AFTER VIVA Phd Thesis

The Representation of Turkish Immigration to Germany in German, Turkish German and Turkish Cinema Deniz Güne ş Yardımcı Doctor of Philosophy Royal Holloway, University of London 2017 1 DECLARATION OF AUTHORSHIP I, Deniz Güne ş Yardımcı, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Date: 26/05/2017 2 ABSTRACT Throughout the 20 th century, various migration movements have transformed not only European cultures and societies but also European cinema. Migration, identity politics and cultural encounters of various kinds have emerged as prominent themes in European cinemas. Filmmakers with a migratory background have played a pivotal role in bringing these themes to public attention. They have also introduced new aesthetic and narrative forms which have influenced well-established cinematic traditions, thereby creating a culturally hybrid diasporic and transnational cinema. This dissertation takes a comparative approach to the representation of Turkish migrants and the Turkish diaspora in Germany in German, Turkish German and Turkish cinema. While there is already a considerable amount of scholarly literature on the representation of Turkish guest-workers and Turkish diaspora culture in German cinema, a critical analysis of Turkish migration in Turkish cinema is still outstanding. My thesis seeks to address this gap by offering an important complementary vantage point that also includes Turkish cinema. By drawing on theories of cultural hybridity, I invoke a critical framework that has hitherto not been systematically applied to the corpus of films under investigation and that, therefore, has the capacity to yield original insights into the filmic construction of migrant and diasporic identities. I argue that German, Turkish German and Turkish cinemas exhibit three distinctive perspectives when depicting Turkish migrants and address issues of cultural hybridity in different ways. This study combines a literature review and the exploration of relevant theoretical concepts with a contextual and textual analysis of selected films. The dissertation’s comparative approach, which focuses on the cinema of the receiving country, the cinema of the sending country, and transnational Turkish German cinema, seeks to make an original contribution to the existing body of scholarship on filmic representations of Turkish migration into Germany in these (trans)national film cultures. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 6 INTRODUCTION 7 CHAPTER 1 From Guest-workers to Turkish German Transmigrants: The Social and Historical Context of Turkish Labour Immigration to Germany 15 1.1 From Post-1945 Guest-worker Recruitment to a Turkish Diaspora in Germany 16 1.1.1 Situating the Turkish Immigrant: The Sociopolitical History of Immigration into Germany between the 1960s and 2000s 17 1.1.2 Germans with a Migration Background and the Turkish Community’s Heterogeneity 25 1.2 The Socioeconomic Impact of Turkish Emigration to Germany on Turkey 26 CHAPTER 2 Theorising Diaspora and Cultural Hybridity 34 2.1 Theorising Diaspora and Diasporic Identities 35 2.2 Diaspora and Hybridity – The Negotiation of Cultural Identity in the Diaspora Space 44 2.3 Theorising Hybridity: From Mikhail Bakhtin to Homi Bhabha 48 2.3.1 Linguistic Hybridity 49 2.3.2 Cultural Hybridity and the Third Space 57 2.4 Aesthetic Hybridity and Polyglot Cinema 66 CHAPTER 3 From Gastarbeiter to the Turkish Diaspora: The Representation of Migrants and Cultural Hybridity in German and Turkish German Cinema 70 3.1 Literature Review: From Guest-worker Cinema to a Cinema of Cultural Hybridity 71 3.2 Gastarbeiterkino and the ‘Cinema of the Affected’ 77 3.3 Examples of Cultural Hybridity in the Gastarbeiterkino and the ‘Cinema of the Affected’ 86 3.4 The ‘Cinema of Cultural Hybridity’ 94 3.5 Examples of Cultural Hybridity in Fatih Akın’s Oeuvre 103 3.5.1 Challenging Stereotypes and the Liberation of the Woman from Victimhood 106 3.5.2 Culturally Hybrid Urban Milieus, Language-Mixing Practices and Hybridisation of Cultural Identity 116 3.6 The Myth of Cultural Fragmentation: Screening the Positives of Cultural Hybridity 128 4 CHAPTER 4 The Representation of Turkish Migration to Germany and Cultural Hybridity in Turkish Cinema 131 4.1 Literature Review and Research Interests 131 4.2 Corpus of Films and Initial Classification 137 4.3 Ye şilçam’s Impact on Turkish Migration Cinema 140 4.3.1 An Outline of Ye şilçam Cinema and Its Specific Conventions 141 4.3.2 The Influence of Ye şilçam Genres on Turkish Migration Cinema 144 4.3.2.1 Comedies and the Melodramatic Modality 145 4.3.2.2 Migration Melodramas under the Influence of Ye şilçam 150 4.3.3 The Hybrid Structure of Ye şilçam Cinema 157 . 