The Politics of Cultural Representation: Turkish–German Encounters

Abstract

This article considers the development of Turkish-German cinema, situating it in relation to both the early manifestations of a diasporic literature in Germany and the attempts by filmmakers associated with the New German Cinema to represent the experience of migrants in the Federal Republic. These films were frequently criticised for reducing their protagonists to stereotypes, portraying the migrant as victim and focusing excessively on conflict of an intercultural or intracultural kind. The 1990s saw the emergence of a younger generation of Turkish directors in Germany intent on breaking away from this ‘cinema of the affected’ by not foregrounding the problematisation of alterity. The article concludes by examining the recent work of one of these directors, Thomas Arslan, and assesses its success in representing ‘life in, as well as between, two cultures’.

Notes

1. David Horrocks and Eva Kolinsky, ‘Introduction: Migrants or Citizens’, in David Horrocks and Eva Kolinsky (eds.), Turkish Culture in German Society Today (Providence, RI/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996), p.137–156.

2. Eva Kolinsky, ‘Conclusion’, in Horrocks and Kolinsky (eds.), Turkish Culture in German Society Today, pp.186 and 190.

3. Franco Biondi and Rafik Schami, ‘Literatur der Betroffenen’, in Christian Schaffernicht (ed.), Zu Hause in der Fremde: Ein bundesdeutsches Ausländer-Lesebuch (Fischerhude: Atelier im Bauernhaus, 1981/Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1984), p.146. In 1980 Biondi and Schami had been instrumental in setting up the publishing collective Südwind, who organised a series of anthologies of literary texts in German by immigrant writers called ‘Südwind gastarbeiterdeutsch’.

4. Ibid., p.146.

5. Aras Ören, ‘Dankrede zur Preisverleihung’, in Heinz Friedrich (ed.), Chamissos Enkel:Zur Literatur von Ausländern in Deutschland (Munich: dtv, 1986), p.29.

6. Aras Ören, Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstraße (1973), Der kurze Traum aus Kagithane (1974) and Die Fremde ist auch ein Haus (1980).

7. Heidrun Suhr, ‘Ausländerliteratur: Minority Literature in the Federal Republic of Germany’, New German Critique 46 (1989), p.87.

8. Leslie A. Adelson, ‘Migrants and Muses’, in David E. Wellbery (ed.), A New History of German Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p.915.

9. Sabine Fischer and Moray McGowan, ‘From Pappkoffer to Pluralism: on the Development of Migrant Writing in the German Federal Republic’, in Horrocks and Kolinsky (eds.), Turkish Culture in German Society Today, p.8.

10. Renan Demirkan, Schwarzer Tee mit drei Stück Zucker (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1991), p.49.

11. Ibid., p.49.

12. Werner Schiffauer, Die Migranten aus Subay: Türken in Deutschland – Eine Ethnographie (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991), p.146. See Yasemin Karakasoglu, ‘Turkish Cultural Orientations in Germany and the Role of Islam’, in Horrocks and Kolinsky (eds.), Turkish Culture in German Society Today, pp.157–79.

13. Ibid., pp.140–48.

14. Demirkan, Schwarzer Tee mit drei Stück Zucker, pp.41–2.

15. Schiffauer, Die Migranten aus Subay, p.344.

16. Ibid., p.368.

17. Demirkan, Schwarzer Tee mit drei Stück Zucker, p.73

18. Saliha Scheinhardt, Die Stadt und das Mädchen (Freiburg/Basle/Vienna: Herder, 1993), p.27.

19. Fischer and McGowan describe Scheinhardt's (female) protagonists as follows: ‘Their destinies lie completely in the hands of their fathers, brothers and husbands, who either force them to emigrate, subject them to extreme brutality, or abandon them penniless at home when they themselves leave their country. Fear and dependency hinder many of the protagonists from developing constructive strategies for liberating themselves from this situation. Their suffering often expresses itself in desperate deeds … In Scheinhardt's narratives men are depicted as victims of circumstance and women are presented as victims of the victims.’ Fischer and McGowan, ‘From Pappkoffer to Pluralism’, p.13.

