Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany
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Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany
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Overview
Mandel explains that within Germany the popular understanding of what it means to be German is often conflated with citizenship, so that a German citizen of Turkish background can never be a “real German.” This conflation of blood and citizenship was dramatically illustrated when, during the 1990s, nearly two million “ethnic Germans” from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union arrived in Germany with a legal and social status far superior to that of “Turks” who had lived in the country for decades. Mandel analyzes how representations of Turkish difference are appropriated or rejected by Turks living in Germany; how subsequent generations of Turkish immigrants are exploring new configurations of identity and citizenship through literature, film, hip-hop, and fashion; and how migrants returning to Turkey find themselves fundamentally changed by their experiences in Germany. She maintains that until difference is accepted as unproblematic, there will continue to be serious tension regarding resident foreigners, despite recurrent attempts to realize a more inclusive and “demotic” cosmopolitan vision of Germany.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822389026 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/04/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 440 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Ruth Mandel teaches in the Department of Anthropology at University College, London. She is a coeditor of Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism.
Read an Excerpt
COSMOPOLITAN ANXIETIES
Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in GermanyBy RUTH MANDEL
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2008 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4176-5
Chapter One
Shifting Cosmopolitics
The city of Berlin plays the role of a protagonist in this chapter. Its centrality is unavoidable when exploring the interplay of local and global identities at the margins of changing nation-states. It is precisely when the nation-state becomes a questionable unit of analysis that the interplay of local and global can be understood. As Ulrich Beck has written, "Globality means that the unity of national state and national society comes unstuck; new relations of power and competition, conflict and intersection, take shape between, on the one hand, national states and actors, and on the other hand, transnational actors, identities, social spaces, situations and processes" (2000: 21). An important aspect of globality for Beck is the role of technology in the service of transnational connections and networks. Televisual technology in particular dissimulates presence, communion, and immediacy, giving a deceptive sense of participating in a singular global-local event. In the case of East Berlin, this was the technology that both joined and disjoined the two parts of the city, producing an anxiety of an unresolvable distance. This was always contradictory, perceived as an impossible proximity-in other words, two sites that might topologically lay two hundred meters apart were, quite literally, of two separate worlds, east and west, both bridged and severed by radio and televisual signals. (It is not, then, by mere chance that the dismantling of the long traumatic era of a divided Germany was captured as a global televisual local event.)
The workers from Turkey who arrived in Berlin in the early 1960s entered into a radically changed and changing historical and political landscape. This was a place where the symbols and technologies of antinomian ideologies became instantiated around the Berlin Wall. Moreover, the workers from Turkey were entering into the different rhythms of two Western modernities. On the one hand their arrival into Berlin was marked by the fixed territorial boundaries delimiting the Federal Republic of Germany from the German Democratic Republic. On the other they were to be participants, even catalysts of the unmaking of the German national landscape, as they unwittingly were swept up in the repercussions of the dissolution of the boundaries of the nation-state.
The first impact of unification, this grandiose experiment in reconstruction, was a traumatic one, exposing a disjointed cityscape that was at once becoming delocalized and deterritorialized while at the same time giving rise to novel reterritorializations. These forms of reterritorialization were intimately tied to the transformation of German subjectivity and the tectonic shifts affecting national identity. Decades of dealing with processes of localization and delocalization of identity governed by the dictates of the Cold War have raised significant questions about German identity and its global aspirations. These aspirations of the Federal Republic during the Cold War, articulated in terms of a specific political lexicon of modernity, focused on the reality of the nation-state, and on the protection of its borders. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the accelerated diffusion of globalization over the following decade have radically altered the frame of the question. As Beck has observed, with the emergence of a global political culture the relationship between territory and nationhood has come "unstuck." This suggests new possibilities of thinking around cultural, national, and global identities. Elsewhere Malkki has shown "that state and territory are not sufficient to make a nation and that citizenship does not amount to a true nativeness" (1996: 446), thus challenging conventional assumptions about the relationship between national consciousness and place of nativity.
