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There is a new wall rising in the city of Berlin. To cross this wall you have to go to the city’s central and northern districts—to Kreuzberg, Neukölln and Wedding—and you will find yourself in a world unknown to the majority of Berliners. Until recently, most Berliners held to the illusion that living together with some 300,000 Muslim immigrants and children of immigrants was basically working. Take Neukölln. The district is proud of the fact that it houses citizens of 165 nations. Some 40 percent of these, by far the largest group, are Turks and Kurds; the second-largest group consists of Arabs. Racially motivated attacks occur regularly in Brandenburg, the former East German state that surrounds Berlin, where foreigners are few (about 2 percent). But such attacks hardly ever happen in Neukölln. As Stefanie Vogelsang, a councilwoman from Neukölln, put it to me, residents talk about “our Turks” in an unmistakably friendly way, although they are less friendly when it comes to Arabs, who arrived decades after the Turks and often illegally.
But tolerance of Muslim immigrants began to change in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. Parallel to the declarations of “unconditional solidarity” with Americans by the German majority, rallies of another sort were taking place in Neukölln and Kreuzberg. Bottle rockets were set off from building courtyards: a poor man’s fireworks, sporadic, sparse and joyful; two rockets here, three rockets there. Still, altogether, hundreds of rockets were shooting skyward in celebration of the attack, just as most Berliners were searching for words to express their horror. For many German residents in Neukölln and Kreuzberg, Vogelsang recalled not long ago, that was the first time they stopped to wonder who their neighbors really were.
When a broader German public began concerning itself with the parallel Muslim world arising in its midst, it was primarily thanks to three female authors, three rebellious Muslim musketeers: Ates, who in addition to practicing law is the author of “The Great Journey Into the Fire”; Necla Kelek (“The Foreign Bride”); and Serap Cileli (“We’re Your Daughters, Not Your Honor”). About the same age, all three grew up in Germany; they speak German better than many Germans and are educated and successful. But they each had to risk much for their freedom; two of them narrowly escaped Hatun Surucu’s fate. Necla Kelek was threatened by her father with a hatchet when she refused to greet him in a respectful manner when he came home. Seyran Ates was lucky to survive a shooting attack on the women’s shelter that she founded in Kreuzberg. And Serap Cileli, when she was 13 years old, tried to kill herself to escape her first forced marriage; later she was taken to Turkey and married against her will, then she returned to Germany with two children from this marriage and took refuge in a women’s shelter to escape her father’s violence. Taking off from their own experiences, the three women describe the grim lives and sadness of Muslim women in that model Western democracy known as Germany.
Reading their books brought to mind a forgotten scene from seven years ago. Every time my daughter, who was 14 at the time, invited her schoolmates for a sleepover, the Muslim fathers would be standing at the door at 10 p.m. to pick up their daughters. My wife, an immigrant herself, was indignant. I didn’t like these fathers’ dismissive, almost threatening posture, either, but I was a long way from protesting. Nor did I worry much when my daughter told me that one or another girl in her class was not taking biology or physical education and no longer going on field trips.
For a German of my generation, one of the most holy legacies of the past was the law of tolerance. We Germans in particular had no right to force our highly questionable customs onto other cultures. Later I learned from occasional newspaper reports and the accounts of friends that certain Muslim girls in Kreuzberg and Neukölln went underground or vanished without a trace. Even those reports gave me no more than a momentary discomfort in our upscale district of Charlottenburg.
But the books of the three Muslim dissidents now tell us what Germans like me didn’t care to know. What they report seems almost unbelievable. They describe an everyday life of oppression, isolation, imprisonment and brutal corporal punishment for Muslim women and girls in Germany, a situation for which there is only one word: slavery.
Seyran Ates estimates that perhaps half of young Turkish women living in Germany are forced into marriage every year. In the wake of these forced marriages often come violence and rape; the bride has no choice but to fulfill the duties of the marriage arranged by her parents and her in-laws. One side-effect of forced marriage is the psychological violation of the men involved. Although they are the presumed beneficiaries of this custom, men are likewise forbidden to marry whom they want. A groom who chooses his own wife faces threats, too. In such cases, according to Seyran Ates and Serap Cileli, the groom as well as the bride must go underground to escape the families’ revenge.
