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Geborgte Narrative: Wie sich türkische Einwanderer an den Juden in Deutschland orientieren
Abstract
Der Artikel erörtert, wie deutsche Türken jüdische Tropen benützen, um einen analogen Diskurs zu ihrer sozialen Position in der deutschen Gesellschaft herzustellen. gestützt auf die Literatur zur Integration von Einwanderen wird argumentiert, dass typischerweise neue Einwanderer ältere Migrantengruppen als Vorbilder für ihren eigenen Integrationsprozess benutzen. Sie tun das im vorliegenden Fall, indem sie sich das sozio-kulturelle Repertoire der Juden als historisch wichtigster Minorität für ihre Leit-Erzählungen borgen. Dies wird vor allem erreicht mittels der Parallelisierung von Rassismus zu Antisemitismus und dessen Gebrauch als politisches Modell für Forderungen gegenüber dem deutschen Staat. Ein Blick auf die Schriften türkischer und jüdischer Autoren in Deutschland zeigt überdies, dass Juden und Türken sich wechselseitig besonders bezüglich ihrer Stellung in der deutschen Gesellschaft beobachten und diese Stellung in Form triadischer Beziehungen reflektieren. Um die Integration von Einwanderern zu verstehen, müssen wir uns deshalb nicht nur mit der Beziehung zwischen Staat und Migranten befassen, sondern auch dem Verhältnis zwischen Einwanderergruppen untereinander. This article examines how German Turks employ the German Jewish trope in order to establish an analogous discourse for their own position in German society. Drawing on the literature on immigrant incorporation, we argue that typically, immigrants take older, more established minority groups as a model in their incorporation process. Here, we examine how German Turks formulate and enact their own incorporation into German society. They do that, we argue, in that they borrow as leading narratives the socio-cultural repertoire of Germany's principal earlier minority, German Jewry. This is accomplished especially in relation to racism and anti-Semitism and as a political model in terms of making claims against the German state. Moreover, a look at writings by Turkish and Jewish authors in Germany demonstrates that Jews and Turks take notice of each other's position in German society and think in terms of triadic relations. We argue that in order to understand immigrant incorporation, it is not sufficient to look at state-immigrant relations only; we also need to look at the immigrant groups' relationships to other minority groups.
... This experience is both unique to Muslims in Europe's postcolonial/postimperial age and also indicative of broader social tendencies in modern forms of cultural stratification. I have thus drawn parallels to the Jewish experience in Europe (as do both scholars of Muslim life in Europe, and Muslims in Europe, themselves) and the Black experience in the USA (Bodemann and Yurdakul 2005;Yurdakul 2006;Özyurek 2018). Yet the perceivable similarities between the ways in which Jewishness in Europe (from premodernity through the 20th century), and Blackness in the USA (from the 17th century to the present) have been constructed as uncivil cultural otherness tell us less about what European Jews, Black Americans, and European Muslims have in common than they do about the deeply discomforting realities of the societies in which we live. ...
Positing Muslim positionality in Europe as an undercaste helps to make sense of how cultural stratification, rooted in associations with incivility, has resulted in deep and unrelenting inequalities experienced by diverse Muslims. Based on two years of ethnographic research with a Muslim community in Berlin as well as a survey of secondary research, this paper both theorizes and empirically showcases the process by which Muslims have become synonymous with incivility, and how this affects opportunities and inclusion across the educational, economic, residential, and private spheres. By drawing parallels with other instances of caste-based status differentiation in the West, specifically the Jewish experience in Europe and Black experience in the USA, it further illuminates how cultural stratification through associations with incivility (as a modern secular coding of impurity) that endures for generations functions in the contemporary world. Employing the concept of caste deepens the cultural turn that has replaced economic or legal explanations of Muslim marginality in Europe. And it awakens a dormant sociological vocabulary that allows for a more precise theoretical understanding of this empirical social phenomenon and thereby the possibilities—and limits—of pluralism in modernity.
... Here, the use of the term 'colonial racism' seems to promise both a conceptual extension towards the idea of colonial continuity and to attach heightened significance to discrimination against minorities by suggesting analogies to an incriminated colonial past. However, without specification, the prefix 'colonial' and its respective compounds become 'borrowed narratives' (Bodemann and Yurdakul, 2005) in that they condense the experiences of colonized people into catchphrases and, at best, evoke stereotypical iconographies of colonial history. Furthermore, to turn a 'racist discourse' into a 'colonial racist discourse' suggests a distinction between dark-skinned and fair-skinned minority groups and -intentionally or unintentionally -supports a hierarchy of victim status and promotes the logic of competitive memory. ...
