Inclusive National Belonging

Intercultural Performances in the “World-Open” Germany

Bruce Snedegar Burnside

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2020

© 2020 Bruce Snedegar Burnside All Rights Reserved Abstract

Inclusive National Belonging

Intercultural Performances in the “World-Open” Germany

Bruce Snedegar Burnside

This dissertation explores what it means to belong in Berlin and Germany following a significant change in the citizenship laws in 2000, which legally reoriented the law away from a

“German” legal identity rooted in blood-descent belonging to a more territorially-based conception. The primary goal is to understand attempts at performing inclusive belonging by the state and other actors, with mostly those of “foreign heritage” at the center, and these attempts’ pitfalls, opportunities, challenges, and strange encounters. It presents qualitative case studies to draw attention to interculturality and its related concepts as they manifest in a variety of contexts.

This study presents a performance analysis of a ceremony at a major national museum project and utilizes a discursive analysis of the national and international media surrounding a unique controversy about soccer and Islam. The study moves to a peripheral neighborhood in Berlin and a marginal subject, a migration background Gymnasium student, who featured prominently in an expose about failing schools, using interviews and a text analysis to present competing narratives. Finally it examines the intimate, local view of a self-described “intercultural” after- school center aimed at migration-background girls, drawing extensively on ethnographic interviews and media generated by the girls.These qualitative encounters help illuminate how an abstract and often vague set of concepts within the intercultural paradigm becomes tactile when encountering those for whom it was intended. Table of Contents

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………….……ii

Dedication……………………………………………………………………………………..…iv

Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1

Chapter 2: Humboldt Forum………………………………………………………………….….43

Chapter 3: A Fatwa for German Soccer……………………………………………………….…77

Chapter 4: Narratives of Neukölln…………………………………………………………..…113

Chapter 5: MÄDEA: After-School Center……………………………………………………..165

Chapter 6: Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….…210

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………227

Appendices:

A. Methods………………………………………………………….……………………….…245

B. Map of Central Berlin…………………………………………………………………….…256

C. Berlin Boroughs Map……………………………………………………………………..…257

D. Fatwa for the Soccer Player - Arabic Version……………………………………………….258

E. Fatwa for the Soccer Player - German Version……………………………………………… 260

i Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all the many people in Germany who participated in my study. I am grateful because they shared their time, perspectives and patience with me. Their willingness to speak with me and share their stories and lives made this dissertation possible. Thank you to the

Humboldt University’s European Ethnography department and Technical University of Berlin’s

Center for Metropolitan Studies for welcoming as a guest and offering me suggestions and support.

I am deeply grateful to my advisor Dr. Katherine Ewing for her guidance and knowledge over the course of this project. It was her work which originally helped inspire me to become an anthropologist and I have endeavored to live up to that dream. I thank Dr. Hervé Varenne for sharing his knowledge with me and his leadership in our program. Thank you to Dr. Lesley

Bartlett for her mentorship during my first years at Teachers College.

I would also like to thank Dr. Petra Kuppinger for sharing her insights with me and showing me a corner of Stuttgart. I would also like to thank Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod and Dr.

Claudio Lomnitz for their guidance as I took my first steps as a graduate student and their on- going support as I continued. Thank you to Dr. Paige West for her critical support of me as a teacher at Barnard College. I am also grateful to Dr. Hope Leichter and Dr. Nicholas Limerick for their thoughtful readings of this manuscript.

I am fortunate to have had many readers and supporters. Thanks to Jill Siegel for hearing out my ideas and offering her feedback through the many iterations of this project. Thank you to

ii Sarah Montgomery-Glinski, Darlene Dubuisson, and Prashanth Kuganathan for their support in and out of the classroom.

Thank you to Melanie Hibbert, Damian Harris, and my parents, Barbara and Robert, for their unwavering support and enthusiasm. Thank you most of all to my wife Julie, it would not have been possible without her.

iii For Julie, Nader, and Gwendolyn Marie

iv Chapter 1: Introduction

The Mitte neighborhood of Berlin, Germany has the happy fortune of containing many of the nation’s most distinguished and famous museums: the Bode, the Altes and Neues Museums, and the Pergamon as well as the construction site of future Humboldt Forum (a topic of this study). However, in the northern reaches of the quarter where it borders the neighborhood of

Wedding one can visit the humble Mitte Museum. It is a museum devoted to the borough itself.

Since Mitte combined with its smaller sister neighborhoods of Wedding and Tiergarten in 2001 into the larger super borough (also known as Mitte)1, the museum graciously includes all of these neighborhoods in its subtitle and, of course, in its exhibits and collections. During the early days of my fieldwork in a Wedding after-school center (which features in the final chapter), I was getting to know the neighborhood and visited the small museum. It is located on the busy

Pankstrasse in a former nineteenth-century yellow-brick school building, somewhere between austere and charming.

Though the museum was very much devoted to the Mitte borough (with its newer additions), it was a borough that had been located relatively recently in the crossroads of history.

The Berlin Wall ran a few blocks away (the school building was located on the Western side, within Wedding), which alone left the small museum with no shortage of material and ideas to display to the public. The old Mitte neighborhood had sat within the communist German

Democratic Republic and Soviet sphere. However, its newer additions of Wedding and Tiergarten belonged to the Federal Republic and the Allies. In its current super form, it includes the massive

1 Please see Appendix A and B for maps of central Berlin and its boroughs. 1 Tiergarten park, the federal government borough, the Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden,

Potsdamer Platz and even Checkpoint Charlie at its southern edge. All the same, the schoolhouse neighborhood museum remained relatively restrained. It dutifully displayed its collections of swords, scythes, Prussian helmets and black and white photos of long-destroyed buildings that originated in its days as a so-called Heimat, or hometown, museum. It even reserved a room as a mock-up of one of the building’s former classrooms with wooden desks and charming pedagogical wall-hangings of a Chinese tea farm operation and a North African oasis.

Nevertheless, it also could not resist the occasional lengthy textual explanation of the borough to its inhabitants and visitors.

One such text was titled “Immigration” (Zuwanderung), which drew me in, as immigrants were what had drawn me to the after-school girls center in the neighborhood initially and remained a keystone as I moved through different case studies considered throughout this work. The text, running to a couple of thousand words, made some expected and unexpected claims. In the expected column, it began with the platitude that “Berlin is a city of immigrants” and continued by pointing out that “about 26% of the residents [of the enlarged Mitte Borough] were as of December 2000 of foreign heritage.” This proportion was within the well- acknowledged statistics of Berlin’s make-up. However, it was tinged with slightly awkward politically (somewhat)-correct language, with its reclassification of a quarter of its residents from the charged status of “foreigner,” as might be found elsewhere, to the slightly more palatable of

“foreign heritage.”

However, the next two sentences of the text are unexpected. We learn that “those not born locally [Nicht am Ort Geborene] always played a significant role in Berlin. Even the city’s

2 founders were Rhenish or Flemish merchants.” This assertion referring to the late 12th-century founding of the city by merchants is hardly controversial, but positioning them as the first

“immigrants” is an unexpected strategic maneuver. The presumably German-speaking merchants are (according to the text’s logic) merely the beginning of a cascading cast of arrivals from elsewhere. The text goes on in its eleven paragraphs to describe the arrival of “immigrants” through the centuries, including “Hollanders,” “Jews,” “Huguenots,” “Flemings” (again),

“Hollanders” (again), Bohemians,” “Swiss.” Others came from the “German regions” of

Wurttemberg, Saxony and Mecklenburg, Vogtland, Brandenburg, Silesia, Pomerania, Saxony

(again), and also Russian Poland and Austrian Galicia. The October Revolution gave

“immigration” from Russia a new boost with the arrival of 360,000 refugees, and “immigration” had always included many “Jews” from other parts of the country and abroad. The “National-

Socialist dictatorship” brought slave labor (not “true immigration” in the text’s wording) to

Berlin, counted at 381,147 persons in 1944, and a few years later the number of “foreign persons” (not counting military) in Berlin had fallen to less than one percent of the population.

Then, in the museum’s text narrative, the “‘Guest workers’” arrived in the wake of the

‘“Economic miracle” with their families from Turkey, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy to “West

Berlin.” Those with “Turkish heritage” in particular came to Tiergarten and Wedding. Another

“wave” came following the break up of the “socialist lands” of the East in 1989. As of 2000,

83,750 people with “foreign heritage” live in Mitte. The text concludes, “The proportion of people with migration backgrounds is the highest in Mitte’s history. Integration places high demands on politics and every individual.”

3 In short, with the long view of history, we can see that all Berliners are immigrants, according to the text. However, the text cannot quite sustain its consistency of concepts and terms, or it should have read, in 2000, all of Mitte has “foreign heritage” if everyone or the ancestors at one point came from elsewhere. Nevertheless, the point is still evident. It offers a humble, strategic thought technology for its readers: Integration is a high demand for us all, but consider that all of our ancestors immigrated to this place. Perhaps, it implies, we can find common cause.

My purpose is not to evaluate this text’s claims. Instead, it reveals the contours of the problem encountered throughout this study: what does it mean to be German? More specifically, what does it mean to belong in Berlin and Germany following a significant change in the citizenship laws in 2000, which legally reoriented the law away from a “German” legal identity rooted in blood-descent belonging? It reveals the confusion of identity labels: “immigrants,” “not locally born,” “foreign heritage,” and “migration background” with an uncertain understanding as to whom they should apply and to whom they should not. It attempts a strategic solution as it argues that all Mitte residents are of immigrant background but unintentionally implies that perhaps some are more obviously of “foreign heritage” than others. It also poses a vague solution to the problem—integration—that will I consider in its many guises throughout this study. Like it often does elsewhere, integration remains undefined. The text is uncertain of exactly what it might mean. However, the implication is that people, somehow different in “heritage” and religion and purpose, must live together in this neighborhood, in this city, in this country.

But how exactly? In the post-2000 era, residents in Berlin and Germany began to encounter this

“how” more and more as imperative and in a seemingly endless array of guises. This study is a

4 close observation of several case studies of these attempts by the state and other actors to set forth approaches at that “how,” mostly with those of “foreign heritage” at the center, and these attempts’ pitfalls, opportunities, challenges, and strange encounters.

The Problem

Since 2000, the young “migration background” and “foreign heritage” residents of Mitte,

Berlin and Germany as a whole have been part of a new generation whom the government granted the possibility of this very different relationship with German citizenship. The hundred- year-old legal tradition overturned that year had defined “German” citizenship primarily by

“blood,” that is to say, by descent. The law had survived the German Empire, the Weimar

Republic, the Third Reich, and the first half-century of the Federal Republic in various forms and intensities. However, in 2000 the Federal government decreed that citizenship would be open to those whose parents had lived in Germany for at least eight years, among others contingencies.

Significantly, one was not required to have “German” parents or ancestors. Now only the duration of residence or one's parents’ residence mattered. It remained to be seen how long such a law would take to have an effect and at what magnitude. Many potential young citizens had hesitations because dual citizenship was expressly forbidden, and relinquishing a Turkish passport, for example, could mean relinquishing certain rights to inheritance in Turkey. The law demanded that children would have until their twenty-third birthday to decide between German citizenship and that of their parents (Kulczycki 2016:77).

This new relationship those migration-background residents might have with German citizenship resonated with a more general and international concern for cultural diversity. In

5 2000, the same year that the new law came into effect, the European Union proclaimed its

Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU and committed itself to “respecting cultural, religious and linguistic diversity” of its member states (Arzoz 2008:5). That same year the EU introduced its motto “United in Diversity” (europa.eu 2016), signaling the Union’s disassociation “from any homogenizing pretensions” (Kraus 2008:87). Eventually, the language of diversity made it into the 2009 Treaty of Lisbon, where the respect for “cultural” and “cultural and linguistic diversity” made multiple appearances, including in provisions about education. Article 2 of the Treaty affirms that “The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity, and equality between women and men prevail” (Art. 2). This language echoed the 2001 “Universal Declaration on Cultural

Diversity” adopted by all 185 member states at the UNESCO General Conference, which stated that “This diversity is embodied in the uniqueness and plurality of the identities of the groups and societies making up humankind. As a source of exchange, innovation, and creativity, cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature. In this sense, it is the common heritage of humanity and should be recognized and affirmed for the benefit of present and future generations” (Arzoz 2008:1-2). That is, Germany’s new pluralistic citizenship law came into effect in an international context primed for efforts towards intercultural and inclusive belonging in the first decade and half of the twenty-first century. However, it did so without resolving much of the conceptual and practical confusion of how a new “world-open” Germany might operate and how it might look.

6 The semantic and categorical confusion of the Mitte Museum text captures the “problem” with these new legal and implied existential possibilities and echoes throughout the case studies presented here. Furthermore, “problem” was the most common word tossed about by political and cultural commentators, in everyday language on the street and in the language of social services with rancor or concern or thoughtlessness to describe what was going on. That “problem” generally referred to a perceived failure of integration—a failure to accommodate, absorb, or transcend difference. However, the problem I propose here is different.

Many of “foreign heritage” are often already German citizens, raised in Germany, who speak

German, attend public schools, and anticipate their future in Germany. Nevertheless, the fact that they might also be Muslim and have recent ancestors who lived in Turkey makes calling them

“German” difficult for many, even those with official commitments to the new interculturality.

They may check every box in “what it means to be German” list (language, residence, citizenship), but somehow appeared to others—and often to themselves—as still somehow other than “German.”

This study concerns itself with several case studies that attempt different approaches, strategies, tactics, solutions, and failures to this conundrum of belonging, of attempting to incorporate previously excluded differences within the new frames. The case studies fall within an eight-year period from 2008 (when the book discussed in chapter four was published) to 2016 when I completed a final round of fieldwork. This period roughly corresponds to an open window when the kind of inclusive belonging performances discussed in these pages became most plausible and part of sustained effort and promotion at multiple levels of society in

7 Germany. That window symbolically opened in 2010 when the first German national men’s soccer team played in the World Cup with the first roster to fully benefit from the 2000 law and whose plurality was lauded and celebrated in Germany and internationally (and feature in

Chapter 3). It was symbolically closed five years later with the first sizable demonstrations in

Germany of far-right anti-immigration association Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the

Islamization of the Occident) following the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting in France. Though this group plays no role in this dissertation, they have powerfully shaped the discourse about inclusion (of immigrants, Muslims, and refugees in particular) in the years that have followed.

Even if the discourse around inclusion in its broadest terms seems constrained or defensive in

2020 (at the time of writing) in comparison to the period under consideration, that time speaks to ongoing challenges and possibilities of making inclusive belonging work as well as the vulnerabilities of the model and unexpected encounters it engenders. Everyday, “new” kinds of

German citizens are legally made and the everyday work of negotiating, performing, and claiming that belonging continues.

The Argument

How does the claim of what it means to be German within this new field of intercultural possibilities—that is to claim to be similar but also different—to live with difference, stand up to close observation? From what level or scale could we see the situation of “every box checked” as a success, rather than a problem with this call for integration? Moreover, what does this tell us about the current model of “interculturality” (or its analogs “multiculturalism,” “diversity,”

“integration”) which proposes differences be recognized and respected by all parties, but with an

8 agreement to champion certain norms? How structurally sound is this model, particularly as we scale up and down in our observations? The central drive of this study is to ask what it means to claim, question, challenge, and perform national belonging in the "new" Germany that is shaped by the citizenship law of 2000.

Using the “intercultural“ model as a framework for understanding an emergent concept of how various actors can and do formulate this answer, I draw on my fieldwork and research to argue that though the interculturality evoked and performed at different scales might be conceptually very similar, their actual effects and consequences enacted at various levels and in particular places are often remarkably different. Through close observation I argue that unexpected contours are revealed and that scale matters in how such interculturality is understood, performed and contested by its actors as they attempt to emphasize the incorporation of formerly excluded categories of difference; and that though these performances of belonging are constrained at each level by the material and social circumstances they encounter, they nonetheless can shape (or be shaped by) and change (or be changed by) those circumstances and the actors involved. Throughout these case studies I continue to draw attention to the institutional traces present in the negotiation of these performances while also understanding the emphases given to the agency of the various actors.

I show that at a significant state-sponsored cultural museum project the surprising lives of objects tell a story of resistance to intercultural incorporation at a moment of symbolic world- openness in the heart of Berlin; how the national symbol of soccer was reshaped by the 2000 law, leaving it ripe for strategic leveraging by a Muslim advocacy group as a vehicle for staging an act of performative belonging for intercultural religious life in Germany; that at a high school

9 and among very different and sharp power differences an intercultural success story of a student can be narrated as a failure utilizing the very differences intercultural values state actors were meant to celebrate; and how an intercultural after-school center, where its voluntary nature encourages potential parity among the stakeholders, recognition and celebration of cultural difference can be part of a performance of belonging and enacted as a “German" trait regardless of citizenship.

The study itself seeks to intervene in intercultural discourses in Germany primarily through nuance and complication of how the various actors perform belonging (and by implication interculturality and its analogs) in these cases, rather than an evaluation of the degree of interculturality and integration, or a legal evaluation. This study gives insight to the often unexpected practical effects of intercultural policies on the ground as they are enacted, challenged and shaped by those who promote them and those they are intended for and gives insight to belonging in Germany today. It aims to add to the scholarship on belonging, with consideration for educational and cultural intervention among youth (which in the past has been

“sparse” (Ríos-Rojas 2011:67), and with particular attention given to the role of creative performativity.

Historical/Political Context

The challenges to German citizenship and identity are hardly confined to the 2000 citizenship law. The twentieth century saw economic upheaval, war, and radical changes in governments In particular, the fall of the Third Reich in 1945 and the result of its horrific policies

—its radical and murderous extension of an exclusive model of national belonging culminating

10 in the Holocaust—led to a reckoning about what it means to be “German” that continues to this day in the political systems which followed. The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) is a relatively new country. Founded in 1949 by the consent of the occupying Allied forces who had ruled since 1945, it had several existential challenges to which to respond. Most obviously was the former eastern states which had been occupied by the victorious Soviets who founded their own Germany only a few months later in a communist mold, the German Democratic Republic

(GDR).

In addition to its anti-communist stance, the FRG, despite being a “new” country, faced the compromising recent actions of its citizens during the Third Reich. At first there was a compulsory denazification campaign by the Allies, which included the selective arrests and prosecution of mostly former high-level Nazi officials, with many high-profile trials and public documentation of the regime’s many crimes (Evans 741). At the same time, there was also continuity. Institutions and laws that stemmed from the Empire and shaped in the Third Reich,

FRG officials incorporated into its constitution, including the citizenship law (Mandel

2007:207). Likewise, many officials, professionals, and workers peopled this new government despite previous Nazi affiliations from the Third Reich period. However, as a new generation came of age in the FRG, the full scale of the crimes of the Holocaust became evident. So too did the complicity of still-living perpetrators as a new series of trials prosecuted by the FRG took place in the 1960s (Evans 748).

Symbolized by the student and societal upheavals of 1968, an existential question of what it meant to be “German” gradually entered the realm of public discussions and concern. These concerns included many direct policy consequences as well, from increased Holocaust education

11 in secondary-school (Marcuse 1998:432), to reluctance to display the FRG flag (Mandel

2007:321), to one of the most liberal asylum policies in Europe (Aktürk 2012:64). It was into this confluence of the Nazi-legacy and anti-Communism that the first waves of Gastarbeiter (guest workers), one of the main precursors to the immigrant-background population in Germany today, arrived in the 1950s and 1960s. Guest worker status was temporary in theory (though also in reality as many returned to their sending-countries) and their numbers small in the beginning. It was only after the program’s formal end in the early 1970s that it became clear to some that many of this group had made their homes in the FRG (Castles 1985). They began bringing or starting families of their own in their adopted country. The presence of these immigrants remained unacknowledged in policy terms at the federal level, where an attitude of “we are not a country of immigration” was a common refrain among officials. (Aktürk 2012:63).

