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Abstract
Multicultural literature produced in the mid-20th century has been criticized for reducing its
protagonists to stereotypes, portraying the migrant as victim, and focusing excessively on
conflict of an intercultural or intra-cultural nature. The works of many Turkish-German authors,
such as Dilek Güngör and Aras Ören, have revised the immigrant narrative by not foregrounding
the conflicts of alterity. These contemporary narratives focus on a more universal, more
everyday experience where first-generation immigrants and their German-born children
struggle with their unique circumstances. Young Turkish-Germans seek out paths of their own
design, while mainstream German society and traditional Turks look askance at their audacity.
This new perspective reveals life within, as well as between, the two cultures to be much more
varied, fluid and less confrontational than political rhetoric would have us believe.
Countering claims of German intolerance and insular Moslem immigrants,
contemporary Turkish-German authors and film-makers are evidence of underlying currents of
functional co-existence and cultural exchange. Recent decades have witnessed the emergence
of a younger generation of Turkish directors intent on breaking away from this “cinema of the
affected.” This emergent vein of cosmopolitanism is reflected in the work of female TurkishAustrian director Feo Aladag, as well as celebrated Turkish-German director Fatih Akin, whose
films go beyond attempts by earlier filmmakers associated with the New German Cinema to
represent accurately the realities of living within two cultures. These contemporary directors
have moved on to explore the various paths open to those of mixed ethnicity, to those living
within but not wholly part of German society, to those who have severed their ties to tradition
completely: crime, adaptation or return, or the search for self-determination.
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Dedication
I would like to dedicate this thesis to my husband and my family. There is no doubt in
my mind that without their continued support, counsel, and active participation in the
revision process, I could not have completed this project.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the support and assistance given me by Dr. Kader Konuk of
the University of Michigan, who has been very generous in her support of my academic
pursuits by offering invaluable feedback and advice on the position of Turkish-German
literature within the German literary canon.
Contemporary Turkish-German Multiculturalism in Text and Film
by
Peggy Colleen Stricker
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
in
Literature and Writing
Thesis Committee:
Oliver Berghof, Chair
Salah Moukhlis
Yuan Yuan
California State University San Marcos
©2012
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Table of Contents
Abstract .................................................................................................................. i
Dedication............................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgements................................................................................................ iii
Introduction..............................................................................................................1
Chapter One
The Definition of Multiculturalism………………………………………………………..5
Chapter Two
Historical Background
A.
B.
Recent Events……………………………………………………………..8
Past History………………………………………………………………..13
Chapter Three
Literary and Film Analysis
A.
B.
C.
D.
Please, No Police by Aras Ören…………………………………………22
Head On and Edge of Heaven, Director Fatih Akin……………………30
When We Leave, Director Feo Aladag………………………………….44
My Turkish Grandmother’s Secret by Dilek Güngör………………….. 52
Chapter Four
Conclusion................................................................................................................63
Bibliography..............................................................................................................67
1
Introduction
On October 17th of 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel publicly declared
the death of multiculturalism in Germany while addressing a conference of the youth
wing of her Christian Democratic Union party. She was quoted in the Guardian
newspaper as saying it had "failed utterly" (10.17.2010). The reality is, however, that an
increasingly settled Turkish-German population now manifests a permanent presence in
Germany: over a third were born there, and a third have German citizenship.1 It could
be expected that thirty years of a coexistence which defies assimilation would produce
violent conflict in the streets and an outpouring of oppositional sentiment expressed in
cultural media. Yet, contemporary Turkish-German authors and film-makers are
countering claims of German intolerance and insular Moslem immigrants; indeed, they
are themselves evidence of functional co-existence and cultural exchange between the
two communities.
It is clear that any effective consideration of multicultural issues, and any
discussion of the accuracy of Chancellor Merkel’s volatile statement, is contingent upon
a working definition of the term “multiculturalism” as it pertains to the arguments in this
thesis. So many definitions exist for the term that some would argue that its
inexactitude has rendered the term nearly useless. This thesis traces the origins of the
term “multiculturalism,” and distinguishes between a policy of multiculturalism
maintained by the nation-state, and multiculturalism as expressed artistically and
socially within various social strata, discussing texts and films in the context of the latter.
1
Statistics taken from the 2009 report published by study published by the Statistisches Bundesamt (Federal
Statistical Office of Germany) refer to registered residents.
2
Examples of recent events in Germany such as Thilo Sarrazin’s controversial
book, Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Does Itself In), discussions of the
assimilation of non-naturalized immigrants, sporadic incidents of honor killings, and the
rise of neo-Nazi violence expand upon a detailed account of why and how the first
Turkish immigrants were invited into Germany, and why the integration of those who
remained proved so difficult.
A close examination of historical events from the end of WWII to the present
emphasizes the significance of the war on the German labor force, the fallacies inherent
in the guest-worker scheme, and the long-term effects of Germany’s delayed
implementation of programs to aid assimilation, including something as basic as
German language courses for workers and their children.
This thesis also discusses the socio-political indicators present in the migrant and
post-migrant narratives of contemporary authors Aras Ören and Dilek Güngör, and film
directors Fatih Akin and Feo Aladag as they relate to the broader discourse of
multiculturalism and the community’s definition of self. The primary theme in each of
these works is that conditions of the disenfranchised comprise a set of universals,
implying that the marginalized have more in common with each other than with
mainstream society, regardless of ethnic background.
The works supporting this thesis demonstrate the permutations of TurkishGerman literature over the last fifty-one years, beginning with Aras Ören’s novella,
Please, no Police! (Bitte Nix Polizei!), currently listed by Amazon.de as a “crime novel.”
Published in 1974, this piece of Gastarbeiterliteratur2 describes the parallel, rarely
2
This term refers generally to the German-language, multicultural literature of the 20th century that originated
during the earliest phases of Turkish economic migrantion to Germany, beginning in the early 1960’s. This genre
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intersecting universes inhabited by the German and Turkish working-classes. Crosscultural blending such as that discussed by writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Maxine
Hong Kingston is conspicuously absent from Gastarbeiterliteratur, as it precedes any
current notion of hybridization. The social divisions in Please, No Police!, while not
geographic in nature, exist as psychological barriers of gender, class, and culture.
Author Dilek Güngör’s work represents the opposite end of the spectrum, both
chronologically, and critically. Born in southern Germany in 1972, some forty years later
than Aras Ören, Güngör’s newspaper columns, fiction, and theater piece, reveal a
highly-integrated writer, born of Turkish immigrant parents and educated in Germany
and England. Her work has been referred to by some as post-postcolonial, but in the
context of German literature, calling it post-migrant literature would be more correct.
Güngör and other post-migrant voices of her generation reflect varying degrees of
hybridity, and varying degrees of resistance to both mainstream culture, as well as
aspects of their communities. In Güngör’s case, the world is decidedly rosy – so much
so that no one is afraid to take a peek at their Turkish neighbors.
The impact on cross-cultural relations of multicultural material that is both
entertaining and widely available must not be underestimated. The emergence of
diasporic cinemas, and the potential of post-national and post-migrant cinemas in the
current context of globalization has created an additional popular space for the
consideration of multiculturalism and identity, as well as resistance and hybridity The
films of Fatih Akin and Feo Aladag discussed in this thesis bring issues of ethnicity,
reflects the combative spirit of the German Communist tradition of the Arbeiterliteratur, or Workers‘ Literature, of
the Weimar Republic, and many of these authors were themselves Gastarbeiter. Because the importation of
laborers from Turkey effectively ended in 1973, the Turks who remained in Germany became immigrants. The
1980’s saw the emergence of the term Migrantenliteratur , or Migrant Literature, referring to written work
produced by non-native German language speaking authors residing in Germany, Autria, and Switzerland.
4
class, gender, sexuality, nationhood, and belonging to a broad international audience.
Their inclusion here leads to a deeper consideration of the role of visual media in
modern culture and the influential role films play in bridging the gap between academia
and the greater population.
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Chapter One
Definition of Multiculturalism
It is clear that any effective consideration of multicultural issues, including any
discussion of the accuracy of Chancellor Merkel’s volatile statement, is contingent upon
a working definition of the term “multiculturalism” as it pertains to the arguments in this
paper. As Polona Petek aptly points out in her essay “Enabling collisions: Re-thinking
multiculturalism through Fatih Akin’s Gegen di Wand/Head On,” “multiculturalism is
hardly a unanimously, let alone generally embraced phenomenon”(178). It can be
argued that the word multiculturalism has been bandied about and stretched to fit so
many situations, it has lost any definitive meaning. “As Homi K. Bhabha writes,
multiculturalism has become a ‘floating’ signifier, a ‘portmanteau term for anything from
minority discourse to postcolonial critique, from gay and lesbian studies to chicano/a
fiction’ (Bhabha 31), a catch-all term with increasingly little substance” (Patek 178).
Petek sees the origins of the term as developing from the word “multicultural,”
that came into general usage in the late 1950’s in nations such as Canada and
Australia, which comprise distinct settler cultures. Most importantly, Petek emphasizes
that “from its inception, or very shortly thereafter, multiculturalism became part of the
rhetoric of the nation-state, and it is as such, as primarily a term referring to government
policy, that multiculturalism has entered academic discourses”(177). This official usage
is associated with the official recognition of different ethnic groups within a nation-state’s
borders, and is concerned with “disadvantage and lack of equity, which the nation-state
recognizes as its responsibility to address”(178). By underscoring the difference
between political and social multicultural spaces, Petek makes it clear that the political
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concept of “multiculturalism” must be distinguished from the description of a society as
“multicultural” (177).
Petek uses the United States to illustrate how multiculturalism as a state policy
“is not necessarily present in societies which can be described as obviously
multicultural,” explaining that although the United States is generally regarded to be the
epitome of multicultural societies, and defines itself as a global melting pot,
multiculturalism is not specifically reflected in U.S. federal policies above and beyond
the rights assured individuals by the constitution. Indeed, the expectation is that all
citizens would be “Americans first,” and as scholars Jon Stratton and Ien Ang point out,
multiculturalism is seen in some societies as “controversial because of its real and
perceived (in)compatibility with national unity” (135). Due to the strong shared cultural
memory which exists between American and German culture, as well as the economic
and political ties between the two nations, it is not surprising that German attitudes
towards multiculturalism, and their efforts to mange a multi-ethnic society, reference and
reflect American cultural and political policies.
The “melting pot” concept, primarily associated with, but not limited to, the United
States, is based on an assumed reality of wave upon wave of immigrants who would
leave the political strife and atavistic customs of their respective homelands behind, and
contribute to the propagation of a mighty hybrid culture. When transplanting themselves
and their families to the United States, Canada, South Africa, and Australia, generations
of Russian, Polish, Italian immigrants, among others, discouraged their children from
speaking the languages of their forefathers and to reject many of their old customs.
Recent decades of heightened cultural sensitivity have changed all that; the goal has
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been to preserve and celebrate the ethnic origins of the various immigrant communities,
a shift which has sparked one of the primary controversies surrounding multiculturalism.
By attempting to include and embrace the cultural uniqueness of immigrant
communities, the dominating culture once again risks assigning intransient
characteristics and behaviors to minority communities, making them instantly
recognizable as the Other, and just as easily containable. Slovenian philosopher and
cultural critic Slavoj Žižek argues that with its reliance on the liberal principles of
tolerance and equal respect, “the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is
multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each
local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people – as ‘natives’ whose mores
are to be carefully studied and ‘respected’” (Žižek 44). For Žižek, and a great number of
like-minded social critics, multiculturalism carries an inherent degree of patronizing
Eurocentric remoteness alongside its respect for other cultures. In an article appearing
in The New Left Review entitled “Multiculturalism, Or the Cultural Logic of Multinational
Capitalism,” Žižek writes:
Multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism,
a ‘racism with a distance’ – it respects the Other’s identity, conceiving the
Other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which he, the
multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged
universal position. (44)
If this is so, then any attempts to force the social multicultural situation to mimic the
conventions of the multicultural nation-state are likely doomed to failure, prompting
negative prognostications and judgments such as Merkel’s.
