In 2004 a German fi lm took the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival for the fi rst time in eighteen years.1 A dark love story about two rebels who meet in a psychiatric ward after attempting suicide, Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand (released in English under the title Head On) was not only a critical success around the world but also a box offi ce hit at home, in Germany. That the fi lm’s two leads, like Akin himself, were ethnic Turks makes the achieve-ment the more remarkable. Here was a case of an apparently minor—and minority—movie making it big as a major fi lm.
Although the fi lm’s protagonists—Cahit and Sibel—are indeed margin-alized fi gures, Gegen die Wand presents no clear victims, which one might expect of a fi lm centered on despondent minority characters. As the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane put it in his adulatory review: “[O]ne of the virtues of [Akin’s] movie is its refusal to play the blame game. He is in the business neither of mauling Germany for its treatment of Turkish workers nor of turning on his own kind. He simply recognizes that, wherever one nation is playing host to another, be it with good or ill will, there is an unmissable chance—call it an obligation—for both parties, host and guest, to tell stories of themselves.”2 As “a German fi lm with a Turkish soul,”3 the movie “resists easy assimilation into the existing matrix of cultural stereotype,”4 or simply put, “it rocked against all cultural ascriptions.”5 What seems to have taken some German critics by surprise was that it took an apparently multicultural fi lm to revive “German romanticism.”6
Not only does the fi lm not assign blame, it goes so far as to place the responsibility for the protagonists’ lives squarely on their own shoulders and agency. The few “native” Germans represented in the fi lm are well inten-tioned but essentially irrelevant, beginning with the German psychiatrist who tries to counsel Cahit after his suicide attempt by earnestly quoting song lyrics from the rock band The The. His professional counsel, however, is quickly and poignantly dismissed by Cahit. The fact that the German psychiatrist is named Schiller, like the foremost poet and proponent of Ger-man huGer-manist idealism, signals that Cahit is refusing to submit himself to the authority of a native German and ultimately to the norms of tradition-ally conceived German society and culture.7 This is also corroborated by
Cahit’s relationship to Maren, his sometime girlfriend and the only “native”
in this fi lm who has any kind of relationship to the protagonists, albeit one that seems to be limited to rather untender sex. Her position is not one of authority or power, either, as had been customary in earlier fi lms that dealt with ethnic minorities in German society. Indeed, in this fi lm it is the native Germans who seek acceptance from the nonnative protagonists, not the other way around. Any signifi cant confrontations with overt racism, prejudice, or ethnic discrimination are thus absent from the fi lm because the confl icts occur only between or among the Turkish dramatis personae in the fi lm. The native Germans, when considered at all, are portrayed as being rather oversolicitous of the protagonists’ feelings.
The fundamental perspective of the fi lm stands in stark contrast to the so-called migrant and minority literature and cinema in Germany, which began in the sixties and seventies with the signing of the fi rst bilateral recruitment agreements by the Federal Republic with other nations (Italy in 1955, Greece and Spain in 1960, Turkey in 1961, Portugal in 1964, and Yugoslavia in 1968). Indeed, it is only when measured against the limited expectations of migrant cinema that the signifi cance of a breakout fi lm such as Gegen die Wand can be fully appreciated.
The devastation of two world wars had taken its toll not only on Germa-ny’s physical landscape but also on its able-bodied workforce. Moreover, improved working conditions such as better pension plans and a reduction Figure 4.1 Cahit (Birol Ünel) and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli) in Gegen die Wand. Screen-shot, Wüstefi lmproduktion, 2004. Directed by Fatih Akin. Produced by Fatih Akin, Andreas Schreitmüller, and Stefan Schubert.