On the basis of two case studies – the media controversies over the question of maintaining or abolishing the N-Wort in children’s books and the renaming of a street in Berlin, the Gröbenufer, as May-Ayim-Ufer – this essay sheds light on recent negotiations of colonial memory and various manifestations of memory politics in Germany. It argues that as a result of political and social power struggles, activists of memory politics add to the preservation of the existing inappropriate rankings of horror and competition of victims. Thus, in in the long run, current non-governmental memory-political activities will turn out to be counter-productive, will undermine political goals that are in principle desirable and will prevent the emergence of politically more productive forms of colonial memory.
The staging of history in literature is engaged in dynamic exchange with society’s memory discourses and in this context, literature is generally seen as playing a creative role as a formative medium in memory cultures. For some time, however, many feel that established concepts of Cultural Memory Studies need to be reconsidered for multiethnic societies. The assumption is that official memory cultures tend to exclude people with a migrant background from identity-forming discourses about the past. Using Germany as an example, this paper argues, first, that the question of memory in multiethnic societies needs to be reconsidered indeed, but in a different direction than has been assumed so far, and, second, that much-discussed concepts such as the post-migrant paradigm or multidirectional memory tend to circumvent the problems at hand rather than contribute to their solution. The paper therefore discusses the preconditions for a literary-theoretical engagement with this socio-political issue and the direction in which an alternative conceptualization would have to go – that is, not a new theory or method, but a novel perspective that should be the basis for future theory building .
Rather than confining the notion of a »shared history« to, either the common history of a country’s native population, or to the history since migration shared by minorities and receiving society, this paper proposes to focus on actual links between the histories of Germany as the receiving society and the histories of the new Germans’ countries of origin. Using literary texts and discussing a concrete example, it brings such shared histories to the fore and explores how they open up national memory discourses transnationall y. The underlying vision is that these important components of multiethnic societies have the potential to show a way in which national and transnational memory landscapes as a whole could be transformed. In this sense, the metaphor of »Migration into Other Pasts« may be rephrased as migration not »into the past of others« but a territorial move within one common shared history . The paper therefore shows that the prerequisites for a literary-theoretical examination of the question of memory culture in multiethnic societies and its literary representations must be sought in the offerings of literature itself. The literary example, Orkun Ertener’s novel Lebt (Alive/Live! 2014), with its numerous entangled and interweaving shared histories shows particularly clearly how literature can function as a drive or even theory generator for concepts to be developed – instead of, conversely, imposing readymade concepts on both German multiethnic societies and its literary production.
The novel perspective of this paper can be summarized in the inversion of the conventional point of departure: Instead of looking for a way to include people with a migrant background into the German memory culture, the first question to be asked should be how, in the age of the general recognition of concepts of entangled history, the idea could arise and persist for so long that migrants with Turkish roots, for instance, have no relation to German history. By focusing on the historical connectivities between Germans and new Germans, Orkun Ertener’s novel Lebt chooses a different approach in this regard. It provides a transnational expansion of memory discourses on German, Greek, Jewish and Turkish/Ottoman history and thus opens up a new and long overdue memory space that is of central interest to multiethnic societies in Germany and beyond. As it seems, it takes writers who are more interested in entangled histories than in history as a resource for identity to get this right. Ertener undoubtedly belongs to this type of writers, as evidenced not least by the fact that he cites or refers to some of the most important historical studies for his context from Mark Mazower’s Salonica – City of Ghosts , a standard reference on the multiethnic and multicultural history of Thessaloniki, to Turkey, the Jews and the Holocaust by Corry Guttstadt who challenged the myth of a Jewish-friendly policy in Turkey. Ertener’s novel Lebt is saturated with the interconnected histories of various ethnic groups and may therefore serve as a blueprint for a vision of memory culture in a multiethnic society .