20. These include: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Katzelmacher (1969) and Angst essen Seele auf (1974); Helmer Sanders-Brahms, Shirins Hochzeit (1975); Christian Ziewer, Aus der Ferne sehe ich dieses Land (1977); Werner Schroeter, Palermo oder Wolfsburg (1980); Jan Schütte, Drachenfutter (1987); Hark Bohm, Yasemin (1987); and Dorris Dörrie, Happy Birthday, Türke (1991).

21. ‘[Cultural tourists] visit unfamiliar territory … for specified periods of time in order to consume “ways of life” different from their own. Having done this, they can collect information, they can claim knowledge, they can make authoritative pronouncements about this territory.’ Derek Paget, True Stories? Documentary Drama on Radio, Screen and Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p.89.

22. Arlene Akiko Teraoka, ‘Talking “Turk”: On Narrative Strategies and Cultural Stereotypes’, New German Critique 46 (1989), p.106.

23. Ibid., pp.117, 127.

24. Cf. Wolfgang Braun, ‘Der entscheidende Kritikpunkt an Wallraff: Umgedrehter Rassismus’, Die Brücke 38 (1987), pp.10–11.

25. Aysel Özakin, ‘Ali hinter den Spiegeln’, Literatur Konkret 11 (1986), pp.6–9.

26. Teraoka, ‘Talking “Turk”’, p.119.

27. See Franz Ulrich, ‘Parabel über eine Gettosituation – Interview mit Tevfik Başer über 40 m² Deutschland’, Zoom 38/17 (1986), p.14.

28. Özay Fecht, who played Turna, and Claus Bantzer, who composed the musical score, both received awards. Başer's second feature film, Abschied vom falschen Paradies (Farewell to a False Paradise, 1987), was likewise nominated for the Federal Film Prize, while his third, Lebewohl, Fremde (Farewell, Stranger, 1991), served as Germany's official entry to the Cannes Film Festival in 1991.

29. Başer's second film, Abschied vom falschen Paradies, is in fact a cinematic adaptation of Scheinhardt's first novel, Frauen, die sterben, ohne daß sie gelebt hätten (1983). For a comparative analysis see Rob Burns, ‘From Bondage to Bonding: Saliha Scheinhardt's Frauen, die sterben, ohne daß sie gelebt hätten and Tevfik Başer Abschied vom falschen Paradies’, in Jeff Morrison and Florian Krobb (eds.), Text into Image: Image into Text (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp.330–47.

30. Ulrich, ‘Parabel über eine Gettosituation’, pp.14–15.

31. Cf. Suhr, ‘Ausländerliteratur’, p.95, and Sigrid Weigel, ‘Literatur der Fremde – Literatur in der Fremde’, in Klaus Briegleb and Sigrid Weigel (eds.), Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1968 (Munich: dtv, 1992), pp.223–4.

32. Leslie A. Adelson, ‘The Price of Feminism: Of Women and Turks’, in Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (eds.), Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Nation (Providence, RI/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997), p.307.

33. Deniz Göktürk, ‘Turkish Women on German Streets: Closure and Exposure in Transnational Cinema’, in Myrto Konstantarakos (ed.), Spaces in European Cinema (Exeter/Portland, OR: intellect, 2000), p.66.

34. At school Yasemin dresses in a modern fashion indistinguishable from that of her German friends; on her way home she is shown modifying her appearance in accordance with her parents' expectations by lowering the length of her skirt and covering up her bare midriff with a sweater. On entering the family's greengrocer shop she greets both her father and her uncle with a deferential kiss of the hand: in the case of her uncle, a strictly orthodox Muslim, she does this spontaneously, but with Jusuf, her father, it only follows his knowing glance in the direction of his brother. Nevertheless, her compliance is by no means unconditional. When her mother insists there must be limits to her daughter's ambition – ‘You are a woman! Haven't you grasped that yet? You are a woman!’ – Yasemin responds by turning her head away in a gesture of sullen defiance, anticipating what the rest of the film will elaborate: that she is not prepared to share her mother's resigned acceptance of women's subordination.

35. See Dursun Tan and Hans-Peter Waldhoff, ‘Turkish Everyday Culture in Germany and its Prospects’, in Horrocks and Kolinsky (eds.), Turkish Culture in German Society Today, pp.137–56, in particular pp.142–50.

