Kasaba R. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 4, Turkey in the Modern World

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the case with religious orientation, a sure sign of an unwillingness to integrate –

rather than of social problems located in the institutions of education or the

job markets.

If we take the case of Berlin, the city with the highest concentration of Turks

in Germany, a total of about 370,000 students are educated in the public school

system, and foreigners comprise 15.1 per cent of this total. The proportion of

students whose mother tongue is not German is slightly higher, at 19.8 per

cent. The majority of foreign youths attend and graduate from Hauptschule

and Realschule (33 per cent and 16 per cent, respectively, in the school year

2000–1). In the German school system, although both school types provide

high school education, the Hauptschule primarily channels its graduates to

vocational training and apprenticeship. The graduates of the Realschule have

equal chances of ending up in apprenticeship or in higher education after they

graduate.

In the decade between 1983 and 1993, while the graduation levels for for-

eigners from the Hauptschule showed a decline, the graduation levels from the

Realschule registered a rise, indicating a deﬁnite trend away from vocational

education. In the same decade, the rates of matriculation in higher education

institutions rose sharply, from 4 per cent in 1983–4 to 13 per cent in 1993–4. These

trends continued in the 1990s, with the rate of attendance in higher education

remaining steady, at about 12 per cent. Turkish students comprise the largest

group among the foreigners attending Berlin’s higher education institutions,

about 14 per cent. Among the foreign youths, attendance in the Gymnasium,

or the university-track high schools, in Berlin is considerably lower, but shows

a steady increase, from about 7 per cent in the school year 1995–6 to nearly

10 per cent in 2000–1. At the high school level, the percentage of dropouts

among migrant youths shows a slow but steady decline, from 35 per cent

in the 1983–4 school year to 25.2 per cent in 1993–4, and to 23.8 per cent in

1999–2000.

Although there have been improvements over the last two decades, the

educational achievement of migrant youths, in Berlin as well as in Germany

48 Statistics regarding the condition of migrant youths are not readily available and compre-

hensive. Unless otherwise stated, the statistics given in this section are compiled from the

publications of the Berlin senate’s Foreigners’ Bureau, and particularly from its reports

on integration and foreigners’ affairs (Bericht zur Integrations- und Ausl

anderpolitik, 1994,

1996/1997), various press releases (Pressemitteilung, 1997, 2000, 2002), and other docu-

mentation made available to the author.

49 For a detailed description of the German high school system and a detailed analysis of

its effects on the educational and vocational prospects of Turkish youths, see Thomas

Faist, Social Citizenship for Whom? Young Turks in Germany and Mexican Americans in the

United States (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995).

214

The migration story of Turks in Germany

and in other European countries, is not necessarily a success story. Between

1996 and 2003, while the overall dropout rate for Germans remained at a stable

2 per cent, the rate for Turkish migrants, though declining from 27 to 21 per

cent during the same period, was still alarmingly high. The only good news

was that the dropout rate for the second-generation migrants dropped from

19 to 3 per cent, closer to the average for Germans.

To place the blame for failure on the cultural propensities of immigrants

themselves, as most integration arguments do, is unwarranted. Among Turk-

ish youths, and foreign youths in general, the girls do better in school. In the

school year 1999–2000, among the foreigners in Berlin, the percentages of girls

who completed their education in Hauptschule and Realschule were 49 and 52,

respectively. The percentage of girls attending higher education was nearly 56.

Between 1996 and 2003, the percentage of young Turkish women who opted

for an academic career path showed a signiﬁcant rise, from 2 to 7 per cent, and

the percentage of those attending Gymnasium increased from 3 to 11.

These

numbers clearly refute the cultural arguments about the reluctance of Muslim

parents to send their female children to school.

More importantly, with the Pisa Study, an OECD learning evaluation that

compared thirty-two countries, it became apparent that the German education

system was substantively failing on international scale. In reading competence,

German pupils ranked twenty-ﬁrst, and in mathematics and natural sciences,

their place was twentieth. Among Germany’s states, Berlin did particularly

poorly, despite its high spending per pupil. The study also underlined the close

correlation between education and social status in Germany and revealed that

Germany’s foreign pupils were less successful than their counterparts in other

European countries with high immigrant populations.