Following the self-dissolution of the communist German Democratic Republic in 1990 and the absorption of its territory by the FRG, officials claimed that they were re-uniting a people. However, cracks in the unity appeared quickly, and some even feared the emergence of two separate German “ethnic groups” (Baer 1998:141). More acutely, in the early 1990s, Neo-

Nazi attacks against communities of Turkish-background in the newly-joined eastern states

(notably at Solingen and Mölln) awakened new fears and challenges to identity. Despite whatever calls for unity and intercultural understanding, actual “ethnic” legal barriers remained to who could become a citizen. Even as anti-“foreigner” violence increased in the post-GDR period, the children of the first generation of immigrants from Turkey, Italy, and elsewhere began their search for belonging in the FRG (Soysal 1999). However, under the pre-2000 citizenship law, a route to FRG citizenship was foreboding, regardless of how long one lived there or how

12 long one’s parents lived there if one could not prove German-descent. Many so-called Turks faced this legal “ethnic” barrier. In the 1990s, the FRG underscored this barrier as it offered citizenship to "settlers" (Aussiedler), people of purported German descent and out-migration

(sometimes many centuries since) in former Soviet lands. FRG officials justified this offer based on the settlers perceived “Volkszugehörigkeit” (a racially-charged term meaning “belonging to the [German] people”). The FRG funded the "return" journey and settlement in the FRG with huge expenditures (Mandel 2007:207).

In 2000 the legal block to non-ethnic (i.e., non-German descent) citizenship was effectively removed, but the “cultural” block remained very much unresolved. At this time, a politician from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Friedrich Merz, introduced the term Leitkultur, and advocated for recognition of Germany’s “leading culture,” with the impetus that immigrants and new citizens must adapt to this presumed dominant culture and its values. In this highly contentious debate, many participants highlighted speaking German and adherence to the values of the constitution as necessary (Deutsche Welle 2005). Shortly after, the conservative

CDU party began a rule over German politics under Chancellor Angela Merkel that has lasted until the time of this writing. Eschewing the controversial language of Leitkultur, the CDU leadership articulated its vision of what this new Germany might be.

Notably, in 2010 two seemingly contradictory proclamations were made to this end in major speeches by the Chancellor and the FRG President, Christian Wulff, also a CDU politician.

In October 2010, Merkel declared in a speech to the youth wing of the CDU that

“multiculturalism has failed, utterly failed” (Weaver 2010). However, that same month Wulff, in a speech celebrating twenty years of German unification, declared that “Islam is also a part of

13 Germany” along with Christianity and Judaism. He added that integration would be Germany’s second “unification” (Warner and Le Bond 2010). Both speeches captured part of the mood and tension of policymakers in regards to immigration to Germany: the anxiety over a multicultural society where integration seems to be faltering and the recognition that immigrants and their children are there to stay. Merkel used “multiculturalism” in this context as a euphemism for what her party considered to be a failed liberal policy of live and let live. Its critics argued that this naive acceptance of all cultural elements of migrants, and with no attempts to bring its members into the imagined German cultural fold, had led to the creation of “parallel” societies within Germany. Such structures were opaque and dangerous, not only to the society at large but to some of the migrant groups’ most vulnerable members: women and children. The CDU officials' meant for this call for “integration” to be a methodological corrective to the

"multicultural" mistake of the past (as well as a counterpoint to the equally marginalized concept of “assimilation”).

As I will show in later chapters, the CDU made the case that certain differences could be maintained, respected and even celebrated, while also asking that society’s newest cultural members adapt to and respect certain “German” cultural mores and forms at the same time, with language being foremost among them. This approach ironically mimicked past interpretations of

“multiculturalist” polices at different levels. Regardless, this new federal-level call for

“integration” reverberated through many venues, discourses, and institutions and actors sought far and wide for the ways and means to encourage, implement, and model such integration. The emphasis in tone was to be inclusive, though uncertainty remained about who or what should or could be imagined as belonging to this new Germany.

14 Conceptual Context

This study takes seriously Anderson’s (2006) claim that communities, including nations, are “imagined,” for at its base is a simple, logical assertion. The vast majority of participants of even the smallest modern nation-states will never see or know one another. Therefore, its members must imagine their relationship to one another. As facile as this observation might seem, it underpins the conceptual framework of anthropologists’ approaches to studying the nation and nationalism, including their history, construction, and ontological status. The

“imagined” in Anderson’s “imagined community” posited what many scholars came to call an

“imaginary,” a realm to which the imaginings of participants directed their thoughts, actions, words, and artifacts. Ewing, drawing on Borneman, argues that the “national imaginary” can be understood as a “system of cultural representations that makes the country of the nation-state emotionally plausible” (2008:2). The philosopher Charles Taylor indicates that there is something to what he calls the “social imaginary” beyond the mere “intellectual schemes people may think about social reality in a disengaged mode” (2004:23). That is, though at some level people are “imagining” themselves as part of a mostly unseen group (per Anderson), there is also an enacted and embodied mode of social imagining that is underscored with “deeper normative notions and images that underline these images” (23). The “imaginary” is shared by large groups in the society, which makes common practices possible and gives the force legitimacy (23). The nation requires participation from its contributors through active imagining, but also by creating

15 performances, texts, artifacts, etcetera, and translating that imagining into forms or reacting to such forms which shape the contours of that nation.

Imagined also implies that the nation, as a shared conceptual project with real-world effects, is constructed by its participants. That is to say, it is not natural, given, or inevitable.

Again, this is a well-developed theme within the discipline of anthropology and has been a rich source of exploration, mainly since the hoped-for post-nationalism period of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century seemed possible and then to falter. For anthropologists and others interested in a human-centered approach, it provides a clear path. We can study those constructing, their constructions and those reacting to such constructions, or where two or all three of these overlap. However, with this remit so broad and varied, the scholarship poses the question about what qualifies as an object of (or process to) study in our approach to nations and national belonging. This is especially pertinent in an era when the nation-state can profoundly shape a human’s life from birth, gendering, marriage, and procreation to the paths we walk on each day (through the infrastructure of our urban and rural environs), to our food, health, and death.

Anderson’s (2006) approach was through the historic rise of nationalism, and he argued that nationalism arose in conjunction with particular media technologies that enabled an increased speed of circulation of texts and images, namely the printing press. The kinds of media primarily generated by printing-press capitalism, like the daily newspaper and the novel, generated new ways of conceptualization of a synchronous “empty” time (26); of the

“logoization” of space as a flat territory of a map; and of personhood then linked to others through this shared spatial-temporal experience (xiv). I draw on Anderson’s foundation for

16 approaching the study of national belonging. For participants to share in imagining a nation, the means of circulation of the texts, images, ideologies, and artifacts that help constitute such imaginings must necessarily circulate as such a rate and reach to understand the spatial-temporal experience as shared. Many other anthropologists and scholars of the nation have expanded on this notion in the four decades since the original publication of Anderson’s book, and each has pushed and expanded on the limits of what might come under scrutiny in making the nation and national belonging.

However, before expanding on those contributions, it is worth considering the extreme of what might constitute the nation-state and its study. Navaro-Yashin noted that “life processes now run through the materiality of networks that function under the emblem of the state” (2002:179). According to her, the state could appear almost anywhere in “fleeting and intangible, transmogrified forms” (3). Navaro-Yashin utilized a range of approaches from the study of an Islamic fashion show to jokes and rumors to political ceremony to examine these

“boundless guises” (3) of the nation-state. If indeed the nation-state could appear anywhere and wore such boundless guises then, seemingly, every human-centered action and artifact in the modern era could be considered as part of the constitution of the nation-state. Arguably this would make the complete study of the “the” or “a” nation-state potentially impossible, considering the boundless areas of study. However, it is this implied premise from which I argue we can better understand the limits and possibilities of studying national belonging.

First, however we bracket our study and whichever potent domains we select for analysis, we can be aware that they are entangled in deep, complex matrices whose details upon magnification reveal unexplored fractal complexities. Second, this will allow us to be attuned to

17 complex relationships between actors and eschew simple assumptions of causation, reception, and agency. This latter point is especially crucial to this study of nationalism as it relates to belonging, that is to say, the “who” of the nation. It is a theme productively taken up by many scholars of the nation since Anderson, as ethnography allowed for more specific questions about who was producing, receiving, and negotiating meaning in creating media (Mankekar 1999;

Abu-Lughod 2008).

Ethnography also drew attention to discursive disputes between people about belonging generated from objects, from political buttons to archeology (Handler 1988; Özyürek 2006; Abu

El-Haj 2001; Karakasidou 2009). Navaro-Yashin posits while this “public square” of discourse and interaction can be understood as a site for the “production of the political,” ethnographic details can also challenge who is the “state” in such an encounter by paying attention to the varied interventions. It opens the strategic possibility of effecting change from unexpected directions, of actors acting or appearing as more “’stately’ than the state”(2002:1). Navaro-

Yashin’s approach pushes us to go beyond the limiting notion of bounded institutional frames or discourses for understanding the political. Indeed it may be “unsitable” as it is distributed the many “faces” of the public (3). It asks us to draw out the implication of understanding public life as the shared “domain” of the state and the people, rather than as two separate forces in opposition (2). It suggests a necessary ongoing performative aspect to the making of the nation, shared across social and political hierarchies, even as it constitutes a shared concept or imaginary.

To this end, I draw on the anthropological work on performance. Concurrent to the anti- colonial turn in the late 1960s in anthropology was a broader theoretical shift from “structure to

18 process, from competence to performance” (Turner 1986:21). In this context, Turner developed a concept of “cultural performance,” which understood ritual and other performances as dynamic processes that included the possibility of active, creative change within each performance (24).

Some decades later, Judith Butler expanded this concept beyond traditional notions of performance we might encounter in an explicitly ritual context. She argued that we constitute— perform—all of social reality through “language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social signs” (1988:519). Individuals and groups must act within and with the material circumstances they encounter, but through this interaction, they change and shape those materialities and one another. At the extreme, this suggests that every human action is, in fact, a performance and potentially flattens every action to the status of fabricated.

Instead, I argue that the performative is best utilized by first resisting the desire for validating an action’s sincerity, artfulness, intention, and agency. In a straightforward social science approach, such evaluations remain unknowable, with only the “reported” characteristic as an unreliable proximate measure. Instead, the performative quality of human action, including in the domain of nationalism, but also its related concept of culture, draws our attention to the changeable, non-static quality of these domains. Even as their status as static objects is constantly reified, close, ethnographic observation can help us remain open to such subtle and shifting “fragments of discourse,” which often circulate unobserved through a nation (Schein

2000:27). These fragments are performatively created, engaged and experienced, and help constitute our understanding of belonging in Germany today. The term “fragments” also suggests the kinds of limits this approach imposes. The analyses and insights I argue for are, by necessity, limited to specific circumstances, contexts, and actors. However, those fragments—framed in

19 four case studies in this work—are meant to work as challenges to certain universal assumptions of how nationalism and how belonging in Germany work, what it is, and who constitutes it. I also offer them as (hopeful) tools to work and think with in consideration of this complex, wide- ranging, and vital question of what it means to be German today.

Much of the scholarship in recent decades on German national belonging with an anthropological bent has been conducted in this spirit of questioning universal assumptions about what constitutes German nationalism. Particular attention has been brought to the varied ways that differentiation operates to exclude various groups from national belonging. Mandel, in her work on the relation of Turkishness to German belonging highlights the dominant German national narrative “evoked across the German public sphere, encompassing realms political to moral, economic to aesthetic. This discourse is intimately entangled with a vision of alterity, specifically with the perception of "Turkishness as a threat to a supposedly stable German essence” (2008:7). Without necessarily characterizing it as performative, she gives attention to contested and negotiated discourses, images and ideologies about this belonging: “Germany has entered into an internal debate about what constitutes German identity. Germans now must ask, in a very real sense, ‘who is German’ and, echoing Walter Amish, ‘how German is it?’ It is a question that has perplexed Germany since its inception in the nineteenth century and bears troubling references to the anxieties and uncertainties surrounding German right-wing ideology at the turn of the century” (7). Ewing, in her work on the stigmatization of Muslim men in

Germany, argues for a similar abjection of the other as constituting German national belonging. “Discursively, a national subject’s ‘us’ is defined by its ‘not-us’ in the ‘national imaginary of belonging.’ Butler calls it a ‘zone of uninhabitability’ — wholeness is maintained

20 through abjection and casting out that which is ‘improper’ or dangerous to the integrity of the self. this abjection structures the fantasy, even transnationally, such as ‘modern’ against the

‘traditional’ (Muslim man)” (2). For Ewing, a sense of “exclusive belonging” is “generated through an ongoing process of myth-making” through the state making its claim on its inhabitants by “marking various forms of social difference.” (2). That is, for both scholars belonging is characterized by exclusion. While I certainly do not object to this characterization as often being true, I aim to draw attention to the particular conundrum of actors in dramas of national belonging emphasizing and attempting to perform inclusion, whether successful or not.

Borneman, in his ethnography of the “two Berlins” of the late 1980s, observed how differentiation could emerge even among two states, which formally acknowledged inclusion as state policy, by recognizing the other’s population as composing a single Volk or people with its own (1992). For example, the FRG’s demarcation policies (Abgrenzungpolitk) of the 1950s ranged from a simple strategy of exclusion, such as not mentioning the communist GDR in educational contexts (243), to the abjection of “working women” in East Germany (86).

Eventually, this allowed for the west Berliner to see the east Berliner as the other, “enabled by the misrecognition of them as non-kin” and “was an officially encouraged survival strategy” (204). This situation was solved politically in 1990 with the absorption of the former

GDR states by the FRG, even though issues of differentiation between eastern and western

German identities flared up from time to time (Baer 1998) and seemed to exacerbate alterity with those perceived as non-German (Çil 2007).

Even before 2000, some social scientists began noticing trends in education that showed improving outcomes for migration-background students—that is to say inclusive trends—but

21 with many qualifications. Faist’s study in Duisburg schools revealed better matriculation rates, including in the lower-tier Hauptschule (1995:73). It would take decades at the rate of improvement, he observed, to achieve parity with other students (75). However, things were even more uncertain after school, where lack of access to citizenship paths and other factors seemed to continue to reproduce lamented social differences to the majority population (81-2). As was not uncommon, this differentiation was reproduced in this type of scholarly work, where Faist spoke of “Turks” as opposed to their “German” peers.

Religious differentiation seemed to form a similar obstacle post-school. Karakaşoğlu’s study of academically successful young “Turkish" women revealed that certain signifiers like headscarves seemed to occasion discrimination from state authorities (2003). This seemed to be born out from the laws passed in many German states (including Berlin) around the late 1990s to forbid the wearing of the headscarf for school teachers (120), though it remained permissible for students. Nonetheless, Karakaşoğlu began observing a particular discourse among some students who demarcated their headscarves as fundamentally different from the “backwards” tradition of their mothers. Instead, they were part of the choice of modern, self-determining individuals, who, while resisting assimilation, were capable of integration in Germany. Integration here is marked by inclusion in the open, tolerant liberal project, where “identity” (ethnic and religion) is protected, though limited to the private sphere (123).

However, in the years since these studies, a cosmopolitan fashioning that had been observed in Berlin (Mandel 2008:5) became a more mainstream political stance following the

2000 citizenship law. Though even in Berlin spaces of inclusion and exclusion remained contested (Brady 2004, Çağlar 2001). Conservative CDU politicians (as outlined above) began

22 arguing for and instituting new strategies of inclusion that would integrate formerly excluded people and their forms of alterity, including those with migrant-backgrounds, Islam and, to a certain extent, the “non-European.” Mandel traces more specifically how Berlin’s wish for a cosmopolitan face came up against a more general German revulsion at Turkish alterity

(2008:65). While I follow the argumentation of these scholars, that is, that the “not-us” is a critical discursive strategy in constituting national belonging, the making of the “us” is observably not merely constituted via negativa. Rather, there is also a performative attempt at creating affinities in national belonging, of incorporating differences as part of the “wholeness.”

What I trace in this study is performative attempts by participants to emphasize the incorporation rather than exclusion of alterity and what possibilities, limits, and entanglements they enact

(which might, however, include further alterity). That is, the 2000 law, like “unification” in 1990, has given Germany a new opportunity for correcting the “misrecognition” of others as “non-kin” and new possibilities (and pitfalls) for intercultural living.

Alongside alterity in understanding German nationalism, and of the anthropology of belonging in Germany, a fundamental framework has been the concept of culture. In political discourse, everyday speech and academic scholarship about German culture scholars mapped it to nationality on a one-to-one scale, at other times aligned with the categories of religion

(Karakaşoğlu 2003), made it indicative of a generational grouping (Atabay 1998) or any combination of the above. However, increasingly, as will be explored in this study, culture in the context of national belonging in Germany is understood in the plural as “cultures.” Undoubtedly this has been shaped by policies and practices of the European Union, of which Germany has frequently been the leader.

23 However, I posit the problems formulated and shaped in these case studies as responses to an understanding imbedded in “German” history itself. People and policymakers are aware of

Europe, and undoubtedly there is “evidence that new constraints and possibilities have appeared while old ones are disappearing” (Varenne 235:1992). However, the symbols of Europe remain peripheral to a discursive approach to plurality in Germany. Though a relatively benign and even common observation elsewhere, the new inclusive approach suggests that plurality is the baseline, rather than an assumed (if often unspoken) monoculture (e.g., “German” full- stop) within Germany. Such plurality may exist as two more cultures within the personhood of a single subject, as part of a community, and as the 2000 citizenship law seems to encourage, as part of the German community as a whole. This study explores this inclusive approach effort along a continuum of multi- and intercultural, diversity and integration rhetoric, policy, and performance in the years since 2000 as enacted, evoked and performed through several institutions at a national and city scale, in the news media and at the level of everyday life.

In the approach to culture in this study, I draw upon anthropology’s long history and engagement with the culture concept, from its formulation in the nineteenth century as a sociological concept seeking to understand the human world as composed of distinct cultures, to the pivotal current era (though already three-decades along) of the critique of the culture concept.

In particular, I build on one of the core pieces to this critical turn regarding culture, Abu-

Lughod’s “Writing Against Culture” (1991). In this seminal piece, she argues that feminist scholarship had drawn new attention to power structures in academic studies, which challenged the foundational formula in anthropology of the self (the one studying) versus the other (the one studied). According to Abu-Lughod, feminist scholars understood the “self” as well as the

24 “other” as constructed, with the latter subject to a certain amount of representational violence due to the power relationship that is key to such representations. The culture concept is underpinned by this self versus other division, mirroring the alterity-based understanding of how national belonging works. Even in sophisticated analytical forms, it nonetheless serves to mark one group as essentially different than another, and prompts Abu-Lughod to ask, does difference,

“always smuggle in hierarchy?” (146). She suggests that the culture concept can be challenged by drawing attention to the way discursive practice has multiple and competing modes even within a social group; by emphasizing the connectedness between the group studied and the anthropologist, including the complex and problematic historical circumstances that may have brought them together; and finally by writing “ethnographies of the particular” which resist easy generalizations (149).

Schein, while agreeing with Abu-Lughod’s critique, reframes the approach to culture in her work on the Miao in China as a move “away from culture as static, timeless, and bounded, and toward it, as produced, contingent, and deployable” (2000: 13). This is perhaps not so different than Abu-Lughod’s call for attention to practice, to the “possibility of recognizing within a social group the play of multiple, shifting, and competing statements with practical effects” (1991:148). This study leans firmly into this anti-reductionist approach towards emphasizing the complexity of entanglements and the performative dynamics of national and cultural belonging. Like many ethnographic studies before it, it acknowledges the possibilities of representational violence of those deploying the culture concept, the reproduction of an “us” versus “them.”