36. Ibid., p.145.

37. See Elçin Kürsat-Ahlers, ‘The Turkish Minority in German Society’, in Horrocks and Kolinsky (eds.), Turkish Culture in German Society Today, pp.117, 130.

38. Zentrum für Türkeistudien, Türkei Sozialkunde (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1994), p.127.

39. See Beate Winkler, ‘Zur Situation der ausländischen Bevölkerung in der Bundesrepublik’, in Beate Winkler (ed.), Zukunftsangst Einwanderung (Munich: Beck, 1992), p.36; see also Sigrid Meske, Situationsanalyse türkischer Frauen in der BRD (Berlin: Express edition, 1983), and Rita Rosen and Gerd Stüwe, Ausländische Mädchen in der Bundesrepublik (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1985).

40. Ram Adhar Mall, ‘Kulturelle Begegnung aus interkultureller Sicht’, in Ernst Karpf, Doron Kiesel and Karsten Visarius (eds.), ‘Getürkte Bilder’: Zur Inszenierung von Fremden im Film (Marburg: Schüren, 1995), p.74.

41. Kühn makes this point in reverse, namely that these are questions the film begs with its sentimental ending; cf. Heike Kühn, ‘“Mein Türke ist Gemüsehändler”: Zur Einverleibung des Fremden in deutschsprachigen Filmen’, in Karpf et al. (eds.), ‘Getürkte Bilder’, p.51.

42. Deniz Göktürk, ‘Beyond Paternalism: Turkish German Traffic in Cinema’, in Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter and Deniz Göktürk (eds.), The German Cinema Book (London: bfi, 2002), p.251.

43. Ibid., p.251.

44. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), pp.28–39 and pp.216–19. Cf.: ‘The non-synchronous temporality of global and national cultures opens up a cultural space – a third space – where the negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension peculiar to borderline existences’ (p.218).

45. Coincidentally, Tekinay herself could be seen as an instance of this latter tendency: her first novel Der weinende Granatapfel (The Weeping Pomegranate, 1990) appeared in the very mainstream press of Suhrkamp but as part of its fantasy collection, the Phantastische Bibliothek. One cannot help but speculate, as Michelle Mattson has done, whether this was not an attempt by Suhrkamp to have it both ways, by accepting Tekinay's work ‘only to remarginalise it within a category generally viewed to be less than serious literature’ (Michelle Matson, ‘The Function of the Cultural Stereotype in a Minor Literature: Alev Tekinay's Short Stories’, Monatshefte 89/1 (1997), p.82).

46. Kürsat-Ahlers, ‘The Turkish Minority in German Society’, p.117.

47. Alev Tekinay, Nur der Hauch vom Paradies (Frankfurt a. M.: Brandes & Apfel, 1993), p.19.

48. Ibid., p.110.

49. Ibid., p.54.

50. Ibid., p.108.

51. Ibid., p.16.

52. Ibid., p.94.

53. Ibid., p.190.

54. Ibid., p.111.

55. Ibid., p.46.

56. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001). In comparison with Hollywood movies, transnational films are distinguished by what Haficy has termed their particular ‘accent’, which derives from the displacement of the filmmakers, their alternative modes of production and their cinematic style.

57. In 1993 Article 16a of the Basic Law – ‘Those who have been politically persecuted enjoy the right to asylum’ – was amended to the effect that the right to political asylum in the Federal Republic no longer extended to those who came to Germany via a member state of the European Union or from a third country that recognised the United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees and the Protection of Human Rights and Basic Freedom.

58. Gökturk, ‘Turkish Women on German Streets’, p.71.

59. Angelica Fenner, ‘Turkish Cinema in the New Europe: Visualising Ethnic Conflict in Sinan Çetin's Berlin in Berlin’, Camera Obscura 15/2 (2000), p.122.

60. Christoph Wingender, ‘Berlin als Paradigma einer multikulturellen Werkstatt: Dialog auf primärer Ebene: Sinan Çetins Kinofilm Berlin in Berlin’, in Michael Kessler and Jürgen Wertheimer (eds.), Multikuluralität: Tendenzen, Probleme, Perspektiven im europäischen und internationalen Horizont (Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1995), p.171.