Unemployment rates among migrant youths are disproportionately high.

Among foreigners, unemployment is much higher for Turkish youths than

for other groups. In the mid-1990s, the unemployment rate among male for-

eigners under the age of twenty was 4 per cent, whereas among female youths

in the same age group, the rate was 7 per cent. During the same time, the

rate of unemployment among youths between the ages of twenty and twenty-

ﬁve was much higher, with 15 per cent of the males and 15.3 per cent of the

females unemployed.

In Berlin, the unemployment rates among foreigners

50 Datenreport 2004,p.578.

51 Ibid.

52 For more detailed information on the Pisa Study, see the website of the Max-Planck-

Institut at www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de.

53 S¸enetal.,Almanya’da ayrımcılık.

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levent soysal

rose considerably between 1998 and 2000, from 15.6 to 34 per cent. In the

same period, unemployment rates for German citizens rose from 10.8 to

17.6 per cent. The unemployment rates for foreigners remained relatively

high throughout the ﬁrst half of the 2000s.

Migrant youths not only suffer from substantially high rates of unemploy-

ment; it is also signiﬁcantly difﬁcult for them to ﬁnd openings for vocational

training. The labour market in Germany requires two to three years of appren-

ticeship before a vocational career, and apprenticeships have become progres-

sively rare over the years. In Berlin, between 1974 and 1990, the percentages

of foreign pupils successful in completing vocational training increased slowly

but surely, from 3.4 to 13.3 per cent. In the last decade, however, the percentages

dropped signiﬁcantly (5.4 per cent of an available 62,904 training positions in

1999). Overall, from 1994 to 2002, the percentage of available training places

for foreign youths dropped from 8 to 5.3 per cent. Despite the shortage of posi-

tions, among the foreigners, Turkish youth had the biggest share of vocational

training, with 38.9 per cent.

Over the years there has been a clear shift in the professional aspirations

of migrant youths. The high rates of interest in entrepreneurship and the

emerging demands for civil service jobs can be read as indicative of a positive

outlook and expectations of ‘better prospects’ in the economic sphere, despite –

or perhaps because of – increasing unemployment. When asked about their

professional preferences in a 1997 survey, the responses of Turkish youth indi-

cated a strong inclination for self-employment and entrepreneurship (60.9 per

cent), rather low interest in being a worker (10.7 per cent) or shop assistant

(15.9 per cent), and a new propensity to enter the civil service (12.6 per cent).

Comparatively, in 1991, the responses had rated in the order of self-employed

(51.4 per cent), shop assistant (28.4 per cent), and worker (20.1 per cent) – the

choice to become a civil servant being absent either from the questionnaire

or their envisioned set of possibilities at the time.

oner kebap

Since the arrival of Turkish migrants and the opening of the ﬁrst Turkish

restaurants, d

oner kebap, spit-roasted meat served in bread (a variant of the

foodstuff known as shwarma in the Arab world, gyro in Greece and pastor in

Mexico) has become a ubiquitous fast food in Europe. In 1996, various media

outlets in Germany celebrated the twenty-ﬁfth anniversary of its arrival.

54 Datenreport 2004,p.74.

55 Kızılocak, D

unden bug

une Almanya.

216

The migration story of Turks in Germany

Now it has the status of undisputable Turkishness in the European context,

although its ascent to fast-food status in Turkey is relatively new.

In Germany, perhaps more than anywhere else in Europe, d

oner has become

a major fast-fooditem. Accordingto Aufgespiesst(Skewered),

a book dedicated

to d

oner’s popularity with Germans, Berlin has more than 1,300 kiosks (imbiss)

and small restaurants selling 25 tons of d

oner every day. A rough calculation

indicates that the daily consumption of d

oner in Germany is about 200 tons,

which adds up to a consumption of 72,000 tons, or 720 million sandwiches,

per year. In short, by 1996 it was an industry of gross DM 3.6 billion with

ever-increasing sales and had a larger market share than major corporate food

giants in Germany – among them McDonald’s Deutschland, M

ovenpick and

Burger King.

oner kiosks were the ﬁrst consumer outlets to reach the so-called bar-

ren topography of East Germany, their owners assuming the role of fron-

tier entrepreneurs. Since the 1990s, the d

oner industry has been re-making its

image in its competition with other fast-food chains. Product differentiation

oner with feta cheese, chicken d

oner, d

oner with grilled vegetables), product

standardisation (d

oner meals), uniforms (sales personnel in caps and wear-

ing t-shirts with store colours), and new store names (McMahmud, McKebap,

Keb’up, Mister Kebap) are all part of this new orientation towards standardised

fast-food outlets and chains.

