The guest-worker program was shut down in 1973, when the Arab oil embargo triggered a recession. But today there are nearly three million people of Turkish descent living in Germany. Only half are German citizens. Some have ascended to prominence—such as Cem Özdemir, co-leader of the Green Party. What struck me about the conversations I had with ordinary Turks, however, was the consistent note of ambivalence toward Germany.
“To be a ‘guest’ in a country for decades—that’s insanity,” said Ayşe Köse Küçük, a social worker in Kreuzberg, the Berlin neighborhood where many Turks settled. She came to Berlin when she was 11 and has lived there 36 years. She still doesn’t feel accepted, and her children don’t either. “My children, whom I never told, ‘You are Turkish,’ started saying, ‘We are Turks,’ after fourth grade,” she said. “Because they were excluded. That hurts me.” And yet Kreuzberg is her beloved home.
“We came as workers, and as workers we’re integrated, but not as neighbors and fellow citizens,” said Ahmet Sözen, 44, who was born in Berlin. He can’t fully integrate, he explained, into a society his father doesn’t belong to. In Bebra, on the other hand, everybody knows one another, and Turks stage an annual cultural festival in the town square, Fatih Evren said; integration has worked. Still, although he was born and grew up in Germany and has many German friends, he expects to be buried in Turkey.
Feeling fully accepted in Germany has never been easy, even for some Germans. Christian Grunwald’s maternal grandparents were refugees—ethnic Germans from northern Serbia who ended up in Rotenburg after the war. His mother told me the story one afternoon at the Alheimer Kaserne. We were in the old guardhouse, surrounded by jail cells full of donated clothes; Gisela Grunwald coordinates a Red Cross operation that supplies clothing to today’s refugees.
Gisela’s mother is in a nursing home now, she said. Her ancestry is German, she has lived in Rotenburg for 65 years, her grandson is the popular mayor—and still, Gisela said, one day not long ago “someone came to her and said, ‘You’re not German.’ ” It seems she hadn’t quite shaken the accent she’d brought along with her from Serbia.
A large majority of Germans accept immigration and Islam intellectually, said political scientist Naika Foroutan of the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research—but emotionally, not so many. Foroutan’s team surveyed 8,270 German residents in 2014, before the Paris or Brussels attacks or the surge in refugees. They found that nearly 40 percent believed you can’t be German if you wear a head scarf. Forty percent would limit the construction of conspicuous mosques. More than 60 percent would ban circumcision, an essential ritual in both the Islamic and Jewish religions. Finally, some 40 percent believed that to be German you must speak German without an accent. (Gisela Grunwald’s mother must have met one of those.)
Even before the terrorist attacks, even before a bizarre series of incidents outside the Cologne train station on New Year’s Eve, when immigrants, more than half from North Africa, harassed and molested hundreds of women, many Germans perceived Muslims as a threat. That feeling has fueled the resurgence of the political right. “I don’t believe such a mass of people can be integrated,” said Björn Höcke of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the populist party that after elections in March is now in half of Germany’s state legislatures. Höcke leads the delegation in the eastern state of Thuringia. Immigration, he thinks, has undermined the “community of trust” that once existed in Germany. The AfD, he has said a little menacingly, is “the last peaceful chance for our country.”
Höcke scares and disgusts many Germans. “Good God!” Damm exclaimed, when I mentioned I was going to see him. In person, Höcke is cerebral and almost mild; a few years ago he was a history teacher. But when he strikes the mystic chords of nationalism at the AfD rallies in Erfurt, when he leads the crowd on the cathedral square in chants of “Wir sind das Volk—We are the people,” meaning the German one that Merkel is allegedly trying to “abolish” with immigration—it reminds many Germans of the Nazis. “Sportpalast, 1943,” said Christian Grunwald, referring to an infamous speech by Joseph Goebbels.
Yet many Germans share at least some of Höcke’s unease—and a spate of attacks by refugees this past summer only increased it. In county elections in Hesse last March, one in eight Rotenburg voters chose the AfD; in state legislative elections in Saxony-Anhalt the following week, it was one in four. It would be hard to shove that many people into the Nazi corner. What are they afraid of?
In a word: Parallelgesellschaften, or “parallel societies.” “The parts of cities where you wouldn’t know you were in Germany,” as Höcke puts it. The term is a bogeyman even among moderate Germans. To an American, it may evoke a more benign image—of a Chinatown or a Little Italy or even one of the hundreds of Little Germanys that once existed in the U.S. Why can’t Germans take in immigrants now, in the same spirit? I put the question to Erika Steinbach, who, in spite of being a former refugee herself, has been a controversial critic of Merkel’s policy from the right flank of the CDU.
“I don’t want that,” she said simply. “We should preserve our identity.” Steinbach limned the threat with anecdotes. Her secretary in Berlin had been groped at the train station by a man she “could tell” was a refugee. Her hairdresser’s son in Frankfurt was one of only two native Germans in his elementary school class. A CDU staffer there said that gangs of immigrants walk down the main shopping street belching in people’s faces. “My goodness,” Steinbach said. “What is it all leading to?”
By the time I talked to her, I had met some of the new faces of Germany. There was Ahmad, sweeping in front of his door in Rotenburg. There were the two boys at a shelter in Berlin, who cry themselves to sleep, their father Mohamad told me, when they can’t reach their mother back in Damascus. There was Sharif, a restaurant owner from Aleppo, who saw Germany as a last chance; his kids hadn’t been to school since the fighting began in 2011.
And then, at the same gym in Berlin, there was an anguished 20-year-old, visibly pregnant, her face a smooth oval framed by a white head scarf. Soon after she started talking, she burst into tears—at how much she missed her family in Syria, at how kind the Germans were, but also at how scared she’d been one night when an angry crowd of them gathered on the street outside. If she could, she said, she’d tell those Germans she wasn’t there to take anything away.
The hate was appalling, but I could understand the apprehension many Germans feel. Even Ahmad could. “Germans are right to be afraid for their country,” he had told me. “Germany is used to security and order. People are afraid that will change.” But the encounter with him and the others had affected me. I asked Steinbach whether she’d had any personal contact with refugees.
“No,” she said.
And all from a non biased quote?
It has been argued against here. So is it biased or not?
And if I am biased why am I putting links up that are not biased? How many non biased links does Mart put up?