4.4 The Turkish Diaspora in Germany and Its Relationship to the New Cinema of Turkey 161 4.5 Cultural Hybridity in Turkish Migration Cinema: A Close Analysis of Three Films 169 4.5.1 Almanya’da Bir Türk Kızı/A Turkish Girl in Germany , Almanya Acı Gurbet/Germany Bitter Gurbet , and Berlin Kaplanı/The Tiger of Berlin 170 4.5.2 Polyglot Elements: Multilingualism and Language-Mixing 171 4.5.3 Culturally Hybrid Identities 181 4.5.4 Ye şilçam’s Influence: Nostalgia, Melancholy, and the Melodramatic Mode 189 4.5.5 The Use of Music and the Positioning of Cultural Identity 205 4.5.6 Conclusion: Cultural Hybridisation as an Inevitable Process 210 4.6 Turkish Migration Cinema: Ye şilçam’s Dominance and the Dis pleasures of Cultural Hybridity 211 CONCLUSION 215 BIBLIOGRAPHY 223 FILMOGRAPHY 246 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am immensely grateful to the Media Arts Department at Royal Holloway, University of London for awarding me the Reid and Crossland scholarships, fully funding my PhD. This dissertation could not have been realised without this generous support. I also want to thank the Media Arts Department for providing me with several grants to participate at conferences and discuss parts of my research with established scholars and fellow PhD students. This dissertation could not have been completed without the great support of my supervisor Professor Daniela Berghahn. I benefited greatly from her in-depth knowledge of transnational and diasporic cinema. Her comments, suggestions, corrections, and guidance helped me to develop and finish my work. I also want to thank her for her patience during difficult times. I also gratefully acknowledge the doctoral research funding I received from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) for a seven-month period, which enabled me to conduct important archival research in Turkey, so I could identify and examine the great number of Turkish films on external migration. I would also like to extend my thanks to Professor Sava ş Arslan, Professor Ayhan Kaya, and Professor Asu Aksu Robins for accepting me as a visiting research scholar at their departments at Bahce şehir University Istanbul and Bilgi University Istanbul and for their kind assistance and valuable feedback on my work. I am grateful for the helpful comments and feedback on my research from Professor Christopher Townsend and Dr Manishita Dass and want to thank both for their kindness and support when I needed them most. Very special thanks to my examiners Professor Deniz Bayrakdar and Professor John Hill for an enjoyable PhD viva and all their valuable suggestions that improved my dissertation. I would also like to extend my thanks to Professor Susanne Marschall, Professor Franz Hamburger, and Professor Christoph Klimmt, who all encouraged me to pursue a PhD and helped me to take the first steps towards this while studying at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Many thanks to Chantal Latchford for an excellent proofreading of the last draft of my thesis. I would also like to thank my friends and family for their very useful comments on my work and for always being there for me. My deepest gratitude goes to my parents Fazilet Yardımcı and Tahsin Yardımcı for their encouragement, unconditional support, their trust in me, and for their love. 6 INTRODUCTION In the famous Turkish movie Almanya Acı Vatan/Germany Bitter Homeland (1979, Şerif Gören), Güldane, a Turkish guest-worker in Germany, has a monotonous, hectic, and stressful job as an assembly line worker at a typewriter factory. The scenes showing Güldane at home and at her workplace emphasise the inhumane living and working conditions by depicting Güldane running and working rapidly in a sterile environment of white and cold pastel blue. ‘Achtung 25959! Achtung 07401! Achtung 07401! Achtung 22401!’, a constant robotic voice chivvies the workers along by calling ‘Attention’, followed by their personal numbers whilst a disturbing relentlessly loud machine noise persists throughout the scenes. The 1970s’ disco hit song ‘Rasputin’ by Boney M, playing at the factory, accompanies the scene that introduces Güldane’s work. The upbeat music that aims to speed up the workflow and increase efficiency is incompatible with the song’s original context – German discos in the 1970s and a hedonistic Western lifestyle – and stands in stark contrast to the hard living and working conditions experienced by guest-workers. Whilst Güldane faces the hardship of the capitalist industrialised world, her husband Mahmut struggles with the foreign German culture. When he arrives at the train station in Berlin, he is left alone with a suitcase and an address. Mahmut is overwhelmed by the new impressions and his effort to speak to the people around him to ask for help to find the address fails. When he finally manages to leave the station things get worse. Anxious and confused, he wanders around the streets, observes his environment, which appears strange to him, gets lost in a huge mall, and is afraid of crossing busy streets. Mahmut’s panic peaks when it gets dark and he is confronted by disturbing bright lights and a crowd of people asking him: ‘Hey Turk, do you have hashish?’.

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