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Chapter Two
Historical Background: Recent Events
In view of relatively recent events in Germany, the perception and definition of
multiculturalism in the German context is further complicated by public concerns over
religious issues. Whereas the majority of post-unification immigrants are European and
primarily Christian, the position of Turkish immigrants in Germany is compromised by
public perceptions of their Islamic religion and the role of Sharia law in Moslem
communities. It is in this political context that Angela Merkel’s remarks must be
considered. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the former U.S.S.R.,
Germany has seen an influx of immigrants from the former DDR and other Eastern Bloc
nations which has put an economic strain on the country’s resources. The influx of
economic refugees and asylum seekers from former Communist nations, added to the
existing Turkish Gastarbeiter population since the collapse of the former Soviet Union,
has resulted in numerous outbreaks of violence against all foreigners since
reunification. The growth of Neo-Nazi and other extremist groups, debates over asylum
policy, and liberalized naturalization laws have accompanied Germany's new
demographic profile.
In August of 2010, just three months prior to Merkel’s address, the advance
release of provocative excerpts from a book entitled Germany Does Away With Itself
precipitated shockwaves of political turmoil over assimilation, multiculturalism, and the
suggested implementation of an official “Leitkultur,” or leading national culture, to which
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all immigrants should be expected to conform. In this very controversial book, Thilo
Sarrazin, a politician from the Social Democratic Party, who was actually sitting at the
time on the board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, developed proposals for demographic
policies aimed specifically at the Moslem population in Germany. Sarrazin argues that
Germany’s future stability and well-being are threatened by immigrants from Moslem
countries. In addition to embarrassing his political party, Sarrazin’s assertions lent
authority to stereotypical perceptions of Turks and other immigrants, and reinforced a
growing trend of xenophobia among the greater population. Detractors of Sarrazin’s
opinions point out that his conclusions are based on a simplistic eugenic argument.
Sarrazin warns that because immigrants are presumably outbreeding native Germans,
the mainstream German population should be worried. His warning is based on the
conclusion that because immigrant laborers test with significantly lower IQs than other
Germans, their contribution to the gene pool will diminish the combined national
intelligence quotient of Germany. Such reasoning is based on the assumption that IQ is
a genetically determined trait, and ignores the role of nutrition, education, culture, and
economic environment in determining IQ scores. The additional assumption of high
fertility or reproduction among immigrant communities flies in the face of findings by
researchers such as the American population expert Matthew Connelly, who writes at
length about the generally decreasing reproductive levels within immigrant communities
in his book Fatal Misconception, citing similar pronouncements made in the past
regarding Catholic and Chinese immigrant populations (142-143).
Though Sarrazin was ousted from his position on the board of the Bundesbank,
and in spite of the initial spontaneous objections from major politicians, Sarrazin’s
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theses met with a high level of popular support. One poll cited by renowned
philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, 3 in a 2010 New York Times article, “Leadership and
Leitkultur,” found that more than a third of Germans agreed with Mr. Sarrazin’s
prognosis that Germany was becoming “naturally more stupid on average” as a result of
immigration from Moslem countries (1).
The situation was further inflamed by a second disturbing media event weeks
later, when, on the anniversary of German unification in 2010, the newly elected
German president, Christian Wulff, “took the liberty of reaffirming the commonplace
notion, which former presidents had already affirmed, that not only Christianity and
Judaism but ‘Islam also belongs in Germany’” (Habermas1).4 Coming from Wulff, who,
as the premier of Lower Saxony, had been the first to appoint a German woman of
Turkish origin as a member of his cabinet, the assertion was unsurprising and Wulff’s
speech received a standing ovation in the Bundestag from the political assembly. The
next day’s conservative press, however, focused its critical commentary on the
President’s assertion about Islam’s place in Germany; the issue has since prompted a
split within the Christian Democratic Union.
3
Jürgen Habermas, currently ranks as one of the most influential philosophers in the world. Bridging continental and
Anglo-American traditions of thought, he has engaged in debates with thinkers as diverse as Lyotard, Gadamer, ,
Foucault, and Derrida. His extensive written work addresses topics stretching from social-political theory to
aesthetics, epistemology and language to philosophy of religion, and his ideas have significantly influenced not
only philosophy but also political-legal thought, sociology, communication studies, argumentation theory and
rhetoric, developmental psychology and theology. Moreover, he has figured prominently in Germany as a public
intellectual, commenting on controversial issues of the day in German newspapers such as Die Zeit. Bohman,
James and Rehg, William, "Jürgen Habermas", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition),
Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
4
In a speech commemorating the 20th anniversary of the reunification of Germany, Wulff spoke of the need for a
second process of German unity: this time with foreigners living inside the country. His speech sent a shudder
through skeptics who felt the President failed to acknowledge a distinguish between the concepts of religious
freedom and religious equality
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Habermas warns that, “the real cause for concern is that, as the Sarrazin and
Wulff incidents show, cool-headed politicians are discovering that they can divert the
social anxieties of their voters into ethnic aggression against still weaker social
groups”(1). While it is true that, although the social integration of Turkish guest workers
and their descendants has generally been considered a success, as Habermas points
out, in economically depressed areas, Germany continue to contend with problematic
immigrant neighborhoods that “seal themselves off from mainstream society”(1).
Habermas’ wording would imply, however, that that such ghettos exist by choice, and
are not the predictable result of socio-economic factors such as level of education,
marketable skills, and Islamophobic sentiments among the dominant German
community.
Habermas’ very astute political considerations address, therefore, developments
of multiculturalism on the governmental or administrative levels, and do not explore
parallel developments which have contemporaneously occurred at the communal within
a multicultural society. Angela Merkel’s proclamation that Germany’s multicultural
experiment is a failure, likewise addresses the political maelstrom wreaking havoc at the
moment of her speech, but does not in any way take into account the numerous
“successful” events which made possible Wulff’s appointment of Aygül Özkan, a
Moslem female attorney and member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union
party, to his cabinet in the first place. That Özkan, and other Turkish-German public
figures like her, have emerged in Germany is proof in itself of a productive co-existence
of two very different cultures.
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Habermas is not wrong, however, to bring up the troublesome pockets of unrest
located in Germany’s manufacturing and urban areas. The concept of multicultural
communities, where diverse cultures coexist and function together, in a sort of
cosmopolitan Utopia, has introduced complications of its own. If the primary goal of
multiculturalism has been to eliminate racism and xenophobia, we might say that it has
failed. The fact is that any degree of assimilation and mutual trust between disparate
communities is a time-consuming process that has required, historically, numerous
generations to reach a comfortable solution. Perhaps a large part of the global struggle
with immigration is that, faced with a multitude of points of conflict, governments attempt
to regulate and institutionalize what are normally naturally evolving processes, and seek
to speed up the process through legislation. Such efforts to force too much too soon,
with an eye on voter approval, are often provocative and essentially counter-productive.
Žižek asks, “what can a philosopher do here? One should bear in mind that the
philosopher's task is not to propose solutions, but to reformulate the problem itself, to
shift the ideological framework within which we hitherto perceived the problem”
(YouTube Violence 4 of 5). In her essay, Polona Patek proposes such a shift,
approaching the problem of multiculturalism at a community level, on a quite human
level, shifting the ideological framework from the political arena to the popular cultural.
Specifically, she uses the soundtrack to Fatih Akin’s film Head On to examine the
capacity of music to “activate musical tastes as the axis along which new forms of
multicultural bonding can emerge”(177). Patek reformulates the problem as one of
introduction and interpretation, and finally, of pleasure. It is indisputable that familiarity
and a repeated positive experience is fundamental to building trust. Whatever may
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happen on the legislative level, real cultural exchange occurs most effortlessly on the
human plain when cultures blend by means of a slow and steady blurring of lines of
demarcation. Music and art, food and romance, and a community-based system
providing for the exchange of goods and services provide a site for identity negotiation.
The films and books selected for this thesis all demonstrate not only how film and
music, but all forms of cultural creative productivity may serve as an agent that
expresses not only a multicultural experience based on insurmountable differences, but
also one that is based on empathy, economic circumstance, and common human
ground in the context of the German-Turkish multicultural “experiment.”
Historical Background: Past History
As Akile Gürsoy Tezcan points out in the introduction to Please, No Police, any
discussion of contemporary Turkish-German literature and film must begin with “a look
at the economic and political history of the phenomenon which has produced it, the
phenomenon known as Turkish labor immigration” (ix). And any discussion of TurkishGerman immigration begs clarification as to why Turks were motivated to come to
Germany in the first place, and why such a massive immigration was encouraged.
Germany at the end of World War II was an incapacitated nation sifting through
the rubble in search of its future. While extensive air raids and phosphorus bombs had
severely damaged most major German cities, decimating its manufacturing sector, the
shortage of manpower dramatically slowed reconstruction. During the final two years of
the war, the population of Cologne, Germany’s fourth largest city, plummeted from
768,000 to less than 250,000; the statistics for many other German cities reflect similar
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reductions. Germany’s opera houses, theaters, museums, and cathedrals were reduced
to ruins, while thousands of Germans were displaced. Industrial production came to a
halt and the stable Reichsmark issued in 1924 became worthless, making barter the
only credible form of exchange (Mendershausen 124).
In spite of its bleak prospects, Germany launched an impressive economic
redevelopment program, driven by quickly implemented economic reforms pushed
through by free-market economist Ludwig Erhard. The new West German
establishment received powerful support from a number of sources. Manufacturing was
bolstered by investment funds under the European Recovery Program, commonly
known as the Marshall Plan. German industry was further stimulated by Cold War fears
that arose in the West at the onset of the Korean War. The German willingness to work
hard for low wages until productivity had increased was another positive factor, but
perhaps the most essential component of success was the revival of confidence brought
on by Erhard's shock recovery approach and by the introduction of the Deutsche Mark
(H. Mendershausen).
This miraculous economic turnaround, the Wirtschaftswunder, continued at an
astounding pace through the nineteen-fifties, with a growth rate in industrial production
of 25.0 percent in 1950. By 1960, industrial production had risen to two and one-half
times the 1950 figures, far beyond levels attained in all of Germany by the National
Socialists during the nineteen-thirties.
The GNP rose by two-thirds during the same decade, while the number of
employed individuals rose from 13.8 million in 1950 to 19.8 million in 1960. This boost
was reflected in unemployment figures of 1.2 percent in 1960, down from 10.3 percent
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in 1950. Labor benefited from the economic miracle, as salaries rose over 80 percent
between 1949 and 1955, in stride with growth. West German social programs were
given a boost in 1957 with the government’s initiation of a number of social programs
and the expansion of existing ones, and it seemed the miracle was set to continue
unimpeded. But the West German economy did not grow as far or as quickly in
the1960’s as it had in the 1950’s, partly because of decisions made by a Bundesbank
fearful of overextending resources and burning out the economy, and partly, too, due to
the fact that the supply of fresh labor from East Germany was cut off by the construction
of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
A brief yet comprehensive article in Der Spiegel entitled "Turkish Immigration to
Germany: A History of Self-Deception and Wasted Opportunity" explains that, to counter
the sudden labor shortage, the German government looked to neighboring countries
who struggled with unemployment and underproduction. The first German treaty to
recruit short-term laborers was signed with Italy in 1955, followed in quick succession by
similar bilateral agreements with a number of other countries, including Poland, Portugal
and Spain. Under the terms of the original agreement with Turkey, the first contingent of
one hundred thousand workers arrived by train in Munich from Ankara and Istanbul
in1963, and was then dispersed to the country's various industrial zones. The first
waves of Turkish immigrants were granted two-year visas and returned home to make
room for new workers. The guest workers were expected to live together in newly built
dormitories near the factories where they worked, and return to their native countries
after working their allotted time. However, this changing-out of the labor force was a
distinct disadvantage to business owners and managers in the manufacturing sector,
16
who were, quite understandingly, unwilling to part with workers trained at their expense.
The system of rotation was soon suspended (Bartsch), with the result that “less than a
decade later, one million Turks were living in Germany” (Seyhan 100).
The Spiegel article describes both the West German government and the
economy as “ecstatic over the Turkish guest workers, who were ‘between 18 and 45, at
the prime of their labor capacity,’” boosted tax revenues and social security
contributions, and made a "substantial contribution to increasing production levels."