25 However, this study also emphasizes attempts (if not always anthropologically-savvy) at inclusive trends in culture-making by various actors, including at the national level. That is, there are official, official-adjacent, trickledown, and improvised efforts to give voice, acknowledgment, and a role to the multiple and competing modes of discursive practice regarding cultures in Germany in the context of national belonging. Likewise, there are bottom- up, street-level cases of actors "solving" this conundrum at the neighborhood or city level

(Kuppinger 2014b), even if such solutions are often misinterpreted when disseminated to a broader audience (Shavit and Wiesenbach 2012). I explore several of these attempts, typically labeled among a continuum of concepts (intercultural, multicultural, integration, diversity), at different scales, in particular contexts, with different actors, but all with the aim of reconciling multiple (perceived) cultures with a unitary framework of belonging in Germany.

Though definitions examined in this work of these terms of interculturality overlap, change, and occasionally put by their users into opposition to one another—and most frequently they are not defined at all—they are all evoked as increasingly positive (and occasionally still negative) terms for organizing difference in society as implied by Abu-Lughod’s critique.

“Intercultural,” “multicultural,” “integration,” and “diversity,” though regularly deployed (and encountered) with a static understanding, become “citations” or types of performances where the social order is reproduced (Schein 2000:259). They are unevenly distributed “powered discourses” (Ríos-Rojas 2014:13), which have real effects as they are enacted, engaged, and deployed. Critical to this work is to ask, what is “the work that diversity discourses do”?—to investigate “the ways in which these are deployed to sustain relations of power even as those powerful arrangements are increasingly more diffuse and masked by official commitments to

26 diversity” (17). Ríos-Rojas, drawing upon a Foucauldian concept of “regimes of truth” or discourses which shape our lives, policies, and institutions (Foucault 1980), develops the term

“diversity management,” and argues that though ideologically the term implies “celebrated” appeals “to tolerance and cosmopolitanism,” it is “also something requiring management and disciplining” (Ríos-Rojas 3). The need for diversity management becomes more explicit, particularly as the term has come into discursive favor in European Union policy (including its motto “United in Diversity”) as well as among its member countries like Spain (in Ríos-Rojas’ work) and the FRG. As the hierarchal structures of an institution intensify (such as from an after- school program to secondary school), this management and work to organize social life become more apparent.

At a macro level, diversity management is linked to the “practices of nation-making” where discourses of difference are deployed to “draft the boundaries of belonging in order to define the ‘us’ of the nation and ‘them’ of the hinterlands” (Ríos-Rojas 2). Even as different actors make claims on these terms, some claims emerge with greater force. The “true” account

“emerges out of social negotiations where unequal resources might be in play between participants,” but that truth is not necessarily static or solitary (Gilsenan 1996:58). Thus I pay close attention to when what Gilsenan terms “narrative coherence” is asserted from the dominant position from which such social claims about belonging can be made (58-59). However, the focus on narrative power can also reveal how it might be strategically subverted, unexpectedly challenged, or even reimagined by “shadow” narratives that emerge through these encounters

(58).

27 Case Studies

The chronological focus of this study is brief, from 2009 to 2016. However, it embraces a central issue in the current-day Germany of (national) belonging and traces some of the contours of its development in a post-2000 generation, including how its “performed,” narratively contested, symbolically engaged, and discursively constructed and shaped. The reach of the general concern about belonging is broad in terms of what it might “mean” for the nation in policy debates to everyday practical engagements, from encounters in the streetscape to classrooms. Though much of this reach features in my research in the field and makes appearances in this study, my intent is not a broad survey, but rather to use qualitative case studies to draw attention to interculturality and its related concepts as it manifests in a variety of contexts. My approach2 is grounded in a skeptical empirical approach that is a critical component of modern anthropology. By this, I mean close and systematic observation, which “uses cases to find more variables” (Becker 2014:14). Such observation and analysis reveal elements to its audience that often have the effect of challenging accepted “universal” truths but also of providing new complications (variables) when considering cases that resemble it. Though there was always a strong tendency to generate its own claims of general theory and universals in the early decades of anthropology, this practice became less bold and far more conditional following the critical turn in the post-colonial era. Instead, the skeptical approach was refined to become more self-reflective, and the theorizing became far more specific and contingent and often

“characterized by a certain ‘nervousness’” (Crapanzano xii:1985). For my purposes, this

2 Please see Appendix A for a longer discussion on methods. 28 “nervousness” served to constrain (though not preclude) my temptations towards broader generalizations.

The anthropological approach critical of the generalizing nature of social science writing and thinking perhaps has been acutely formulated by Abu-Lughod in her “Writing Against

Culture” (1991), discussed above. In addition to her critique of the danger of the uncontested deployment of the culture concept, she advocates for writing “ethnographies of the particular” as a methodological strategy that can challenge such assumptions (149). By focusing on the particularities of people’s experiences, such an ethnography would show how people contest interpretations of what is happening, and how they strategize, feel pain, and live their lives (154).

Although these discourses may be determined beyond the individual and, as in any society, include several sometimes contradictory and often historically changing terms. Such ethnographies can help us remain open to such subtle and shifting “fragments of discourse,” which often circulate unobserved through a nation (Schein 2000:27). The “particulars” and

“fragments” examined and unpacked in this study work then to undermine the generalizations which produce “effects of timelessness and coherence to support the essentialized notion of

‘cultures’” (Abu-Lughod 1991:157) which make up the intercultural framework of belonging in

Germany.

This work unfolds in a type of spiral, from the center of Berlin and from the center of

“imagined” intercultural Germany (in the news media) to the city’s peripheries and the peripheral

(but essential) targets of belonging in a new Germany. It begins with two more centralized and prominent engagements—performances—of national belonging that amount to strategic interventions meant to leverage the power of the national symbols as also compatible with an

29 intercultural understanding of the nation. From this “high” level of a major national museum project and of the central circulating national discourse on belonging by the nation’s news providers, the study moves next to a peripheral neighborhood in Berlin and a marginal subject, a migration background secondary student, but with a twist. The narrative of this student was shared nationally (as a book) by her teacher as a warning of the perils failing to integrate. Finally, it circulates to another peripheral neighborhood, to the intimate, local view, lowdown, of a self- described “intercultural” after-school center aimed at migration-background girls. It explores the contours and possibilities of interculturality on a small scale and how the center’s integration approach is meant to engage with, shape, and help create an intercultural Germany.

Humboldt Forum

Berlin is perhaps over-represented in research about immigrants and belonging in the

FRG. All the same, the city’s symbolic power is undeniable as it is “essentialized [by the government] as the place of the origin of German unity” (Kuhlke 2004:110). The capital of the

FRG was moved from its former home in Bonn to Berlin in 2000, the same year the new citizenship law came into effect. The new capital was spatially linked with past governments: the

GDR, the Third Reich, Weimar, the German Empire, Prussia, and the Mark of Brandenburg. At the center of today’s Berlin is Museum Island, a sliver of land on the River Spree, which in 1999 was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Museum Island is where the Humboldt Forum will be located, on the former site of the royal City Palace of the Hohenzollern dynasty, who served as Princes of Brandenburg, Kings of Prussia, and finally as Emperors of Germany.

30 Following this introduction, Chapter Two focuses on the new Humboldt Forum museum in Berlin, one of the boldest cultural buildouts ever in the FRG. This monumental project arose from discussions in the 1990s over what was to be done with the communist GDR’s former parliament building. That space-age structure had been the first to replace the original City

Palace after its damage from Allied bombing in World War II and its subsequent demolition in

1950. Eventually, after almost two decades of deliberation following the end of the GDR, it was decided to demolish the communist Parliament and rebuild the City Palace’s facade. However, its new interior would house a cultural forum as well as the new home of the Ethnographic and

Asian Art museums. Its detractors have referred to this project as “another billion-euro grave” (in addition to the Berlin-Brandenburg Airport construction), and it was scheduled to open partly in

2019, but since delayed (Junge Welt 2019).

The Ethnographic and Asian Art museums, comprised of “non-European” objects were being called upon to do intercultural work in the context of the “European”-focused museums already on Museum Island. Its supporters maintained that it would symbolically give credence to visitors to what Berliners and Germany knew. In essence, it was already a “world-open city” by virtue of its immigrant population and a model the new for national belonging. To make this case to the public, however, would prove more difficult than museum and public officials imagined.

The intellectual labor spent to this end—which I center around a symbolic stone-laying ceremony in 2013—was massive. Their labor revealed the difficulty of modeling interculturality on a grand scale.

Anderson identified museums as a locus of the emerging modern nation-state in Imagined

Communities (2006). He argued that the ethnographic study of the nation-state could be

31 accomplished by the study of several emergent nineteenth-century media that shaped the imagined group’s territorial and chrono-synchronicity, including novels and newspapers, but also the map, the census, and the museum. He considered these latter three as a kind of “grammar” of the ideologies and policies of the colonial-era states that hatched the modern-day nationalism project (2006:163). These elements, including the museum, were a way for the colonial state to have “imagined its dominion—the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry” (164). This “museumizing imagination” of the nation-state (182), which inherited the colonial mantle, is evident in the Humboldt Forum construction. The museum section is the shortest in Anderson’s book and has been often

“overlooked” by scholars and observers (Hajdarpasic 2008:109). However, arguably the museum

“remains a relevant analytical category to offer insights into the complex political context in which these [national] institutions operate” (109), not least because in our time museums continue to grow at an “unprecedented rate” (MacDonald 1998:1). They “are capable, through their strategies of display, of summoning up and collapsing together different places into a particular ‘world-view’” (9) and continue to present a strategic site of investigation for attempts to order society.

Museum officials’ claim that the new museum will represent Berlin’s status as a “world- open city” is not limited to the city3. As a “global city,” Berlin has positioned itself within the uneven flow of transnational capitalism above the nation-state, advertising its “cultural diversity” to attract global capital (Çağlar 2007). However, its new role as the capital saw this rescaled

3 Berlin is one of the FRG’s three city-states among the sixteen federal states. Most of its city and federal positions and institutions are overlapping, for example the head of the senate is also the mayor of the city; its house of representative serves as the city’s and state’s parliaments simultaneously. Therefore as a city, along with Hamburg and Bremen (the other two city-states), it carries an outsized structural influence compared to other cities. 32 position as able to impact the symbolic perception by the world of the German nation-state, and cultural and financial investment increased. Following a UNESCO designation in 1999, the

Federal government initially pledged 20 million dollars worth of investment on Museum Island as a whole through 2010 (D. Butler 2001). Shortly after, the level of investment bloomed to nearly 600 million euros for the Humboldt Forum as the new centerpiece of the Island with the commitment of several actors, including the city, private funding, the federal government, and the European Union. This massive project has gone through many stages as it has moved forward, but the Ethnographic and Asian Arts Museum and the Humboldt University have remained key stakeholders.

I utilize the performance and ritual approaches (which are further developed throughout the chapters) to examine how during a notable point in its construction museum officials articulated the relationship of belonging between the city of Berlin (and of Germany), the museums’ collections and the city’s immigrant population. I frame this analysis by centering it around ritual stone-laying event, which I attended in my fieldwork (and which was also televised and published as a glossy memorial magazine). It is conceptualized with the broader history and scholarship on the museum, as well as material produced by the event itself. The stone-laying event is not meant to stand in for the museum project as a whole or the nation. However, its particulars reveal a rich nexus of tangling with belonging in the Germany of the last few years in one of its most significant historical spaces with key civil and national cultural and political figures playing a part. Part of this ritualized performance of belonging also includes its intersection with the object trajectories in play from the Ethnographic and Asian Arts museums’

33 collections (Appadurai 1988; Kopytoff 2013), as well as the site itself, including its ruins.

Soccer

Chapter Three, like the one previous, examines the performance of a strategic intervention of intercultural belonging at a national scale. The “performance” here extended over a year, but focused on two incidents linked at each end, including the 2010 Word Cup. However, instead of the migration-background subject being staged on the margins of the performance, they were the central players for the drama. Furthermore, rather than being promulgated by officials from the center (such as the federal government or the Prussian Cultural Heritage

Foundation), it was spearheaded by a marginal group, a small Islamic advocacy organization.

The chapter centers around their attempt to leverage the power of a German national symbol— soccer—and reconcile it with a relatively well-known Islamic practice—fasting during Ramadan

—to discursively stage and perform national belonging country-wide and on an international scale.

Sport and fitness figured early on in the development of the proto-German state, in particular the “Turnen” gymnastics movement of the Napoleonic era, which intensified following imperial unification in 1871. It underscored the link between the health of the nation’s morals to its citizens’ fitness (Goltermann 1998). By the Weimar period (1918-1933), soccer had taken a prominent place in the relationship between the nation and the bodies of its citizens (Eggers,

2001). During the subsequent decade and half of National Socialism, scholars have argued that this link with sport, including soccer, and the nation reached an apex (Fischer 1999, Bitzer 2003,

Ewing 2008). Even following the repudiation of Nazi principles, soccer continued to play a

34 significant part in the national consciences in the two German states that emerged from the war’s aftermath, as it did in many other countries (Meier and Mutz 2016; Quiroga 2013). Particularly heightened moments of concern for soccer concentrated around the World Cup championships, including in recent decades (Brüggemeier 2004).

With the centrality of the sport of soccer—and in particular its national men’s team—to

German culture, much attention was given in 2010 to the squad as it readied for its games in the

World Cup in South Africa. This was the first team to have benefited fully from the changes in

2000 law opening citizenship up to non-ethnic Germans. A “dedicated immigration officer” had been appointed by the league to shepherd newly eligible players onto the national team (Hytner

2010). By 2010 eleven of the twenty-three players boasted at least one migrant parent. This received mostly praise in the international and German press. Some claimed it was the “most ethnically diverse” squad in the World Cup (Hytner 2010). This ethnic diversity was widespread throughout the professional league, and many of those players were also Muslim.

In more recent years, Islam has featured prominently in debates over belonging in

Germany (Al-Azmeh and Fokas 2007, Goldberg 2002). Though it has been claimed that Islam is

“a part of Germany” by President Wulff, issues related to Muslims and Islamic practice in

Germany remain contentious in many areas. “Imagining,” in Anderson’s (2006) terms, that Islam

(and Muslims) as belonging to the German nation is a recent phenomenon in the FRG. Over four million at least nominally Muslim women, men, and children live in the FRG (REMID 2018).

The role of Islam in German society had come under new scrutiny following the September 11,

2001 attacks in New York City. However there were also new opportunities by Muslim organizations in Germany to attempt intervention in the public discourse about the role of Islam

35 in society. Partly this was due to increased access to political and media influence. Though

Islamaphobia periodically circulated through news media and political discourse, many journalists and politicians sought ways to forge bonds and promote the integration agenda increasingly promoted by Chancellor Merkel's government.

It was into this pro-diversity atmosphere that a prominent German Muslim organization was able to execute a public relations strategy to stage an act of inclusion regarding a positive intercultural message about the compatibility of Islam and Germany. That group, the Council for

Muslims in Germany (Zentralrat für Muslime in Deutschland (ZMD), had come to prominence when it introduced an "Islamic Charta" shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, which attempted to set guidelines affirming Muslim commitment to Islam along with a commitment to life in Germany, including respect for its constitution. The ZMD's approach was to act as an umbrella organization for Muslim-interest groups with much larger memberships to continue to make this case. The event that occurred into 2009, that the ZMD would link to the following year’s World Cup, was a professional league’s team’s reprimand of three of its players for fasting during Ramadan.

The strategic intervention enacted by the ZMD unfolded with the dissemination of a fatwa regarding fasting and professional soccer in Germany, which became part of a national

(and international) media strategy. I draw upon a foundational concept in legal anthropology of the “breach” or “trouble case” to position this strategy. For Llewellyn and Hoebel, this was a methodological solution to their study of Cheyenne law, where norms were assumed by their practitioners, and discussing them was unfamiliar. However, cases of trouble required, according to them, “‘somebody doing something about it’” thereby revealing the norm or law (cited in

36 Conley and O’Barr 2004:24). While I find this approach very useful throughout this work, I posit that there is also a latent possibility for the production of new norms here, for effecting change from unexpected directions, of actors acting or appearing as more “’stately’ than the state” (Navaro-Yashin 2002:1). That is, the case I examine here, creates and elevates its own

“trouble case,” thereby directing and creating its own “solution” to be discovered by the stakeholders, which in turn will reveal a “norm” of compatible belonging between Germany and

Islam to be discursively distributed at the broadest levels.

Neukölln

In Chapter Four, the work circulates from the center to a peripheral neighborhood in the city, but one that has become more symbolic of the “immigrant problem” in Berlin and the FRG as a whole, the southern borough of Neukölln. Here belonging is approached through a heightened “narrative” contest (Gilsenan 1996:57), between a former teacher’s tell-all book about her teaching experiences in a high school in this notorious neighborhood and a long-form educational “life history” with a student featured in that book. That is, the book itself was intended for a national audience, but its subject (a Neukölln school) was deliberately portrayed as a symbolic war zone. Its students were likewise portrayed as marginal (that is to say, of migration-background) to an assumed non-migration background audience (i.e., “German”), but were nonetheless indictable of the country’s future peril and pitfalls in their perceived struggle

(and failure) to be integrated.

In the education scholarship concerning the FRG over the last three decades, attention has been drawn to immigrant youth underperforming in the school system in comparison to their

37 German school peers (Alamdar-Niemann et al 1991, Korte 1987, Kolinsky 1996, Ostergaard-

Nielsen 2003, Stowasser 2002). This chapter builds on this work and the work of education scholars working in the USA and elsewhere, who theorized that a dominant if often unacknowledged characteristic of schooling was to reproduce social inequality through a variety of mechanisms, including how language was deployed, classroom arrangements, testing, and discipline (Ogbu 1974; Yon 2003; Tobin and Kurban 2014; Heath 1983). That is, school was not a neutral place where one simply learned course content, nor merely a mirror to society, but rather a place where society shaped and reproduced its image through active and often coercive engagement between students, teachers, administrators, and parents (Willis 1981).

Intercultural scholars working on FRG schools approached the study of the documented inequality of outcomes in comparative modes. Often these comparatives were between two schools, whether locally defined, such as between two schools in the same city or between two or more international schools (Faist 1995). Commonly, at least implicitly, a distinction was drawn between schools attempting an intercultural model and those that were not—or were, but less successfully. I intervene in this discussion by going beyond the evaluative approach to intercultural education and instead question the undermining assumptions of the intercultural model to serve students within the school institution. In particular, I focus on its vulnerability to reproduce “difference” at the convenience of those positions of social power while maintaining a facade of inclusion. New narratives of failure can be asserted outside the power of students’ agency and action, even of those who “succeed.”

The student at the center of this chapter narrated her experiences to me not only regarding the teacher and school in question and the book itself but more extensively about her

38 understanding of her own educational journey, including her more recent experience with universities. However, my intention is not to overgeneralize her case, but instead, I methodologically treat it as a “breach” or “trouble” case—with a twist. As mentioned above, cases of breach, are a methodological way of observing norms, because they are departure enough from those norms for somebody “to do something about it” to reveal them (Conley and

O’Barr 2004:24). That is, the student appears in the teacher’s book to “fail” as an integrated, intercultural subject and is therefore emblematic of the broader “problems” with immigrant youth it purports to detail. For the teacher, the book’s publication and dissemination of its message was the first stage of the redress to this trouble. However, the twist is that a second breach emerges in the student’s own counter-narrative and lived life: she actually scholastically succeeds. I use this twist to open up a set of questions of our understanding of how intercultural practices and belonging work in a stricter hierarchal setting; how a shift in structure and relationships in those structures can turn a practice against itself.

