Modelos de ecuaciones estructurales en la muestra total

Whilst the early guest-worker is represented a solitary figure in the German neighbourhoods like Jorgos in Katzelmacher or in enclosed spaces detached from German society like Turna in 40 Quadratmeter Deutschland in first-phase films, this depiction changes in Turkish German cinema. Over decades, immigrants formed diasporas, such as the Turkish diaspora, and multicultural and multiethnic districts emerged in big cities such as Hamburg and Berlin, where people from diverse cultural backgrounds not only live together, but also influence each other’s cultural identity.

Akın’s stories are often set in these multicultural districts or feature urban multiculturalism. In this way, the filmmaker demonstrates the normality of how the constant contact of multicultures has created culturally hybrid milieus.

Already Akın’s first film Kurz und Schmerzlos is set in the culturally hybrid district Altona in Hamburg and focuses on three friends, Gabriel, Bobby, and Costa, who have a Turkish, Serbian, and Greek migrant background. The director depicts his characters with their very own multifaceted cultural identities, including aspects of their parents’ culture, the friends’ migration backgrounds, German culture, urban youth culture, a petty criminal culture and, in case of Bobby, American gangster culture. The intermingling of these diverse cultures creates the particular culturally hybrid identity of each character, which finds expression in their hybrid language, habits, gestures, and lifestyle.

Another film set in a culturally hybrid urban milieu is Kebab Connection, which features people from diverse national and cultural backgrounds including Turkish, Greek, German, Albanian, and Italian origins all residing in the same district. This culturally multifaceted neighbourhood is introduced in the opening credits. Whilst the

117 young Turkish German protagonist İbo skateboarding around his neighbourhood Schanze in Hamburg, the camera shows people of different ethnic backgrounds, Turkish grocery stores and restaurants, old women with scarves, German policemen and homeless people. A Turkish English rap song with oriental melodies by Turkish rap singer Sultana accompanies the images. The song’s bilingualism and hybrid melody underline the cultural hybridity of the neighbourhood. The cultural heterogeneity of the area is demonstrated throughout the film, by a Turkish Kebab restaurant, a Greek restaurant, an Arab café, and a taxi rank with predominantly immigrant drivers as (main) settings of the film. In Kebab Connection Akın shows that there are no static ethnic or cultural borders by presenting how characters from various (migrant) backgrounds influence each other. The film thus negates any simplistic construction and essentialist understanding of culture and cultural identity.

The character Lefty himself and his café constitute good examples of how a culturally multifaceted urban milieu creates a culturally hybrid location and how cultural identity is formed by different cultural influences. Greek German Lefty is İbo’s best friend. With the Albanian German Valid, the three men – similar to the trio of Gabriel, Costa, and Bobby in Kurz und Schmerzlos – have grown up as second-generation immigrants in the same neighbourhood and they have been friends since childhood. Lefty is disowned by his father for refusing to work in the family’s Greek restaurant and deciding to become vegetarian and to open a vegetarian restaurant with his friend Valid. The restaurant is a trendy local café with a predominantly Arabic vegetarian cuisine, aptly named after Iraq’s capital ‘Bagdad’. Its interior design reveals influences from various cultures. The café has a young and hip clientele amidst traditional Middle Eastern tray tables and glasses; decorated with dreamcatchers (symbolic objects in Native American culture); serves Afri Cola (an old-school local German soft drink); and has the Greek instrument bouzouki hanging on the wall. The music playing in the café is a piano-based instrumental cover version of the old Turkish classical song ‘Kalamış’tan’ from the Türk Sanat Müziği genre (Turkish Art music or Ottoman Classical Music), rooted in the Ottoman Empire. The two owners’ migration backgrounds, the name of their café, the decoration, and the music create a uniquely culturally hybrid venue, never static, but ever open to new cultural negotiations.

I argue that the cultural atmosphere of Bagdad café represents the fusion of different cultures from the culturally multifaceted milieu and even includes other diverse cultural influences, such as the Aboriginal inspired dreamcatchers. Moreover, I suggest, that the café at least partially reflects Lefty’s cultural identity, extending from

118 his bouzouki, which he will play at İbo’s wedding and make his Greek father, who has called his restaurant Taverna Bouzouki proud, to his favourite Arabic vegetarian food, falafel. During the film, the viewer learns more about Lefty. He wears a longsleeve T-shirt with a Buddha image, which may symbolise his spiritual or religious bent, he smokes weed, and has passion for kung-fu films and culture. To conclude, the representation of Lefty and his café can be interpreted as the creative culturally hybrid outcome of the continuing cultural intermingling in the multicultural neighbourhood Schanze itself, as well as cultural influences from outside the milieu.