The article states that support for the new labor force was such that in November of
1969, the then-president of the Federal Labor Agency, Josef Stingl, greeted the 1millionth "guest worker from the southeastern European region" with great enthusiasm
at Munich's main train station. “The 24-year-old Turk from Konya in central Anatolia was
given a television set before being shipped off to a factory in Mainz near Frankfurt, and
Stingl used the opportunity to announce that Germany needed many more like him to
maintain its course of strong economic growth” (Bartsch).
Despite calls for more Turkish laborers and the suspension of the rotation
system, it is apparent that both the Turkish and German communities believed that the
Turks would eventually return home and few efforts were made by either side to
integrate the guest workers into mainstream society. German enterprises were primarily
interested in semi-skilled or unskilled laborers for poorly paid, unpopular jobs on
assembly lines and shift work. Poor, remote regions of Turkey were the preferred
recruitment areas. At the time, neither employers nor politicians in Germany were
concerned by the fact that a great many of the guest workers could barely read or write,
making it difficult for them to interact with Germans, much less participate in German
17
society. Many factories even employed interpreters, eliminating any urgent need on the
part of the workers to learn German. 5
Ismail Tipi, Turkish-German Landtagsabgeordneter for the conservative party in
Hesse, believes that both Turks and Germans from the outset bought into, and still cling
to, some universal homeland fantasy of immigrants one day returning home. "It was an
illusion to believe that we were all just guest workers and would eventually go back to
Turkey" Indeed, in the same Bartsch article, Rauf Ceylan, an expert on immigration and
religion, points out that "Germany has only had an intensive integration policy for about
10 years" (Bartsch ).
Many Turkish workers repeatedly delayed their return home, reluctant to give up
a steady source of income in the face of the uncertain economic and political situation in
Turkey, a nation afflicted by a series of military coups. Still, almost all of the workers
assumed that they would eventually leave Germany and return to their families, says
Ismail Tipi. "Some of our friends kept their packed suitcases under the bed or on top of
a closet for 10 or 15 years, so that they could leave at a moment's notice" (Bartsch).
A document prepared by Gijs Beets and Frans Willekens for the European
Commission in the Hague entitled Demography Network of the European Observatory
on the Social Situation and Demography examines the impact of economic crisis on
international migration and how labor migration, especially that of low-skilled workers, is
affected by declining global economic conditions. Page one of the study lists a number
of salient points directly applicable to the Turkish-German immigration scenario. The
authors’ investigations led them to conclude that:
5
According to a Turkish national census taken in 1968, the rate of literacy for young males between 16 and 24 was
nearly 84%, but figures for males in the age group of most Gastarbeiter averaged 62%, not discriminating between
urban and rural areas (Benedict 161).
18
• of all types of migration, labour migration will be affected most;6
• political and environmental refugees, marriage migration and family
reunion will not be much affected; however, various forms of
international migration may work as ‘communicating vessels’: if one
cannot enter as a labour migrant one may try to enter for example as
an asylum seeker;
• migrants employed in sectors that are most affected by the economic
recession are more likely to lose their jobs than migrants employed in
other sectors of the economy;
• low-skilled immigrants are among those most affected by the worsening
of the labour market conditions because they tend to be concentrated in
industries which are more sensitive to business cycle fluctuations
(construction and part of the service sector) and because they have less
secure contractual arrangements in their jobs;
• migrants who invested heavily in migration and settlement in the country
of destination are not likely to return to their country of origin but to stay;
• the recession reduces the remittances sent by migrants and foreign
workers to their families in their home countries;
• anti-immigration sentiments may increase and may result in restrictive
immigration policies. (1-2)
6
In September 2009, Papademetriou and Terrazas (2009) from the Migration Policy Institute published a
paper on the effect of the economic crisis on migration and immigrants in the United States.
19
When, in 1973, the international oil crisis threatened the German economy, the
presence of the guest workers rapidly came to be considered a fiscal liability. ThenChancellor Willy Brandt's coalition government composed of center-left Social
Democrats and liberal Free Democrats enacted a moratorium on the recruitment of
more foreign guest workers, which, paradoxically, led to an increase in the numbers of
foreign immigrants. Resident Turkish men began to bring their families to live in
Germany rather than return to Turkey, effectively turning guest workers into immigrants.
Many workers, already apprehensive of conditions in Turkey, were fearful that
they would not be able to return to Germany if they left the country, given prevailing
circumstances. The Turkish families were not able to settle in factory accommodations
intended for single, male individuals and moved into low-rent apartments in the areas
nearby, which Germans gradually vacated. This variation of American “white flight”
eventually created permanent immigrant communities in many large German cities such
as Duisburg, Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt, which the Bartsch article refers to as
“strongholds of so-called parallel societies””(1).
By the mid-1970’s, according to Freiburg-based contemporary historian Ulrich
Herbert, German politicians reacted to the development of such enclaves “either with
helplessness or by proposing contradictory plans. For example, while foreigners already
in the country were to be ‘integrated,’ the official policy until the late 1990s was to
‘promote the desire to return home,’ at times by offering the guest workers monetary
rewards of up to 10,500 deutschmarks (€5,400)”7 (53).
7
approximately $7,204.00 U.S.
20
Herbert writes that in keeping with the underlying message to “go home,” many
urban schools introduced lessons in Turkish in the mid-seventies and early eighties, not
in the interests of multiculturalism, but rather with an eye on the children’s future reassimilation in Turkey. An "unconditional integration into the German school system"
was not desired. The result, says Herbert, was a generation of "bilingual illiterates" who
were fluent in neither the language of their parents, nor in that of their German fellow
students and whose prospects of employment were slim (142).
By the 1980’s, the German public, though appreciative of contributions made by
the guest workers as a labor force in the past, had become increasingly conflicted with
regards to a permanent Turkish presence in their midst and viewed the growing number
of asylum-seekers with apprehension. Fears of a cultural invasion and an eventual
Islamization of Germany’s secular Judeo-Christian society sparked a polarized political
debate between the Green Party's demands for a right of residence for well-integrated
asylum seekers in a multicultural society and the xenophobic rhetoric of multiple
factions within the conservative CDU. "The foreigners' return to their native countries
must be the rule and not the exception," Alfred Degger, the then-head of the CDU in the
state of Hesse, said in 1982. In Degger's view, it was "not immoral to demand that what
is left of Germany be reserved mainly for the Germans." Manfred Kanther, interior
minister in the cabinet of then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl, drew attention for similar views
in the 1990s (Bartsch).
Today, more than forty-five years after the first Gastarbeiter set foot on German
soil, a workable integration policy has gathered support across party lines. In their
Bartsch article, Bartsch, Brandt, and Steinvorth offer the reassuring example of Armin
21
Laschet, a CDU politician in the western city of Aachen, who was one of the first
conservatives to advocate a non-ideological commitment to immigration. They quote
Laschet as saying that "the discovery of integration policy marks the end of a decadeslong collective denial of reality"(1).
Emerging cultural indicators bode well for improved relations between the
Turkish and German communities. The state of Hesse now offers German classes for
preschool children from immigrant families, a young Turkish-German soccer player,
Meszut Özil, became a quick favorite with fans when he played on the German national
team competing for the 2010 World Cup, and anecdotal accounts abound that readers
of the popular Bildzeitung voted the döner kebab the second favorite fast food in
Germany, surpassed only by the firmly entrenched Würstchen mit Pommes.
22
Chapter Three
Literary and Film Analysis: Please, No Police
Blending on a popular level of musical, filmic, and gastronomic experiences
between the two cultures is an indication that Turkish immigrants have much in common
with Germans of the same socio-economic level. The immigrant population’s concerns
are depicted as conflicts arising from economic hardship, lack of education, and
generational clashes – all of which they share with their German counterparts. Many of
the multicultural works produced in the mid-20th century have been criticized for
reducing their protagonists to stereotypes, portraying the migrant as victim, and
focusing excessively on conflict of an intercultural or intra-cultural nature. Authors such
as Dilek Güngör, writing in German, and Aras Ören, who writes in Turkish and German,
have revised this narrative by not foregrounding the conflicts of alterity. It is significant
that the same underlying themes and concepts are easily identifiable in works created
by quite diverse artists in a variety of genres.
Fatih Akin is a Hamburg-born, Turkish-German director who expresses a
profound understanding of dual cultural identities in his numerous films, while Austrian
Feo Aladag, wife of Turkish-German director Züli Aladag, addresses the plight of
women in general, and the particular cultural conflicts Moslem female immigrants to
Germany contend with, in her film When We Leave. Dilek Güngör is a forty-year-old
female, German-born columnist whose work appears in several prominent German
newspapers. Güngör has branched out to publish an anthology of her columns, a play,
and a full-length German language novel. Born in Istanbul in 1939, Aras Ören, who
writes primarily in Turkish and is then translated into German, is recognized as one of
23
Germany’s most accomplished authors. His work, which addresses themes of identity
and gender conflict in a context of immigration, is characterized by deep psychological
insight and political understanding.
For decades, Ören has been promoting the idea that it has never been so much
a question of multicultural sensitivity as of turning peasants into city dwellers by helping
them become incorporated into a modern market or corporate economy (Schneider 1).
Young Turkish-Germans and their German peers share a base, in the Marxist sense,
exhibiting similar expectations, beliefs and values. They are prompted by a common
ideology, determined by economics, which prompts them to seek out paths of their own
design, while both mainstream German society and traditional Turkish families look
askance at their audacity. Close attention to this ideology reveals life within, as well as
between, the two cultures to be much more varied, fluid and less confrontational than
political rhetoric would have us believe.
Aras Ören’s Please No Police (1981), translated into English from Turkish by
Teoman Sipahigil, is a critical representation of Berlin’s multicultural working-class life in
the Kreuzberg district. The novella describes the desperate problems typical of such
urban communities around the world: alienation, unemployment, alcoholism, abuse, and
ethnic prejudice, as they are manifested in both German and Turkish communities.
The novella’s Turkish protagonist, Ali Itir, is an illegal alien, newly arrived in
Germany in the dead of winter, and though he speaks not ten words of German, he is
looking for any sort of gainful employment. Having spent time as a Turkish soldier, Ali is
more experienced, with a broader world view than many of his fellow Gastarbeiter in
Berlin, who were recruited from remote areas of Turkey and have seen little else.
24
Individuals from these isolated rural villages already face great difficulties integrating
into large urban environments in their native Turkey, where they are popularly viewed
as unsophisticated, conservative, and deeply religious, and are often disparagingly
referred to as "black Turks" by elite members of Turkish society in Istanbul and Ankara
(Bartsch 1). The culture shock experienced by the earliest guest workers to arrive in
Europe proved nearly overwhelming for many of them, who could not rely on traditional
social and familial support systems to help them adjust to life in their adopted country.
Though the Turkish family is often glorified as a cultural asset, its limitations,
restraints and oppressive aspects are depressingly evident in Please, No Police. Ali
lives with his married cousin Ibrahim and the cousin’s wife Sultan, who resents and
belittles him at every turn for his inability to find a job and help pay his way In Berlin, Ali
is at the mercy of Sultan, and in his homeland, was at the mercy of the military. In
Turkey, he was made to stand night watch over a tile fountain every night for two years.
Once in Germany, he tells himself he is now “on guard duty over [his] own purse” (36),
which empowers him. The money is everything. Ali’s first priority is to earn wages to
send home, and therefore he spends as little as possible on his own sustenance. Ali’s
family in Turkey appreciates his contributions, though they can hardly imagine the
extent of his personal sacrifice. Sultan’s lack of compassion, in spite of her intimate
knowledge of Ali’s situation, illustrates a common, if paradoxical, phenomenon among
immigrant communities, in which more established individuals or groups within the
community resist being positioned as Other, first by challenging mainstream perceptions
of their culture, and second, by positioning the newly arrived as a subordinate Other
within their own communities. Sultan, like other long-term immigrants, is thus able to
25
distinguish herself as superior, ironically reproducing the same sort of discrimination the
immigrant community otherwise resists.
Living in the same community are middle-aged Greta and Bruno Gramke,
sharing a cramped one-bedroom apartment with their sixteen-year-old daughter Brigitte,
who sleeps on the sofa. It is 1973 in post-war Germany, and the Gramkes, transplanted
from the Soviet Sector in 1955, share a bathroom with the other families on their floor.
