About a year ago, I flew into Berlin on my way back to the States for a short stop over to visit a friend. He picked me up from the airport and pointed out landmarks as we took the train to his flat on the East Side of Berlin. Not speaking a word of German, and not having traveled west of Istanbul for almost a year, I felt a strange combination of foreign-ness and familiarity. I could not understand the language or city around me, but felt a familiar comfort in the order and cleanliness of the German city; young people reading on public transportation, going to familiar stores and purchasing familiar products.
Once we arrived in Daniel's neighbourhood, however, I began to feel familiarity in a different way. The kebap shop next to his house declared with a handwritten sign "Help wanted" in Turkish, and I heard Turkish on the lips of adolescent boys walking by. Daniel lives in one of Berlin's neighbourhoods highly populated and influenced by Turkish immigrants, most of which first came to Germany under its policy of importing "guest workers" the country hoped would leave after their contracts were up. As many countries across Europe have discovered, however, such policies rarely work as planned. "Guests" often do not want to leave their few years are up, yet because the "host" countries have done little in the way of integration, tension often arises between new and older residents.
Many individuals more qualified than I have written much on the subject of the Turkish diaspora in Germany, so I'll withhold any grand statements. But one common observation is that the immigration patterns from Turkey to Germany tend to consist mostly of Turks from smaller towns and villages, rather than larger cities. Additionally, there is also an idea that Turkish communities in Germany respond to the life in a country that treats them more as guests than residents or citizens with a more inward, insular approach, magnifying the influence and importance on traditional values and customs.
Almost all second-generation youth experience unique ways of fusing identity and culture, but one aspect of the second generation Turks in Germany, and especially Berlin, that has been deemed particularly press-worthy is the idea of queer youth navigating the spaces of a socially liberal urban landscape, and a family and community that may be not even recognize the idea of homosexuality or queer identities.
A piece this week in the International Herald Tribune explores these issues in Berlin, an international city with "an openly gay and highly popular mayor" and a large Muslim population.
The writer visits a monthly club party called "Gayhane," filled with gay, lesbian and bi-sexual identified people of Turkish or Arab background. Hane is Turkish and Arabic for "house" - perhaps this is also a play on words of the "Meyhane" - an establishment where men will gather, drink, and smoke.
"When you're here, it's as if you're putting on a mask, leaving the everyday outside and just having fun," said a 22-year-old Turkish man who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear that he would be ostracized or worse if his family found out about his sexual orientation.
Ideas on homosexuality in Turkish communities is an incredibly complicated discussion beyond the scope of this post. What interests me in this article is this tension in these Turkish diasporas relating to sexual and gendered identities, this navigation of two or more languages, identities, cultures and expectations.
Safety and secrecy come up regularly in conversations with guests, who laugh and dance but also frequently look over their shoulders. To be a gay man or lesbian with an immigrant background invites trouble here in two very different ways.
"Depending on which part of Berlin I go to, in one I get punched in the mouth because I'm a foreigner, and in the other because I'm a queen," said Fatma Souad, the event's organizer and master of ceremonies. Souad, 43, a transgender performer born in Ankara as a boy named Ali, has put on the party for over a decade.
During my visit to Berlin, most of my feelings of familiarity and foreignness were a temporary state as a visitor attempting to navigate this new terrain in relation to other experiences. But the everyday navigation of men quoted above is just one aspect of their lives in the city. Much writing and theory has grown out of or been inspired by this aspect, this idea - I was pleased to see a brief exploration of such issues raised in this article.
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