkishness and Kurdishness, and then moved toward Zaza, thinking in Turkish. The Dersimli is called Zaza in Turkish. But when we think in the Zaza language, we distinguish the Zaza from the Dersimli. Then we see the Kurd in Dersim, but he is called Kıda¸s. My name is not Zaza, but Kırmanc. We also hear of the Armenians. We are from Dersim. Underneath that identity are di√erent sub-identities. None of these groups have a problem with one another. (ibid.)

Addressing the interpenetration of ‘‘Dersimliness’’ and Turkishness, Neyzi deftly illustrates the intergenerational transformations of Alevi-ness, showing how it influences the contemporary subjectivity of the younger generation, particularly in the realm of expressive culture. The phenomenon of Dersim-Kurdish-Turkish-Zaza-Alevis, like Armenian Alevis, raises questions about the ways in which indigenous conceptualizations need to be taken into account when considering processes of ethnicization. At an informal gathering of Alevis near Frankfurt, twenty-five-year-old Kemal, after teasing the host, Hasan, mentioned to me that Hasan was his Seyit, in other words, a representative of the lineage hierarchically connecting the families. The Seyits served as the holy guides to a set of families or villagers, performed religious rites, and in turn were provided with respect and gifts. ‘‘My family is Kure¸san,’’ he explained, ‘‘and we kiss their hand.’’ Hasan laughed and nodded in agreement. They related the story of the two brothers, Seyit and Kure¸s, and the origins of this hierarchy. According to the tale, originally Seyit always kissed the hand of Kure¸s, respecting him as his superior, after Kure¸s had achieved the di≈cult—and miraculous —feat of riding a wall. But then Kure¸s reversed this, saying ‘‘Seyit, you are older and greater since you have even tamed a wild bear—even the wild bear recog-

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

277 l

nizes your authority; therefore I will kiss your hand.’’ Since that time, the Kure¸san—who have their own talip [followers, disciples]—have always kissed the hand of the holy Seyits.

The kissing of hands (and occasionally, among Alevis, shoulders) is associated with recognition of hierarchical and/or generational superiority and respect. Children kiss the hands of their elders, their parents, and grandparents. The person expressing respect for the other takes the hand, kisses it and then raises it to his or her forehead. Exchange also plays a role in the hierarchical relationship. In some cases the hand kisser, the social inferior, gives the superior a gift of niyaz, an o√ering, during ritual encounters with a pir or seyit. In return, the holy man gives the follower, the talip a dua, a prayer. (In other situations, such as the annual festival of s¸ eker bayram, children go through the neighborhood kissing the hands of adults who give them candy or money in return.) In the course of the day Hasan, the Seyit, arranged to give his old car to Kemal, the Kure¸san, ten years his junior. As this represented the structural inverse of the expected behavior expressed by their hierarchical relations, I ventured a comment to that e√ect. It evoked a great deal of laughter, yet they were undisturbed by the profound changes in place and time that have rendered the former social structural relations close to irrelevant. An exchange that could have been interpreted as transgressing social boundaries a short generation and migration ago assumed the shape of a fleeting joke. In this diasporic generation such an interpretation can be seen as an amusing and casual violation of hierarchy and class distinctions. Observers of culture and society are certainly familiar with the frequent lack of fit between theory—native or otherwise—and practice. The mundane example of the automobile exchange perhaps reveals more about the concerns of the literal-minded anthropologist than about the actors involved. However, it also o√ers an example for understanding contemporary expressions of Alevilik selfhood, through the native exegesis of mythic ancestors. The conclusion of the story of the two respectful brothers provides nothing less than normative codes for conduct, as hand kissing, a symbolic act of the utmost meaning, denotes hierarchical relations of which all are aware, and which may or may not be invoked. Rules, not simply there to be broken, are also there to be learned, known, and recited. For Alevis in a European diaspora, it is the knowing and the narrating of stories, and in the celebration of the cems, that the rules and the roles l 278

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

serving as an ideological charter for Alevi identities are reproduced and rendered meaningful. RITUAL AND CONTINGENCY

The spirit and ideology of resistance, instilled into the Alevis from early childhood through song, ritual, and politics, is inculcated as the identity of a historically oppressed people. Realized in adolescence and adulthood, such an ideology finds expression through membership and involvement in a variety of leftist parties or Kurdish or Alevi separatist organizations. However, as described above, many Alevis have found that working with Kurdish-identified groups proves impossible due to anti-Alevi prejudice. Discrimination and repression not only are felt in the realm of explicitly political activity but extend to ritual practices as well. The Alevi practice of their central communal ritual, the cem, seen as subversive by the state, was until recently outlawed in Turkey. With the advent of an Alevi renaissance beginning in the late 1980s, openly defiant cems took place and the ban subsequently was lifted. Alevilik, not an o≈cially recognized religion, causes many to allege state discrimination. The Diyanet, the government’s Religious A√airs Directorate, claims that Alevis constitute a culture, not a religious group. During a September 2004 visit to Germany, Turkish Prime Minister Erdo˘gan asserted to journalists that ‘‘Alevism is not a religion’’ and that their cemevis were ‘‘culture houses’’ rather than ‘‘temples.’’ The Diyanet treads a fine line between permissiveness and intolerance. In not acknowledging the cemevi as a legitimate place of worship,≤∑ it sees itself as fulfilling its obligation to oversee or represent a supra-Muslim identity irrespective of sect di√erentiation. However, many Alevis interpret this as hypocritical, as Sunni Islam unquestionably enjoys the dominant pride of place, o≈cially and uno≈cially. As part of Atatürk’s secularization policies, a law enacted in 1925 closed down all tarikats—religious, often dervish orders—and forbade their ceremonies and practices.≤∏ Even prior to the ban, Alevis practiced the rite of cem in secret, posting watchmen to keep guard against raids from hostile Sunnis. After the law forbidding the cem’s practice, the Alevis were on guard not only against Sunnis but now also against jandarma, the military police of rural Turkey. Should an Alevi guard sight an approaching group of jandarma, word would be sent, and instantly it would become a ‘‘wedding’’ celebration. REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

279 l

While living in the German diaspora, the celebration of the ayin-i cem ritual has provided a collective grounding for displaced Alevis. In the 1980s Berlin cems were held on a roughly annual basis, although in novel forms and settings. I attended an ayin-i cem during the 1980s in the West Berlin district of Wedding, a run-down working-class neighborhood whose population boasts a high proportion of foreign residents—primarily Turkish. It was held in a large hall, deep in a complex of enormous old Hinterhäuse, warehouses, now converted and rented out for discos, parties, and the occasional religious ritual. Typically, cems involve song, music, and dancing (sometimes in a trance), food and drink. They also reproduce the historical memory of oppression and martyrdom, through an emotionally charged reenactment of the martyrdom of Hasan, Hüseyin, and Ali. This one was no di√erent. About three hundred people, fairly evenly divided between sexes and generations, had gathered. Before entering, women and girls donned the appropriate headgear—kerchiefs tied loosely, revealing hair on the forehead and hanging down the back. Each group of arrivals removed their shoes and received instruction to stand in a certain way, feet together, the big toe of the right foot over the big toe of the left. Then performing namaz (bowing completely and kissing the ground), they presented niyaz, their o√erings of food, to the presiding dede, the man o≈ciating in the ritual (dedes can trace their origin to a holy lineage; the word in other contexts means ‘‘grandfather’’). With men on one side of the room, women on the other, and children darting back and forth, the dede led the assembled in prayers, songs, and a great deal of formulaic preaching. He often was accompanied by a saz, a plucked instrument resembling a longnecked lute, and closely associated with Alevi mystical poetry.≤π His o≈cial assistants, adorned with red armbands, used long sta√s to keep order, performing their prescribed ritual duties. The climax of the cem is the dousing of candles. For the Sunnis, the phrase ‘‘to extinguish the candle’’ (mum söndü) directly refers to this ritual, implying that in the dark, with the candles out, incestuous orgies occur, the epitomizing act of putative Alevi immorality. For participants, extinguishing the candles at the Berlin cem was indeed the most emotionally charged portion of the ceremony. As water doused the twelve burning candles (for the Twelve Imams and martyrs) in front of the o≈ciating elders, the entire community began to utter wails; many were moaning and weeping, calling out ‘‘Yezidilere lânet olsun!’’ (Cursed be the followers of Yezid, damnation to them). l 280

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

FIGURE 25. Berlin Alevi cem; note Turkish flag and picture of Atatürk

The Alevis blame the followers of Yazid for the assassinations of Ali and his sons Hasan and Hüseyin—the founding event to which the Alevis look for their origins. Shi’ites and Alevis believe that Muhammed designated Ali as his successor; Ali’s sons Hasan and Hüseyin and the patriline following them were then to have succeeded him as the Muslim caliphs. According to Shi’ite and Alevi doctrine, the caliphate was wrongfully stolen from Ali and his descendants. The underlying doctrinal belief in the Imams as the rightful successors of Ali, their authority, and Ali’s rightful place in Islamic history as the first caliph is shared by all those who can be loosely grouped under the Shi’ite rubric. Alevis today mistrust Sunnis, the contemporary descendants of the Yezidis, the killers of their revered patriarchs. Though Sunnis revere Ali, they neither believe him to have been the rightful successor to Muhammed nor do they deify him in the manner of the Alevis; to Sunnis this smacks of unacceptable polytheism. To return to the West Berlin cem, sometime after the dousing of the candles came the semah, a form of Alevi music and dance.≤∫ Many varieties of semah are performed—the Turnalar Semahı, the semah of the cranes, perhaps the best known. It begins slowly, but gradually the rhythm quickens— REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

281 l

analogous perhaps to the dancing and unison call of cranes (as part of mating behavior, cranes engage in a duet of sorts with repeating sequences of vocalizations, along with reciprocal ‘‘dancing’’ complete with foot stomping, ruΔing of feathers, leaps, and bows). The men and women who rose to dance to saz music performed stylistic variants, displaying regional di√erences. As the music’s powerful rhythm accelerated, some dancers entered a dervi¸s, or trance state, dancing with their eyes shut, their faces assuming unselfconscious otherworldliness, expressing an aura of inner ecstasy and awe.≤Ω Meliko√ has linked the Alevi semah to earlier forms of shamanism. Correspondingly, Marko√ links the dance to the ‘‘transformation of shamans into birds taking flight’’ (1995). The other most famous of the semahs is known as the Kırklar Semahı—the semah of the forty. This recalls the legend of the kırklar meclisi, the assembly of the forty, whereby Ali, the Imams, his family and followers humbled Muhammed. The semah is accompanied by saz music. The saz comes in several sizes and tunings, of which the ba˘glama is the most common, the two names often used interchangeably. A popular folk instrument throughout Anatolia, it is associated with Alevi music and ritual. The ba˘glama (from the Turkish verb ‘‘to tie,’’ ba˘glamak) itself has assumed symbolic, even sacred importance; some musicians speak of it as the material incarnation of ‘‘the imam Ali and the tenets of his faith; the resonator represents his body, the neck his sword Zülfikar, and the twelve strings or sometimes frets, the twelve Alid imams of Shiia Islam’’ (Marko√ 1986: 48). Commensality, essential to many rituals, was central to the cem. A highly animated and communal meal followed, the highlight of which was the consuming of the kurban. The kurban, the sacrificial lambs ritually—and illegally—slaughtered the previous day and prepared as a stew, were served by several women from an adjacent kitchen. A novel element had been added to the Berlin cem: video. Three video cameras had been set up by participants, with blinding lights, all operated by amateur cameramen in order to preserve the ritual record; some participants later purchased copies. No one thought it peculiar or paid the cameras any mind. One week later I observed the video shown in an apartment of one of the leaders of the cem. He became incensed when his daughters gossiped about the clothing worn by some of the women in the video. To him it showed disrespect for the sacrality of the event, regardless of its second-hand transmission via a tv monitor. These children had been raised in a German l 282

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

neighborhood, schooled in German, with many German friends. Though aware of their Alevi heritage they were not well schooled in its customs and felt less investment in the hieratic significance of the cem than did their father, who came from a family of pirs, near the Alevi epicenter, Dersim/ Tunceli. It would be insu≈cient, however, to leave the cem only as described thus far. What appeared to be a blending of subtle di√erences into a harmonious landscape of newly found a≈liation and solidarity became fraught with a cacophony of dissonance that ultimately threatened the integrity of the community. Near the end of the evening trouble emerged, as factions among the congregation made themselves known. In particular, a blind bard, ozan, herself an activist with a leftist Alevi organization, was handed a saz and asked to sing. As she was given the instrument, the o≈ciating dede instructed her, saying, ‘‘I will tell you what to play.’’ ‘‘I am a professional bard,’’ she replied. ‘‘There is no need to tell me what to play. I am fully capable of deciding for myself. I shall play the songs of Pir Sultan Abdal.’’ The dede became angry and authoritative: ‘‘No, I forbid you—I will not allow any political music at this cem.’’ At this point a spontaneous outcry arose with support for the bard. People shouted things such as ‘‘Pir Sultan Abdal is ours, he represents us, he is Alevi, he belongs in a cem. . . .’’ The haunting music of Pir Sultan Abdal, the sixteenth-century minstrel hanged by the Ottoman authorities, had been appropriated by leftist Alevis, finding that his rich, multilayered mystical poetry spoke eloquently to their struggles, evoking political metaphors of resistance to the state. I watched as the collective solidarity of this cem dissolved in a matter of minutes and reconstituted itself in a polarized form against its putative leader. Later I learned that this dede had been flown in from Ankara for the event and, though some considered him to be a learned man, others believed him to be something of a charlatan, with vague connections to the widely despised ruling military regime. Clearly the dede and the Bekta¸si organizers of the cem wished to take few risks, not even in the decor. Supported by an ideology of dissimulation, pictures on the wall depicted not only Ali, Hacı Bekta¸s, and the Twelve Imams but, in the center of this iconostasis, hung a huge picture of Atatürk, above whose head was draped a Turkish flag; and these precautions even in distant Berlin.≥≠ Attempting to please multiple masters, the dede had alienated the politicized youth for whom anything representing the Turkish state was anathema. REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

283 l

The saz with its accompanying soulful lyrics has long been suspect. Marko√ (1986: 46) discusses the eighteenth-century Alevi poet Dertli (lit. ‘‘troubled’’), who was ordered by a kadi, an Ottoman judge and part of the Sunni clergy, to destroy his saz, since it contained the devil. In response the poet replied in cynical, provocative verse: Its name is the saz with strings; It attends neither Holy verse nor Kadi; He who plays it knows (its truth). Where is the devil in it? Its strings came from Venice, Its back from a juniper tree; Oh, you stupid slave of God Where is the devil in it? If you perform ablutions, it comments not, If you do your prayers, the same; It doesn’t take bribes like a Kadi, Where is the devil in it? (ibid.)

Along with references to an eighteenth-century global economy—the strings come from Venice—Dertli, undaunted, mocks false Sunni piety and what he sees as its agency-denying practices: ‘‘stupid slave of God.’’ Not only does the saz not hinder the pious from their practices—ablutions and prayer—but, unlike the corrupt bribe-taking government o≈cials, it represents purity, honesty, even profane secularism. Surely the line is blasphemous—‘‘it attends neither Holy verse nor Kadi.’’ Far from satanic, those who play it ‘‘know its truth,’’ implying a hidden, esoteric dimension. The strong political statement contained in Dertli’s verse proclaims the enduring centrality of the saz, its musical power, and the willingness of Alevi bards to commit treason in its name and in their lyrics. After all, Pir Sultan Abdal, the poet of protest in the Berlin cem, lost his life for his inflammatory verse. Just as with the saz music controversy, the Berlin rebellion against the dede was not without precedent. In the 1960s, as part of the popular and growing revolutionary climate in Turkey, opposition to the institutions of dede, pir, and cem grew among young, politicized Alevis. Religious and l 284

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

communal leaders, dedes or pirs inherited their authority as members of holy lineages, traveling between settlements of their talips (followers). They had the sacred and social right to demand payment in whatever form they saw fit. This might take the form of land, food, animals, money, or hospitality. In extreme cases, some dedes were accused of an excessively liberal interpretation of droit de seigneur and slept with whichever woman they wished; allegedly this included the sexual initiation of girls. Whether the stories were apocryphal or not, some young Alevis, particularly those swept up in the wide-ranging leftist mood of the time, rebelled against the perceived ‘‘tyranny and exploitation’’ of pirs. Ultimately, the cem, the epitomizing symbol of the ideological Alevi matrix, gave rise to revolutionaries who would destroy the very system that shaped and legitimized them. In the diaspora context, some leftist Alevi activists have again reinterpreted the meaning of cem. A young Alevi man in Germany explaining the cem in terms of the progressive nature of Alevilik, said to me, ‘‘Kadınsız cem olmaz; kadınsız devrim olmaz,’’ without women there can be no cem; without women there can be no revolution, implying a logical fit conjoining cultural meanings and social relations—in this case, specifically relating to gender and the critical participation of women in Alevi political and sacred life—with historical contingencies. Far from a cultural quantum leap, it shows the conceptual continuity in the transposition from ritual to political spheres, the cem the metaphor and template for social change. The polysemic cem, as a ritual act, might be interpreted as either reactionary or revolutionary—the locus of class struggle or feminist practice—depending on the time and place. It has assumed historical importance as an expression of mimetic self-creation and self-a≈rmation; it represented a struggle to survive, against odds at home and abroad. In that assertion, historical meanings and relations are reinterpreted in a new context. These multiple interpretations of the cem—progressive and revolutionary, or reactionary—can prove troubling for young Alevis, I realized in the course of numerous conversations with Haydar, a thirty-year-old Alevi and freelance photographer. Not known as an Alevi, his public persona was Kurdish, a founder of a Kurdish cultural center in Berlin. Normally he sco√ed at discussions about Alevi identity and appeared convinced of a cia plot behind the Kızıl Yol separatist organization, motivated by a ‘‘divide and conquer’’ strategy. Like the self-conscious Marxist he wished to be, he dismissed ties to anything religious as anachronistic superstition. When I told him of an upcoming cem he appeared uninterested. Yet on the night of REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

285 l

the event he appeared, claiming to have come only as a curious observer. During a critical part of the cem, the dede demanded that all those present who were feuding, those not on speaking terms, kiss and reconcile their di√erences—otherwise the cem could not continue. Haydar was su≈ciently moved to the point where he ran across the room, embraced a certain individual, and kissed him on both cheeks. Later he seemed somewhat embarrassed about his apparently involuntary behavior. He then confided that he often felt uneasy with his Kurdish activist friends, because of their disrespect for Alevis. This realization had disillusioned him; he felt caught between the Kurdish cause to which he wished to be committed and the unpleasant reality that his chosen cause had not chosen him. Despite his secular skepticism Haydar thanked me for inviting him to the cem. The contrast between 1985 and 2005 is pronounced, even dramatic: there has been a virtual explosion of Alevi activities, cems, organizations, centers, publications, and websites in Germany. For some teens and young adult Alevis the only cem they know, if any, has taken a new turn. For them, it has become a folklorized performance. They have learned the semah not from watching their grandmother in a small clandestine cemevi in an Anatolian village but instead at folkdance classes, organized by the numerous Alevi communal organizations. The cems sponsored by these organizations feature identically dressed young men and women—often garnished with a red scarf—performing synchronized movements well rehearsed to prepared music. A fundamental shift, these cems are a far cry from the spontaneous ecstatic dancing and music of the cem recounted above. Folklorized performances, together with the rising popularity of Alevi symbols, indicate that Alevilik has entered a new social terrain. No longer the exclusive domain of esoteric secrecy, the new cems have joined company with other publicly staged performances that might take place on a proscenium stage for a ticket-buying audience. Such consciously staged, choreographed, and rehearsed cems occur with regularity throughout the European Alevi diaspora. I witnessed what was perhaps one of the earliest of this genre at a conference in 1986 in Strasburg. Soysal discusses a Berlin cem sponsored by municipal authorities in the early 1990s. Of note was a speech of a presiding dede defending the theatricalization of the cem, resorting to the rhetoric of German ‘‘integration.’’ His priority, he told the gathering, was to bring the Alevi youth into the fold; if this was how it had to be done, so be it. ‘‘If the times don’t conform with the Alevis, the Alevis will conform to the times. This is l 286

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

integrasyon for the Alevis, matching what Germans call integrasyon’’ (n.d.: 10). Such cems have provoked questions and conflict concerning their correct and true nature. The clashes evoked by ritual transformations have led to intra-Alevi debates about authenticity versus the historically contingent character of rites, intriguing examples of how rites are continually reinscribed in a mimetic reenactment of ‘‘tradition.’’ THE TURCOMAN WOODCUTTERS: ‘‘THEY ONCE WERE THE POOREST — NOW THEY ARE RICH’’

The experience of diaspora inspired diverse orientations to the homeland. Having escaped discrimination in Turkey, Alevis tend to be less interested than Sunnis in repatriation. The villages of Alevis from Kurdish regions may have been deserted in the civil war-like climate over the past decades, the people having fled to nearby towns and cities, or perhaps abroad. One unusual group of Alevis, however, seems in some respects to defy this generalization. This group is composed of members of a village I will call ‘‘Kızıl Köy’’ (lit., red, or scarlet, village). Kızıl Köy is located in southwestern Anatolia’s lush and fertile Meander Plain, in a valley irrigated by tributaries of the Great Menderes River. The Kızıl Köylüler, the villagers, are members of a Turkoman tribe, commonly known as tahtacı, woodcutters.≥∞ One of dozens of such groups in southwestern Anatolia, stretching from Antalya to Balıkesir, they formerly were transhumant woodcutters in the mountain range visible from their lowland village today. In winter they descended with their flocks to the plains either near where they presently live or, more likely, toward the Aegean coast, approximately one hundred kilometers to the west. In the 1920s, in the early years of statehood, the central government in Ankara implemented a sedentarization policy. It was then, in the early Republican period, that this group, under the leadership of one individual, bought the village for a pittance. Recently abandoned during the bloody War of Independence (1921–22), Kızıl Köy had long been inhabited by Greek-speaking Christians of the Eastern Orthodox rite. In 1921, following a grandiose scheme designed by Eleftherios Venizelos, irredentist Greek forces engaged in an ill-fated adventure: they invaded and attempted to ‘‘retake’’ Asia Minor for the Greeks, hoping to set in motion the centuries-old Hellenic dream of Megali Idhea, the Great Idea, the reestablishment of Byzantium. Mustafa Kemal led the fledgling Turkish army to victory, quite literally driving the Greeks into REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

287 l

(and across) the sea. In the process, the picturesque cosmopolitan harbor city of Smyrna (present-day Izmir) was razed. The most significant outcome of this war was the major demographic change wrought by a portion of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. This stipulated the permanent exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey: ‘‘Greeks’’ living in Asia Minor (with the exception of Constantinople/Istanbul) were to be moved to Greece, exchanged for ‘‘Turks’’ living in Greece (excepting western Thrace), who were to be moved to the new Turkish Republic in Asia Minor. Approximately 1,300,000 Anatolian Christians moved west, compared to 400,000 Muslims who moved east. However, for the purposes of the exchange, definitions of ‘‘Greek’’ and ‘‘Turk’’ assumed a nearly exclusively religious meaning. Orthodox Christians became Greek nationals, just as Greek-speaking (and Turkish-speaking) Muslims from Greece became Turks.≥≤ The politics of the day saw it as ‘‘repatriation’’; later interpretations di√ered. Lewis writes of ‘‘two deportations into exile—of Christian Turks to Greece, and of Muslim Greeks to Turkey’’ (1961: 354–55). These newly forged national categories deviated from the Ottoman-based millet system, where each di√erent religious group was recognized and, to a limited extent, self-governing. Considering the historical precedent, the logical continuity of Kızıl Köy’s negative markedness becomes clear. What was once a marked Rum (Ottoman/Anatolian-Greek-Christian) village overnight became Alevi. The stigma of the Alevi village not only echoed an earlier stigma but became amplified. On the one hand, though the Rum ‘‘Greeks’’ were religious outsiders, they were a recognized part of a larger structural whole; they occupied a legal and conceptual category. In many parts of the Ottoman Empire they, like Armenians, Jews, and other minority millets, occupied specific occupational, economic niches. On the other hand, Alevis were never a millet. At best, they were tolerated and despised; at worst, they were persecuted as heretical, non-Muslim infidels. They were stigmatized at least as much if not more than any legal minority millet ever had been. Liminal in the worst possible sense, they were outsiders disguised as insiders and thus perceived as all the more dangerous and threatening. During the fifty years following sedentarization, Kızıl Köy remained the poorest village in this fertile valley. Centuries of shepherding and woodcutting did not bode well for success in agriculture, despite the region’s rich soil. With the onset of recruitment to Germany, many of the villagers opted to try their luck abroad. By contrast, few of the Turks from the relatively l 288

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

prosperous Sunni villages in the region felt motivated to migrate. Decades after the initial migration, the village underwent a major transformation when approximately 25 percent of the villagers migrated to Western Europe. Though when I visited, only one family had made the kesin dönü¸s, permanent repatriation, each summer most of the villagers undertook the izinli return, transforming the village to a seasonal ‘‘little Germany.’’ Unlike many of the other migrants’ investment patterns, frequently oriented toward purchasing properties in Istanbul or Ankara, these Turkoman villagers displayed a remarkable degree of common purpose and solidarity, investing in the agricultural land from neighboring Sunni villagers in their home region. In addition, most of the migrant families have built new homes for themselves in the village, the designs and features of which blended their newly acquired European tastes with village vernacular. Some of the families have also purchased small homes in ‘‘vacation villages,’’ new developments lining the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts. During a summer trip to Kızıl Köy a family might oversee the construction of an additional story onto their house, bring consumer goods for themselves or relatives, oversee tenant farmers, and negotiate land purchases. The village took on a new, wealthy look and had recently been upgraded to a higher level of municipality by the regional authorities. At night streetlights illuminated the village, gracing the recently paved street through its center. Parked throughout the village were brightly colored Mercedes with bold decals displaying the ‘‘D’’ for ‘‘Deutschland.’’ The Mercedes comfortably shared the roads and driveways with expensive new tractors. The mood of the village in the summer was one of a joyous family reunion. One might be greeted with ‘‘Grüß Gott’’ (a friendly greeting used in southern states of Germany) or with ‘‘Merhaba’’ (Turkish, from Arabic, for ‘‘hello’’). Young people socialized openly, taking walks, riding motorbikes together, and continued partying late into the night, dancing to contemporary European and Turkish music. In the evenings tables and chairs of the co√eehouses spilled out into the streets, as adults—men and women—watched a television set up for public viewing, socializing as they drank co√ee or rakı (anise-flavored liquor). This scene contrasted with the prescribed gender-specific behavior prevalent down the road, in Sunni-dominated Sutepe, a socially conservative, right-wing Sunni stronghold. The di√erences in the two places were plain. In Sutepe only men walked the quiet streets; women were visible solely on REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

289 l

the far side of windowpanes in chiaroscuro shadows created by layered curtains. Middle-aged, married women and unmarried girls preferred to remain in their houses and compounds rather than subject themselves to public notice and gossip. To avoid this potential shame, they would send a neighborhood boy to run their errands. The sectarian distinctions were evident as well in women’s clothing. There are several styles of ¸salvar, the loose-fitting, flowing pantaloons favored by village women in Turkey. The Kızıl Köy women preferred one style, the women of the surrounding villages and towns wore a distinctly di√erent cut. Resolute in their desire for distinction, the women in a small, two-block enclave of Turkoman Alevis in Sunni Sutepe chose to express their Alevi identity, asserting their di√erence from the rest of the town by means of their ¸salvar. They wore the marked, identical kind worn by the Alevi women of nearby Kızıl Köy. Moreover, the Alevi and Sunni women think nothing of ridiculing each other based on the others’ cut and use of ¸salvar fabric. During my stay in this region I traveled the ten kilometers between a Sunni family in Sutepe and Alevi friends in Kızıl Köy numerous times. The women of each place insisted that I wear their style of ¸salvar, mocking the style of the other: Sunni women: ‘‘We will make you a pair of our ¸salvar; they use so much fabric, two more meters than we do, can you imagine . . . tsk tsk . . .’’ Alevi women, much amused at the Sunni style: ‘‘They have this extra piece of fabric hanging from the crotch like diapers . . . [snicker, snicker]; we will make you a pair of ours.’’

The young female returning migrants from Germany put away their jeans and don either Alevi or Sunni ¸salvar once they reach the village in the summer, expressing their identities sartorially in prescribed styles. The Kızıl Köy villagers, having bought farmland with their remitted earnings, had transformed the socioeconomic relations of the region: Alevis became the employers of Sunnis from nearby villages such as Sutepe, who worked for them as amele, day laborers. During the work year, relatives in the migrants’ village assumed the managerial roles. This dramatic turnaround was spoken of throughout the entire region: ‘‘They used to be the poorest village, now they are the wealthiest in the area.’’ In addition, as has been noted in other studies of return migration in southern Europe,≥≥ the investment pattern of the villagers of Kızıl Köy is upwardly mobile in l 290

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

social trajectory, bordering on ostentatious at times. But despite the money poured into the homes, the property, the roads, and other civic improvements, it is unclear if, or when, the absentee landlords will repatriate. Many admitted that, like their children, they had little regard for and even less interest in agriculture. ‘‘What can they do here?’’ the parents asked rhetorically, not stating the obvious. For it was neither comfortable nor easy to accept the inevitable: that their children would remain in Germany and continue to appreciate the village for the only thing they have ever known it as—a summer vacation retreat. As the Kızıl Köy villagers reveled in their newfound prosperity, resentment festered among the Sunnis in neighboring villages and towns. This was expressed by bringing them down a peg through the continual reference to the Alevis’ past poverty, implying that their present economic strength ‘‘doesn’t count,’’ in a sense, since they are nouvelles venues. They all remembered that the region had seen its share of the sectarian violence that rocked the country in the 1970s, leading to the military junta in 1980. Kızıl Köy was frequently the target of violence perpetrated by young men from the local branch of the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Movement Party. Later the conflicts were not as pronounced and assumed a di√erent dimension. A telling manifestation of the simmering antagonism was vandalism. The sole signpost marking the turno√ onto the narrow, unpaved road leading to Kızıl Köy stood a kilometer to the west of the village. Vandals continually stole the sign, seeking to negate the very existence of the village by this symbolic denial, erasing the Alevi village’s onomastic legitimacy. ALEV˙I FUTURES

Alevis have dealt with historical insults from massacres to vandalism by memorializing and mythologizing their history of martyrdom. This stems from their belief that history has mistreated them by a theological deviation robbing them of the legitimacy they deserved. From their perspective, history strayed o√ its correct path. Contemporary Alevis are the vessels carrying historical righteousness, recognizing the true path; but each succeeding generation’s interpretation of old and new oppressions assumes new forms. A historical rupture can be identified in contemporary Germany, as Alevis there have experienced a novel form of enfranchisement and emancipation in this diaspora. Yet this has altered the opposition against the Sunni ideology to the point where Sunni’ism or the Turkish REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

291 l

state no longer represents their ultimate enemy. Rather, some Alevis believe that the most threatening force is what they perceive to be assimilation and secularization brought about by influences of German society but also by the transformations and ‘‘modern’’ interpretations of ritual.≥∂ Similar accusations of the threat of secularization to Alevis have been made in Turkey. Bozkurt explains: ‘‘For four hundred years the Alevi have endeavored to prove to the state and their Sunni neighbours that they are indeed Muslims, but all to no avail. Now the tables are turned. Since 1990 it has been the state and the Sunni theologians who have been trying to prove the Muslim credentials of the Alevi while the opposite opinion is being put forward by Alevi writers of the younger generation’’ (1998: 93). Bozkurt believes that intellectual assimilation is the root of this change, taking concrete forms of, first, the state erection of mosques in Alevi villages,≥∑ and second, compulsory (Sunni-oriented) religious education in public schools, a legal artifact of the martial law era of the 1980s, paving the way toward a ‘‘Turko-Islamic synthesis.’’ Yet others claim that the state is willing to grant a new degree of tolerance toward Alevis, since it is trying to ensure that Alevis not join the Kurdish cause and it also hopes to win votes against potential sectarian Alevi parties and candidates. And there is further the matter of counteracting growing Islamist movements. One response to this proliferation took place in Turkey. A group of Alevis who had begun to mobilize themselves ‘‘joined with secularist Sunni journalists, intellectuals and artists in drawing up an ‘Alevi manifesto,’ Alevilik Bildirgesi ’’ (Vorho√ 1998: 21). The signatories saw the rapid expansion of Islamists throughout Turkish political and social life as su≈ciently threatening to warrant this novel and assertive reaction. ‘‘For the first time in the history of the Turkish Republic the Alevi declared themselves openly not only as a political force but also as a religious community claiming the right of self-determination and o≈cial recognition’’ (ibid.). This act and the subsequent flood of interest in Alevilik by both Alevis and outsiders is all the more remarkable considering that, not even a decade before, Alevi parents feared for their children, teaching them to dissimulate to neighbors and classmates, both in Turkey and in the European diaspora. Earlier than Turkey, the European context o√ered radically new opportunities for expressing identity in explicitly marked religious terms—or just as explicit a negation thereof. Some observers believe that the Alevi activities in Europe in the 1980s, along with what Alevis saw as the disturbing rise of Islamism, led to what now is widely thought of as an Alevi revival, in l 292

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

both Turkey and Western Europe. Transnational ties facilitated by the Internet, other disseminated media, and increasing ease of travel between Europe and Turkey have also been critical in the astonishing blossoming of Alevilik. The founding in 1997 of an Alevi Academy in Europe, based in Cologne, has helped foster this ‘‘coming out’’ of Alevilik. Hundreds of competing Alevi-related web pages are available at the touch of a Googled finger; scores of Alevi centers and organizations flourish in Europe and Turkey. In Turkey a court ruled in 2002 that an Alevi cultural center was permitted to exist, overturning an earlier decision. It would appear that those who have signaled the demise of Alevilik have been overly hasty in their pessimistic predictions. However, they may be correct in another sense. Alevilik as it has existed for the last several centuries, marked by practices that are secretive, underground, dissimulating, and oppositional, may indeed be nearing obsolescence, replaced by a transformed public, politicized, folklorized, popularized and ever-splintering iteration of Alevilik that continually finds ways to re-express itself.

REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN

293 l

11. Veiling Modernities ‘‘One day an actress who was playing a Turkish woman appeared at rehearsals wearing a headscarf. I asked her why. A German actor had told her that she ought to thus demonstrate her commitment to being Turkish.’’1

l In Germany, the headscarf worn by many women and girls from Turkey is the key diacritical marker of Turkishness. Many Germans associate the scarf with Turkish women. Curiously, this piece of cloth has become the focus of debate, literature, stereotypes, controversy, and criticism, not only in Germany but throughout Europe. I argue that the headscarf crystallizes the ‘‘foreigner problem’’ in that it symbolizes the essential intractability of the ‘‘other’’—Turkish/Muslim/Arab/outsider. It is used both to justify and explain the impossibility of making Turks (and perhaps Muslims in general) into loyal subjects of the German nation, and it is not easily appropriable by the West. The ‘‘headscarf debate’’ does not simply represent dichotomous views and practices about clothing. Rather, more than covering the body, the headscarf implies the ontology of the self and views of morality. A more nuanced reading demonstrates some of the ways in which moral, religious, and political notions of selfhood become couched in the language of clothing and veiling. Contested discourses surrounding the headscarf reveal a polysemic set of markers, as the headscarf itself acquires the evocative power of an aura, deploying a field of allure for the German/European gaze, and points to multiple levels of di√erentiation. Given the obsessive significance conferred upon the headscarf, one might argue that it has become a kind of fetish, an ‘‘objet chargé.’’≤ It is a material object imputed with capacities to reveal and conceal moral visions of the self and through which people express their own anxieties about a historically changing world. It is not merely an index of identity, an additional meaning, as Keane argued more generally about material culture as a whole, as if the headscarf were a sign of an identity to be arbitrarily put on or removed from the body (2005). Rather, it is a sign that must be placed in relation to other signs, symbols, and social relations. By circulating

through the discursive chain in the public domain, the headscarf engenders specific consequences (social division, animosities, and anxieties) in the social world. Indeed, the headscarf has become saturated with di√erent ideological and political interpretations; as such, it serves as a mediator among di√erently valorized groups of persons, joining and disjoining them. What is generally foreign to much criticism of the scarf is its potency as a contested icon of rank and distinction within the symbolic space inhabited by Alevis and Sunnis, both in the diaspora and in Turkey. Among other things, it serves as a moral marker to di√erentiate visibly the openly observant elements of parts of the Sunni community from all others, Alevis and Germans alike. Many progressively minded Germans interpret the headscarf as the quintessential instantiation of Turkish patriarchal repression and objectification of women; yet in their own arguably obsessive, even fetishistic attention paid to head covering, are they not also objectifying Turkish women? The heightened concern with the scarf serves as a vehicle to reify Turkish women as cultural stereotypes of an outmoded and outlandish culture in need of modernization and emancipation. The discourse about headscarves has been characterized by the widespread paradigm of oppression: women’s subordination to an oppressive system.≥ Interestingly, the obsession with the headscarf is in no way a predominantly Western phenomenon expressing an Orientalist, exoticizing gaze. Rather, it finds its counterpart in Turkey (and other parts of the Middle East as well), where the Kemalist secularist appropriation of anti-Islamic, Western feminist discourse takes an antinomian form. There, the headscarf represents not only a threat to secularist self-representations as Western and modern but also to the nature of the state itself.∂ Similar to the German state, in the Kemalist tradition the scarf is as an aesthetic threat to the achievement of its secular aims, as a heritage that must be eliminated by all means. The di√erence between the responses and perceptions of the two states lies in the fact that for many Germans the headscarf constitutes the ultimate proof of Turkish intractability, but not without dividing the public sphere over the issue of women’s emancipation in accordance with moral standards and ideals of a secular, independent self. In Turkey the headscarf has become a visible symbol in which opposing political factions conflict with one another, producing an internally divisive and charged atmosphere. However, the debate cannot be reduced to the conflict about demands of a ‘‘repressive Islam’’ and passive, voiceless women. VEILING MODERNITIES

295 l

L’AFFAIRE DU FOULARD: LAICITÉ AND UNIVERSALISM

The headscarf debate that has raged in Germany over the past several decades is not the only instance of a conflict between majority and minority populations in Europe focusing around the issue of headgear. France was rocked by ‘‘l’a√aire du foulard,’’ its own headscarf crisis, beginning in October 1989, when three female Muslim students were prohibited from attending school in Creil because they would not remove their headscarves. This became a national issue, revolving around ideologies of secular state education and universalism.∑ Later, an incident involving over seventy girls wearing headscarves provoked a parents’ organization to act. These (nonMuslim) parents opposed expulsions, explaining that were the girls not in school, conservative family influence would be greater, thus hampering their emancipation.∏ Woodhill echoes this position, claiming that if these girls, the most assimilable element of the immigrant population, ‘‘begin to defend their right to ‘di√erence,’ the whole project of integration seems to be jeopardized’’ (1993: 48, cited in Honig 1998: 214). Entering the debate, Julia Kristeva adopted a similar position, elevating the decision to wear or shed a scarf to the level of French universalism, the abstract advantages of which, she asserts, may be superior to the concrete benefits of a Muslim scarf (1993: 47, cited in Honig 1998: 204). ‘‘L’a√aire du foulard’’ has moved to the forefront of public policy discourse, taken up by academics, journalists, and activists alike. The sociologists Gaspard and Khosrokhavar convey the complex layering of contradictions between expressions of ostensible tradition and modernity, and the individual and the public sphere: [The veil] mirrors in the eyes of the parents and the grandparents the illusions of continuity whereas it is a factor of discontinuity; it makes possible the transition to otherness (modernity), under the pretext of identity (tradition); it creates the sentiment of identity with the society of origin whereas its meaning is inscribed within the dynamic of relations with the receiving society. . . . it is the vehicle of the passage to modernity within a promiscuity which confounds traditional distinctions, of an access to the public sphere which was forbidden to traditional women as a space of action and the constitutions of individual autonomy. (1995: 44–45, cited in Benhabib 2002: 97)

l 296

VEILING MODERNITIES

As well as the interplay of public and private, tradition and modernity, laicité itself has come into question, laicité being the uniquely French version of secularism defining the relationship between church and state, held as a near-sacred principle of the Republic. Kastoryano describes how laicité ‘‘systematically produces an antireligious discourse’’ along with ‘‘denominational neutrality’’ (2002a: 119–20). Yet the headscarf a√air has challenged its very basis, forcing the issue into the judiciary and the streets.π Thus have the French public and the courts negotiated the delicate balance between, first, the sartorial instantiation of laicité and its potential violation, and, next, freedom of religious expression. The controversy became increasingly politicized, until in 2005 a nationwide ban on the display of all ostentatious religious symbols went into e√ect. The law did not sit easily among those charging it with neocolonialism, racism, anti-Islamic policies, and antifreedom of religious expression, on the one hand, while proponents of the ban defended it, based on their understanding of laicité and female egalitarianism. Benhabib sums up the enduring dilemmas the conflict evoked: L’a√aire foulard eventually came to stand for all dilemmas of French national identity in the age of globalization and multiculturalism: how to retain French traditions of laicité, republican equality, and democratic citizenship in view of France’s integration into the European Union, on the one hand . . . and the pressures of multiculturalism generated through the presence of second- and third-generation immigrants from Muslim countries of French soil, on the other hand. (2002: 99–100)

AUTHENTICITY AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF HEADGEAR

Headscarves have become the displaced locus of debates on socioeconomic dynamics in contemporary Germany and have acquired a complex plethora of meanings. The headscarf debate is particularly apt in revealing the fissures within the highly di√erentiated German society as they come into sharper relief. Opposing political positions, seemingly religiously neutral, become more di√erentiated and ideologically oriented within public discourse. The scarf serves to highlight the political, social, and gendered struggle for control over the bodies of subjects by an increasingly biopolitical system. In other words, following the arguments developed by Foucault

VEILING MODERNITIES

297 l

and Agamben, the issue of the headscarf is fundamentally a part of a larger concern of modernity with natural life and the biopolitical. Thus the pressure surrounding the wearing of scarves and veils concerns the indistinguishability of the body from an identity politics fought out in the public sphere. As Moors argues, veiling has become central to Muslim women’s cultural authenticity, reproducing the fixation on the veil. Up to the present, debates on veiling continue to be framed by evaluations of processes of modernization and Westernization and quests for cultural authenticity (1998: 210). Given the historical precedent of wearing headscarves in di√erent contexts and for di√erent reasons, caution should be exercised when assigning any sort of stability to this phenomenon. Though the native claims might be phrased in a language of authenticity, it is essential also to attend to historical contingency. Women in both Germany and Turkey have equally made use of headscarves to express a form of resistance to a system rather than reiterating their own subaltern position within a patriarchal society, as a Turkish woman wearing a headscarf makes visible the relation between herself and her personal religio-political views, her economic state, or her region of origin. The political pulse of the Turkish diaspora beats in an arrhythmic pattern; it can be a slightly distorted echo of the political climate back in Turkey or, in some cases, an instigator for events in the homeland. With this in mind, I turn to a discussion of historical changes in the meaning of headscarves in Turkey, and then follow the thread it weaves through the present migration of Turks to Western Europe. In Turkish history, headgear styles have had profoundly political implications, long before the current headscarf debate. Upon the demise of the Sunni Islamic Ottoman Empire after World War I, Mustafa Kemal, backed by the Young Turks, arose as the founder and leader of the new Turkish Republic. Mustafa Kemal—later awarded the honorific title Atatürk, or father of Turks—instituted a set of ‘‘revolutions’’ following his Westernizing vision. Frequently known simply as ‘‘Kemalism,’’ the aim was to bring Turkey as an equal partner into the sphere of Europe; this was to be accomplished in part through an Occidentalist adoption of the modes and manners of Europe. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk inaugurated these reforms in the whirlwind decades of the 1920s and 1930s, following his stunning victory over the Western powers to which the corrupt and moribund remnants of the imperial Ottoman government had granted numerous capitulations. In the years following the deposing of the Ottoman sultan l 298

VEILING MODERNITIES

and the Islamic caliphate, Atatürk introduced the most significant of these reforms: changing the alphabet from Arabic to Roman script, symbolically breaking past associations Turkey had with Arabs, the Middle East, and most importantly, Islam and its clergy. One of his early reforms, called the ‘‘hat revolution,’’ began in the very conservative religious city of Kastamonu. He banned the fez, introducing the brimmed European style cap and the bowler hat. An objection to the brimmed cap was that it obstructed prayer: the forehead could no longer touch the ground. This was resolved by wearing the brim backwards, a form of passive resistance to the hat revolution. Yet the battleground of sartorial fashion and secularism had been prepared a century before Atatürk’s hat revolution, and his act was not without its own irony. For the fez had itself been introduced as an object of reform, one hundred years earlier, as part of the widespread period of reforms, known as tanzimat. At that time the fez, seen as Western and modern, replaced the turban, associated with Islamic Orthodoxy. The fez had been a Greek Christian fashion, worn in the Greek islands and borrowed from the Barbary corsairs.∫ The fez, produced in Vienna, was sold and used beyond the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it was a Western projection of ethnic garb. marking the historic and feared enemy of the Austro-Hungarians. Appropriated in the late Ottoman period of the nineteenth century as a marker of modern political and social status, it later acquired the ‘‘traditional’’ connotation, making it an obvious target for Atatürk’s reform movement. Here, the reinvention of tradition exemplifies the often conflicting relations and interpretations around the clothed body as it emerges in di√erent spatial and temporal realms. Though the veil, unlike the fez, never formally was banned, Atatürk actively discouraged women from wearing it, encouraging them to unveil their faces, to dress in Western-style clothing. Schoolgirls were not permitted to wear any headdress, part of the comprehensive nationalist, secularizing e√orts to be realized through standardized indoctrination in the public schools and village institutes. Atatürk’s own wife and coterie of adopted daughters were used as exemplary national models, along with several other important women participants in government and the arts. The unveiling of women simultaneously accompanied women’s entry into public space. Women in Turkey became enfranchised far earlier than in many Western states and began participating in previously male-only sectors. Atatürk’s revolution opened the way to virtually all sectors of VEILING MODERNITIES

299 l

society.Ω Integral to the Turkish nationalist project, women were situated as mediators between a backward Islamic past and a modern European future. Göle suggests that women’s social position became ‘‘the touchstone of Kemalist civilization,’’ a ‘‘bridge between civilization and nation’’ (1996: 64–65). Atatürk was determined that his Republic of Turkey would be secular, and o≈cially it has been, since the 1920s. Religious activity—the building of Qur’an schools and mosques, the training of imams, the taxing and regulating of vakifs (pious endowments), and so on—was placed under the control of government ministries. Turkish secularism was not a separation of church and state; it was the subordination of the church to the state, the sacred to the secular. The stalwart, traditional upholder of ‘‘Atatürkism,’’ a term often synonymous with secularism, has been the Turkish army, maintaining a powerful infrastructure extending throughout rural Anatolia. The army, moreover, staged three military coups d’etat at approximately ten-year intervals since 1960, always with the ostensible aim of ‘‘restoring Turkey to the correct (and secular) path of Atatürkism.’’ It is therefore noteworthy that the junta that assumed power in Turkey on September 12, 1980, proceeded with a somewhat di√erent strategy, particularly vis-à-vis religion. Despite their relentless pursuit, censorship, and massive incarceration of intellectuals, publishers, trade unionists, communists, alleged communists, and others considered subversives, the leaders of this military government neglected to put equivalent checks on growing underground Muslim groups. The irony of this strategy of silencing critical voices within civil society is that adherents of Islamism have been able to claim that the secular government turned Turkey into an authoritarian society, thus negating the basic freedoms of speech. A consequence of this criticism has been the partial colonization of civil society by Islamists, especially following the electoral successes of Islamist parties from 1994 onward. The long-term consequences of this criticism have been radical, culminating in a controversial Islamist government in Ankara elected in 1996 and led by Erbakan.∞≠ Eventually the military felt it could no longer countenance the Islamist agenda that had strayed intolerably far from Kemalism, and, without resorting to an overt coup, it managed to topple the government in the summer of 1997. Nevertheless, these religious orders have been growing unimpeded, in many cases assisted by generous donations from related organizations of Turkish workers in Germany. This support of religious orders calls attenl 300

VEILING MODERNITIES

tion to the contrast between the open, legal religiosity practiced by Turks abroad and the o≈cial ideology of secularism at home. Yet as mentioned in chapter 10, the scandal tying Özal’s ostensibly Atatürkist government to Saudi Arabia’s financing of religious education among Turks in Germany caused a domestic furor, particularly when the prime minister’s brother was implicated in the a√air. Thus, even within the explicitly and o≈cially secular republic, profoundly divisive movements have sought to undermine the basis of the nation’s laicist legitimacy.∞∞ This can be understood as an early example of what came to be called the ‘‘Turko-Islamic synthesis’’: the incorporation of religion into the received nationalist narrative. Other allegations linked government individuals with a Saudi-backed organization dedicated to irtica, transforming Turkey to the rule of Sharia, Islamic law (irtica; a ‘‘going back’’ or a ‘‘political reaction’’). One of their actions has been to pay women university students to wear headscarves to class. University attendance can be a costly pursuit in Turkey, and many young women took up the o√er (other women chose to wear the scarf for other reasons). The government has attempted to prevent these women from wearing scarves to classes, and the police have stepped in at examination time. Then, only women without scarves may enter the premises to sit for exams. An early manifestation of the pro-scarf movement occurred in the summer of 1987, when women students staged a hunger strike and public demonstrations in front of Istanbul University, protesting against the illegality of the headscarf. Hunger strikes in university dormitories have also taken place in rural Anatolian universities. Turning a half-blind eye, the government’s ambivalent and inconsistent attitude toward religious activities and symbols led it into an intractable situation. Precisely because the government chose to pursue the headscarf ban, it was pushed into an intransigent and arbitrary corner by enforcing such regulations. The headscarf debate has been a lively one in Turkey, and the intellectual community is divided over it. Some leading figures have publicly supported the protestors, citing civil rights. Others see the strikers as reactionary, fanatic Muslims who, given the opportunity and right climate, would deny all others civil rights. Many seem to agree that if the government ignored the headscarf activists, the problem would cease to exist. They believe that the government played into the hands of the fundamentalists, who cited persecution to justify their actions on moral grounds, asserting religio-moral legitimacy, a claim the secular government could scarcely VEILING MODERNITIES

301 l

make. The government found itself in an awkward position and, in the pursuit of a solution, proposed a compromise. In 1984 the Council of Higher Education allowed women to cover their hair with a ‘‘new’’ alternative, which, interestingly and not without historical irony, was called the ‘‘modern turban.’’ This head covering, resembling a cross between a shower cap and a small scarf tied behind the head, was proposed in the hope of satisfying the discontent.∞≤ The solution was short-lived, for three years later, in 1987, the turban was banned by the president of the Republic. Two years later, the Constitutional Court deemed it unconstitutional to wear the turban at university, claiming that ‘‘rather than an innocent custom, it [the headscarf ] has become a symbol of a world view opposed to the fundamental principles of the Republic’’ (Benhabib 2002: 203). Over the ensuing decades, the issue has escalated in Turkey in a way similar to that in Western Europe. In spring 2006, when the normally liberal, highly secularist daily, Cumhuriyet, learned that at Istanbul’s Bosphorus University students were freely wearing headscarves, it took action. On its front page it published a picture of scarved girls on the lush campus, with the caption ‘‘Is this Saudi Arabia?’’ Bosphorus University is widely considered the most selective and elite higher education institution in Turkey; all teaching is in English, and most of its faculty received their doctorates in the United States or Europe. Moreover, it is the only university in Turkey that uno≈cially permits students to wear scarves. The rector and vice-rector have been adamant in their support of their students’ civil rights, unwilling to enforce the o≈cial ban. Cumhuriyet clearly disagreed with this stance and provoked a showdown. Shortly after the sensationalist photo, the Higher Education Authority announced a week-long ‘‘routine inspection’’ of the campus, obviously to put pressure on the school’s administration for not complying with the law forbidding students from entering universities with headscarves. An administrator met with the leader of an Islamic women’s organization and they agreed that for the duration of the inspection the students would enter through the campus gates unscarved (though they were free to don wigs or hats). The university could then claim compliance with the letter of the law forbidding headscarves from entering the campus. It was explained to me that ‘‘Once the students are inside, if they choose to put on a scarf, what can we do? Our business is to teach, not to run around removing scarves.’’ The headscarf found its way into literature as well, having captured the fertile imagination of Turkey’s best-known contemporary author, Orhan l 302

VEILING MODERNITIES

Pamuk. In his novel Snow (2004), Ka, a secular Turkish poet, returns to the snowbound eastern Anatolian town of Kars after many long years in Germany, to research the distressing spate of suicides among headscarfwearing girls and young women. Assisted by gentle doses of magical realism, Pamuk interweaves the complex motivations of a variety of individuals attracted to ‘‘political Islam’’ with the tragic history of the region and the state. Kars, a formerly cosmopolitan town of faded beauty, inhabited by ghosts of its past residents—Armenians, Russians, Circassians, Ottomans— has become painfully provincial, heavily Kurdish, and controlled by the brutal local police and secret security services working for the laicist, antiIslamic state. Senseless violence erupts during the burlesque performance of an early Republican, heavily didactic Atatürkist propaganda play, My Fatherland or My Headscarf, as Pamuk anticipates the nonfictional unrest evoked by this piece of cloth. The 2008 lifting of the headscarf ban for university students, explosive and polarizing at home, has reached an international audience as well. Thus do issues of modernity and secularism meet head-on with civil rights concerns, challenging both the state and individuals to strike a precarious balance. Benhabib’s observations about the dilemmas facing France (2002), where national identity and laicité may be undermined by multiculturalist practices in an era defined by globalization, prove equally pertinent to Turkey. SUNNIS, ALEV˙IS, AND SCARVES

One obvious marker of the religio-morality of a Muslim woman is the headscarf; in some circles, the closer the scarf is to a totally covering veil, the higher is the piety-prestige value. Therefore, one mode of di√erentiating oneself from Alevis and secularists is by the type of headgear one wears or, for males, that one’s wife and daughter wear, since the form of women’s display in public is a direct reflection of her male relatives. Religiously observant Sunni women are never seen in public without headscarves. For some women, this stems from the belief that by viewing women’s hair a man experiences lust, causing his ritual purity to be compromised and necessitating that he perform abdest—ritual ablutions performed after the sexual act. However, as described above, the same women who in Turkey might never wear a scarf, when in Germany may don the scarf with pride, seeing it as a way of reappropriating their bodies from the fixity and fixation of Germans. VEILING MODERNITIES

303 l

Scarf-wearing women may adopt any number of variants of fastening and tying, based on either regional convention or political-religious belief or a≈liation. The most extreme is complete veiling, consisting of fabric covering the face but su≈ciently diaphanous to permit seeing out, while shielding the woman from the male gaze. This is rarely seen in Turkey. Many other scarf styles can be seen throughout the country; some resemble the nun’s habit commonly seen in the days before the liberalization of the Catholic Church. Only the face shows, from the eyebrows to the chin, with the ears and all hair covered. Many women wear several layers of scarves: small, thin, cotton kerchiefs around their heads, under a longer scarf falling over the shoulder and part-way down the back, over which still a third loose capelike scarf-shawl is draped over the head and body, and clutched either with teeth or a hand. Regional styles are responsible for some of the variation, but the methods of wearing, folding, and tying indicate not only regional identity and markedness but also a combination of sect, fashion, and political a≈liation. The fashionable tesettür outfit enjoys huge popularity. Generally an ankle-length coat, along with a large headscarf, it conceals the wearer’s neck and hair, though it reveals her face. The colors and style of the coat and scarf, as well as the make and pattern, change seasonally. Those who opt for this uniform follow magazines, the Internet, and Islamist-oriented fashion shows where models parade the latest styles of tesettür to eager consumers.∞≥ A wide range of styles can be seen on the streets of Berlin and Istanbul, including consciously color-coordinated accessories and elaborately arranged scarf-dos, mimicking fancy hairdos. The fashionable elides into the political, as scarved women unambiguously express political allegiances with their sartorial choice. On the contrary, not wearing a headscarf has become an equally marked choice. Secular and Alevi-identified women deliberately di√erentiate themselves from the Sunni Islamists; it is a presentation of the self through an absence of this emblem. THE POLITICS OF RESISTANCE AND THE ‘‘FOREIGNER PROBLEM’’

To understand the headscarf debate in the German context, recall that German questions of nationhood and identity set the terms of debate about Turkish identity as well. In Germany women and girls with their heads covered often encounter negative reaction; attempts have been made to prevent them from wearing scarves. Similar to the situation in Turkey, l 304

VEILING MODERNITIES

some German public school teachers have prohibited girls from wearing scarves in the classroom. The debate has focused the attention of the right and the left alike, providing a forum for their diametrically opposed views on the issue of assimilation and the future of the Turkish presence in Germany. Only in their categorical opposition to the scarves are the right and left united, but the motivations informing the anti-scarf sentiment diverge. In the prevailing discourse of the right, the headscarf represents proof of the fundamental ‘‘nonintegrateability’’ of the Turks. The scarf is seen as ugly, backward, and most of all, threateningly un-German, but also something intransigently innate to Turks and Turkish identity. This perception reflects a belief in an insurmountable, ontological di√erence between Turks and Germans. By contrast, in the discourse of the feminist left, the headscarf symbolizes innate Turkish practices of sexism, backward and primitive patriarchal domination of women, and repression. For much of the left the headscarf represents the barrier that must be removed before successful Turkish emancipation and integration into German society can be achieved. According to this logic, the act of removing a part of the body’s covering strips away just enough backwardness to allow Turkish women to join an ideal political community championing personal freedoms. To Turks reacting to these pressures, the headscarf has taken on an additional symbolic dimension representing a sartorial form of resistance. The headscarf conflict reflects Hebdige’s analysis of subculture and style; in this conflict we can observe ‘‘the dialectic between action and reaction which renders these objects meaningful . . . [which] can be encapsulated in a single object, so the tensions between dominant and subordinate groups can be found reflected in the surfaces of subculture—in the styles made up of mundane objects which have a double meaning’’ (1979: 2). However, caution should be exercised in espousing such a strict dialectic because the same relations are often reversed or at least not as clear-cut and stable as Hebdige implies. Turkish German women are fully cognizant of German negative attitudes about headscarves. Some have chosen to interpret the disapprobation in a positive way, turning the German reproach on its head. One woman, Zehra, arrived at her decision to wear a scarf through syllogistic reasoning. She told me, ‘‘I never wore a scarf in Turkey. But here in Germany it seems Germans think all Turkish women wear scarves. So if I don’t wear one, they may think I’m not a real Turk. I’m proud to be Turkish—I VEILING MODERNITIES

305 l

certainly wouldn’t wish to be German—so here I’ll wear a headscarf.’’ Thus, quite literally, Zehra embodies German expectations of her. Her logic bears a close resemblance to that of the actor playing the part of the Turkish woman described in the chapter epigraph: she both internalizes and embodies presumed external expectations. Meeker notes similar dynamics, remarking how, in the case of Islamist youth in Turkey, ‘‘in the course of having more direct contact with the West, a segment of Turkish youths discovered their Islamic identity’’ (1994: 47). Similarly, Zehra’s decision was contingent; it emerged from the complex web of identity politics within Germany. In Turkey, her Turkishness had never been called into question; in Turkey there was no need for her to don the scarf. Some parents, feeling threatened by the encompassing Christian, permissive society and its potentially corrupting influence on their children, turn to the headscarf to define a symbolic border, delimiting two separate corporate groups and a≈rming themselves as part of a moral community. The reactions of younger generations can take di√erent forms, since, for some, years of intensive indoctrination at home, Qur’an schools, and the mosque outweigh other forces and influences. But other teenage girls have responded to the religious practices of their parents by shedding the scarves they are expected to wear as soon as they are out of sight of their homes, adorning themselves with makeup and miniskirts at school. In other instances, girls of nonobservant parents decide on their own to adopt tesettür. The diaspora context does little to alleviate the already deep-set antagonisms, suspicion, and animosity between Sunnis and Alevis. In fact, if anything, some Sunnis become still more hostile toward Alevis due to several factors. The unchecked politicization of mosque-centered religious preaching proliferating in Germany often is directed against ‘‘infidel immoral’’ Germans, communists, and, by extension, Alevis. In political life the Alevis have reputations as leftists; in Germany, an environment characterized as ‘‘forbidden,’’ haram,∞∂ some Sunnis readily make the association that these heretical Muslims would embrace German moral codes as well. They find the proof they seek in Alevi women and girls publicly displaying scarfless bare heads for all to see, parading about without this protector and definer of morality. It does not require a conceptual quantum leap for some Sunnis to presume that Alevis abroad partake of pork, rea≈rming stereotypical beliefs. Nilüfer’s experience seemed not uncommon. I was visiting her family, l 306

VEILING MODERNITIES

Alevis, when she returned home, visibly upset. Nilüfer, eleven, told me that a Turkish (Sunni) classmate had asked her about her mother. She explained: The girl asked me, ‘‘Does your mother cover her head?’’ and I said, yes, she usually does. Then she asked me if my mother’s scarf totally covered her hair, so that not even one strand of hair showed. I told her no, she doesn’t wear that sort of scarf, her hair does show. Then she said to me, ‘‘Aha!’’ You’re one of them!’’ and she turned her back on me and walked away.

Alevi women in Germany usually do not wear scarves, particularly girls and women who were born in Germany or who came as children. Their older mothers or elderly grandmothers might wear kerchiefs out on the street, but like Nilufer’s mother, they wear loose kerchiefs revealing hair; they would not wear a complete three-layered arrangement. The shedding of the scarf is consonant with Alevi cosmology. Alevi women need not keep their scarves on to keep their identity intact because the hidden, pure self needs no piece of cloth to protect it. Paradoxically, shedding the scarf, an act not particularly significant to Alevis, becomes imbued with meaning for liberal Germans, who would take this act as a sign of their willingness to ‘‘integrate.’’ Thus, even the act of not wearing a scarf becomes a polysemic and contested one. By understanding scarflessness in this way, Germans appropriate the other’s other. At this point we might ask why the terms of the debate occur only within a discourse delimited by assimilation and exclusion. The contest over the scarf, characterized by multilayered meanings, mediates between as many positions, but the notion of pluralism rarely enters the realm. Whereas the assimilationist arguments align easily with the shift toward European postmulticulturalist policies and sensibilities, perhaps a perspective informed by cultural pluralism might imply a society where headscarves lose their stigma, where the marked, problematic visibility of scarved women loses its markedness. When thinking and writing about the proverbial ‘‘other’’ it is essential to exercise caution not to reproduce the strategy of the dominant, of the colonizer, or of the structuralist extremist, to avoid falling into the trap of turning the dichotomization of ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ into an ontological one, be it Turk/German, Sunni/Alevi, or scarved/uncovered. The identities that emerge and shift through specific times and places, with their correspondVEILING MODERNITIES

307 l

ing meanings, are generated, contested, and fought over, not simply decreed or enacted (Coronil 1986). The question of human agency enters the discussion, as the nature and mode of particular boundary-setting mechanisms and dialogues are mediated by a strongly contested sartorial symbol. It is within the social, political, and physical fields described that the setting and resetting of boundaries takes place. The expression of identities, delimited by these boundaries, involves the often self-conscious acceptance and rejection of symbolic practices, and an accompanying revalorization as much for Germans as for Turks. The many threads become intricately interwoven and problematized in a charged piece of cloth, as illustrated through brief excursions into Turkish history, alternative expressions of Islam—both in Turkey and the migrant diaspora—in addition to the highly di√erentiated German political spectrum. Headscarf debates emerge in all these fora. It may be useful to put this debate in perspective by comparing it with another earlier one, in Algeria, described by Fanon in his essay ‘‘Algeria Unveiled’’: To the colonialist o√ensive against the veil, the colonized opposes the cult of the veil. What was an undi√erentiated element in a homogeneous whole acquires a taboo character, and the attitude of a given Algerian woman with respect to the veil will be constantly related to her overall attitude with respect to the foreign occupation. (1967: 47)

In a subtle yet elaborated way, the Turkish headscarf plays a similar role. Though since the 1920s the headscarf in Turkey has not always been an ‘‘undi√erentiated element in a homogeneous whole,’’ some styles of the scarf nevertheless have been generic and unmarked. Certainly it has come into its own in the foreign context. The current situation has become still more complex with regard to the styles, attitudes, and significations given the veil by Turks and also the range of positions expressed by Germans. One might look at scarf-wearing women as Bourdieu’s ‘‘dominated agents . . . defining themselves as the established order defines them’’ (1984: 471), but neither is this su≈cient. True, they are defining themselves as the headscarf wearers that the German established order envisions, but for some of these women this gesture is transformed into an emphatic statement of cultural politics. Thus, in a sense, the woman becomes her raiments for those who would unveil her, transposing her into an arena where l 308

VEILING MODERNITIES

formerly taken-for-granted symbols are redeployed within a contested political terrain. A more radical, even transgressive use of the veil can be seen in another example I witnessed in Germany, in 2001, at the well-attended celebration of ‘‘Turkey’s Day of Youth’’ in Berlin’s House of World Culture—a huge city-funded complex promoting multicultural arts and politics. Seated beside me were two teen-aged girls, immaculately dressed and made up, complete with stilettos and stylish body-hugging shirts and trousers. In addition, they wore bright white headscarves fashionably tied behind their heads, each accessorized by a red and gold headband. Emblazoned on headbands across their foreheads was the name of a popular singer. This mixing of ‘‘traditional’’ religious headscarves and popular global fashion accentuated a kind of baroque aesthetic of the self, denoting an aesthetic surplus irreducible to its possible meanings. Some other young women I knew spoke with awe and respect for their friends who had decided to wear headscarves in more conventional ways. They expressed the sincere hope that one day perhaps they too would have mastered the internal struggle and attain the courage to wear the headscarf. EROTIC SCARVES AND ‘‘MODERN GIRLS’’

Still, scarves are not simply the boundary markers between Sunnis and Alevis on the one hand, or Germans and Turks on the other. In late 1990s Berlin, scarves acquired a new currency in the mimetic reinvention of identities. Not uncommon are street scenes in Kreuzberg of colorfully scarved teens and young women, dressed like the girls at the youth festival. Below their scarved shoulders, they strut complete with perilously high platform shoes, body-revealing clothes, makeup, even pierced navels. Some call them modern kızlar—modern girls. Neologizing them as Neuköllner Fräuleinwunder (Neukölln is a west Berlin neighborhood that, along with Kreuzberg and Wedding, has a large Turkish population; Fräuleinwunder is a ‘‘girl wonder’’), Smotczyk projects his fascination with them: ‘‘The headscarf is a magic hood, a code, and fashion. It says ‘We are di√erent. Different from the Germans. Di√erent from the Turks.’ They (these girls) are the masters of eroticism in revealing and concealing. They organize their private lives on their mobile telephones’’ in order that their parents won’t know where they are and with whom they are sleeping (1999: 97). The Fräuleinwunder are not the only Berlin Turks innovating with new VEILING MODERNITIES

309 l

combinations of sartorial cultural politics. Turkish Berliner transvestites also have appropriated it for themselves. One night each month a Gayhane, ‘‘gay-house,’’ held in Kreuzberg attracts transvestites, heterosexuals, gays, and lesbians.∞∑ Perhaps the scarved Turkish transvestite represents a localized, ironic spin on the ‘‘traditional’’ flamboyantly dyed platinum blond look, but both the gender-benders and the assertively sexualized revealing/ concealing young women have taken a ready-made symbol and transformed it, while reinventing themselves in a place they unequivocally are claiming as their own. While staking social claims to this place, they play with symbols and paradoxes, with deliberately ambiguous alternative spins on ‘‘tradition’’ and ‘‘modernity.’’

l 310

VEILING MODERNITIES

Conclusion Reluctant Cosmopolitans demotic: of or pertaining to the current, ordinary, everyday form of a language; of or pertaining to the common people.1

l The arguments of this book have revolved around the problematic framing of otherness. Otherness has been interpreted in its numerous inflections, including racialization, ethnicization, and gendered politics of scale, where diasporic contours of a shifting German society and associated transnational networks provide the relevant and meaningful contexts. I have tried to show how the multiple physical and social spaces inhabited by Turkish German actors, whether in domestic or public spheres, suggest an analysis of social relations in Germany. For example, ‘‘world-openness’’ is an oft-heard phrase referring to ideas about how to arrange culture and politics in an acceptably cosmopolitan fashion. Yet what sort of cosmopolitism is envisioned? Whom does it include and exclude? Where do the Turkish Germans fit in this self-consciously defined world-open, cosmopolitan society? Echoing discussions of ethnicity in earlier chapters, the question arises: Whose cosmopolitanism? In addressing the problems related to concepts of ethnicity, I drew a distinction between folk models and beliefs on the one hand and social science theories on the other, suggesting that in some cases the latter had unwittingly appropriated the former. Likewise, when considering cosmopolitanism, drawing a similar distinction between folk models and analytic theories is useful, albeit at the risk of destabilizing the way cosmopolitanism often is understood.≤ Given the specific context of Germany and the elite capture of the term cosmopolitanism, a revisiting of alternative definitions and possibilities is in order.≥

ARE TURKS COSMOPOLITAN?