61. Göktürk, ‘Turkish Women on German Streets’, p.71.

62. Compare Çetin's own interpretation of the ‘happy ending’: ‘At the end of the film, you see that nationality is unimportant. Whenever people live together, they are forced to get on.’ Der Tagesspiegel (22/23 May 1994), quoted in Wingender, ‘Berlin als Paradigma einer multikulturellen Werkstatt’, pp.174–5).

63. Fenner, ‘Turkish Cinema in the New Europe’, p.131.

64. Ibid., p.106.

65. Christiane Peitz, ‘Überall ist es besser, wo wir nicht sind’, Tageszeitung, 13 May 1994, pp.15–16, quoted in Fenner, ‘Turkish Cinema in the New Europe’, p.109.

66. Göktürk, ‘Turkish Women on German streets’, p.71 and ‘Beyond Paternalism’, p.249.

67. A literary or filmic text can be described as self-reflexive if it ‘incorporates into its narration reference to the process of composing the fictional story itself’; see M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th edn. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1993), p.168.

68. Fenner, ‘Turkish Cinema in the New Europe’, p.136.

69. Quoted in Moritz Dehn, ‘Die Türken vom Dienst’, Freitag, 26 March 1999, p.3.

70. Quoted in Georg Seeßlen, ‘Leben in zwei Kulturen’, Kulturchronik 18/5 (2000), p.42.

71. Quoted in Daniel Bax, ‘Voll aus dem Leben’, Tageszeitung, 8 July 1997.

72. Georg Seeßlen, ‘Vertraute Fremde’, Freitag, 17 May 2002, p.13.

73. Cf. Göktürk, ‘Turkish Women on German Streets’, pp.64–6, ‘Beyond Paternalism’, pp.248, 254–5 and Seeßlen, ‘Vertraute Fremde’, p.11.

74. Barbara Mennel, ‘Bruce Lee in Kreuzberg and Scarface in Altona: Transnational Auteurism and Ghettocentrism in Thomas Arslan's Brothers and Sisters and Fatih Akin's Short Sharp Shock’, New German Critique 87 (2002), p.145.

75. Quoted in Dehn, ‘Die Türken vom Dienst’, p.13.

76. In cinema, as in drama and literature, naturalism is a heightened form of realism that draws its subject matter from everyday life and tends to present it in a pessimistic, if not fatalistic vein. See the discussion below.

77. Quoted in Seeßlen, ‘Vertraute Fremde’, p.13, and ‘Leben in zwei Kulturen’, p.42.

78. Dehn, ‘Die Türken vom Dienst’, p.13.

79. Bertolt Brecht, ‘Der Naturalismus’, Gesammelte Werke, Vol.16 Schriften zum Theater 2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1967), p.519.

80. Arslan himself describes the petty-crime milieu Can inhabits as a ‘mixture of vitality and fatalism’ (quoted in Seeßlen, ‘Vertraute Fremde’, p.13).

81. Anna Kuhn, ‘Bourgeois Ideology and the (Mis)Reading of Günter Wallraff's Ganz unten’, New German Critique 46 (1989), p.192. Similarly, Aysel Özakin describes pity as a means of reinforcing patterns of cultural dominance and wonders whether ‘it isn't the most refined expression of scorn and contempt’ (Özakin, ‘Ali hinter den Spiegeln’, p.9).

82. ‘Thomas Arslan über seinen Film: Auszüge aus einem Interview mit dem Regisseur von “Der schöne Tag”', http://www.zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/18/0,1872,2012818.html (accessed 28 March 2003), p.1.

83. Quoted in Tobias Hering, ‘Irgendwo muss das Leben ja stattfinden’, Freitag, 23 Nov. 2001, p.48.

84. ‘It was clear that Deniz's journeys through town play an important role, that we accompany her en route and that this would be the crucial factor in the rhythm of the film. I like showing how someone moves from one place to another. The journeys are not dead time’ (‘Thomas Arslan über seinen Film’, p.1).

85. Other influences he cites include Jean Eustache, Maurice Pialat and Abbas Kiarostami, ibid., p.1.

86. Kolinsky, ‘Conclusion’, p.182.

87. Ibid., p.190.

88. Ibid., p.189.

89. Seeßlen, ‘Leben in zwei Kulturen’, p.42.