The reason I narrate this silent success story of d

oner kebap as a European fast

food is to draw attention to the futility of unremittingly deployed arguments

for the resilience of cultural difference. The reinvention of d

oner kebap as a

European fast food, with its new extras (red and white cabbage and three

different sauces – anathema in Turkey) testiﬁes to the swift reconﬁguration of

the so-called ‘traditional’ habits and established meanings of taste, German or

otherwise.

oner is not the only consumer product making its way into the German

culture, so to speak. Slowly but surely, many Turkish foodstuffs are becoming

standard items. The recent trend among Turkish entrepreneurs in Berlin is

to open specialty stores selling Turkish-style roasted nuts, herbs and spices,

and coffee and tea and pastry shops specialising in varieties of baklava and

56 Eberhard Seidel-Pielen, Aufgespiesst: wie der d

oner

uber die Deutschen kam (Hamburg:

Rotbuch Verlag, 1996).

57 Ibid., p. 13.

58 See Ays¸e S.C¸a

glar, ‘McD

oner: d

oner kebap and the social positioning struggle of German

Turks’, in Janeen Arnold Costa and Gary J. Bamossy (eds.), Marketing in a Multicultural

World: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cultural Identity (London: Sage Publications, 1995);

Seidel-Pielen, Aufgespiesst.

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levent soysal

other sweets. The reverse (the ‘German effect’, for lack of a better expression)

is also instantly recognisable. One ﬁnds in the shelves of Turkish grocery

chains halal (pork-free) varieties of every possible variant of German salami

and sausage. Most bakeries in Berlin are now owned by Turks, who bake and

serve traditional German Br

otchen (small breakfast breads) and pastries, along

with espresso. It is safe to say that after forty years of migration, some traditions

are no longer entrenched as deﬁnitely Turkish or German – at least in the ﬁeld

of provisions and food habits.

Culture, Islam and women

Religion is the most contentious issue as regards the ‘integration’ of immi-

grants. In policy and academic debates, religious orientation categorically

serves as the measure against which integration should be judged. To com-

pound the problem, there has, since the 11 September attacks, been heightened

sensitivitytowards ‘Islamic’ inclinations of Turks and Arabs in Europe. Revived

debates on the ‘veil’, newly invented ones on ‘parallel societies’ (i.e. segregated

ethnic enclaves) and the proclivity of Muslim youths to ‘terrorism’ bring to

the fore an underlying anxiety about the ability of Muslims to integrate into

‘European’ societies and values and, more generally, about the supposed civil-

isational incommensurability of Islam and the West.

The state authorities in Germany – and Europe – have an uneasy relation-

ship with Islam. The inﬂammatory emphasis on religious orientation as an

indicator of ‘dis-integration’ seriously contradicts the discursive emphasis on

diversity and cultural rights on the part of European courts and state agencies.

While the ‘security’ concerns lead to measures that constrain the realm of

activities for immigrants, by designating them de facto Muslims and therefore

dangerous, discourses of diversity promote religion as a cultural right and

facilitate provisions for realising this right.

The state of Berlin, like many other states in Germany, pursues a concerted

policy of multiculturalism, relentlesslyexpressing support for cultural diversity

and funding projects to that end. Multiculturalism at work in Berlin since the

early 1990s hardly amounts to an unambiguous conceptual framework and

coherent policy agenda. At times, the acts of multiculturalism stop short of

being a feel-good discursive practice on the part of state ofﬁcials and immigrant

activists. Nonetheless, as a discursive instrument and policy tool, the idea

of multiculturalism exists across the political spectrum, even within certain

factions of conservative parties. As it is practised in Berlin, multiculturalism is

rather consequential.