The identities of a place, as García Canclini has argued (with reference to another city defined by a border-Tijuana), are forged by the "relationship to other places: the rest of Mexico, North America, the wider world-it is a 'delocalized locality'" (1995: 239). Similarly the mutual reflections of Berlins East and West continually shifted according to a perspectival positioning which, in Berlin, was frequently marked by distorted geopolitical projections. Just as individuals, groups, and nations define their own identities by relating themselves to others, often through processes of mimetic reflection, given localities assume similar identifications by being placed in changing maps of meaning. As de Certeau reminds us, cities are "constellations that hierarchize and semantically order the surface ... operating chronological arrangements and historical justifications" (1988: 104). The city can be radically transformed through diverse practices of making and marking spaces. De Certeau goes on to argue that names (speaking here of the proper names of and within cities) are characterized by their ability to transcend their signification (ibid.). Nowhere has this been truer than for Berlin. In relation to Berlin, Borneman has shown to what extent this process is evident; "in an effort to create new forms of authority, the state improvised, continuously redrawing borders and boundaries, renaming persons and things, endowing them with an aura of provisionality (1998: 164).
For most connoisseurs of Berlin the city was metonymically associated with the Wall. Even before the dramatic fall of the Wall in November 1989, Berlin occupied a bizarre historical and symbolic location, representing the firing line frontier of the Cold War. Doubtless more than any other concrete slab in the world, throughout its quarter-century life the Berlin Wall became overinvested in meaning. Inscribed in it was a politics signaling practices of exclusion and the severing of places and localized identities. Yet for many Berliners, the Wall was not merely an abstract symbol of vision and division but the visible inscription of a wound to be alternately ignored and confronted daily. Thus an ethnography of Berlin will have to work though its material scar, its traumatic division, and ultimately its multireferential associations.
THE LOCAL LANDSCAPE OF A CITY THAT WAS
An island unmoored to its mainland, West Berlin flaunted its wealth and might to the surrounding East, equally through airwaves and architecture. The vistas of the cityscape, when seen from far off, united the twin cities by making indistinguishable the outlines of buildings, church steeples, and towers from both Berlins. Especially pronounced stood two unmistakable symbols of the fractured cities, competing for prominence. In the east loomed the Radio Tower, said to be the tallest structure this side of Moscow. In the west, the familiar Mercedes insignia spun twenty-four hours a day high above Europa-Center, symbolically shielding the ruptured half-city from the ideologies emanating out of Marx and Engels Platz, East Berlin's central square, only a couple kilometers away. Just as the American military's colossal satellite dish in Dahlem ensured excellent reception of its propaganda broadcast over the Wall, the Mercedes logo served as West Berlin's revolving response to the GDR's dominating obelisk in the eastward skyline. They each were, for the Manichean world orders of the Cold War, their respective centers, tourist attractions with competing cachets.
The Wall imposed new spaces, often in absurdly arbitrary ways. Streetcar tracks, blocks of houses, and alleys were interrupted by the concrete slabs that broke the city in half. As it delimited space, it assumed the status of an urban horizon line, or circle, the impenetrable edge both uniting and separating the two sides of a coin. It was an implicit reference point for the inhabitants of both sides, albeit with different semantic referents. And it played optical tricks. From any open point in the city offering a vista, the juxtaposition of all the cities' tall distinguishing structures appeared to be the skyline of an uninterrupted urban landscape. But then, walking east or west, inevitably the Wall interfered with one's vision, mediating and distorting the depth of field. Only when approaching the Wall did the realization hit: that unremarkable building over there actually was a different country, and an enforced myopia imposed itself.
On the Wall, a dividing line between East and West, a partition between neighborhoods and nations, were a wide variety of graffiti-encoded messages. Ranging from the political to the personal, this transcript remained hidden to the East Germans, to whom it was addressed, capturing anxieties and aspirations of the West Berliners trapped within their island outpost. Some of these West Berliners were relative newcomers from Turkey and other labor-sending countries. Upon their arrival they found a city divided not only according to Cold War geopolitical categories, but, more meaningfully, divided by haves and have-nots, the latter often synonymous with Turkish.
When I first lived in West Berlin's Kreuzberg district, the so-called Turkish Ghetto, in the mid-1980s, one phrase written on the Wall near my flat, lettered in deliberate green, read: die Welt ist kein Ausland-es gibt keine Ausländer; the world is not a foreign land-there are no foreigners. The green lettering marked a political affiliation: West Germany's leftist ecology party, concerned with issues ranging from acid rain to the closing of nuclear power plants to civil rights for the resident foreign community. This graffiti, on the Wall bordering Kreuzberg, faced the district of West Berlin with the city's largest foreign immigrant population.
