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For many Turks, Germany is home
Graham Bowley/IHT, Monday, October 04, 2004, International Herald Tribune
As EU debates Turkey's membership, assimilation and identity are at issue
ESSEN, Germany
Arslan Kaynar's father left Zonguldak, a Turkish coal town on the Black
Sea, in 1969. Arslan followed two years later and got a job in one of
the great Krupp steel factories along the Ruhr in this industrial part
of western Germany. As a Muslim, he went to a mosque - which had been
converted from a sausage plant - until arsonists razed it in 1995.
One
recent morning, Kaynar sat in the new Mehmet the Conqueror Mosque,
which opened three years ago in Essen, breakfasting on Turkish bread,
white squares of cheese and olives. The mosque has six clocks beneath
the dome showing the times of daily prayers, a chandelier from Turkey
and one of the first minarets to be built in Germany. The minaret looks
out over a region populated by one of the largest communities of Turks
in Western Europe, most of whom now consider Germany their permanent
home.
"I want to stay here," said Kaynor, 45, a stocky man with
a reddish-brown mustache and serious brown eyes. "We have bought a
house. My children want to stay here. We in Germany are already in the
European Union. Here is home."
On Wednesday, European
commissioners in Brussels are likely to give their approval for Turkey,
which has been a member of NATO since 1952, to begin talks to join the
European Union. The long-awaited decision will end an agonizing debate,
one that has roiled the EU's political elite, about the true borders of
Europe and the nature of European identity.
The EU was stretched
in May when 10 new countries, mainly in Central and Eastern Europe,
joined the club of 15 Western nations. In recent months doubts have
been raised in the EU about whether Turkey, with a foot in Asia and a
foot in Europe, truly belongs alongside countries like France, Germany
and Britain and whether embracing this vast, poor and mainly Muslim
nation of around 70 million people could precipitate an explosive wave
of migration across the Continent and a clash of values in the West.
Yet
in the crucible of the Ruhrgebiet, the industrial region around Essen,
East has lived with West for 50 years. It is here that answers can be
found about whether an earlier wave of Turkish migrants has integrated
successfully and what it means today to be European.
Of the 3.8
million ethnic Turks now in Western Europe, more than two million of
them have settled in Germany, forming the country's biggest foreign
population. When they started to arrive, mainly in the early 1960s,
they were drawn by jobs.
The Ruhrgebiet, a region dotted with
spires and churches, had earlier sucked in Prussians, Poles and other
migrants to work in the booming coal mines and steel mills.
In
the '60s, the German government wanted the Turks; it needed extra hands
to work the lathes and foundries of the nation's postwar
Wirtschaftswunder, its economic miracle. But by the late 1970s and
1980s, when industry began to decline, Germany encouraged Turks to
return home.
"Germans hoped that tomorrow they would wake up and
all the Turks would be gone," said Helmut Schweitzer, who works with
immigrants on behalf of the city government here.
But the "guest
workers" had put down roots, so much so that their compatriots back
home began referring to them as "almanci," or German-like: rich,
comfortable, some even consuming pork.
Their wives and families joined them in the West, and they had children in their new home.
"People
started realizing they were not going back to Turkey," said Lale
Yalcin-Hechmann, research professor at the Max Planck Institute for
Social Anthropology in Halle, eastern Germany, who was born in Turkey.
"Turkey was not forgotten, but it became a place to go for your
holiday, just like for other Germans."
Today, a majority of
Germany's Turks have integrated successfully. Take Selgün Calisir, for
example. In 1969, his father left Istanbul to become a carpenter in
Duisberg, about 30 kilometers, or 20 miles, along the Ruhr valley from
Essen. It is a city dominated by the chimneys of the Thyssen steel
company.
After attending college, the younger Calisir opened a travel agency.
In his job, he flies Turks back to their homeland. Now he has expanded and runs a tax consultancy and a bank in Duisberg.
Depending
on the day, he drives a sleek, black Mercedes-Benz or a blue BMW sport
utility vehicle, twin symbols of German middle-class solidity.
"I
feel both German and Turkish," Calisir said, standing in his
broad-windowed office in a street lined with Turkish dress shops and
jewelry stores. "Yes, I go to the mosque, but not that often. We take
our son 10 kilometers to a school where there are no Turks so he has to
speak German.
"But now I am buying a plot of land for my own house in a German neighborhood."
Turks
like Calisir offer a hopeful picture for any future westward migration
triggered by Turkey's inclusion in the EU. Yet other Turks here have
been less able or willing to part with aspects of their native identity.
In
the streets close to Arslan Kaynar's mosque, women wearing head scarves
push their children past the Turkish food stores and shops. The head
scarves, interpreted by Germans as symbols of political Islam, have
suddenly begun to appear again - a sign, according to Bernd Kassner of
the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, the local newspaper, of a new
"de-integration" by third- and fourth-generation Turks. Their retreat
into stricter Islam, he says, may be caused by the economic downturn,
which has hit the Turkish community hard, but also by a search for
identity.