218

The migration story of Turks in Germany

A case in point is the teaching of religion in schools. In a recent court

case, for instance, the Islamic Federation in Berlin won the right to provide

religious education in Berlin’s schools, establishing parity between Islam and

formally accepted Protestant and Catholic churches. The major Alevi associa-

tion in Berlin, claiming religious and cultural difference from the Sunni Islamic

Federation, appealed to Berlin state and was granted the right to teach its own

religion classes. Now there are after-school courses on Alevi teachings and rit-

uals offered in a number of schools in Berlin, taught by educators on the state

payroll. In addition, the Foreigners’ Ofﬁce, recently renamed the Directorate

for Integration and Migration, published a book on Alevi culture as part of its

effort to publicise the cultural diversity of the city, adding another entry to the

series of forty-plus booklets produced under the generic title of Miteinander

Leben (Living Together).

Another ﬁeld of government action in which multiculturalism brings about

substantial results is youth work. Berlin, for instance, is the centre of youth

organisations. These organisations display a spectrum of orientations and

attract representative cross-sections of Berlin’s migrant youth. In Kreuzberg,

NaunynRitze, a youth centre operating under the auspices of Kreuzberg’s

municipal government, operates as the headquarters for hip-hop. In the early

1990s, NaunynRitze was home to a successful and long-lasting hip-hop posse,

To Stay Here is My Right. Under the approving supervision of NaunynRitze’s

social-work team, the posse ﬂourished into a successful ‘hip-hop community’

and attracted prospective stars and hip-hop hopefuls to NaunynRitze. Grafﬁti-

writing sessions, breakdance practices, rap courses and hip-hop parties came

to dominate the cultural agenda of the ‘ghetto’ youth attending NaunynRitze.

Throughout the 1990s, the hip-hop scene in Kreuzberg produced prominent

names such as MC Gio, writers Neco and Sony, DJ Derezon, dancer Storm

and rapper Boe B. Their pictures and words were prominently featured in the

stylish pages of cosmopolitan Berlin bi-weeklies. Their stories and art were

interpreted, and ampliﬁed, as the necessary condition of social harmony and

the multicultural unity of Berlin. Like Neco, who has become an important

director with three feature ﬁlms to his credit, many of these young artists have

found themselves niches in the art scene of Berlin.

In addressing the youths as cultural producers of hip-hop, NaunynRitze was

not alone. In the 1990s, almost every other state and private agency reverted to

hip-hop in order to reach out to the youth. It was chosen as the natural art form

for migrant (ghetto) youths – though it was difﬁcult to call Berlin’s immigrant

neighbourhoods ‘ghettos’ proper. There was, for instance, the state-subsidised

Hiphop Caf

einSch

oneberg for rappers and writers, a Berlin-wide annual rap

219

levent soysal

competition for young women, initiated by non-proﬁt organisations, and a

two-day dance and music show, called

Istanbul, organised by Tempodrom,

one of the major music venues in Berlin. Gangway, a Berlin-wide organisation

funded by various state agencies to deliver social work to ‘street kids’, arranged

trips to hip-hop festivals in various European countries.

Though the most prominent, hip-hop is only part of the range of creative

cultural projects migrant youths of Berlin produce and consume. They stage

concerts, poetry readings, parties, dance shows and plays. They dance through

the streets of Berlin the entire day in the Carnival of Cultures, print poems on

love and justice in short-lived literary periodicals,write articles on bilingualism,

and take part in rallies to protest against the drastic budget cuts proposed by

the state.

This cultural participation does not preclude an intensive – and increasingly

contentious – debate over Turks and Islam, and the prospects of a multicultural

society. The cover of a recent issue of the journal Focus (10 April 2006), which

styles itself as ‘the modern news magazine’, was headlined ‘Die Multikulti-

uge’ (The Multikulti Lie) against a stencilled ﬁgure of a woman in a headscarf.

Focus was not alone in spotlighting ‘multikulti’ as the problem of Germany.