Perhaps it was not unfitting that the Wall essentially surrounded the eastern-most bit of Kreuzberg, as the Wall's very existence determined their presence in Germany and their absence from Turkey. The Wall's construction blocked access to the East German labor pool upon which West German industry had become dependent. The cutting off of East German labor created a need for West German industry to search elsewhere in order to fuel the growing postwar boom economy. It was intended that the imported workers would assuage West Germany's labor shortage and fill the lacuna partially created by the freezing of East-West Cold War relations.
The Wall effectively helped to forge two very separate political, social, economic, and national entities over a nearly thirty-year period. Its subsequent demise meant that entire Weltanschauungen essentially needed to be dismantled overnight. These suddenly obsolete worldviews, deliberately crafted by the two respective states, whose quiet warring "with one another from their inception, each half of Germany, West and East-like the opposing sides in the forty-five year Cold War-worked hard to mold its resident population into a distinct and cohesive nation," writes Borneman (1991). In the West, for the duration of the Cold War, as a result of the national refocusing of a common culture, language, and history, these considerable attempts at molding the citizenry excluded a large portion of the population from this exercise at nation building: namely, the several-million-strong non-German resident Turks and other Ausländer. Though having been proscribed from the historical processes shaping postwar and post-Wall politics, eastern and western, the Ausländer nevertheless found themselves very much avected by the opening of the Wall. Considered more fully below, after the initial euphoria had waned, Turks in Germany began uttering the phrase duvar bizim üstümüze düstü-the Wall fell on us-reflecting new tensions, anxieties, and violence for which they were ready targets. The signs they discovered around them were much more ideologically overcoded than those perceived by the Berliner population at large. To Turkish Germans unification signaled increased competition in the labor market from unemployed eastern Germans, threats by growing neo-Nazi groups, the generalized fallout from the unification taxes of increased Ausländerfeindlichkeit, xenophobia, and so on. Thus, the conflation of neo-fascism and an aggressive transition to a capitalist market economy in the eastern states represented the political overcoding which characterized the changing foreigner policy, Ausländerpolitik, over these two periods.
The Berlin Wall, then, was a harbinger for the Ausländerproblematik that was to follow, the "foreigner problem" that implicitly frames this book. Over the past decades, the "foreigner problem" in Germany has been mass-mediated, analyzed, rationalized, its focus always outward, other-oriented. Indeed, the "foreigner problem" tends to euphemize certain vexing aspects of German attitudes toward others in the midst. For example, the very word Ausländer quite often has been used as a politically more correct gloss for the obvious but unstated Turkish referent. The ostensibly neutral denominator Ausländer enunciates an entire ideological discourse of programs, policies, and their implementation. As described in later chapters, community workers might choose to do Ausländerarbeit, a literary critic might write on Ausländerliteratur, the government makes clear its Ausländerpolitik, and so on. My argument is that behind the seemingly innocent use of the idiom of Ausländer lies both a clear ideological agenda and an explicit expression of social discontent, where questions of belonging and exclusion, of diaspora and diverence, come to the fore.
REVISING BERLIN
Berlin defines a place where tenses converge, as past, present, and future collide. In this overdelimited place, Berliners converge, collude, act out collisions, in lived space and in memory. Here I chart a particular axis of these convergences of time, space, and peoples. Drawing from Bakhtin, one might think of Berlin as a synthetic moment of chronotopicity. Bakhtin confined his use of chronotope to its metaphoric potency in his masterful study of representation and narrative in the novel. Chronotopicity he in turn borrowed from Einstein and wrote, "[We] will give the name "chronotopie" (literally 'time-space') to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships" (1981: 84).
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ixPreface and Acknowledgments xi
Note on Language xxiii
Introduction: Germany, Turkey, and the Space In-Between 1
Berlin: A Prelude 23
1. Shifting Cosmopolitics 27
2. "We Called for Labor, but People Came Instead" 51
3. Making Auslander 80
4. Haunted Jewish Spaces and Turkish Phantasms of the Present 109
5. Berlin's Kreuzberg: Topographies of Infraction 141
6. Beyond the Bridge: Two Banks of the River 155
7. Minor Literatures and Professional Ethnics 184
8. Practicing German Citizenship 206
9. Deracination to Diaspora: Leave and Leaving 232
10. Reimaginig Islams in Berlin 248
11. Veiling Modernities 294
Conclusion: Reluctant Cosmopolitans 311
Glossary 327
Notes 329
Works Cited 359
Index 403