My Tie is Red
The villa is dead. Long live the roof terrace! For those who can afford it, there is nothing that quite compares with life at the top. Whether in Munich's Gärtnerplatz or Istanbul's Galata district, the high life is in. The Bosporus location, though, has one clear advantage over its rivals on Munich's Isar River – the outlook. The cultural treasures of two millennia spread out beneath one here in a view of incomparable grandeur.
An Istanbul architect who had the idea of turning this lofty prospect into a business prospect, recently extended an invitation to anyone who had ever spent a holiday in one of his stylishly restored Bosporus roof terrace apartments. The idea being that it would help to still their yearnings to give them the opportunity of attending an evening celebration for the "homesick".
As it turned out, so many of the homesick turned up at the Munich venue that the Turkish buffet laid on for the occasion quickly succumbed – with not a single crumb left to tell the tale. Mind you, it was not homesick Turks, pining for their Bosporus homeland, who crowded the hall to bursting point for the evening slide show, but Germans, amongst them many who, not so long ago, would very likely have made Tuscany their destination of choice. This crowd maybe a shade younger, more casual.
An image revamp for Turkey
Nowadays, those who favour Turkish meze over Italian antipasti know that they are in select company. Similar get-togethers to the one organised in Munich have already been organised in Zurich, Berlin and Lucerne, by the same architect. Nowadays, Turkey is no longer seen as a crisis region or defined as the country with the Kurdish conflict, at least not by those Western Europeans in the know, who long ago discovered that this is the place to be when it comes to partying and having a good time. For them, the Istanbul dance terraces definitely have the edge over the rooftops of Rome or Paris.
But that's not all. Turkey, at least in terms of its image, has been making gigantic strides this year. And the country is currently everywhere you look. The Popkomm music fair in Berlin has chosen Turkey as partner country this year. Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair will also be Turkey. And at the Biennale this year in Bonn the focus will be on … you've guessed it – Turkey! The Bonn showcase wants to avoid becoming a "migration festival" says Biennale director Klaus Weise.
Chairman of the German Music Industry Association, Dieter Gorny, would also like to see the event in October help his Turkish partners escape the kind of pigeonholing that tends to see them classified in terms of what Gorny describes as this "artificial migration and world music debate".
Crescent moon on a coffee cup
It all sounds like changed days for a country possessed of great cultural wealth but, until recently, much maligned. And with everything else going so swimmingly, it goes without saying that the economy, too, is riding this new Bosporus wave of prosperity. Tüsiad, the highly influential Turkish businessmen's association, has just produced a glossy brochure which has been distributed throughout Germany with this week's Frankfurt Allgemein newspaper, as well as being sent out to opinion makers across the country. Its been a remarkable piece of self-promotion, so brilliantly done that it has even had hardened PR experts swooning in admiration.
The title page is full of text, which, on closer inspection, turns out to be only individual words, a feel-good staccato printed in an attractive shade of blue. Tea. Energy. Youth. Departure. Hamam. Growth. Inspiration. Troy. Modern. Raki. Joie de vivre. Enjoyment. Neighbourhood, and so on. Only a single halfway complete sentence is to found in the midst of this shower of words. It says: "Why Turkey belongs in Europe." This sentence appears in yellow. Blue and yellow are the colours of the flag of Europe.
Amongst those to appear in the brochure are: Norbert Walter, chief economist of Deutsche Bank, ("Turkey will be Europe's next boom economy"), corporate strategy consultant Roland Berger (holding a coffee cup bearing the Turkish crescent moon), former Daimler chairman Edzard Reuter ("Turkey is my second home" – Turkey provided a refuge for Reuter's parents during the Nazi era).
"Friends must become partners"
Politics, too, has gotten in on the publicity act. Three German politicians with Turkish roots (from the CDU, SPD and the Green Party) are pictured sailing on the Spree in Berlin, the composition photographed in such a way so as to look as if it could be on the Bosporus. Half close your eyes and the Reichstag in the background with its curlicue capitals could almost be taken for another 18th century Neo-Renaissance style building: Istanbul's Dolmabahce Palace. By comparison, former SPD leader Frank Müntefering's PR efforts seem rather prosaic ("friends must become partners").
He is followed by EU vice president, Günter Verheugen, sporting a (Turkish) red tie. So the gloss in this particular magazine is a highly political one. Its message on Turkey less ambiguous than any that is currently likely to emanate from the grand coalition sitting in Berlin. It all makes for a rather delicate situation.
This is no doubt the reason why the PR brochure contains no photograph of Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. He it was who, together with the then Turkish foreign minister Abdullah Gül, was responsible for helping to launch the Ernst Reuter Foundation for Advanced Study – here subscribed as a cooperation partner of Tüsiad – in Istanbul one and a half years ago.
The Italianisation of Anatolia
The joint image campaign by Turkish industry and German politicians is clearly focused on creating some cultural added value. This ranges from discrete reference to the multiethnic Ottoman past, via literature Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, to the new Istanbul mania. So it's all looking very rosy for Turkey, the new Tuscany, but the self confident presentation of the country as the sleeping giant of the Bosporus slowly awakening after a long sleep stands in stark contrast to some very different perceptions.
The country's rise to economic and cultural power is something that is happening as it were above the heads of the European Turks, and especially of the German Turks. Their experience of life is significantly less exalted. The German Turkish journalist Canan Topcu recently described this side of the picture in Der Spiegel Special magazine. Under the heading "Allah im Abendland" (Allah in the West) Topcu writes that, in the face of the mosque building controversy and some of the rather stupid anti-Turkish reflex responses now evident in Germany, she feels more and more alienated.
"I am a Muslim," she writes and no one is more surprised by this defiant confession than herself. It's a stance she feels compelled into taking now, for the first time, given the open Islamophobia she has been confronted with, though she is not deeply religious. Lawyer, Seyran Ates, who is also German with Turkish roots, feels similarly disturbed when, after 38 years in Berlin, she is still asked if she "returns home" now and again – home, of course, being Turkey.
Eternally on the defensive
Ates is well-known, one of those who have been successful. She has also been one of the most voluble of critics of the Turks who resist integration in Germany, preferring to live in their own parallel world. The Turkish bazaar in Neukölln and the Turkish market in Munich's Goethe Strasse where Bavarian butchers sell their freshly slaughtered lambs may be two elements of a separate universe, but in the experience of many Turks in Germany there is also a quite different parallel universe. Their former homeland may be in the ascendancy, but for them it is often a case of just struggling to gain simple respect.
While their German neighbours may take a holiday in Antalya, perhaps fitting in a trip to the cave churches in Cappadocia along the way, for the Turk it is a case of once a migrant always a migrant – and the constant presence of this word alone is enough to make him feel increasingly deprived of basic human dignity. "I love to go walking in Rheingau, to relax to a Bach cello sonata; I really thought I was at home here," writes Canan Topcu, disappointed by the need to be eternally on the defensive.
Words such as guest-worker and migrant are now foreign to the lips of the dolled up Bosporus bride of Tüsiad and the Ernst Reuter Foundation. The day of the guest worker is gone, now there is the "Initiative Moderne Türkei" (modern Turkey initiative) as the alliance names itself in capital letters in its logo with the blue and yellow stars. Incidentally, the economic people have decided to do without the help of Turkish politicians for their campaign. This may also be rather useful for the image. After all, at the moment, the political scene in Turkey is simply too confusing.
Christiane Schlötzer
© Süddeutsche Zeitung / Qantara.de 2008
Translated from the German by Ron Walker
This article was previously published by the German daily, Süddeutsche Zeitung.
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