On Migrants

I've been thoroughly unsettled over the past few days by the escalating conflict over refugees in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Nina Rossmann has a profile of a refugee and some background information on the protests at Slow Travel Berlin, while Philip Oltermann wrote more generally on the developments in the Guardian and Sharon Dodua Otoo called out the international press on its lack of reporting.

It's a complicated issue, with wrangling over political responsibility seemingly slowing everything down further. Refugees whose cases are being processed elsewhere have contravened the (ridiculous) ban on leaving the administrative territories where they applied for asylum and come to Berlin to protest their inhumane treatment. And they've been protesting (mainly) in Kreuzberg, where the local council is responsible for evicting them from the school they've occupied. Only it didn't issue an eviction notice until the police forced its hand. A number of refugees are now camping out on the school's roof and refusing to come down until their demands are met (which were officially granted after the previous occupation, four months ago, but have not been put into practice). So we have a national – indeed, global – issue being tackled on a local basis, with local residents and other supporters protesting at the refugees' treatment and subjected to brutal treatment by a municipal police force.

I don't understand why the protest is so divisive, nor why it has erupted into violence. I have always understood post-WWII Germany as a country that has profited socially, culturally and economically from migration and has a moral obligation to take in refugees. Not that any country does not have that moral obligation to save people from persecution elsewhere.

It's enough, I think, that those of us who have come to Germany are people, but some of those people are particularly creative and have contributed great things to the culture. At the Berliner Büchertisch, Jana Weiß has started a column on Berlin writers and their city. One of those she portrays is Mascha Kaléko, who arrived in the city from Polish Galicia at the age of 16 in 1923. She adopted and adapted the Berlin dialect for her poetry until she was banned from publishing her work, being Jewish, in 1935 and in 1938 emigrated to the USA. How can people fail to make a connection between persecution in Germany then and persecution now in other parts of the world?

Words Without Borders also has a new issue up, focusing on migrant labour around the world, something that has shaped today's Germany. Please read Mely Kiyak's memories of her father, one of the guest workers from Turkey, translated by Rebecca Heier. How can we treat people as statistics when we can read stories about them as individuals? If you read German, your next stop should be Kiyak's latest column for the Gorki Theater, in which she talks about doormen who choose who to let in and who to keep out, and asks:

On the roof of the school, which has been widely cordoned off for days, there are people who are prepared to jump to their deaths if we don't allow them a life worth living in Germany. The state does not want to be seen as giving in to blackmail. My question: is blackmail the right word when the ransom to be obtained is humanity?
Humanity is a door that is opened. But our state is standing in front of it like a grouchy doorman, waiting. Waiting for what? I don't understand it.

Nor do I. 

If you want to do a tiny thing that might help, you can sign a solidarity petition at http://worthalten.wordpress.com/. Or you can show support via @Ohlauerinfo in various ways.

Writers and Translators on Turkish Protests

I hesitated to write about this, not sure of whether posting about Turkish protests on love german books would be exploitative and tasteless. But then I decided it wouldn't.

Germany has strong links to Turkey on ground level, despite cool diplomatic relations. I probably don't need to explain why, right? So news of the Gezi Park protests spread very quickly here. I was confused by the flood of Facebook posts from friends and colleagues in the UK, saying "We need to know this is happening" when in fact, we did know over here. But then I worked out they were talking about effective media blackouts inside Turkey. There have been solidarity demonstrations in Berlin, where apparently Germans suddenly learned various catchy Turkish slogans. I don't know whether they also indulged in public drinking after 10 p.m.

And writers are involved too. First there was Moritz Rinke, who seems to have been in Istanbul to get married (I think his fiancée is from Turkey), and wrote a diary of events and gave a number of interviews. Interesting, if a little confused. Then there's Mely Kiyak, who's in Istanbul to research a new book and "will be reporting weekly on the situation and the protests". She's written about sleeping next door to Erdogan and about Turkish TV reporting.

I've also been following translator-in-residence at London's Free Word Centre Canan Marasligil, who's reporting from afar on how the events make her feel, fascinating linguistic phenomena, and more. What I like is that she feels the need to explain more, because British readers know less than Germans about Istanbul. Or I assume they do.

As Erdogan threatens to "clean" Gezi Park so the authorities can deal with the "fringe terrorist" groups he accuses of being there, we can watch tendentious language used in a very aggressive manner. I'm glad there are other people sharing their information and knowledge in a more considered way.

Dear Mely Kiyak

Mely Kiyak is a columnist for the Frankfurter Rundschau. She writes witty, caustic weekly open letters to politicians, hypocritical TV chefs, analogue satellite TV, people looking for flats in Berlin, and pretty much anyone or anything who alerts her attention or ire. She tends to be rather rude. Her column devoted to Sakineh Ashtiani won the prestigious Theodor Wolff Prize for journalism last year.

Mely Kiyak was born in Germany to Kurdish parents and took German nationality as an adult. She takes an active interest in racism and neo-fascism in Germany and often addresses the subject in her writing. As such, like many of us, she was incensed by Thilo Sarrazin's mega-selling racist book Deutschland schafft sich ab and then commented on a recent TV appearance of his to promote his latest work about how Europe doesn't need the Euro. I don't know what she wrote because she made a mistake and insulted Sarrazin in it on the subject of his lisp and stiff facial muscles, which she didn't know were lamed by an operation. She soon found out. A wave of indignation from right-wing bloggers and journalists hit her unexpectedly and the column was taken offline in an attempt to calm things down.

Her clarification came quickly:

At no point was it my intention to belittle him personally. Thilo Sarrazin appears unusual in public discussions and requires tolerance and consideration due to his language, gestures and mimicry. He himself, however, refuses this consideration and tolerance to others with regard to appearance, lifestyle, origins and disposition. What I intended was to point out his own imperfections – not due to physical factors – in his presentation; I now find that the means I used were not inadmissible. Had I known the physiological background I would not have chosen the image. I greatly regret that. 

Too late, however. As the Frankfurter Rundschau writes, the reaction has developed into a full-blown hate campaign. Kiyak and the newspaper have received hundreds of often anonymous abusive emails, calls and letters. Some of them have been passed on to the police.

I don't agree with everything Mely Kiyak has ever written. But I do think she has the right to write it without being subjected to abuse. The fact that Sarrazin's brave defenders have begun standing up for him as part of a minority - a person with a disability - while the man himself has spread numerous insults against ethnic and religious minorities would be funny if it weren't so tragic. At some point BILD demanded an apology from Kiyak. I'm wondering whether Sarrazin has apologized to all the people he's insulted over the past few years. Certainly his foreword to the paperback of his popular book claiming that immigrants are making Germany less intelligent as a whole apparently emphasizes that he's not willing to take back one word he's written. I haven't read it.

If you're in Berlin you can show your support for Mely Kiyak by attending a solidarity reading at the Ballhaus Naunynstraße this Friday evening. Writers, actors, playwrights and musicians will be reading from her columns. I shall try to attend.