The ‘‘Turkish community’’ has been associated in the popular imaginary with secluded, marginalized spaces within the ghettoized, poverty-ridden district of Kreuzberg. In this representation of abjection, the Turk has been depicted as victim, downtrodden, socially excluded, incapable of speaking on her own behalf. She has been deprived of political and economic agency and considered ultimately uninterested in ‘‘integrating’’ into German ways of life—this entire cluster crystallized in the iconic headscarf. Throughout this book I have attempted to confront such representations by showing the multilayered diversity of Turkish German lives. The stereotype that would isolate a mustached Turkish migrant slicing meat o√ his rotisserie in a kebab shop fails to recognize that an entire transnational world unfolds within these very boundaries. On the contrary, this shop owner has acquired basic accounting skills, has learned to negotiate with German health and sanitation authorities, and, using his German-language skills and communicative practices, often sells his sandwiches to Germans and other non-Turks. Furthermore, he has developed managerial talents with his employees as well as entrepreneurial skills as he considers issues such as advertising, competition, pricing, expansion, and the market. The success of kebab shops in Germany, as Ça˘glar has shown, also relates to the appeal of a specific culinary aesthetic, newly indigenized in the diasporic context and not reliant on reproducing ‘‘authentic’’ genres and ingredients from the homeland (Marston 2000; Pécoud, n.d.; Ça˘glar 1995). A more nuanced understanding of the immigrant population might view Turkish Germans less as ghettoized victims than creative players whose skills may be transferred across boundaries—geographic, political, or cultural. Similarly, the success of Turkish German groups of elites (the ‘‘ethnic elites’’) with German cultural producers and consumers bears witness to the multifaceted nature of their experience and to the manifold places they inhabit simultaneously. In other words, even though I have argued that the so-called ethnic elites might ultimately reproduce German stereotypes about Turkish authenticity, it is equally the case that they have begun to resist such constraints, defying the limited visions once presented to them. A Turkish German cabaret artist, Muhsin Omurca, has resisted, indeed, transgressed the given abjection paradigm. His graphic stories, transmitted both in print and over the Internet, cleverly manipulate the l 312

CONCLUSION

adventures of Kanakman, humorously defusing the sting of the once pejorative moniker—the name itself a grammatical conjoining of languages. One of the characters represents a ‘‘plagiarized German’’ (‘‘German by day, Turkish by night’’); another of Omurca’s tongue-in-cheek depictions describes how Europe owes the Turks a debt of gratitude—after all, it is only thanks to them that the otherwise squabbling European countries unite in their common hatred of Turks. Accordingly, Omurca and other ‘‘ethnic elites/culture producers’’ have entered an arena of traveling in cyberspace, beyond conventional borders, traversing social and geographic frontiers, and thus remapping the ‘‘roots and routes’’ (Cli√ord 1998) available to transnational networkers. Still, a growing perception of Turkish Germans as transnational actors, yet committed to living and working in Germany, has gained currency. In part, this emerged from the politics of contestation of the early 1990s bringing to the fore the contradictions of the ‘‘foreigner problem.’’ The horrendous violence of the immediate postunification period, marked in particular by the killing of Turks in Mölln and Solingen, brought visibility to the existential and social conditions in which Turks, often born in Germany, were living at the time.∂ This period proved to be an epochal shift, whereby hundreds of thousands of Germans felt roused to act, participating in candlelight marches in solidarity with Ausländer. Such activities evolved into political campaigns within the Green and Social Democratic parties and numerous Turkish German organizations, to liberalize citizenship policies, recognizing that the ‘‘foreigners’’ had earned a right to stay, with equal legal rights and protection. In the aftermath of the violent incidents many Turkish Germans vowed to remember the victims. As Kastoryano describes, wall gra≈ti memorialized the ‘‘victims of racist acts, as if to mark the territorial limits of the neighborhood and the borders of a collective identity’’ (2002: 129). In addition, associational gatherings of Turkish groups ritualized the memorializing of the dead with a minute of silence. The increased tension felt by this minority, extremist parts of which have called for vengeance (ibid.), had a direct impact on how they inhabited the city. In the wake of the attacks, many Turkish Germans took pains not to call attention to themselves. They refrained from speaking Turkish in public; they escorted their children to and from school; they remained in the western portions of the city, away from the skinheads. Within an undivided Berlin new divisions arose, no longer delimited by a wall but where identities increasingly beCONCLUSION

313 l

came defined by reactions to the violence (ibid). Whereas the immediate e√ect of the attacks was a retreat of Turkish Germans into reduced visibility, the long-lasting e√ect was a crystallization of the will to make claims for human and civil rights. Competing images of Turkish Germans circulated in public spaces. Posters appeared on city walls proclaiming solidarity with foreigners; didactic messages were aimed at the local xenophobic audience. One of the solidarity posters seen throughout Berlin in 1992 stated simply in black and white ‘‘Ich bin auch ein Ausländer,’’ I, too, am a foreigner, echoing a popular slogan ‘‘We are foreigners everywhere.’’ The poster’s field was filled with names of prominent Germans. One poster incited controversy. A striking image seen throughout Berlin in 1992, it portrayed in black and white a photograph of a small Turkish child, up against a wall, with a frightened expression on his face. Surrounding the child were large trousered legs, towering over him. The text read: ‘‘Stop—no violence. Violence against others is always unjust. Place your heart and understanding against fists and hatred.’’ Many found the depiction of the pitiful child insulting, with its perpetuation of the stereotype of the helpless, pathetic, passive Turk.∑ A decade later, Berlin’s popular biweekly info magazine Zitty sponsored an advertising blitz of posters throughout the city. Conforming to the same simple template, each showed a large photographed portrait of a person’s face looking directly at the camera, engaging the viewer. The posters proclaimed the single phrase ‘‘Die Stadt bin ich,’’ I am the city. Befitting the target audience Zitty wished to attract, the faces represented all colors, lifestyles, ages, and sexes. With this clever marketing strategy, Zitty declared to its present and potential readers that it was an inclusive, politically correct medium. Zitty, while commodifying the others, also granted them a stake in the very city that often marginalized and ‘‘foreignized’’ them. Many of the depicted faces clearly were meant to be read as ‘‘Turkish’’ Berliners. Thus Zitty in its marketing campaign inadvertently helped create the space for what I provisionally call a ‘‘demotic cosmopolitanism.’’ These images were at odds with the self-consciously cosmopolitan images projected by ‘‘world-open’’ elites, the ‘‘frequent travellers’’ described by Calhoun, ‘‘whose cosmopolitanism is a ‘lifestyle choice’ ’’ (2002: 91). Zaimo˘glu (2006) speaks of a new sort of German; alongside east and west Germans, there are now ‘‘foreign Germans.’’ This phrase in German

l 314

CONCLUSION

might strike the native speaker as a contradiction in terms—surely his intention.∏ Perhaps Zitty’s poster campaign accelerated this provocation. COSMOPOLITAN CHALLENGES

One challenge to demotic cosmopolitanism has been the incoming ethnic Germans from the East Bloc. The sudden and dramatic increase in their number in the 1990s contributed to a further transformation in the construction of otherness, making more complex the identitary dialectic between the ostensibly German German, and German Ausländer groups. The newcomers may have challenged the assumptions of what it meant to be a foreigner, but equally, they brought into question what it meant to be German. Whereas prior to unification the salient social identity opposition was German-Ausländer, this was complicated by a new set of oppositions no longer fitting the simplistic opposition of West vs. East people. The perceived and felt di√erences between Aussiedler and eastern and western Germans were manifested in myriad forms: in disparate habitus, including sensibilities, dispositions, consumption patterns and their meanings, and di√erent life experiences, as well as in their separate and unequal economic situations and vocational prospects. The fear was that they might be another sort of ‘‘foreigner Germans.’’ Eastern Germans who operated in western German environments had to learn to deal with the psychological pressures of sticking out, of being the tainted easterners, of having the wrong accents, taste, clothing, work ethics, habits, and spending practices. Some western Berliners who socialized or worked with eastern Berliners spoke of their surprise to learn how profound was the sense of easterners’ helplessness and insecurity; they were even more shocked to hear blatant racist comments issued from people ‘‘who should have known better.’’ Some observers explain this by the fact that the eastern Germans were accustomed to life in a fairly closed society; the only foreigners with whom they normally came into contact were citizens of other East European socialist states and the USSR.π Prior to unification, a fantasy of one imagined Volk, merely temporarily separated, could be nurtured.∫ Faced with the political and economic reality of uniting that imagined Volk, Germany had to come to terms with its population looking over its shoulder at two radically distinct visions of personal and collective history, ‘‘an interplay between hegemonic and oppositional

CONCLUSION

315 l

memory’’ (Berdahl 1999b: 192), implying deep fissures in the once takenfor-granted Deutschtum, the generalized sense of Germanness, including ideas about German ‘‘Culture.’’ At the same time new economic strains from the exorbitant costs of German-German unification, along with the perception of finite resources, no longer enough to go around, have meant that ‘‘foreigners’’ have been adversely a√ected by the new situation. Turkish immigrants have been compelled to question their role in the new Germany, within a new fortress Europe. Some Turkish Germans interviewed in the 1990s expressed nostalgia for the days without competition from the East, before Poles, eastern Germans, Aussiedler, and, increasingly, asylum seekers underbid them for jobs. During the 1990s the foreigner discourse became entangled with the sense that a new group of Ausländer, the asylum seekers, were taking undue advantage of the country’s liberal policies (Sanadjian, 1995).Ω The German government’s policy toward asylum seekers, to physically segregate them in holding settlements called Heim, ironically recalled the German Heimat. Despite their geographic isolation, the asylum seekers were nevertheless visible to the wider population and vulnerable to attack. The image abroad of a democratic Germany was tarnished by the neo-Nazi skinhead-led attacks; this a√ected Germany’s economy, as many foreign businesses steered away from the country. At the same time the German government began to soften its immigration and naturalization policies, demonstrating to the larger world the coherence of its foreigner policy. As described in chapter 8, this culminated in the new citizenship law of 2000 and the immigration reform of 2001. Whereas the new law has enabled the children born to legally residing Turks in Germany to acquire citizenship, it has stopped short of permitting them to express a full range of a≈liations, as dual nationality remains D illegal. Still, this new law takes a step in the direction of answering Senocak’s complaint about conceptual or cultural room for civil definitions of citizenship, regardless of passport. In the thirtieth year of immigration, Germany must no longer be last in line in Europe when it comes to the rights and life options of foreigners. Despite German assurances to the contrary, we see no serious desire for integration as long as the de-bureaucratization and the liberalization of the German naturalization law in its implementation are excluded from discussion. The o√er l 316

CONCLUSION

entailed in the statement ‘‘the foreigners could become citizens if they really wanted to’’ remains a mockery in the face of many aspects of German citizenship that derive from genealogical criteria. According to these principles, someone of German descent from an Eastern European country whose ancestors might have lived for as many as five hundred years outside German territory and who speaks only broken German or no German at all, is considered a German. But not a Turk of the second or third generation who speaks far better German than Turkish: he is and remains a foreigner. The fact that racialized thought (Rassengedanke) can continue to play such a central role in a country where such thinking led to unimaginable crimes is, to put it mildly, alienating. (2000: 7–8)

The absence of an immigration policy contradicts the presence of more than seven million ‘‘foreigners’’ residing in Germany, many of them for several decades, many of them having been born there. The highly contested passage of the citizenship law—but the failure to legitimize dual nationality—showed that many Germans were not ready to include such problematic Turkish Germans as genuine co-citizens, albeit with a more extensive cosmopolitics. The citizenship reform debates were governed by the tired logic of loyalty, assimilation, integration, and exclusion of foreigners. D As Senocak has observed, German debates on integration imply a radical form of resignation of one’s own culture. ‘‘ ‘Integrate,’ say the others. By this they mean nothing short of absolute assimilation, the disappearance of Anatolian faces behind German masks. . . . demonization and glorification of things foreign lie close together. Both are defensive mechanisms, that rest, not on a relationship of partnership, but on one of domination’’ (2– 3). Indeed, ‘‘integration’’ euphemizes ‘‘assimilation,’’ entailing in part a loss of self. In ‘‘integration’’ the ostensibly opposed discourses of the pro-foreigner left converge with the Ausländer raus!—foreigners out—right. As with the headscarf, the prospect of others in our midst steadfastly refusing to become us, to look, eat, and act like us, to be exclusively loyal to us, simply is intolerable to many well-meaning Germans. Tenacious di√erence that chooses not to assimilate is the problem, even a threat—again, how can there be a ‘‘foreign German’’? In a symbolically similar way to earlier calls for mass repatriation of Turks, assimilation signifies disappearance, accomplishing the same task. In today’s Germany much of the political rhetCONCLUSION

317 l

oric implies that competing images of Turkishness need to be governed by an ambiguous cultural logic, for some, associated with the elusive dream of a Leitkultur. Yet e√orts to ease the integration trauma have been made. Marieluise Beck, in her capacity as the Federal Commissioner for Migration, Refugees, and Integration, has criticized some aspects of refugee and asylum law. ‘‘The integration of foreigners in Germany must be, in the future, more than just paper pushing over where and how they are to live. These days, every fourth newborn in Germany has a foreign parent, making the debates over a multicultural society rather superfluous’’ (Grässler 2005). Representing the Greens—the party unsuccessfully advocating dual nationality—she has challenged the anti-immigration policies of Germany’s conservative parties. Unafraid to speak of immigration, her o≈ce published an updated ‘‘integration guide’’ for foreigners in Germany. Available in numerous languages, A Manual for Germany o√ers helpful information decoding the nuts and bolts of daily life, explaining everything from welfare benefits and health insurance to popular culture, naturalization procedures, and ‘‘how to participate in German democracy.’’ Ambiguously, in its genuine attempt to integrate the foreigners, it invites the reader to abandon the ‘‘foreign’’ stigma. From the manual’s introduction: What is the ‘‘Einwohnermeldeamt’’ and what does the ‘‘Ausländergesetz’’ mean for you? What about your ‘‘Krankenversicherung’’? What about the ‘‘Kindergarten’’ for your children? What does the ‘‘gez’’ stand for? How do you get electricity, a telephone line or an Internet connection in your new apartment? Who are ‘‘Deutsche Michel,’’ ‘‘Max and Moritz’’ the ‘‘Tigerente’’ and ‘‘Willy Brandt’’? And last but not least, what rights do you have to participate in German democracy? What does the ‘‘Zweitstimme’’ mean and what is the ‘‘kommunale Ausländerwahlrecht’’? You will soon see that it is not as complicated as it seems. The cabaret star Karl Valentin used a clever pun: ‘‘Foreigners only feel foreign in a foreign environment.’’ This brochure is designed to help you integrate in Germany as quickly as possible. We hope the word ‘‘foreigner’’ will soon become a foreign word for you and we wish you the best of luck.∞≠

The task of ‘‘integrating’’ foreigners is truly monumental, and the manual makes important strides. Attempting to ease the way of immigrants in their quotidian lives by translating Germanness, it invites them into the body politic, o√ering the privilege and responsibilities of potential enfranchisel 318

CONCLUSION

ment. What remains unsaid is how di√erence might be accommodated in an inclusive way, creating a space for achieving ‘‘integration’’ that is not simply a euphemism for assimilation. DEGREES OF GERMAN: DENATIONALIZING CITIZENSHIP

While the German government makes a legal case for distinguishing between ‘‘ethnic German’’ and Ausländer, popular perception sometimes conflates the two. Initially, many Germans, confronted by alleged coethnics from the former Soviet Union, the Aussiedler, were themselves prepared to make economic sacrifices on their behalf. However, once the Aussiedler arrived, they acted, looked, and sounded un-German. They violated the implicit contract, not conforming to desired models of Germanness, instead appearing to be another variant of Ausländer : hence the contradictory perception of a putative insider who has come to be defined increasingly as an outsider. An unprecedented awareness, taken by some as a symptom of decay of the German heritage, has been that foreignness can inhabit ostensible Germanness and its national narrative. Might this signal a potential transformation of the very nature of German citizenship? Zaimo˘glu’s ironic proposal may have wider implications than he imagined. Perhaps contained within a transformed national narrative is an inkling of possibility, that first would sanction the ‘‘foreignness’’ of the Russian Germans and then extend the same welcome to Turkish Germans. The alternative would be a deeper entrenchment of the troubling genealogical, common-descent models of belonging predicated on the realization of an organic community premised on the idea of a common culture.∞∞ Some politicians claim that Germany already has abandoned the ideology of common culture, pointing to the citizenship reforms and cosmopolitan façade of Berlin. They cite the new/old capital as exemplifying democratic renewal of German institutions. In the government’s publicly accessible websites, conscious decisions have been made as to how it wishes to represent itself visually and textually. On one visit to the website of the federal government, the initial image displayed was a photo of an East Asian girl; the site explicitly cast Germany as a ‘‘hospitable, cosmopolitan and attractive’’ tourist destination. The City of Berlin website o√ered as its own icon the image of a cultural metropolis, represented by a billboard photograph of Sir Simon Rattle, the British Jewish conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. Berlin praises its CONCLUSION

319 l

own cultural complexity, its diversity that fosters opportune conditions for cultural and economic creativity. It points to numerous subcultures as possessing the necessary critical mass for their lasting and far-reaching cosmopolitanizing e√ects. Furthermore, Berlin locates itself on the geopolitical map as belonging to both the east and west, o√ering itself as the linking bridge, the site where experiences of the previously divided continent gather together. Choosing the iconic onion domes of the Kremlin juxtaposed with the Ei√el Tower of Paris, the website situates itself as the epicenter of a new geopolitical space and ‘‘east-west metropolis.’’ How should one read the site’s touting of Berlin’s diverse nature, given that Turkish language and culture find no place within this virtual cyber-cityscape? It is noteworthy that while Germany has a vision of itself at the doorstep of the east and praises its capacity to welcome and to move e√ortlessly between the two poles of the Ei√el Tower–Kremlin continuum, it does not fundamentally recognize, to use the words of Trinh Minh-ha, that the ‘‘Third World has moved West (or North, depending on where the dividing line falls) and has expanded so as to include even the remote parts of the First World’’ (1989: 98). It is as if Berlin’s and Germany’s self-congratulatory world-open cosmopolitanism limits itself to an east-west axis, ignoring the north-south, even when the south has moved northwest, becoming an integral part of the body politic. There remains a reluctance to abandon this elitist version of cosmopolitanism; as Trinh Minh-ha points out, this might be due to the reluctance to see themselves as ‘‘just an other among others’’ (99). In this case, Germans who resist overwhelming evidence that they are becoming, indeed, simply one ‘‘other among others’’ resist the implication or the potential of relativism.∞≤ The recognition of the ‘‘self as an other among others’’ is another way of imagining a demotic notion of cosmopolitanism. A reconsideration of the hierarchically construed way cosmopolitanism generally has been appropriated and conceived by elites, it opens the way for a democratization of the concept. Moreover, it would portend the capitulation of the very basis of the idea of a special status of Germany in geopolitical and cultural life, a notion that has gained frighteningly wide currency among a powerful minority in the short time since unification.∞≥ At the same time, German politicians increasingly embrace the argument of Germany’s equal status among other states, in order to show that the tragic, shameful past no

l 320

CONCLUSION

longer predetermines German foreign policy. An example of this new democratic positioning of the German state was the commitment of German troops on foreign soil, in the Yugoslavia conflict. A fear of political and cultural relativism, part of a rising concern with the state of the nationalist narrative and symbolism, might be at stake. Yet despite the inward-looking trends, exemplified by the advocates of Leitkultur, the monumental step of citizenship reform arguably leads in a di√erent direction. Fundamentally at odds with the age-old jus sanguinis ideology and policy, for the first time citizenship no longer is reckoned exclusively by claims to privileged patrimony. That children born of Turkish parents have a right to the previously o√-limits membership in the German circle of citizenry rocks the foundation of the meaning of German, and the nature of citizen.∞∂ It implies as well a step toward what Sassen has called ‘‘denationalized citizenship’’ (2002). She argues that in light of the significant changes nations are undergoing—for example, how pressure from an international human rights regime impinges on traditional state sovereignty—the meaning of citizenship within nations also is altered, destabilizing older ideas about exclusive state sovereignty. NATIONAL BELONGING TO NATIONAL BRANDING

Since the 1980s, some in Germany have been concerned with the waning sense of national belonging. In response they initiated a rapprochement with the great cultural and national symbols, including residues from the prewar period, among them the national anthem, the eagle, and the flag, in order to renew positive identifications and the corresponding sense of symbolic attachment to the idea of the German Fatherland. However, as Mushaben argues, ‘‘the re-introduction of national symbols has met with more indi√erence than active enthusiasm’’ (1996: 68). Among the reasons given by many were indi√erence but also embarrassment, estrangement, and ignorance about the meaning of such symbols. Toward the end of the 1990s it was acknowledged that Germany no longer could avoid the significance of the negative impact of its symbols, both domestically and abroad. Thus instead of continuing the process of reappropriation of the old repertoire of national symbolism, a search began for new, positive identifications, images, and symbols of what ultimately has been proposed as a new de—Deutschland-Europa. The lowercase letters, ‘‘de,’’ already enjoyed high

CONCLUSION

321 l

recognition as the su≈x for German Internet addresses. Capitalization and altering the referent were meant to attract attention to the changing atmosphere and aspirations to a new Euro-cosmopolitanism. Recall the rebranding campaign described in my introduction. A powerful brand, asserted the pr spin-doctors, can change the world. Not only does successful marketing and rebranding fundamentally transform tastes and pleasures but, similarly, history and nationhood undergo transformations and manipulations. In a sense, the rebranding of Germany represents the inverse of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the confrontation with the past, for this is its rewriting, or, more accurately, reimaging. This project of separating the contemporary German national consciousness and identification from its troubled history, specifically the legacy of National Socialism, might be described as a way of representing the German Federal Republic as a Staat der Gegenwart, a state of the present, or, even as a Staat der Zukunft, a state of the future, ‘‘rather than a nation whose future rests primarily with the past’’ (Mushaben 2004).∞∑ One might ask whether this focus on the present, with the future keenly in mind, could be an iteration of the German fantasy of taking a vacation from history (Kramer 1996). Whereas the specific geopolitical conditions surrounding Cold War Berlin allowed it to thrive in a state of suspended animation apart from history, the challenges facing a unified Germany no longer permit the perpetuation of ahistorical fantasies. The national narrative privileged by the German government construes the present condition as an epochal period in which Germany can connect into the ‘‘time’’ of Europe, opening up the possibility of configuring its future in a novel manner. Such a future, necessarily linked to Germany’s aspiration of becoming a cosmopolitan center, would be untainted by accusations of xenophobia or anti-Semitism. This notion of cosmopolitanism is premised on enlightenment ideas of abstract universality (together with an emphasis on collectivity, territoriality, and national boundaries) and a humanistic heritage. Paraphrasing Beck, one might say that by holding on to the fiction of a common culture Germany remains stuck in the cosmopolitanism of the first age of modernity, one where those from nonWestern societies ‘‘were defined by their foreignness and otherness, their ‘traditional,’ ‘extra-modern’ or ‘pre-modern’ character’’ (2000: 87). By contrast, in ‘‘the second age of modernity everyone has to locate himself in the same global space and is confronted with similar challenges, and now strangeness is replaced by the amazement at the similarities’’ (ibid.). Gerl 322

CONCLUSION

many has traveled a long way to embrace both ages of modernity, with their contradictory demands ranging from the limits of centralizing modernization to the expansion of globalization. Still, it has not fully altered its perception of other non-Western, non-Christian nations and nationals. As long as di√erence remains a national peril, Germany cannot yet be ‘‘amazed by similarities.’’ Still, radical changes in the wake of the new citizenship law emphasize the extent to which German society has been transformed by the force of late-modern historical events. These have dissolved the fantasy of a homogeneous national past into a more complex repertoire of ideas. Echoing this, the Foreign Ministry has acknowledged that issues of linguistic continuity, geographic boundaries, and shared religious traditions can no longer consolidate a national collective sentiment. Yet at the same time as it recognizes the problems inherent in the myth of homogeneity—past, present, and future—the German government has concerns about a strong national ideological center that have not abated. For example, the 2005–6 campaign ‘‘Du bist Deutschland’’ (you are Germany) was designed to inspire confidence and positive identifications with Germany and Germanness. Accompanied by a cheerful logo—an abstract form suggestive of a person in the colors of the German flag—the media blitz of two-minute tv spots, supplemented by related advertisements and Internet links, cost thirty million Euros. An expensive though gentler message than Leitkultur, aiming to include, it nevertheless proved controversial, as some viewers drew parallels with the nationalism of Third Reich propaganda. BENIGN MULTICULTURALISM AND THE NEED FOR HOSPITALITY

On the one hand, a belief in the reciprocal influencing of di√erent cultures paves the way for a form of benign multiculturalism. Yet at the same time such multiculturalism often tends to be premised on the alternating fascination, threat, or even obsession with the exoticism of ‘‘other’’ cultures, without fundamentally challenging the hegemony or false boundedness of one’s own ‘‘culture.’’ I have tried to show to what extent the project of multiculturalism reinforces a hierarchical ideology in which the ‘‘others’’ definitely find a place, though at times a constricted place defined by ethnicized class and gendered markers. This of course does not imply that at all times and in all places, Turkish Germans are incapable of cultivating their own critical voice or of refusing to remain trapped in subaltern CONCLUSION

323 l

complicity. (Nor, by the same token, do I intend to generalize ‘‘the Germans’’ into a unified homogeneous community that necessarily reifies the ‘‘other.’’) Rather, there are increasing signs that Turkish Germans have become successful spokespeople for themselves, rejecting their mediating role with institutions and articulating a more nuanced understanding of their own possibilities within their diasporic space as well as within an expansive transnational one. Furthermore the transnational character of diasporic existence might produce a more demotic cosmopolitanism. This would be a cosmopolitanism that no longer revolves around the aestheticism, exoticism, and ideological framework characterized by Beck’s first age of modernity. It is not so much a matter of giving a new substance to cosmopolitanism as of altering its totalizing purview. It is possible, as Derrida pointed out, that a new discourse on the rights and duties of cosmopolitanism, what he called an ‘‘ethics of hospitality,’’ might decenter the structure of the state, devolving power and placing more emphasis on the emancipatory potential of the ‘‘cities of refuge’’ (2001). As the experiences of Berlin’s Foreigner Commissioner and the Federal Commissioner for Migration, Refugees, and Integration have shown, Derrida’s point can have direct application. Demonstrably the outstretched hand has been successful not only in persuading otherwise skeptical foreigners to naturalize but also in educating them about their own rights in the host land. Equally part of the commissions’ pro-integration projects have been the often didactic methods imparted to the German public, a remedial education in how to appreciate and understand foreigners in their midst, ranging from language learning to encouraging cross-cultural engagement and sensitivity. A second issue raised by Derrida points to the more explicit articulation of the legal implications of both duties and rights pertaining to hospitality. He writes, ‘‘[It] is a question of knowing how to transform and improve the law, and of knowing if this improvement is possible within an historical space which takes place between the Law of an unconditional hospitality, o√ered a priori to every other, to all newcomers, whoever they may be, and the conditional laws of a right to hospitality, without which the unconditional Law of Hospitality would be in danger of remaining a pious and irresponsible desire, without form and without potency, and of even being perverted at any moment’’ (22–23). Whereas the Kantian tradition of hospitality recognizes the pragmatic limits of states’ responsibilities toward its guests—its conditionality—Derrida questions the political and moral legitl 324

CONCLUSION

imacy of placing conditions on what should be an unconditional law. Might this unconditionality imply an end to the essentializing discourse of the Ausländer ? What then could e√ect a public recognition that the obsolete Ausländerproblematik instead might better be approached as an Inländerproblematik to be overcome? Legislation leading to the adoption of a less conditional law of hospitality would pave the way for the redefinition of Germany’s relationship to its own outsiders inside. This might imply, for instance, overcoming the fears of permitting dual nationality to local foreigners on the basis of an exclusivist view of cultural citizenship. The demotic citizen of a denationalized state, whose demos and cosmos transcend borders, instead would represent a critical step toward the democratization of cosmopolitanism, where ‘‘world-openness’’ necessarily would include the local as well as the global.

CONCLUSION

325 l

Glossary Alevis, Alevilik Tk.; the people who identify with the religious tradition of ‘‘Aleviism’’; Alevis are Turkish and Kurdish speakers; estimates of population range between 10 and 30 million; they fall loosely under a Shi’a rubric, sometimes referred to as mystical or sufi, like the related Bekta¸sis; they su√ered centuries of persecution, practicing a very di√erent sort of Islam from the Sunnis (the majority practice in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire); Alevis are over-represented in the German diaspora from Turkey. Often associated with leftist politics. Alamanya/Almanya Tk.; Germany. Almanyalı/Almancı Tk.; vernacular for a migrant or immigrant to Germany; implication is ‘‘German-ish’’; can be pejorative. Alternative Ger.; German counter-culture. Ausländer Ger.; foreigners, outsiders. Ausländerfeindlichkeit Ger.; xenophobia. Aussiedler Ger.; ‘‘settler,’’ specifically an ‘‘ethnic German,’’ who moves from the former USSR to Germany. Cem (ayin-i cem) Tk.; central Alevi communal ritual in which women and men participate together; includes dancing (sometimes in a trance state), music, symbolic reenactment of tragic Karbala events; traditionally held in a cemevi (lit. ‘‘Cem house’’). Gastarbeiter Ger.; guestworker. Gavur Tk.; colloquial for non-Muslim, infidel. Gurbet Tk.; exile. Gurbetçi Tk.; one who lives in exile, away from home. Gymnasium Ger.; academic high school, o√ering preparation for university entrance.

Haram Tk.; forbidden (e.g., food that is not permitted, or helal ). Heimat Ger.; homeland. Hoca Tk.; teacher. Kafir Tk.; infidel, non-Muslim. Kızılba¸s Tk.; lit. ‘‘red-head’’; pejorative term for Alevi. Mitbürger Ger.; lit. fellow citizen, co-citizen. Namus Tk.; honor, self-regard, sexual modesty. Ossies/Ossis Ger.; colloquial term describing former East Germans; depending on context, can express derision and mockery, especially when used by Wessies. Saz Tk.; stringed, plucked folk instrument; it resembles a long-necked lute Vergangenheitsbewältigung Ger.; the struggle to confront, come to terms with, or deal with the past, specifically the Holocaust. Wessies/Wessis Ger.; colloquial term describing former West Germans; depending on context, can express sense of Wessi superiority over Ossis, as in the ironic Besser-Wessi (better Wessis). Zaza Tk.; a Kurdish language or the people who speak it, who often are Alevi; also called Dimili, Dımılki, Dimli, Kirmanckî, Zazaki.

l 328

GLOSSARY

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

The epigraph is taken from Emine Özdamar’s Mother Tongue (1994: 13). The terms ‘‘Turk,’’ ‘‘Turkish German,’’ and ‘‘German Turk’’ are all used in this book. Though some writers have tended to prefer ‘‘German Turk,’’ I often opt for the less seen and perhaps more controversial ‘‘Turkish German.’’ Though D rarely encountered (but see Senocak and Leggewie 1993), this usage implies a shift in emphasis from a ‘‘Turkish’’ essence, however adjectivalized, to a suggestion of a di√erently configured civic identity within Germany’s public sphere, where a wide range of types of Germans—again, however adjectivalized—might be envisioned. Cf. German Turk/Turkish German with the ethnic labels common in the United States. The term ‘‘Turk’’ has a fascinating semantic genealogy, embracing ideological, imperial, and nationalist projects. For a more elaborated account of this history, see, for example, Lewis 1961; and Kafadar 1995. Yet to speak of ‘‘spaces in-between’’ raises problematic red flags. It is not my intention to assume static borders in between which characters in a troubled space bounce o√ one ‘‘side,’’ then the other. This is not to posit that ‘‘there is no there there,’’ either—rather, I am interested in a space open to new forms of visibility. This is discussed in Spyer 1993: 2. On the debate in Germany on the modern transformation of German identity, culture, and politics, including the revival of the politics of national conservatism, see Habermas 1989. Some of these have been outlawed in Turkey. For a graphic description of the sorts of political repression and human rights abuses in 1980s Turkey that many migrants and refugees sought to escape, see, e.g., Helsinki Watch Report from 1986. L. Soysal 2003. Cranshaw 2004: 107.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

June 2002. See www.accentur.de/downloads/markenmanifest—2002.pdf. For a more elaborated discussion of cosmopolitanism and the construction of nationhood, see the essays in Cheah and Robbins 1998. Thanks to Caroline Finkel for sharing this with me. Ay¸se Ça˘glar (1995) has demonstrated to what extent the symbolism of Turkish foods, in particular döner kebab, has fundamentally shaped German Turkish relations, contributing to a new cultural aesthetic. For example, she shows how döner became the name of ‘‘a widely announced youth get-together organized for Turkish and German youth in Berlin in 1987, Disco-döner’’ (221). She has looked at the way in which food symbolism has penetrated proforeigner discourse, so that banners at pro-foreigner demonstrations read ‘‘No döner without foreigners; no döner without Turks.’’ On social remittances, see Levitt 2001. An early acknowledgment of this in the literature on migration was Castles, Booth, and Wallace 1984. See Fanon 1986 and Memmi 1965 for similar examples of the working of power relations.

PRELUDE 1.

2.

3.

Later, in 2000, as a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, I was to experience a thoroughly di√erent Berlin, this time in the elegant district of Wannsee. The antithesis of Kreuzberg, this lush, tree-filled neighborhood of imposing nineteenth-century mansions surrounding the lake was a site of privilege and luxury, of minor aristocracy, yacht clubs, and very few Ausländer. It also was the site of a sinister, haunted past, as Wannsee acquired its historical significance thanks to the Haus am Großen Wannsee, the imposing waterside residence where the details of the notorious Final Solution were agreed upon in a decisive meeting that was to help direct the course of Nazi genocide. Only after years of extensive lobbying was the house in which the conference occurred finally, in the 1990s, made into a museum and study center. See Je√ Eugenides’s essay (2003) for a sensitive rendering of our trip into the Nazi-era bunker built beneath the building housing the American Academy in Berlin, the Hans Arnhold Center. This term describes that large German conservative, middle-class petitbourgeoisie. Kleinbürger is a synonym. I am grateful to daad—Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, or German Academic Exchange Service—not only for the doctoral research grant

l 330

NOTES TO PRELUDE

4.

but also for an earlier grant, in 1982, for intensive German study at the Goethe Institute in Schwäbisch Hall. Perhaps predictably, often before traveling to Germany in the 1980s and certainly prior to going initially, I had a series of Nazi concentration camp nightmares. This surely was not unrelated to having been reared in a liberal, reform Jewish household, where from an early age I was exposed to a wide range of Holocaust literature, films, lectures, and the like. Ours, like so many others, was one of those households in the 1950s and 1960s where German products simply were not purchased or consumed; they were tacitly taboo. It was a sort of kashrut of commodities but also of spaces: when Jewish friends or relatives traveled abroad, they went to France, England, Italy, the Far East or Israel—implicitly, it simply was accepted unquestioningly that Germany was to be avoided, it was out of bounds. It is still the case that many Jews would not consider travel to Germany, and for some, even through Germany. Many friends and relatives (most adamantly nonreligious) insist that they would, and could, never go to Germany. In that sense, my choosing to go to Germany implied a kind of transgression within this milieu.

1. SHIFTING COSMOPOLITICS 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

In Berlin the Green Party was known as the Alternative Liste. For further reading, see Kle√ et al. 1990 for a study of racism in this period; for an early, comprehensive bibliography of works about the unification and Wende period, see Abbey 1993. For a reading of the social ferment around Ausländerpolitik in the 1990s, see Habermas 1994b. Berdahl borrows the term from Connerton 1989: 14. http://www.germany-info.org, ‘‘Party Planners Rediscover East German Palace,’’ August 6, 2004. For a perceptive discussion of this controversy, see Kramer 1999: 62–63. The radical restructuring economic policies of the World Bank and the imf, led by Je√ Sachs, created widespread unemployment and inflation in the early 1990s, leading to illegal cross-border trade in persons and goods. See, for example, Chilosi 1993 and Sachs 1994. An extensive body of work deals with the problematics of such memory. See, for example, Herf 1997. The classic work influencing much of the literature on Berlin’s seamier side

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

331 l

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

was Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1952), in turn a source of the popular musical and film Cabaret. For analyses of fashion as a mode of cultural subversion, see Gregson, Brooks, Crewe 2001; also see Hebdige 1979. Tomlinson, citing the work of Turner and Cli√ord, has shown how a local sense of place can be disturbed and actively transformed through the involvement of forces such as television, radio, commodities; i.e., one need not physically move from one place in order to change the perception of one’s cultural-local connection. Most important is the ability of local actors to choose among di√erent forms of information that contribute to the process of deterritorialization and delocalization (1999: 29). By contrast, on the artificial nature of emancipation through the televisual media, see Bauman 1991. For the former GDR the process of linking the nation to its own historical legacy has followed di√erent ideological matrices than those adopted in the postwar FRG. On this topic, see Berdahl 1999a, especially chapter 7. See Bodemann 1996 for a critical history of Kristallnacht. This anticipation must be understood in the context of the debate over the Sonderweg, embodied by Germany in its postwar period. As Habermas points out, the Sonderweg—a special, exceptional, or unique path—constitutes the ‘‘enforced abnormality of a defeated and divided nation’’ (1994b: 137). One might argue that the revival of nationalism within German conservatism is an expression of a lingering concern with whether or not Germany has moved beyond the Sonderweg in the redeployment of its national narrative and symbolism. As Derrida (2001) and Turner (2001) point out this reaches back to Hellenic and early Christian ideals of hospitality. On the critique of contemporary discourse of cosmopolitanism as a revival of enlightenment universalist mentality, see Gray 1997. Two participants in the wider debates about military humanism in the international scene are Rie√ (e.g., 2002) and Fassin (e.g., 2001).

2. ‘‘WE CALLED FOR LABOR’’ 1.

2.