Both Gramkes have blue-collar jobs. A second, unnamed daughter is purported to work
at a hair salon, though it is commonly known that she is a prostitute, whose Sundaydinner “fiancé” is actually her pimp. The Gramkes are willing to turn a blind eye to their
older daughter’s activities in return for the money she is able to give them. Brigitte, who
has neither talent nor inclination for the work, has been forced into an apprenticeship
with a hairdresser.
The novella’s peripheral German characters fare no better. They are seen as
sexually permissive, petty, materialistic, and mean-spirited, and like their Turkish
neighbors, they too are victims of alcohol, abusive fathers and husbands, exploitive
superiors in the workplace, lack of privacy, and anger. It is the rage against authority
that powers this novella, and a despairing sense of impotence that fuels the rage.
Bruno Gramke has long been bitter towards his employers at a garment factory.
He is a skilled tailor, but they have had him cutting cloth on an assembly line for twenty
years, ignoring the skills and training he brought with him from the Soviet sector.
Equally disregarded by local government, Bruno at one point engages a local
councilman in a heated confrontation, berating him for coming to them again and again
26
for their input only long after all decisions have been made and programs implemented.
Drunk and resentful, he says:
On the one hand you shouted ‘freedom opens its bosom to you’ at the top
of your lungs, so that some of us, when we heard the word ‘heaven’
thought it was here. And then, when we left the Soviet-occupied area and
came to Berlin, you treated us like fugitives and put us in immigration
camps for months. Where was heaven? Where is heaven? (86)
Though Greta Gramke admires this moment in her husband, she resents his
constant drinking and feels little for him but anger. She also harbors a twenty-year-old
resentment against their neighbor, Herr Kutte. In the nineteen-forties, this now pitiful
figure of a man was the bullying foreman of a post-war neighborhood reconstruction
crew who sexually molested Greta and raped her co-worker. When the elderly Herr
Kutte slips and falls one morning while walking his dog, Greta leaves him to die in the
snow, thus satisfying a decades-old yearning for revenge. Ören writes the incident into
the plot in such a way that the reader is completely unaware of Herr Kutte’s abusive
offenses until much later. Frau Gramke is therefore first perceived as a cruel and
heartless German, playing on a widely accepted stereotype of Germans. The reader is
thereby tripped up by his or her own preconceptions and expectations, and forced to
consider the stereotypes which bias his or her own perceptions.
Although Please, No Police does not specifically focus on gender relations,
Turkish scholar Akile Gürsoy Tezcan notes in his preface to Please No Police that the
novella does bring added perspectives of ethnicity and economic power to
considerations of cross-cultural sexual interaction, and underscores how the
27
marginalizing effects of poverty interfere with socialization. Brigitte is locked out of
communication with her father due to his life-long alcoholism (Ören xxxiii). Her
boyfriend Achim is prevented from hearing anything she says by his egotism and
inherent anger. Their relationship is so horribly toxic that Achim drags Brigitte to a
tattoo parlor and has a cross tattoo matching his own inked between her breasts.
Neither Achim nor the tattoo artist asks for Brigitte’s consent, and she offers no protest.
Thoroughly disempowered, Brigitte steals a hundred-mark note from the family’s
sugar bowl the next morning and decides successively to be late for her apprenticeship,
not to go at all, to apply for work at a brothel (where she is rejected as too young), and
finally, to sell herself on the street. By chance, she solicits Ali in front of a bar and goes
home with him, promising sex for twenty marks. At the last instant she recoils and runs
screaming from the apartment, her clothes torn. She tells everyone she’s been attacked
by a Turk, but no one believes her. Ali’s own inability to speak German and his
unfamiliarity with German customs may well be an obvious obstacle to communication,
but one that can be surmounted. That Brigitte has no voice with either her father or her
boyfriend, and that virtually no one listens to her - ever - is far more indicative.
A second type of cross-cultural gender dynamic is represented by the
relationship between Greta Gramke and Hatçe, a Turkish woman who cleans offices
with her. The women work well together but are not close, and Greta is shocked to find
Hatçe has given herself an abortion in the public restroom at work because she already
has four children. Hatçe’s situation is further complicated by the fact that her husband
has moved in with a “balding German woman” (47). Any discussion of her situation
would have been too intimate for either woman, and if she were to bring up the flawed
28
German woman who now has her husband, Hatçe would in effect be tarring Greta as
well, and Greta is her boss. That Greta is self-centered and clearly not likely to assist
anyone she is in a position to help would not have encouraged Hatçe to confide in her.
Tezcan comments that “[t]he silence introduced by the author is not due to the
incomprehensibility of Turkish culture or the enigmatic, riddle-laden quality of the alien
Turk, but rather it is due to the juxtaposition of two different world views, with different
responses to human needs” (Ören xxxv). The awkward familiarity between the two
women, based on the precarious social hierarchy of the workplace, and a tacit
agreement to maintain boundaries, defies both Marxist and contemporary feminist
thinking that would lead readers to expect a sense of solidarity between Greta and
Hatçe as women, if not as workers enduring the same conditions and frustrations.
To underscore the socio-economic themes running throughout the novel, Ören
includes a Turkish student activist who tries to raise awareness among illegal workers
only to be met by a mute and inscrutable audience. He reads excerpts from a document
criticizing the Turkish government for not showing greater concern for the conditions
and treatment of its workers in Germany and tells them that “[t]hey keep reiterating how
the state ought to be responsible toward the workers. Is the state trying to clear itself of
its crime or shame of selling workers? We want jobs in our own country, we want to
work there” (Ören 30). The workers are unaware of and uninvolved in their own
reification. Once again, more than focusing on mistrust and misunderstanding between
Turks and Germans, Ören has chosen to emphasize the yawning abyss between
Turkish workers and Turkish authorities, and between the isolated undocumented
workers and the political activist.
29
The activist represents the Marxist position here, as well as the disconnect
between the intellectual and the worker. Similar to the way housewives and mothers not
employed outside the home resist feminist thinking in that they feel it demeans their role
as homemaker and dismisses their value to society, members of the working-class often
demonstrate a surprising and passionate conservatism in response to having pointed
out the misery of their existence by what they perceive as an intellectual elite. Ören’s
novella cannot be considered a Marxist piece of fiction in the narrowest sense, as the
author goes to great pains to explore the relationships between women and the
asymmetrical balance of power in the novella between the male and female characters,
regardless of their class or countries of origin. The author’s attention to gender issues in
Please, No Police results in a more contemporary, multi-level view of stratification than
strictly Marxist thinking would produce.
Clearly, the German and Turkish working-class characters in the novel are not
oppressed to the same degree, or in the same ways. However, as pointed out by Seth
Nii Asumah and Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo in Diversity, Multiculturalism, and Social
Justice, “in the most general sense, all oppressed people suffer some inhibition of their
ability to develop and exercise their capacities and express their needs, thoughts, and
feelings. In that abstract sense all oppressed people face a common condition” (37). In
Please, No Police, Ören, like those of many of his fellow Turkish-German writers, takes
a relatively cosmopolitan stance, viewing the threats to life and quality of life in workingclass Germany as the result of economic and educational factors which in reality
privilege neither community, and are shared by both. This is not, however, to be
interpreted as a call for assimilation. Many Turkish writers, in fact, consider German
30
pressures on Turkish immigrants to assimilate to be racist, and multiculturalism a threat
to their cultural heritage.
Literary and Film Analysis: Fatih Akin
For the immigrant, the very act of moving within a foreign society, the fact of
being in and moving between diverse cultural contexts demands endless adjustment,
and constitutes a balancing act far more delicate than the word “assimilation” can
describe. On the larger scale of community, and on a conceptual level, the infinitesimal
yet constant course corrections faced by the individual become large, highly visible
expressions of alterity and commonality. In Writing Outside the Nation, Azade Seyhan
writes:
As cultures collide, unite, and are reconfigured in real and virtual space in
unprecedented ways, postcolonial, migrant, and border-crossing theorists
and artists fine-tune received critical traditions in order to safeguard
historical and cultural specificities. Ultimately, every theory of postcolonial,
transnational, or diasporic literature and art is most convincingly
articulated and performed by works of literature and art themselves. (7)
Seyhan goes on to explain the role of language in defining cultural concepts, and how
theory debates of the
postmodern era have shown us that concepts of race, ethnicity, and
gender are socially and culturally constructed and are shaped by specific
historical conditions. Language is the primary tool for these constructions.
Literary texts, become, therefore, a critical forum for the understanding the
31
conditions for the production of prejudice, discrimination, sexism, and
xenophobia. (114)
Despite the abundant and impassioned discussion of multicultural issues and literature
on the theoretical level, much of this discourse is lost to the majority of both host and
immigrant communities. The language of such discourse, and even the language of
literature, is often the language of neither party, and inadequately addresses their
existential concerns. M. Vikat Mani asserts that:
The Turkish guest worker is incommensurable, not merely due to the
foreignness of his language or his silence. While he may offer the
possibility of being perceived as part of a nation-state where he is a
migrant or a foreigner, he cannot be written into the logic of a nation-state
or into any available histories or presents with alacrity. (57)
Etienne Balibar maintains in, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, that
language can provide a common ground for the negotiation of culture and identity. More
importantly, he emphasizes that
the national language unites people of different classes or people who
were never in direct communication and connects them up with an origin
which may at any moment be actualized and which has as its content the
common act of their own exchanges, of their discursive communication,
using the instruments of spoken language. (98)
If language is, then, at once divisive and unifying, perhaps Arjun Arpandurai is
correct in arguing that a cultural study of globalization multiculturalism “requires an
understanding of how imagination functions as a major social force in the contemporary
32
world”(58). If images and language can be combined in art,( for example in film), if
imagination can create a space of greater communication and compassion, then
Balibar’s assertion that a national language can bring otherwise disparate factions
together can be expanded to include the inarticulate and the less educated, the foreign
and the marginalized.
It is precisely this audience that Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin addresses
in his films. Akin sees issues of conflict between Turkish immigrants and the
mainstream German community rooted in economic inequality. As in his film Head-On
(2004), Akin’s films often feature Turkish-German protagonists struggling within a bluecollar subculture they share with their German peers. Head-On is set in Hamburg’s
working-class Altona district and that port-city’s seamy underbelly of St. Pauli.
Like Feo Aladag’s 2010 film When We Leave (Die Fremde), Head-On is
concerned with generational conflicts within the Turkish-German communities, where
daughters attempting to strike out on their own are frequently driven to desperate
measures. While the film addresses issues of both ethnic consciousness and hybridity
in a peripheral manner, Akin does not use Head-On to take a position on assimilation.
Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin sees issues of conflict between Turkish
immigrants and the mainstream German community rooted in economic inequality.
Akin’s films often feature Turkish-German protagonists struggling within a blue-collar
subculture they share with their German peers. The first German film to win a “Golden
Bear” in Berlin in eighteen years, Head-On is set in Hamburg’s working-class Altona
district and that port-city’s seamy underbelly of St. Pauli, where Turkish immigrants,
their German-born children, and working-class Germans mingle with drug-dealers and
33
junkies, prostitutes and pimps, the unskilled and the unemployed, the struggling
students and the starving artists. In this aspect, Altona greatly resembles the Berlin
described by Ören in Please, No Police.
Akin’s Head-On met with both critical and popular acclaim when it was released
in 2004 and it has since come to be viewed by critics as a milestone of multicultural
European cinema. In our efforts to identify and acknowledge expressions of
multiculturalism, it is important, however, that our considerations do not become so
narrow that works by post-colonial and immigrant communities are viewed not as
complete and complex works, but solely as a response to a colonial or host presence.
That is to say, to see such works solely in relation to how they delineate the parameters
of multiculturalism, and lose sight of the fact that they exist as freestanding creative
accomplishments, would be short-sighted and opportunistic. It is precisely the creative
appeal and quality of such works that facilitate cultural cross-pollination and encourage
permanent shifts in public thinking.
Social entities such as religious groups or political parties and local governments
may make regulations to contain or promote the bleeding of one cultural entity into
another, but individuals living within and among diverse cultural environments cede to
the pressures of those environmental influences to varying degrees. Immigrants and
their hosts likewise make individual choices as to how much or how little to familiarize
themselves with the cultures around them, and it is this element of choice that makes
generalizations about the nature of multiculturalism inherently inaccurate, and the
implementation of programs intended to force mutual trust and pacific cohabitation
unproductive.