"They are trying to express themselves by being not
German," Kassner said. "Then there is the embrace of Islam as the
religion of the underprivileged."
Islam has taken extreme forms
in the Ruhrgebiet: Milli Görüs, a group promoting a strict
interpretation of Islamic law, has its headquarters in Cologne, close
to Essen. The self-styled caliph of Cologne, Metin Kaplan, a militant
Islamic cleric and head of a separate group, has called for the violent
overthrow of the secular Turkish state.
The return to Islamic
roots among some Turks has hardened opposition to immigrants among some
in the ethnic German population. Rightist extremists were among those
suspected of burning down the mosque in Essen.
But unlike
Eastern Germany, where xenophobic parties scored high in elections last
month, the western region has been generally tolerant toward its
immigrants.
Still, there are new calls for Turks to do more to
assimilate. "There is still lots to do on integration," Wolfgang
Reiniger, the center-right mayor of Essen, said in an interview at the
town hall.
This angers the Turkish community. It believes it
should be able to retain a dual identity and blames the government for
policies that they say keep Turks in their ghettos.
"Germans
attack us for not assimilating, for being in a ghetto, but it is their
problem, not ours," said Oylar Saguner, a burly man who runs the
German-Turkish Language and Cultural Institute in Essen. "They need to
accept us."
Notions that Turks are different from Western
Europeans were stirred in the past two weeks by a row in Europe over
the adoption by Turkey of a new penal code. The code was viewed in the
EU as essential to demonstrating Ankara's embrace of the western rule
of law.
But Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
considered adding a clause criminalizing adultery. And the spreading
conviction that Turkish values were not Europe's - that the eastern
country, while modernizing, was still not modern enough - prompted
Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democratic Union in Germany, to
call for membership talks to be postponed.
Frits Bolkestein, an
outspoken EU commissioner from the Netherlands, warned of the
"Islamization" of Europe and dwelt on the 1683 siege of Vienna,
conjuring up the prospect of a Europe and Christendom overrun by
marauding Turks. The imagery resonated with older, conservative
communities in Germany, Austria, Netherlands and France.
Erdogan
eventually dropped the adultery law, but the incident revived the
debate on Turkey in the EU. This debate has to do partly with a
convulsive fear that Turks would take Europe's scarce jobs. But it also
reflects visions of what the EU should be: a loose, sprawling trade
pact, which is what Britain wants, or a cohesive political entity, able
to exert itself powerfully in world politics, which is the French
ideal. Critics of Turkish membership suspect that British and American
support for Ankara is motivated by the fervent hope that Turkey's
impoverished population of 70 million will scupper Europhiles' dreams
of a strong federalist union centered on Berlin and Paris.
But
just as some Europeans cling to anti-Turkish views, others are becoming
more accepting of the foreigners who already live in their midst. In
Essen, the immigrant influence is clear in the meat kebab stalls at the
city's main train station, busy with hungry Germans. But change is also
evident in more subtle ways.
According to Schweitzer, of the
Essen municipal government, Germans are now recognizing the true extent
of immigration in their country.
"We are really an immigrant
nation and don't know it yet," Schweitzer said. "We are traditionally
very monolingual - one citizenship, one passport, one language. But we
are gradually accepting other languages. Germany is becoming a normal
immigrant country."
That acceptance of a multiethnic future
means Turkey will probably get the go-ahead this week to begin
negotiations to join the EU. Two weeks ago, Günter Verheugen, the EU
commissioner in charge of enlargement and a German citizen, said no
"outstanding obstacles" remained on the table. The commission, however,
may attach strict conditions requiring Turkey to make progress on human
rights and democracy. After Verheugen and his fellow commissioners vote
Wednesday, their opinion will be used as the basis for a final decision
by European leaders on Dec. 17.
It will end 40 years of talk:
Turkey has been offered promises of EU membership for decades. An
affirmative decision in December will also reunite the Turkish diaspora
in Essen with their country. But while a momentous event for Turks, it
will say as much about how Western Europe is changing.
In a
classroom in the Essen suburb of Kartenberg one recent evening, four
Germans read from textbooks as they struggled to learn Turkish. "I
teach in a primary school where 60 percent of the pupils are Turkish,"
said Barbara Wahl, a 59-year-old German. "Their mothers don't speak any
German at home." Her husband, Dirk, 60, a retired engineer, said: "Our
daughter married a Turkish man. He speaks very good German, but we tell
him to speak Turkish to his children."
A third student, Axel
Buchmann, 48, a dentist, said he was learning Turkish to start a
business helping Germans get their teeth fixed across the Bosporus.
"I am not afraid they will overwhelm our identity," he said. "I believe in my culture. It is strong enough to survive."
International Herald Tribune
Copyright © 2004 The International Herald Tribune
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