MÄDEA

The final chapter circulates to another periphery of the city. Its approach is grounded in the neighborhood and street-level as it details the accounts of an after-school center for immigrant girls in the Wedding district. Unlike the student in the previous chapter, these girls remained out of the national media focus but were generally (as migration-background youth) the target of integration and intercultural efforts from the federal, city, and borough levels. At this particular after-school center, they interacted with a particular pedagogical tradition that grew out of a feminist program for doing “girl work,” or shaping future women as fully participating

39 members of society. MÄDEA is a self-described “intercultural” center, which is the centerpiece of this chapter of this study. The women running the center emphasized various activities and programs to encourage the girls there to be thoughtful and expansive in considering the complexity of their culture and identities as girls (as they all were), as migrants or migrant- backgrounded (as most of them were) and as residents of Berlin (where most of them had spent the great part or all of their lives). They had been promoting and encouraging the compatibility and desirability of multiple (previously mutually exclusive) identities. Namely, that one could be, for example, German and Kurdish and Muslim. It was an attempt intercultural written on a single individual.

In the 1980s and 1990s, anthropologists in the FRG and Berlin, in particular, turned their attention to potential “shadow” narratives emerging among immigrant youth, the so-called

“second generation” of Turks who were primarily raised in the FRG. Their reported status of feeling neither here nor there was theorized as a state of “in-betweenness” (Horrocks and

Kolinsky 1996, Atabay 1998, Mandel 2008), where these young people felt like they did not belong (or only partly did) in the FRG nor the ancestral countries of their families (Abadan-Unat

1985). However, scholars also showed new interest in what kinds of cultural production these youth were involved in beyond being simply in-between. The concept of “hybridity” resonated with scholars, which was understood as a constructive “blending” (Klopp 2002:201) or bricolage

(Kaya 2001:173). There was excitement at this youth cultural production, even as others criticized the state structures and pedagogies (such as after-school centers) that framed it and helped shape it (Çağlar 1998:249).

40 I am also skeptical of an immediate celebration of hybridity, yet ongoing ethnographic work reveals two interesting conundrums. The first is that many migrant youths still discursively frame their feeling of belonging as “in-between,” which shapes not only their sense of their identity but indeed the cultural production work they continue to do, as I explore in this chapter.

The second conundrum is that close observation seems to confirm that there is a common characteristic of “already blended” among migrant youth. Klopp argues, for example, that “just as there is no homogeneous or fixed German subject, it is impossible to speak of one integrating into the other” (2002:201). Nevertheless, not only do we continue to speak of integrating one into the other, the blended/hybridized paradigm reproduces a baseline assumption that there were two original, distinct, and different (cultural/ethnic) substances to be brought together. Blended/ hybridized remains open to the “narrative dominance” and “diversity management” critiques outlined above.

I develop further here the concept of what I call performative belonging. These are the performances of belonging by the migration-background girls at an after-school center help to illustrate the remarkable moments which speak to possibilities and openings, textures, and fissures of belonging in the Germany of today. It is at the scale of the day-to-day that we seem to see the most apparent input, creation, and interpretation of the intercultural concepts by its principal targets and intercultural at its most robust state. As many scholars have noted, particularly in debates over young Muslim women's perceptions of agency matter and their work goes a considerable way in nuancing agency as a concept (Abu-Lughod 1999, Scott 2010,

Mahmood 2011). This often draws on a feminist discourse of agency, where it is understood as a universal embodied by the “experiential idea of choice” (Nussbaum 1998:11). This is the

41 tradition most aligned with the youth center and its sensitivity to the backgrounds of the girls it oversees. This work’s purpose is not to evaluate the degree of “agency”—however defined—on the girls’ part, but to mark its evocation in text and performance by the girls and staff of the youth center as a sign and strategy of the process of negotiating belonging.

***

The negotiation for belonging is at the heart of the intercultural (multicultural/diversity/ integration) efforts in Germany because this discussion fundamentally hinges on the question of what it means to be German, including within the context of the EU whose motto is “United in

Diversity.” These qualitative encounters help illuminate how an abstract and often vague set of concepts within the intercultural paradigm becomes tactile when encountering those for whom it was intended. They help us to move beyond easy generalizations about what it means to be

German as well as what role intercultural approaches can play in shaping the next Germany.

Those advancing definitions of what it means to be German or intercultural are unexpectedly confronted with Germans in headscarves or the attempts of some intercultural pedagogies to insist on the violent reassertion of difference; of forgotten ruins of past stones or professional soccer leagues citing a fatwa as proof of its inclusive agenda.

42 Chapter 2: Humboldt Forum

Outside of the massive construction site on the grounds of the former royal palace, just across the busy Unter den Linden boulevard in the Lustgarten park stood a monument to

“Diversity Destroyed.” It was a temporary one, comprised of a couple of dozen 10-ft columns, in red and white, with black and white photographs. Each column had information about

“Resistance and the Public Sphere” and told a personal story impacted by the coming to power of the National Socialists in 1933 and the Jewish Pogrom of 1938. The theme “diversity destroyed” was a year-long Berlin State-sponsored and city-wide effort in 2013 and spanned not only many dozen other columns throughout the city (with their own different sub-themes), but also billboards, museums, readings, and temporary exhibitions throughout the city. The years

1933 and 1938 epitomized what potentially could be lost when “diversity” was undermined for the creators and organizers of the campaign. For city and federal officials, it also served as a fitting negative image of what they were actively advocating for in the most centralized and publicized forms—that the Berlin and Germany of today were world-open, inclusive, and ready to demonstrate a new commitment to diversity. Walking through those columns on a bright June day, I was in the center of Berlin to witness just such an attempt, a celebration of one of the city’s, state’s, and country’s most ambitious cultural build-outs to intercultural belonging: Berlin

Palace - Humboldt Forum.

Introduction: The Stone-Laying for the Berlin Palace – Humboldt Forum

The focus of this chapter is a case study centered around the foundation stone-laying at what is officially known as the Berlin Palace — Humboldt Forum, a 600 million euro project

43 which will consist of a replica of the former Royal City Palace’s facade which will contain the

Ethnographic and Asian Art museums as well as a library and several exhibitions and labs from the Humboldt University. By concentrating on the one-hour televised performance of the stone- laying—what was said, seen and done, and the speakers’ relationship to the objects intended for the Forum, including the site itself—I ask what it can reveal about the imaginary for national belonging at stake in the (re)construction of this palace for Berlin and German officials from a perspective of a concentrated and centralized dominant narrative. By imaginary, I mean “tacitly held models of the social and political world” where “the assumptions, conceptions, attitudes, and sensibilities about a sociopolitical situation” are brought to bear in the situations of everyday life (Liu 2012:13). The particular event under consideration here of the stone-laying brings together several state actors, the German president, the president of the Prussian Cultural

Heritage Foundation (who oversee Berlin’s major museums), and the Federal cultural minister, among others in a carefully orchestrated performance. It is an opportunity to observe an attempt to perform and make a case for intercultural belonging at a centralized and top-down national- scale site, an admittedly heightened situation. It is a nexus making it “good to think” (with) in

Levi-Strauss’ parlance (89:1963).

I aim to show at this scale, how the dominant narratives about interculturality attempt to utilize various resources around them (things, people, places), yet in doing so, reveal the intercultural model’s potential vulnerability to unexpected meaning-making when propagated in such a hierarchical and uneven manner. The organizers of this performance marshaled not only the discourse of intercultural virtue but “non-European” objects, selective migrant-background

Berliners, and the “the best of” Prussia to make a case for Berlin and Germany as “world-

44 open” (humboldtforum.com). Under the auspices of a well-known Turkish-German TV moderator, political and museum officials discussed and presented the museum project to the

German public—to a select VIP crowd of two hundred on the site (and a small public audience including myself viewing from an on-site installation) and to a live broadcast around the country

(and later in a glossy published magazine).

I framed my analysis of this day with repeated visits to the construction site, to the

Humboldt Box, in my discussions with the Humboldt Forum lab group at the Humboldt

University’s European Ethnology department, with comparative visits to other Prussian Cultural

Heritage Foundation museums on Museum Island, to borough museums throughout the city, with site visits to the Ethnography and Asian Art Museums in Dahlem (their current home), reviews of dozens of official publications about the Forum from its foundation (including the official magazine about the stone-laying ceremony) and its monthly newsletter as well as the televised version of the stone-laying ceremony.

I argue that the staging of an official conception of the Humboldt Forum was not merely performative and discursive, but also grounded in the material reality around it. The material part of this equation addressed in this chapter includes the beginning of the construction site for the

Humboldt Forum, the ruins of the historic palace revealed in the excavation, a temporary on-site display space for models of the museums and with a few chosen objects from the collections on display (called the Humboldt Box), and, not least, the main body of objects of the Ethnographic and Asian Arts collections in Dahlem awaiting transport into their new home. I examine a key claim made by officials that the Humboldt Forum will further make a case for Berlin and

Germany as a “world-open” city and country (in addition to its “intensely” integrated migration-

45 background citizens) in the inclusive nature of its collections, which in turn reflects the inclusive intercultural city of Berlin. That is, the concept of “performative belonging” is put forth on a visible and central stage and on a grand scale with the museum’s model for interculturality.

To draw attention to the narrative contest at play in the museum stone-laying performance, I utilize two separate but complementary insights regarding objects and the attempt to harness their power to shape a model for intercultural living. The first draws on the anthropological treatment of objects as socially constructed. Simultaneously de-fetishizing

(observing the social and other labor put into an object’s creation) and re-fetishizing an object methodologically (by “following” the object), an object’s “biography” or “life,” just like a human’s, could reveal in its trajectory social forms and construction of the human worlds which conjured forth such an object (Appadurai 1988; Kopytoff 2013). Indeed much of this work has been used to reveal and reassert the concealed, hidden, and forgotten colonial origins of museum objects in Europe (Fiskesjö 2015:6). My concern is not to further document the biographies of the museum objects coming to the Humboldt Forum, but to show how these biographies (which museum officials are very aware of and acknowledge) are performatively engaged. I argue this is done in part by officials attempting to decouple the object from its often (acknowledged) problematic history and reposition it as a current museum piece for an exciting new symbol of

Berlin’s cosmopolitan image. In this attempt I draw on the second insight and I ask what

“haunts” these objects as they are engaged with and what is “conjured up” in an attempt to

“conjure away” (Barak 2013). Why do such objects’ lives remain sticky, clinging to their biographies, even in highly stage-managed performances? In particular, I focus on the colonial

46 legacy at stake in many of these objects that are being marshaled by federal, city, and museum officials as models of Germany’s new intercultural belonging.

I go on to trace two additional strategies to situate these objects as viable symbols of the new inclusive Germany. The first was their tactical pairing and framing in the stone-laying ceremony with a small, but select and visible group of “migration-background” Berliners, presented as on stage as performers already integrated. Their deployment as actors in the performance aimed to make a case for the city and nation’s commitment to integration and hoped to smooth the way for the museums’ collections and the Forum itself. These persons as “cultural resource of a global city” (Çağlar 2007) are meant to act of a preemptive answer to the critics' charges of the colonial-tainted status of its central museums. I argue that even as these performers are meant to stand for Berlin’s and Germany’s inclusive belonging among its citizens, they are here flattened into a mere representation in an attempt at “diversity management” (Rios-

Rojas 2011). Perhaps most indicative of this flattening is the migration-background Berliners selected to participate, to symbolically stand for the cosmopolitan city, have no direct connection to the former colonial lands of the Empire, or to the objects removed from them currently in the museums’ collections. Regardless, I show how the Ottoman Empire, one of whose successor countries the Turkish Republic would become a major sending country of migrants for today’s

Germany, was nonetheless linked to the German Colonial Empire. Ottoman objects also haunt

Museum Island’s other institutions and conjure up their own troubled pasts.

This attempt to harness the power of the objects and the power of the city’s “intensely integrated” (as a Palace official put it in the performance) citizens and make a case for a world- open Germany, is also intertwined in the performance with the second strategic endeavor to

47 manage another closely-tied legacy of the Humboldt Forum site, Prussia. In the discursive and performative engagement with Prussia in the stone-laying ceremony (including a blessing of the stone by a Lutheran and Catholic priest), I argue that the spatial qualities of the old palace’s ruin contribute to an excess of meaning beyond the officials’ presentation of what they refer to as the

“best of" Prussia. In this approach, the imaginings of the state and its materialities and real effects are not disassociated, but count for the “make-believe” (the made and the imagined) state

(Navaro-Yashin 2011:5). This approach is what she terms “both-and,” that is, the human- centered, constructivist viewpoint is seen as complementary to an object-centered one (5). It is not merely that meaning is “grafted” onto a spatial environment, but that there is also “something in space, in material objects, or in the environment that exceeds, or goes further and beyond human imagination, but that produces an affect that may be experienced by human beings” (18).

I do not linger on the emotive quality of “affect” here or try to determine its causal direction, but instead, use it as a kind of latent sign to be interpreted. I draw on Kohn’s work on the forests of

Ecuador to ask why it seems at the palace site, that “bits of history, the detritus of prior formal alignments, get frozen… and leave their residues there” (2013:183) and rise alongside the difficult lives of museum objects and people to complicate a performative narrative about belonging. I aim to show how the excesses of meaning produced in this performance reveal a conundrum of belonging directed in a top-down manner, how “shadow narratives” (Gilsenan

1996:58) emerge in even the most controlled performances, and conjure, evoke and gesture towards unexpected complexities, possibilities, and potential future pasts.

48 Site Overview: A Palace Reborn

In November of 1989, the gates of the tightly guarded Anti-fascist Protection Barrier (as the Berlin Wall had been glossed in the East) opened one night in November due to bureaucratic confusion or slyness combined with an eagerness to exploit it. Though relatively unhampered movement of peoples from East to West and West to East began in order to reunite with family, to party and to gawk, for a time, two simultaneous Germanys continued. During this heady time on the small island that marks the city's traditional center of first royal, then civic, then

Communists' people's power—today’s Museum Island—the East German Communist Party issued two of its final and most remarkable decrees. The first was to formally dissolve their country and its political system and stand back as thirteen million of its citizens (including themselves) were granted permission to join the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), a country as young as theirs but seemingly destined to continue as the only Germany. The second decree, and one of its final ones, was to shut down the parliament building where this historic decision had been made due to the reported recent discovery of asbestos (Boym 2001:188). Built in 1976, the parliament building just a brief time before had been considered a relatively new addition to the Eastern capital's landscape and a prominent symbol (along with the still-standing TV Tower) of German communist achievement. Its gigantic squat presence and its shimmering gold windows conveyed to many Soviet visitors the power of their “West.”

It was not the first time such a question arose for this symbolic space on Museum Island.

For nearly five hundred years, a building on that spot had served as the City Palace to the ruling

Hohenzollern dynasty, who ruled as Kings of Prussia and then Emperor’s of German Empire.

Following the German Empire’s defeat at the end of the First World War, the Hohenzollern

49 family fled to Holland and the German nobility was abolished. The first significant contestation of the vacated building came immediately. The communist leader Karl Liebknecht took to one of the massive balconies of the still-standing baroque City Palace in November 1919 and declared the arrival of the revolution (Boym 183). That uprising and Liebknecht were quickly swept away in counter-revolution. During the ensuing Weimar Republic and sequential Third Reich, the abandoned palace became more or less a civic-minded museum or a flag-bearing facade, but noticeably without government functions.

Remarkably the enormous edifice mostly survived Allied bombing in the Second World

War. However, one year after its founding in 1950, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) sent a clear message about the legacy of imperial Germany on its side of the border and within its capital. It dynamited the building, calling it a symbol of Hohenzollern “bondage” (Caron and

Gralchen 2008). It took more than twenty-five years of neglect, then deliberation to replace the ruin, and in the 1970s, the GDR constructed its communist Parliament building known as the

Palace of the Republic. However, the glorious future its builders had imagined came to an abrupt end after only fourteen years with the end of GDR in 1990. In the twenty-five years that followed a remarkable set of fights, false-starts and digging were undertaken as the unified country debated the legacy of Prussia and the GDR. The People’s Palace was eventually in its turn torn down, and in 2002 the FRG Parliament (now relocated from Bonn to the Reichstag in Berlin) drew on the work of an independent commission to go ahead with the Humboldt Forum project

(Bose 2012). With funding from the city and federal governments, the EU, and private donors

(for the Palace facade), the march began towards a summer day in June of 2013 when yet a new foundation stone was laid down in a celebratory ceremony. The City Palace was to be reborn.

50 The other three sides of the large square on which the palace construction site eventually emerged have remained little altered in the years since unification. The busy Unter den Linden cuts off the palace site from the Lustgarten park and the attending Berlin Cathedral and the imposing Old Museum. The fourth side of the square is itself separated by the river Spree. The old armory (now the German National Museum) supposedly (according to vocal tour guides passing through the square) completes the Prussian vision of power represented by the square: royalty, religion, culture, and war. Though local traffic has increased over the years to nearby government buildings or the Humboldt University, it is mostly tourists one sees, whether on their way to nearby museums or pausing to rest and take pictures on the grass of the Lustgarten.

Though the summer day of the stone-laying was bright and shiny, the festivities were somewhat muted. There were ongoing scandals about the mismanagement of the construction of the new airport at Schoenefeld and recent protests against its cost-overruns at the nearby city hall.

Rumors circulated that Chancellor Merkel had sent the much-less prominent President Gauck in her stead to what many referred to at the “billion (euro) grave” in the media. Guests passed through a monitored entrance to the site and to a professionally staged area where the foundation stone was featured.

Those not invited but wanting to watch could pay the small entrance fee (as I did) to the

Humboldt Box, the temporary exhibition space that provided a window into the site. On its first floor, there were about 60 members of the public gathered to watch the festivities. Around the relatively narrow window to the site, about ten chairs were already full, and a crowd of mostly

German retirees pressed behind them with cameras ready. This space was tight and small around the window, under-the-breath arguments and poking elbows broke out periodically. Nearby there

51 were about thirty chairs set out around a television tuned to a live broadcast of the event. Here the chairs were full too, and others stood behind them, including the small staff of the Humboldt

Box, who clapped the loudest throughout the hour. The Box was also where the exhibition was set up by the Humboldt-Foundation, the group responsible for overseeing the fundraising for the project. A viewer could turn to see a chronological historical tour of the palace in words and pictures as well as a large three dimensional model of the center of Berlin in the late nineteenth century, with the palace as the focus. This prompted visitors to imagine a city with a palace again. Notably, all around the room, there were casts of pieces of the former facade, including

Prussian eagles, Hohenzollern crowns, helmets, and roaring lions. The next two floors of the

Humboldt Box contained selections from the institutions intending to the be centerpieces of the

Humboldt Forum, the Ethnographic, and Asian Art museums as well as the Humboldt

University.

` Out in the construction site itself, a couple of hundred guests gathered in seats in front of a stage, with a large scrum of press standing behind. A three-part backdrop showed a visualization of the exterior with dome and an interior to come. In the middle of the stage was the symbolic foundation stone. Atop a small brick platform, the dates “1443-2013” were carved into its side. In the early afternoon sunshine, a carefully managed performance unfolded over the hour. Manfred Rettig, the head of the Berlin Palace Foundation, made the opening remarks.

Nazan Gökedemir, a TV moderator, then led a “debate” with Klaus Wowereit, the Mayor of

Berlin, Peter Ramsauer, the Federal Minister for Building, Traffic, and Habitation, and Bernd

Naumann, the Minister of Culture, the latter two from the ruling conservative Christian

Democratic Union (CDU) Party. This was intercut with video testimonies to the importance of

52 the project from Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum and from Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State. After a gong performance, Professor Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, who oversees Berlin’s major museums, gave an impassioned speech. There was yet one more gong performance (this time with a saxophone), then the insertion of a time capsule into the stone with a few words from the

German President Gauck, and finally a blessing by a Lutheran minister and a Catholic priest.