34
In her essay “Enabling collisions: Re-thinking multiculturalism through Fatih
Akin’s Gegen die Wand/Head On,” scholar Polona Petek begrudgingly acknowledges
that an internationally produced film such as Head-On may well represent a
commitment toward actively promoting a multicultural society and affirming the multicultural nature of individuals. Petek makes the point, however, that in addition to the
sense of separateness immigrants may feel in relation to their host community, the
immigrants themselves are assimilated to different degrees. The varied degrees of
assimilation manifest disparate concerns along economic and educational lines within
the community, and Patak emphasizes that assimilation does not bestow upon
immigrants a common set of goals, abilities, or aspirations. She writes:
The film brings the experience and diasporic subjects – the former is
embodied in Cahit, the latter negotiated with rebellious gusto by Sibel –
into close proximity; indeed, it forces them into tragic collision, but it
never conflates them. Furthermore, the film shows that the processes
of cultural integration, assimilation and hybridization (Hall 1991; Bhabha
1995; Papastergiadis 2000) are complex not only because they are
asymmetrical, but because that are hardly unidirectional (180).
Far from being limited to traditional East-West binary, Head-On deals with the
thin line between freedom and reckless abandon and examines what Petek calls “a
communion of cultures within and without what is now and again - somewhat ominously,
given the provenance of the phrase – Fortress Europe”8 (179).
8
The phrase Fortress Europe was formerly used to describe the Nazi occupation during the Third Reich and has
entered the vocabulary of Euroskeptics. It is generally invoked by critics of European Union measures intended to
restrict immigration form non-EU countries (Griffin 194).
35
In addition to providing a full-frontal exposure of life at the lower end of the
economic and moral measure that at times makes audiences wince, Head-On is equally
concerned with generational conflicts concerning filial obligations and the role of women
within Turkish-German communities. Head-On opens, in fact, with a song of unrequited
love from a woman’s perspective performed by a traditional folk orchestra. The five
musical performances by the orchestra that divide the film into sections not only
foreshadow and complement plot developments, but underscore the film’s cultural
plurality and layered linguistic codes. The opening piece is performed in traditional
dress, with the Bosporus coursing behind the musicians, which implies that it is a
Turkish song by Turkish performers. That it is not Turkish at all, but rather a traditional
gypsy love song performed by a Romani orchestra9 is an indicator of selective cultural
choices made in the film (Barucca, De Pascalis 5).
The performance is romanticized and formal, the musicians and female singer
barely move, the performance plays out under open skies in direct sunlight; there are no
secrets. For all its highly stylized presentation, Akin’s opening act hints that all is not
what it seems and that where there is order, chaos lurks. The contrast between the
idyllic qualities of the first musical performance and the disorder and debris of the film’s
initial concert hall sequence is harsh and disorienting. Head-On’s double prologue
creates a number of such binaries, none of which are religious or political.
The contexts of idealized femininity and brutish masculinity are introduced early
on in the film and remain a constant presence. In the second prologue, Cahit (Birol
Ünel), the film’s highly unlikely male lead, is cleaning up after hours at Altona’s Die
9
Selim Seslar, was born in Keşan in Edirne, Turkey in 1957. He is from a family of musicians originally
from Drama (Greece), who emigrated to Turkey in 1923.
36
Fabrik10, draining dregs of beer from discarded bottles. Apart from the fact that Cahit
speaks to the concert hall manager in Turkish, there is nothing overtly foreign about him
except perhaps for his mustache. Cahit has a light complexion, and his clothes are
German, and his Turkish is apparently quite poor. What is clear is that Cahit is in every
conceivable way unappealing.
At forty-plus years of age, Cahit seems to have absorbed the concert venue’s
darkness and sense of abandonment. This Turkish-born immigrant from a village called
Mersin has wed and lost a German wife to disease, and has since dedicated himself,
literally, to sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. And alcohol. He is so clearly emotionally
isolated and brooding that the audience is surprised to see that in the subsequent scene
in the car, Cahit becomes emotive, violent, and brutish, spurred on by the rhythms of
post-punk rock.
While driving home drunk, Cahit sings to Depeche Mode’s “I Feel You” at the top
of his lungs and intentionally plows his car head-on into a wall. It is not insignificant that
this first reference to feelings in the film is made in English, as Cahit has no language to
express his emotions in German or Turkish. Presumably Cahit spoke little German
when he met his deceased wife, and she likely spoke no Turkish. Therefore, English
became the language of Cahit’s heart, and English pop provided its vocabulary. It is not
surprising that he should revert to English in his anguish and rage (Baruca, De Pascalis
10).
Cahit survives the car crash, but the attempt at suicide lands him in a state clinic
for a psychological evaluation. It is in the clinic that he encounters a young woman,
10
Die Fabrik is an actual concert venue in Hamburg, Germany housed in former factory building located
at the heart of the city’s Altona district, home to many immigrant communities. The bar/concert hall is
extremely popular with students and alternative music aficionados.
37
Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), a fellow patient whose rigid, unmoving pose and bandaged wrists
communicate a desperation and capitulation not reflected in her face. Though her
brother has broken her nose because she met with a man, Sibel’s demeanor is
animated and full of hope. Far from being determined to end her life, the young Turkish
woman sees in Cahit her ticket to freedom and begins to badger him into a marriage of
convenience that would permit her to leave her father’s house. Where Cahit’s failed
attempt to obliterate himself has left him with a sense of failure, Sibel’s survival seems
to have infused her with an almost manic desire to break down the walls of her cage, to
rail against all authority.
As the daughter of a fairly traditional Moslem Turkish family, Sibel has been
subjected to any number of social restrictions imposed by her father and brother. Akin
might draw criticism from some quarters for his portrayal of Sibel’s father Yunus (Demir
Gökgöl) and brother Yilmaz (Cem Akin) as oppressive and patriarchal. But Akin does
not merely reiterate a stock Western stereotype, nor does he rely on a MoslemChristian or Turkish-German binary to drive the film. These are men of another world,
likely a rural world, and of another generation, whose traditions define both their
maleness and their membership in the community of men.
In creating a film that addresses a young woman’s obsessive quest for freedom,
Akin has chosen the friction of two extremes to drive the plot of Head-On. To represent
the authoritarian and oppressive presence against which Sibel rebels, the director uses
a universally recognizable patriarchal family environment. This choice reflects both
contemporary concerns regarding women’s rights and issues within Akin’s own
community as they relate to greater German society.
38
If exaggeration serves to enhance drama, Akin’s choice of patriarchal TurkishGerman familial confines for Sibel can be perceived as more creative than political.
Sibel is incredibly naïve, and having had little contact with freedom, she has no way to
define it, no idea of its parameters. A more worldly and autonomous European or
American female protagonist could not have believably carried off Sibel’s Icarus-like
ascent to moral burn-out.
When the Sibel character enters the film, she is in the clinic’s visiting area
surrounded by her entire family. There are reprimands and there is anger, but there is
also love, and Sibel is clearly part of an intact family. The confrontational aspects of the
discourse are contained in group shots, underscoring a sense that Sibil does, in some
way, belong to this group. She is not a young woman running toward a German reality,
but rather toward a less restrictive Turkish one.
Sibel’s idea is that the two should marry and live together as platonic roommates
and she eventually convinces Cahit to go along with this plan. After the marriage, Sibel
and Cahit move into his squalid apartment and, though the two do form a bond of
affection, Cahit continues his sexual relationship with Maren (Katrin Strieback). Maren is
a gritty German woman who seems genuinely to care for Cahit and asks little of him.
In spite of their age difference and the circumstances of their marriage, there are
joyous moments between Sibel and Cahit. The two are seen at home jumping up and
down in an eighties’ pogo dance to blaring music as Cahit screams “Punk is not dead.”
The sequence shows once again that Cahit reaches back to an earlier time and the
context of English to connect with emotions. The moment represents, as well, the
chaotic freedom of their marriage, a chaos that Sibel embraces, confusing it with
39
liberation. Cahit begins to fall in love with Sibel, while she, beginning with their very
wedding night, embarks on a campaign of rebellious exploration, from tattoos, navelpiercing, and suggestive dancing, to sexual exploration with other men, experimentation
with drugs, and alcohol abuse. Intent on the subversion of traditionalist attitudes on
chastity and abstinence, flaunting even the most liberal moral norms, Sibel’s actions are
essentially dangerous and self-destructive.
Sibel’s self-indulgent promiscuity leads to a jealous rivalry between Nico
(Stephan Grebelhof), one of her former lovers, and Cahit, whom she has come to love.
When Cahit accidentally kills the other man and is sent to prison, Sibel flees her family’s
retribution to Istanbul and stays with her older cousin, Selma. The promising employee
of a luxury hotel, Selma is divorced and independent. She routinely works out, has a
strong work ethic, and has her sights set on a position in upper-management. Selma
tries to help Sibel get on her feet by facilitating a position for her on the housekeeping
staff. Unfortunately, financial independence and the incumbent dedication to routine,
procedures, and social norms do not translate into freedom for Sibel, but represent
instead yet another system of authoritarian constraints.
Sibel is not willing, or is as yet unable, to give up her oppositional lifestyle and
hits a new low of degradation in Istanbul. At one point in the film, she drinks until she
passes out on the floor of a bar and is then raped from behind as she lays unconscious
on the floor by the bartender, a former friend. Her self-indulgent and obsessive search
for freedom has led Sibel to anarchy and chaos. Set adrift in Turkey, she is
simultaneously cut off from her birth family, from the “family” she established with Cahit,
and becomes estranged even from her own femininity. She cannot be a Turkish woman
40
in the traditional sense, and to present herself as a Western woman alone in Turkey is
far too dangerous. She cuts her hair boyishly short, dons a bomber jacket, assumes an
essentially asexual aspect, and gives free rein to primal aggression. When Sibel finally
challenges three drunken men to a fight in the streets of Istanbul and is then brutally
beaten and stabbed, we sense that if Sibel has not died, her dance with death, at least,
is at an end.
There is a large gap in the film’s chronology as this point, and the narrative turns
to Cahit, now released from prison. His feelings for Sibel were sustained by her frequent
letters, and the relationship, however tormented, appears to be the film’s one constant.
Looking to reconnect with Sibel, Cahit looks up Selma, who rebuffs him. It is noteworthy
that when Cahit pitifully defends his feelings for Sibel, he again resorts to English and it
is not all clear that Selma speaks even a word of English. It is evident that Cahit is
struggling to clarify his feelings for Sibel in his own mind by articulating them through his
only language of emotion.
When Sibel and Cahit finally meet and make love, they realize their passion is
still very much alive. Sibel, however, has moved on, and now lives with a man she cares
for and with whom she had a child. In the end, Sibel stays with her lover and daughter in
Istanbul, having found that within the confines of motherhood and partnership there are
elements of self-determination, as well as safety from self-destruction. Cahit boards a
bus for Mersin, perhaps in search of the same safety, perhaps in search of a lost
language.
Head-On can be viewed as a multicultural film because it deals with a level of
German society inhabited by numerous cultures and ethnicities that often intersect, or
41
perhaps because the director is Turkish-German and the film is international in its
venues. It would be a mistake, however, to cite the film itself as a statement of
multiculturalism. More accurate would be to point to the fact that a Turkish-German film
director has made an internationally-acclaimed film not based on an oppositional binary
of dominant and subordinate cultures. With Head-On, Akin goes far beyond such stale
fare and provides a look at an alternative reality in which host and immigrant cultures
play merely supporting roles in a human drama. Regardless of the death-knell sounded
for multiculturalism by Chancellor Merkel, Fatih Akin himself is proof that
multiculturalism, as a process, survives.
LA Weeky journalist Scott Foundas expresses a similar viewpoint in his article
“Border Stories: Fatih Akin's Edge of Heaven,” in which he comments on another of
Akin’s films and interviews the director on the success of Edge of Heaven, which was
Germany’s only official foreign-language entry submitted to the Oscars for 2008.