The title of this chapter comes from Max Frisch’s Überfremdung (1967). It is my translation; an alternative might be: ‘‘We called for manpower (laborpower) and people came.’’ Compare with Ralph Grillo’s analysis of the words étranger and immigres as they are used in France. ‘‘All immigres are étrangers, but not all étrangers are

l 332

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

immigres . . . Étranger refers to nationality; immigre to socioprofessional position (1985: 65). Aussiedeln is ‘‘to evacuate;’’ siedeln is ‘‘to settle, to colonize.’’ This term is used for the so-called volksdeutsch, or Russlanddeutsch, those deemed as ethnic Germans, some of whom were living in formerly German-controlled lands, for the most part in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania; it is also used for the immigrants from the former Soviet Union (fSU). Spätaussielder refers to the more recent immigrants from the fSU. The term stands in implicit opposition to the West German designation Übersiedler (‘‘over-settlers’’) for the socalled émigrés, referring specifically to those East Germans who settled in the Federal Republic prior to unification. For an illuminating analysis of the cultural bases of Nazi genocide, including an extensive discussion of the meanings of work in Nazi culture, see Newborn 1994. This was an organized program that recruited labor to lands of the Reich. The foreign workers were non-Jews whose labor was needed to replace the eleven million German men serving in the military, out of the labor force, between the years 1939 and 1944. By September 1944, ‘‘7.5 million foreign workers were employed in the Reich. Some of the foreign workers were recruited through agreements made with ‘friendly and neutral countries’—i.e., Italy, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Rumania, Croatia, and Spain. But most were recruited by force in the occupied areas, both east and west, and 1.8 million were actually prisoners of war’’ (Castles and Kosack 1973: 23–24). These Fremdarbeiter were presented to the public through Nazi propaganda as Untermenschen (subhuman) and ‘‘considerable measures had to be taken to protect racial purity. Himmler ordered that German women who associated with Poles should be sent, after public humiliation, to concentration camps’’ ( 24). It is widely believed that the term Gastarbeiter was neologized in the post– World War II Federal Republic (see, for example, Schönbach, in Rhoades 1978: 562). Rhoades, however, traces the origin of the term to Nazi Party mass media experts. Prior to the introduction of this term, the word Arbeitsgäste was coined in 1942. ‘‘Some pigs are more equal than others’’ (Orwell 1946). The entrenched beliefs and practices about guests and hospitality in the Middle East and Mediterranean area are well documented; early anthropological observers were Peristiany (1966, 1976) and Pitt-Rivers (1963). The Blums analyzed the psychodynamics motivating Greek filoksenia, asserting that demonstrative hospitality shown to outsiders is a form of reaction

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

333 l

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

formation, masking a deep-set suspicion and fear of the stranger/guest (Blum and Blum 1970: 212). Greeks often invoke the ancient myth of the god visiting a poor village house disguised as a shepherd; i.e., ‘‘you never know who your guest might turn out to be.’’ For a more complex discussion of these positions, see Barbieri 1998. The categories Aussiedler and Übersiedler refer to Volksdeutsch, or ethnic Germans and their descendants who live or lived in formerly German lands or lands within the Soviet bloc. These people all had and have a right, in accordance with the German constitution, to immigrate to Germany and claim German citizenship. At the time the Heidelberg Manifesto was written, West Germany, in secret agreements with East Germany, was paying capitated sums for imprisoned dissidents. Deportation to, for example, German border countries of France or Holland would o√er far preferable alternatives to the prospect of Poland or the Czech Republic. The market for ‘‘proofs’’ of passage—souvenirs such as train tickets, coins, receipts, etc.—testifies to the refugees’ passage through a desired country. On the troubling rise of anti-Semitism in Germany, see, e.g., Bodemann 1996, 1998, 2002. A documentary aired in Britain, The Truth Lies in Rostock (Spectacle Productions), demonstrated widespread right-wing extremist links, the unwillingness of the o≈cials to combat it, and the documentary evidence of police harassment of the antiracist peaceful demonstrators and regulating media manipulation. Helsinki Watch blamed right-wing violence on the government, claiming it exploited the situation in order to achieve its anti-asylum goals (1992: 1). Published by the Press and Information O≈ce of the Federal Government (Bundesrepublik Deutschlands) Foreign A√airs Division, Bonn, January 1995. The importance of Grunewald, more specifically its S-Bahn station, as a site where Berlin Jews were loaded onto trains headed for concentration camps, is discussed in chapter 4. For an overview of this population, including a comprehensive bibliography about the Volga Germans, see the chapter on ‘‘Germans’’ in Sowell 1996. Consequently, Jewish emigration from Israel is equally informed by Zionist ideological concerns, pejoratively marked by the term yored, implying descent. Some scholars dispute this connection (e.g., R. Munz, personal communication).

l 334

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

Millions of Soviets and their families, deemed ‘‘enemies of the state,’’ were exiled to Kazakhstan and other parts of Central Asia, and Siberia, in Gulag camps. These included not only the Volga Germans (who had lived in Russia since the time of Catherine the Great) but Caucasian peoples such as Tatars, Chechens, Greeks, Kurds, Turks, many Poles from the Ukraine, Koreans from the Far East, and literally hundreds of other groups of peoples. Many later were settled in ‘‘closed’’ cities, state or collective farms, not permitted to travel outside their immediate areas—a sort of house arrest lasting for decades. The Commissioner of Foreigners’ A√airs of the Berlin Senate (Ausländerbeauftragte 1992a). Interview with Barbara John, September 14, 1995, Berlin. See further discussion of Alevi music in chapter 10. For more on Arabesk, see Stokes 1994.

3. MAKING AUSLÄNDER 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

D Epigraph taken from Zafer Senocak and Bülent Tulay 2000: 3. This is not to presume an absence of troubling hierarchies persisting in the United States with regard to the structuring of inequality among di√erent ‘‘ethnic’’ groups. Rather, it is to highlight a society where a completely contrasting set of assumptions about immigrants, others, and membership pertains. For a study of citizenship, migration, and the state in Europe, see Soysal 1994. The terms Einwanderer (immigrant) and ethnische Minderheit (ethnic minority) do exist but are not commonly deployed within the migration discourse. More recently, David Hollinger (1995), for example, has written of America’s ‘‘ethnoracial pentagon,’’ the method by which the U.S. population is structured into one of five essential color-coded categories: black, yellow, white, brown, and red corresponding to African American, Asian American, European American, Latino, and Native American. Hollinger criticizes the widespread reliance on this pentagonal model, as he looks for alternative ways to refine practices of multiculturalism. These ethnoracial categories, like many other attempts at social classification and categorization of groups and people, fail to reveal an acceptable fit between models and the realities they ostensibly describe. Very much like the conflicts described by Fischer 1986 and Friedlander 1975. As de Certeau has remarked, space is the locus of historical practice, whereas place stands for an identifiable, ‘‘instantaneous configuration of positions. It

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

335 l

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

implies an indication of stability’’ (1986: 117). The geographic place of the urban landscape is ‘‘transformed into a space by walkers’’ (ibid.). Where geographers tend to understand space (éspace) as the more abstract of the pair, de Certeau underlines its historicizing quality. Quoted from Radtke 1996: 10–11 (my translation; emphasis added). Though there has been some controversy as to the content, even veracity, of this particular speech, I contend that, because it has been so extensively cited over the years, even as a metanarrative, it warrants attention. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published a commentary on December 2, 1982. Von Weizsacker himself has no recollection of the speech (personal communication). Forsythe remarks that Germans became discomfited when she referred to herself, a non-German, as an Ausländer (1989: 149). See Goldhagen 1997, Hilberg 1985, and Newborn 1994 for alternative analyses of the processes of Nazi genocide. On the product and reproduction of stereotypes and ideological representations through the mobilization of cultural products, see Bourdieu 1984. See Bourdieu for discussion of class, status, social space, and symbolic capital; 1977, 1985, 1986, 1990. In the 1980s there were few Gypsies in Berlin; since the opening of the Wall, many have come and they clearly are more despised than Turks. Until 1988 Greeks did not enjoy freedom of labor movement in the EU. During the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Greece stood alone in Europe in its support of coreligionist Serbia. Greece threatened to pull out of the EU over the issue of Macedonia’s name. Greece has annoyed member countries by continued violations of EU regulations. This is an overgeneralization; many competing factions within Turkey have debated the relationship of Turkey to Europe. Navaro-Yashin has shown that some in the Islamist movement favor joining the EU whereas some Kemalists oppose it. For an extended discussion of the politics of Islam in contemporary Turkey, see Navaro-Yashin 2002. The name has been changed, from another equally Hellenic one. The name, like that of many Greek restaurants, was meant to resonate with ancient Greece. Turkish restaurants tend to be named after place names, generally large towns or cities in Anatolia, signifying the proprietor’s origin. For more on Greek and Turkish restaurants in Europe, see Moutsou 1998. The Muslim Turks of Western (Greek) Thrace, along with the Greek Orthodox of Istanbul, were two groups exempted from the massive exchange of populations (stipulated by treaty in Lausanne, Switzerland, January 30, 1923),

l 336

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

19.

20.

when approximately one million three-hundred-thousand Orthodox Christians (Greeks) from Turkey were forcibly relocated in Greece, and some four hundred thousand Muslims (Turks) moved to Turkey (Stavrianos 1958: 590). This population has been a politically charged one, in Turko-Greek relations. Turkish is their native language (most are bilingual) and Islam their religion; their passports are Greek. Though they are usually represented in the Greek parliament, charges of discrimination and harassment are regularly levied against the Greek government—just as the Turkish government has at times been accused of mistreating its non-Muslim minorities (Christian—Greek, Armenian, Assyrian; and Jewish). Though the members of this minority group carry Greek passports and are Greek citizens, they generally identify themselves as ‘‘Turks, from Western Thrace,’’ never as Greeks. This is a direct hold-over from the Ottoman Empire, where for centuries people were legally separated, categorized, taxed, conscripted, and often granted limited autonomy, according to their millet, a system based primarily on religion (see Inalcık 1986). Inherited from this legacy, the contemporary notion of Greekness is less a civil definition than a racialized ethnic one, one that de facto and de jure has excluded nonChristians and even marginalized non-Orthodox Christians (ref. Herzfeld on Christian minorities). Today the Turks of western Thrace have close connections with the modern Turkish Republic. Many have moved to Turkey voluntarily, send their children to university, buy property there, regularly visit, and so on. In an intriguing example of ‘‘interethnic’’ resourcefulness and repatriative cooperation, in some cases, an informal nonmonetary exchange of property has occurred, between western Thracian Turks wishing to move to Turkey, and minority Greeks in Turkey wishing to move to Greece. Since the war in Cyprus (1974) and the subsequent partition of the island, antagonism between the two nations has been consistently high, with periodic military and political skirmishes. Still, there have been overtures between high-profile Greek and Turkish individuals, as exceptional as they are productive, that have had surprisingly positive public reception in both countries. I think in particular of the collaborative e√ort of the musicians and singers Zülfü Livaneli and Maria Farantouri, whose 1980s album set a record for the highest sales of any long-playing album in Greece. (When it was released, it was banned in Turkey, so only fans with good connections heard it there.) More recently, after the earthquakes, the two countries sent each other wellreceived and appreciated aid, prompting friendly high-level diplomatic encounters. More recently a Turkish soap opera about a mixed Turkish-Greek

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

337 l

21.

22.

23. 24.

(Muslim-Christian) couple has found an astonishingly enthusiastic audience on both sides of the Aegean. Greek nouns, including the proper sort, decline according to case. Thus, for example, ‘‘Yiannis’’ in the nominative case becomes ‘‘Yianni’’ in the accusative. For further reading on Turkish youth in Germany, see L. Soysal 2001, Kaya 2001, Tertilt 1996. But see Lakein’s work on racist discourse in eastern Germany (2002). This thought is echoed by Handler and Segal: ‘‘Constructed as nations, England and France were certainly located within the place called Europe, but their European identity was one of the rhetorical e√ects of their constructions, and not a simple geographic fact’’ (1993: 3).

4. HAUNTED JEWISH SPACES, TURKISH PHANTASMS 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

Topography of Terror, for many years only a few meters west of the Berlin Wall, is an open-air museum of in situ archeological excavations of Nazi headquarters and prisons. Here I use the collocation referring both to this specific site as well as in a generalized sense. Instigated by the Jewish Community, the German government agreed to allow some 100,000 former Soviet Jews to enter Germany under the ambiguous category of ‘‘quota refugees.’’ On the contradictory nature of postwar silence about the Nazi crimes and the projects of memorialization, see Bodemann 1998. On the numinous quality of nationalist symbols, see Elias 1996, e.g., 146. Ironically, one of the most ubiquitous symbols of postwar Germany in its incarnation as the economic miracle has been the tripartite icon of Mercedes —a brand also enjoyed by Nazi leaders. The GDR was in terrible economic straits by the 1980s. In an attempt to find outside financial assistance from the West, Honeker hoped to begin normalizing relations with wealthy Western countries. It was believed that one way to do this was by demonstrating how well the GDR treated its Jewish community. ‘‘Symbolic reparations’’ were mentioned for the first time. Thus a foundation was set up by the GDR, including state and private monies, to restore part of this synagogue. An additional part of this search for hard currency was the awarding of a high state honor to Edgar Bronfman, the Canadian Jewish industrialist and then president of the World Jewish Congress. Despite the honor, I am unaware of any Seagram or Bronfman monies invested in the GDR.

l 338

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

Though Kristallnacht is commonly assumed to be a historical ‘‘fact,’’ Bodemann’s research shows that events associated with this night actually took place over an extended period of time and symbolically can be understood in part as an acting out of a pre-Christian Carnival myth, which always began at eleven minutes past eleven, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month. This information does not in any way lessen the horrors and significance of the well-planned and executed Nazi pogroms and arrests of that night. Thanks to Y. M. Bodemann for pointing this out to me. In this case, paradoxically, the original surname had the ‘‘-er’’ su≈x, adding a further layer of ambiguity. For more on this, see Nolan 1988, Maier 1988, and Habermas 1989. My thanks to Jenny Weisberg and Mark Landsman for their thoughts on this and for bringing these works to my attention. In East Berlin the memorials to the Herbert Baum Group, Jewish anti-fascist resistance fighters, skilfully emphasize their anti-fascist credentials while disregarding that they also were Jews fighting Nazis. In both o≈cial and monumental interpretations by the East German state, Nazism was conveyed as something inflicted upon the GDR—a curious twist of historical revision, since the German Democratic Republic of course only came into existence after the war. This logic produced monuments thanking the Soviets for saving them from ‘‘fascism’’ (more anonymous and less German-sounding than ‘‘Nazism’’) and the accompanying total absence of admission of complicity. This was somewhat understandable in light of the participation of the founders of the German Democratic Republic in anti-Nazi resistance. East Germany never was subject to the de-Nazification experienced in West Germany. Two generations of students were not instructed about the extent of the German population’s complicity with Nazism. Years of perpetuating the myth purporting that Nazism was a West German phenomenon are now taking their toll, as a disproportionate number of the murders and continual violence against Turks and other foreigners in Germany have been instigated by East Germans who have not had the benefit of exposure to their own history. By no means has all the xenophobic violence of recent years been perpetuated by East Germans; however, often shockingly racist attitudes and practices have been evident, from o≈cials down to the disproportionately numerous neo-Nazi youth. On the superficial and often hypocritical process of deNazification, see Habermas 1989 and Herf 1997. For an insightful discussion on the ramifications of this, and other processes of memorialization, see Young 2000.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

339 l

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

On di√erent forms of memorialization in Berlin, see Czaplicka 1995. Though in some senses Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung may actually be a more accurate description, with its more critical and processual implications, than Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, which implies the possibility of mastery and completion, I employ the latter, as it has more popular currency. On ephemerality and art, see Küchler 2002. Continuing with the theme of filling and creating voids, Libeskind currently is beginning the massive project of memorializing and replacing architectural structures at the site of the World Trade Center in New York City. Not unrelated has been the revival and widespread popularity of ‘‘traditional’’ Eastern European Yiddish musical forms, such as klezmer. Many synagogues in Berlin (and elsewhere in Europe) are hidden from view, standing concealed in a hinterhof (inner courtyard); see discussion of Kreuzberg architecture in chapter 5. The Oranienburger Strasse Synagogue was constructed in marked contrast to this practice of concealment, with its ostentatious façade, directly at street level, topped by a golden dome—also unusual; generally the dome would be in the back of the building, over the bima. In this case Berlin synagogue architectural conventions were disregarded, demonstrating instead the high self-regard the community felt; concealment no longer was relevant to this large, prosperous, and well-integrated population. The synagogue at Fraenkelufer in Kreuzberg was another exception to the rule. One freelance artist/intellectual, Ronnie Golz, o√ers custom-made walking tours of various themes of Berlin Jewish life, past and present, all fully described on his website: http://home.t-online.de/home/rgolz/. A Berlin fortnightly magazine with comprehensive listings of events. See Davidson 2002. I am fully aware that the term has many other uses, for example, in political speeches aimed at Germans, ‘‘fellow countrymen,’’ ‘‘good citizens.’’ The term certainly predates the usage relating to Jews and Ausländer. However, when used about Jews and Ausländer, the intention usually is extremely positive; my point is that the e√ect on the subjectively receiving end often is at odds with the good intention of the speaker. I am grateful to John Borneman, Uli Linke, and Thomas Hauschild for lively discussions on this controversial and sensitive topic. This was, after all, the word used exclusively by the early Church for total sacrifice. Following Agamben’s logic, perhaps the historically specific term ‘‘Shoah’’ should gain colloquial currency, rather than the more generally applicable and religiously connoted ‘‘Holocaust,’’ resonant of sacrifice.

l 340

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

Though I am not convinced by the whole of Agamben’s argument, the practical side does seem apparent. By giving a theological status, even by implicit association, to an event, one is depriving it from its role in historical engagement and agency. On this topic, see Adelson 2003: 244–55. For a more recent attempt to clarify the phantasmatic association between Turks and Jews in the German imaginary, see Adelson 2000. See also Yurdakul and Bodemann 2006. For a penetrating analysis of this process, see Newborn 1994, especially his analysis of the Stroop Report. A thoroughly assimilated Jew could not possibly exist and therefore was supposed to be a kind of a liar. As indicated in the introductory chapter, this has been well documented by Gilman (1990), who has demonstrated that the construction of the Jew as the traitor constitutes the legacy of the contradictory politics of German Protestantism stemming from Luther. The next line in the German proverb from which he takes his title, ‘‘Life is like a chicken coop ladder,’’ is ‘‘short and shitty.’’ For a discussion in which garlic is shown to play a role as a marker of social distinction, particularly of Jews, see Neiman 1992. I am grateful to Uli Linke for leading me to this work. Susan Neiman has described a fascinating association between garlic consumption and rabbinic Judaism. According to talmudic prescription, Jews were encouraged to eat garlic, as it possessed numerous auspicious qualities (e.g., provided warmth, increased semen, removed jealousy, etc.). The prophet Ezra elevated the consumption of garlic to one of his ten regulations to be followed on the Sabbath. The Mishnah identified pejoratively a group of Samaritans as ‘‘non-garlic eaters’’ due to their alternative interpretation of a biblical injunction (equating sexual relations with proscribed lighting of fire on the Sabbath) (1992: 190). Heimat served as the title of an internationally successful television miniseries, sympathetically following a presumably ur-German extended family over the course of the twentieth century, through the world wars and several generations. For extensive discussions of diaspora, see Cli√ord 1994; Armstrong 1967; Tölölyan 1996, passim; Cohen 1997; Schnapper 1991 and 1999; Safran 1991 and 1999. For more on the relationship between the ideology of rootedness and the specific basis of German conservative politics, see Bourdieu 1988. Though contradicted in practice by the massive demographic upheavals after

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

341 l

35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

World War II, when previously Catholic or Protestant areas became instantly integrated with the new German refugees. This notion of transgression of the Heimat by deracinated peoples applies in other places and situations as well, particularly where sedentarism is privileged. On September 24, 1992, Germany signed a readmission agreement with Romania, e√ective November 1 of that year. The Gypsies repatriated were provided for in cash payments to be used for housing and vocational training. Romania was paid approximately thirty million deutsche mark as part of this program. Precise criteria were spelled out how nationality was to be ascertained in situations with no valid identity papers. I am grateful to Michael Stewart for providing me with this information (personal communication). As quoted in Comaro√ 1996: 183. I am grateful to Hanns Thoma-Venske for bringing this to my attention (personal communication). ‘‘Juda’’ was used both for ‘‘Jew’’ and ‘‘Judaism,’’ personifying the evils of Judaism within the Jew. The protoracist ‘‘verrecke’’ could be rendered politely as ‘‘perish’’; rather less politely, and more toward the intended meaning in this context, is the colloquial ‘‘croak.’’ I am grateful to Jud Newborn for his exegesis of this phrase. Der Spiegel, September 6, 1999, 92.

5. BERLIN’S KREUZBERG 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

The early 1980s saw violent clashes between squatters and the West Berlin riot police in Kreuzberg. For ideas about the relations between power and space, and the geographies of social systems and class, Lefebvre 1991 is a critical text. Interview, bbc World’s Hard Talk, October 1998. The Internet allows marginal peoples to transcend otherwise limiting spatial exclusion. This politician’s website is one example. For more on the relationship between cyberspace and civil space, see, for example, Tsagarousianou et al. 1998. Jane Kramer has written about alternative Kreuzberg, including the punk, alternative, and art scenes; e.g., 1996, 1999. Kreuzberg was divided into two districts, 61 and 36. In autumn 1994 final ceremonies took place marking the termination of Allied rule over Berlin. This is a widespread phenomenon. Compare with ‘‘Jewish neighborhoods’’ in

l 342

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

9.

10.

11.

12.

the United States or in the United Kingdom, where Jews usually are fewer than 20 percent of the population. Urban sociological research has identified a ‘‘tipping point,’’ where upon reaching a particular proportion of a given minority, neighborhoods shift into an inescapable markedness, a√ecting real estate values, panic peddling, and urban migrations. For a recent study on this phenomenon, see Gladwell 2000. Some labor economists (e.g., Dustmann passim) claim that Turks’ low status derives from identifiable and testable ‘‘cultural variables’’ including religion, education, and language. However, such explanations are not su≈cient when analyzing structures of inequality in contemporary Germany. However, Turkish children with whom I worked have complained about the lack of an appropriate space to do homework. Sometimes the problem was heat—often only one room in the flat had a coal stove (Kachelofen) so the children were forced to work amid noisy family life, the ubiquitous television (always on), guests, and other distractions. Greeks commonly share this antiprivacy value. Numerous languages do not have an equivalent gloss to the English word for privacy, including modern Greek, Turkish, and Russian. (This does not mean, of course, that the concept cannot be expressed using other words.) This has been part of a citywide urban renewal project of architects, urban planners, artists, and others, called iba, International Bauaustellung. One of the goals was to dislocate as few people as possible as a result of renovation. Indeed, in many instances, the original residents were able to decide at what level of modernization their building would be altered. Thus, buildings with poorer residents were able to choose against central heating and to retain their coal ovens, for example, to keep costs down.

6. BEYOND THE BRIDGE 1.

2.

3.

4.

Poem by an anonymous Turkish girl in Germany, sometime in the 1980s; my translation. Here I employ the language of Ernesto Laclau, in the sense that he speaks of empty signifiers in the rhetoric of political discourse. See Laclau 1996. One of the earliest studies of return migration to Greece was Kollarou and Mousourou 1980. For a recent discussion of the politics of the Greek government toward its own migrants, see Monova 2001. On the ‘‘second-generation’’ Turkish experience in the UK, see Aydın 2001, particularly chapter 4; Ronald 1982.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

343 l

5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

1992, Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats Berlin Türkische Berliner—Eine Minderheit stellt sich vor/Berlinli Turkler. Miteinander Leben in Berlin. Berlin. Translation from German, Ruth Mandel. This recalls ‘‘National Brotherhood Week’’ in the United States, so aptly satirized by the singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer. Mitburger is used in many contexts, e.g., referring in an inclusive way to, simply, ‘‘fellow Germans.’’ It also is used to describe the German Jews; see discussion in chapter 4. Broadcast in 1992 on Sender Freies Berlin. For more on the language of migration, see Jung et al. 1997. At least one international human rights group has called for an end to virginity tests, after the suicides of several Anatolian teens. On the anthropology of return migration, see Ghosh et al. 2000. For further reading about Kurds in Turkey, see the work of Lale YalcinHeckmann 1991; Martin van Bruinessen 1978, 1984, 1996, 1997, 1998; and Ismail Be¸sikci 1964. Though the road to Turkey’s EU membership continues to be long and uneven, eventually liberalization of travel restrictions will probably occur. Honekopp estimates that 236,000 Turks under age eighteen returned to Turkey between 1981 and 1986 (during the time of the go-home premiums). In a study conducted in 1987, he found that 50 percent of these minors who had repatriated wished to return to Germany (quoted in Martin 1991: 7). It is possible that with the growing number of mixed comprehensive schools, some of the most severe tracking will be reduced. But see Ewing’s description of a second-generation girl’s strategic use of the educational system (2003). Altın bilezik, a gold bangle-type bracelet, is the most common wedding gift and can be an important portion of the bride price. Gold, most often in the form of these bangles, is the preferred sort of wealth, in that its value is believed to be quite stable and flexible, as the bangles can be sold and repurchased when needed. A useful vocation also is seen to be transferable from Germany to Turkey. For an interesting study that takes this as its starting point, see Wolbert 1991. This information can be accessed at http://www.destatis.de/basis/d/biwiku/ schultab — 16.php (accessed September 14, 2007). See also Radtke 2004. The term dü˘gün, or celebration, is used for the festivities following engagements and circumcisions, as well as weddings.

l 344

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

This sort of wedding was common in the 1980s; adaptations through the 1990s and in the years after 2000 ushered in the ‘‘modern dü˘gün,’’ and now rental ‘‘salons’’ look more upscale. The long cafeteria-style tables have been replaced by smaller, round tables complete with tablecloths and comfortable chairs instead of the metal folding type. Food is served gratis: entire meals instead of the bowls of nuts of the past and options to purchase food. Now, at Alevi or non-observant Sunni weddings, guests are plied with Johnny Walker and rakı, free of charge; a cash bar sells other drinks. These weddings, though they have invitations, do not require rsvps, unlike the highly aspirational ‘‘sosyete’’ weddings held at the city’s five-star hotels. Other changes have occurred as well—couples often prefer smaller weddings that they design, primarily for friends, rather than the enormous ‘‘village-like’’ extended family atmosphere. This shift conflicts with parents’ desires, who fear the social shame if they withdraw from perceived reciprocal obligations by not sponsoring an expected and ‘‘traditional’’ event. Most Turkish girls in the 1980s completed only the legally required minimum education or continued on for a vocational training program of some sort, such as nurse’s helper, child care, or sewing. See Edinsel 1984 for an analysis of pyschosomatic illness among migrants in Berlin. This form of music, heavily influenced by Arabic rhythms, is usually associated with working-class urban culture. For an excellent analysis of arabesk, see Stokes 1992. A musical instrument of mine, handmade in Turkey, was stolen from a car. With some discrete inquiries, I was able through a ‘‘connected’’ friend to begin negotiations for its return—ultimately unsuccessful. Geçmek also contains the meaning ‘‘to renounce’’ or ‘‘give up on’’ (Redhouse Dictionary 1983: 137). This conversation took place soon after the catastrophic earthquake in Turkey in 1999. Mehmet cited this as another reason why people do not plan to repatriate. This in no way is meant to deny the enormous problems entailed in the profound social and economic exclusion and inequality experienced by many minorities. Rather, it is recognition of the social space o√ered most immigrant groups in a country with an ideology valuing inclusiveness, immigrant roots, and civil citizenship—all, in many respects, antithetical to Germany’s situation. That U.S. identity politics can raise contradictory practice is another issue altogether—here, the point is ideology.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

345 l

28. 29.

Quoted from CEM, August 1997, 34. Available on the website http://www.cumart.de/biographie/index.html.

7. MINOR LITERATURES, PROFESSIONAL ETHNICS 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

One of the earlier anthologies of minority literature, edited by Scha√ernicht (1981), combined these forms with expository works by foreigners and Germans focusing on the condition of foreigners in Germany. For other early writing by and about foreigners in Germany, aimed at either or both audiences, see, e.g., von der Grün 1975; Akçam 1982; Frölich and Märthesheimer 1980; Baumgartner-Karabak and Landesberger 1978; Dal 1979; Ören 1978; JanMohamed and Lloyd 1990; and Peck 1989. For more recent consideration of writing in the 1990s (and earlier), see Adelson’s masterful book (2005). On national ideology and its o≈cial narratives, see Bhabha 1990; Anderson 1991; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Taussig 1997. Clearly, this situation is not unique to Germany. There have long been complaints among minorities in the United States and the UK, for example, who have been systemically excluded or else confined to stereotypical roles. Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats Berlin, Türkische Berliner—Eine Minderheit stellt sich vor/Berlinli Türkler (1992); my translation. For an assessment of the variety of minority literature in Germany, including the experiences of, for example, writers from Greece, Italy, Germans from outside Germany, etc., see Harnisch et al. 1998; Suhr 1989; Teraoka 1989; Adelson 2000; Gott 1994; and Chin 2002. Kerim Edinsel 1985 (my translation from the Turkish original); from Acılara Gülümserken (Berlin 1985). Reprinted with permission of the author. For a comprehensive analysis of minor cinema in Germany, see Göktürk 2001. See Kanak Attak Manifesto at http://www.kanak-attak.de/ka/about/manif— eng.html.

8. PRACTICING GERMAN CITIZENSHIP 1.

2.

3.

Particularly in the work of Descartes, Vico, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Bossuet, and Bodin. In Herder’s view each nation has its own distinctive national spirit, defining the uniqueness of its own national character. However, Herder did not privilege German national uniqueness over any other nation. For further elaboration between science and German ideology, see Harrington 1996.

l 346

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

Pierre Bourdieu noted that a residue of linguistic remnants of the romantic idea of Volksgemeinschaft survives in Martin Heidegger’s distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity, a distinction that Heidegger draws in his early work Being and Time (1962), arguing that the root of authenticity in Heidegger is largely present in German conservativism at the turn of the last century, particularly referring to the binary opposition between elites and masses. Bourdieu (1988) points to a rediscovery of an esoteric elitism, an ecological mystique of ‘‘the Jugendbewegung or of Steiner’s anthroposophy, which preached a return to rural simplicity and sobriety, forest walks, natural food, and hand-woven garments’’ (52). An implicit romanticism, shared by elements of German conservatism, including National Socialist culture, can be identified in Heidegger. However, as Habermas frequently has shown, Heidegger is also the key German philosopher who has opened the way to criticism of these very metaphysical ideals (especially of the mythologizing of home, Heimat, community, history, and so on). Hence his short-lived early association with National Socialism, while the rector of the University of Freiburg, does not render all his philosophy a mirror of the National Socialist agenda, most of which was alien to Heidegger’s concerns. His contested relationship to some of his Jewish disciples and friends, including Arendt, Levinas, Marcuse, Löwith, Jaspers, Celan, Husserl, and others, has been much debated, even by these individuals themselves, many of whom maintained their loyalties to Heidegger to the extent of appealing to the Allied powers to reinstate him after the war. A speculative theater piece, Hannah and Martin, explores the ArendtHeidegger relationship. The particle ver- in these two German words serves as an intensifier. In actuality many states practice a hybrid, where the two models overlap, e.g., the United States, the UK, and France. El-Tayeb has shown to what extent the decision concerning who belongs to the German nation was predicated on racist, biological assumptions (1999: 162). See Agamben 1998 and 1999 and Foucault 1994a and 1994b. Indeed, as Lacoue-Labarthe argues, ‘‘There are thus two forms of mimesis. First a restricted form, which is the reproduction, the copy, the reduplication of what is given (already worked, e√ected, presented by nature). . . . Then there is general mimesis . . . (which thus re-produces nothing at all), but which supplements a certain deficiency in nature, its incapacity to do everything, organize everything, make everything its work—produce everything’’ (1989: 255). As Lacoue-Labarthe, in his discussion about the relation of mimesis to politics, writes, ‘‘Possession, in other words, presupposes a subject; it is the mon-

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8

347 l

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

strous, dangerous form of a passive mimesis, uncontrolled and unmanageable’’ (1989: 264). According to Gilman, this doctrine of the nonconvertibility of the Jews appears explicitly in Luther: ‘‘Luther’s view seems to be close to those of both Reuchlin, with his stress on the special nature of the Jews’ language, and Pfe√erkorn, whose fears of the Jews’ books reflected his own fear of becoming once again a Jew. . . . [Luther] expresses doubts about whether the Jews can be converted at all’’ (1990: 62). Foreign Ministry, Bonn, May 21, 1999, Das Neue Staatsangehörigkeitsrecht, 2. Ibid., 2–3. Ibid., 3. Education Minister Annette Schavan proposed this publicly in 2004. See Deutsche Welle, November 24, 2004. The Bundesrat, the upper house of Parliament, ratified it on May 21, 1999. ‘‘Klares Nein zur rot-grünen Doppelstaatsbürgerschaft, ’06/01.1999,’’ January 6, 1999, http://www.cducsu.bundestag.de/texte/csu/dreuth99ze.htm (accessed November 2000). Interview with Barbara John, September 14, 1995, Berlin. Interview, Turkish Consul General, Berlin, December 19, 2000. The Turkish government has begun cooperating with Germany on tracking its dual nationals; if discovered, they will lose their German citizenship. For a critique of this model, see Faist 1999. O’Leary and Tiilikainen (1998: 100) object to Soysal’s position that ‘‘the EU is in fact attempting to encourage an exclusive (and mythical) European identity that sets cultural and legal limits on the expansion of citizenship’’ (cited in Faulks 2000:159). Another point, from Jacqueline Bhabha (1998: 612), recognizes the failure of the European Union in protecting individuals who have been excluded from membership. In Germany there are many cases of failed asylum seekers who have been extradited to Turkey at their peril, with no recourse to extra-German channels of justice (Bhabha 1998). For alternative views of the sociocultural meaning of jus sanguinis, see Connor 1994: 93, 198; Brubaker 1992: 60.

