‘Home,’ The Negotiated Place: Narratives of Transnational Home-Making Practices of Turkish-Germans in Schleswig-Holstein

Abstract

Turkish-Germans who first arrived in Germany as ‘guests’ in the 1960s hold diverging attitudes towards their habitat, proving that it remains a negotiated reality to this day. The place they migrated to some time ago has now come to be referred to as ‘here’ or ‘home’, after years of this group’s public and private grappling with the concept. This paper examines the home-making practices of people of Turkish descent in Geesthacht, a German city in the Schleswig-Holstein region. We presume the environment still offers opportunities for Turkish-Germans to display physical amenities that are essential for the development and expression of their transnational identities. Through the use of individual memory and personal narratives, we pledge to understand how different generations have manifested belonging and identity formation in the material and immaterial practices of their home environments, and from this understanding create a narrative of Geesthacht.

KEYWORDS: :

• Turkish-Germans
• guest-workers
• home-making
• negotiated place

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to express our sincere thanks to all our interviewees who voluntarily participated in this research, opened their homes, and shared their memories with us. Thanks to Bahçeşehir University for proofreading support. Finally, we would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Several generations of Turkish people live in Germany. This population is characterized by demographic, socio-economic, socio-cultural, ethnic and religious diversity, which is further differentiated by different migration movements (Miller 2018: 19). We focus on guest-workers and their descendants in this paper. To clarify the terminology, ‘guest workers’ refers to first-generation Turkish workers who came to work with the recruitment agreement before the 1980s. ‘Second generation’ is used to describe the Turkish men and women who were born in Germany from the 60 s to the 80 s as children of the guest-workers or those who moved with their parents from Turkey to the Federal Republic of Germany from the 60 s to the 80 s at the early childhood age. The children of the second generation, who were born and grew up in Germany, are named in the research as the ‘third generation’. The second and third generations are mostly called German-Turks, Turkish-Germans or Germans of Turkish descent. Our interviewees claimed that the term German-Turks does not bear any negative connotations for them, and, on the contrary addresses their transnational identity. However, we decided to use Turkish-Germans for the second and third generation since it covers different ethnicities that the people of Turkish descent in Germany have, as implied by Nilay Kilinc (2014: 2). Turkish-Germans even embrace the first generation who do not perform as guest-workers anymore. However, this doesn’t mean that all have German citizenship.

2. The majority of our subjects have Sunni backgrounds. Among the Sunni Muslims, there are several strands of beliefs, and a variety of religious institutions that they hold membership in.

3. In the course of time, Börnsen Heim was demolished and replaced by rental apartments.

4. Unfortunately, this interviewee died at the beginning of 2020. We commemorate him and thank him for the precious memories he shared with us.

5. The barrack on Hegebergstraße is still existing today, unchanged as the guest-workers left it, and is now inhabited by low-income groups.

6. The reason was due to the fact that, in most of the plan organizations the entrance door was directly opening to the living room and Turkish-Germans found it unsanitary, especially for religious reasons. This was particularly evident in the example of the Taş Mahallesi, where guest-worker families had built a front entrance area so that they did not have to enter their living area with their shoes.

7. Please see Nasır, Timur and Gürel (2019) and Özyürek (2006) for the habit of having two living rooms, one of which acts as ‘a museum-salon’ in Turkey.

8. All photos used in the article are taken by Hazel Erdal.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hazel Erdal Baran

HAZEL ERDAL; M.SC. RECEIVED HER DEGREE IN ARCHITECTURE FROM GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ UNIVERSITY IN 2015; COMPLETED HER GRADUATE STUDIES M.SC. (2018) IN ARCHITECTURE AT BAHCESEHIR UNIVERSITY. JOINED BAHÇEŞEHIR UNIVERSITY (BAU) AS A TEACHING ASSISTANT. MAIN RESEARCH INTERESTS INCLUDE ASPECTS OF HOME-MAKING AND PLACE-MAKING PRACTICES. [email protected]

Nilay Ünsal Gülmez

NILAY ÜNSAL GÜLMEZ; B.ARCH., M.SC., PHD, RECEIVED HER DEGREE IN ARCHITECTURE FROM MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY IN 1997; COMPLETED HER GRADUATE STUDIES M.SC. (2000) AND PH.D. (2008) IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN AT ISTANBUL TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY. JOINED BAHÇEŞEHIR UNIVERSITY (BAU) IN 2005 AND CURRENTLY WORKS AS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT BAU. SHE IS THE HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE. MAIN RESEARCH INTERESTS INCLUDE ONTOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF DWELLING, HOUSING STUDIES, THEORY AND HISTORY OF DESIGN, GENDER AND SPACE, AND PLACE-MAKING PRACTICES. HER WORK HAS APPEARED IN WOMAN/KADIN, MEGARON, METU JOURNAL OF FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, AND JOURNAL OF INTERIOR DESIGN AS WELL AS OTHERS. INTERESTED IN INTERDISCIPLINARY POTENTIALS OF ARCHITECTURE AND SEARCHES FOR IN-BETWEEN GROUNDS FOCUSING ON SOCIAL/CULTURAL ASPECTS OF DWELLING AND PLACE-MAKING. [email protected]