Foundas points out that although the film takes place in Istanbul, Hamburg, and
Bremen, and although the dialogue transpires in three languages, the film’s universal
theme of the relationships between parents and children distances Edge of Heaven
from the socio-political issues that provide a backdrop for the plot.
Focusing on the eternal human need to connect, the film’s cast comprises a wide
spectrum of characters. A traditional Turkish father is at odds with aging and with his
German-born son, an academic. The father’s Turkish-born consort, a prostitute, has
constructed a fantasy life in letters to her daughter, Aytan (Nurgül Yesilçay), at
university in Istanbul. Aytan, fleeing events of May 1 st political violence in Istanbul, tries
to find her mother in Bremen and, and failing that, moves in with a young German
42
student, Charlotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), and her mother. The two girls form an intense
and intimate friendship that has fatal consequences for Charlotte.
The shifts from character to character, from venue to venue could be irritating to
an audience and hamper the film’s effectiveness, but Foundas aptly comments in his
article that “what might have easily been a Eurotrash version of Crash becomes, in the
hands of writer-director Fatih Akin, a more resonant portrait of the peculiar geometry of
the modern world. Borders disappear, identities blur, the seeds of extremism are sown,
and lives are caught in the crosscurrents” (1).
From Charlotte and Aytan to Charlotte’s cautious German mother, Susanne
(Hanna Schygulla), the female characters in Edge of Heaven are principled, tough, and
independent. They are modern and engaged women that defy stereotyping and fit well
in Akin’s global social context. The film has impact on political as well as social levels,
but Akin eschews a specific political agenda.
Foundas writes that though this film is nominally “about a number of highly
sensitive issues – immigration, Moslem fundamentalism, political terrorism […] when
you’re watching it, the characters and the human drama always come out first, and the
politics seem to grow organically out of it”(1). Akin himself has stated that he does not
want to be perceived as a missionary figure out to promote a political agenda. He says
of himself, “I try to be a journalist, to have a neutral position, and whatever political
thoughts come out of the film are created by the audience” (Foundas 2).
In addressing immigration, Akin exposes the frustrations of dealing with German
bureaucracy on the superficial level, but drives home the message of how official rulings
impact then personal lives of individuals by his sensitive handling of Aytan’s deportation
43
and ensuing incarceration in Turkey. Charlotte follows Aytan to Istanbul and proves her
indefatigable, if naïve, champion, to the point that she retrieves a gun Aytan had
stashed away before initially fleeing the country. Street urchins steal the gun from
Charlotte and eventually use it to shoot her to death when she pursues them.
Charlotte’s mother, Susanne, comes to Istanbul upon hearing of her daughter’s death
and tries to understand Charlotte in the aftermath of her death. Susanne helps Aytan
get out of prison as a way of making peace with her own guilt and the senseless loss of
her estranged daughter.
In addition to its theme of parents and children trying to find and maintain a
connection with one another, Edge of Heaven touches on the issue of hybridization.
When the German academic Nejat’s father, Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), is sent to prison in
Germany for the accidental death of his mistress, Nejat makes his way to Turkey to
escape the scandal. Nejat (Baki Davrak), born in Bremen, feels out of place in Istanbul
and is drawn to a German bookstore operated by a German ex-pat. The ex-pat,
suffering the void of homesickness, is looking to sell the bookshop. Nejat, the Germanborn Turk who feels most at home with German literature but flees to a homeland he
has never known, buys a shop from a German-born Turkish resident who, it seems,
never left his homeland behind. The irony is not lost on the audience, and the
microcosmic representation of Akin’s world is significant. By creating films that attempt
so clearly to negotiate the repercussions of his own cultural identity, Akin does not
address only those with a similar background, but carries the message of his unique
perspective to a greater, global audience.
44
In addition to providing such personalized cultural insights, film study is a useful
sociological tool which serves to reconfirm or reformulate emerging trends apparent in
literature. Indeed, as a weathervane of popular opinion and an indicator of political and
social trends, the film medium has certain advantages over literature. Visual images
require less focus and do not rely as heavily on language proficiency and interpretive
abilities, and are thus accessible to a broader public. Cinematic rhetoric and filmic form
are able to either influence or assess national and global sentiments, simultaneously
reaching a huge cross-section of the world’s population, whereas literary works may
take years to filter through academic institutions before reaching the general public.
The immigration-linked cultural issues addressed by recent Turkish-German films
have helped to redefine current perceptions of identity and subjectivity and provide a
space of negotiation for diverse systems of imagery, identity, and culture. Specifically, a
number of German films of the last two decades reflect the significant shift toward
cosmopolitanism expressed in Turkish-German literature during the same time period
and have, moreover, brought the complex issues of German –Turkish cohabitation to
international attention at a time when many countries are struggling with immigration,
religious extremism, and nationalism.
Literary and Film Analysis: Feo Aladag
The beginning of the 1990’s saw the emergence of a new generation of young
Turkish directors in Germany who from the outset have broken with the 'cinema of the
45
affected'11 associated with the New German Cinema movement (Burns 133). This
emergent vein of cosmopolitanism in film is evident in the works of Turkish-German director Fatih Akin and female Turkish-Austrian director Feo Aladag, whose film Die
Fremde, was nominated for the Academy’s 2010 Best Foreign Film award under its
English title When We Leave.
These current film-makers explore the various paths open to those of mixed
ethnicity or mixed cultural identity, those living within but not wholly part of German
society: crime, assimilation or return, or the struggle for self-determination. Their
protagonists invariably come up against boundaries set by their social and cultural
surroundings, posing the question of where the culturally ambiguous can go in
Germany. Virtually anywhere, respond the films of Fatih Akin. Aladag’s view is that
anything may indeed be possible, but that for women, the price is often painfully high.
Violence against women is relatively underrepresented as a major theme in
popular cinema; when it is present, gender violence is often reduced to a cinematic
device which takes the form of a peripheral female corpse in detective drama, stalking
and rape, or the horror film fridge trope12, all instances where actual or impending
violence to a woman is used merely to heighten tension and to shock. In When We
Leave, Feo Aladag brings women in from the fringes, taking on the issue of honor
killings in the Turkish community in a nuanced and sensitive way, exploring the
11
A term Rob Burns drawing an analogy with a trend in German literature during the 1980s known as
'Literatur der Betroffenen' (literature of the affected), which is the title of a programmatic essay by Franco
Biondi and Rafik Schami in the Zu Hause in der Fremde: Ein bundesdeutsches Ausländer-Lesebuch.
12
A term used to refer to the random and meaningless death of a female character constructed to create
a more intricate storyline for male characters. Its origin is attributed to comic book writer Gail Simone, who
first identified the trope in 1999 in an issue of The Green Hornet. In graphic novels, horror films, and other
popular media, women, or their heads, are often stuffed in a refrigerator or the trunk of a car as a plot
point which serves to spur the male hero to seek revenge, or otherwise encourages his heroic journey.
The term “dead men defrosting” later emerged to refer to male victims, but it is noted that male characters
tend to go down fighting.
46
emotional and cultural complexities of her characters far beyond the superficial levels of
rhetoric.
A primary source of intercultural conflict in Germany springs from what Germans
perceive to be an inability or unwillingness on the part of Turkish immigrants to
assimilate. The treatment of Turkish women within their own communities in general,
and forced marriages and honor killings in particular, are at the heart of this conflict. A
report by the Deutsche Welle International Service asserts that though it is widely held
that honor killings in Europe are on the rise, reliable statistics are largely unavailable,
because honor-related crimes often enter the records as murders unspecified by
motivation, or as incidents of domestic violence. It is also likely that the number of
incidents has grown in proportion with the overall increase of community and that cases
of incidents once hidden from public scrutiny are now being reported with greater
frequency (DW-Welt).
The Deutsche Welle report states that in the year 2000, “the United Nations
estimated that around 5,000 girls and women in at least 14 countries, among them
Pakistan, Jordan and Turkey, were killed yearly because their families felt they brought
dishonor on them.” This estimate serves to put the situation into proportion, showing
that although even the death of one girl at the hands of her family is unforgivable, not all
Moslem fathers and brothers can be held accountable for the extreme behavior of what
is clearly a minority within their communities (DW-Welt).
In a famous case that clearly influenced the chilling When We Leave, twentythree year old Hatin Aynur Sürücü, the daughter of Turkish Kurds, was shot on her way
to a bus stop in Berlin-Tempelhof. Official reports state that the victim was killed by
47
several point-blank shots to the head and upper body (Reimann 1). Three of her five
brothers were charged with her murder, and one is now serving a ten-year sentence.13
Such incidents continue to make international headlines and are frequently cited to
affirm “the dangers of ‘parallel worlds’ and ‘misguided tolerance’” (Göktürk 511).
With When We Leave, Ms. Aladag counters feelings of mistrust and fear within
the German population by creating a strong sense of empathy between the audience
and even the harshest of the characters, thus facilitating a dialogue less influenced by
negative stereotypes and baseless assumptions. When receiving the 2010 LUX Prize
awarded by the members of the European Parliament, the fledgling director stated: “I
made Die Fremde [the film's German title] because I believe we live in a multicultural
society which can no longer rest on promoting consensus but must rather find new ways
in dealing with arising divergence” (MS. Blog).
Aladag’s film was inspired by research she conducted when recruited by
Amnesty International to make two German-language public service spots condemning
violence against women. The thirty-second spots, though successful, left the Austrianborn actor/director/writer with much more to say. In a press release distributed by the
film’s producers, Majestic Productions, the director explains what she hoped to convey
with Die Fremde:
Im Kern erzähle ich ein filmisches Drama, in dessen Zentrum als
Hoffnungsschimmer die verpasste Möglichkeit zur gegenseitigen
Annäherung steht. Es ist eine Geschichte, bei der niemand moralisch
verurteilt wird, sondern bei der ich die Zwänge und Konflikte sowie die
13
It is generally the youngest male relative who is chosen by the family council to carry out such murders - or to
claim responsibility for them (Reimann).
48
damit verbundene Tragik aller Figuren emotional nachvollziehbar machen
wollte. Die Intention ist, Empathie zu schaffen. Jenseits von medialen
Vorurteilen und rassistischen Verurteilungen. (Production Press Book: Die
Fremde)14,15
Though the characters in When we Leave are complex, the plot is fairly simple.
The protagonist Umay is sent from Berlin, where she was raised in a predominantly
Turkish district, to enter into a marriage arranged by her parents to a man in Istanbul.
Umay, like Hatin Aynur Sürücü, has a son and flees with him back to her family when
her husband verbally abuses her, beats her and ultimately threatens the child. Like
Hatin, Umay, too, seeks refuge in a German state-supported women’s shelter, and
becomes a catering apprentice.
Umay eventually finds the respect and love denied her by the other males in her
life in a relationship with Florian, a young German colleague. Some critics have
chastised Aladag for this romantic angle, accusing the director of falling back on reliable
stereotypes where the Western male saves the day, but such arguments are shortsighted and ignore certain socio-economic realities. As a single mother of very limited
means, Umay has virtually no social life. Her contacts are confined to the women at the
shelter, as well as her catering colleagues. A young Turkish male working in a bluecollar position would almost certainly identify strongly with Umay’s family in rejecting
her, and would not enter into anything but a sexual encounter with a Turkish woman
14
Page number unknown
In essence, I am recounting a drama in film, at the center of which stands a missed opportunity for
rapprochement, as a glimmer of hope. It is a story where no one is morally judged, but rather where I wanted to
make the constraints on each character, their conflicts, and common tragedy, comprehensible. The intention is to
create empathy. Beyond the prejudices of the media and racist condemnations. (Translation by Colleen
Stricker)15
15
49
who has ruined her family and already has a child by another man. Umay is able to
have a relationship of affection and mutual respect with Florian because he is not
entangled in the same rigid cultural conventions. Florian does not rescue Umay. He
assumes the role of her partner and lover in the film, not of her protector. He is
ultimately powerless to save Umay from her family and the traditional mind-set of her
father.
Far from a tale of dominant/subordinate cultures, Die Fremde is a study of
violence against women, and about women helping women. Most of the women in the
shelter with Umay are, in fact, German, and Umay finds among them the safety and
understanding her family withholds. Umay’s mother, Halyme, is unable to accept her
daughter’s lifestyle and suffers from the family’s social exile. As a wife, she sympathizes
with her husband’s loss of face in the community and is heartbroken to see his shame.