Calling for World Culture, Conjuring the Colonial

For officials managing the stone-laying performance of the Humboldt Forum, they hoped their museum would make a case for Berlin and Germany as “world-open” places, as sites that others would look to for models of inclusive belonging. A central strategy of this performance was to present the museum's “non-European” objects (as they were referred to) coming to the

Forum as key symbols to demonstrate that belonging. I use this element of the performance to demonstrate the difficulty of crafting master narratives of national belonging. I show how attempts at managing belonging from above, here using objects, produce unexpected moments of contention, protest, excess, and escape from the performed narrative.

The flashpoint at the center of the presentation was seemingly small, a swift dismissal of the “colonial” as a topic of concern in the Humboldt Forum, during the speech by Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the group that oversees the city's museums. The colonial connections in the collections which are coming to the City Palace are alternatively acknowledged and erased in the Humboldt Forum’s other official presentations, as I will show regarding its displays in the Humboldt Box on the construction site. It has significantly

53 been part of the Forum's critics' approach, including in literature distributed on that day by the two protesters present. Its legacy most affectively lingers over the objects waiting in the still- suburban confines of the Ethnographic and Asian Art Museums in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem-

Dorf. I ask what “haunts” these objects as they are engaged with and what is “conjured up” in an attempt to “conjure away” (Barak 2013:99). Ironically, in order to reduce, order, and quiet the colonial, as Parzinger's speech indicates, it must be evoked and summoned first. This is what

Barak, drawing from Derrida, refers to in his work on time and technology in the early twentieth century as a “hauntology” (88). When locomotives were introduced in Egypt, the middle classes feared the peasant's misattribution of steam power to the world of the jinn. They thus put considerable effort into “scientifically conjuring them away,” which caused “the production of more discourse around the exorcized entities, retroactively enchanting them. It was a conjuring away that ended by conjuring up” (99). With the move of the Ethnographic and Asian Art museums to the city center, Germany's colonial period has been conjured up by its critics and their targets in ways not seen for many many decades.

The hour-long performance, in many ways, was not unique for museums with complicated colonial collections. It captured the struggle that many former colonial powers with now problematic collections must undergo to position themselves and their objects anew. Should objects be repatriated, re-consecrated, repackaged? These disputes allow us to witness new

“cosmologies in the making” in so far as museums are sites of cultural ordering (Fiskesjö

2007:6). World culture was evoked throughout the stone laying, such as the President Gauck's wish in this speech that the Humboldt Forum be a “lively engagement with world culture” and speaks to current trends in museum reconfiguration. In a slightly self-admonishing tone,

54 Professor Parzinger suggested in his speech that the Humboldt Forum had some catching up to do with other major museums in the world and how they presented their non-European material, naming the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Quay Branly

Museum in Paris. The latter, for example, was based on what its founder Jaques Chirac called in his forward to the museum’s guidebook, “‘the debt we owe to the peoples and countries’ of the former French empire. Their civilizations have ‘long been ignored or underrated,’ he writes, and the museum will help see ‘justice rendered’ (Rothstein 2011). Like those museums, the

Humboldt Forum would use its ethnographic art collection as a means to reposition its relationship to its colonial period and also offer itself as a “world-oriented” city and country.

However, many of these objects were “collected” mostly in Germany's relatively short and less- well-known colonial period.

Many historians have made these linkages between the Humboldt Forum collections and colonial ventures more explicit (Bose 2012), and officials were not unaware of them. At first,

Parzinger evoked the colonial period without naming it, by suggesting the objects were returning. That is, they were returning to where they were first collected. Before this was a

UNESCO protected Museum Island, he told the crowd, the objects, the collection at the Old

Museum across the road, and others nearby had “their origin” (ihren Ursprung) here, indicating the place they sat. He went on to explain that they began as “cabinets of wonder” (Kunstkammer), alluding to the fact that many of these objects were royal property and had been part of the Hohenzollern’s collections. These genealogical ties have been uncovered in part by the work of Horst Bredekamp (Bose 2012) and others. Nor was this the first time

Parzinger alluded to such connections (Parzinger 2011:47-48). Their “origin” at this moment in

55 his speech was defined by this ownership, not their sometimes dubious procurement thousands of miles away. Some of these objects would be returning to the site of the palace from which they began their Prussian and German lives. Similarly, he said in his speech, the Humboldt

University's library and scientific collections also began “within the walls of the Palace” and implied that they would also be returning. The imagining of the palace, and in turn, the imaginary of national belonging for Berlin and Germany, by the state, then is intimately tied to the material project of the “returning” objects.

The issue of the colonial legacy has been a critical pressure point for the palace critics, along with its nearly 600 million Euro price tag. The two earnest protesters outside the stone- laying event were handing out a one-sheet demanding an immediate halt to construction. This halt would be in order to hold a public debate, contending that “the current concept [of the

Humboldt Forum] violates the dignity and property rights of communities in all parts of the world, it is Eurocentric and restorative” (No Humboldt21! 2013). Signed by dozens of activists groups related to bringing attention to Germany's colonial legacy, it goes on to argue that the nearly half a million objects were acquired through violence in the colonial context and contest their returning to the “resurrected residence of the Brandenburg-Prussian monarchs.” These leaders were “responsible for the enslavement of thousands of people from Africa as well as genocides and concentration camps in Germany's former colonies” (No Humboldt21! 2013).

Furthermore, the protesters argued, the positioning of these objects on Museum Island is not problematized, not done with consultation of the origin countries, and will serve only the good of the “people of the North” (No Humboldt21! 2013). In Parzinger's speech, he seemingly addressed many of these critiques, but by necessity, in order to “conjure away” this unwanted

56 association, he had to “conjure” it up. He mentions, for example, that they will be bringing curators from around the world “where these things were created” (evoking an alternate point of origin, but not a point of return) to help position the objects appropriately. African art and

European art side by side will make them equals and will be a “turning point” in the approach to these objects. He noted that many would be skeptical about such a museum in Berlin, “the place of the Congo Conference in 1884, ’85. Of course, that will always be part of our history. A painful part of our history. We know very well what it meant for Africa and the consequences that followed.” The Congo Conference is seen by many as the formal beginning of the German

Empire’s colonial ventures, where under Bismarck’s direction, they made their first claims of territory in Africa (Townsend 1966:90-91). Parzinger suggested that the mistake of focusing on the colonial history is that it dishonors the fact that these objects, that “Africa” had a history before and after colonialism. We should not reduce their reality to the colonial context. We, the audience, had the colonial acknowledged for us but were expected to move on with the celebration.

The German Empire only came into being in 1871 and its colonies followed shortly. The end of World War I would strip the Reich of all it had gained. Previous to that unification under

Prussian power in Berlin, the various German states had made small attempts in fits and starts to establish and claim various colonial possessions. However, almost all of these colonial adventures ended after a short time, like Prussia's Gross Friedrichsburg fort in West Africa

(Townsend 1966:15). The reasons given for the lack of colonial success are various. However, a significant factor is understood to be the lack of a strong central government (22). This would change with the proclamation of empire in the halls of Versailles in 1871. However, Otto

57 Bismarck, the Imperial chancellor, was not initially an open supporter of a colonial policy, even refusing to accept some French colonies offered up following the Franco-Prussian war. Arguably, an initial “cultural” colonization began in Prussia as the dominant Protestant Prussian Germans engaged in a culture war, Kulturkampf, that first targeted Catholics suspected by Bismarck as disloyal to the new state (Clark 2007:570). This included many Prussian Poles, who found they were not fit to be different and equal in the new state. Germanization swept through, making

German the only language of instruction in the Eastern provinces and encouraging “German” farmers to settle among Polish speakers (582). Of course, the city-states and princedoms had to be brought in line with the Prussian vision of Empire as well.

Many settler Germans had not waited for permission to undertake their own colonial adventures and acquisitions of trade opportunities, as well as archeology and other collecting had been underway for some time, not least by Alexander von Humboldt. Hanseatic cities like

Hamburg and Bremen, established beachheads for commercial activity first in East Africa and later in the South Seas and elsewhere (Townsend 1966:45-47). There was mass emigration to

North and South America throughout the nineteenth century as Germans imagined new lives in faraway places (36-38). Germans with religious motivations went as missionaries to South West

Africa and the South Seas (42). Prussian Old Lutherans, fleeing the Kulturkampf, sought refuge in Australia. Many Germans also went to Ottomans lands. Seven German settlements were founded in Palestine in 1853 (42). The Ottoman Sultan permitted “several hundred Prussian families” to settle in West Anatolia and the Balkans in 1857 (Fuhrmann 2006:45-46). In 1887 a group of “Russian-Germans” sought to recreate original “golden” days of their previous Russian settlement in Anatolia (53). Though some of these Germans lost their connection with their

58 homeland, many remained hopeful that Germany's foreign ambitions would grow bolder, giving them official protection.

Germany’s moment came in 1884. Bismarck, in connection to a diplomatic crisis with

England over claims in South West Africa, finally proclaimed the German Colonial Empire.

Many among those Germans throughout the world welcomed Bismarck's new pro-colony stance in 1884 and the banner of Weltpolitik that would carry it forward (Fuhrmann 2006:90-91). This is, of course, the date that coincided with the Congo Conference and the beginning of the

“painful part” of German history that Parzinger in his speech “conjured up” and which had allowed amongst other things for the ethnographic and other collections to be brought to Berlin.

Germany has many distinct painful periods, and Berlin has some of the most remarkable memorials for attempting to remember, situate, and process those times, many in the vicinity of

Museum Island. On Bebel Square next to the State Opera, Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman designed a remarkable memorial of negative space to the 1933 Nazi book burning. A glass panel on the ground among the cobblestones reveals a four-walled library with empty bookshelves large enough to hold the 20,000 books that were burned on the spot. Just south of the

Brandenburg Gate stands the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a set of nearly 3,000 gray concrete slabs designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman. The stones undulate like still waves and evoke a cemetery. The visitor can wander freely among them and easily become lost and disoriented. These kinds of memorials are works of international cooperation and provoke unique engagements with truly horrible moments in German history and present prominent and nearby examples of how a difficult past can be directly engaged with, even on a massive scale.

59 Perhaps then a critical skepticism is warranted that a triumphant Prussian palace will supposedly provide the transcendence of these objects' procurement, as Parzinger suggests.

However, despite his easy dismissal, in the few objects already on show at the Humboldt Box

(where and I other members of the public stood on the day of the stone-laying) the indication is that complexity will not (or cannot) be simply waved away, not least by the curators. In the display of a throne from Cameroon, given as a “gift” to Kaiser Wilhelm II by King Njoya. It asks us to question its status as a gift in the Colonial context and to ponder its interpretation “here” and in Cameroon and indicates that such a display technique will challenge “us to re-examine our own history.” These half-million artifacts are not easily shorn of their often violent extraction. However, such attention to complexity, in the end, may not withstand the more extensive ordering which is being re-produced, including the text of this display: between an

“us” and a “them,” a “European” and a “non-European,” “art,” and “ethnology.” They remain haunted by the colonial and as well as the context and history for collecting and ordering them in

Germany.

Radical Difference and the Ethnographic Museum

Ethnographic museums in Germany and elsewhere developed alongside the discipline of anthropology. They reflected the attempts by early anthropologists such as Bastian to mirror their displays to the orderings of the discipline, such as grouping together a “‘people’s’ material culture” to represent a society (Penny 2002:170). Penny argues that these museums then often reflected the problems “inherent in the ethnographic project itself (179). Early professional anthropologists often began their careers in museums. Franz Boas, before he helped to found the

60 anthropology department at Columbia University, was an employee at the (then) newly opened

Ethnographic Museum in Berlin. Later Boas was a foundational element in establishing the

American Museum of Natural History in New York, a place he imagined might be a museum goer’s first encounter with “radical difference” (Penny 2002:208).

Even as most anthropologists lost their professional ties to museums throughout the twentieth century, ethnographic collections continued to represent, in David Jenkin’s terms, “‘a shift from delighting in the world’s strange offerings and the appeal of subjective involvement to an attempt to master and control the world’s diversity through new forms and conceptualization’” (cited in Penny 2002:165). They are a “mirror to the profession of anthropology” as much as they are “windows onto other cultures,” though, as many have argued, they are also “cannibalistic in appropriating other peoples’ material for their study and interpretation” (Ames 2014:3). Museology scholars have continued to make “the politics of representation and voice” a central issue for museums as it has remained for the discipline of anthropology (Riegel 1998:89). The museum itself became an “object of study” and an ‘artefact of our own society’” (Ames cited in Riegel 89).

The Berlin Ethnographic Museum, which will be central to the Humboldt Forum, is doubly interesting in this sense. When the museum was opened in the late nineteenth century, it had a reputation as the leading ethnographic museum in Germany. It had powerful backers, including the Prussian government and Berlin University. The nucleus of the collection (as a collection) did, in fact, begin its life in the former City Palace as part of the royal museum. The

Ethnographic Museum followed the model of collecting and displaying objects as “regalia for a secular colonial state” (Anderson 2006:182) even as its ethnological curators attempted to gain

61 and maintain control over these collections (Penny 2002:187). Moreover, it is in the engagement with the collections of the current Ethnographic and Asian Art Museums and to re-imagine them in a new home that the “insecurities about how to represent in the contemporary world” (MacDonald 1998:7) are put on powerful symbolic display.

Those insecurities are also present in their most recent home. The visitor must make the subway journey to the prosperous suburb of southwestern Berlin, Dahlem-Dorf, where the

Ethnographic Museum and the Asian Art Museum are located near to the Free University. The cavernous post-war building that houses them both side-by-side was mostly empty of other visitors on my visit there not long after the stone-laying. The Ethnographic Museum is organized in a mostly traditional manner by region: “Africa,” “Oceania,” “the Americas.” The objects are given individual space to be seen, in contrast to the older methods of tightly packing many objects of similar kinds, which often obscured the individual (Bose 2012: 158). The collections on display are impressive. Massive stone heads from Central America fill a sunlit hall; beautiful sailing vessels and completely reconstructed lodges from the South Seas are lighted up in darkened galleries. Nevertheless, most of these objects contain little explanation beyond their country of origin and perhaps a period of creation. A redress calls for what Bose, writing about the Humboldt Forum, terms two aspects. On the one hand the “mode of representation,” how the objects are ordered in space, and on the other what stories could and should be told by the objects (159).

There are two notable exceptions in the current museum. The first is the current inclusion of a “Europe” section. Usually the “ethnographic” has been associated with the “primitive,” and

European collections have ended up in separate buildings, whether their own “art” buildings such

62 as the Metropolitan in New York, or their own “folk” museums such as in Stockholm. Though awkwardly placed in a series of rooms towards the back of the museum, the “Europe” section did contain some folkloric objects. It also tried to tell some stories connecting the objects through time and culture. It included some more contemporary objects, such as players' jerseys from the last German World Cup team, whose intercultural significance will be discussed in the next chapter. The second notable exception was located on the far side of the Oceania wing, and it was a photographic exhibit about the German Reich’s colonial presence in Samoa. Though it incorporated very few objects, it did contextualize them within an aware and critical narrative of the colonial context. However, the exhibit was a small one, hidden away at the far end of a hall in a Museum on the edges of Berlin. Other orderings overwhelmed these efforts, the objects clearly of the “other,” but also strangely quiet.

The Humboldt Forum will give curators a chance to re-present these objects (as can be seen in the Humboldt Box), to tell new stories (Bose 2012). However, as Parzinger makes clear in his speech, these objects are not returning to the Forum to bear witness to colonialism. He attempted in the performance to re-contextualize them as part of Germany's world-oriented cosmopolitanism, by showcasing them as “art” on par with the European and Classical sculptures, paintings and artifacts on display on the other side of Museum Island. This division between high and low art has been just a much a part of the controversies in repositioning colonial ethnographic collections. It has been the subject of earnest international conferences in the lead up to the Humboldt Forum. In Paris, the Quai Branly did not touch the “fine” Asian Art at the nearby Guimet Museum (Fiskesjö 2007:8; see also Price 2007). In Stockholm, bitter disputes broke out as to whether the Asian art collection should be grouped under a new “World

63 Culture” moniker and resulted in street demonstrations (7). The separation of the Ethnographic and Asian Art Museums (which apparently will continue at the Humboldt Forum) accounts for this high/low ordering. Even as Parzinger imagined and called for us to imagine in his speech an

“agora,” a place of learning, cultural sharing, “multiple perspectives,” and a transcendent space of humanism, these objects and the museum itself were haunted by their stories and by the ordering of Museum Island. They are not being returned to an empty shell, but to a reconstruction of one of the most powerfully evocative spaces in Berlin, the renewed capital and palace. The exorcizing will continue to conjure up old and new jinns and ghosts to Museum

Island, and the “painful parts” will continue to ache. However, Parzinger had two other powerful resources to call forth to give credence to these objects’ —and the Humboldt Forum’s—symbolic power as interculturally viable: the city’s “integrated” residents and a new legacy for Prussia itself.

Migrants

Parzinger and the supporters of the museum made clear in their presentation that they were not only relying on objects to make their case for the inclusive nature of their museum, but also people. The most striking visual image of the ceremony was the gleaming golden gong at the centerpiece of two sound performances by Berlin artist Saichu “Sayo” Yohansyah that bracketed Parzinger's speech. Coming on stage after the first performance, Parzinger noted that the gong was “symbolic” because it was the first object acquired by the Humboldt Forum, but what was especially apt was the fact that the artist had been living in Berlin for twenty-five years. He insisted that we would see how “intensively integrated” this artist of Indonesian-

64 background was with Berlin's contemporary music scene in the performance to follow where he performed with a saxophone player who grew up in East Berlin. “The world has already come to

Berlin,” he told his audience, and it is high time for such a place as the Humboldt Forum. Thus it was not the gong that was the point, but the Indonesian musician, and by implication the Turkish-

German moderator. The Humboldt Forum is, for Parzinger, “is an embassy to the world, to show how Germany is a world-open country. We are invested in the world here in Berlin. There will be a time when the world looks to Berlin and says, my god, what a city!” Crucial to this vision is not just the museum, but the “world” that has already come to the city, namely its migrants.

In the ceremony itself, a “migrant” Berliner, as a musical performer for the audience and along with the Turkish-German moderator, were used in an attempt to link the Humboldt Forum project to the city's wider migrant communities and in turn absolve the project of accusations of

Eurocentrism or exclusion. To be clear, the majority of current immigrant communities in

Germany are not connected to the peoples of its former colonial possessions, unlike the United

Kingdom or France. So the linkage is more analogous than literal. I situate this positioning of the migrants in regards to the rebuilt palace in the unfolding story of the struggle to position Berlin as a global city. Foundational to the scholarship on urbanization is the necessity to understand cities not merely as physical artifacts, but as processes entangled in various flows of capital, labor power, and commodities that extend far beyond their borders (Harvey 1989:7). Recently there has been attention drawn to the necessities of cities to position themselves “culturally.”

Even as sweeping urban transformations are brought forth with the destructions of neighborhoods and the buildings of highways, select parcels are deemed worthy of

“preservation” and are remodeled to please the gaze of eager tourists (Çelik 1994). Such efforts

65 can often meet heated debate, resistance, and even failure (Amar 2013). However, cities remain under pressure to draw on cultural resources, from migrants to museums, in order to gain an additional advantage in the global economy. The “success” of such ventures can depend as much on the resources available as to how firmly the city can rely on supranational actors in carrying out their schemes (Çağlar 2007).

Since the 1960s, first West Berlin and then the reunited city, has been discursively bound to its Turkish population. Arriving as guest workers, many had stayed on and made their lives in

Germany after the formal end of the program in the early 1970s. They and their descendants became by far the most numerous minorities in Germany, numbering nearly four million today.