It was simply following suit and highlighting the usual stories: headscarves,

youth gangs, segregated men’s coffee houses, segregated high-rises with

70 per cent immigrant inhabitants, soaring crime ﬁgures, low language skills,

unemployment and extremism of various kinds – indeed, a bleak picture.

Something that ignited the integration debate was the brutal murder of

a twenty-three-year-old Turkish woman, Hatun S

u, by her brothers for

disgracing her family. Hatun’s crime was to leave her husband and attempt to

raise her child as a single mother – thus bringing shame to her family. At the

trial, the youngest brother pleaded guilty, while the older brothers proclaimed

their innocence – or ignorance – of the crime. When the trial ended, the older

brothers were acquitted, and celebrated their release with V-signs in front of

the cameras; the younger brother was sent to a juvenile prison to serve nine

years.

The murder of Hatun S

u galvanised the long-entrenched doubts and

questions about the compatibility of Turkish (and/or Muslim) traditions with

Western norms and ways of life, particularly with regard to the place of women

in Muslim societies and cultures. The debate did not simply position Germans

against Turks, but generated a multi-vocal questioning. The Turkish feminist

activist Necla Kelek, for instance, publicly condemned honour killings, and

made a plea to Muslims to question their traditions and change. Her call for

reform in Islam was answered in the pages of the renowned intellectual weekly

220

The migration story of Turks in Germany

Die Zeit, with a strongly worded rejoinder from sixty prominent German and

Turkish ethnographers, intellectuals, immigration researchers and activists,

calling attention to the complexity of the debate and the dangers of the blanket

condemnation of immigrants (as Muslims) at a time when there is increasing

anti-immigrant sentiment, both among the populace and policy makers.

The polemic of ‘Kelek vs. Intellectuals and Ethnographers’ was not the

ﬁrst of its kind. In the past, more often than not, female authors and activists

of immigrant origin, mostly with feminist a orientation, have enraged their

detractors with their critical stances against headscarves, the segregation

of women, honour killings and other kinds of violence against women

within immigrant communities and in their home countries. It is also cru-

cial to point out that the critique of ‘tradition’ is not a stance restricted to

women and activists. It is a passionately and publicly debated issue, creating

unusual alliances and rivalries – between Germans and Turks, the intellectuals

and the streetwise, religious and lay persons, leftist and rightists, men and

women.

Without going further into the details and merits of such polemics, I would

like to assert that what lies at the locus of all this debate on integration – and

the divergent positions as regards gender equality and culture – is the question

of women. In the post 11 September era, the term ‘Muslim’ has attained a

status of unqualiﬁed infamy, leading to the widespread perception of every

Muslim person as an adherent of an uncivilised, non-modern culture, if not a

terrorist. Muslim women, not coincidentally, have always been at the centre

of the debates on Islam and its place in European social spaces.

In Europe today, imprinted on the female body, the headscarf empirically

demonstrates foreignness (as in being non-Western) and authenticates it,

mostly, as Islamic. When the subject matter is immigration or Islam, pic-

tures of women with headscarves invariably accompany newspaper articles,

television coverage and academic works. The image provides the necessary

visual accreditation to the written and spoken word.

On the one hand, the headscarf (variously named hijab, turban, foulard, kopf-

tuch) signiﬁes an eternal Islam that underwrites the submission of women

to the authority of Muslim men and tradition. The tradition as such is con-

sidered anathema to the normative values of the West, and appears as an

obstacle to the integration of Muslim women into Europe or the West.

On the other hand, Muslim women without headscarves are considered

59 For the debate between Kelek and her adversaries, see Mark Terkessidis and Yasemin

Karakaso

glu, ‘Gerechtigkeit f

ur die Muslime!’, Die Zeit, 1 February 2006,no.6; and Necla

Kelek, ‘Sie haben das Leid anderer zugelassen!’, Die Zeit, 9 February 2006,no.7.

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secular – and hence ‘Westernised’. However, according to this reasoning, being

‘Westernised’ denotes not integration but rather a loss of tradition, ‘cultural’

dislocation, and inauthentic selves.