in working hours, as well as longer education and training periods and the redomestication of women, all contributed to an immense labor cri-sis in the then-booming economy. Although this defi ciency was initially alleviated by the large numbers of expellees returning ‘home’ from former occupied territories in Eastern Europe and by the so-called transit work-ers from East Germany, the erection of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall forced the West German government to seek alternative resources for manpower by massively recruiting foreign workers. What was needed was a fl exible reserve of deployable and expendable workers for unattractive, lower-paying, and physically demanding jobs, which would function as an economic buffer and also allow German workers upward socioeconomic advancement as a new underclass of foreign laborers came into being.8
Mainly from Mediterranean countries, these young and usually male alien laborers were initially ‘invited’ to work and live in Germany for one or two years, and the German government, industries, and media, as well as the recruits themselves, regarded their stay in Germany as a temporary one. However, German employers discarded the rotation principle soon after when they found it much more profi table to retain their trained and proven Gastarbeiter (guest workers) than to invest in a new recruit every other year. By 1973, when the oil price shock and the worldwide recession brought the steadily growing German economy to an abrupt halt, the FRG had recruited over 14 million foreign nationals, about 80 percent of whom had gone back to their native countries.9 With the economic downturn, the German government imposed a recruitment ban, or Anwerbestopp, to regulate the weakening labor market and dispose of the now-excessive labor reservoir that had once fueled an expanding economy. Faced with the sudden ultimatum to stay permanently or leave immediately with what was considered a generous Rückkehrförderungsmaßnahme, a repatria-tion package, many guest workers, especially those from Turkey, decided to stay, not merely because they could always return at a later time but also because the conditions in their home countries had not improved to the point where they could apply their acquired industrial skills and uti-lize their occupational qualifi cations. In addition to the markedly higher standard of living to which they had become accustomed, a secure welfare system including child support and unemployment benefi ts made the deci-sion to stay even more attractive.10 Indeed, only with the recruitment ban did Germany begin to have a genuine ‘immigration situation,’ if it was not already a de facto immigration country.11 The temporary Gastarbeiter had become an unwanted permanent guest, a Dauergast.
Despite this changing reality, German policy regarding foreigners and foreign residents was until recently, before the revision of and addendum to the citizenship laws beginning in 2000, devoid of any language that might suggest that Germany was becoming or was in fact already a country of immigration. Its vehement refusal to establish any kind of immigration legislation, although it had annually admitted more (im)migrants since the
late 1980s than the recognized immigration states of Canada and Australia combined,12 harkens back to the German nationality law of 1913, whereby membership was based on ethnicity and ancestry and founded upon ius sanguinis, or ‘right of blood.’
This decree’s true colors were revealed decades later when hundreds of thousands of migrants from Eastern Europe, following the disintegration of the Soviet system and its satellites in the early 1990s, claimed German descent and were almost immediately granted German citizenship, whereas German residents of foreign ethnicity who were born into the language and culture of their adopted homes were still being denied the political rights and social protection that came with citizenship.
As an immigration country in denial,13 Germany’s postwar identity was
“rooted in a mismatch of self and self-understanding,”14 and it is under such “pathological” circumstances that the fi rst generation of guest work-ers settled in and the second and third generations of non-Germans were born and raised. Vulnerable to exploitative situations and without the same legal protection as their German counterparts, the fi rst wave of labor immi-grants thus resisted assimilation into a country that was neither prepared nor willing to integrate them into the German social life. Their initial lack of knowledge of the German language and culture led to an eventual form of ghettoization that allowed them to preserve their traditional cultural values and in which the structure of a closely knit community provided stability and orientation. Due to the preservation of family and community structures as well as their native languages, the identity of migrants was defi ned essentially in terms of cultural segregation.