In 2000 the German government overhauled its citizenship laws, removing its strong ties to ethnicity, and opening it to many people from migrant backgrounds. The government was undergoing significant efforts to reposition these migrants from guest workers to productive subjects in the globalized order. The city of Berlin, with its even higher proportion of migrants, is especially keen to draw on them to highlight its “competitive capacities through a narrative of cultural diversity” and “(re)position themselves in relation to other cities both with and across state boundaries (Çağlar 2007:1071). Cities seek to mobilize their human resources as well as their material ones. This is the importance of the artist-as-immigrant for the Humboldt Forum and that the moderator was a Turkish-German woman. Though this was not mentioned explicitly during the ceremony, the press reporting on it made note of her “migration-background” (Welt

2013).

These performative attempts to link the Humboldt Forum with the city’s migrants were not unique. In Sweden, its major world museum project was cast in the frame of attempting to

66 salvage its faltering multiculturalism and immigrant integration programs and hoped to appeal to the “New Swedes” (Fiskesjö 2007:7). The objects may draw tourists, but it was unclear precisely what the Humboldt Forum's actual connections would be to Berlin's migrant population beyond the stone laying. I understand this as an attempt to not only draw on their cultural capital to defuse the critiques about the Forum and its objects, but to “manage” the diversity of the performance, and symbolically of the city’s migrants. That is to symbolically display two migration-background Germans as indicative of the city’s diversity, but which ultimately mask the sustained relations of power in the performance, in the Humboldt Forum and in Berlin and

Germany (Ríos-Rojas 2011:17). It is a relation in which its master narratives were crafted by simplifying the complexities of its history, but also the complexities of building an inclusive imaginary of belonging.

The current champions of the Humboldt attempt to position their “non-European” objects in their collection to argue for Berlin and the Forum's position as “center for World cultures” and look to the capital's migrants to validate this proposition. However, diversity management at this scale reveals a certain porosity on inclusive national belonging. Evoking belonging by leveraging the city’s current migrant population can unearth unexpected histories and produce contested narratives, but also unexpected alliances and strange encounters. This is what in Kohn’s formulation he calls, “bits of history, the detritus of prior formal alignments,” which can “get frozen inside the forest forms and leave the residues there” (2013:183). Drawing on his work with the Runa of the Amazon, he argues:

History, as we commonly imagine it—as the effects of the past on the present—ceases to be the most relevant causal modality inside form. Just as the cause responsible for riverine and floristic spatial patterns are in a sense irrelevant to how these can be linked

67 by a highly patterned emergent socio-economic system, and just as the words in a language can relate to each other in a way that is mostly decoupled from the individual histories of their origins, so too in the realm of the masters the linearity of history is disrupted by form (180).

That is, “form” or kinds of patterns that emerge from human interaction with the world around them, can supersede a linear or causative model of the world. Within form, we can read history differently.

There are, in fact, intertwined patterns on Museum Island between its already existing museums and the city’s migrants, peculiar linkages not suggested by the Humboldt Forum speakers, latent signs being called forth. On the other side of the Museum Island, the Pergamon

Museum, for example, houses the altar of the same name, dug and brought to Germany in apparent agreement with the Ottoman government in the late 1870s. However, this was just before the stricter antiquities laws would be implemented by Osman Hamdi Bey, the director of

Ottoman Archeology and also one of the best-known Ottoman painters. There are not only other objects of Ottoman provenance but even a painting by Osman Hamdi Bey himself in the Old

National Gallery. It depicts a family of Western travelers (with father in a pith helmet) buying a carpet from several “traditionally” garbed locals. Other paintings make the connection between the former empires even more explicit such as Wilhelm Gentz's depiction of future Kaiser

Friedrich III entering Jerusalem. Decked in a turban and on a white horse, the local population bows in reverence as the Hohenzollern approaches the city walls, palm fronds lining the way.

The two empires became more and more entwined, not least in their defeat in World War I.

The rebuilding of a destroyed city Palace is not a unique event, not even on Unter den

Linden where, just across the river, the Crown Prince’s and Princess’s Palaces were reconstructed

68 by the Communists in the 1970s and further renovated in unified Germany in 1990s. From

Warsaw to Moscow to Istanbul, the robustness of certain royal legacies is remarkable, even after they have long been eliminated in a political sense. It is not merely a Berlin or “German” story, but one which is entangled in world flows and frictions, often with very different outcomes. The rebuilding of the palace facade, the evocation of its unearthed “patterns,” also helps unsettle the city of Berlin, and by extension, Germany, and to decenter it in the present and past. Where is

Berlin imagined to be? Berlin's streets fill with the smell of roasting Döner as much as sausage today, as well as the sounds of Turkish, Kurdish, and Russian. That Döner has become local to

Germany (Çağlar 1998a), and those languages part of its everyday fabric.

Berlin has historically been rhetorically associated with Asia. Even as Soviet citizens admired the city as part of their “West,” the West German President Adenauer dismissed the city with distaste as being in “Asia” (Boym 2001:176). This was not the first time that “Asiatic steppe” was suggested to begin east of the Elbe River (Clark 2007:563). The last Kaiser made several key state visits to the Ottoman Empire where they built him a palace (the still standing

Chalet in Yildiz Park) and where he declared himself the friend and protector of all Muslims

(McMurray 2001:31). This ideological rhetoric can unintentionally reveal what many in colonial studies have long suggested that the peripheries are already in the metropole (Wright 1991:53).

This is what Parzinger inadvertently draws our attention to in reminding the audience that the

“world” is already present in Berlin.

Berlin has long been the “East” from a hegemonic point of view. Centuries before the

Congo Conference of Bismarck, the Hohenzollerns first came from the West to the sandy wastes in the 1300s to find a robust Slavic population, where they would make their new home as

69 Electors in the Holy Roman Empire and eventually as kings of Prussia (Clark 2007:2-3). Berlin

—the name, in fact, a Slavic one—its rebuilt palace and migrants all speak to the complicated processes of “integration,” of the longue durée of Berlin as a city of immigrants, as suggested in the Mitte Museum at the beginning of this work. These strategies of inclusive national belonging on this grand scale and what they directly and unintentionally conjure up reveal the sometimes forgotten, but often contested confluences and excesses that help construct the imaginary of the

Berlin and Germany of today, of the future and the past, often despite officials’ intentions.

Perhaps the most unexpected strategy of the performance was the evocation of what the

Humboldt Forum’s critics considered its most reactionary theme: Prussia.

Prussia

Prussia was discursively part of Parzinger’s speech, and of course, the facade of the

Humboldt Forum will be an “authentic” recreation of the Prussian palace (though the inside of the palace will be newly designed for the museums, libraries, labs, and other amenities). At the closing of the performance, the blessing was given by a Lutheran minister as a Catholic priest stood by, and sprinkled holy water hardly evoked the multicultural world-openness that the Gong performer might have. However, it also arguably linked the event symbolically to a pre-imperial

Prussia. It was a Prussia in which Fredrick the Great had built a Catholic church (the nearby St.

Hedwig’s) in the middle of his protestant capital to spite his intolerant domestic enemies. It was what Parzinger referred to as the “the best of Prussia” in speech and a theme that echoes the official line Parzinger promoted in Humboldt Forum documents such as a section titled “The

70 cultural heritage Prussia opens up new perspectives in intercultural dialogue” (Parzinger

2011:43).

The Prussian legacy, its erasure after the Second World War and its slow rebirth and rehabilitation in the last few decades, is part of the ongoing story of how to present and understand German national belonging. It is a remarkable sign of the porousness of intercultural national belonging that such a reviled former political configuration could stand for inclusive intentions. The audience at the stone-laying sat perhaps for the last time for a long time among the exposed stone foundations of the old palace. German nationalism has been a hesitant venture since World War II. However, the idea of Prussia was considered even more dangerous and all but erased from the map by the Allied occupiers in a law passed in 1947 (Clark 2007:xix).

“Prussian militarism” was identified by them as a root cause of Nazi evil. It was a “dangerous anachronism,” and the Soviets proceeded in the communist GDR to confiscate the estates of the

Junker class (675). Soon East Prussia was given to Poland, and West Prussia dissolved. Prussia was deemphasized in new textbooks in FRG and Prussian heroes like Fredrick the Great given short shrift. The Hohenzollern statues that had lined the walks of the Tiergarten in west Berlin were buried in the garden of nearby Bellevue palace (679).

However, by the early 1980s, there were significant national exhibitions about Prussia in the FRG, and a slow rebirth and reordering of its legacy began once more. Its militarism was no longer the point, but rather its other legacies, the one that had hosted Rousseau, spoke French and drew on the ideals of the Enlightenment. This was the Prussia that Parzinger interpreted. It was the “best of Prussia” as he put it in his speech, and was one, he told us, of humanism, of

Leibniz. It was, he continued, a Prussia of the Humboldt brothers, of an outward-looking,

71 engaged and knowledgeable viewpoint. This is an un-problematized portrayal, of course, one not considering the consequences of Alexander von Humboldt's “imperial” taxonomies, for example

(see Pratt 1992). Parzinger imagined, however, that though Alexander's name would be more readily called to mind, it would be Wilhelm, the founder of the Berlin (later Humboldt)

University that would be most happy with this combination of learning lab, library, and museum.

Prussia (in a linear historical sense) does not cause the rebuilding of the palace nor its evocation during the performance, but engaging with the “form” (in Kohn’s (2013) formulation) of Museum Island brings a possible Prussia into circulation with the sign of the palace, one that officials attempted to control and direct to their own ends. These were not observably emoting ruins; nonetheless, particular circulations existed ‘inside’ the form. Understanding the palace ruins as a “form,” is according to Kohn, “understanding of how certain configurations of constraints on possibility emerge and of the particular manner in which such configurations propagate in the world that result in a sort of pattern” (157). Within this form is where signs await new interpretation. Signs seen can only be interpreted by the living, but signs can be everywhere.

It was Prussian eagles that emerged from the display walls of the Humboldt Box, where I stood watching the ceremony, and it was a Palace (facade) that had existed for most of its life in

Prussia, not Germany, that was being rebuilt outside. Navaro-Yashin, in her work on the war-torn landscape of Cyprus, deploys the metaphor of “ruin” to understand affect in the landscape and to the fundamental problem of locating affect. She argues that we must not choose between a subject-centered or object-centered approach to affect, that one does not have to "cancel out" the other. Instead, we can take a “both-and” approach: “But neither the ruin in my ethnography nor

72 the people who live around it are affective on their own or in their own right; rather, they produce and transmit affect relationally. An environment of ruins discharges an affect of melancholy. At the same time, those who inhabit this space of ruins feel melancholic. They put the ruins into discourse, symbolize them” (2012:172). Navaro-Yashin uses causative language to capture affect in this formulation (where the ruin “discharges” and the subjects “put in”). This poses a difficult problem of how one would observe or evaluate such affect. However, rather than needing to assume that the ruin contains affect in some way (or that ruins or objects have agency), we can understand them as latent signs to be interpreted by human subjects and still maintain the integrity of “both-and,” as they are both required for a new sign to emerge.

As suggested above, many of the objects intended to be put on display, in particular from the ethnographic and Asian Art museums, have direct connections to not only to Germany's colonial history but what they evoke about the legacy of “Germany.” Similarly, the affect of the palace's facade continues to produce discussion and response about the complicated Prussian legacy—the facade will be the most faithfully reproduced portion of the building—and connections to ongoing anxieties about German national belonging. In part, this follows the turn towards unpacking the “cultural biography of objects” where an object is not merely considered at a single moment, but rather is understood as possessing dynamic and changing meanings through time and space and engaged in ongoing social interactions that it shapes and is shaped by

(Gosden and Marshall 169:1999). A recent documentary on the Berlin palace characterized it as part of “a German history.” However, as Prussia was evoked as a prior model, the performance revealed, “that multiple pasts are always somehow present in how people understand their current situation, imagine their possibilities, and make claims for their futures” (Liu 2012:17).

73 The histories are not necessarily linear in how they are evoked, restored, or forgotten. This is the

“rich experience” that Harvey suggests must be rescued from the threat of the “deathly silence of the tomb” in order to understand the complex power stakes at play in urban transformation

(Harvey 1989:228), including in major cultural projects like the Humboldt Forum.

It should not be a surprise to us that the makers of the Humboldt Forum, when harnessing the form of the palace site, might encounter expected visitors like Prussia and the Humboldt brothers, and unexpected or unwelcome visitors circulating inside it such as colonization, which in turn rework the meaning of the performance of belonging. Notably absent in the discursive and visual presentation—almost—were the Hohenzollern themselves, yet nonetheless, they too were conjured. Die Welt's report on the event afterward, playfully reassured the reader that the monarchy was not returning (2013). Parzinger had opened his speech with a gesture to the beautiful weather that day, suggesting that we could call this “Kaiserwetter,” weather fit for an emperor. Perhaps some viewers might have seen the Phoenix channel's documentary on the

Humboldt Forum construction from a few years before would have been treated to a search for two lost graves of the early Hohenzollern electors among the ruins in the dug-up earth near to the

VIP section. Alas, they were not found (Caron and Gralchen 2008). The ruin seemed to nonetheless gesture towards this family that reigned in Prussia for five hundred years, with its patriarch also the head of the Lutheran church and its many ancestors buried in the crypt of the

Berlin Dom across the square. Its signs were everywhere. It is the Hohenzollern crown after all that will grace the rebuilt facade.

Moreover, though unremarked upon in the television broadcast, as it began and guests were taking their seats, there was a real live Hohenzollern approaching President Gauck (who

74 remained seated) to shake hands. Prince Georg Friedrich of Prussia, the thirty-something current head of the family, great-great-grandson of the last Kaiser, afterward quietly took a seat in the third row. Though the Hohenzollerns have quietly returned to the castle and lands just south of

Stuttgart where they originated, in small ways, it is their Prussia too. The family maintains the preussen.de website and has permission to visit their ancestors' graves held in the public trust.

Just as Berlin shades into the East, the reemergence of Prussia and the not-quite ghostly dynasty shift the imaginary belonging of Germany. It was Prussian hegemony which unified the many “German” free cities, princedoms, duchies and kingdoms. A close scrutinizing of its history can remind us that “Germany” was not a foregone conclusion (Applegate 1990; Confino

1997). There was at the very least a moment where its most famous king preferred speaking

French over German, and many of its proud subjects were Poles when Hanoverian resistance to

Prussian hegemony could have created an alternate future. Though the crown and eagle moldings are perhaps meant as nothing more than future treacly tourist trinkets—Mitteleuropa kitsch—to accompany a palace along the route of speeding tour buses, nonetheless this imagining engenders unexpected makings and new lines on the map being to appear. It suggests that the construction of belonging is potent with new possible meanings beyond the control of its makers, even the most potent agents at its center.

It will be many years before the dreamed-of palace is finished (in 2019 according to

Parzinger then—and since delayed) and before the Humboldt Forum welcomes its first guests.

The city, the federal government, and the European Union have all invested significant funds and goodwill into the project. What changes or new uncoverings might emerge remains to be seen. If one follows the waters of the Spree, past the Museum Island and out of the city, it slowly breaks

75 apart into a thousand rivulets known as the Spreewald. Here are the Sorbs and Wends, the remaining bastion of the original Slavic inhabitants, the ur-colonized. In the late nineteenth century, they became the local exotic, and day-trippers went to witness their curious hats and boat-based lives. Their small wooden houses and their language barely survive today in this swampy area. This and other legacies, rivulets, byways, and flows wait to be called forth and to haunt inclusive belonging. The city is “porous,” and we must always pay attention to the cracks in the pavement (Boym 2001:176) and to what might be conjured up and slip in. Perhaps the

Humboldt Forum will become as the architect Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm hopes, neither East nor

West, but a “third city” where the “bricks are the stuff dreams are made of” (186).

76 Chapter 3: A Fatwa for German Soccer4

In the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin, two of its objects stand out to the viewer as unusually German among its otherwise collection of “non-European” material. The two objects were of recent origin, made in only 2010 of “synthetic fiber, machine sewn” and “donated by the

German Football Association (DFB)” and displayed on two headless mannequins, one male and one female. These were jerseys from the German national men’s and women’s team, “No. 8 -

Mesut Özil” and “No. 19 - Fatmire ‘Lira’ Bajramaj”. These jerseys were part of a remarkable exhibition about “Europe” in the museum that made a case for “Cultural Unity through

Diversity,” including food (a plastic döner was displayed), “piety” and sport. The section on sports argued that “although the sense of belonging to a nation can be pronounced, it finds scant attention in everyday life” except for “sporting contests.” Such competitions are “based on the

Olympic idea; they are meant to be peaceful and ‘unite the nation.’” These jerseys are symbols of a united nation, and that unity is underscored by the jersey wearer’s own diversity: “some of their wearers' not only have German roots: Mesut Özil is the child of Turkish immigrants and grew up in Gelsenkirchen, Fatmire ‘Lira’ Bajramaj came to Germany from Kosovo at the age of four.” The Ethnographic Museum was not alone leveraging the “international” background of the national teams' soccer players to make a point about diversity. In particular, 2010, the year of the jerseys' origins, had given the opportunity during the men’s World Cup to notice, pontificate about, and leverage the squad’s diversity for making a case for new kinds of national

4 Portions of this chapter are from The Athlete as National Symbol: Critical Essays on Sports in the International Arena © 2020 Edited by Nicholas Villanueva, Jr. by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www. mcfarlandbooks.com (see Burnside 2020). 77 belonging in Germany. One of the more unusual but highly publicized attempts to do so appeared in 2010 in the unexpected form of a fatwa.

Introduction

In October of 2009, news media widely reported that three Muslim players were reprimanded by their professional soccer team in Germany for fasting during the holy month of

Ramadan. The reporting seemed to suggest an intractable mismatch between the players’ faith and the beloved sport of a nation. However, the story quickly disappeared into the grist mill of the news cycle. It was to the surprise of many that in the following summer, the incident was brought back into the limelight with great fanfare in conjunction with the men’s World Cup. A primary German Muslim association, along with the key operators of professional German soccer, and the players’ team trumpeted a solution to the previous year’s reprimands. The answer was a fatwa, an Islamic legal opinion5, which the promoting parties presented as a just reconciliation of the players’ Islamic faith and the needs of German soccer. This was the latest public voice in an ongoing debate of what it means to be a European or German Muslim. Islam’s role in German social and legal life is a hotly contested issue, especially within German media and politics. In the year of the fatwa’s issue, 2010, the German Interior Minister, Hans-Peter

Friedrich of the ruling conservative party (CDU), stated that Islam is not a part of a German

“way of life” (Dempsey 2011). However, that same year at an event celebrating twenty years of

German unification, the German president, Christian Wulff, also with the CDU, made two

5 A fatwa is a non-binding legal opinion issued by a Muslim legal jurist (mufti) based on his knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence. A fatwa is not a ruling, though in traditional Shariah (Islamic Law) systems, they were often used to inform decisions made by judges (qadis) in court (Hallaq 2009:176-178). 78 remarkable declarations to the opposite effect. First, Islam, “like Christianity and Judaism,” is a part of Germany and not a foreign element; and second, the “integration” of Germany's migrant communities would be Germany's “second unification” (Warner and Le Bond 2010).