9. DERACINATION TO DIASPORA 1. 2.

Interview with Vrietel, International Herald Tribune, January 27, 1984. The roots of the word garip/b, which can mean ‘‘strange,’’ ‘‘odd,’’ or ‘‘Western,’’ like gurbet, are in the Arabic root of G-R-B.

l 348

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

For further reading on the phenomenology of displacement, see de Certeau 1984, Hannerz 1996. Throughout the Middle East and Iran similar tropes of melancholia and depression can be found, some with mystical associations. Gharib in Persian has been analyzed by Good, Good, and Moradi (1985); and M. Fischer (1995)—who also discusses the associated term avareh; Hamid Naficy (1993b) has examined Iranian films in this light as well. I would like to thank an anonymous reader who brought this to my attention. This is not unlike the relationship between musical genres and the experience of su√ering and displacement undergone by, for example, musicians during the apartheid period in South Africa, Woody Guthrie’s Dustbowl Blues documenting the westward migration during the Depression, African Americans who produced blues and spirituals growing from slavery and segregation, and many others. A virtually limitless literature has been and is being produced on concepts of diaspora and the analyses of diasporic populations. See, e.g., Appadurai 1991, 1996; Cohen 1997; Cli√ord 1994, 1997; Pattie 1997; Safran 1991; Tölöyan 1996; Malkki 1992, 1994; Werbner 2002; and especially the journal Diaspora, founded and theorized by Khatig Tölöyan. In the 1980s, with the exception of a forty-minute program, Türkiye Mektubu (Turkey Letter), broadcast once each fortnight as part of a Second Channel weekly program Nachbarn in Europa (Neighbors in Europe), there were no Turkish television programs on West Germany’s three channels. On the rare occasions when Turkish movies were shown on television, they, too, were out of linguistic reach of most Turks, since, like most movies shown in West Germany, they were dubbed in German. At that time there was a nightly Turkish radio broadcast from Cologne. My experience was that it was the exceptional Turkish migrant family that did not own a vcr, and the Turkish video industry abroad was booming; in the mid-1980s West Berlin boasted perhaps seventy Turkish video shops. Now, satellite television has made inroads, altering video viewing habits. The Internet, too, has had a revolutionary impact on strengthening and creating transnational ties between Turks throughout Europe and Turkey. For more on this, see Robins and Aksu 2001; Kosnick 2000. Unlike the apparent situation in some Anatolian villages (e.g., as described by Delaney 1990) the term izin as used by migrants contains connotations of freedom, vacation from a disagreeable job, release from constraints. Delaney claims that izin(li), meaning ‘‘(with) permission’’ or ‘‘leave,’’ is part of a hierarchical set of social relations and a concept used to restrict women’s movement

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9

349 l

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

within the village. My research shows instead that it is not restricted to such a limited definition but that numerous meanings inhabit this polysemic term. Much of the discussion in this section stems from observations I made in the summer of 1986, driving from Berlin to Turkey and back. Due to the unfortunate incidents in the mid-1980s a√ecting the Turkish minority in Bulgaria, Turks felt apprehensive about driving through the country. However, the apprehension usually was not serious enough to warrant any change of plans. No one I spoke with was willing to opt for the much longer alternate route through Turkey’s adversarial nato ally, Greece, despite the fact that the road through northern Greek Macedonia and Thrace passes through the heartland of Greece’s Turkish minority. Turkish still can be heard in many parts of the post–Ottoman Empire Balkans. Here one might take issue with Delaney, who fails to understand the returning migrants’ lack of any ‘‘rational calculus’’ motivating their life-threatening journey (1990: 513). She inexplicably attributes this peril to the formerly communist Balkan countries through which the migrants passed en route to Turkey. Quite the contrary, in fact: instead of risk and fear, the sojourners enjoyed the familiarity of the Balkans, as it felt increasingly less German and more Turkish, thanks to a shared Ottoman past. On the importance of material culture for social actors in a variety of contexts, see, e.g., Spyer 1998; Keane 2005; Miller 1987; Appadurai 1986b; and Douglas and Isherwood 1979. Though not specifically addressing the migrant experience, nevertheless these analyses shed light on the role of commodities in shaping social relations. Literally, gecekondu means ‘‘built at night,’’ referring to the legal requirements of its construction. The increasing number of specific diseases a√ecting migrants is such that a subfield of medicine, Gastarbeiterkrankheit, guestworker illness, has emerged. In Europe migrants experience physical and emotional ailments they claim are caused by migration—a complex series of what we would call psychosomatic and psychological illnesses (for an early study of the syndrome, see, for example, Edinsel 1984). Delaney (1990) has compared this to the hac (or ‘‘hajj’’—the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca), implying that the return home is the ultimate integrating, meaningful, and orienting element in the lives of ‘‘immigrants’’ [sic]; my observations indicate that if anything, though notionally the ideally annual return might resonate within a pilgrimage model, its realization is precisely

l 350

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9

16.

the opposite, as the experience of return often proves as disillusioning as it is dis-integrating. Rittersberger-Tilic (1998) describes how a community of returnee Alevis have chosen to recast their public identity from Almancı—‘‘perceived as ‘spoiled’ or ‘polluted’ Turks’’—to Alevi, apparently convinced that the latter was a lesser stigma than the former.

10. REIMAGINING ISLAMS IN BERLIN 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam (2006) is a considered, historically nuanced account of the personal and political contradictions that led to van Gogh’s murder, highlighting the implications for liberal society in the Netherlands and Europe. See, e.g., the Transnational Communities Programme website, www.trans comm.ox.ac.uk. Sensationalist articles and television specials about forced child marriage, girls forced to wear headscarves, and the like abound. Such approaches do little but fan the flames of conservative, nationalist, and often racist political movements and tendencies, as they obscure the diverse expressions of various peoples whose di√erences become conflated when placed under one Islamic rubric. The term ‘‘Sufi’’ generally is not known by Alevis but is sometimes used by outsiders seeking to categorize them. ‘‘Sufi’’ has come to be a catch-all term for any Muslim group with mystical, ‘dervi¸s’ practices, e.g., entering a trancestate. In addition, many other religious orders coexist in Turkey. These orders generally revolve around a sheikh, operating in secret. Some of the orders have international connections with Muslim brotherhoods elsewhere in the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, and Africa. See, for example, Mardin 1989; Meeker, 1991; Karamustafa 1994. McDowall posits that Zaza and Gurani are southwest Iranian languages, whereas Sorani and Kurmanji are believed to be northwest (1996: 10). One implication is that the Zaza speakers may have migrated to eastern Anatolia in a separate wave from the Kurmanji-speaking Kurds; despite the latter’s greater numbers in the region, they have maintained their distinct identity (Alevi) and language (Blau 1996). Here I can only give a highly abbreviated version of their complex and welldocumented history.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 10

351 l

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

Alevi rural life has been romanticized in Kemal Bilba¸sar’s Gemmo, albeit with a socialist, democratic subtext (1976). As Navaro-Yashin has eloquently shown, the terms ‘‘secular’’ and ‘‘Islamist’’ inadequately describe practices that might appear neutral or clear-cut outside a Turkish context (2002; esp. 188–203). Kelek’s The Foreign Bride (2005) and Ate¸s’s Long Journey into Fire (2005) are two such books. Many Turkish German sociologists found Ate¸s’s book o√ensive and signed a public petition objecting to it. The saint Hacı Bekta¸s Veli is equally revered among Alevis and Bekta¸sis. The most important di√erence between the two is that Aleviness is an ascribed, inherited status, whereas Bekta¸sis are initiated into the sect. For more, see Birge 1937; Kehl-Bodrogi, Kellner-Heinkele, and Otter-Beaujean 1997. See Yael Navaro-Yashin 2002; see also White 2002 for excellent discussions of this theme. Kosnick has written extensively about the history of foreigner-oriented broadcasting in Germany (2000, 2004). For an account of the international political implications of the program, particularly during the periods of military and fascist regimes of Greece, Turkey, and Spain, see Kosnick 2000. Some of these are Al Canlar, Kırk Budak, Gelin Canlar Bir Olalım, Ehl-i Beyt Yolu, and Kuran ve Ehl-i Beyt Alevilerin Sesi. In the Istanbul home of wealthy, nonobservant Jews I was served ham. Along with speaking French among themselves, consumption of pork was not so much a statement of their own non-observance of Jewish dietary customs as it was symbolic of di√erentiation from Turkish Muslims and a≈liation with Europeanness. Some Turkish women described the extent of husbands’ love by their degree of jealousy. Occasionally the jealousy takes the form of violence against women. See Göktürk 2001 for trenchant analyses of Turkish films, particularly those aimed at a Turkish German audience. I have been unable to locate any specific information about this film; it was hugely popular in the mid-1980s. For more on Islam in German schools, see Jonker 2001; Schreiner and Wul√ 2001; and Radke 2004. Further competition for the souls and allegiance of the Zaza Alevis has come from an unlikely source, the pkk, the principal Kurdish nationalist party led by ‘‘Apo,’’ Abdullah Öcalan (since February 1999 residing in Turkish custody). Many in the pkk ‘‘suspected the Turkish secret police of being the true motor’’ (van Bruinessen 1997: 18) behind the growth of the Zazaist and Dersim Alevi

l 352

NOTES TO CHAPTER 10

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

movements, and were equally suspicious of groups advocating a Turkey-wide Alevi-Bekta¸si synthesis, further alienating Alevi Kurds from Sunni Kurds. Countering these tendencies, the pkk created a journal, with the heavily symbolic name Zülfikar (Ali’s sword), in a deliberate attempt to woo Alevi Kurds to their cause. The pkk hoped to persuade them that Kurdishness took precedence over their Alevi identity and to convince them that Bekta¸sis did not deserve their support, as they were merely tools of the repressive state. The journal was backed by pkk military muscle in the Dersim region, in what probably was a deliberate e√ort to force the Dersimis to make a political choice for or against the Kurdish movement. The government responded by one of the most massive military operations since the establishment of the republic, forcibly evacuating and partially or completely destroying around a third of Dersim’s villages (van Bruinessen 1997: 19). Few Zaza Alevis lent their support to the pkk cause, believing its fundaments to be Sunni, despite the Zulfikâr initiative. For more on dedes in Germany, see Sökefeld 2002. Code-switching is the linguistic practice of alternating in speech between di√erent languages, dialects, or registers, often within a single sentence. See Urciuoli 1996. See Schneider 1977 and 1984 on the vicissitudes of kinship. Kirve, describing the sacred relationship between families, is established through the institutions and rituals of godparenthood and circumcision sponsorship. It implies a set of mutual obligations and is marked by great respect. It often extends through generations. The term also can be used between friends, denoting trust and intimacy. The relationship between Alevis and Armenians is an intriguing one; only few references in the literature can be found. Méliko√, for example, refers to the relationship between the Paulician heresy ‘‘which has given rise to various heterodox doctrines whose traces are found among the Ah-i Haqq and Alevis’’ (1998: 194; cited in van Bruinessen 1998). Some point to the pantheist and dualist cosmologies and shared territory in which they lived. As far as the contemporary period, after some probing I learned that some Armenian Alevis did, in fact, express a particular a≈liation with one another and could sometimes be found gathering at a restaurant in the Kumkapı district of Istanbul, a neighborhood closely associated with Armenians. Cemevi, ‘‘cem house,’’ is an Alevi gathering place where cems and other collective activities take place. Law 677 prohibits and abolishes the profession of tomb keeping, the assigning

NOTES TO CHAPTER 10

353 l

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

of mystical names, and the closing of tekkes (dervish lodges), zaviyes (central dervish lodges), and tombs. December 13, 1925. On the analysis of Alevi mysticism and poetry, see Schimmel 1975. For more on the cem, see Meliko√ 1998. Sometimes spelled sema for the dance associated with the Mevlevi order. For further reading on ecstatic dance in Islam, see Molé 1963: 145–280. To many, the Atatürk image signified the links of the dede to a repressive regime, attesting to the polysemic nature of the Atatürk image. By the late 1990s, pictures of Atatürk took on an opposite meaning, expressing ideological distance from the political Islamist agenda. For more on this area during Ottoman times, see Inalcik 1986. Extensive ethnographic work has been carried out on related groups by Gökalp 1980 and Kehl-Bodrogi 1988. See chapter 3, n. 18 in this book. See, for example, Brettell 1986. Cf. Armenian expression for assimilation—‘‘white massacre’’ (Pattie 1997: 24). Some Alevis found this amusing, claiming only the dogs paid attention to the recorded calls to prayer in the empty mosques, barking at the disturbance.

11. VEILING MODERNITIES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Epigraph from Emine Sevgi Özdamar, describing her experience directing a play in Frankfurt; in Horrocks and Kolinsky 1996: 61. For excellent analyses of fetishism, see Spyer 1998, particularly the introductory chapter. Similarly, Moors has written about the veil. Like the headscarf it has ‘‘by and large been discussed in terms of women’s subordination and an essentialized Oriental di√erence’’ (1998: 211). When a Turkish social scientist, herself belonging to this group of westernized elite, studied Islamist women, she was fully expected to soundly chastise them, to join the politicization of them; when she did not, she found herself the object of harsh criticism (see Göle 1996). M. Silverman (1992) analyzes the implications of the French headscarf a√air. His discussion of the French left’s contradictory stance on the issue of di√erence vs. assimilation reveals as a fascinating contrast with the German left. For a comparison of religious symbols and their social and political meanings in Germany and France, see Auslander 2000; Kastoryano, 2002a; Schi√auer et al. 2004; Benhabib 2002; P. Silverman 2005; Scott 2007; and Bowen 2007.

l 354

NOTES TO CHAPTER 11

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

Honig (1998) provides an excellent analysis of this incident, in terms of the debate about integration/assimilation; she also takes issue with Kristeva in relation to the movement from a nationalist to a cosmopolitan perspective. See also Scott 2007; and Bowen 2007. Silverstein (2004) discusses l’a√aire du foulard islamique, placing it in the context of both French educational ideologies and structures but also juxtaposing it to sports practices. See also Scott 2007; and Bowen 2007. Kinross 1964. For an amusing account of the fez, past and present, see Seal 1996. See especially Sirman 1989 on women in the early Republican period. Erbakan has been a long-time figure in Turkish political life; his leadership of the National Salvation Party—msp—in the 1970s led to his incarceration following the 1980 junta. Saylan has documented the extensive financial connections between aramco, Saudi Arabian individuals, banking institutions and Turkish financial institutions, corporations, holding companies, vakifs (religious endowments), and the key Turkish players, including the brothers Korkut and Turgut Özal. For extensive discussions of the politics of the new veiling movement, see Göle 1996; Arat 2001; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Kramer 2004. See Navaro-Yashin 2002 for a fascinating analysis of contemporary tesettür. Haram means ‘‘forbidden.’’ It is more or less equivalent to traif in Hebrew, as opposed to kosher. Haram’s counter is helal, which, like kosher, denotes those things that are lawful, ‘‘in order,’’ or permitted. Islamic law not only defines things as helal (obligatory) and haram (forbidden) but specifies three mediating states between these. They are: mandub (recommended), mubah (permitted), and makru (reprehensible). I am grateful to the late Fazlur Rahman for explaining these and related intricacies to me. Hane (pronounced ‘‘han-ay’’) is Turkish for place, house, venue, home. Yemek means food; yemekhane would be a dining hall. Yatak, bed, becomes dormitory in yatakhane. Thus Gayhane is the place for gays.

CONCLUSION 1.

2.

This definition of demotic can be found at http://yin.arts.uci.edu/players/ demotic/about.html. This particular demotic is a multivocal, interactive performance work by Antoinette LaFarge and Robert Allen, which explores multiplicity in America; it is produced by the Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, California, July 2004. Much has been written about cosmopolitanism, taken from numerous per-

NOTES TO CONCLUSION

355 l

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

spectives—the relation to globalization, consumption, supranational political forms, democratization, citizenship, etc.—that extend my scope here. For more reading, see, e.g., Strauss 2003; Archibugi and Held 1995; Calhoun 2002; Breckenridge et al. 2002; Cheah and Robbins 1998; Turner 2001; Vertovec and Cohen 2002. See Bloomfield 2003 for a discussion of the contradictions in Berlin’s cultural policy between conceptions of ‘‘multicultural’’ and welto√en, cosmopolitan. The escalation of xenophobic violence that occurred after the Eastern European revolutions, bringing new migrants and asylum seekers, was not confined to Germany. The growth in Le Pen’s popularity in France was echoed by increased violence in Britain provoked by the National Front. In Austria, Kinnear (1992) reports the following gra≈ti on a Viennese tram car, surrounded by swastikas: ‘‘Who ruins the people and the country? The Social Democratic Party and the asylum seekers. Foreigners out . . . Kanakas on the gallows; foreigners to Mauthausen’’ (Mauthausen was a Nazi death camp). Recent theorizing has begun to question the victim model of the Turks, for example, Adelson 2000 and 2005. The phrase ‘‘foreign Germans,’’ Auslandsdeutsche, has a history preceding Zaimo˘glu’s recoining of it. It had been used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for Germans living abroad, most often those who had left for Russia, the ancestors of today’s Aussiedler. See Klekowski von Koppenfels 2002a. Non-Germans, such as Cubans, Angolans, and Vietnamese, did live in the GDR. However, the proportion of foreigners in relation to the country’s population was significantly smaller than that in the Federal Republic. In many cases, the foreign workers were housed in special hostels and rarely interacted with local Germans. And also inscribed in passports. West German passports nowhere indicated the ‘‘west’’ portion of the political identity, a≈rming a generalized, totalizing Germanness. An analysis of the political etymology of policies and discourse around asylum seeking can be found in Mattson 1995. Ein Handbuch für Deutschland (Berlin: Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Migration, Flüchtlinge und Integration, 2005). Brubaker (1994) expands on the distinction between common culture and common descent in German political culture. Rainer Bauböck discusses democratic cosmopolitanism (2003), though his focus is somewhat di√erent, focusing on the macro-relations between communities and states. See also, for example, the article in Die Zeit (October

l 356

NOTES TO CONCLUSION

13.

14.

15.

1999) criticizing foreign anthropologists for (mis)treating Germans as legitimate anthropological subject matter. Clearly, this generalization does not include the significant numbers of Germans who find the very notion of any form of German nationalism repugnant; in fact, according to some Euro-statistical studies German youth have the lowest rates of nationalism and see themselves as Europeans first and Germans second. The involved and contentious field of German exceptionalism is beyond the scope of this book. Here I refer not to the historical debates about Sonderweg, the exceptional, special, peculiar path Germany has taken, but rather to a more vernacular sense that arises in the public sphere, whether in the context of discussion of Leitkultur or the explicit denial of being an ‘‘immigration country.’’ As explained, they must satisfy a host of criteria and not claim any other national a≈liation. This phrase Staat der Gegenwart was used by Dan Diner at the conference ‘‘Gemeinsame Vergangenheit, getrennte Geschichte’’ and is quoted in Mushaben 2004.

NOTES TO CONCLUSION

357 l

Works Cited Abadan-Unat, Nermin. 1976. Turkish Workers in Europe, 1960–1975: A SocioEconomic Reappraisal. Leiden: Brill. Abbey, William, ed. 1993. Two into One: Germany, 1989–1992: A Bibliography of the ‘‘Wende.’’ London: Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London. Abish, Walter. 1980. How German Is It? New York: New Directions. Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1988. ‘‘Fieldwork of a Dutiful Daughter.’’ In Soraya Altorki and Camillia Fawzi El-Solh, eds., Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society, 139–62. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press. Adelson, Leslie A. 2005. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2003. ‘‘Against Between: A Manifesto.’’ New Perspectives on Turkey 28–29: 19–36. ———. 2000. ‘‘Touching Tales of Turks, Germans, and Jews: Cultural Alterity, Historical Narrative, and Literary Riddles for the 1990s.’’ New German Critique 80: 93–124. ———. 1994. ‘‘Opposing Oppositions: Turkish-German Questions in Contemporary German Studies.’’ German Studies Review 17: 303–30. Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by D. Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books. ———. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. A˘gao˘gulları, Mehmet Ali. 1987. ‘‘The Ultranationalist Right.’’ In I. Schick and E. Tonak, eds., Turkey in Transition: New Perspectives, 177–217. Oxford: Oxford University Press. aka (Arbeiteskreis Entwicklungspolitik). 1982. Regnet es in Anatolien? Berlin: Express Edition. Akademie der Dioezese Rottenburg. 1995. Ausländerbuch für Inländer. Rottenburg: Akademie der Dioezese Rottenburg. ———. 1994. Beitraege zur Begegnung von Kirche und Welt, nos. 63–64: 34–35. Rottenburg: Akademie der Dioezese Rottenburg.

Akçam, Dursun. 1982. Deutsches Heim Glück allein/Alaman Oca˘gı: Wie Türken Deutsche sehen. Bornheim-Merten: Lamuv Verlag. Aksoy, Asu, and Kevin Robins. 2000. ‘‘Thinking across Spaces: Transnational Television from Turkey.’’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 3(3): 343–65. Algar, Hamid. 1998. ‘‘Elements de provenance Malamati dans la tradition primitive Naqshbandi.’’ In Alexandre Popovic, Nathalie Clayer, and Thierry Zarcone, eds., Melamis-Bayramis: Etudes sur trois mouvements mystiques musulmans. Istanbul: Editions isis. Allievi, Stefano, and Jorgen Nielsen, eds. 2003. Muslim Networks and Transnational Communities in and across Europe. Muslim Minorities Series, volume 1. Leiden: Brill. Almanya Alevi Birlikleri Federasyonu. 1991. Das neue Staatsangehoerigkeitsrecht/Yeni Vatanda¸slık Yasası. Cologne: Almanya Alevi Berlikleri Federasyonu. Amann, Renate, and Barbara von Neumann-Cosel, eds. 1997. Berlin: Eine Stadt im Zeichen der Migration. Darmstadt: vwp (Verlag für Wissenschaftliche Publikationen). Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, Perry. 1979. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1991. ‘‘Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology.’’ In Richard G. Fox, ed., Recapturing Anthropology: Working Papers in the Present, 191–210. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. ———. 1986a. ‘‘Center and Periphery in Anthropological Theory.’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 28(2): 356–61. ———. 1986b. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archibugi, Daniel, and David Held, eds. 1995. Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order. Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press. Archibugi, Daniel, David Held, and Martin Kohler, eds. 1999. Re-Imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1951. Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Armitage, John, ed. 2001. Virilio Live. London: Sage. l 360

WORKS CITED

Armstrong, Harold Courtenay. 1932. Grey Wolf: Mustafa Kemal, an Intimate Study of a Dictator. New York: Minton, Balch. Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century. London: Verso. Asut, Attila, ed. 1994. Sivas Kitabı. Istanbul: Edebiyatçılar Derne˘gi. Ate¸s, Seyran. 2005. Grosse Reise ins Feuer: Die Geschichte einer deutschen Türkin. Berlin: Rowohlt. Auslander, Leora. 2000. ‘‘Bavarian Crucifixes and French Headscarves: Religious Practices and the Postmodern European State.’’ Cultural Dynamics 12(3): 183– 209. Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats Berlin (Commissioner of Foreigners’ A√airs of the Berlin Senate). 2000. Das Aufenthaltsrecht: Ein Leitfaden zum Ausländergesetz. Berlin: Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats. ———. 1992a. Principal Duties. Berlin: Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats. ———. 1992b. Türkische Berliner—Eine Minderheit stellt sich vor / Berlinli Türkler. Berlin: Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats. ———. 1992c. Erleichterte Einburgerung junger Auslander, Turkische Berliner—Eine Minderheit stellt sich vor / Berlinli Türkler. Berlin: Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats. ———. 1985. Miteinander leben: Bilanz und Perspektiven. Berlin: Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats. Aydın, Mehmet Ali. 2001. Turkish Speaking Communities and Education—No Delight. London: fatal Publications. Babcock, Barbara A., ed. 1978. The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Bach, Monika. 1980. Mediennutzung und Türkische Jugendliche: Die Auswirkung des Fernsehkonsums auf die Sozialisation. Berlin: Hitit Verlag. Bade, Klaus. 1994. ‘‘Immigration and Social Peace in United Germany.’’ Daedalus (winter): 85–105. Bade, Klaus, ed. 1992. Ausländer, Aussiedler, Asyl in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. 3rd ed. Hannover: Niedersächsische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung. ———. 1987. Population, Labour and Migration in 19th and 20th Century Germany. New York: Berg. Bade, Klaus, and Myron Weiner, eds. 1997. Migration Past, Migration Future: Germany and the United States. Providence: Berghahn Books. Baer, Hans. 1998. Crumbling Walls and Tarnished Ideals: An Ethnography of East Germany before and after Unification. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America. WORKS CITED

361 l

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Balibar, Etienne. 1991. ‘‘Es gibt keinen Staat in Europa: Racism and Politics in Europe Today.’’ New Left Review 186: 5–19. Banks, Marcus. 1996. Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions. London: Routledge. Barbieri, William A., Jr. 1998. Ethics of Citizenship: Immigration and Group Rights in Germany. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Barı¸s Partisi. 1985. Temel Yakla¸sımlar. Ankara. Barth, Frederik, ed. 1969. Introduction. In Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 9–38. Boston: Little, Brown. Basch, L., Nina Glick-Schiller, and C. S. Blanc. 1994. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Post-colonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-states. New York: Gordon and Breach. Ba¸sgöz, Ilhan, and Norman Furniss. 1985. Turkish Workers in Europe: An Interdiscplinary Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Turkish Studies. Battaglia, Deborah. 1992. ‘‘At Play in the Fields (and Borders) of the Imaginary: Melanesian Transformations of Forgetting.’’ Cultural Anthropology 8: 430–42. Bauböck, Rainer. 2003. ‘‘Political Community beyond the Sovereign State, Supranational Federalism, and Transnational Minorities.’’ In Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, 110–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———, ed. 1994. Preface to From Aliens to Citizens: Redefining the Status of Immigrants in Europe. Brookfield, Vt.: Avebury. Bauböck, Rainer, and J. Rundell, eds. 1998. Blurred Boundaries: Migration, Ethnicity, Citizenship. Aldershot: Ashgate. Baucic, Ivo. 1984. ‘‘Ten Year Experience in Planning and Implementing the Return of Migrants in Yugoslavia.’’ In Daniel Kubat, ed., The Politics of Return: International Return Migration in Europe, 147–52. Rome: Centro Studi Emigrazione. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1991. Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press. ———. 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Baumann, Jochen, Andres Dietl, and Wolfgang Wippermann. 1999. Blut oder Boden: Doppel-pass, staatsbürgerrecht und nationsverständnis. Berlin: Elefanten Press. Baumgartner-Karabak, Andrea, and Gisela Landesberger. 1978. Die verkauften Bräute: Türische Frauen zwischen Kreuzberg und Anatolien. Hamburg: Rowohlt. l 362

WORKS CITED

Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Aussiedlerfragen. 2000. Info-Dienst Deutsche Aussiedler, no. 106. Berlin: Netzwerke für Integration. ———. 2000. Info-Dienst Deutsche Aussiedler, no. 95. Berlin: Netzwerke für Integration. ———. 1999. Info-Dienst Deutsche Aussiedler, no. 103: Aussiedlerpolitik 2000: Integration in Deutschland—Hilfen in den Herkunftsländ. Berlin: Netzwerke für Integration. ———. 1998. Info-Dienst Deutsche Aussiedler, no. 97. Berlin: Netzwerke für Integration. ———. 1991. Info-Dienst Deutsche Aussiedler, no. 24. Berlin: Netzwerke für Integration. ———. 1991. Info-Dienst Deutsche Aussiedler, no. 107. Berlin: Netzwerke für Integration. Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Migration, Flüchtlinge und Integration. 2005. Ein Handbuch für Deutschland. Berlin: Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Migration, Flüchtlinge und Integration. Beck, Ulrich. 2000. ‘‘The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology of the Second Age of Modernity.’’ British Journal of Sociology 51(1): 79–105. Bellér-Hann, Ildikó, and Chris Hann. 2001. Turkish Region: State, Market and Social Identities on the East Black Sea Coast. Oxford: James Currey. Benhabib, Seyla. 2002. The Claims of Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press. Berdahl, Daphne. 1999a. Where the World Ended: Reunification and Identity in the German Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1999b. ‘‘ ‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things.’’ Ethnos 64(2). Berger, John, and Jean Mohr. 1975. A Seventh Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Berliner Institut für Vergleichende Sozialforschung. 1994. Was wäre Berlin ohne die Berliner—Immigranten scha√en eine Metropole. Berlin: Edition Parabolis. Berlin Statistische Berichte. 2001. Statistik, Bevolkerung in Berlin, Statistisches Landesamt. Berlin: Berlin Statistische Berichte. ———. 1998. Melderectlich registrierte Auslander in Berlin 31 Dezember 1997. Berlin: Berlin Statistische Berichte. ———. 1992. Statistische Berichte, Berliner. Berlin: Berlin Statistische Berichte. ———. 1986. Berliner Statistik, Melderechtlich registrierte Einwohner in Berlin (West) (31 December). Berlin: Berlin Statistische Berichte. WORKS CITED

363 l

Berman, Russell A., Azade Seyhan, and Arlene Akiko Teraoka, eds. 1989. Special issue: ‘‘Minorities in German Culture.’’ New German Critique 46 (winter). Be¸sikçi, Ismail. 2004. International Colony Kurdistan. London: Parvana. ———. 1969. Do˘gu Anadolu’nun Düzeni. Istanbul: E. Yaginlarlı. Beyme, Klaus von. 1999. ‘‘Shifting National Identities: The Case of German History.’’ National Identities 1(1): 39–51. Bhabha, Homi K. 1990. ‘‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation.’’ In Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration, 291–322. New York: Routledge. Bhabha, Jacqueline. 1998. ‘‘ ‘Get Back to Where You Once Belonged’: Identity, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Europe.’’ Human Rights Quarterly 20(3): 592–627. Bilba¸sar, Kemal. 1976. Gemmo. London: Peter Owen. Birge, John. 1937. The Bektashi Order of Dervishes. London: Luzac. Birkenfeld, Helmut, ed. 1982. Gastarbeiterkinder aus der Turkei. Munich: Beck Verlag. Blau, Joyce. 1996. ‘‘Kurdish Written Literature.’’ In Philip Kreyenbroek and Christine Allison, eds., Kurdish Culture and Identity, 20–28. London: Zed Books. Bloomfield, Jude. 2003. ‘‘ ‘Made in Berlin’: Multicultural Conceptual Confusion and Intercultural Reality.’’ International Journal of Cultural Policy 9(2): 167–83. Blum, Richard, and Eva Blum. 1970. The Dangerous Hour: The Lore and Culture of Crisis and Mystery in Rural Greece. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1965. Health and Healing in Rural Greece. London: Oxford University Press. Bodemann, Y. Michal. 2002. In den Wogen der Erinnerung: Juedische Existenz in Deutschland. Munich: dtv. ———. 1998. ‘‘Eclipse of Memory: German Representations of Auschwitz in the Early Postwar Period.’’ New German Critique 75: 57–88. ———. 1996. Gedächtnistheater: Die jüdische Gemeinschaft und ihre deutsche Erfindung. Hamburg: Rotbuch. ———. 1996. ‘‘Reconstructions of History: From Jewish Memory to Nationalised Commemoration of Kristallnacht in Germany.’’ In Bodemann, ed., Jews, Germans, Memory: Reconstructions of Jewish Life in Germany, 179–225. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Böhning, W. R. 1986. ‘‘Bibliography on International Return Migration.’’ International Migration (International Migration for Employment Working Paper Review) 118(4): 401–14. Borneman, John. 2002. ‘‘Deutschsein: Fiktion und das Reale [German as Referent, German as the Real].’’ In Thomas Hauschild and B. J. Warneken, eds.,

l 364

WORKS CITED

Inspecting Germany. Internationale Deutschland-Ethnographie der Gegenwart, Forum Europäische Ethnologie, vol. 1, 173–94. Münster: Lit Verlag. ———. 1998. ‘‘Grenzeregime, (Border Regime): The Wall and Its Aftermath.’’ In Wilson and Donnan, eds., Border Identities, 162–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. Settling Accounts: Violence, Justice, and Accountability in Postsocialist Europe, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ———. 1992. Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1991. After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin. New York: Basic Books. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1994. ‘‘The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups.’’ Theory and Society 14: 723–44. ———. 1988. The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Translated by Peter Collier. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. ———. 1986. ‘‘The Forms of Capital.’’ In J. G. Richardson, ed. Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, 241–58. New York: Greenwood Press. ———. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ———. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loic Wacquant. 2000. ‘‘The Organic Ethnologist of Algerian Migration.’’ Ethnography 1: 173–82. Bovenkerk, Frank. 1974. The Sociology of Return Migration: A Bibliographic Essay. The Hague: Martinus Nijho√. Bowen, John R. 2007. Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boyarin, Jonathan. 1992. Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bozkurt, Fuat. ‘‘State-Community relations in the Restructuring of Alevism.’’ 1998. In Tord Olsson et al., eds., Alevi Identity, 85–96. Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. ———. 1982. Buyruk. Istanbul: Anadolu Matbaasi. Breckenridge, Carol A. et al. eds. 2002. Cosmopolitanism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Breckenridge, Carol A., and Arjun Appadurai. 1989. ‘‘On Moving Targets.’’ Public Culture 2: i–iv.

WORKS CITED

365 l

Breeden, James O., ed. 1980. Advice among Masters: The Ideal in Slave Management in the Old South. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Brettell, Caroline. 1986. Men Who Migrate, Women Who Wait. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton, University Press. Bringa, Tone. 1995. Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Brubaker, Rogers. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1992. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Budzinski, Manfred, and Karin Clemens. 1991. Rausland: oder: Menschenrechte fuer alle. Göttingen: Lamuv. Bultmann, Peter Friedrich. 2002. ‘‘Dual Nationality and Naturalisation Policies in the German Länder.’’ In Hansen and Weil, eds. Dual Nationality, Social Rights and Federal Citizenship in the U.S. and Europe: The Reinvention of Citizenship. New York: Berghahn Books. Bumke, Peter. 1979. ‘‘Kizilbash-Kurden in Dersim (Tunceli, Turkei): Marginalität und Häresie.’’ Anthropos 74: 530–48. Bundesrepublik Deutschland. 1995. The Situation of Foreigners in Germany: Facts, Analyses, Arguments on Hostility toward Foreigners. Bonn: Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, Auslandsabteilung. ———. 1993. Hostility toward Foreigners in Germany: Facts, Analyses, Arguments. Bonn: Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, Auslandsabteilung. ———. 1990. Aussiedleraufnahmegesetz. Bundesgesetzblatt. Bonn: Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, Auslandsabteilung. ———. 1949. Grundgesetz. Bundesgesetzblatt. Bonn: Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, Auslandsabteilung. Burleigh, Michael, and Wolfgang Wipperman. 1991. The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press. Burul, Ye¸sim. 2003. ‘‘The World of Aziza A.: Third Space in Identities.’’ New Perspectives on Turkey 28–29: 209–28. Ça˘glar, Ay¸se S. 2004. ‘‘ ‘Citizenship Light’: Transnational Ties, Multiple Rules of Membership and the ‘Pink Card.’ ’’ In Jonathan Friedman and Shalini Randeria, eds., Worlds on the Move: Globablisation, Migration and Cultural Security, 273–92. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2002a. ‘‘Media Corporatism and Cosmopolitanism.’’ In Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, 180–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press. l 366

WORKS CITED

———. 2002b. ‘‘A Table in Two Hands.’’ In Deniz Kandiyoti and Ayse Saktanber, eds., Fragments of Culture, 294–307. London: I. B. Tauris. ———. 1998. ‘‘Verordnete Rebellion: Deutsch-türkischer Rap und türkischer Pop in Berlin.’’ In Ruth Mayer and Mark Terkessidis, eds., Globalkolorit. Multikulturalismus und Populärkultur, 41–56. St. Andrä-Wörden: Hannibal. ———. 1995. ‘‘McDöner: Döner Kebap and the Social Positioning Struggle of German Turks.’’ In Janeen Arnold Costa and Gary J. Bamossy, eds., Marketing in a Multicultural World: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Cultural Identity, 209–30. London: Sage. Calhoun, Craig. 2002. ‘‘The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers: Towards a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism.’’ In Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, 86–109. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Campbell, John K. 1964. Honour, Family, and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Camus, Albert. 2000 The Outsider. Translated by Joseph Laredo. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Classics. Castles, Stephen. 2000. Ethnicity and Globalization: From Migrant Worker to Transnational Citizen. London: Sage. Castles, Stephan, and Alastair Davidson. 2000. Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging. London: Macmillan Press. Castles, Stephen, and Godula Kosack. 1973. Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castles, Stephan, Heather Booth, and Tina Wallace. 1984. Here for Good: Western Europe’s New Ethnic Minorities. London: Pluto. Castles, Stephen, and Mark J. Miller, eds. 1993. The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World. New York: Guilford. Cesarani, David, and Mary Fulbrook, eds. 1996. Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe. London: Routledge. Chaliand, Gérard, ed. 1979. People without a Country. London: Zed Press. Chapin, Wesley D. 1996. ‘‘The Turkish Diaspora in Germany.’’ Diaspora 5: 275–301. Charbut, Yves. 1979. Children of Migrant Workers and Their Home Countries. Ankara: Haceteppe Press. Cheah, Pheng, and Bruce Robbins, eds. 1998. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cheesman, Tom. 2004. ‘‘Talking ‘Kanak’: Zaimo˘glu contra Leitkultur.’’ New German Critique 92 (spring–summer): 82–99. Chin, Rita. 2002. ‘‘Imagining a German Multiculturalism: Aras Oren and the WORKS CITED

367 l

Contested Meanings of the ‘Guest Worker,’ 1955–1980.’’ Radical History Review 83(2): 44–72. Çinar, Dilek. 1994. ‘‘From Aliens to Citizens: A Comparative Analysis of Rules of Transition.’’ In Rainer Bauböck, ed., From Aliens to Citizens, 49–72. Aldershot: Avebury. Clark, Bruce. 2006. Twice a Stranger. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Clastres, Pierre. 1989. Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. New York: Zone Books. Cli√ord, James. 1998. ‘‘Mixed Feelings.’’ In Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, 36–70. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. ———. 1994. ‘‘Diasporas.’’ Cultural Anthropology 9(3): 302–38. Cohen, Abner. 1974. Urban Ethnicity. London: Tavistock. Cohen, Robin. 1997. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ———. 1991. Contested Domains: Debates in International Labor Studies. London: Zed Books. Cohn, Bernard. 1996. ‘‘Cloth, Clothes, and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth Century.’’ Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Collaros, Titsa, and Loukia Moussourou. 1978. The Return Home: Socio-economic Aspects of Re-integration of Greek Migrant Workers Returning from Germany, Athens: Re-integration Center for Migrant Workers. Collet, Beate. 2004. ‘‘Muslim Headscarves in Four Nation-States and Schools.’’ In Werner Schi√auer et al., eds., Civil Enculturation: Nation-state, Schools and Ethnic Di√erence in Four European Countries. New York: Berghahn Books. Comaro√, John. 1996. ‘‘Politics of Di√erence in an Age of Revolution.’’ In Edwin Wilmsen and Patrick McAllister, eds., The Politics of Di√erence: Ethnic Premises in a World of Power, 162–83. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1992. ‘‘Totemism and Ethnicity.’’ Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Confino, Alon. 2000 ‘‘Traveling as a Culture of Remembrance: Traces of National Socialism in West Germany, 1945–1960.’’ History and Memory 12(12): 92–121. Connor, Walker. Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton, University Press, 1994.

l 368

WORKS CITED

Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooper, Frederic, and Ann Laura Stoller. 1997. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coronil, Fernando. 1986. ‘‘Mastery by Signs, Signs of Mastery.’’ Plantation Society in the Americas 2(2): 201–7. Cowan, Jane. 1991. ‘‘Going Out for Co√ee?’’ In Peter Loizos and A. Paptaxiarchis, eds., Contested Identities, 180–202. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Crawshaw, Steve. 2004. Easier Fatherland: Germany and the Twenty-First Century. London: Continuum. Cresswell, Tim. 1996. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Czaplicka, John. 1995. ‘‘History, Aesthetics and Contemporary Commemorative Practice in Berlin.’’ New German Critique 65: 173–80. Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1994. ‘‘The Changing Quality of Citizenship.’’ In Bart van Steenberger, ed., The Conditions of Citizenship, 10–19. London: Sage. Dal, Güney. 1979. e-5. Istanbul: Milliyet Yayınları. Davidson, Simone. 2002. ‘‘Voluntary Visibles.’’ B.A. thesis, Modern European Studies, University College of London. De Certeau, Michel. 1998. Culture in the Plural. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1986. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Delaney, Carol. 1990. ‘‘The ‘hajj’: Sacred and Secular.’’ American Ethnologist 17(3): 513–30. Delanty, Gerard. 1976. Citizenship in a Global Age: Society, Culture, Politics. Buckingham: Open University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations: 1972–1990. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London: Routledge. ———. 2000. Of Hospitality. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Deutsche Welle. 2005. ‘‘Politician Wants Academics to Have Kids.’’ Deutsche Welle, January 24, 2005. Available at http://www.dw-world.de/.