As a mother, Halyme is in a state of great turmoil, because Umay’s behavior threatens
the younger daughter Rana’s chances to marry well. Rana, pregnant by her potential
bridegroom, is frantic the wedding will not take place and can conjure up no
understanding for what she sees as her sister’s selfish behavior. Rana’s situation is
precarious, even perilous, and she sees the shelter within the confines of her culture as
her only recourse.
The elder of Umay’s two brothers, Mehmet, has appointed himself as her moral
guardian and it is he who most fervently wants to see her punished. The youngest
brother, Acar, is barely sixteen and is distant from the traditional mind-set of his brother
and father. Ultimately, however, he folds under their pressure and agrees to kill his
sister. He is powerless to refuse this rite of passage of sorts, which forces him to
50
choose one set of social norms over another. It is a sign of his youth and cultural
confusion that he cannot carry out his mission. Witnessing the younger brother’s failed
attempt, Mehmet tries to stab Umay. Tragically, instead he stabs Umay’s son, his own
6-yr-old nephew Cem, to death. It is a film with no satisfying ending for anyone, and
serves as a cautionary tale of what can happen when change occurs too quickly in a
social environment anchored to tradition.
Die Fremde is in no way intended to represent the Turkish-German community at
large or to implicate Islam in the death of Umay. Indeed, religion is notably absent from
the film, apart from a scene where the young son, Cem, attends prayers at the mosque
with his grandfather, and another where Umay’s female Turkish employer Gül attempts
to move Umay’s father, Kader, to reconciliation. When Kader calls upon Allah, Gül
pointedly admonishes him that Allah has no part in the situation he has created.
It is significant that Kader, despite his years abroad, does not seek the advice of
his local religious leaders in dealing with his errant daughter, but travels instead back to
the village of his birth, where a wizened old man, possibly a family elder, uneducated
and infirm, counsels him to deal with Umay’s dishonorable transgressions in the most
definitive and final way. Aladag emphasizes with this detail that Kader is not appealing
to his religion, but rather to the age-old traditions of his rural peasant origins. Kader’s
choice of homeland, and the voices of childhood, over any authoritative voice potentially
tainted by the new, confirms that Umay’s father, typical of many first-generation
immigrants, reaches into a distant past to negotiate a present which seems out of their
control and beyond their understanding.
51
Germany’s often uncomfortable cohabitation with its Turkish population makes
for an interesting study not only because of the size of its Turkish population, but also
because other countries do not report the same sort of problems with Turkish
immigrants living within their borders. The discrepancy may well lie in the fact that while
devoutly religious and uneducated immigrants from Anatolia and their children have
informed the image of Turks in Germany, countries not likewise dependent on a foreign
unskilled labor force have attracted well-trained Turkish specialists. In the United States
and Great Britain, for example, Turks are considered to be well integrated. "They adapt
to the British lifestyle, are generally very fluent in English, are involved in local politics
and practice a moderate form of Islam," says Sara Silvestri, a social scientist at the
University of Cambridge (Bartsch 1).
Aladag’s sympathetic portrayal of Kader, exposing the depth of his very real
despair, underscores the fact that cultural change is dependent upon education, healthy
self-esteem, and the crucial element of time. The coexistence of diverse cultures can no
longer be measured in terms of dominance and degree, but neither should its success
be measured by degree of assimilation or willingness to assimilate. At present, the
greater Turkish-German narrative has little to do with German mainstream response, or
becoming German. It has a great deal to do, however, with non-confrontational
coexistence, less multicultural than cosmopolitan. The sincere desire for a harmonious
and mutually beneficial relationship between the two communities does not, however,
mean that destructive elements in either of the communities need not or may not be
addressed. The rise of Neo-Nazism and nationalism on one side is no less disturbing
than religious extremism and continued violence against women on the other.
52
Films such as Aladag’s also remind us how easily political correctness becomes
a carnival mirror in which acts of violence against women, from rape and forced
marriage to female circumcision and honor killings, are represented more as culture
than crime. It can be hoped that such candid and provocative contributions as When
We Leave will clear the way for honest dialogue and effective social change.
Literary and Film Analysis: Dilek Gungor
Where Aladag addresses an international audience with an eye toward radical
intervention, other film makers and writers explore the Turkish-German experience in
Germany from a highly personal perspective, emphasizing the areas of commonality
between the two communities. Dilek Güngör, a journalist with the Berliner Zeitung and
the author of three books, approaches the arena of cultural conflict with anecdotes and
familiar references to the everyday in Berlin. Her work addresses the experiences of
second and third generation Turkish immigrants raised in Germany, and how they
navigate a cultural plain determined as much by their German environment as by their
parents’ memories of a “home” their children will never experience in the same way.
In her first novel, Das Geheimnis meiner Türkischen Großmutter (My Turkish
Grandmother’s Secret), the Turkish-German writer addresses how younger generations,
born and raised in Germany, must negotiate the elements of traditional Turkish village
life that informed their parents’ worldviews and values, when they themselves cannot
easily accept or completely understand them.
The protagonist of Das Geheimnis meiner Türkischen Großmutter is Zeynep, a
German-educated young journalist in her thirties who, after a split with her boyfriend,
53
Stephan, moves back home with her parents. She quits her job at a newspaper where
she and Stephan worked together because he has found someone else, and Zeynep
cannot face the daily encounters with her former lover at work. She is at loose ends and
emotionally vulnerable. After some months, the family is called to her dying
grandmother’s bedside in the Anatolian village of her parents’ birth. The progression of
the novel traces the emergence of a warm relationship between Zeynep and Fatma, her
grandmother, which grows steadily as Zeynep becomes aware of a dark family secret
that challenges her fundamental perceptions of her family and her culture.
Although somewhat underappreciated by academics and critics, Dilek Güngör
represents a unique presence on the multicultural literary scene in Germany. She was
born in Schwäbisch Gmünd to a Turkish Gastarbeiter and his wife, and attended a
Catholic high school. From1998 to 2003, Güngör worked for the Berliner Zeitung as a
journalist writing a weekly column, reminiscent of Erma Bombeck’s16 folksy accounts of
home life, in which she affectionately detailed her family’s lives and her experiences
growing up the daughter of Turkish immigrants. Güngör went on to earn a Master's
degree in Race and Ethnic Studies from the University of Warwick, which informed the
sharp interest in race relations and inter-cultural relations that is handled so subtly in her
writing.
Now living in Berlin, writing a weekly column that appears in both the Stuttgarter
Zeitung and the Berliner Zeitung, Dilek Güngör's articles and novels serve mainstream
Germans with a non-threatening point of encounter with the lives of Germany's current
Turkish-German population. A collection of her columns published under the title Ganz
16
The American humorist Erma Louise Bombeck was an American humorist who achieved great popularity for her
newspaper column that described suburban home life from the mid-1960s until the late 1990s.
54
Schön Deutsch (Pretty Darned German) shares anecdotes from her life, such as
explaining to her Aunt Hatice why a British friend has sent her a photo of himself kissing
the Blarney Stone, and how her father refuses to let anyone explain to him how his
newly acquired camera operates. Both anecdotes have universal appeal; the fussy aunt
and a father’s clumsy attempts to master new technology find parallels in the lives of all
readers.
Güngör portrays life as it is, for her, a German woman of Turkish ethnic origins,
who finds delight and richness in her plural identities. Güngör’s work is not driven by
the same sense of alienation felt by many Turkish-Germans, but she does not see
herself as “assimilated,” indeed she rejects the issue as irrelevant. In an Online
Interview with Vera von Kreutzbeck, My Identity is Constantly Present: with Author Dilek
Güngör, Güngör insists that she is essentially German, pointing to the need to redefine
German national identity rather than to look at cultural and ethnic difference as a
classifying index. She clarifies her position by stating, "Nowadays to be German can
also mean that you were born in Germany and that your parents are from Turkey. This
is Germany's reality. I think that the concept of being 'German' should be broadened.
Germans should slowly understand that Germany is a country of immigration" (3).
Güngör’s characters subvert assumptions and stereotypes many Germans have
regarding Turkish immigrants and their Turkish-German children, but because her work
does not address honor killings of women and forced marriage, drug dealers and sex
traders, some readers and critics question her credibility and her authority.
Despite her efforts to disabuse her readers of common Turkish stereotypes,
Güngör is continually faced with the assumptions mainstream Germans and other
55
Europeans make about the Turkish people. In a 2006 interview with the on-line
expatriate website Expatica, the author recounts a telling incident:
Once, at a reading, someone said she was really disappointed in
me because [the event] had been announced as a Turkish writer
talking about her family life and yet there was no forced marriage
and there was no honour killing and it was not reality. I said 'what
did you expect?' People have their fixed ideas about Turkish
culture and if you do not present that, then they think you're lying.
(1).
Unintentionally, Güngör has found herself thrust into the role of a representative
of the Turkish community in Germany, expected to explain aspects of Islam that are
hotly debated among religious scholars themselves. "I got phone calls from people who
wanted to know if Turkey should join the European Union or not. All of a sudden you
have to speak on so many different aspects and I don't want to do that. I'm not the
spokesperson for Turkish society or the Turkish community (1).17"
Clearly, Güngör’s charming and anecdotal accounts of everyday life within her own
middle-class family were never intended to be a means to counter mainstream German
fears of radical Islamization and the widely perceived deterioration of German traditions,
yet her unique access to mainstream German readership have made her an immigrant
voice that not only reaches that audience, but one that it trusts.
The impact of Dilek Güngör’s writing should not be underestimated. By
introducing the population at large to a non-threatening, Turkish community that forms
numerous points of commonality with its German neighbors, Güngör’s work can much
17
Expatica.com interview, February 2006.
56
more effectively defuse racist thinking at its points of origin, in the German middle and
lower classes, where many Germans feel their traditions and national identity being
eroded. As a writer, Güngör does not disavow differences between the German and
Turkish cultural and traditions, but her work does not incorporate the intense tension or
violence used with such disturbing effectiveness by other Turkish-German artists, such
as author Zafer Şenocak or director Fatih Akin. Güngör has chosen to implement her
own experiential references, rather than privilege a reality that represents GermanTurkish life as one community’s struggle against a deeply-rooted hegemony. Though
the interrelationship between art, activism, and politics cannot be denied, Güngör does
not, in her work, directly or indirectly address emotionally charged topics which would tie
her views to community or national political agendas. Any confrontations portrayed in
her writing are domestic in nature, or address concerns within the Turkish culture. This
approach may be considered, by some, to be a form of acquiescence to mainstream
pressures to assimilate, but it should not be overlooked that power is best leveraged on
the thin edge of a welcome wedge. Neither should the fact that Güngör inhabits a space
of choice go unexplored. In Violence, Slavoj Žižek writes that:
The basic opposition on which the entire liberal
vision relies is that between those who are ruled by a culture,
totally determined by the lifeworld18 into which they were born, and
those who merely ‘enjoy’ their culture, who are elevated above it,
free to choose it. This brings us to the next paradox: the ultimate
source of barbarism is culture itself, one’s direct identification with a
particular culture, which renders one intolerant towards other
18
From Edmund Husserl’s Lebenswelt, referring to the individual’s world of lived experiences.
57
cultures. The basic opposition here is that between the collective
and the individual: culture is by definition collective
and particular, parochial, exclusive of other cultures, while –
next paradox – it is the individual who is universal, the site of
universality, insofar as she extricates herself from and elevates
herself above her particular culture.” (141)
By choosing to enjoy her Turkish identity, while simultaneously choosing to exist
in a German lifeworld, Güngör has tapped into her universal self; it is that universal self
which appeals to her readers, and it is from this perspective of inquisitive universality
that Güngör writes.
In Das Geheimnis meiner Türkischen Großmutter, the protagonist, Zeynep, tries
to reconcile her German lifeworld with the realities of Turkish village life and her family
history. Zeynep’s experiences in her parents’ Turkish place of birth cause her to
question many assumptions she had about her family and their limited worldliness in a
small provincial Turkish village, assumptions and misconceptions that were shared by
many of her German colleagues and friends. Zeynep comes to realize, through her
contact with the other female characters in the book, that these women, even her
grandmother, desire the sort of autonomy that Zeynep wields in Germany. The sad
realization that she never gave these women credit for such desires moves her deeply.