In this chapter, I consider the appearance of this single fatwa in German and international news media in 2010, the year following the reprimand, which considered the permissibility of active professional soccer players in Germany to forgo fasting during the month of Ramadan. To the surprise of many, the fatwa permitted professional soccer players to not fast on game days during Ramadan, with certain provisions. I ground the understanding of this fatwa in an exploration of the context for Ramadan and its relationship to soccer in Germany exemplified by mainstream media in this period. It is this context that gave this particular fatwa its potency and which in turn is illuminated by asking in what world would such a fatwa matter? In tracing the

“life” of this fatwa in Germany, I argue that it represented a powerful opportunity to pair Islamic jurisprudence and practice with soccer, a sport which has been intertwined with German national identity, and for its proponents to position Islam for positive inclusion in the discourse on national belonging as something also German—or at least compatible with a major German cultural practice.

I utilize the “breach” or “trouble” case from legal anthropology to position the strategy of the group behind the fatwa. Though this methodology was developed to study the supposed- norms of unwritten laws by looking to the “trouble” cases to reveal those norms, because

“somebody had to do something about it” (Conley and O’Barr 2004:24), I show there is a latent possibility to produce a “new” norm. The group that sought the fatwa performatively engaged with and elevated the reprimand of a second-division team into an incident of “trouble” of

79 national and international concern and invented and promoted its own “solution" along with key stakeholders. Like the previous chapter, this incident pivoted on a key national symbol, here the men’s national team and the sport of soccer itself (rather than a critical symbolic space and collection). It also drew upon the cultural diversity of Germany’s migrants (Çağlar 2007), but more explicitly so to make a highly publicized case for inclusive national belonging. However, it did not craft this narrative from the point of view of traditional state institutions like the

Humboldt Forum did, but rather from the perspective of a non-state Muslim advocacy group acting more “’stately’ than the state” (Navaro-Yashin 2002:1).

Following a discussion of the theoretical framework and methodology underscoring this chapter, I proceed by exploring the context for understanding Ramadan’s place in Germany in

2009 when the initial controversy erupted. I also show the conditions for the issuing of the fatwa a year later as Germany’s national team competed in the World Cup in South Africa. Examining this fertile ground is key to understanding why the fatwa emerged when it did. I examine the main actor in this strategy, the Central Council For Muslims in Germany, der Zentralrat fùr

Muslime in Deutschland (ZMD), and the professional soccer organizations’ co-press release about the fatwa to the German media. To situate the ZMD's motivation in packaging the fatwa as they did in a major press release (in which the fatwa itself was often obscured or lost in further reporting), I inspect their “Islamic Charta,” a declaration of principles they issued in 2002. The

“Charta” explicates their understanding of Islam and Islamic law within German society. I then discuss the fatwa as a document in its German and Arabic versions and trace the fatwa back to its issuing body, the Dar al-Ifta, the official fatwa-issuing body in Egypt, and show that the same fatwa had, in fact, had a previous “life” and had been in existence since 2008. Finally, I situate

80 the fatwa in the broader discourse of Islam in German society and argue that the “failure” of an

Islamic practice and German society to (temporarily) co-function (namely the reprimanded players) provided the impetus for the ZMD and the professional soccer representatives to create a moment for a “German” Islam to emerge and showcase an integration success.

The case examined here is built on the continuing centrality and importance of soccer’s potential for articulating national understanding in Germany. Such potential is deeply intertwined with German history. In broader strokes, scholars link this association’s emergence to the

“Turnen” movement of the Napoleonic era, which intensified following imperial unification in

1871. It underscored the link of the health of the nation’s morals to its citizens’ fitness

(Goltermann 1998). By the Weimar period (1918-1933), soccer had taken a prominent place in the relationship between the nation and the bodies of its citizens (Eggers, 2001). During the subsequent decade and half of National Socialism, scholars have argued that this link with sport, including soccer, and the nation reached an apex (Fischer 1999, Bitzer 2003, Ewing 2008). Even following the repudiation of Nazi principles, soccer continued to play a significant part in the national consciences in the two German states that emerged from the war’s aftermath, as it did in many other countries (Meier and Mutz 2016; Quiroga 2013). Particularly heightened moments of concern for soccer concentrated around the World Cup championships, including in recent decades (Brüggemeier 2004). This particular study hinges on the 2010 World Cup. The

“multicultural” (as it was described) make-up of the team was apparent like never before, following a change in citizenship laws in 1999. This change excited comment in major news media around the world (as shown below) as well as a range of scholarly attention in the years

81 that followed (Stehle and Weber 2013; Dubin 2011; Majer-O’Sickey 2006; Young 2013; Hicks

2014).

Additionally, this chapter aims to build on how Muslims and Islamic practices have come to figure in the discourses of national belonging in Germany and Europe, and more particularly through their interaction with sport and fitness. Indeed, fatwas regarding sports have received detailed attention, showing a “mushrooming” in number as well as a wide range of concerns, from players’ salaries to the suitability of being a spectator or an Islamic militant who loves the game, and arguably show the contours of a “struggle between modernity and tradition” (Shavit and Winter 2012:280; see also Dorsey 2016). In Germany, legal challenges have garnered both mainstream and scholarly attention, in particular to the challenges brought by students to issues with their schools’ sports programs (Rohe 2008). The cases, from mixed-gendered swimming to the suitability of a headscarf, have often been perceived as an attack on German values and even its polity, as many mistakenly believe school sports to be enshrined in the German constitution

(Ewing 184:2008). However, anthropologists in particular have drawn attention to the ways such issues, when they are out of the limelight, have been “solved” at the neighborhood or the city level (Kuppinger 2014b), even if such solutions are often misinterpreted when disseminated to a broader audience (Shavit and Wiesenbach 2012). Like many of these studies, I aim to contribute to the understanding of what “integration”—that oft deployed term—comes to mean in the complexity of “socio-religious realities” (59)—specifically here in the life trajectory of this fatwa born of a momentary failure to reconcile Islam and German soccer.

In examining the fatwa, I follow Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen (1997) method for understanding fatwas. He argues that we must look beyond the language and content of the fatwa

82 to understand how they work in the world: “A fatwa is part of a complex world where different interests and ideologies will compete to make use of it for their own purposes” (20). This method is echoed in the anthropological treatment of objects as socially constructed. Simultaneously de- fetishizing (observing the social and other labor put into an object’s creation) and re-fetishizing an object methodologically (by “following” the object), an object’s “biography” or “life,” just like a human’s, could reveal in its trajectory social forms and construction of the human worlds which conjured forth such an object (Appadurai 1988; Kopytoff 2013). Therefore I treat this fatwa not only as a set of words but also as an object whose “life,” in particular in the portion where it appeared couched in a major press release, can tell us something about the ongoing position of Islam in the discourses over national belonging in Germany. The scholarly work on belonging and Islam in Germany is broad and deep. It examines such discussion and action at the level of the street and neighborhood (Kuppinger 2014b), in education and policy, from legal cases (Rohe 2004) to food regulation (Çağlar 1998). As will become evident in this analysis, I keep my examination at the level of national and international media attention, mostly focused on newspapers. I do not measure the impact of the fatwa in the lives of everyday professional players who fast (though we will see hints that the impact is limited), nor do I attempt to evaluate the success (or failure) of integration into national belonging. For my purposes, national belonging in this chapter is performative discursive action taken by participants, to leverage and promote a problem and its solution as a case for an inclusive intercultural approach. I aim to show how such an action unfolded in newspapers and other related media, as well as some of the tangled complexities that tracing its trajectory can reveal. In particular, I attempt to show why

83 such a fatwa came to such a prominent phase of its life in Germany in 2010 to make the case that

Islam and Germany, Ramadan, and soccer are compatible.

The Frankfurt Three

In October 2009, a second division professional soccer team in Germany,

Fußballsportverein (FSV) Frankfurt, reprimanded three of its players for fasting during

Ramadan. According to the team, the three players—Soumaila Coulibaly, Pa Saikou Kujabi and

Oualid Mokhtari—fasted during the month of Ramadan without notifying the team's management. A press release from FSV explained that the reprimand was not due to the “fact of fasting,” but arose instead from the players' violation of their contracts, which the team claimed required them to disclose information that might put the players' health and performances at risk.

The press release added: “The actions of FSV Frankfurt in no way constitutes a violation of religious freedom, the rules apply just as well to the Christian Lent before Easter” (Berliner

Zeitung 2009). The FSV management tried to avoid a controversy over religion in their reprimands, but many others saw this action precisely as such.

The news of the reprimands was reported widely in the German and international newspapers (Bild 2009; Bossaller 2009; Chawla 2009). The Union of Contracted Soccer Players

(VDV) represented the reprimanded players in the controversy. The VDV counsel, Frank Rybak, responded to the reprimands in a statement labeling them a “novelty” and as “absolutely illegal” (Sport1 2009). He suspected that fasting might not have been the real problem, that there might be other reasons for the reprimands, hinting at an anti-Muslim bias. The German Football

League (DFL), the organization that oversees operations for the first and second division teams

84 in Germany, insisted that the problem was between the FSV team and its players. Though the

DFL had provided a model contract (with no references to fasting) for FSV to issue its players,

FSV had added the specific clauses mandating that fasting be disclosed. FSV's legal department defended its reprimands and alluded to possible “doping problems” that could be caused by fasting players' nutritional supplements (that they would presumably take to keep performing), which might be on the prohibited list (Sport1 2009).

Despite FSV's insistence that the fasting itself was not the problem, the VDV, the players' union, claimed that the opposite was true. The VDV managing director, Ulf Baranowsky, insisted there was no direct proof of how fasting affects player performance. However, the medical advisor for the German Soccer Association (DFB), which co-hosts the German professional leagues with DFL, claimed that “Ramadan becomes a problem for players due to possible circulation problems, weakness of concentration and muscle injury” that results from the absence of food and drink before games (Bossaller 2009). Ultimately the reprimand caused no direct consequences for the players. They were not benched or released from their contracts. However, it was this reprimand, this failure to reconcile Islam and soccer, that would become an opportunity to showcase in its strategic approach the inherent compatibility of Islamic law and a key German cultural practice—soccer. This arrived a year later in the form of the fatwa wrapped in a press release. That fatwa would attempt to authoritatively answer the question for Muslim soccer players in Germany of how exactly religion—here in the case of fasting and Islamic law

—should situate itself professionally and personally in the German context. However, that fatwa did not enter a void. In an examination of the practice of Ramadan in Germany and the discourse on Ramadan and professional soccer in German media outside of these reprimands and fatwa, we

85 can already see a complicated engagement with the issue of fasting and negotiating belonging as a Muslim in Germany.

German Ramadan

Ramadan awareness and discussion in Germany in the years around the fatwa went beyond soccer players, of course. Close to the month of Ramadan, German newspapers often supplied general guides to explain to their readers the meaning and practice of fasting during this lunar month (Rössler 2010). Such articles also featured highlights of interesting intersections, like Ramadan and diabetes (Lenzen-Schulte 2009), in addition to soccer and Ramadan, discussed in detail in the next section. Before Ramadan 2010, RTL 2, a major private television channel, announced that it would include “tips” about Ramadan in its German broadcasts, including start and stop times. RTL 2's press officer Carsten Molis said: “One could theorize about integration, but we wanted to send a clear signal” (Welt 2010). Aiman Mayzeck, the general secretary of the

Central Council of Muslims in Germany (ZMD), one of the largest Islamic organizations in the country (and the one that would arbitrate the soccer dispute), praised RTL 2's decision as showing “societal responsibility” and as setting “a good example for other major channels” (Welt

2010). Articles like these reflect the importance of Ramadan in German society writ large, but also its importance to the Muslim community in Germany, especially in comparison to other religious practices, like prayer or visiting the mosque.

There is an indication of fasting at Ramadan being less controversial than other Islamic practices in Germany. The Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad reported that Ramadan is of growing interest to Germans. Whereas “previously the iftar feast was only for Muslims,” now

86 Christian mayors and political parties in Germany are inviting Muslims to celebrate the breaking of the Ramadan fast (Dachs 2010). This tradition began with the Christian Democratic Union

(CDU), but other parties soon followed. The CDU's integration policy spokesman Kurt Wansner said, “that our invitation is a sign of respect to all Muslims living in this country.” The article adds that “several studies show that up to 80 percent of Germany's Muslims will observe

Ramadan” (Dachs 2010). It does not specify which studies this claim refers to, but it does reflect a trend among German Muslims shown in two surveys conducted in the 2000s. These show that in addition to being a more acceptable religious practice for Muslims in Germany as far as

German politicians are concerned, it is also a more common practice in comparison among

Muslims, especially among the young.

The Foundation Centre for Studies on Turkey conducted the first of these in October

2000. The survey focused on Turkish immigrants in Germany and the “religious influences” that affect their “daily lives.” Two-thirds reported that they feel “religious,” seven percent “strongly religious,” and twenty-five percent “not religious at all.” The trend is for the younger generation to feel less religious than their parents' or grandparents' generations (Şen 2008:39). However, the survey shows in the frequency of “performed religious acts” that fasting, along with dietary practice, almsgiving, and the Eid al-Adha feast, are popular acts among all age groups, but especially the young6. The study concludes that for the young, fasting, almsgiving, dietary laws and Eid are “not considered religious matters” (unlike mosque visits, prayer or pilgrimage), but instead are seen as “traditional practices” and part of their cultural identity (Şen 2008:40).

6 In the 18-29 year old age group 77.4% report fasting, 88.9% follow dietary laws, 65.7% donate to the poor and 82.4% take part in the Eid al-Adha feast. These are in contrast to 20.8% who perform daily prayers, 19.8% who attend Friday prayer, 29.6% who attend holy Feast prayers, 13% who visit the mosque regularly and 54.7% who go on pilgrimage (Şen 2008:40). 87 However, the separation of culture and religion in relation to Islam is ambiguous in Germany.

Ewing shows how the conflation of the two works in her discussion of a German state's “Muslim

Test” for would-be citizens. The test has a high frequency of questions regarding gender relations and clothing, such as headscarves. The test tries to distinguish “the Muslim who will not integrate successfully into German society from the 'real' German” by comparing and contrasting supposedly normative Turkish Muslim practices with the “ideals of a democratic society” (Ewing

2008:181-183).

In a second survey in 2005 of young Muslims (including non-Turks) in the northern city of Kiel, a similar pattern is recorded. Eighty percent observe the fast compared to 35 percent who pray daily (Eilers et al 2008:102). The Kiel study does not distinguish Ramadan from other practices as more or less religious, but it does conclude similarly that the practices are part of identity performance. This may be part of the shift they note in the increased self-identification as “Muslim” or “religious” in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City.

(Eilers et al 2008:113).

Ramadan’s benign mainstream presentation in Germany, in comparison to more controversial Islamic practices like headscarves, as well as its appeal to young Muslims, made it a more attractive issue to leverage in promoting a positive image of Islam. Ewing argues that the controversies that erupt in Germany from such identity performance often revolve around body issues, in particular the headscarf. For the German national imaginary, the Muslim headscarf offends “culturally particular aspects of bodily practice and gender organization that masquerade as universal prerequisites for life in a modern, democratic society” (Ewing 2008:185). In short,

Ewing shows that the headscarf controversy revolves around two issues: gender difference and

88 body exposure, both concerns of the German state (185). Though it is the topic worthy of its own paper, Ramadan differs from the headscarf (and to varying degrees other Islamic practices) in the discourse of German media. Ramadan is not presented as a gendered issue in German media, and though it is concerned with the body, it is not written on the body to the same effect as clothing

(or its absence) are. Even before the fatwa, Ramadan was often taken up by pairing it discursively with professional soccer, a sport that for Germany (as for many countries) plays a significant role in the daily lives of its people and their national imagery. It provided sympathetic newspapers a particular moment once a year to observe the ongoing notion of what it means to be Muslim in Germany and laid the fertile ground for the fatwa packaged in a press release considered here to make an impact in 2010. Notably, this presentation in mainstream media, examined next, is generally free of so much of the anxiety in German discourse on Islam, which becomes entangled with highly charged concepts from honor killing to feminism to terrorism.

Ramadan and Soccer

Leading up to the beginning of Ramadan in August of 2009 (the year of the reprimand), there were numerous stories in German media about Muslim soccer players dealing with the fast.

The various articles painted a complex picture, which showcased multiple practices and solutions for the players in the Ramadan month. They also show a relatively sophisticated understanding of Ramadan's sources, including Quranic citations, and the possibility for varying interpretations.

In a piece in the Zeit newspaper, a “German-Turk” player, Berkant Goektan, simply said that he did not fast at all (Aumüller 2009). The coaches for the professional teams from Hamburg and

Duisburg maintained that there is “a rule of exception” for soccer players and that the “Quran

89 allows” for the fast to be moved to breaks between games(Aumüller 2009). The Zeit notes that this point is controversial and cites the Quranic sura (chapter) 2 verse 185, noting that “previous

Quran-interpretations allow exceptions for travelers, sick people, pregnant women, small children or those who do hard manual labor” (Aumüller 2009). The article elaborates that it is

“interpreted a little differently” for each regarding who qualifies as a “hard worker.” The

Augsburger striker Momo Diabang sought counsel with an imam in his homeland of Senegal, who reportedly told him, “'If the job from which your livelihood stems does not allow the fast, it is okay to forgo it'” (Aumüller 2009).

Many of the articles in the German press around Ramadan in 2009, like the Zeit piece, framed Ramadan and soccer as a question or a conflict for the players, but crucially a resolvable one, either through personal choice or consultation with an authority. Franck Ribery is a frequently mentioned player in these articles. His star status, combined with his French citizenship, his conversion to Islam, and playing for one of Germany's most famous teams,

Bayern München, makes him a popular focus. An article from the Welt begins cheekily that “with all due respect to the Archangel Gabriel: He couldn't know what kind of difficulty he would bring to the soccer player Franck Ribery when he revealed the Koran to the Prophet Mohammad in a cave in Mount Hira in 610 AD” (Lüdeke 2009). It goes on to explain that this “conflict of conscience” is something that all Muslim pro-sport players around the world face once a year. It also cites the previously mentioned Qu'anic Sura 2 verse 185 and tells us that all believers must not eat or drink during Ramadan between sunrise and sunset. This article, like the others, reports that Ribery found a compromise: on the days he plays games, he forgoes the fast, but when not playing, he attends to his religious duty and fasts. Interestingly, the article goes on to interpret

90 that this “path is certainly allowed at away games because the Koran allows explicit exceptions for 'travel'” (Lüdeke 2009). It notes that the Egyptian team before it played Rwanda the previous

Saturday, “allowed a legal opinion (fatwa) to be made. This came a few weeks ago – and 1399 years after the Koran's revelation – to the conclusion that the team is 'on a national mission' and for that reason the players do not have to comply with Ramadan” (Lüdeke 2009).

A similar portrayal of the professional player Ümit Korkmaz, (an “Austrian with Turkish roots”), who explained to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Newspaper (FAZ) in 2009 that, “fasting from a sporting perspective is too difficult. In the end, I want to have fuel for practice” (Beister

2009). He further elaborated that for each day he does not fast during Ramadan, he donates alms to the poor in Turkey. The FAZ article explains that the Quran exempts hardworking people from the obligation to fast. A doctor affiliated with the newspaper explains the dangers of fasting, especially to metabolism, and says that he advises his patients who engage in hard labor or high performance to forgo fasting. (Beister 2009). In a different FAZ article from the previous year on fasting, the newspaper explained that for Muslim players, Ramadan is a “long time of discord” where they must “decide between health and belief and therein find a personal compromise” (Frankfurter Allgemeine 2008). The article claims that ten Muslim players in the

German League, including Franck Ribery, will not fast on game days due to health reasons. It says that they “interpret the Quran to their favor” by associating soccer with hard work, as accepted in the Koran, and allowing them “a way out from their discord” (Frankfurter

Allgemeine 2008). In contrast, the article presents Abdelaziz Ahanfouf, a second division player for Wehen Wiesbaden. This “Moroccan with a German passport” says he cannot look to others, but for him, “fasting his very important for his belief.” He adds that of the eight teams he has

91 played for in Germany, not one had forbidden him to fast. In fact, his only hat trick came during the month of Ramadan while he was fasting. (Frankfurter Allgemeine 2008).