I want to elaborate on one of these ‘outside influences’ in the film that affect the construction of culturally hybrid identities. Even the very beginning of Kebab Connection exhibits how cultural impacts from outside the milieu create a unique cultural hybridity. The film starts with the East Asian martial arts genre-inspired scene in the Turkish kebab restaurant where two men are fighting over the last döner kebab.

The scene draws heavily on the aesthetics of martial arts films, with kung-fu moves, slow-motion jumps and flying fighters, and South East Asian melodies in the background. However, the kung-fu genre-inspired fight is set in a Turkish kebab restaurant and some fight scene characteristic elements are interchanged. The usual swords are changed for large kebab knives, the falling leaves the kung-fu fighters catch with their swords are replaced by napkins, the enemy’s decapitation is achieved by a lahmacun (Turkish pizza), and the music switches into oriental melodies towards the end of the scene. Moreover, during the fight, the camera occasionally captures the everyday life outside the neighbourhood Schanze through the large window in the restaurant and shows a Turkish flag behind the kebab counter. The positioning of martial arts aesthetics in a different cultural context, namely in a typical Turkish kebab diner, not only parodies the martial arts genre itself, but by mimicking it and mixing it with Turkish and German culture produces a new and unique culturally hybrid scene.

Soon the audience learns that the kung-fu fight scene is for a commercial İbo is making for his uncle Ahmet’s kebab diner called ‘King of Kebab’. İbo, who is fascinated by the martial arts film culture and dreams of shooting the first kung-fu film in Germany, produces two more spots for his uncle’s restaurant during the film.

His second commercial for his uncle’s restaurant, that also features a fight scene, draws on the Italian Western or so-called Spaghetti Western genre, combining this again with kung-fu elements. İbo plays the hero ‘Shanghai Joe’, a reference to the Italian Western movie Il mio nome e Shanghai Joe/The Fighting Fist of Shanghai Joe (1973, Mario Caiano), in which the Chinese martial artist protagonist is called Shanghai Joe.

119 İbo’s passion for kung-fu films generates further intertextuality. After smoking some weed, he hallucinates the kung-fu artist Bruce Lee, who encourages him to fight for his relationship with his pregnant girlfriend Titzi. Reika Ebert and Ann Beck (2007) have suggested that the title ‘Kebab Connection’ refers to the title of the film Chinese Connection (1972, Wei Lo)⁴⁴, starring the actor Bruce Lee.⁴⁵ Similar to the first commercial, this commercial also depicts a culturally hybrid scene. Drawing on the generic conventions of culture-clash comedy, coming-of-age film, martial arts film, and Italian Western, Kebab Connection also displays generic hybridity.

The Asian martial arts culture is shown to have influenced the characters’

identities. İbo in particular, not only reflects his passion in his commercials and his hallucinations of Bruce Lee, but also surrounds himself with symbols characteristic of this culture. Besides his Buce Lee T-shirt, he has a big Chinese yin-yang-Symbol taijitu patch on his jacket, builds a dragon-shaped buggy for his baby, and he greets a friend with martial arts moves or practises kung-fu techniques with his friends. This is one of many other cultural influences on İbo’s cultural identity in the film. His ‘Turkish’

cultural background is evident in his interactions with his family members and its importance is symbolised by the Turkish flag on the window of his atelier. Another significant cultural influence can be detected in his baseball cap and skateboard, which could be seen to represent German hip hop youth culture.

İbo’s passion for kung-fu film culture seems to have influenced his German girlfriend Titzi’s cultural identity, too. Titzi, who wants to study drama, has a large dragon tattoo on her arm, a dragon lamp in her room, and is shown cooking a spicy Chinese soup for İbo that she serves in traditional Chinese bowls. Furthermore, she has a traditional Middle Eastern tray table in her room and wears a kufiya (also known as a Palestinian scarf) round her neck in one scene.

To sum up, the examination reveals that all the different cultural influences create Lefty’s, İbo’s and Titzi’s culturally hybrid identity, making it impossible to label or categorise. The predominance of aspects of the martial arts (film) culture shows that cultural negotiations reach further than just the German majority culture and minority cultures. Diverse cultural influences, whether generational, as evident in the case of Emmi and Ali in Angst essen Seele auf, external, like the impact of martial arts culture in Kebab Connection, or between minority cultures as with Gabriel, Costa, and Bobby

44 The film is also known as Fist of Fury.

45 See Ebert and Beck (2007) on Kebab Connection’s intertextual reference to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

120 in Kurz und Schmerzlos, as I will demonstrate in my analysis of language-mixing practices in Kurz und Schmerzlos, appear in German and Turkish German cinema on migration.