The literary and cinematic productions by and about the fi rst wave of migrants in the sixties and seventies refl ected, in general, this alienation, focusing on the plight of the marginalized Gastarbeiter. Their writings fol-lowed or coincided with other literary and social movements in Germany such as Konkrete Poesie (concrete poetry) and proletarian literature, Neue Subjektivität (new subjectivity), and the women’s liberation movement, which were seeking alternative forms of self-expression, individuality, and authenticity in the wake of the intense politicization of literature in the 1960s. As such, they were seen as part of the larger Betroffenheitsliteratur, a ‘literature of the affected’ that responded directly to social victimization and was thus “therapeutic writing by victims of social processes, articu-lating, objectifying, and establishing the commonality of experience by recording it in simple, conventional, usually autobiographical forms.”15
As scholars and critics today look back at this early genre of Gastarbeiter-literatur or BetroffenheitsGastarbeiter-literatur, it is commonly held that its signifi cance related mostly to its biographical content and sociopolitical implications rather than its inherent literary value. It served to inform Germans about the economic misery, the crisis of identity, and the cultural confusion expe-rienced by the migrant worker. The inhospitableness of their host country, expressed in the term Bitterland (bitter land), became a central concern
of fi rst-generation writers such as Franco Biondi, Rafi k Schami, and Aras Ören.16
The one-dimensional portrayal of the quietly suffering migrant and his or her experiences underwent a slight development with the emergence of women writers such as TORKAN and Emine Özdamar17 and the sec-ond generation of artists in the late eighties. Characterized by upward social mobility and transnational status, and no longer linguistically or educationally disadvantaged as their parents had been, this genera-tion had to face not so much the quesgenera-tion of whether to adjust and inte-grate into German society, but rather how to adapt oneself to a life ‘in between’ while learning, as Zafer Şenocak put it, “to walk on two shores simultaneously.”18
They were raised in the German educational system and were exposed to German culture by day but went home every evening to a very different location of socialization. This dilemma of living in two separate worlds was also aggravated by the fact that many of those who experienced exclu-sion, stigmatization, and threat from mainstream German society also felt imprisoned by their own families. As they attempted to come to terms with individual life in Germany, their most pressing issue showed itself to be a lack of orientation and the consequent diffi culty of living with multiple identities in the absence of any single identity, that is, the lack of one prime source of identity. Their displacement was not so much a linguistic one, but rather a cultural one within themselves and their families.
The literary products of second-wave writers of foreign descent, in par-ticular of Turkish descent, refl ect changes in themes and topoi as their quest for identity developed into a request for acknowledgment and acceptance of their difference. The tone changed as well, from a largely accusatory or lamenting cry to a far more self-critical and self-refl ective voice. Concur-rently, however, these intercultural writers were also scrutinizing the social and cultural conditions in which their literary works were received, contest-ing that for far too long their writcontest-ings had been relegated to the confi ncontest-ing and patronizing category of Gastarbeiterliteratur and that their works had been defi ned and managed by German cultural mediators, who with ‘mis-sionary’ eagerness wished to contain the imported cultures of their ‘perma-nent guests’ as separate and separated entities. For their artistic endeavors, categories had to be ‘invented’ or upheld, which led and continues to lead to separate anthologies and magazines, separate publishers, and discrimina-tory distribution channels.
Thematically, they also had to limit themselves to their ‘otherness.’ As such, literature by foreign-born and foreign-descent writers had always been the slightly-less-than-respectable pages of German letters—at times poignantly critical, stimulating, and always fascinating to be sure, but locked up in a separate drawer from the main documents of German cul-ture and kept from actively infl uencing public discourse on (national, or for that matter, global) politics and culture. According to Leslie Adelson,
there lies an inherent risk of missed opportunity in regarding migrant liter-ature as merely a colorful addition to German literliter-ature. As she insightfully points out, such ethnocentric interpretations of this kind of literature—by whatever name we may call it—fail to challenge the “epistemological and political implications of the notion that German literature has as its center something distinctly German to which foreign elements can be added or subtracted.”19 What is at stake is not the appropriate label for the “foreign
‘addendum’ but the fundamental need to reconceptualize our understand-ing of an identifi able German core of contemporary literature.”20 To accom-modate difference as only an exotic enrichment to an allegedly essential body of German texts entails the homogenization of historical specifi city of the race, culture, and gender of what the majority culture terms ‘other-ness,’ and thus would preclude “rigorous analysis of the construction of differences in their social, historical, political, and cultural specifi city.”21 However, difference has always been a constituent of German writing, if not of all literature, and as such, the literary works of foreign-born writers should be posited neither at the margins of nor as a subcategory of (and thus substandard to) ‘essential’ German literature.
