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Index Self Service City: İstanbul | Imprint |
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"We are on Fly Mountain gazing down on the city, but it is so far from here, as far as a fairyland. All types live here: thieves, thugs or bums, day labourers, workmen, they came from all over. From Maras, from distant Van, from Kemah or Erincan, Laz, Kurds and Pomaks, united here by fate. Our house is over there on the hill, all walls made of cracked plywood, the chamber has three windows and a tin roof on top." These verses from the chorus of the "Ballad of Ali from Kesan" (Kesanli Ali Destani) introduce us to the life of the gecekondu, which are informally evolved settlements on occupied grounds that today make up around two thirds of Istanbul's urban space. Haldun Taner, who wrote this pioneering musical in 1971, directed the public's attention to the harsh living conditions of the immigrants who had come to Istanbul predominantly from various regions of Anatolia. About a decade later, the play which was often performed abroad in Europe and the Near East reached Berlin: The Turkish group of the Schaubühne, a Berlin theatre, performed the musical, and we invited two of the former participants to again present parts of it at the Volksbühne. When he visited Berlin at the time, Haldun Taner was enthusiastic about the idea of again writing a play dealing with similar issues, only this time set not on Fly Mountain in Istanbul but in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg. An idea that may at first appear quite absurd when one compares the image of the densely built-up Wilhelminian quarter, which was quite run down then, with that of the gecekondu of the time as typified above. But when taking a closer look the idea does become appealing: Istanbul is the main destination of migrant labourers from Anatolia, and the same has been true of Berlin on an international scale ever since the Federal German government set up an office in Istanbul to recruit Turkish workers for German companies in 1961. The reason was that with the erection of the Berlin Wall half of the workers in Kreuzberg factories, namely those from East Berlin, were locked out. The metropolis on the Bosporus, its rapid growth had just commenced, became an intermediate stop for many migrants from the Anatolian provinces, who were no longer required by an increasingly industrialized agriculture, on their way to West Germany. While during their stay in Istanbul the migrants usually lived in one of the gecekondu settlements, where they had to provide for accommodation without state support, in West German cities they were initially put up in hostels. Later they moved into empty flats in dilapidated quarters of old buildings that were often earmarked for demolition and only for this reason let out to "foreigners" who were rarely welcome and had very little money. In Berlin, Kreuzberg met these requirements to an exceptionally high degree: As in Istanbul, the place of residence of immigrants without means initially resulted from a predicament leaving no other options. They were later often joined by relatives and friends from their regions of origin, who then already found a social and economic network facilitating their arrival in the foreign country. The visions of the future of migrant labourers in Berlin and Istanbul also hardly differed: They only wanted to work for a limited time in foreign parts and once they had saved enough money return to their place of origin, which they visited once a year if their working conditions allowed it. The Istanbul urbanist, Sule Özuekren, found out that even today the inhabitants with Anatolian roots in the Istanbul gecekondus and in the old quarters of Berlin with a high concentration of immigrants resemble each other. In both places they share similar practices of consumption and worldviews as well as living and working conditions. At the same time, many of their descendents have long left the places assigned to them and created novel urban cultures that again often refer to each other in both cities. One can compare not only the immigrants and their manner of settling down in their new city, be it Istanbul or Berlin, but also the way they are looked upon by the respective established residents and the urbanistic discourse on both metropolises. Even today the Anatolian migrants count as culturally backward and are accused of establishing isolated, parallel worlds within the urban society. The usual cliché has it that their rustic, conservative habitus, their village-like social relationships and their lacking willingness to subordinate themselves to the prevailing urban culture undermine the historically evolved Civitas of the European city. This, in turn, is understood by the elites in both Berlin and Istanbul - as if the world had stood still ever since - as the city of urban citizens the way it was before the arrival of the industrial proletariat, a city they romanticize as a cosmopolitan locality refined by urban culture. In the reciprocal views of the other city, further clichés intersect: Especially in the past years, Istanbul appears fascinating from the German perspective. In diverse shows, exhibition catalogues and feuilleton articles it is portrayed as a buzzing and dynamic, but also chaotic metropolis on the verge of collapsing, which, depending on the ideological bias, is perceived as typical Oriental chaos, as a bridge between the continents of Asia and Europe or as a cultural magnet, where "the Turks" are much more modern than one would think here. These frequently orientalizing views of a city like Istanbul that seemingly reveal the other of one's own civilization are crossed from the opposite direction by an occidentalism imagining Berlin as the European city one believes to have lost: civilized by the middle classes, carefully planned and designed, administratively well-ordered and unsuccessfully plagued by the immigrants that have already conquered and destructed the culture and urban structure of one's own city.
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