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The “Guest” Who Refuses to Work, the “Terrorist” Who Contemplates Global Hunger: Minorities in Fatih Akin Films

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2020

İpek A. Çelik Rappas
İpek A. Çelik Rappas*
Affiliation:
Koç University
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Extract

In her book that explores Turkish migrant organizations in Germany, sociologist Gökçe Yurdakul detects a historical transformation in the political representation of migrants and minorities from the 1970s through the 2000s. She marks six historical events that lead to this transformation: labor migration (1961–1972), the introduction of family reunification law (1973–1979), post-1980 military coup asylum seekers from Turkey (1980–1988), the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath of exacerbating xenophobia against non-German minorities (1989–1998), the introduction of the new citizenship law (1999), and finally the terrorist attacks on September 11 (2001–present). According to Yurdakul, these events mark a gradual shift in the minority rights debate. While the first minority organizations were formed around labor rights, gradually, due to these landmark events and laws, their demands shifted toward political and social rights of citizenship, and identitarian rights, such as the right “to exist as Muslims and as Europeans.”

Type
Review Essay: Screening History
Information
Central European History , Volume 53 , Special Issue 2: Burdens and Beginnings: Rebuilding East and West Germany after Nazism , June 2020 , pp. 453 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association, 2020

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References

1 Yurdakul, Gökçe, From Guest Workers into Muslims: The Transformation of Turkish Immigrant Associations in Germany (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 24Google Scholar.

2 Gueneli, Berna, Fatih Akin's Cinema and the New Sound of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Gueneli, Fatih Akin's Cinema and the New Sound of Europe, 91.

4 For a detailed analysis of this transition in Hamburg and in Soul Kitchen, see Halle, Randall, “Großstadtfilm and Gentrification Debates: Localism and Social Imaginary in Soul Kitchen and Eine flexible Frau,” New German Critique 120, vol. 40, no. 3 (2013): 171–191CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Stephen Mulvey, “CIA Flights Controversy Here to Stay,” BBC News, February 16, 2007 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6363361.stm).

6 Christoph Gröner, “Fatih Akin über seinen Kurnaz-Film. ‘Ich wäre in Guantanamo zerbrochen,’” Suddeutsche Zeitung, August 23, 2011 (https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/fatih-akin-ueber-seinen-kurnaz-film-ich-waere-zerbrochen-1.477696).

7 Thomas Meaney and Saskia Schäfer, “The Neo-Nazi Murder Trial Revealing Germany's Darkest Secrets,” The Guardian, December 15, 2016 (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/15/neo-nazi-murders-revealing-germanys-darkest-secrets).

8 Meaney and Schäfer, “The Neo-Nazi Murder Trial Revealing Germany's Darkest Secrets.”

9 Aus dem Nights [sic]—Press Conference: Cannes 2017, Festival de Cannes, May 26, 2017 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xByJcXA8vAU&lc=z12adnk5qvmbv1xla22ij1bjgtayz1azo04).