Not surprisingly, the situation in West Berlin inspired resentment throughout the Federal Republic. West Germans often spoke of the walled city as their “hair shirt.” Most had been willing to wear this garment back in the days when West Berlin seemed in imminent danger of being overrun by the Communists, but with the construction of the Wall an odd kind of “normalcy” had set it, and Berlin inspired considerably less empathy. Now it seemed just another big city am Tropf (on the drip), with no end in sight to the dependency. In exchange for their subsidies, moreover, West Germans felt that they got little in the way of thanks from West Berlin. West Berliners, for their part, were at once proud and frightened by their alienation from the Federal Republic. They often insisted that only they could solve Berlin’s problems, yet when West Germans showed little interest in those problems, they felt snubbed. Increasingly, when West Berliners said drüben (over there), they meant West Germany rather than the world just over the Wall.
Little Istanbul
If West Berlin was becoming, at least in the eyes of many West Germans, a shiftless and profligate dependent, the city also seemed to have become unsettlingly foreign, a place where alien cultures and customs were evident at every turn. As we have seen, in former times the German capital had often been regarded as insufficiently “German,” but alleged Überfremdung (loss of native identity due to an influx of foreigners) emerged as a much more pressing issue with the wholesale importation of foreign workers beginning in the 1960s. West Berlin became especially dependent on foreign laborers because the Berlin Wall cut off its supply of German workers from the East. The walled city went from having virtually no foreign workers in 1960 to having 10 percent of its workforce foreign in 1975. By the early 1980s, 12 percent of the population was non-German. Even though other West German cities, such as Frankfurt and Stuttgart, had higher percentages of nonnatives, West Berlin’s dense concentration of foreigners in specific districts made it seem particularly exotic and multicultural.
Turks constituted by far the largest non-German ethnic group in the city. By the late 1970s West Berlin had emerged as the second largest “Turkish city” after Istanbul. Of course this had not been the plan when Turkish laborers were invited to Germany in the early 1960s; they were expected to remain for only a year or two. But many stayed on with extended residency permits and brought their families over from Turkey to join them. Single men married and founded new families in West Berlin. Like immigrant groups before them, they settled in the poorer parts of town, such as Wedding, Neukölln, and above all Kreuzberg. At the turn of the century the streets around Oranienplatz in Kreuzberg had swarmed with Silesians and smelled of cabbage; seventy years later this area, with some 30,000 Turks, smelled (in the words of Turkish writer Aras Oren) “of mutton, thyme, and garlic.” Berliners called it “Little Istanbul.”
Most of the Turks living in “Little Istanbul” and other heavily Turkish parts of West Berlin did not in fact come from the old Ottoman capital but from villages in central and eastern Anatolia. Accustomed to the rituals and mores of rural village life, they sought to recreate their native environment in the gray streets and crumbling tenements of West Berlin. They established storefront mosques, cafés, restaurants, and countless kabob stands. They tethered their goats in the courtyards of their Mietskasernen. On Sundays they took over entire sections of the Tiergarten for community picnics. They set up small Turkish shops in the abandoned Bülowstrasse U-Bahn station and on weekends turned a stretch of the Landwehr Canal into a giant souk. Many Turkish women went around in their traditional garb of head scarves and wide pants under their skirts, a style which in Berlin became known as “Kreuzberg purdah.”
In reality, even “Little Istanbul” was not solidly Turkish. Kreuzberg itself, located in the southeastern corner of West Berlin and literally up against the Wall, became famous for its diverse population of punks, skinheads, Sixties radicals, students, and hip artists. It was said that if West Berlin was “the insane-asylum of the Federal Republic,” Kreuzberg was its “lock-down room.” But while its denizens thought of this scruffy district as the “real Berlin,” visitors from other parts of Germany tended to wonder if they hadn’t landed on the Bosphorus, or maybe Mars; the place sure didn’t look German to them. Nor, for that matter, did it seem much like home to conservative West Berliners, who complained about being “overrun” by people with whom they had little in common. Claiming to speak for his fellow citizens, Heinrich Lummer, West Berlin’s archconservative interior senator in the early 1980s, said of Kreuzberg: “I’m not in my homeland here; that’s been stolen from me by the foreigners. The whole environment is strange to me. The weirdness begins with the look and goes on to the smell.” While most Berliners who were bothered by the Turkish presence contented themselves with complaints to the authorities and irate letters to the newspapers, some openly insulted the Turks in the streets, calling them Kanake. The city’s young hipsters did not resort to such tactics, but even they rarely had anything to do with their Turkish neighbors. The British journalist Adam Lebor, who studied Muslim communities in Europe and America in the 1960s and 1970s, was shocked by the fact that his liberal friends in Kreuzberg “never once introduced me to a Turkish speaker.”
Tensions between natives and foreign workers increased dramatically when the German economy plunged into recession following the Arab oil boycott of 1973. As unemployment rates shot up, Turks and other foreigners were accused of holding down jobs that otherwise might have gone to Germans. Following the dictum “The Moor has done his work, the Moor can go,” Bonn instructed companies not to renew their Gastarbeiters’ contracts if German natives applied for these positions. The ruling had little effect, however, because few Germans wanted to take the menial low-paying jobs that the foreigners performed.
In the late 1970s West Berlin’s municipal government finally admitted the obvious—namely, that the Turks were there to stay—and instituted programs designed to integrate them into the fabric of German society. But the initiatives were too little and too late. Older Turks had lived too long in their own ethnic ghetto, while the younger ones—those born and raised in Germany—wanted neither to “become German” (even if this were possible) nor to remain Turkish in the fashion of their fathers. The younger generation evolved a hybrid Turkish-German culture suspended between the city in which they lived and the country of their ancestors. They were not willing to turn themselves inside out just to be “accepted” by the Berliners. As one young Turkish rap musician put it: “We are living in Germany and I like Germany. My father has worked here for thirty years. My message to the Germans is that when you want to you can live with me, when you don’t want to it’s not my problem, it’s your problem.”
For all their justifiable ambivalence about Germany and Berlin, the Turks were well adapted compared to the illegal immigrants from Africa and Asia who started to enter the city in large numbers in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of them arrived through the courtesy of the East German government, which, in exchange for hefty payments of hard currency, flew them to East Berlin and then dumped them over the Wall. West Berlin’s authorities could not prevent this without imposing barriers at the various checkpoints, which would have been tantamount to recognizing the Wall as an international border. But while the illegals were allowed to stay in West Berlin, they were not provided with any of the support systems given to registered asylum seekers and ethnic German Übersiedler (settlers) from Eastern Europe. Left to fend for themselves, these people became foot soldiers for prostitution rings, cigarette smuggling operations, and cheap-labor contractors. Their presence added to West Berlin’s image as a crime-ridden, foreigner-infested Babel.