WORKS CITED

369 l

———. 2004. ‘‘Integration Head Wants Imams to Speak German.’’ Deutsche Welle, November 24, 2004. Available at http://www.dw-world.de/. ———. 2004. ‘‘Holland Prompts Soul-Searching in Germany.’’ Deutsche Welle, November 16, 2004. Available at http://www.dw-world.de/. De Soto, Hermine G. 1994. ‘‘ ‘In the Name of the Folk’: Women and Nation in the New Germany.’’ Women’s Law Journal 5(1): 83–102. Dierl, Anton Josef. 1985. Geschichte und Lehre des Anatolischen AlevismusBektasismus. Frankfurt am Main: Dagyeli. Donnan, Hastings, and Thomas M. Wilson, eds. 1994. Border Approaches: Anthropological Perspectives on Frontiers. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge. Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. 1979. The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. New York: Basic Books. Dundes, Alan. 1984. Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Portrait of German Culture through Folklore. New York: Columbia University Press. Dustmann, Christian. 2002. ‘‘Migration, Savings and Uncertainty.’’ Journal of Development Economics 52: 295–316. ———. 1995. ‘‘Savings Behaviour of Temporary Migrants: A Life Cycle Analysis.’’ Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Socialwissenschafte 4: 511–33. Dustmann, Christian, and Oliver Kirchkamp. 2002. ‘‘The Optimal Migration Duration and Activity Choice after Remigration.’’ Journal of Development Economics 67(2): 351–72. Dustmann, Christian, and Ian Preston. 2000. ‘‘Racial Economic Factors in Attitudes to Immigration.’’ Discussion Paper Series. Bonn: Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit. Edinsel, Eser Kutay. 1984. ‘‘Die Psychosoziale Situation Turkischer Kinder und Familen in West-Berlin’’ [The Psychosocial Situation of Turkish Children and Families in West Berlin]. Dissertation, Free University, Berlin. Edinsel, Kerim. 1985. Acılara Gülümserken. Berlin. Eley, Geo√, and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds. 1994. Becoming National: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press. Elias, Norbert. 1996. The Germans. Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press. El Tayeb, Fatima. 1999. ‘‘ ‘Blood Is a Very Special Juice’: Racialized Bodies and Citizenship in Twentieth Century Germany.’’ International Review of Social History 44(7): 149–69. Engelbrektsson, Ulla-Britt. 1982. The Force of Tradition: Turkish Migrants at Home and Abroad. Goteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Entrikin, J. Nicholas. 1991. The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity. London: Macmillan. l 370

WORKS CITED

Epstein, Arnold Leonard. 1978. Ethos and Identity: Three Studies in Identity. London: Tavistock. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 1993. Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto Press. Eugenides, Je√rey. 2003. ‘‘The Bunker.’’ American Academy Berlin Journal, no. 6: 47. Ewing, Katherine Pratt. 2003. ‘‘Between Turkey and Germany: Living Islam in the Diaspora.’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 102(2/3): 405–31. ———. 2000. ‘‘Legislating Religious Freedom: Muslim Challenges to the Relationship between ‘Church’ and ‘State’ in Germany and France.’’ Daedalus 129(4): 31–54. Eyübo˘glu, Ismet Zeki. 1991. Alevi-Bekta¸si Edebiyatı. Istanbul: Der Yayınları. Faist, Thomas. 1999. Overcoming Immobility and Building Bridges: International South-North Migration and Transnational Spaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fakiolas, Ross. 1984. ‘‘Return Migration to Greece and Its Structural and Sociopolitical E√ects.’’ In Daniel Kubat, ed., The Politics of Return: International Return Migration in Europe, 37–44. Rome: Centro Studi Emigrazione. Fallers, Lloyd, and Margaret Fallers. 1976. ‘‘Sex Roles in Edremit.’’ In J. G. Peristiany, ed., Mediterranean Family Structures, 243–60. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto. ———. 1967. Studies in a Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove. Fassin, Didier. 2001. ‘‘The Biopolitics of Otherness: Undocumented Foreigners and Racial Discrimination in French Public Debate.’’ Anthropology Today 17(1): 3–7. Faulks, Keith. 2000. Citizenship. London: Routledge. Favell, Adrian. 1999. ‘‘To Belong or Not to Belong: The Postnational Question.’’ In Andrew Geddes and Adrian Favell, eds., The Politics of Belonging: Migrants and Minorities in Contemporary Europe, 209–27. Aldershot: Ashgate. Federal Republic of Germany. See Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Fetzer, Joel, and J. Christopher Soper. 2004. Muslims and the State in Britain, France, and Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fischer, Michael M. J. 1995. ‘‘Starting Over: How, What, and for Whom Does One Write about Refugees? The Poetics and Politics of Refugee Film as Ethnographic Access in a Media-Saturated World.’’ In E. Valentine Daniel and John Chr. Knudsen, eds., Mistrusting Refugees, 126–50. Berkeley: University of California Press. WORKS CITED

371 l

Fischer, Michael M. J., and George Marcus. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fischer, Sabine, and Moray McGowan. 1996. ‘‘From Pappko√er to Pluralism: On the Development of Migrant Writing in the German Federal Republic.’’ In David Horrocks and Eva Kolinsky, eds., Turkish Culture in German Society Today, 1–22. Providence: Berghahn Books. Fodor, Kate. 2004. Hannah and Martin. New York: Dramatists Play Service. Forsythe, D. 1989. ‘‘German Identity and the Problems of History.’’ In Elizabeth Tonkin, Maryon McDonald, and Malcolm Chapman, eds., History and Ethnicity. asa Monographs 27, 137–56. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1994a. Dits et Ecrits: 1954–1988. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1994b. Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. Friedlander, Judith. 1975. Being Indian in Hueyapan: A Study of Forced Identity in Contemporary Mexico, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Friedländer, Saul. 1992. ‘‘Trauma, Transference, and ‘Working Through’ in Writing the History of the Shoah.’’ History and Memory 4 (spring–summer): 39–59. Friedrich, Paul. 1989. ‘‘Language, Ideology and Political Economy.’’ American Anthropologist 91(2): 295–312. Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. 1999. Integration und Integrationsförderung in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft. Arbeit und Soziales no. 91. Bonn: fes. ———. 1998. Multikulturelle Einwanderungsgesellschaften in Westeuropa: Soziale Konflikte und Integrationspolitiken. Edited by Axel Schulte. Bonn: fes. ———. 1998. Ursachen und Formen der Fremdenfeindlichkeit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Edited by S. Ganer and H. Esser. Bonn: fes. ———. 1995. Antisemitismus und Fremdenfeindlichkeit: Herausforderung für die Demokratie. Arbeit und Soziales no. 43. Bonn: fes. ———. 1995. Die dritte Generation: Integriert, angepasst oder ausgegrenzt ? Arbeit und Soziales, no. 55. Bonn: fes. ———. 1995. Einwanderungskonzeption für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Arbeit und Soziales no. 50. Bonn: fes. Frisch, Max. 1967. Überfremdung: O√entlichkeit als Partner. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Frölich, Pea, and Peter Märthesheimer, eds. 1980. Ausländerbuch für Inländer: Bausteine zum Begreifen der Ausländerprobleme. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Fulbrook, Mary. 1995. Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949–1989. New York: Oxford University Press. Füruzan. 1977. Yeni Konuklar. Istanbul: Adam. l 372

WORKS CITED

Gans, Herbert. 1962. Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of ItalianAmericans. New York: Free Press. García Canclini, Néstor. 1995. Hybrid Cultures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gaspard, François, and Farhad Khosrokhavar. 1995. Le foulard et la Républic. Paris. La Découverte. Geddes, Andrew, and Adrian Favell, eds. 1999. The Politics of Belonging: Migrants and Minorities in Contemporary Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate. Gehmacher, Ernst, Daniel Kubat, and Ursula Mehrländer, eds. 1978. Ausländerpolitik im Konflikt : Arbeitskräfte oder Einwanderer?; Konzepte der Aufnahmeund Entsenderlände. Bonn: Verl. Neue Gesellschaft. Geyer, Michael. 1996. ‘‘The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Germany.’’ In Joan Copjec, ed., Radical Evil, 169–200. London: Verso. Ghosh, Bimal, ed. 2001. Return Migration: Journey of Hope or Despair. Joint United Nations/International Organization for Migration publication. Geneva: International Organization for Migration. Giddens, Anthony. 1986. The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1972. Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber. London: Macmillan. Giesen, Berhhard. 1994. ‘‘Vom Patriotismus zum völkischen Denken: Intellekuelle als Konstrukteure der deutschen Identität.’’ In Helmut Berding, ed., Nationales Bewußtsein und kollektive Identät. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Gilman, Sander. 1991. German Reunification and the Jews. New German Critique 52 (winter): 173–91. ———. 1990. Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gilman, Sander, and Karen Remmler, eds. 1994. Reemerging Jewish Culture in Germany: Life and Literature since 1989. New York: New York University Press. Gitmez, Ali. 1983. Yurtdı¸sına i¸sçi göçü ve geri dönü¸sler. Istanbul: Alan Yayıncılık ———. 1979. Dı¸sgöç Öyküsü. Ankara: Maya Matbaacılık. Gladwell, Malcolm. 2000. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Di√erence. Boston: Little, Brown. Glazer, Nathan, and Patrick Moynihan, eds. 1975. Ethnicity: Theory and Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ———. 1963. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press. Glick Schiller, Nina. 1997. ‘‘The Situation of Transnational Studies.’’ Identities 4(2): 155–66. WORKS CITED

373 l

Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton. 1992. ‘‘Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration.’’ Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645: 1–24. Gmelch, George. 1980. ‘‘Return Migration.’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 9: 135–59. Gmelch, George, and R. Rhoades. 1979. ‘‘Bibliography on Return Migration.’’ Papers in Anthropology 20(1): 187–96. Gökalp, Altan. 1989. ‘‘Alévisme nomade: Des communautés de statut à l’identitié communautaire.’’ In Peter Andrews, ed., Ethnic Groups in the Republic of Turkey, 524–37. Wiesbaden: Reichert. ———. 1979. Têtes Rouges et Bouches Noires. Paris: Société d’ethnographie. Göktürk, Deniz. 2001. ‘‘Turkish Delight—German Fright: Migrant Identities in Transnational Cinema.’’ In Mediated Identities, ed. Deniz Derman, Karen Ross, and Nevena Dakovic, 131–49. Istanbul: Bilgi University Press. Goldak, Ralf. 1997. ‘‘Thinking the Kurdish Diaspora in Germany: A Critical Inquiry.’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Goldhagen, Daniel. 1996. Hitler’s Willing Executioners. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Göle, Nilüfer. 1996. The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Good, Byron J., Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good, and Robert Moradi. 1985. ‘‘The Interpretation of Dysphoric A√ect and Depressive Illness in Iranian Culture.’’ In Arthur Kleinman and Byron Good, eds., Culture and Depression, 369–428. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gott, Gil. 1994. ‘‘Migration, Ethnicization, and Germany’s New Ethnic Minority Literature.’’ Ph.D. dissertation., University of California, Berkeley, Department of German. Grässler, Bernd. 2005. ‘‘Critiquing Germany’s Immigration Law.’’ Deutsche Welle, May 27, 2005. Available at http://www.dw-world.de/. Graubard, Mark. 1943. Man’s Food, Its Rhyme or Reason, New York: Macmillan. Gray, John. 1997. Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press. Gregory, Derek. 1994. Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge: Blackwell. Gregson, Nicky, Kate Brooks, and Louise Crewe. 2001 ‘‘Bjorn Again? Rethinking 70s Revivalism through the Reappropriation of 70s Clothing.’’ Fashion Theory 5(1): 3–28. Greve, Martin. 1997. Alla Turca: Musik aus der Turkei in Berlin. Miteinander Leben in Berlin. Berlin: Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats. Gri≈n, Howard. 1961. Black Like Me. Boston: Houghton MiΔin. l 374

WORKS CITED

Grillo, Ralph. 1985. Ideologies and Institutions in Urban France: The Representation of Immigrants. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1980. ‘‘Nation’’ and ‘‘State’’ in Europe: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Academic Press. Grønhaug, Reidar. 1974. Micro-Macro Relations: Social Organization in Antalya, Southern Turkey. Occasional Paper No. 7. Bergen: University of Bergen, Department of Social Anthropology. Grün, Max von der. 1975. Leben im gelobten Land. Darmstadt: Luchterhand. Gugel, Günther. 1994. Ausländer Aussiedler Übersiedler: Fremdenfeindlichkeit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Tübingen: Verein für Friedenspäagogik. Gülfirat, Suzan. 1998. ‘‘Kleiner Türkischkurs’’ [A Little Turkish Lesson]. Der Tagesspiegel, August 20, 15. Güne¸s-Ayata, Ayse. 1992. ‘‘The Turkish Alevis.’’ Innovation in Social Sciences Research 5(3): 109–14. Gunsteren, Herman van. 1988. ‘‘Admission to Citizenship.’’ Ethics 98(4): 731–42. Gunter, Michael M. 1990. The Kurds in Turkey: A Political Dilemma. Boulder, Colo.: Westview. Gupta, Akhil. 1992. ‘‘The Song of the Nonaligned World: Transnational Identities and the Reinscription of Space in Late Capitalism.’’ Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 63–79. Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1992. ‘‘Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Di√erence.’’Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 6–23. Habermas, Jürgen. 1994a. ‘‘Citizenship and National Identity.’’ In Bart van Steenbergen, ed., The Condition of Citizenship, 20–35. London: Sage. ———. 1994b. The Past as Future. Translated and edited by Max Pensky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 1989. The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate. Translated and edited by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press. Hailbronner, Kay. 2002 ‘‘Germany’s Citizenship Law under Immigration Pressure.’’ In Randall Hansen and Patrick Weil, eds., Dual Nationality, Social Rights and Federal Citizenship in the U.S. and Europe: The Reinvention of Citizenship, 121–35. New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 1999. ‘‘Doppelte Staatsangegörigkeit.’’ Zeitschrift für Ausländerrechte 2: 51– 58. ———. 1998. ‘‘A European Citizenship or a Europe of Citizens? Third Country Nationals in the EU.’’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 24(4): 751–68. WORKS CITED

375 l

Hall, Stuart. 1994. ‘‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora.’’ In Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, 392–401. New York: Columbia University Press. Hammar, Tomas. 1984. ‘‘Dilemmas of Swedish Immigration Policy: They Were Invited to Stay Permanently—Do They Want to Return?’’ In Daniel Kubat, ed., The Politics of Return: International Return Migration in Europe, 187–200. Rome: Centro Studi Emigrazione. Handler, R., and J. Linnekin. 1984. ‘‘Tradition, Genuine or Spurious.’’ Journal of American Folklore 97(385): 273–90. Handler, R., and D. Segal. 1993. Introduction. Social Analysis, no. 33 (September): 3–8. Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. ———. 1987. ‘‘The World in Creolization.’’ Africa 57(4): 546–59. Hansen, Randall, and Patrick Weil, eds. 2002. Dual Nationality, Social Rights and Federal Citizenship in the U.S. and Europe: The Reinvention of Citizenship. New York: Berghahn Books. Hargreaves, Alec G., ed. 1987. Immigration in Post-War France. London: Methuen. Harnisch, Antje, Anne Marie Stokes, and Friedemann Weidauer. 1998. Fringe Voices: An Anthology of Minority Writing in the Federal Republic of Germany. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Harrington, Anne. 1996. Reenchanted Science: Holism and German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Di√erence. Oxford: Blackwell. Hauschild, Thomas, and B. J. Warneken, eds. 2002. Inspecting Germany. Internationale Deutschland-Ethnographie der Gegenwart. Münster: Lit Verlag. Haus der Kulturen der Welt [House of World Culture]. 2000. Heimat Kunst. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Hear, Nicholas van. 1998. New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal and Regrouping of Migrant Communities. London: ucl Press. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Heinrich, Andreas. 2002. ‘‘The Integration of Ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union.’’ In David Rock and Stefan Wol√, eds., Coming Home to Germany? The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic, 77–88. New York: Berghahn Books. Held, David. 1995. Democracy and Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance. Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press. l 376

WORKS CITED

Helsinki Watch. 1995. ‘‘Germany for Germans’’: Xenophobia and Racist Violence in Germany.’’ Human Rights Watch/Helsinki Watch, April. ———. 1992. ‘‘Foreigners Out’’: Xenophobia and Right-wing Violence in Germany. New York: Helsinki Watch/Human Rights Watch. ———. 1986. Violations of the Helsinki Accords: Turkey. New York: Helsinki Watch. Herf, Je√rey. 1997. Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Herzfeld, Michael. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge. ———. 1987. Anthropology through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography at the Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1981. Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece. Austin: University of Texas Press. Herzog, Todd, and Sander L. Gilman, eds. 2001. A New Germany in a New Europe. New York: Routledge. Hesselberger, Dieter. 1999. Das Grundgesetz: Kommentar für die politische Bildung, Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, Lizenzausgabe für die Landeszentralen für politische Bildung. Hilberg, Raul. 1985. The Destruction of the European Jews. Teaneck, N.J.: Holmes & Meier. Hirsch, Eric, and Michael O’Hanlon, eds. 1995. The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1981. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodzic, Saida. 2001. ‘‘Die Einbürgerung in Australien und Deutschland.’’ Master’s thesis, University of Cologne. Ho√mann-Nowotny, H., and K. Hondrich, eds. 1981. Ausländer in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und in der Schweiz: Segregation oder Integration. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Hofmann, Rainer. 1998. ‘‘Nationality Status and Minorities in Germany.’’ In Siofra O’Leary and Teija Tiilikainen, eds., Citizenship and Nationality Status in the New Europe, 57–168. London: Institute for Public Policy Research. Hohmann, Manfred, ed. 1988. Unterricht mit ausländischen Kindern. Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann. Hollinger, David. 1995. Postethnic America. New York: Basic Books. Holzner, Lutz. 1982. ‘‘The Myth of the Turkish Ghetto.’’ Journal of Ethnic Studies 9(4): 65–85. WORKS CITED

377 l

Honig, Bonnie. 2001. Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ———. 1998. ‘‘Ruth, the Model Émigrée: Mourning and the Symbolic Politics of Immigration.’’ In Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., 192–215. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Honolka, Harro, and Irene Götz. 1999. Deutsche Identität und has Zusammenleben mit Fremden. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Horrocks, David, and Eva Kolinsky, eds. 1996. Turkish Culture in German Society Today. Providence: Berghahn Books. Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. ‘‘The Clash of Civilizations.’’ Foreign A√airs 72(3): 22–28. Ignatie√, Michael. 1999. ‘‘Benign Nationalism? The Possibilities of the Civic Ideal.’’ In Edward Mortimer, ed., People, Nation and State: The Meaning of Ethnicity and Nationalism, 141–61. London: I. B. Tauris. Inalcık, Halil. 1986. ‘‘The Yörüks: Their Origins, Expansion and Economic Role.’’ In Carpets of the Mediterranean Countries, 1400–1600, eds. R. Pinner and W. Denny. London: Hali Publications. Inci, Nesteren. 1985. ‘‘Leben als Türken in Deutschland.’’ Forum: Zeitschrift für Ausänderfragen und- kultur; Yabancilar Sorunu ve Kültürü Dergesi 2: 17–23. Isaacs, Harold. 1975. Idols of the Tribe: Group Identity and Political Change. New York: Harper and Row. Isherwood, Christopher. 1952. Goodbye to Berlin. London: New Phoenix Library. Isin, Engin F., and Bryan S. Turner, eds. 2002. Handbook of Citizenship Studies. London: Sage. Jackson, Michael. 1998. Minima Ethnographica: Intersubjectivity and the Anthropological Project. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. JanMohamed, Abdul, and David Lloyd. 1990. Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press. Jarausch, Konrad H., ed. 1997. After Unity: Reconfiguring German Identities. Providence: Berghahn Books. John, Barbara. 2001. ‘‘German Immigration Policy—Past, Present, and Future.’’ In Todd Herzog and Sander L. Gilman, eds., A New Germany in a New Europe, 43–48. New York: Routledge. ———. 1997. Berliner Jugendliche turkisher Herkunft. Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Gesundheit und Soziales, Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats. December 12. Jonker, Gerdien. 2003. ‘‘The Mevlana Mosque in Berlin-Kreuzberg: An Unsolved Conflict.’’ Unpublished article, available at http://www.gerdien-jonker.de/. l 378

WORKS CITED

———. 2001. ‘‘Connecting Muslim Knowledge to the German School System.’’ International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (isim) Newsletter, September. Available at http://www.isim.nl/. Jonker, Gerdien, and Andreas Kapphan, eds. 1999. Moscheen und islamisches Leben in Berlin. Berlin: Miteinander leben in Berlin, Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats. Joppke, Christian. 1999. Immigration and the Nation-State. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jung, Matthias, Martin Wengeler, and Karin Böke, eds. 1997. Die Sprache des Migrationsdiskurses: Das Reden über ‘‘Ausländer’’ in Medien, Politik und Alltag. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Kabbani, Rana. 1996. ‘‘Hunger for Faith.’’ bbc2 Television broadcast. Kafadar, Cemal. 1995. Between Two Worlds: The Contructing of the Ottoman State. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ka˘gıtçıba¸sı, Cidem, ed. 1982. Sex Roles, Family, and Community in Turkey. Bloomington: Indiana University Turkish Studies. Kalpak, A., and Nora Räthzel. 1991. ‘‘A Note on Ausländerfeindlichkeit.’’ Race and Class 32(3): 149–52. Kandiyoti, Deniz, ed. 1992. ‘‘End of Empire: Islam, Nationalism and Women in Turkey.’’ In Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State, 22–47. London: Macmillan. ———. 1991. Women, Islam and the State. London: Macmillan. Kandiyoti, Deniz, and Saktanbar A. 2002. Fragments of Culture: The Everyday in Modern Turkey. London: I. B. Taurus. Karamustafa, Ahmet T. 1994. God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period, 1200–1550. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Kastoryano, Riva. 2002a. Negotiating Identities. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ———. 2002b. ‘‘Türken mit Deutschem Pass: Sociological and Political Perspectives on Dual Nationality in Germany.’’ In Randall Hansen and Patrick Weil, eds., Dual Nationality, Social Rights and Federal Citizenship in the U.S. and Europe: The Reinvention of Citizenship, 158–75. New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 1996. France, l’Allemagne et leurs immigrés: Negocier l’identité. Paris: Armand Colin. ———. 1986. Etre Turc en France: Reflexions sur familles et communauté. Paris: L’Harmattan. Kaya, Ayhan. 2001. ‘‘Sicher in Kreuzberg’’: Constructing Diasporas: Turkish HipHop Youth in Berlin. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. WORKS CITED

379 l

Kayalı, Hasan. 1997. Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1909–1918. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kazazis, Kostas. 1981. ‘‘Ellinas vs. Romios Anecdotally Revisited.’’ Folia Neoellenica 3: 53–55. Keane, Webb. 2005. ‘‘The Hazards of New Clothes: What Signs Make Possible.’’ In Graeme Were and Suzanne Kuechler, eds., The Art of Clothing, 1–16. London: ucl Press. Kearney, Michael. 1986. ‘‘From the Invisible Hand to Visible Feet: Anthropological Studies of Migration and Development.’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 15: 331–61. Kehl, Krisztina, and Ingrid Pfluger, eds. 1991. Die Ehre in der turkischen Kultur— Ein Wertsystem im Wandel. Berlin: Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats von Berlin in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Paritaetischen Bildungswerk e.V. Kehl-Bodrogi, Krisztina. 1992. ‘‘Vom revolutionaren Klassenkampf zum ‘wahren’ islam: Transformationsprozesse im Alevitum der Turkei nach 1980.’’ Sozialanthropologische Arbeitspapier no. 49. Berlin: Freie Universitäts Berlin, Institut für Ethnologie. ———. 1988. Die Kızılbash/Aleviten: Untersuchungen über eine esoterische Glaubensgemeinschaft in Anatolien. Berlin: Schwarz. Kehl-Bodrogi, Krisztina, Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, and Anke Otter-Beaujean, eds. 1997. Syncretistic Religious Communities in the Near East. Leiden: Brill. Kelek, Necla. 2005. Die fremde Braut: Ein Bericht aus dem Inneren des türkischen Lebens in Deutschland. Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch. Kenkel, Karen. 1989. ‘‘New Cultural Geographies: A Conference Report.’’ New German Critique 46 (winter): 181–90. Kepel, Gilles. 2004. The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press. ———. 1997. Allah in the West: Islamic Movements in America and Europe. Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press. Keyder, Ça˘glar. 1987. State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development. London: Verso. Khachig, Tölöyan. 1996. ‘‘Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment.’’ Diaspora 5(1): 3–36. Kindleberger, Charles Poor. 1967. Europe’s Post-war Growth: The Role of Labor Supply. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Kinnear, Ralph. 1992. ‘‘National Culture, Migration and Xenophobia: With Particular Reference to Migration and Regional Development in Central Europe.’’ Innovation in Social Sciences Research 5(3): 39–63. l 380

WORKS CITED

Kinross, Patrick Balfour. 1964. Ataturk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal, Father of Modern Turkey. New York: William Morrow. Kıray, Mubeccel. 1982. ‘‘Changing Patterns of Patronage.’’ In Çi˘gdem Ka˘gıtçıba¸sı ed., Sex Roles, Family, and Community in Turkey, 269–93. Bloomington: Indiana University Turkish Studies. ———. 1976a. ‘‘The New Role of Mothers: Changing Intra-Familial Relationships in a Small Town in Turkey.’’ In J. G. Peristiany, ed., Mediterranean Family Structures, 261–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1976b. ‘‘The Family of the Immigrant Worker.’’ In Abadan-Unat, ed., Turkish Workers in Europe 1960–1975: A Socio-Economic Reappraisal, 210–33. Leiden: Brill. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1998. ‘‘Confusing Pleasures.’’ In Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, 203–48. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kızıl Yol, no. 4. 1985. Bobigny, France. Kle√, Sanem, et al. 1990. BRD-DDR: Alte und neue Rassismen im Zuge der deutsch-deutschen Einigung. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunication. Klekowski von Koppenfels, Amanda. 2002a. ‘‘Politically Minded: The Case of Aussiedler as an Ideologically Defined Category.’’ geses: German Social Science Infrastructure Service (Sofid). Online. Accessed September 17, 2007. ———. 2002b. ‘‘The Decline of Privilege: The Legal Background to the Migration of Ethnic Germans.’’ In David Rock and Stefan Wol√, eds., Coming Home to Germany? The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic, 102–18. New York: Berghahn Books. Klimt, Andrea. 1989. ‘‘Returning ‘Home’: Portuguese Migrant Notions of Temporariness, Permanence, and Commitment.’’ New German Critique 46: 47–70. Koestler, Arthur. 1977. The Thirteenth Tribe. Chicago: Research Associates School Times Publications. Kohl, Helmut. 1998. ‘‘Auf dem 26. Bundestre√en der Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland in Stuttgart’’ [Speech given in Stuttgart at the twenty-sixth meeting of the organization of German expellees from Russia]. Bonn: Presseund Informationsamt der Bundesregierung. June 6. Koshar, Rudy. 2000. From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory 1870–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1998. Germany’s Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kosnick, Kira. 2004. ‘‘ ‘Speaking in One’s Own Voice’: Representational Strategies WORKS CITED

381 l

of Alevi Turkish Migrants on Open-Access Television in Berlin.’’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30(5): 979–94. ———. 2000. ‘‘Building Bridges: Media for Migrants and the Public-Service Mission in Germany.’’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 3(3): 321–44. Kramer, Jane. 1999. ‘‘Living with Berlin.’’ New Yorker, July 5, 50–64. ———. 1996. The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany. New York: Random House. Krane, Ronald, ed. 1975. Manpower Mobility across Cultural Boundaries: Social, Economic and Legal Aspects: The Case of Turkey and West Germany. Leiden: Brill ———, ed. 1979. International Labor Migration in Europe. New York: Praeger. Kristeva, Julia. 1993. Nations without Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Kroeger, Axel, Wolfgang Weber, Emi Koen, and Karin Streich. 1986. Der Umgang mit Krankheit in Türkischen und Deutschen Arbeitnehmerfamilien. Heidelberg: Institut für Tropenhygiene und ö√entliches Gesundheitswesen der Universität Heidelberg. Kubat, Daniel, ed. 1984. The Politics of Return: International Return Migration in Europe. Rome: Centro Studi Emigrazione. Küchler, Susanne. 2002 Malanggan: Art, Memory and Sacrifice. Oxford: Berg. Kudat, Ay¸se. 1974. Stability and Change in the Turkish Family at Home and Abroad. Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum. Kusmer, Kenneth L. 1976. The Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kymlicka, Will, and Wayne Norman. 1994. ‘‘Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory.’’ Ethics 104(2): 352–81. Kymlicka, Will and Wayne Norman, eds. 2000. Citizenship in Diverse Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lackmann, Thomas. 2000. Jewrassic Park: Wie baut man (k)ein jüdisches Museum? Berlin: Phil-Verlagsgesellschaft. Laclau, Ernesto. 1996. Emancipation(s). London: Phronesis. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. 1989. ‘‘Diderot: Paradox and Mimesis.’’ Typography: Mimesis, Philosopophy, Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Lakein, Diane. 2002. ‘‘Umgang mit als rassistisch verstandenen Konflikten in der anti-rassistischen Szene.’’ In Thomas Hauschild, Bernd Warneken, and Bernd Jürgen, eds., Inspecting Germany, 195–207. Münster: Lit Verlag. l 382

WORKS CITED

Lang, Barbara. 1998. Mythos Kreuzberg: Ethnographie eines Stadtteils, 1961–1995. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Large, David Clay. 1999. Berlin. New York: Basic Books. Lavi, Smadar, and Ted Swedenburg, eds. 1996. Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith, Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Leggewie, Claus, Angela Joost, and Stefan Rech. 2002. Der Weg zur Moschee—eine Handreichung für die praxis. Bad Homburg: Herbert-Quandt-Stiftung. Levitt, Peggy. 2001. The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lewis, Bernard. 1961. The Emergence of Modern Turkey. London: Oxford University Press. Limon, José. 1991. ‘‘Representation, Ethnicity, and the Precursory Ethnography: Notes of a Native Anthropologist.’’ In Richard G. Fox, ed., Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, 115–36. Santa Fe: School of American Research. Linke, Uli. 1999a. Blood and Nation: The European Aesthetics of Race. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1999b. German Bodies: Race and Representation after Hitler. New York: Routledge. Loentz, Elizabeth. 2006. ‘‘Yiddish, Kanak Sprak, Klezmer, and Hip-Hop.’’ Shofar 25(1): 33–62. Maier, Charles S. 1988. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and the German National Identity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Malkki, Lissa. 1996. ‘‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism and Dehistoricization.’’ Cultural Anthropology 11(3): 377–404. ———. 1994. ‘‘Citizens of Humanity: Internationalism and the Imagined Community of Nations.’’ Diaspora 3(1): 41–68. ———. 1992. ‘‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees.’’ Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 24–44. Mandel, Ruth. 2002. ‘‘Die ethnische Zwangsjacke: Der Platz der Türken in Deutschland.’’ In Thomas Hauschild, Bernd Warneken, and Bernd Jürgen, eds., Inspecting Germany, 362–77. Münster: Lit Verlag. ———. 1996. ‘‘A Place of Their Own: Contesting Spaces and Defining Places in Berlin’s Migrant Community.’’ In Barbara Metcalf, ed., Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe, 147–66. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———, with Czarina Wilpert. 1996c. ‘‘Migration zwischen der Turkei und DeutschWORKS CITED

383 l

land: Ethnizitat und kulturelle Zwischenwelten.’’ Soziologisches Jahrbuch 1994 1–2: 467–85. ———. 1995a. ‘‘The Alevi-Bektashi Identity in a Foreign Context: The Example of Berlin.’’ In Alexandre Popovic and Gilles Veinstein, eds., Bektachiyya: Etudes sur l’ordre mystique des Bektachis et les groupes rélevant de Hadji Bektach, 427– 34. Istanbul: Les Editions isis. ———. 1995b. ‘‘Second Generation Non-Citizens: Descendants of Turkish Migrants in Germany.’’ In Sharon Stephens, ed., Children and the Politics of Culture, 265– 81. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ———. 1994a. ‘‘Discriminating Discourse: Outsiders in Germany.’’ Special issue: ‘‘Anthropology and Ethnic Violence.’’ Anthropology in Action 1(3): 25–27. ———. 1994b. ‘‘Fortress Europe and the Foreigners Within: Germany’s Turks.’’ In Victoria Goddard, Josep Llobera, and Cris Shore, eds., The Anthropology of Europe, 113–25. London: Berg Press. ———. 1993. ‘‘Foreigners in the Fatherland.’’ In Camille Guerin-Gonzales and Carl Strikwerda, eds., The Politics of Immigrant Workers: Labor Activism and Migration in the World Economy since 1980, 279–94. New York: Holmes and Meier. ———. 1991. ‘‘Identity and Ethnic Constructions in the Context of Migration.’’ In Robin Ostow, Jurgen Fialkowski, Y. Michal Bodemann, and Hans Merkens, eds., Ethnicity, Structured Inequality and the State in Canada and the Federal Republic of Germany, 137–56. New York: Peter Lang. ———. 1990. ‘‘Shifting Centres, Emergent Identities: Turkey and Germany in the Lives of Turkish Gastarbeiter.’’ In Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, eds., Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration and the Religious Imagination, 153–71. London: Routledge. ———. 1989. ‘‘Turkish Headscarves and the ‘Foreigner Problem’: Constructing Difference through Emblems of Identity.’’ Russell Berman et al., eds., special issue on minorities in German culture. New German Critique 46: 27–46. Mandel, Ruth, Susan Pattie, and Michael Stewart. 2002. Final Report. Transnational Communities Programme Report, esrc, Oxford University. Mann, Thomas. 1993. Buddenbrooks. Repr., New York: Vintage. Marcus, George. 1995. ‘‘Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of a Multi-Sited Ethnography.’’ Annual Reviews of Anthropology 24: 95–117. D Mardin, Serif. 1989. Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1983. Din ve Ideoloji. Istanbul: Ileti¸sim Yayınları. ———. 1980. ‘‘Centre-Periphery as a Concept for the Study of the Social Transfor-

l 384

WORKS CITED

mation of Turkey.’’ In Ralph Grillo, ed., ‘‘Nation’’ and ‘‘State’’ in Europe: Anthropological Perspectives, 173–89. London: Academic Press. ———. 1969. ‘‘Power, Civil Society and Culture in the Ottoman Empire.’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 11: 258–81. Marko√, Irene. 1993. ‘‘Music, Saints and Ritual: Sama and the Alevis of Turkey.’’ In Grace Martin Smith and Carl W. Ernst, eds., Manifestations of Sainthood in Islam, 95–110. Istanbul: Isis Press. ———. 1986. ‘‘The Role of Expressive Culture in the Demystification of a Secret Sect of Islam: The Case of the Alevis of Turkey.’’ The World of Music 28(3): 42–56. Marshall, Barbara. 2000. Europe in Change: The New Germany and Migration in Europe. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marshall, Thomas H. Citizenship and Social Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marston, Sallie A. 2000. ‘‘The Social Construction of Scale.’’ Progress in Human Geography 24(2): 219–42. Martin, David. 2002. ‘‘New Rules for Dual Nationality.’’ In Randall Hansen and Patrick Weil, eds., Dual Nationality, Social Rights and Federal Citizenship in the U.S. and Europe; The Reinvention of Citizenship, 34–60. New York: Berghahn Books. Martin, Philip L. 1991. The Unfinished Story: Turkish Labour Migration to Western Europe. Geneva: International Labor Organization. Massey, Doreen. 1999. ‘‘Spaces of Politics.’’ in Doreen Massey, John Allen, and Philip Sarre, eds., Human Geography Today, 279–94. Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press. Massey, Doreen, John Allen, and Philip Sarre, eds. 1999. Human Geography Today. Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press. Massicard, Elise. 2003. ‘‘Alevist Movements at Home and Abroad: Mobilization Spaces and Disjunction.’’ New Perspectives on Turkey, no. 28–29 (Spring–Fall 2003): 163–87. Mattson, Michelle. 1995. ‘‘Refugees in Germany: Invasion of Invention?’’ New German Critique, no. 64 (winter): 61–85. McDowall, David. 1996. A Modern History of Kurds. London: I. B. Tauris. Meeker, Michael. 2002. A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1994. ‘‘Oral Culture, Media Culture, and the Islamic Resurgence in Turkey.’’ In Eduardo Archetti, ed., Exploring the Written in Anthropology, 31–63. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.

