2001 was the 40th Anniversary of Turkish Migration to Germany, marking four decades after the first Turkish workers began joining the ranks of Italian, Spaniard, and other migrant laborers coming north in search of employment from countries around the Mediterranean. The anniversary was celebrated with meetings, panel discussions, concerts, radio shows, and almost endless articles and editorials in newspapers. The highlight of the year, one might say, was “Turkish Day,” bringing Turkish immigrants from all over Germany to Berlin for a parade.

A world renowned author once described “a migrant's vision” in terms of a “triple disruption,” one that occurs when migrants lose their place in the world, enter into a language that is alien to them, and find themselves “surrounded by beings whose social behavior and codes are very unlike, and sometimes even offensive to,” their own. The author in question—let's call him X—then proceeds to explain how the creative work of a lesser known author—let's call him Y—is informed by such “a migrant's vision.”

In recent years, scholars of German literature have increasingly pointed to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's theory of “minor literature” as a crucial framework for understanding the development of minority cultural production in a variety of twentieth-century contexts (Teraoka, 1987; Suhr, 1989; Spector, 2000). Deleuze and Guattari propose that any minority group writing in a major language produces what they term minor literature, which has the capacity to destabilize and undermine the dominant language, culture, and discourse in which its authors operate (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986, pp. 16-27). This specific confluence of identities, texts, and locations, they suggest, calls into question the very foundations of the majority's world view and self-understanding. Deleuze and Guattari's model marks one of the first efforts by Western theorists to conceptualize cultural work that has traditionally been rendered invisible by classical literary writing and established categories of genre, style, and type.

Migration research has often stressed the adverse circumstances of Turkish immigrants living in Germany. The situation of the so-called second and third generations in particular has been seen as entailing a problematic double-bind of living “between two cultures.” In this scholarship, the image of such youth trapped in a structural culture conflict creates the impression that serious personal and emotional crises are an inevitable part of Turkish migrant youths' coming of age in Germany. Moreover, former guest workers and their families have been treated with a less than hospitable attitude insofar as efforts to facilitate their incorporation, for example, by way of the German legal system. Although the hiring of foreign laborers undeniably contributed to the economic and social recovery of West Germany after National Socialism and World War II, immigration has never been treated as a favorable option in German politics. The project of hiring laborers from abroad on a temporary basis gradually developed into de facto immigration, unintended on the part of both Germans and Turks. The resulting demographic multi-nationalization has not (yet), however, become a self-evident ingredient of the German conscience collective (Schiffauer, 1993, pp. 195-98). The very ambivalence of this situation influences the prevalent conceptualizations of the various social groups, as the following brief account illustrates.

The past fifteen years have witnessed a veritable explosion of mass media productions aimed at immigrant populations in Germany. Facilitated by new communication technologies, television channels and radio stations from former “home countries” and elsewhere have become available to immigrants via satellite and the internet. Daily newspapers produced in Ankara, Belgrade, or Warsaw can be bought at German newspaper stands. There has also been a proliferation of mass media venues created locally, by and for immigrants themselves, and nowhere is this landscape of immigrant media more evolved than in the case of Turkish-language media in Berlin.

Migration has been among the most decisive influences shaping contemporary German society, deeply influencing not only economics and demography but also societal discourse and political practice. Legal issues concerning foreigners and immigration have been hotly debated in German society and have played a central role in many elections at both federal and provincial levels. Recognition is an issue at the heart of these concerns. How are migrants viewed in Germany, as “immigrants” or as “foreigners”? As individuals who form a legitimate part of German society, or who have overstayed their temporary “invitation”? Who contribute to the economy and to public welfare, and or who live at the expense of German society? Who are essentially alien to German society and can at best achieve a liminal state of betweenness, or who actively and self-consciously assume a diversity of positions at all levels of society?

The Alevist movement developed almost simultaneously in Turkey and among Turkish migrants, but it is structured and acts quite differently in these distinct, albeit related, political spaces. This comparative empirical study tries to explain the differences in the discourses and the success of Alevist movements in Turkey and Germany by relating them to the broader institutional and discursive contexts within which they are embedded. Alevist movements are incorporated differently in state policies directed to claim-makers and consequently possess different discursive and institutional resources. Spatially bounded institutional contexts and political agendas frame the discourse and strategies of Alevist claim-making, and result in divergent developments. It is thus necessary to disentangle the multiple levels of claim-and policy-making involved (local, national and supranational), and to analyze their relationships and possible articulations. ‘Transnational’ mobilization has often been understood as a mere continuation of mobilization at home or, oppositely, as its driving force. This paper questions the continuity between mobilizations at home and abroad, and argues that mobilization in migration entails specific dynamics, which may not be re-imported home.

The growth in the numbers of asylum seekers to Western European countries over the past decade (Castles and Loughna, 2002) has underlined the significance of “political” and other non-economic factors in shaping migration flows, drawing attention to the inadequacy of theoretical explanations based on socio-economic differentials. The need to reassess earlier research on labor flows to take into account the existence of migrants obliged to flee from situations involving political persecution has become apparent, whether the migrants be directly or personally a target of persecution or whether they feel threatened by association for reasons of ethnicity, geography, etc. My main aim in this article is to raise the issue of the role of “Kurdish ethnicity” as one instance of such political forces in shaping migration flows from Turkey to Germany. During the 1970s and 1980s, research on patterns of migration between the two countries was almost exclusively concerned with the “incorporation of guest workers” into German labor markets and the contribution of their remittances to the Turkish economy.

Every summer Wantijpark in Dordrecht, a small town in the western Netherlands, hosts a World Music festival called “Rainbowpark.” The performers of the 2002 season included Bun Sani from Surinam/The Netherlands, Ghalia Benali & Timnaa from Tunisia/ Belgium, Bayuba Cante from Cuba and Los de Abajo from Mexico. But the biggest star of the festival-that is, whose name was highlighted with the largest fonts in the posters and flyers-was Aziza A., presented as an artist from Turkey. In fact, this multi-faceted artist, whose real name is Alev Yıldırım, was born in Berlin in 1971 and has lived ever since. Her parents had lived in Germany as guest workers for 31 years and then returned to Turkey in 1999, but Aziza had stayed on in Berlin, which she now calls her home. I met her during the “Karneval der Kulturen” in Berlin (the Carnival of Cultures, which took place a month before the Rainbow festival) where she performed on the night of the grand parade.

The Turkish-German axis is not the first route that comes to mind when rethinking German cinema in a global perspective. Turks in German cinema have tended to be cast in one-dimensional roles, as victims on the margins of society, unable to communicate and integrate. After more than four decades of Turkish presence in Germany, can we finally observe a new trend in representation, focusing more on playful enactments, mutual mirroring, and border-crossings? In an era of increasing global mobility of people and media, questions about the status of transnational cultural productions by travelers, emigrants, and exiles have achieved a new intensity. Film critics, concomitantly, have begun to call for a new genre category, one which explodes the boundaries of “original” national cultures as well as those of cinematic conventions. This new genre is variously labeled “independent transnational cinema,” (Naficy, 1996) “postcolonial hybrid films” (Shohat and Stam, 1994) or simply “world cinema,” (Roberts, 1998) a descriptor which, in contrast to older separatist categories such as “third world cinema” (Pines and Willemen, 1989) or “sub-state cinema” (Crofts, 1998), stresses the universality of mobility and diversity.