In the course of this section, I want to focus on different types of language-mixing and its relation to cultural identity for two reasons. Firstly, I consider language-mixing the phenomenon that best displays the hybridisation of cultural identity; secondly, my own multilingualism and familiarity with German and Turkish allows me to recognise even subtle forms of language-mixing. Additionally, the sociolinguist Androutsopoulos (2012a), with reference to multilingualism in film, argues that ‘sociolinguistic difference in fiction may not be noticed at all, for example when films are screened to audiences with different sociolinguistic backgrounds, when knowledge of the original language is limited or unavailable, and of course when films are dubbed’

(Androutsopoulos 2012a: 304). Not only can I understand and discern the use of different accents and sociolects, but also interpret what kind of circumstance determines the language use and why.

My analysis of five of Akın’s films demonstrates various forms of language-mixing practices mostly between Turkish German and sometimes English. While the first generation prefers talking in their mother tongue Turkish, speaks German with accent, and uses Gastarbeiterdeutsch or what Androutsopoulos calls interlanguage German, the following generations are bilingual and communicate in German among themselves. Some of them are not fluent in Turkish, for instance the second-generation Turkish German characters Nejat in Auf der anderen Seite and Cahit in Gegen die Wand. These generations often speak Turkish with an accent and have not mastered Turkish vocabulary and grammar. Drawing on Androutsopoulos’s (2012a) categorisation of four language groups in a Turkish German movie, I suggest extending his useful concept by adding near-native Turkish as a language of several second- and subsequent-generation Turkish Germans to the language styles near-native German, Turkish, native German and interlanguage German. Like native German, near-native Turkish also includes dialects and sociolects. This coversation between the first-generation Turkish Yeter, who works as a prostitute in Germany, and the second-generation professor of German literature Nejat, demonstrate the characters’ different language repertoires, each philologically hybrid in themselves, which can be seen as the first level of linguistic hybridity. A second level of linguistic hybridity is the linguistic

121 hybridisation of their conversation. After Yeter and Nejat’s father Ali have become a couple, Nejat is curious about how they met each other.

Nejat: Wie habt ihr euch denn kennengelernt? (How did you meet each other?) Yeter: Er ist zu mir gekommen. (He came to me.)

Nejat: Wohin? (Whereto?)

Yeter: Hat er dir nichts erzählt? Ben bir hayat kadınıyım.⁴⁶ (Didn’t he tell you anything?

I’m a prostitute.)

Nejat: Hayat kadını ne demek. (What means prostitute?)

Yeter: Bildiğin orospu işte. Gute Nacht. (Simply a whore. Good night.)

Their conversation reveals many forms of linguistic hybridity. Nejat’s Turkish is poor so he fails to understand the Turkish euphemism ‘hayat kadını’, literally translated as

‘woman of life’. Yeter is forced to use the less flattering expression ‘orospu’ (whore) instead. Yeter’s German is perfect, but like most first-generation Turkish immigrants, she has an accent when she speaks German and is therefore more comfortable using her mother tongue. Borrowing from Androutsopoulos’s (2012a) differentiation of four language practices, she can be categorised as a near-native German user. This is true of Nejat’s father Ali, who prefers to use Turkish in his conversations with his son. Ali has a very strong dialect from his region of origin, the Black Sea Coast in Turkey. In summary, this short extract shows various kinds of linguistic hybridity in the form of an accent, a dialect, and inter- and intra-sentential language-switching or code-switching.

Language-switching is particularly common among the second- and third-generation Turkish Germans as illustrated by the characters Nejat, Sibel, and Gabriel, who are still close to their parents and therefore speak good Turkish. They frequently choose to communicate in Turkish with their parents and, with their bilingual siblings and friends, they either speak in Turkish or switch between languages. Thus, it appears that there is a generation-specific use of language and language-mixing. Cahit, though, has no contact with his parents and sister, which might explain his poor Turkish. In Gegen die Wand, when Cahit asks for Sibel’s hand in marriage, her brother Yılmaz addresses Cahit’s bad Turkish skills.

Yılmaz: Dein Türkisch ist ganz schön im Arsch. Was hast du mit deinem Türkisch gemacht? (Your Turkish is pretty much screwed. What did you do with your language?) Cahit: Weggeworfen, (Thrown away.)