WORKS CITED

385 l

———. 1991. ‘‘The New Muslim Intellectuals in the Republic of Turkey.’’ In Richard Tapper ed., Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Poliitics and Literature in a Secular State, 189–223. London: I. B. Tauris. Mehrländer, Ursula. 1982. ‘‘Integration Process of Second Generation Migrants: Results of an Empirical Study on Italian Youths in the Federal Republic of Germany.’’ In H. Korte, ed., Cultural Identity and Structural Marginalization of Migrant Workers, 109–16. Geneva: European Science Foundation. Mehrländer, Ursula, ed. 2001. Einwanderungsland Deutschland: Neue Wege nachhaltiger Integration. Bonn: Dietz. Mehrländer, Ursula, and Günther Schultze. 1992. Einwanderungskonzept für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Fakten, Argumente, Vorschläge. Bonn: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Meliko√, Irene. 1998. Hadji Bektach: Un mythe et ses avatars: Genèse et évolution du soufisme populire en Turquie. Leiden: Brill. ———. 1995. ‘‘L’ordre des Bektachis et les groupes relevant de Hadji Bektach.’’ In Alexandre Popovic and Gilles Veinstein, eds., Bektachiyya: Etudes sur l’ordre mystique des Bektachis et les groupes relevant de Hadji Bektach. Istanbul: Les Editions isis. ———. 1992. Sur les traces du soufism turc: Recherches sur l’Islam populaire en Anatolie. Istanbul: Les Editions isis. Memmi, Albert. 1965. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon. Mernissi, Fatima. 1987. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Micksch, Jürgen. 1997. Kulturelle Vielfalt statt nationaler Einfalt: Eine Strategie gegen Nationalismus und Rassismus. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Otto Lembeck. Miller, Daniel. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Social Archaeology Series. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Minh-Ha, Trinh T. 1989. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mitchell, Katharyne. 1997a. ‘‘Transnational Subjects: Constituting the Cultural Citizen in the Era of Pacific Rim Capital.’’ In Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini, eds., Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, 228–56. New York: Routledge. ———. 1997b. ‘‘Di√erent Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity.’’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15(5): 533–53. Mitscherlich, Alexander, and Margarete Mitscherlich. 1975. The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior. New York: Grove Press.

l 386

WORKS CITED

Moerman, Michael. 1967. ‘‘Being Lue.’’ In J. Helm, ed., Essays on the Problem of the Tribe, 153–69. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Molé, Marijan. 1963. ‘‘La Danse extatique en Islam, in Les Danses Sacrée.’’ Sources Orientales 6: 145–280. Molho, Michael, and J. Nehama. 1975. In Memoriam: Hommage aux victimes juives des Nazis en Grèce. Salonika: Israeli Community of Thessaloniki. Monova, Miladina. 2001. ‘‘De l’historicité à l’ethnicité: Les Égéens ou ces autres Macédoniens.’’ Balkanologie 1–2: 179–97. Moors, Analiese. 1998. ‘‘Wearing Gold.’’ In Patricia Spyer, ed., Border Fetishisms, 208–23. London: Routledge. Morley, David, and Kevin Robins. 1990. ‘‘No Place Like Heimat : Images of Home(land) in European Culture.’’ New Formations 12: 1–23. Morokvasic, Mirjana. 1984. ‘‘Strategies of Return of Yugoslavs in France and the Federal Republic of Germany.’’ In Daniel Kubat, ed., The Politics of Return: International Return Migration in Europe, 87–92. Rome: Centro Studi Emigrazione. Mortimer, Edward, ed. 1999. People, Nation and State: The Meaning of Ethnicity and Nationalism. London: I. B. Tauris. Moutsou, Christina. 1998. ‘‘Handling ‘Food for Thought’: Greek and Turkish Hybrid Representations in Brussels.’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge. Mudimbe, V. Y., and Sabine Engel, eds. 1999. Special issue: ‘‘Diaspora and Immigration.’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 98 (winter/spring). Munz, Rainer, and Myron Weiner, eds. 1997. Migrants, Refugees, and Foreign Policy: U.S. and German Policies toward Countries of Origin. New York: Berghahn Books. Munz, Rainer, and Ralf Ulrich. 1997. ‘‘Changing Patterns of Immigration to Germany, 1945–1995: Ethnic Origins, Demographic Structure, Future Prospects.’’ In Klaus Bade and Myron Weiner, eds., Migration Past, Migration Future. Providence: Berghahn Books. Mushaben, Joyce Marie. 2004. ‘‘More Than Just a Bad-Hair Day: The Head-Scarf Debate as a Challenge to Euro-National Identities.’’ Unpublished manuscript. ———. 1998. From Post-War to Post-Wall Generations: Changing Attitudes toward the National Question and nato in the Federal Republic of Germany. Boulder, Colo.: Westview. Naficy, Hamid. 1993a. The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

WORKS CITED

387 l

———. 1993b. ‘‘Exile Discourse and Televisual Fetishization.’’ In Hamid Naficy and Teshome H. Gabriel, eds., Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged, 85–116. London: Routledge. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1977. The Inoperative Community. Theory and History of Literature 76. Translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, eds. 1991. Mythe Nazi. La Tour d’Aigues: Editions de l’Aube. Narroll, Raul. 1964. ‘‘On Ethnic Unit Classification.’’ Current Anthropology 5(4): 283–312. Narrowe, Judith. 1998. Under One Roof: On Becoming a Turk in Sweden. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Nathans, Eli. 2004. The Politics of Citizenship in Germany: Ethnicity, Utility and Nationalism. Oxford: Berg. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2002. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Neiman, Susan. 1992. Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin. New York: Schocken Books. Neumann, Ursula, and Hans H. Reich. 1977. Türkische Kinder-deutsche Lehrer. Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann. Newborn, Jud. 1994. ‘‘Work Makes Free: The Hidden Cultural Meaning of the Holocaust.’’ Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago. Neyzi, Leyla. 2002. ‘‘Embodied Elders: Space and Subjectivity in the Music of Metin-Kemal Kahraman.’’ Middle Eastern Studies 38(1): 89–109. Nolan, Molly. 1988. ‘‘The Historikerstreit and Social History.’’ New German Critique, no. 44 (spring/summer): 51–80. O√e, Claus. 1997. Varieties of Transition: The East European and East German Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press. Ogan, Christine. 2001. Communication and Identity in the Diaspora: Turkish Migrants in Amsterdam and Their Use of Media. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books. O’Leary, Siofra, and Teija Tiilikainen, eds. 1998. Citizenship and Nationality Status in the New Europe. Institute for Public Policy Research, London: Sweet and Maxwell. Olsson, Tord, Elisabeth Özdalga, and Catharina Raudvere, eds. 1998. Alevi Identity: Cultural, Religious and Social Perspectives. Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. l 388

WORKS CITED

Ören, Aras 1980. Die Fremde ist auch ein Haus [A Foreign Country Is a Home Too]. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag. ———. 1978. Deutschland, ein türkisches Märchen: Gedichte. Düsseldorf: Claassen. ———. 1973. Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstraße? [What’s Niyazi Doing in Naunynstraße?]. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag. ———. 1974. Der kurze Traum aus Kagithane [The Fleeting Dream of Kagithane]. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag. Orwell, George. 1946. Animal Farm. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Ossman, Susan, and Susan Terrio. 2006. ‘‘The French Riots: Questioning Spaces of Surveillance and Sovereignty.’’ International Migration 44(2): 5–21. Ossowski, Leonie. 1984. Voll auf der Rolle. Berlin: grips Theater. Ostergaard-Nielson, Eva. 2002. ‘‘Diasporas in World Politics.’’ In Daphne Josselin and William Wallace, eds., Non-State Actors in World Politics, chap. 13. London: Palgrave. ———. N.d. ‘‘The Politics of Migrants’ Transnational Political Practices.’’ Ostow, Robin. 2000. ‘‘Of Germans, Jews, and Dinosaurs.’’ New German Critique 81: 189–91. Özdalga, Elisabeth. 1998. The Veiling Issue, O≈cial Secularism and Popular Islam in Turkey. London: Curzon. Özdamar, Emine Sevgi. 1994. Mother Tongue. Toronto: Coach House Press. ———. 1992. Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus. Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch. Paine, Suzanne. 1974. Exporting Workers: The Turkish Case. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pamuk, Orhan. 2004. Snow. Translated by Maureen Freely. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Park, Robert Ezra. 1928. ‘‘Human Migration and the Marginal Man.’’ American Journal of Sociology (May 6): 881–93. ———. 1967. On Social Control and Collective Behavior: Selected Papers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parris, Ronald, ed. 1982. Living in Two Cultures: The Socio-Cultural Situation of Migrant Workers and their Families. Paris: unesco. Parsons, Talcott. 1975. ‘‘Some Theoretical Considerations of the Nature and Trends of Change of Ethnicity.’’ In Glazer and Moynihan, eds., Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, 53–83. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Pattie, Susan Paul. 1999. ‘‘Longing and Belonging: Issues of Homeland in Armenian Diaspora.’’ PoLAR 22(2): 80–92. ———. 1997. Faith in History. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. WORKS CITED

389 l

Paulick, Jane. 2004. ‘‘Breaking the Mold.’’ Deutsche Welle, August 12, 2004. Available at http://www.dw-world.de/. Pazarkaya, Yüksel. 1981. Heimat in der Fremde? Yaban sıla olur mu? Berlin: Ararat Verlag. Peck, Je√rey M. 2006. Being Jewish in the New Germany. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. ———. 1998. ‘‘Turks and Jews: Comparing Minorities in Germany after the Holocaust.’’ In Je√rey M. Peck, ed., German Cultures, Foreign Cultures: The Politics of Belonging, 1–16. Washington: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. ———. 1997. ‘‘Natives, Strangers, and Foreigners: Constituting Germans by Constructing Others.’’ In Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., After Unity: Reconfiguring German Identities, 61–102. Providence: Berghahn Books. ———. 1996. ‘‘Rac(e)ing the Nation: Is There a German ‘Home’?’’ In Geo√ Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader, 456–78. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1989. ‘‘Methodological Postscript: What’s the Di√erence? Minority Discourse in German Studies.’’ New German Critique 46: 203–8. Peck, Je√rey M., and John Borneman. 1994. Sojourners: The Return of German Jews and the Question of Identity. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Peck, Je√rey M., ed. 1998. German Cultures, Foreign Cultures: The Politics of Belonging. Washington: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. Peck, Je√rey, and E.Valentine Daniel, eds. 1996. Culture/Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pécoud, Antoine. N.d. ‘‘Cosmopolitanism and Business: Entrepreneurship and Identity among German-Turks in Berlin.’’ Working paper. Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Available at http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/. ———. 2002. ‘‘Cosmopolitanism and Business among German-Turks in Berlin.’’ Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe 2(1): 2–12. Pennix, Rinus, and Herman van Renselaar. 1978. A Fortune in Small Change: A Study of Migrant Workers’ Attempts to Invest Savings Productively through Joint Stock Corporations in Village Development Co-operatives in Turkey. The Hague: remplod. Penny, Glenn. 1999. ‘‘Fashioning Local Identities in an Age of Nation-Building: Museums, Cosmopolitan Visions, and Intra-German Competition.’’ German History 17(4): 489–506. l 390

WORKS CITED

Peristiany, J. G., ed. 1976. Mediterranean Family Structures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———, ed. 1966. Honor and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pfa√, Carol. 2005. ‘‘Kanaken in Alemannistan: Feridun Zaimo˘glu’s Representation of Migrant Language.’’ In Volker Hinnenkamp and Katharina Meng, eds., Sprachgrenzen überspringen: Sprachliche Hybridität und polykulturelles Selbstverständnis, 195–225. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. ———. 1999. ‘‘Developing Educational Language Policies for Minority languages in Germany.’’ Paper presented at the symposium ‘‘Minorities in European Linguistic and Cultural Policies,’’ Society for Research and European Integration, University of Vienna and Brussels Center for Multilingualism, Vienna, November 5–7, 1999. ———. 1981. ‘‘Sociolinguistic Problems of Immigrants.’’ Language in Society 10(2): 155–88. Pfleuger-Schindlbeck, Ingrid. 1989. ‘‘Achte die Älteren, liebe die Jüngeren’’: Sozialisation türkisch-alevitischer Kinder im Heimatland und in der Migration. Sozialwissenschaften, vol. 34. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum. Piore, Michael. 1980. Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pitt-Rivers, Julian. 1963. Mediterranean Countrymen: Essays in the Social Anthropology of the Mediterranean. Paris: Mouton. Pletsch, Carl. 1981. ‘‘The Three Worlds, or The Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975.’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 23(4): 565–90. Pocock, J. G. A. 1998. ‘‘The Ideal of Citizenship since Classical Times.’’ In Gershon Shafir, ed., The Citizenship Debates: A Reader, 31–41. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Popovich, Alexandre, and Gilles Veinstein. 1995. Bektachiyya: Études sur l’ordre mystique des Bektachis et les groupes relevant de Hadji Bektach. Istanbul: Les Editions isis. Portes A., and J. Borocz. 1989. ‘‘Contemporary Immigration: Theoretical Perspectives on its Determinants and Modes of Incorporation.’’ International Migration Review 28(4): 606–30. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Proctor, Robert. 1998. Racial Hygiene. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Radtke, Frank-Olaf. 2004. ‘‘Die Illusion der meritokratischen Schule: Lokale WORKS CITED

391 l

Konstellationen der Produktion von Unglichheit im Erziehungssystem.’’ In Klaus Bade and Michael Bommes, eds., Migration-Integration-Bildung: Grundfragen und Problembereiche, 143–78. Osnabrück University. ———. 1996. ‘‘Fremde und Allzufremde—Prozesse der Ethnisierung gesellschaftlicher Konflikte.’’ In Gunter Schultze, ed., Ethnisierung gesellschaftlicher Konflikte, 10–11. Bonn: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Rahman, Fazlur. 1979. Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Räthzel, Nora. 1991. ‘‘Germany: One Race, One Nation?’’ Race and Class 32(3): 31–48. Ravenstein, Ernest George. 1976. The Laws of Migration. New York: Arno Press. Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak. 2001. Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Anti-Semitism. London: Routledge. Relph, E. C. 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion. Rhoades, Robert E. 1978. ‘‘Foreign Labor and German Industrial Capitalism, 1871–1978: The Evolution of a Migratory System.’’ American Ethnologist 5(3): 553–73. ———, ed. 1979. Towards an Anthropology of Return Migration. Papers in Anthropology. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Rie√, David. 2002. A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ritter, Joachim. 1984. Hegel and the French Revolution. Cambridge, Mass: mit Press. Rittersberger-Tilic, Helga. 1998. ‘‘Development and Reformulation of a Returnee Identity as Alevi.’’ In Tord Olsson, Elisabeth Özdalga, and Catharina Raudvere, eds., Alevi Identity: Cultural, Religious and Social Perspectives, 69–78. Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. Rittstieg, Helmut. 1994. ‘‘Dual Citizenship: Legal and Political Aspects in the German Context.’’ In Reiner Bauböck, ed., From Aliens to Citizens: Redefining the Status of Immigrants in Europe, 11–20. Brookfield, Vt.: Aldershot. Robbins, Bruce. 1998. ‘‘Comparative Cosmopolitanisms.’’ In Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, 246–64. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Roberts, Sean, producer and director. 1993. What Is Ethnic? Video. Peripheral Productions. Robins, Kevin, and Asu Aksoy. 2001. ‘‘From Spaces of Identity to Mental Spaces: Lessons from Turkish-Cypriot Cultural Experience in Britain.’’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27(4): 685–711. Rock, David, and Stefan Wol√, eds. 2002. Coming Home to Germany? The Integral 392

WORKS CITED

tion of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic. New York: Berghahn Books. Rogers, Rosemary. 1984. ‘‘Return Migration in Comparative Perspective.’’ In Daniel Kubat, ed., The Politics of Return: International Return Migration in Europe, 277–99. Rome: Centro Studi Emigrazione. Rogers, Rosemary, ed. 1985. Guests Come to Stay: The E√ects of European Labor Migration on Sending and Receiving Countries. Boulder, Colo.: Westview. Rouse, Roger. 1991. ‘‘Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism.’’ Diaspora 1(1): 8–23. Rudolph, Hedwig, and Felicitas Hillmann. 1997. ‘‘Döner contra Boulette—Döner und Boulette: Berliner türkischer Herkunft als Arbeitskräfte und Unternehmer im Nahrungsgütersektor.’’ Leviathan 17: 85–105. Safran, William. 1999. ‘‘Comparing Diaspora: A Review.’’ Diaspora 8(3): 255–91. ———. 1991. ‘‘Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.’’ Diaspora 1(1): 83–99. Sanadjian, Manuchehr. 1995. ‘‘Temporality of ‘Home’ and Spatiality of Market in Exile: Iranians in Germany.’’ New German Critique 64: 3–36. Santner, Eric. 1990. Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2002. ‘‘Towards Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship.’’ In Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner, eds., Handbook of Citizenship Studies, 277– 92. London: Sage. ———. 2001. ‘‘Beyond Sovereignty: De-facto Transnationalism in Immigration Policy.’’ In Todd Herzog and Sander Gilman, eds., A New Germany in a New Europe, 49–73. New York: Routledge. ———. 1999. Guests and Aliens. New York: New Press. ———. 1996. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press. Sayad, Abdelmalek. 1991. L’immigration ou les paradoxes de l’alterite. Brussels: DeBoeck Université; Paris: Editions Universitaires. Saylan, Gencay. N.d. ‘‘Religion and Politics: Emergence of Fundamentalism in Muslim Societies–Turkish Case.’’ Paper in Center for Mediterranean Studies series. Joint Working Group of the Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences of Gazi University and the Faculty of Political Sciences of Ankara University. Scha√ernicht, Christian, ed. 1981. Zu hause in der Fremde: Ein bundesdeutsches Ausländer-Lesebuch. Fischerhude: Verlag Atelier im Bauernhaus. WORKS CITED

393 l

Schick, Irvin, and Ertugrul Ahmet Tonak, eds. 1987. Turkey in Transition: New Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schi√auer, Werner. 1991. Die Migranten aus Subay: Türken in Deutschland: Eine Ethnographie. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. ———. 1983. Die Gewalt der Ehre: Erklärungen zu einem türkisch-deutschen Sexualkonflikt. Frankurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Schi√auer, Werner, Gerd Baumann, Riva Kastoryano, and Steven Vertovec, eds. 2004. Civil Enculturation: Nation State, Schools and Ethnic Di√erence in Four European Countries. New York: Berghahn Books. Schimmel, Annemarie. 1975. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Schmidt, Sandra. 1998. ‘‘Immigration Policy and New Ethnic Minorities in Contemporary Germany.’’ In Karl Cordell, ed., Ethnicity and Democratisation in the New Europe, 91–105. London: Routledge. Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Cambridge, Mass: mit Press. Schmitter Heisler, Barbara. 1985. ‘‘Sending Countries and the Politics of Emigration and Destination.’’ International Migration Review 19(3): 469–84. Schnapper, Dominique. 1999. ‘‘From the Nation-State to the Transnational World: On the Meaning and Usefulness of Diaspora as a Concept.’’ Diaspora 8(3): 225–54. ———. 1991. ‘‘A Host Country of Immigrants That Does Not Know Itself.’’ Diaspora 1(3): 353–63. Schneider, David Murray. 1984. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 1977. ‘‘Kinship, Nationality and Religion: Toward a Definition of Kinship.’’ In Janet Dolgin, David Kemnitzer, and David Schneider, eds., Symbolic Anthropology: A Reader in the Study of Symbols and Meanings, 63–71. New York: Columbia University Press. Schneider, Peter. 1983. The Wall Jumper. New York: Pantheon Books. Schreiner, Peter, and Karen Wul√, eds. 2001. Islamischer Religionsunterrich: Ein Lesebuch. Münster: Comenius Institut. Schuck, Peter H., and Rainer Münz, eds. 1998. Paths to Inclusion: The Integration of Migrants in the United States and Germany. New York: Berghahn Books. Scott, Joan Wallach. 2007. The Politics of the Veil. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Seal, Jeremy. 1996. A Fez of the Heart: Travels around Turkey in Search of a Hat. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. l 394

WORKS CITED

Senders, Stefan. 2002. ‘‘Jus Sanguinis or Jus Mimesis? Rethinking Repatriation.’’ In David Rock and Stefan Wol√, eds., Coming Home to Germany? The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic, 87– 101. New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 1999. ‘‘Coming Home: Aussiedler Repatriation, History, and Justice in PostCold War Berlin.’’ Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University. ———. 1996. ‘‘Laws of Belonging: Legal Dimensions of National Inclusion in Germany.’’ New German Critique 67: 147–77. Sennett, Richard. 1974. The Fall of Public Man. New York: W. W. Norton. D Sen, Faruk, and Andreas Goldberg. 1994. Türken in Deutschland: Leben zwischen zwei Kulturen. Munich: Freudenberg Stiftung. D Senocak, Zafer. 2000. Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture, 1990–1998. Translated and edited by Leslie A. Adelson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. DSenocak, Zafer, and Claus Leggewie, eds. 1993. Deutsche Türken/Türk Almanlar: Das Ende der Geduld/Sabrın Sonu. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. DSenocak, Zafer, and Bülent Tulay. 2000. ‘‘Germany—Home for Turks?’’ In Zafer D Senocak, Atlas of a Tropical Germany, 1–9. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Seufert, Güntert. 1997. ‘‘Between Religion and Ethnicity: A Kurdish-Alevi Tribe in Globalizing Istanbul.’’ In Aysche Öncü and Petra Weyland, eds., Space, Culture, and Power: New Identities in Globalizing Cities. London: Zed Books. Shafir, Gershon, ed. 1998. The Citizenship Debates: A Reader. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shields, Rob. 1991. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge. Shils, Edward. 1975. Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sholem, Gershom Gerhard. 1973. Sabbatai Sevi. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Silverman, Maxim. 1992. Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France. London: Routledge. Silverstein, Paul. 2004. Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sirman, Nükhet. 1989. ‘‘Feminism in Turkey.’’ New Perspectives on Turkey 3(1): 1–34. Sirman, Nükhet, and Andy Finkel, eds. 1990. Turkish State: Turkish Society. London: Routledge. WORKS CITED

395 l

Skursky, Julie. 1996. ‘‘The Ambiguities of Authenticity in Latin America: Dona Barbara and the Construction of National Identity.’’ In Geo√ Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader, 371–402. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Andrea, ed. 2003. Europe’s Invisible Migrants. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Smotczyk, Alexander. 1999. ‘‘Erregend anders.’’ Der Spiegel, September 6, 94–97. Sökefeld, Martin. 2004. Struggling for Recognition: The Alevi Movement in Germany and in Transnational Space. Hamburg: Habilitationsschrift, University of Hamburg. ———. 2003. ‘‘Alevis in Germany and the Politics of Recognition.’’ New Perspectives on Turkey, no. 28–29 (spring–fall): 133–61. ———. 2002. ‘‘Alevi Dedes in the German Diaspora: The Transformation of a Religious Institution.’’ Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 127: 163–86. ———. 2001. ‘‘Reconsidering Identity.’’ Anthropos 96: 527–44. Sowell, Thomas. 1996. Migrations and Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Soysal, Levent. 2003. ‘‘Labor to Culture: Writing Turkish Migration to Europe.’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 102(2/3): 491–508. ———. 2001. ‘‘Diversity of Experience, Experience of Diversity: Turkish Migrant Youth Culture in Berlin.’’ Cultural Dynamics 13(1): 5–28. ———. N.d. ‘‘Ritual on Stage: A Cem Ceremony in Berlin.’’ Unpublished paper. Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoglu. 1994. Limits of Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spectacle Productions. 1993. The Truth Lies in Rostock. Documentary film. Channel 4, United Kingdom, July 22. Spyer, Patricia. 1998. ‘‘Introduction: Fetishism.’’ In P. Spyer, ed., Border Fetishisms, 1–12. London: Routledge. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen. Stavrianos, Leften. 1958. The Balkans since 1453. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Steenbergen, Bart van. 1994. The Condition of Citizenship. London: Sage. Steinberg, Stephen. 1982. The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America. Boston: Beacon. Stevenson, Mark A. 1999. ‘‘German Cultural Policy and Neo-Liberal Zeitgeist.’’ PoLAR 22(2): 64–79. Stevenson, Nick, ed. 2001. Culture and Citizenship. London: Sage. Stewart, Charles, and Rosalind Shaw, eds. 1994. Syncretism / Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis. London: Routledge. l 396

WORKS CITED

Stirling, Paul, ed. 1993. Culture and Society: Changes in Turkish Villages. Huntingdon: Eothen Press. Stokes, Martin. 1994. ‘‘Local Arabesk, the Hatay and the Turkish-Syrian Border.’’ In Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, eds., Border Approaches: Anthropological Perspectives on Frontiers, 31–51. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America. Strauss, Andrew, ed. 2003. Debating Cosmopolitics. London: Verso. Suhr, Heidrun. 1989. ‘‘Ausländerliteratur : Minority Literature in the Federal Republic of Germany.’’ Russell Berman et al., eds., special issue on minorities in German culture. New German Critique 46 (winter): 71–103. Suttles, Gerald D. 1968. The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tan, Dursun, Hans-Peter Waldho√, and Elçin Kür¸sat-Ahlers, eds. 2001. Türkei und Europa: Facetten einer Beziehung in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Frankfurt am Main: iko, Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation. Tapper, Richard, ed. 1991. Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics, and Literature in a Secular State. London: I. B. Tauris. Ta¸skıran, Tezer. 1976. Women in Turkey. Istanbul: Redhouse. Taussig, Michael T. 1997. The Magic of the State. New York: Routledge. D Tekeli, Sirin, ed. 1995. Women in Modern Turkish Society: A Reader. London: Zed Books. Teraoka, Arlene Akiko. 1989. ‘‘Talking ‘Turk’: On Narrative Strategies and Cultural Stereotypes.’’ Russell Berman et al., eds., special issue on minorities in German culture. New German Critique: 46 (winter): 104–28. Tertilt, Hermann. 1996. Turkish Power Boys: Ethnographie einer Jugendbande. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Thompson, E. P. 1982. ‘‘Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism.’’ Past and Present 38: 56–97. Till, Karin. 2001. ‘‘Returning Home and to the Field.’’ Geographical Review 91(1– 2): 46–56. ———. 1999. ‘‘Staging the Past: Landscape Designs, Cultural Identity, and Erinnerungspolitik at Berlin’s Neue Wache.’’ Ecumene 6(3): 251–83. Toelken, Barre. 1985. ‘‘ ‘Turkenrein’ and Turken ‘Raus’—Images of Fear and Aggression in German Gastarbeiterwitze.’’ In Ilhan Ba¸sgöz and Norman Furniss, eds., Turkish Workers in Europe: An Interdisciplinary Study, 151–64. Bloomington: Indiana University Turkish Studies. Tölöyan, Khachig. 1996. ‘‘Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transitional Moment.’’ Diaspora 5(1): 3–36. WORKS CITED

397 l

Tomas, William Isaac, and Florian Znaniecki. 1984. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Tomlinson, John. 1999. Globalization and Culture. London: Polity. Toprak, Binnaz. 1981. Islam and Political Development in Turkey. Leiden: Brill. Tsagarousianou, Roza, Damian Tambini, and Cathy Bryan, eds. 1998. Cyberdemocracy: Technology, Cities and Civic Networks. London: Routledge. Tuna, Korkut. 1981. Yurt Dı¸sına i¸sçi gönderme olayının sosyolojik ele¸stirisi. Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Basımevi. Turner, Bryan S. 2001. ‘‘Cosmopolitan Virtue: On Religion in a Global Age.’’ European Journal of Social Theory 4(2): 131–52. ———, ed. 1993. Citizenship and Social Theory. London: Sage. Underhill, Robert. 1980. Turkish Grammar. Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press. Urciuoli, Bonnie. 1996. Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Van Bruinessen, Martin. 1998. ‘‘The Shabak, a Kizilbash Community in Iraqi Kurdistan.’’ Les Annales de l’Autre Islam 5: 185–96. ———. 1997. ‘‘ ‘Aslını inkar eden haramzadedir!’ The Debate on the Ethnic Identity of the Kurdish Alevis.’’ In Krisztina Kehl-Bodrogi, Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, and Anke Otter-Beaujean, eds., Syncretistic Religious Communities in the Near East, 1–23. Leiden: Brill. ———. 1996. ‘‘Kurds, Turks, and the Alevi Revival.’’ Middle East Report 200: 7–10. ———. 1984. ‘‘Popular Islam, Kurdish Nationalism and Rural Revolt.’’ In Janos Bak and Gerard Benecke, eds., Religion and Rural Revolt, 281–95. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 1978. Agha, Sheikh and State: On the Social and Political Organization of Kurdistan. Risjwijk, Netherlands: Europprint. Vassaf, Günüz. 1983. Daha sesimizi duyurmadık: avrupa’da türk i¸sçi çocukları [We haven’t raised our voices yet]. Istanbul: Belge Yayınları. Vertovec, Steven. 2000. ‘‘Fostering Cosmopolitans: A Conceptual Survey and A Media Experiment in Berlin.’’ Working paper, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Available at http://www.transcomm.ox .ac.uk/. Vertovec, Steven, and Robin Cohen, eds. 2002. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———, eds. 1999. Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Vertovec, Steven, and Ceri Peach, eds. 1997. Islam in Europe: The Politics of Religion and Community. New York: St. Martin’s Press. l 398

WORKS CITED

Villa, Dana R. 1996. Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Vinogradov, Amal Rassam. 1974. ‘‘Ethnicity, Cultural Discontinuity and Power Brokers in Northern Iraq: The Case of the Shabak.’’ American Ethnologist 1(1): 207–18. Virilio, Paul. 1999. Polar Inertia. London: Sage. ———. 1995. The Art of the Motor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1981. Negative Horizon. New York: Semiotext(e). Vogel, Sabine. 2000. ‘‘Dort wo du nicht bist wohnt das Gluck.’’ In Heimat Kunst [Homeland Art]. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Vorho√, Karin. 1998. ‘‘Academic and Journalistic Publications on the Alevi and Bektashi of Turkey.’’ In Tord Olsson, Elisabeth Özdalga, and Catharina Raudvere, eds., Alevi Identity: Cultural, Religious and Social Perspectives, vol. 8: 23– 50. Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. Vorho√, Karin, Barbara Frischmuth, Martin Greve, and Sinan Erbekta¸s. 1998. Wie der Phönix aus der Asche: Renaissance des Alevismus. Cologne: Föderation der Aleviten Gemeinden in Europa. Walfra√, Günter. 1985. Ganz Unten. Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1991. ‘‘The Construction of Peoplehood.’’ Translated from the French by Chris Turner. In Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, chapter 4. London: Verso. Weber, Max. 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner. Weil, Patrick. ‘‘Nationalities and Citizenships: The Lessons of the French Experience for Germany and Europe.’’ In David Cesarani and Mary Fulbrook, eds., Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe, 74–87. London: Routledge. Welz, Gisela. 1993. ‘‘Promoting Di√erence: A Case Study in Cultural Politics.’’ Special issue: ‘‘Foreigners and Foreignness in Europe.’’ Journal of Folklore Research 30(1): 85–91. Werbner, Pnina. 2002. Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims. Oxford: James Currey. White, Jenny B. 2002. Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ———. 1997. ‘‘Turks in the New Germany.’’ American Anthropologist 99(4): 754–69. ———. 1995. ‘‘Turks in Germany: Overview of the Literature.’’ Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 29(1): 12–15. ———. 1994. Money Makes Us Relatives: Women’s Labor in Urban Turkey. Austin: University of Texas Press. WORKS CITED

399 l

Whitehead, Alfred North. 1978. Process and Reality. New York: Free Press. Williams, Carol J. 2001. ‘‘Sputtering German Economy Stalls Interlaced Neighbors,’’ Los Angeles Times, July 21, 2001. Wilpert, Czarina. 2003. ‘‘Racism, Discrimination and Citizenship: The Need for Anti-Discrimination Legislation in the Federal Republic of Germany.’’ In Zig Layton-Henry and Czarina Wilpert, eds., Challenging Racism and Discrimination in Britain and Germany, 245–69. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 1998. ‘‘Migration and Informal Work in the New Berlin: New Forms of Work or New Sources of Labour?’’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 24(2): 269–94. ———. 1995. ‘‘Ideological and Institutional Foundations for Racism in the Federal Republic of Germany.’’ In John Wrench and John Solomos, eds., Racism and Migration in Europe, 67–81. Oxford: Berg. ———. 1992. ‘‘The Use of Social Networks in the Turkish Migration to the Federal Republic of Germany.’’ In Mary M. Kritz, Lin Lean Lim, and Hania Zlotnik, eds., International Migration Systems: A Global Approach, 177–89. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1991. ‘‘Migration and Ethnicity in a Non-Immigration Country: Foreigners in a United Germany.’’ New Community 18(1): 49–62. ———. 1988. ‘‘Religion and Ethnicity: Orientations, Perceptions and Strategies among Turkish Alevi and Sunni Migrants in Belin.’’ In Thomas Gerholm and Yngve Georg Lithman, eds., The New Islamic Presence in Western Europe, 88– 106. London: Mansell. ———. 1984. ‘‘International Migration and Ethnic Minorities: New Fields for PostWar Sociology in the Federal Republic of Germany.’’ Current Sociology 32(3): 305–52. ———. 1983. ‘‘Minorities’ Influence on the Majority: Reactions of the Majority Political, Institutional and Social Scientific Spheres.’’ In C. Fried, ed., Minorities, Community and Identity: Report of the Dahlem Workshop on Minorities: Community and Identity, Berlin 1982, Nov. 28—Dec. 3. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. ———. 1980. Die Zukunft der Zweiten Generation: Erwartungen und Verhaltensmöglichkeiten ausländischer Kinder. Königstein/Ts.: Verlag Anton Hain. Wilpert, Czarina, ed. 1988. Entering the Working World: Following the Descendants of Europe’s Immigrant Labour Force. Aldershot: Gower. Wilpert, Czarina, and Ali Gitmez. 1987. ‘‘Les micro-sociétés des Turcs à Berlin.’’ Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 3(1–2): 175–98. Wilpert, Czarina, and Zig Layton-Henry, eds. 2003. Challenging Racism in Britain and Germany. London: Palgrave Macmillan. l 400