Heavily veiled women wearing long coats even in summer are becoming an increasingly familiar sight in German Muslim neighborhoods. According to Necla Kelek’s research, they are mostly under-age girls who have been bought—often for a handsome payment—in the Turkish heartland villages of Anatolia by mothers whose sons in Germany are ready to marry. The girls are then flown to Germany, and “with every new imported bride,” Kelek says, “the parallel society grows.” Meanwhile, Ates summarizes, “Turkish men who wish to marry and live by Shariah can do so with far less impediment in Berlin than in Istanbul.”
Before the murder of Hatun Surucu there were enough warnings to engage the Germans in a debate about the parallel society growing in their midst. There have been 49 known “honor crimes,” most involving female victims, during the past nine years—16 in Berlin alone. Such crimes are reported in the “miscellaneous” column along with other family tragedies and given a five-line treatment. Indeed, it’s possible that the murder of Hatun Surucu never would have made the headlines at all but for another piece of news that stirred up the press. Just a few hundred yards from where Surucu was killed, at the Thomas Morus High School, three Muslim students soon openly declared their approval of the murder. Shortly before that, the same students had bullied a fellow pupil because her clothing was “not in keeping with the religious regulations.” Volker Steffens, the school’s director, decided to make the matter public in a letter to students, parents and teachers. More than anything else, it was the students’ open praise of the murder that made the crime against Hatun Surucu the talk of Berlin and soon of all Germany.
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After 1945, Germany, in the process of reconstruction, needed great numbers of workers and initiated recruitment campaigns in the poor countries of Europe and on the Mediterranean rim: in Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Tunisia and Morocco. The arrival of the 100,000th immigrant worker, in the 1950’s, was cause for celebration; the exhausted man climbed out of a train at a German station and was immediately handed a check. But from the beginning, the invitation came with a certain reservation on the part of the host and the proviso, often repeated, that Germany was not really a country of immigrants, not a melting pot. It was no accident that the foreign workers were called gastarbeiter, guest workers. Guests are expected to leave after a while.
The first Muslim immigrants came without their families. They slaved away repairing streets or working below ground, generally slept in men-only dormitories and for the most part had the same expectations for themselves as their employers had for them: they would work for a few years, send as much of their earnings home as possible and then, if all went well, drive back to their villages in a used Mercedes with enough capital to buy a house.
Naturally, things did not work out as expected. The Swiss author Max Frisch recognized the contradiction early on: “Workers were called,” he wrote, “and human beings came.” These were people who wanted their families to join them, people who after a long, hard working life wanted to spend their remaining years in Germany, people who wished to provide their children with an education and a better future in that country. Germany did not give guest workers passports or the vote, but it did repay them by incorporating them into the social system and giving them the opportunity for social advancement. A result was the rise of a Muslim middle class—relatively broad in comparison with those in France or in England—contributing around 39 billion euros annually to the gross national product and billions to the national pension funds. But as the German economic miracle came to an end, the most important condition of this precarious idyll changed. Although active recruitment was stopped as early as 1973, more and more Turks and Kurds moved to Germany, in accord with a ruling on reuniting families. And these parents, wives, husbands and children took their traditional lifestyle onto the German streets. Whereas during the first years of immigration, Turkish women wore Western clothing, they now appeared in long flowery skirts, hand-knitted jackets and tightly bound head scarves. The plastic trunks in which they had brought sacks full of dry beans, bulgur wheat and chickpeas metamorphosed into Turkish grocery stands. And with the food and the family members, traditional celebrations in the Muslim districts gradually became more and more like those back home as well. In the back rooms of the vegetable stands and halal butchers, prayer rooms sprang up, and in time these rooms became mosques. The German-Turkish author Necla Kelek sums it up this way in “The Foreign Bride”: “The guest workers turned into Turks, and the Turks turned into Muslims.”
Growing unemployment in Germany (now 4.8 million people, roughly 12 percent of the work force) hit the Muslim immigrants doubly hard—especially the youth, who frequently drop out of school before obtaining a diploma. “Seventy percent of the newcomers,” according to Otto Schily, a former minister of the interior, referring to the period since 2002, “land on welfare the day of their arrival.” Whole enclaves sprang up consisting of extended families living on the dole.
Necla Kelek asked a group of “import brides” who had been living in Germany for years how they had actually prepared for their future in Germany. Their answer: incredulous laughter. Prepare? How and for what? “But how can you stand living here?” Necla Kelek went on. “You don’t have anything to do with this country, you despise its culture and the way people live here.” But we have everything we need here, was the answer; we don’t need the Germans.
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(Posted on December 8, 2005)