In short, the headscarf as a sign hides Muslim women behind a timeless

culture and tradition, regardless of their actual religious beliefs and political

and cultural orientations. If immigrant women wear the sign, they are deemed

to be the factual prisoners of Muslim culture – and thus silent. If they are

without it, they are considered culturally confused – and thus are silenced by

the logic of inauthenticity. They become located in the shadows of a precarious

tradition, standing at an incommensurable distance from the modernity and

present tense of the West.

Though intuitive, this cultural perception, with its undue emphasis on the

headscarf – and thus on Islam – renders invisible the extensive participation

of immigrant women in the social, cultural and the economic life of the

countries in which they reside. Their accomplishments, and their resilience,

inventiveness and activism,havebecome captive to reiﬁed categorical identities

(Turkishness and Islam) since they have surfaced in the imagination of the

European mind. Lost is the female voice, speaking of their conditions and

expectations, speaking to the world at large, articulating utopias against the

uncertainties of their lives – as exempliﬁed in the intolerable death of Hatun

At this juncture in the history of migration, Germany and Europe seek to

reconcile the task of managing diversity with that of achieving security, both

highly charged discursive and policy agendas. The apparent conﬂict between

these two agendas seems likely to continue for some time to come, and will

afford grounds for a continuing debate on the potential integration of immi-

grants in Europe.

. . . and the end

The story I have told here does not amount to a complete account of Turkish

migration to/in Germany. That is a task far beyond the means of this chapter –

perhaps an unmanageable one in the rapidly changing, and ‘globalizing’,

world. I have, however, offered an account that recapitulates the contem-

porary condition of Turkish immigration. The trends I have drawn from the

sample of statistics presented here are not always encouraging, but neither are

they discouraging. One thing that they clearly indicate is the incorporation of

migrants into legal and societal institutions, regimes of rights and membership,

and economies of ownership and inequity.

222

The migration story of Turks in Germany

The incorporation of immigrants in Germany has proceeded rather rapidly

and without exceptional controversy. The ampliﬁed talk of integration today

is more about maintaining the categorical integrity of the national order and

ﬁghting the ghost of a civilisational enemy than about remedying empirical

inequalities, which are more often than not subsumed under the foreignness

of migrants and erased from social agendas. In other words, heightened but

undue attention to the cultural ‘problems’ associated with migration disre-

gards the processes of incorporation and the difﬁculties of maintaining for-

eignness in a globalising world. What we end up with is an elementary story

of integration, in which the parameters that create difference and identity

are taken to be national/ethnic/religious – i.e. Turkishness, Germanness,

Islam. Rather than attending the complex layering of inequities and afﬁni-

ties within and without the nation-state, the incessant debate on integration

concerns itself with apocalyptic cultural fragmentations, parallel societies and

Islamic ghettos. In the end, ‘ironically, as immigrants are increasingly incorpo-

rated into the membership schemes of European host polities, the debate over

how well they “adjust” intensiﬁes, and their cultural otherness is accentuated.

Guestworkers become symbolic foreigners’ in Europe.

As symbolic foreigners (Turks in Germany, Indians in Britain, Arabs in

France), contemporary immigrants are conﬁned to an unyielding past – the

past of their home and culture – and a persistent present, the present of their

host country and their Otherness. They are considered to be bounded by

their nation (or religion) in the nations of others, and in this boundedness

they live in permanent diasporas. Lost in this vision are futures, dreams and

competencies, along with the possibility of having more than one home,

and livingwith/out nations. Are all stories of migration about homes, pasts and

tedious repetitions of the present? Is contemporary migration simply a cultural

economy of movement between peripheries with edenic pasts and centres with

afﬂuent presents, or between the nothingness of underdevelopment and the

wealth of advancement?

These are difﬁcult questions in search of a new narratives and new answers.

New narratives and answers are in the making in the stories of migrants

who traverse the world in disproportionate numbers, mobilized by market

demands, political upheavals, environmental catastrophes, and imaginaries of

desire. We encounter their stories not only in Europe, but also in presum-

ably remote corners of Asia and Africa. Their numbers encumber statistical

maps so orderly kept by states; their travels confound geographies mapped

60 Nuho

glu Soysal, Limits of Citizenship,p.135.

223