WORKS CITED

Wilpert, Czarina, and M. Morokvasic, eds. 1983. Bedingungen und Folgen internationaler Migration. Berlin: Technical University Berlin. Wilpert, Czarina, John Rex, and Daniele Joly, eds. 1987. Immigrant Associations in Europe. Aldershot: Gower. Wolbert, Barbara. 1995. Der getötete Paß: Arbeitsmigration und Rückkehr in die Türkei, Eine ethnologische Studie. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. ———. 1991. ‘‘More than a Golden Bangle . . . the Significance of Success in School for Returning Turkish Migrant Families.’’ Anthropology and Education Quarterly 22(2): 181–99. ———. 1984. Migrationsbewältigung. Orientierungen und Strategien. Biographischinterpretative Fallstudien über die ‘Heirats-Migration’ dreier Türkinnen. Göttingen: Edition Herodot. Woodhill, Winifred. 1993. Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Yalçın-Heckmann, Lale. 2002. ‘‘Negotiating Identities: Media Representations of Di√erent Generations of Turkish Migrants in Germany.’’ In Deniz Kandiyoti and Ayse Saktanber, eds., Fragments of Culture, 308–21. London: I. B. Tauris. ———. 1995. ‘‘The Predicament of Mixing ‘Culture’ and ‘Religion’: Turkish and Muslim Commitments in Post-Migration Germany.’’ In Gerd Baumann and Thijl Sunier, eds., Post-Migration Ethnicity: De-essentializing Cohesion, Commitments, Comparisons, 78–98. Amsterdam: Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies. ———. 1991. Tribe and Kinship among the Kurds. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Yalman, Nur. 1969. ‘‘Islamic Reform and the Mystic Tradition in Eastern Turkey.’’ Archives Européennes de Sociologie 10: 41–60. Yasa, Ibrahim. 1979. Yurda dönen i¸sçiler ve toplumsal de˘gi¸sme. Amme Idaresi Enstitüsü Yayınları No. 182. Ankara: Türkiye ve Orta Dogu Amme Idaresi Enstitüsü Yayınları. Young, Iris Marion. 1998. ‘‘Polity and Group Di√erence.’’ In Gershon Shafir, ed., The Citizenship Debates: A Reader, 263–90. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Young, James E. 2000. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. ———. 1997. ‘‘Germany’s Memorial Question: Memory, Counter-Memory, and the End of the Monument.’’ Special issue: ‘‘German Dis/Continuities.’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 96(4): 853–80. ———. 1993. Introduction and ‘‘The Gestapo-Gelande: Topography of Unfinished WORKS CITED

401 l

Memory.’’ In The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, 1–15, 81–90. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Yurdakul, Gökçe, and Y. Michal Bodemann. 2006. ‘‘ ‘We Don’t Want to Be the Jews of Tomorrow’: Jews and Turks in Germany after 9/11.’’ German Politics and Society 24(2): 44–67. Yürüko˘glu, R. 1990. Okunacak en büyük kitap insandır. Istanbul: Alev Yayınevi. Zaimo˘glu, Feridun. 2006. ‘‘Mein Deutschland.’’ Die Zeit, no. 16, April 12. ———. 1997. Abschaum: Die wahre Geschichte von Ertan Ongun. Hamburg: Rotbuch Verlag. ———. 1995. Koppsto√: Kanak Sprak: 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag. ˇ zek, Slavoj. 1995. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. Ziˇ Zolberg, Ari. 1989. ‘‘The Next Waves: Migration Theory for a Changing World.’’ International Migration Review 23(3): 403–30. Zürcher, Erik J. 1993. Turkey: A Modern History. London: I. B. Tauris.

l 402

WORKS CITED

Index Abish, Walter, 7 Abjection, 3, 21, 129, 184–85, 189, 196, 200, 202, 248, 312 Adelson, Leslie A., 12, 128, 133 Agamben, Giorgio, 127–28, 151, 208, 226, 298 Agency, 20, 196, 202, 244, 312 Akın, Fatih, 188 Almanyalı/almanayalı/almancı, 1, 57, 73, 228, 241, 243–44, 246, 247, 350 n. 16 Alevilik, 20, 249, 251, 260, 264–65, 268– 72, 273–74, 278 Alevis: and Alevistan, 233, 272, 273–74; in Berlin, 248–49; and change, 291– 93; and dissimulation, 20, 92, 263; headscarves, 303–4; and identity, 271–87; mimetism, 101–6; music, 76, 102, 176, 260, 263, 280, 281–83, 284, 286; religion, 20, 252, 279, 292; and Sunnis, 92, 102, 251–55, 265, 281, 306; territoriality, 260; wedding customs/ rituals, 168–74 Alienation, 200–201 Alternativen, 87, 90, 96–98, 146 Anatolia: as inherited landscape, 164; Kurds, 92, 102, 154, 157–58, 251; marriage rites, 170; music in Berlin, 75, 176, 282; representations, 190; returning to, 242; villages, 17, 19; worship practices, 263

Anderson, Perry, 16 Anthropology, urban, 82 Antinomianism, 252 Anti-Semitism, 53, 64, 126, 128, 130, 137, 138–40, 216 Appadurai, Arjun, 84, 246 Aptes, 254 Arendt, Hannah, 226–27 Aryan myth, 8, 208 Assimilation, 12, 163, 292, 307, 317 Asylum law, 61–62 Asylum seekers, 63, 73, 209, 230, 316, 348 n. 22, 356 n. 4 Auschwitz concentration camp, 127–28 Ausländer: Ausländerproblematik, 31– 32; defined, 55, 80; and equality, 88; and nation building, 31; as political touchstone, 67; representation of, 75; status, 51, 63, 91; term, 93, 99; Turkish Germans as, 10–11, 87, 162 Ausländer-seven, 126, 192–94 Aussiedler: and authenticity, 213; and Germanness, 211; and identity, 5, 7; immigration of, 67–71, 155; and integration, 159, 217; and xenophobia, 54 Authenticity: vs. cosmopolitanism, 48; and deracination, 200; as elusive, 185; and ethnicity, 20, 96, 99, 146; and food, 312; of Germans, 89, 159, 206, 208, 212–13; and headgear, 297– 303; vs. inauthenticity, 346 n. 4; of

Authenticity (continued) natives, 87; vs. rites, 287; search for, 201, 203; Turkish, 162 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 32 Balibar, Etienne, 100–101, 106 Barth, Fredrik, 82 Bauböck, Rainer, 220 Bauman, Zygmunt, 131 Beck, Marieluise, 318 Beck, Ulrich, 27, 28, 322, 324 Behr, Daniel, 231 Bekta¸si, 283, 352 n. 10, 352 n. 19. See also Dervishes Benhabib, Seyla, 48, 297, 303 Berdahl, Daphne, 4, 33 Berlin, Germany, 23–26; art scene in, 37; as chronotope, 32, 34, 35–36, 41; as cosmopolitan, 5–6, 37–38, 47; countermemories in, 116–24; East/ West di√erences, 29, 36–39; ethnic restaurants, 94; and German identity, 5–6; immigrant policies, 71–72, 77–78; Islams in, 248–93; Jewish walks, 125; multiple temporalities, 35–37; Palace of the Republic, 33; Potsdamer Platz, 34; revising, 32–35; surveillance in, 139; urban renewal, 124–26. See also Kreuzberg district (Berlin) Berlin Wall: art on, 45–46; and boundaries, 27–28, 38; crossing over, 39–41; impact on immigrants, 29–32; and labor force, 5–6; as mental state, 42– 43; as metonym, 29; nonrecognition of, 39; selling pieces of, 44–45; visitors’ interest in, 32–33. See also Unification of Germany

l 404

Bhabha, Homi, 21 Bismarck, Otto von, 54 Black Power movements, 82 Bodemann, Y. Michal, 339 n. 7 Borneman, John, 4, 29, 31, 32–33, 41 Böse, Kuno, 138 Boundary dissolution, 28 Bounded communities, 18 Bourdieu, Pierre, 18, 92, 308, 346 n. 4 Brandenburg Gate, 109, 119 Branding of Germany, 13–15, 321–23 Break dance, 177 Breckenridge, Carol A., 246 Bribes, 239, 240 Bridge metaphor, 66–67, 178 Bulgaria, Turkish minorities, 258–59 Ça˘glar, Ay¸se, 175, 176, 312, 330 n. 13 Calhoun, Craig, 314 Castles, Stephen, 20 Çelik, Neco, 188 Cem, 252–53, 263, 279, 281–83, 285–86 Cemevi, 279, 286, 353 n. 25 Center/periphery dichotomy, 141, 232– 35 Chicago School, 81–82 Christian Democratic Party, 58, 61, 65– 66, 67, 71, 138, 219 Christianity: Anatolian cults, 251; vs. Islamism, 11–13, 16, 249, 270 Christo, 33 Chronotopicity, 32, 34, 35–36, 41 Çırak, Zehra, 194–96 Citizenship, German, 210–16, 221–25; contested meanings, 226–30; and descent, 209, 211, 214, 321; and exclusion, 206; and immigration laws, 207–8, 230; law, 193, 217–19, 220, 323;

INDEX

and nationality, 226–27, 229; politics of, 15–16 Cli√ord, James, 14, 19, 48, 50, 234 Closure, 59 Codeswitching, 275 Coexistence, 59, 77 Co√ee shops, 261 Cohen, Abner, 82 Colonialism, 101 Comaro√, John, 20, 85 Community, 208, 230 Concealment, 112–16 Coronil, Fernando, 308 Corridors, 39–41 Cosmopolitanism: authentic, 49; in Berlin, 5–6, 37–38, 47, 72, 77; and citizenship, 226, 229–31; demotic, 50, 314, 315, 324; elitist, 49–50; German state as, 12–14, 47-48, 99, 322; and headscarves, 6, 11; indigenous, 107– 8; and professionals, 190; and Turkish Germans, 311–20 Cosmopolitics, 47-50 Countermemories, 116–24 Culture and identity, 59, 184 Cumart, Nevfel, 183 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 229 Dal, Güney, 238 Dance: Alevi, 169–70, 176, 257, 280, 281–82, 286; belly dance, 170, 174; break dance, 177; cem, 280, 281; semah, 281, 282, 286 Davidson, Alastair, 20 De Certeau, Michel, 10, 28, 35, 335–36 n. 6 Delaney, Carol, 350 n. 11, 350 n. 15 Deleuze, Gilles, 201–2

INDEX

Deportation, 234 Deracination, 1, 17–19, 232–47 Derrida, Jacques, 22, 324, 332 n. 15 Dervishes, 250, 279, 353 n. 26 Descent: and citizenship, 209, 211, 214; and German identity, 214–16; and language, 206 Deterritorialization, 83, 86, 184–85, 202, 204, 232, 234 Diaspora: contexts, 18–19; and homeland, 136–37, 185. See also Turkish diaspora Dietary restrictions, 133–34 Di√erence/di√erentiation, 3, 6, 17; and headscarves, 294, 295, 297; vs. identification, 22; mechanisms, 7; and moral self, 11–12; and social hierarchy, 92–93. See also Foreignness; Otherness Dishonor, 267 Displacement, 17 Dissimulation, 248–49, 251, 263, 283, 292–93 Dual nationality, 15, 219–22, 224–25, 316–17, 318, 325 Dü˘gün, 168, 172, 344 n. 20 Dundes, Alan, 134–35 Durmu¸s, Hakan, 157 E-5 road, 238–39 Edinsel, Kerim, 198–201 Education, 164–68; Gymnasium, 91– 92, 165–67; Qur’an school, 268–72 Emplacement, 17 Endogamy, 255–58. See also Marriage Engholm, Bjoern, 209 Epstein, Arnold Leonard, 82 Equality, 87–90

405 l

Erbakan, Necmettin, 300 Ethnic chic, 95–98 Ethnic cleansing, 61 Ethnicity/ethnicization, 2, 20–21, 79, 80, 87–106; and belonging, 321; and consumption, 95–96; destabilizing, 84– 86; and indigenous conceptualizations, 277; making of, 81–84; marketing, 107–8; and mimetism, 21, 83, 101– 6; and professionals, 190–91, 204–5; vs. race, 99; and reification, 84–85; test for, 211–12; in workplace, 191–93 Ethnic places, 86–87 Ethnonationalism, 66 Exclusion, 57–58, 142, 156, 206 Fanon, Frantz, 308 Federal Jewish Social Welfare Agency, 125 Federal Republic of Germany: and boundaries, 27–28; on GDR, 41; as non-immigrant land, 56; on Palace of the Republic, 33; and travel to Berlin, 39. See also Unification of Germany Ferguson, James, 43, 233 fes. See Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Fezes, 299 Filmmakers, Turkish, 187–88, 203 Films, Turkish, 267–68 Fischer, Michael, 83–84 Fischer, Sabine, 196 Foreignness: aesthetics of, 196; acquired, 247; Ausländer as, 55; and Germanness, 318–19; and German public sphere, 136; Kreuzberg as, 87– 88, 90; non-Western societies as, 322; semantic inscriptions, 51; Turkish

l 406

Germans as, 159, 319. See also Di√erence/di√erentiation Forgetting, 33 Foucault, Michel, 297–98 Frankfurt, Germany, art scene, 98 Fremdarbeiter, 55 Friedländer, Saul, 9 Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (fes), 180 Frisch, Max, 51, 55 García Canclini, Néstor, 28 Garlic, 135–36, 341 n. 31 Gaspard, François, 296 Gastarbeiter, 6, 55–58; and identity, 57, 190; as marginalized, 12, 55–56; registration, 53–54; status, 63, 91; term, 99, 238 German Democratic Republic: and boundaries, 27–28; and dual citizenship in West Germany, 220; economics, 338 n. 6; on Palace of the Republic, 33; West Germans on, 41. See also Unification of Germany German Federal Republic. See Federal Republic of Germany Germanish. See Almanyalı/almanayalı/almancı Germanness: of Aussiedler, 211; degrees of, 319–21; examination of, 75, 219, 316; and integration, 318; and Jewishness, 215; and purity, 212–13; rights to, 212; and su√ering, 212; and Turkishness, 7, 79 German public sphere: on branding, 13–15; Turkishness in, 3 German Turkish social spaces. See Turkish German social spaces Gerz, Esther Shalef, 120

INDEX

Gerz, Jochen, 120 Ghettoization, 89, 205, 218 Gilman, Sander, 13, 138–39, 216, 341 n. 27, 347 n. 11 Globality, defined, 27 Gluckman, Max, 82 Göktürk, Deniz, 185, 187, 189 Göle, Nilüfer, 300 Gra≈ti, 10, 30, 46, 176–77, 260 Green Party, 67, 143, 219–21, 313 Grey Wolves, 104, 259 Grillo, Ralph, 332 n. 2 Grunewald district (Berlin), 65 Guattari, Félix, 201–2 Guest (term), 56–57 Guestworkers. See Gastarbeiter Gülfirat, Suzan, 77–78 Gupta, Akhil, 43, 233 Gurbet, 233–34, 237, 243, 245, 267 Gymnasium, 91–92, 165–67 Gypsies, 92, 137, 336 n. 13, 342 n. 36 Habermas, Jürgen, 117–18, 332 n. 14 Hacı Bekta¸s Veli, 260, 263, 283, 352 n. 10 Hand kissing, 277–78 Hanefi legal code, 251 Hannerz, Ulf, 48–49 Haring, Keith, 45 Headgear, Turkish, 297–303 Head-On (film), 188 Headscarves, 294–310; and authenticity, 146; and cosmopolitanism, 6, 11; in dream, 25–26; and identity, 131, 180, 250, 255, 258, 317; rejection of, 20; as symbol, 11, 187 Hebdige, Dick, 305 Heidegger, Martin, 346–47 n. 4 Heidelberg Manifesto, 58, 59–60

INDEX

Heimat. See Homeland Herzfeld, Michael, 93 Hip-hop culture, 76, 77, 177–78, 202–3 Hitlerism. See National Socialism Hoheisel, Horst, 119 Hollinger, David, 335 n. 5 Holocaust: and countermemories, 116– 17; and historiography, 9; and Jewish Americans, 109; and loss, 9; meaning of, 117; and memorialization, 118–19; and social exclusion, 129 Holocaust (docudrama), 116–17 Homeland: attachment to, 1, 19–20; and exclusion, 130, 206; ideal, 7, 8; political visions, 10; and repatriation, 60, 69; and Turkish-Germans, 72–73, 161–63, 185; and violation, 136–37 Honecker, Erich, 113 Honor: female, 254, 267; in films, 267; killing, 258; living for, 182; male, 254, 267; namus as, 245, 266; and pigs, 266; and Turks, 266; and weddings, 168 Hospitality, 21–22; ethics of, 22, 324; need for, 323–25; rules of, 56, 87; and weddings, 168 Identity: cosmopolitan, 50; and culture, 59, 184; vs. di√erentiation, 22; and function, 55; and images, 111; and localization, 28; and mimetism, 6–9; multiple, 48; and nation-state power, 14–15; oppositions in, 2; of place, 228; rhizomatic, 141–42; and stigmatization, 89; supranational, 15–16; and transnationalism, 11, 20 Identity, German: and assimilation, 13; and Ausländer, 23–24; and Aussiedler, 5, 7–8, 69; and descent, 214–16; East

407 l

Identity, German (continued) vs. West, 41–42; meaning of, 138; and mimetism, 4, 6–9, 86, 207, 213–14; and National Socialism, 215, 322; signifiers, 214; and unification, 4–5 Identity, Turkish: Alevi, 274, 290; and co√ee shops, 261; and cultural politics, 190; in Germany, 23–26; and headscarves, 294, 296–97, 304–7; and Jewish practices, 133–34 ifb. See Islamic Federation of Berlin Immigrants: and alienation, 200–201; and asylum law, 62; and Berlin Wall, 29–32; categories, 15; contributions, 18; and cosmopolitanism, 48–50; and di√erentiation, 7; elites, 10, 186, 190, 194, 203–5, 312–14; and equality, 87–90; experience, 3, 10, 19–20; feminization of, 57–58; hierarchies in, 81, 90–95, 185–90; and illness, 350 n. 14; literature by, 196–203; migrant term, 159; in multiple spaces, 9; policies, 71–72, 77–78, 316, 318; Polish, 53–54; second generation, 155–61, 178, 297; statistics, 6; status, 63; as term, 160; third generation, 181, 297; as traveler, 14; treatment of, 12; urban-rural divide, 92. See also Ausländer; Migration; Xenophobia Immigration. See Migration Incest, 254 Infestation, 209 Integration: vs. assimilation, 319; and Christianity, 219; failure of, 130, 159, 206; fes publications on, 180; and identity, 130–31; and immigration policies, 318–19; John’s strategy, 73– 74; and language, 184, 202, 217; and l 408

naturalization, 161; tests on, 205; and youth, 169, 177, 286 International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, 249 Isherwood, Christopher, 38 Islam: in Berlin, 248–93; vs. Christianity, 11–13, 16, 249, 270; and dissimulation, 248–93; European awareness, 249–51; international networks, 262; Muslimness, 158; presence in Germany, 10–11; stratifications, 251 Islam Culture Center, 263 Islamic Federation of Berlin (ifb), 258, 269, 270, 271 JanMohamed, Abdul, 201 Jealousy, 265–67 Jewish diaspora, 69 Jewish Museum (Berlin), 124 Jewishness, 9, 109; concealment of, 112–16; and Germanness, 215; invoking, 125; Jewish Renaissance, 110–11; and Turkishness, 133–34 Jews: in America, 109; and asylum law, 62; and German identity, 24; and Nuremberg Laws, 88–89; as Other, 108; and race, 100; restrictions on, 119–20, 121–23; Überfremdung, 54. See also Anti-Semitism John, Barbara, 71, 73–74, 76, 79, 223 Jüdische Gemeinde, 126 Jüdische Gruppe, 126 Junge-Reye, Ingeborg, 66 Jus sanguinis, 210, 220, 321 Jus solis, 210 Kalpak, Annita, 100 Kanak Attak, 204–5 Kanak (term), 2, 3, 21, 202, 204 INDEX

Kanak Sprak, 2, 3, 86, 178, 202–4 Kastoryano, Riva, 297, 313 Kaya, Ayhan, 177–78 Keane, Webb, 294 Kekilli, Sibel, 188 Kemalism, 298–300 Keskin, Hakkı, 192 Khosrokhavar, Farhad, 296 Killing passports, 163–64, 179, 246 Kızıl ba¸s, 252, 254, 276 Kızıl Yol, 272–73, 285 Kohl, Helmut, 58, 63, 67–68, 69–70, 118 Kolat, Kenan, 189 Kollwitz, Käthe, 118 Koshar, Rudy, 129 Kramer, Jane, 41, 47, 129, 322 Kreuzberg district (Berlin), 141–54; counterculture in, 141; demographics, 65–66, 89, 146, 147; ‘‘gayhouse,’’ 310; Germans in, 90, 96–98; gra≈ti in, 30; housing, 151–53; as island, 144–46; Muslims in, 249; periphery and center, 141–43; staking claims in, 260–65; street gangs, 176; as Turkish ghetto, 10, 24, 144, 146, 154; Turkish private space, 148–51 Kristallnacht, 44, 113, 339 n. 7 Kristeva, Julia, 229, 231, 296 Kurds: and assimilation, 163; discrimination toward, 92, 163, 184; identity, 104– 5, 158, 272–79; and Kurdistan, 233; language, 104, 157, 251; practices, 154; returnees, 163; vs. urban Turks, 92 Kymlicka, Will, 227 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 8, 347 n. 9 ‘‘A√aire du foulard, L’,’’ 296–97 Laicité, 262, 296–97, 303

INDEX

Language: bilingual illiterates, 19, 165; and communication, 127; and descent, 206; immigration via, 217; Kurdish, 104, 157, 251; loss of, 1. See also Kanak Sprak Lebensraum, 88 Lefebvre, Henri, 86 Leitkultur, 218–19, 318, 321, 323 Letters of Obscure Men (Reuchlin), 216 Levi, Primo, 124 Lewis, Bernard, 288 Libeskind, Daniel, 124–25 Linke, Uli, 4–5, 209 Lintner, Eduard, 11 Liquidation, 209 Literature, minor, 196–203 Lloyd, David, 201 Loentz, Elizabeth, 202 Loss, 18, 21 Luschan, Felix von, 254 Luther, Martin, 216 Maastricht agreement, 229 Mandel, Ruth, 25 Malkki, Lissa, 28 Marginalization, 12, 81, 90, 198 Marko√, Irene, 282, 284 Marriage, 168–74, 180, 255–58 Marshall, Thomas H., 228 McDowall, David, 351 n. 5 McGowan, Moray, 196 Meeker, Michael, 306 Memorialization, 117–20, 124, 139 Merz, Friedrich, 218–19 Migrants. See Immigrants Migration, 18–19; and change, 17; and citizenship, 207–8; and ethnicity, 20, 83; and manpower, 56; and racism,

409 l

Migration (continued) 101; scale of, 51; and transnationalism, 9. See also Immigrants; Transnationalism Milli Görü¸s, 263, 270 Mimetism: and ethnicization, 21, 83, 101–6; and German identity, 4, 6–9, 86, 207, 213–14; and identity, 29; processes, 4; and scarves, 309 Minority consciousness, 185–90, 202 Mirroring, 4, 7, 12, 21 Mitbürger, 71, 99, 126–27 Mitchell, Katharyne, 82 Mitscherlich, Alexander, 8, 111 Mitscherlich, Margarete, 8, 111 Modernity: ages of, 322–24; biopolitical, 208; vs. civil rights, 303; German, 11, 200, 212; global, 47; and tradition, 296; urban, 175 Moors, Analiese, 298 Moral self, 11–12 Mosques: in Alevi villages, 292; and Alevi Muslims, 272; under Atatürk, 300; in exhibition, 250; and faith, 252, 255; and Islamic organizations, 262–63; in Kreuzberg, 10, 263; preachers in, 270; socializing in, 236; support by Turkish Germans, 260 Mourning processes, 8, 111 Moutsou, Christina, 93 Multiculturalism, 76, 177, 204, 297, 323–25, 335 n. 5 Mushaben, Joyce Marie, 321 Music: Alevi, 76, 102, 176, 260, 263, 280, 281–83, 284, 286; cem, 280, 281, 283, 286; Greek, 93-94; klezmer, 202–3, 340 n. 16; rap/hip-hop, 76, 77, 176– l 410

78, 202–3; and su√ering, 349 n. 4; Turkish, 76–77, 79, 102, 176, 234, 283–84, 289 Mutterzunge (Özdamar), 197–98 Naficy, Hamid, 201 Namus, 245, 266 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 8 Nationalism: and Ausländer, 80–81; and belonging, 321–23; and citizenship, 226–27, 229; and hierarchy, 66; ideology, 3; traditional, 93, 220 Nationalist Movement Party, 291 National Socialism, 61, 111; on community, 208, 216; and concealment, 112– 16; and German identity, 322 Nativeness, 28 Naturalization, 16, 73–74, 161, 206, 221, 222–23, 316, 318 Nazism. See National Socialism Nazi symbols, 64, 111 Neiman, Susan, 341 n. 31 Neocolonization, 86 Null-Tarif, 221 Nuremberg Laws, 88–89, 119 O√e, Claus, 62 O’Leary, Siofra, 230 Omurca, Muhsin, 312–13 Ören, Aras, 196–97 Orwell, George, 56 Ossies/Ossis, 33, 138 Otherness, 2–3; of Aussiedler, 7, 71; as categorical confusion, 94–95; inflections of, 311. See also Di√erence/differentiation; Foreignness Özakın, Aysel, 187 Özdamar, Emine Sevgi, 1, 2, 21, 197 Özdemir, Cem, 11 INDEX

Pamuk, Orhan, 12, 184, 302–3 Park, Robert, 81 Peck, Je√rey M., 136 Periodization, 19 Peripheries. See Center/periphery dichotomy Pigs, 133–35, 265–66 Pink Cards, 156, 223–25, 246 Pir Sultan Abdal, 255, 284 Prenzlauer Berg (Berlin), 125 Rabbits, 253 Racialization, 80, 99–100, 208–10, 216– 17, 311 Racism, 99–101 Räthzel, Nora, 100, 208 Rattle, Simon, 319–20 Reagan, Ronald, 117 Red Path, 272–73, 285 Referentiality, 133 Rehm, Anita, 264 Reichsausländer, 54 Reisigl, Martin, 128 Religious freedom, 7 Repatriation: and Aussiedler, 69; choosing, 20; and expectations, 243– 44; Germany on, 60, 148, 211–12, 214, 217, 317; and Greek Muslims, 288; killing passports, 163–64, 179, 246; and religiousness, 255; vs. returning, 289; Turkey on, 156, 161 Republikaner Party, 66 Residence registration, 53–54, 148 Resistance, 279, 304–9 Returnees, 162–63, 235, 239, 241–46, 350 n. 16 Reterritorialization, 28, 185, 204 Reuchlin, Johann, 216

INDEX

Rittersberger-Tilic, Helga, 350 n. 16 Rituals, Alevi, 279–87 Safavids, 252 Santner, Eric, 8, 111–12, 129 Sassen, Saskia, 321 Scarves. See Headscarves Schengen agreement, 229–30 Schi√auer, Werner, 262 Schmitt, Carl, 207–8 Schneider, Peter, 26 Schnock, Frieder, 119 Segregation, 89, 205 Semah, 281, 282, 286 Senders, Stefan, 211 Sennett, Richard, 38 D Senocak, Zafer, 2, 140, 182, 197, 200, 316–17 Shi’ites, 251, 281 Shoah. See Holocaust Silverman, M., 354 n. 5 Skinheads, 64, 138, 313 Skursky, Julie, 66, 67 Smotczyk, Alexander, 309 Smuggling of people, 61 Snow (Pamuk), 184, 303 Social Democratic Party, 61, 66, 180, 209, 219–21, 259, 313 Social hierarchies, 81, 90–95, 185–90 Social Order of a Slum, The (Suttle), 82 Social spaces. See Turkish German social spaces Sociology, urban, 82 Sovereignty, 15, 226, 321 Soysal, Levent, 177, 228, 286 Soysal, Yasemin, 15, 228, 348 n. 22 Spyer, Patricia, 191 Stallybrass, Peter, 134

411 l

Stih, Renate, 119 Stoiber, Edmund, 209 Submission (van Gogh), 248 Su√ering and Germanness, 212 Sufism, 251, 351 n. 4 Suhr, Heidrun, 182 Sunnis: and Alevis, 92, 102, 251–55, 265, 281, 306; and headscarves, 303–4; religious life, 72, 248, 271 Suttle, Gerald, 82 Synagogues, 44, 112, 125, 131, 139, 338 n. 6, 240 n. 17 Tahtacı. See Turkoman woodcutters Taussig, Michael T., 4 Technology and transnationalism, 27 Teraoka, Arlene Akiko, 187 Thomas, William Isaac, 81 Tomlinson, John, 332 n. 11 Transgression: and abjection, 312; of boundaries, 26, 38, 131, 142, 191, 278; chronotope, 32, 41; desires, 4; and German neighborhood, 23; and Heimat, 137; and Kreuzberg, 90; of norms, 36, 87, 91, 151; and pigs, 134; and Prenzlauer Berg, 125; and purity, 58; and Turkish writers, 79, 185; and veils, 309; and women’s roles, 189 Transnationalism, 3, 9–11, 17–18, 156; and cosmopolitanism, 49–50; and elite, 203–4; and identity, 11; and Islam, 248; and marginalization, 12; and migration, 9, 49; and movement of relatives, 143; networks, 9, 19; organizations, 15; paradoxes in, 232; and politics, 10, 48; and technology, 27

l 412

Tribal paradigm, 82–83 Truth Lies in Rostock, The (documentary), 334 n. 14 Tulay, Bülent, 140 Turbans, 299, 302 Turk (term): as Ausländer, 93; connotations, 3; as new Jews, 13, 129–30, 177 Turkish bonus, 194–96 Turkish diaspora: and center/periphery dichotomy, 232–35; culture bridging, 1–4; and deracination, 232–47; e√ect on German culture, 16; and professionals, 190–91, 204–5; and remaking self, 7; and repatriation, 20, 137, 148, 156, 161; and returning, 235–38, 241–45; second generation youth, 155–61, 178; and social spaces, 9; third generation youth, 181 Turkish German social spaces: aspects, 3–4; decoding, 24–25; division in, 7; as shifting, 4; and transnational networks, 9 Turkish history, influence on Europe, 16–17 Turkishness: in Berlin, 6, 72–73, 174– 76; competing images, 318; and ethnicization, 2; and Germanness, 7, 79, 179–83; in German public sphere, 3, 7; and moral self, 11–12 Turko-Islamic synthesis, 292, 301 Turkoman woodcutters, 287–91 Überfremdung, 10, 51–53, 60; historical, 53–55 Übersiedler, 60 Unheimlichkeit, 109

INDEX

Unification of Germany, 4–5, 17, 31, 41, 61, 68, 110, 118, 153 Urbanization, 82 Van Bruinessen, Martin, 251, 273, 276 Van Gogh, Theo, 219, 248 Veiling, 294–310. See also Headscarves Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 120, 124, 126, 203, 322 Victimization, 214 Virginity, 162–63 Volkszugehörigkeit, 207, 210 Wacquant, Loïc, 18 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 232 Wall Jumper, The (Schneider), 26 Walter, Bruno, 115 Weber, Max, 54 Weddings, 168–74 Weizsäcker, Richard von, 88, 89 Welto√enheit, 14, 47, 50, 320, 325

INDEX

Welz, Gisela, 98–99 Wende period, 4 Wessies/Wessis, 33, 75 White, Allon, 134 Wilpert, Czarina, 166–67, 214–15, 262 Wodak, Ruth, 128 Woodhill, Winifred, 296 World-openness. See Welto√enheit World systems theory, 232 Xenophobia, 31, 53, 54, 58, 60–65, 72, 92, 99, 130, 138–40, 160, 176, 264, 314 Yeter, Hanefi, 52, 76, 147, 165, 246 Young, James E., 227 Zaimo˘glu, Feridun, 2, 3, 21, 51, 178, 205, 314, 319 Zeitlmann, Wolfgang, 221–22 Zionists, 69, 126, 131 Znaniecki, Forian, 81

413 l

The original kernels of a number of the chapters in this book began their public life elsewhere. In the meantime, they have transformed into quite di√erent pieces, reflecting historical developments (e.g., German unification) as well as my own changed thinking and analyses. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, in which have appeared earlier versions of some sections in this book. ‘‘The Alevi-Bektashi Identity in a Foreign Context: The Example of Berlin,’’ in Bektachiyya: Etudes sur l’ordre mystique des Bektachis et les groupes relevant de Hadji Bektach, Alexandre Popvic and Gilles Veinstein, eds. (Istanbul: Les Editions isis, 1995), 427–34. ‘‘Foreigners in the Fatherland,’’ in The Politics of Immigrant Workers: Labor Activism and Migration in the World Economy since 1980, Camille Guerin-Gonzales and Carl Strikwerda, eds. (New York: Homes and Meier, 1993), 279–94. ‘‘Fortress Europe and the Foreigners Within: Germany’s Turks,’’ in The Anthropology of Europe, Victoria Godard et al., eds. (London: Berg Press, 1994), 113– 25. ‘‘Identity and Ethnic Constructions in the Context of Migration,’’ in Ethnicity, Structured Inequality, and the State in Canada and the Federal Republic of Germany, Robin Ostow et al., eds. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1991), 137–56. ‘‘A Place of Their Own: Contesting Spaces and Defining Places in Berlin’s Migrant Community,’’ in Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe, Barbara Metcalf, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 147–66. ‘‘Second Generation Non-citizens: Descendants of Turkish Migrants in Germany,’’ in Children and the Politics of Culture, Sharon Stephens, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 265–81. ‘‘Shifting Centres, Emergent Identities: Turkey and Germany in the Lives of Turkish Gastarbeiter,’’ in Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration and the Religious Imagination, Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 153–71. ‘‘Turkish Headscarves and the ‘Foreigner Problem’: Constructing Di√erence through Emblems of Identity,’’ New German Critique 16(1) (1989): 27–46. Chapter 7 features a translation by Ruth Mandel of a story by Kerim Edinsel entitled ‘‘Whisky, Ayran, City Buses and a Park,’’ excerpted from Acılara Gülümserken (Berlin, 1985). Reprinted with permission from the author.

RUTH MANDEL teaches in the Department of Anthropology at University College London.

She has edited, with Caroline Humphrey, Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism (2002).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mandel, Ruth Ellen Cosmopolitan anxieties : Turkish challenges to citizenship and belonging in Germany / Ruth Mandel. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn-13: 978-0-8223-4176-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-8223-4193-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Citizenship—Germany. 2. Turks—Germany. 3. Germany—Ethnic relations. I. Title. jn3971.a92m36 2008 323.119%435043—dc22

2007050555