In conclusion, the essay outlines that developing an alternative concept of memory and historical consciousness in multiethnic societies and their literary representations cannot be based on much-discussed concepts such as post-migration or multidirectional memory. Although a superficial glance suggests that they might be the obvious choice for the topic of this paper, a novel take on multiethnic memory landscapes must start from specific shared histories and their entanglements. The paper therefore proposes that a bottom-up development of theoretical-methodological work is necessary in the case of representations of memory in multiethnic societies. This approach must highlight how links between the histories of the receiving societies and the histories of the migrants’ countries of origin are, or could become, important components of an alternative memory culture in multiethnic landscapes – and that these links hold the potential for transforming national and transnational memory landscapes as a whole.
n der Schweizerischen Öffentlichkeit wird der Islam seit einigen Jahren wiederkehrend problematisiert. 2009 erreichte die öffentliche Debatte mit der Volksabstimmung über ein Minarettbau-Verbot einen Höhepunkt. Dies löste in der Folge auch breitere Diskussionen über Religion in der Gesellschaft aus. In dieser Arbeit wird aufgezeigt, wie sich aus einem lokalen Konflikt um ein Minarett seit 2006 eine Anti-Islam-Kampagne entwickelte, die 2009 in einem Minarettbau-Verbot in der Schweizer Bundesverfassung gipfelte. Es wird dabei die Herausbildung einer spezifischen Islamfeindlichkeit aus einer allgemeinen Fremdenfeindlichkeit nachgezeichnet, die mit einer zunehmenden Politisierung von Religion einhergeht. Die Wechselwirkung zwischen lokalen Ereignissen und einem übergeordneten Islamdiskurs beförderte zudem eine Konfliktdynamik, der sich die Akteure kaum entziehen konnten und die zu einer Ausweitung des Konflikts und einer Verhärtung der Fronten führte. Ausgehend vom lokalen Minarettstreit wird die zunehmende Vernetzung von islamophoben Aktivisten im deutschsprachigen Raum beschrieben und insbsondere die Rolle der „Islam-Experten“ untersucht, welche den Bau von Minaretten in der Öffentlichkeit erfolgreich als ein dringliches Problem von allgemeiner Relevanz darzustellen vermochten.
Das Konzept der Diaspora hat in den vergangenen Jahren in der akademischen Diskussion eine hohe Konjunktur erfahren. War der
Bedeutungsgehalt des Begriffs historisch auf die klassischen Fälle von teils gewaltsamer Vertreibung, teils freiwilliger Neusiedlung
der jüdischen und griechischen, sowie schließlich der armenischen Gemeinden beschränkt, so bezieht er sich inzwischen auf
quasi alle außerhalb ihres ursprünglichen Territoriums lebenden ethnischen Gruppen (Tölölyan 1991). Dieser Schritt markiert
einen sowohl theoretischen wie auch politischen Einschnitt, der in einem engen Zusammenhang mit den Debatten über die kulturellen
Effekte der Globalisierung steht. Die Wiederkehr der Diaspora kann gewissermaßen als exemplarische Repräsentation einer Vergesellschaftungsform
verstanden werden, die mit unseren nach wie vor territorial verorteten Kategorien bricht und in ihren transnationalen Bezügen
die Grenzen eines „methodologischen Nationalismus“ (Beck 2004) aufzeigt. Das begriffliche Gegenüber der Diaspora bildet demzufolge
der Nationalstaat. Anschließend an den postkolonialen Diskurs scheinen diasporische Gemeinschaften als alternative Entwürfe
deterritorialisierter kultureller Identitäten auf, die im strikten Gegensatz zu nationalstaatlich organisierten Gesellschaften
konstruiert sind (vgl. Appadurai 1994; Clifford 1997; kritisch dazu Anthias 1998). Wie ich im Folgenden zeigen möchte, übersieht
diese behauptete Fundamentalopposition, dass und in welcher Weise Migrationspopulationen nach wie vor durch nationalstaatliche
Regimes und deren institutionelle Zwänge gekennzeichnet sind. Im Unterschied zu einer Position, die insbesondere das kosmopolitische
und grenzüberschreitende Potenzial von Diaspora-Gemeinschaften unterstreicht, will ich insofern gerade auf deren Einbettung
in jeweils nationalstaatliche Rahmen verweisen, in und gegenüber denen die lokalen Diasporas ihre kulturelle Eigenständigkeit
zu behaupten versuchen. Ein solches Vorgehen ist mit der migrationssoziologischen Annahme verknüpft, dass Einwanderung als
Prozess aufzufassen ist, den sowohl die aufnehmende Gesellschaft als auch die Immigranten selbst strukturieren. Es handelt
sich dabei nicht um einen symmetrischen Prozess, sondern um einen zu Lasten der Einwanderer ungleich gewichteten, denn diese
müssen auf die politischen und symbolischen Ordnungsmuster Bezug nehmen, die in den verschiedenen Aufnahmegesellschaften maßgeblich
sind (Bauböck 1992). Diesem Spannungsverhältnis soll am Beispiel der Migration russischsprachiger Juden nach Deutschland nachgegangen
werden.
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