A similar trend can be traced in German cinema. What writers and direc-tors of minority literature and cinema during the seventies and eighties, whether immigrant or indigenous, had in common then was the fact that all were more or less restricted to a certain theme—that of the so-called Ausländerproblem, the foreigner issue; the word itself is already problem-atic because it construes the foreigner as a problem and not the external circumstances that make his or her integration into German society prob-lematic. This was by no means the fault of the artists themselves (or not their fault alone) but was the result of the constraints of the fi nancial cri-teria by which only those screenplays and manuscripts were selected to be produced or published that depicted the ‘problems’ of and difference from the ‘other.’ Their artistic endeavors had to be limited to their ‘otherness,’ as Kemal Kurt, a second-generation German writer of Turkish descent, once deplored: “[N]onnative authors only have a chance when they can prove that they don’t belong.”22
Aside from the countless social and mostly didactic documentaries that represented the migrant as a marginalized victim, numerous feature fi lms during the 1970s and 1980s committed the same sins as their literary coun-terparts. Dutifully exposing the hardships of the foreign guest worker, this German ‘cinema of the affected’ portrayed the migrant as either an object of desire and erotic/exotic projection, as in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali:
Fear Eats the Soul (1974), or as a helpless and oppressed woman who either is killed, imprisoned, or oppressed and eventually rescued by a German, as in Helma Sander-Brahms’s Shirin’s Wedding (1975), Tevfi k Baser’s Goodbye to a False Paradise (1988), and Hark Bohm’s Yasemin (1988), respectively.
To be sure, these sociocritical fi lmmakers were driven by a commitment to social justice and an analytic interrogation of their fascist and, in the case
of Sander-Brahms, sexist legacies. However, using the migrant as a political vehicle for venting their own personal critiques of contemporary German society unwittingly reinscribed the marginalization and victimization of their subjects: The speechless migrant (usually of Turkish origin and male) and his family were encountered as vastly different and in need of our pity and help.
However well-meaning and historically important these fi lms were, in the end, rather than exposing the external as well as the internal determinants of the migrant’s alienation and of the hindrance of a genuine dialogue with the ‘other,’ these fi lms fed on reductive binary oppositions, reinforcing ste-reotypes of the mute migrant as being incompatible and noncommunicative.
The fact that the plots were familiar story lines, readily found in newspapers and other media reports about the guest worker, made it all too convenient as well to overlook the fact that these were fabricated, imagined images.
According to fi lm scholar Deniz Göktürk, the abject fi gures in these fi lms address a hegemonic audience by evoking the viewer’s pity and sympathy, emotions that essentially affi rm and perpetuate the static confi guration of oppressor and oppressed.23 Borrowing from the black British and British Asian cinema, wherein a shift from a “cinema of duty” to “the pleasure of hybridity” has been detected since the mid-1990s,24 Göktürk comparatively examines the migrant cinema in Germany and detects a similar trajectory for Turkish German cinema. If the fi rst generation of fi lms of ethnic cinema such as the works of Tevfi k Baser dealt with migrant questions as “social issues in content, documentary-realist in style, fi rmly responsible in intention,”25 positioning its subjects in relation to social crisis and attempting to articulate
‘problems’ and ‘solutions to problems’ within a framework of center and margin, native German and nonnative communities, the second generation of Turkish migrants developed a much more aloof and multifaceted fi lm style.
Thomas Arslan’s Geschwister (Brothers and Sisters, 1997), Kutlug Ataman’s Lola und Bilidikid (1998), or Ayşe Polat’s Auslandstournee (Tour Abroad, 2000) are representative of the work by a few of the emergent fi lmmakers who, experimenting in their own way with the notion of hybridity, willfully extricate their protagonists from conventional culture-clash situations. Their outsiders’ perspectives afford the viewer what Homi Bhabha has termed a transnational “third space,” a niche in the cultural imaginary wherein the
Thomas Arslan’s Geschwister (Brothers and Sisters, 1997), Kutlug Ataman’s Lola und Bilidikid (1998), or Ayşe Polat’s Auslandstournee (Tour Abroad, 2000) are representative of the work by a few of the emergent fi lmmakers who, experimenting in their own way with the notion of hybridity, willfully extricate their protagonists from conventional culture-clash situations. Their outsiders’ perspectives afford the viewer what Homi Bhabha has termed a transnational “third space,” a niche in the cultural imaginary wherein the