46 The words put in italic are Turkish and serve to visualise the language-mixing between Turkish and German.

122 However, Cahit has not completely ‘thrown away’ his Turkish, but only uses it when he feels comfortable with someone such as his best friend Şeref. Şeref seems to be Cahit’s only connection to the Turkish language until he meets Sibel. He can have a whole conversation with Şeref in Turkish, whereas with Sibel, he favours German and rarely switches to Turkish only for one sentence or an expression. Cahit travels to Istanbul, after his release from prison, to find Sibel, and he has to talk to Sibel’s Turkish cousin Selma in order to find out where Sibel is. In this exchange, he switches from Turkish to English when he gets insecure or wants to expresses his feelings for Sibel.

Cahit: Sibel nerde? (Where is Sibel?)⁴⁷

Selma: Burda, Istanbul’da. (She is here in Istanbul.) Cahit: Beni ona götür. Lütfen. (Bring me to her. Please.) Selma: Olmaz. (No way.)

Cahit: Neden? (Why?)

Selma: Yeni bir hayatı var. Çok mutlu. Sevgilisi var, çocuğu var. Sana ihtiyacı yok. (She has a new life. She is very happy. She has a partner, she has a child. She does not need you.)

Cahit: How do you know that? When I met Sibel first time I was dead. I was dead even long time before I met her. Ben kendimi kaybettim. Çoktan. (I lost myself. Long time ago.) Then she come and drop in my life. She gives me love. And she gives me power. Anladın mı? (Do you understand?) Do you understand that? How strong are you Selma? Are you strong enough to stay between me and her?

Selma: Are you strong enough to destroy her life?

Cahit: Hayır, değilim. (No, I’m not.)

Both characters switch between Turkish and English and the foreign language English enables them to convey intimate feelings.

English also figures in Im Juli, since it is the main language the German Daniel employs in the different countries he traverses in his journey from Germany to Turkey.

Near the start of the film, the conversation between Daniel and his neighbour Kodjo shows a rather extraordinary language-mixing that not only symbolises the multiculturalism and multilingualism of their district, but also playfully demonstrates the hybridity of languages. Kodjo, who is wearing a Jamaica tricot and smoking a bong, seems to be high already when he meets Daniel at the stairs:

47 The words put in italic are Turkish and serve to visualise the language-mixing between Turkish and English.

123 Kodjo: Heeey, erste Person Singular, teacha. (Heeey, first-person singular, teacha.)

Daniel: Hallo Kodjo. (Hello Kodjo.)

Kodjo: You know we go Jamaica, drink cool pina colada and we smoke the good gun just smuggling and look for the kinny sisters. You know the kinny sisters?

Daniel: Ich glaube nicht Kodjo. (I do not think so Kodjo.)

Kodjo: No? Bi and Zu kinny (Hahaha). Digga, wo fährst du in Urlaub hin? (No? Bi kinny and Zu kinny (Hahaha). Dude, where are you going for holidays?)

Kodjo’s first language is German; but he uses English slang and an exaggerated impression of a Jamaican, to joke around with Daniel. Language hybridity is evident in English German code-switching and in Kodjo’s attempt to mimic Jamaican English, which fails and results in a new hybrid language.

Gabriel and Costa in Kurz und Schmerzlos barely use English, but Bobby sometimes interjects English expressions, which can be ascribed to his affection for American gangster movies. He also imitates the gangster screen heroes such as Al Pacino in Scarface (1983, Brian De Palma) in his gesture. A good example is when Bobby introduces Gabriel to his new girlfriend Alice with the words ‘mein badass motherfucker’ (‘my badass motherfucker’). Then, he introduces Alice and the way he talks, shows influences from the American gangster style, including a degrading word choice regarding women.

Bobby: Gabriel, weißt du, wer das ist? Ey, zum Glück, ich hatte Glück. Weißt du, so keine Szenebraut, keine bitch, kein blondes Stück Scheiße. Anstatt dessen krieg ich die Erfüllung meiner Träume Mann. Guck sie dir an, mein Engel, die Mutter meiner Kinder. (Gabriel, do you know who that is? Ey, fortunately, I had luck. You know, no scene chick, no bitch, no blonde piece of shit. Instead I get the fulfilment of my dreams, man. Look at her, an angel, the mother of my children.)

Language-mixing appears in in form of language-crossing, which differs from the above examples of language-switching or code-switching. The term was coined by Ben Rampton, and defined as ‘the use of a language which isn’t generally thought to

‘belong’ to the speaker’ (Rampton 1998: 291). According to the author the crossing appears across distinct felt ethnic and social boundaries and should not be confused with

‘belong’ to the speaker’ (Rampton 1998: 291). According to the author the crossing appears across distinct felt ethnic and social boundaries and should not be confused with