Returning to a place known only in childhood is often disappointing. Zeynep is
saddened to see her grandmother’s old loam farmhouse, with its heavy wooden doors,
has been replaced by a flat, modern structure designed without love or attention to
aesthetics. Her beloved grandfather has since passed on, and Uncle Mehmet blusters
58
and bullies in his place. Émigrés returning home are often subject to culture shock,
disoriented by what has changed and all that has not.
In addition to Mehmet, Zeynep’s grandmother’s household consists of Mehmet’s
daughter Özlem, her husband Fevzi, and their two children. Seeing the subordinated
role of women in Turkish life, Zeynep criticizes Özlem for not contradicting her father
and stands up to Mehmet herself on several occasions. But Zeynep also acknowledges
that the women in her family had little in the way of alternatives. Because the character
of Zeynep is not politicized, her narrative is highly personal and provides readers with
an insight into Güngör herself. Zeynep negotiates German and Turkish value systems
easily and naturally, as does the author.
Zeynep’s personal crisis arises not from a break in her sense of self, but from the
revelation that her now-cherished grandmother and deceased grandfather were
involved in a bloody feud over property and debts unpaid. When, thirty years earlier,
Zeynep’s grandfather’s brother was shot to death, the murder should have been
avenged by her grandfather. Too cowardly to do the deed himself, her grandfather
coerced Mehmet to retaliate by killing a member of the opposing family, apparently with
the active support of his mother, Zeynep’s grandmother, Fatma. Mehmet was
imprisoned , and his victim’s family retaliated with the murder of Mehmet’s married
brother, Yosef, whose death was never avenged. While Mehmet was incarcerated for
saving the family’s honor, Ali was free to seek his fortunes in Germany. Yosef’s widow
was inexplicably disowned by Zeynep’s family, and the feud-related killings stopped
there.
59
What Zeynep comes to understand is that her parents had fled to Germany to
escape the violence, and that, as youngest son, it was Zeynep’s own father, Ali, who
should have held the gun, not Mehmet. The reader now comprehends Mehmet’s
harshness, his bitter sternness. Güngör has not created a Moslem male caricature, but
rather a man who has been robbed of his life by a weak and selfish father, and the
brother he feels abandoned him and left him to his fate. Ali’s return to Berlin leaves his
brother once again alone, this time to face the imminent death of their mother. In
response to this latest abandonment, Mehmet berates Ali:
Oh, tell me about it, you’re running out, back to your cozy nest,
your nice life in Europe. Stuffing yourselves on pizza and piling up
the Euros. Well, too bad I never got a piece of it. The fine gentleman
couldn’t come up with a job or a place to live for his brother. (172)19
That Ali cowers before his Mehmet and says nothing in his defense makes
Zeynep realize the depth of her father’s sense of guilt, and his fundamental weakness.
She is profoundly disillusioned by her father’s inability to defend himself. She thinks to
herself, “Why doesn’t he remind his brother how for years he’s supported his relatives in
Turkey, and regularly sent them money? But my father couldn’t manage to open his
mouth” (173).
Zeynep is horrified by her family’s treatment of Uncle Yosef’s widow, and now
feels betrayed that her parents chose to hide the feud and details of her grandparents’
complicity in the killing. She is torn between her new-found feelings for her
grandmother, her fond memories of her grandfather, and the abhorrent reality that her
grandfather had put a gun in Mehmet’s hand, destroying his own son’s life. Learning the
19
Translated by Colleen Stricker, February, 2012
60
details of the feud is a turning point for Zeynep. She has been treated as a child up to
this point, and has let herself be protected. Seeing her father emasculated by Mehmet,
losing the idyllic image of her grandfather, and accepting that her grandmother was at
once the wise woman she adores and the mother who made her son an assassin,
Zeynep becomes an adult, autonomous and self-aware.
If Güngör were intent on emphasizing a German/Turkish polemic, she would
have based Zeynep’s reactions on a conflict between German sensitivities and barbaric
Anatolian traditions. Instead, she examines Zeynep’s disappointment and
disillusionment at an emotional level, and focuses on how the truth changes her
perception of her parents, her grandparents, and her relationship with Stephan. She
realizes that guilt drives her father to allow Mehmet to bully him, and that the family she
believed respectable is viewed by many with contempt. Zeynep says, “So, my family
belonged to those who hold blood revenge for something to be proud of, while there
were plenty of people who condemned it” (168). Including contradictory perspectives of
the incident in the narrative allows Güngör to effectively sidestep a clear-cut cultural
opposition by making Zeynep aware that the family is scorned for their actions by other
members of their own community.
It would be irresponsible to speculate how much of Zeynep’s story is drawn from
Güngör’s own life, but Zeynep’s process of maturation is indeed reflected in Güngör’s
writing. The writer’s first column, “Unter Uns,” which appeared first in the Berliner
Zeitung, and later also in the Stuttgarter Zeitung, was written in standard, non-academic
German and a delightfully uncomplicated style. Her column facilitated mainstream
German access to the representation of a Turkish family as modern, charming, loving,
61
and “pretty darned German.” Güngör’s entertaining anecdotes quietly challenged
prevailing stereotypes of Turkish immigrants and countered the media focus on drugrelated crimes and honor killings perpetrated by Turks in Germany.
Güngör’s current column “Weltstadt,” which now appears weekly on Mondays in
the Berliner Zeitung, reflects a more mature, more sophisticated writer. Though Güngör
continues to draw on her personal life for material, the themes are now more complex,
her language less coy. In the process of her own professional and personal maturation,
Dilek Güngör has introduced to mainstream German culture first, a charming young
Turkish-German woman and her somehow comfortably familiar Turkish-German family,
and now the more scholarly, thoughtful Turkish-German columnist, novelist, and
playwright, whose reflections on life and language know no borders. Polona Patek
states that major critics of multiculturalism, Žižek included, argue that “multiculturalism
comes about only when the West’s non-Western Other has been made palatable
enough to the Western gaze, that is, once its radical alterity has been trimmed and
transformed into something to be consumed”(179). These critics would certainly view
Dilek Güngör as such a “trimmed” author, one whose work and person are entirely
inoffensive to mainstream sensibilities. I would argue, however, that because the
intercultural exchange which happens more readily in working-class communities
restricted by economic necessity, is slow in moving up in the social hierarchy, only
someone such as Güngör can easily overcome hurdles set by conservatives and social
elitists. Güngör, like CDU representative Aygül Özkan is not only herself proof of the
potential for a successful Turkish-German multicultural experience, she is also the
harbinger of the set of superficial shared values, the everyday rules of decency that
62
Žižek alludes to in Violence (138), that pave the way for open dialogue between
communities.
63
Conclusion
If Dilek Güngör is, indeed, positioned at a hybrid juncture that appears more a
cultural conduit than point of conflict, what does this comfort zone indicate, if anything,
about the position of Turkish-German literature within the German literary canon? In the
introduction to her innovative work on diasporic and transnational literature, Writing
Outside the Nation, Azade Seyhan, writes, "The German reading public and critics still
categorize the work of non-German writers and artists as ethnic and minority literature
and art and do not regard it as an integral part of the national culture" (13). Certainly in
the 1980’s and 1990’s, when Seyhan was researching her book, a Turkish German
writer would have had a hard time finding a regular German press for his or her work.
This is no longer the case, as evidenced by the stature and number of prominent
publishers now representing the work of Turkish-German authors, and the number of
courses devoted, at the university level, to the study of Turkish-German writing.
In her article "Taking on German and Turkish History," Kader Konuk20 addresses
the "classification, function, and contribution" to the German literary scene of literature
by authors of Turkish heritage since its emergence in the 1970’s. She describes the
evolution of the genre, and the marketing of books in the genre, as shifting from
“Gastarbeiterliteratur to Ausländerliteratur, and Migrantenliteratur”(233),21 and asserts
that there are “strong indications of a changing relationship between Turkish immigrants
and German history. Even if the way in which this relationship is articulated is highly
varied, we can say that the doors are now opened and that the notion of a shared past
is evolving” (234). Konuk is referring to “a shift in the way Turks - both in Turkey and
20
Kader Konuk is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and German at the University of Michigan, with
a PhD from Universität Paderborn.
21
Guest workers’ literature, to foreigners’ literature and migrant literature
64
abroad - try to come to terms with the Ottoman and Turkish past that has hitherto been
sealed in silence and denial as a historical legacy”, as it relates to the
“transnationalization of Holocaust remembrance” (251). Linking the remembrance of
traumatic pasts in Turkey and Germany, combined with a growing shared, and
increasingly hybrid present, provides two legs of a supporting cultural infrastructure that
bodes well for the two communities. It is arguable that the third “leg” of mutual
acceptance, so to speak, is represented, for example, by the popularity of Dilek
Güngör's newspaper columns and novels with the greater German public. This
acceptance is an indication that the category of Turkish-German fictional text has again
shifted in the last decade, or that it may soon reach a level of cultural inclusion already
seen in the area of cinema. Fatih Akin's Head-On, for instance, is most often described
as "a German film by Turkish-German director Fatih Akin.”
In an e-mail addressing the issue, Konuk writes that, “That the margin has
become the center of German culture and public debate has become clear in the past
years. It is impossible to make predictions as to the future of the German canon - but
major shifts must be acknowledged” (Konuk E-Mail). She points to the Nobel prize
awarded in literature to Orhan Pamuk in 2006 as evidence of the fact that the
mainstream literary world has acknowledged and incorporated Turkish-German
literature into German literature.
While it is true that texts by minority writers have been absorbed into the canon
of texts marketed by bookstores and taught in numerous German and Comparative
Literature departments around the world, this fact hides a growing rift between what the
educated elite reads, and the real experiences of members of minorities at the lower
65
end of the educational system. Friedemann Weidauer points out in his essay "When
Bobos Meet Bhabha: Do Minority Literatures Challenge the Concept of National
Literatures?" that the minority becomes divided into those who appreciate the “hybrid”
language of minority writings and those who struggle to master the standard language
of the country they live in (21). The essay investigates the preference of the “new ruling
class” for “hybridity” in literary texts and music, and offers—via the concept of
“transnational diasporas”—an explanation why by far the greatest number of people
belonging to minority groups remain completely untouched by these cultural trends. It is
evident that other means are needed to include a larger, more diversified public in
contemporary social discourse.
From print and video advertising to cartoons and comic books, to television and
film, it is undeniable we live in an age where visual information and entertainment are
ubiquitous. Visual culture increasingly commands our attention and disseminates
knowledge in our culture, and because they entertain, the creative appeal of feature
films renders them particularly powerful, non-threatening forums for multicultural
consideration, and a means of constructing new realities in the minds of viewers using
the non-textual appeals of music and visual symbolism.
The American literary critic W.J.T. Mitchell, renowned for his work on images,
iconicity, and the visual, insists on “the inextricable weaving together of representation
and discourse with images – what he calls the “imbrications or overlapping of visual and
verbal experience” (83). Mitchell goes so far as to insist that there are no “purely visual
and verbal media, pictures without words and words without pictures”(95). Mitchell’s
approach to the visual underscores the role of literary theory, and the role of art, in
66
developing the connection between visual culture, ways of seeing, and multicultural
studies. Mitchell’s thoughts help to explain the effectiveness of film as a means for
social change. While literary texts often spend years of scholarly scrutiny and academic
debate before trickling through to mainstream culture, films generally enjoy a shorter
period between the moment of creation and exposure to mainstream culture.
Whatever the future of Turkish-German literature, of any post-migrant literature, it
has taken a large and highly-visible position in the German literary canon, and its study
is providing new perspectives on assimilation, hybridity, cross-cultural communication,
and identity within immigrant communities. The success of diasporic and post-migrant
films in recent decades indicates that as recognition and validation for multicultural
literary works continue to flow from one academic community to another, from one
social class to another, new voices in cinema, addressing ready, film-going audiences,
is rising up to meet academic discourse half-way. The consistent growth of interest in
Turkish-German literature and the huge popularity of Turkish-German films of recent
decades are strong indicators that multiculturalism, as an inevitable human social
process, survives, and at times even thrives, among the people, in their art.
67
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