The religious aspects of Ramadan, its sources and interpretation, are noted to a degree in all the articles, but some present a more in-depth analysis of these issues. Revier-Sport cites verses 183 and 187 in sura 2 of the Quran to explain the command to fast during Ramadan. It says that these verses do not give much detail, but one must look to other religious texts, such as the hadith of Abu Dawud, Book 13: “The month consists of 29 days. Fast only when you first see the crescent moon (Hilal) and break the fast only when you see it again” (Redemann and

Zwaagstra 2009). The article says that though opinions vary on exceptions for fasting, “generally an exception can be made for those whose hard work places a burden on their bodies and those who are ill.” However, it notes that “to the extent that soccer players can invoke this privilege, like many rules in Islam, comes down to interpretation” (Redemann and Zwaagstra 2009).

Stefan Rommel reports for Spox that Sami Khedira, the “son of a German and a Tunisian and who believes in the Koran,” makes an exception to fasting for his occupation, but that other players must decide for themselves (2009). Rommel explains that this issue comes down to a

“small loophole in the Koran.” He writes that the Prophet Mohammed could not have imagined his teachings coming into conflict with “the glossy product of soccer.” However, there is a favorable “hole in the wickerwork” from the Quran sura 2, verse 185 (once again) regarding the exceptions, including those doing hard labor (Rommel 2009). As to whether professional soccer players qualify for this latter category, it is interpreted a little differently by everyone. The prominent imam from Morocco Sheihk Mohammad al Taweel, according to Rommel, opines that

“soccer is a game and the fast cannot be broken because of a game.” The “somewhat more

92 moderate” General Secretary of the Islamic Council for the Federal Republic of Germany says:

“Performance sports and Ramadan are combinable. One must prepare oneself, nourish oneself, and take breaks.” He notes that several Muslim players fast and that many of them give top performances. However, ultimately the General Secretary wants his fellow Muslims to decide for themselves (Rommel 2009).

Explicit health concerns are frequently presented as a deciding factor for players. The player Demba Ba, a “devout Muslim,” says he fasts except for his game days with his team 1899

Hoffenheim (Puck 2009). His coach Ralf Rangnick says he takes no particular consideration of the fasting time because Ba has practiced during Ramadan and is used to it. Stuttgart's national player Serdar Tasci explains that fasting during game days is “just too dangerous. I am just as devout as others, but [fasting] bothers me because of my occupation.” Mesut Özil, a professional player for Werder at the time with “Turkish roots” (whom we will discuss below in his role with the national soccer team), does not fast anymore, due to an experience in the youth league that left him with headaches and feeling limp. Fatmire Bajramaj, a player for the Women's German

National soccer team, says that she eats normally during this time because otherwise, she simply could not make it through the practice and games. Fasting is for her too exhausting (Puck 2009).

The striker for the Borussia Monchenglad team, Karim Matmour, says during Ramadan that “as a professional in Germany it doesn't work any other way. I try, so far as possible, to not eat during the day. But only when there is no risk to my health. On game days, I eat just as I would normally” (Krümpelmann 2009). He also notes that when he traveled to Algeria to train with the national team there, their practice schedule is moved to the middle of the night (beginning at 11 pm) to accommodate Ramadan. Interestingly, Matmour mentions in this article that his former

93 teammate Coulibaly tried fasting completely for two days the previous season and was unable to practice for three days afterward. This is the same Soumaila Coulibaly who would be reprimanded for fasting that year (2009) at his new team, FSV Frankfurt (Krümpelmann 2009).

This is the incident that would spark the fatwa.

These articles show a willingness for German media to understand Ramadan as a complex issue that can vary from player to player. They attempt to take a matter-of-fact look at the sources and differing interpretations of Ramadan as well as to listen to the players' explanations. The authors try to balance religious prescriptions with health concerns.

Interestingly, rarely does an article present the view of any Muslim authority in the form of a person; instead, the Quran is cited. Most notably, Ramadan and soccer are presented (almost) entirely as reconcilable issues. I argue that this context—this relative openness to and curiosity about Ramadan in mass media and its relationship to the national pastime of soccer—combined with the lack of an authoritative religious voice in that media, allowed for a moment of intervention in the story about the three players reprimands. This temporary failure of integration was taken up by the ZMD and the German Soccer League, and they would use the fatwa to make a case for repairing this breach with a new integrative opportunity a year later in the summer of

2010. It was that summer in the full hype of the World Cup that the “multicultural”—and Islamic

—character of the new national German men’s team debuted to the world and would set the perfect backdrop for a fatwa of reconciliation.

Weltmeisterschaft 2010 and a Fatwa in Germany

94 In the first games of the World Cup in South Africa in the summer of 2010, a new soccer star was born on the German squad. The 21-year old Mesut Özil led the team to victory over

Australia, and the international press took note. Frequently remarked on was Özil's “Turkish descent” and how he celebrates his heritage. In the Guardian newspaper, Özil noted that "'My technique and feeling for the ball is the Turkish side to my game,’” whereas, “‘the discipline, attitude and always-give-your-all is the German part’" (McCarra 2010). It was not only Özil's heritage that proved interesting for the media but the heritage of many of the team's players.

Eleven of the squad's 22 athletes had a least one immigrant parent. A different Guardian article by David Hytner that Germany was the most “ethnically diverse” team in the tournament (2010).

The makeup of the team, in part, reflected the dedication of the coach Joachim Löw who made a concerted effort to recruit young players from immigrant backgrounds, including Özil

(Hytner 2010). However, it was Germany's 2000 citizenship eligibility law, which made it easier for the children of immigrants to become citizens that made such a recruitment scheme possible.

The German Soccer Association (DFB), one of the co-hosts of the professional leagues, appointed a “dedicated immigration officer” to facilitate the new team and to ensure that the players did not play for other national teams they might be eligible for as well. The “poster boy” for Germany's team, Sami Khedira, said about his teammates, “'We are aware that it's something new to have German national players with Turkish, Ghanaian, Nigerian or Tunisian roots but for our generation, it's very normal. We have some players called Khedira, and some called Müller.

We don't know any differently'” (Hytner 2010). The New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, in a piece gushing over Özil and the multicultural squad of Germany, likened the “new Germany of

Özil and Aogo” to no less than a “victory over the Big Man [Hitler] who destroyed

95 Europe.” (Cohen 2010). It was into these heady days of German soccer in summer 2010 that the story of the three reprimanded FSV players from the previous year reentered the mass media discussion. This time, the question posed by their fasting and reprimand and the compatibility of

Islam with German soccer came with an answer: a fatwa.

On July 28, 2010, just before the beginning of Ramadan and just two weeks after the

World Cup final, a joint statement was released by Central Council of Muslims in Germany

(ZMD), the German Soccer Association (DFB), the German Football League (DFL), and the players' team, FSV Frankfurt, whose message was unambiguous in its headline: “Professional

Soccer Players May Break the Fast During Ramadan” (zentralrat.de 2010). The statement goes on to explain that, following the reprimand of the three players the year before, the ZMD offered confidential talks to the players, their union, and leading functionaries from the DFB, DFL, and

FSV Frankfurt. They all agreed to a mutual statement during a meeting at the DFL-Central. ZMD and the others found agreement also with the “collection of theological legal opinions.” These included ZMD's own religious advisors, the legal opinion of Al-Azhar in Cario (who ultimately issued the fatwa), and the leading authorities of the European Council for Fatwa and Research

(ECFR). Al-Azhar came to a “conclusion” [Schluss] (which ECFR agreed with and so did not issue a further legal opinion) that “the work contract between the player and the organization compels the player to a specific performance, and when this work – which is contract-based (not for amateurs – hobby soccer) – is his sole source of income, and if he must play a soccer match in the month of Ramadan, and the fast influences his performance, then he may break the fast” (zentralrat.de 2010).

96 This remarkable statement from ZMD et al was accompanied in the press release by supporting statements of the various parties involved in the talks. The DFL managing director

Christian Seifert and the ZMD general secretary Aiman Mazyek commented jointly that, “the associations' and also the players' 'legal security' are achieved likewise in worker's rights and in the sense of theological law” (zentralrat.de 2010) The ZMD elaborated that this “opinion” from

Al-Azhar allows for professional players to follow their “occupation and religious duties without incorrect feelings of guilt.” Mazyek added that players could make up missed fasting days later.

He also noted though this opinion is in contrast to some judgments, it once again makes clear that “work and faith are interdependent and are not in conflict with one another.” The general manager of the FSV team, Bernd Reisig, affirmed that he was happy that FSV could help contribute to this solution and that it is clear that players could achieve “professional high performance in sport and fully live their faith” (zentralrat.de 2010). In addition to the ZMD's website, the press release was included in full on many of the other parties' official websites.

Though notably, the ZMD was the only one with the actual Arabic and German versions of the fatwa available for download at the end of the press release, which I discuss more in detail below.

The “conclusion” contained in the press release relating the fatwa was picked up and interpreted in the German press and around the world. It is in this truncated form (that is without the bulk of its text) that the fatwa traveled. The German news magazine FOCUS presented a straight forward reporting of the press release next to a photo of Mesut Özil praying in his

German national team uniform. Although the FOCUS article mentions that talks had been held between ZMD, the players, and the functionaries, it says that a theological opinion was agreed on

97 —without mention of Al-Azhar or ECFR (FOCUS 2010). An Associated Press wire published on

Fox.com, however, explained in its report about the fatwa that Al-Azhar is the “pre-eminent theological institute of Sunni Islam,” and it is to Al-Azhar that the ZMD “sought advice.” It describes the statement from Al-Azhar as a “ruling,” but presents the announcement overall as something the ZMD and “German soccer authorities determined.” It also noted that Ramadan is when “devout Muslims” fast from dawn until dusk (Fox News 2010). The Mitteldeutsche

Zeitung, in its article, quotes the German coach for Azerbaijan's national team, Berti Vogts, blaming Ramadan for his team's poor performance in a match against Germany. The article notes that the sick, the old, children, travelers, and pregnant women are excepted from the commandment to fast during Ramadan. However, now one more exception has been “approved” by the ZMD: professional soccer players, who may postpone their fast. This article, like the

FOCUS one, does not mention Al-Azhar or the ECFR. (Mitteldeutsche Zeitung 2010).

The Thüringer Allgemeine newspaper quotes the RWE striker, Fikri El Haj Ali, as saying that the decision is “important for me. I no longer have to hear complaints about eating and drinking.” He noted he would make up the fast days later and that his family understands (Fritz

2010). An article on the announcement titled “Permission to Break the Fast” appeared in the

Süddeutsche newspaper. It claimed that many players, like Özil and Tasci, “worry how they can reconcile the commandments of their religion and competitive sport with one another” (Aumüller

2010). It suggests that “this should now change” because the players have received “important guidance” (Aumüller 2010). The article cautions, however, that the ZMD does not speak for all

Muslims living in Germany, but is one of many umbrella organizations and not even the largest.

Nonetheless, their position has a special weight because of the “legal opinion” that was asked for

98 and attained came from Al-Azhar University, “one of the most important authorities in the

Islamic world.” After examining the announcement, the author claims that “to follow the logic of the argument put forth and put professional soccer players under the category of 'hard worker,' like a worker in a blast furnace, might be difficult for some” (Aumüller 2010). The ZMD secretary Aiman Mazyek responded that “We are certainly going to hear minority views.” The article notes that when Ramadan begins, that despite the ZMD opinion, a “small number of players may want to stick to the narrow fasting rules.” It singles out the player Jawhar Mnari who would be switching to FSV that summer and who had fasted the previous year. The FSV coach Bernd Reisig responded that he would accept it when a player decided to fast regardless:

“'I have great respect for him because he is a very religious man.” Reisig mentions that he has spoken with Mnari and that if he decides to fast, he only has to tell the coach. (Aumüller 2010).

Mnari was not the only “minority opinion” that the announcement would spark.

The “soccer culture” magazine 11Freunde interviewed the second vice-chairman of

ZMD, Yakup Tufan, and shows that final decision must have been made despite internal disagreement. When asked how he responds to the “ruling,” Tufan says that he cannot condone what has been agreed, and the solution presented in the joint statement is “no solution of dialog.”

Instead, he believes the situation of each player should be assessed by talking together. Such dialogs should include the “scholars of Islam.” After explaining his understanding of Ramadan, based on the Qu'ran, Tufan claims that every player should ultimately decide for himself whether to fast or not, but there should be no general rule. Fasting should be made easier, not impeded.

However, Tufan, argues despite the “choice” he wishes for the players, that there is not a true possibility of finding a compromise at the expense of fasting. Players should fast, as “devout

99 Muslims hold their ibada, their commitment, regardless of their profession.” He says this is not for soccer associations to decide, but for the scholars of Islam to “judge” (11Freunde 2010). It is not clear in the article what Tufan makes of the fatwa from Al-Azhar, though he does not like the general solution-touting message from the ZMD and its collaborators.

The ZMD as Mediator

The Central Council for Muslims in Germany (ZMD) formed in 1994 in response to the heightened debate in Germany over “foreigners,” including millions of Muslims. The umbrella organization defined its primary goal as “achieving recognition for the religious needs of

Muslims in Germany” (Tietze 2008:220). Though ZMD only represents a minority of Muslims in

Germany in terms of membership, its ambition is broader than many similar groups, which though larger, tend to represent specific ethnic groups, like Turks (Şen 2008:36-37). The ZMD revealed this ambition in early 2002 with the publishing of a remarkable document, the “Islamic

Charta: Fundamental Declaration of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany on the relationship between Muslims, their State, and their Society.” Many other Islamic organizations accepted this Charta, despite some of its more controversial positions (Tietze 2008:216). The

Charta's opening statement declares that the most of the 3.2 million Muslims who now live in

Germany will stay and “identify with Germany” and hopes that the Charta will contribute to

“dispassionate debate on the political and social level” (zentralrat.de 2002). The Charta's preamble explicitly explains it is in response to the debates in Germany on Muslims in German society following the September 11, 2001 attacks. Its first article states that “Islam is a religion of peace,” and the first nine articles, in general, explicate the tenants of Islam, including fasting.

100 The tenth article, however, affirms that “Islamic Law is Relevant for Muslims in the Occident.”

It notes that although Muslims can live anywhere in the world, they should meet their religious duties while respecting the “local legal order.”Article 11 goes further to state that “Muslims accept the basic legal writes guaranteed by the constitution.” Regardless of citizenship, the

Charta states that Muslims represented by the ZMD accept the German Constitution and its legal order, including democracy and freedom of religion (zentralrat.de 2002).

The freedom of religion in the German Constitution (Article 4, Paragraph 1 and 2 GG)

(Tietze 2008:232) has been used as a successful legal tool for Muslims seeking to practice their religion in public in Germany. In a judgment handed down by the Higher Administrative Court in response to a case brought by several Muslim school girls who wanted an exemption from co- educational swimming at school, the court said that part of the freedom of religion involves “the external freedom to manifest one's beliefs in public” (Tietze 2008:230). These challenges to

Germany's courts have acted as “unobtrusive promoter of the inclusion of Islam in Germany systems of social order” (Tietze 200:231). As mentioned above, the FSV management insisted immediately following its three players reprimands, that it in no way a violated their religious freedom, despite suggestions otherwise. Freedom of religion, especially in the very public space of professional soccer—and free from a discussion of gender or other contentious topics—can act as a powerful message of inclusion. The ZMD's entry into the controversy should be seen in this context. The “failure” represented by the Ramadan reprimands is, in this sense, resolvable and powerful. It is a “breach” or “trouble” case that ZMD elevated to the level of national and international concern, whose “solution” it could present along with other stakeholders as evidence of reconciliation between Islam and Germany.

101 The ZMD limits its own understanding of Islamic Law (Sharia) that should be practiced in Germany to anything not contradicting local legal norms, pledging in Article 13 its full acceptance of German civil and criminal law, including marriage and inheritance laws

(zentralrat.de 2002). This necessarily then excludes a significant part of the traditional Sharia, which held range over most criminal and civil matters. This winnowing down of Sharia’s role in the modern era is widespread, including in Muslim-majority countries (Hallaq 2009). However, it is this remaining realm of so-called private sphere or personal practice (prayer, pilgrimage, fasting, almsgiving, and belief) that the constitutional freedom of religion mostly protects in

Germany. In this personal realm then, we can understand the ZMD's seeking inclusion of the fatwa in its arbitration and as part of the solution. On the one hand, the fatwa acts as a supporting text for the ZMD's statement as integrating these two systems (Islamic and German), underlining its authority by noting its origins in an “Islamic” country, Egypt. This “authority” came to stand in for the fatwa itself in the reporting. They referred to Al-Azhar and its authority often (but not always). However, they rarely mentioned the connecting fatwa directly (which was only attached to the ZMD version of the press release), and only quoted from the part of the fatwa that the press release itself had quoted. Though a fatwa is at the center of this reconciliation, it often remained obscured or even hidden as it was spread.

The Two Fatwas

In its role as a supporting text, there are actually two versions of the fatwa, one in

German and one in Arabic.7 The German-language version is about half the size as the Arabic,

7 Please see Appendix D and E for the Arabic and German versions of this fatwa. 102 three paragraphs to the latter's six paragraphs. The German version's short length is explained by its exclusion of most (but not all) of the quotes and reasoning from the fiqh, the human legal doctrine, that are in the Arabic version and often are included in the opinions. The German fatwa is a pdf document. At the top, the title reads “Fatwa of Al-Azhar for the Pro-Soccer Player in the

Month of Ramadan.” This is followed by a boxed text: “Question: we have heard that many soccer players do not fast during the month of Ramadan, with the reason that due to the performance that is expected of them, they cannot fast. What does the Sharia say in this case?” (FOCUS 2010). The three paragraphs that follow are under the heading “Answer.” The first paragraph begins with the quote in full reproduced above in the press release: “The work contract between the players...” It continues with a more general argument about employees who are contract bound to do hard work during the fast and that if so, “as the Hanafi fiqh allows,” may break it (FOCUS 2010).

The second paragraph extends the general argument without reference to soccer per se. It notes first that the scholars of many law schools have given their opinions on the issue, including

Ibn 'Abidin al-Hanafi, al-Hattab al-Maliki, Ibn Hajar al-Haytami al-Shafi, Ibn Abd al-Hamid

Shrawany. It goes on to refer to the noted exceptions like the sick and those who are nursing.

However, it notes that breaking of the fast is also permitted for those farmers who must harvest the wheat and laborers whose livelihoods would be affected by fasting and make them reliant on the alms of others. The third and final paragraph returns to the issue of soccer, specifically. It says that if the soccer games need to be played in the day, then the practices should be moved to the nighttime. However, if this does not happen, then “the sin is ascribed” to those responsible for not moving them. The fatwa answer ends here with a Qu'ran citation and quote, “Allah says:

103 (But whoever is forced [by necessity], neither desiring [it] nor transgressing [its limit], there is no sin upon him. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful) 2/173.” The answer is followed by

“Secretariat of the Fatwa Al-Azhar” and the date of 08/21/2008. The document ends with a note that Omar Soufan translated it on 7/23/2010 (FOCUS 2010). Tracing the Arabic version of this fatwa’s life will explain the discrepancy in these dates.

The Arabic fatwa8 from the ZMD website is a Word document and begins with the same title as the announcement. There are two pieces of additional information. The first notes the

“following questions were sent to the Public Administration of Al-Azhar Journal answered under the section 'Fatwa for the Readers'” (FOCUS 2010). The second piece explains that the “fourth question” (the other questions are not included) was sent from “Mr. R.M.N.” The question is the same, and the six paragraphs that follow cover the same ground as the German version, only in more detail. Both versions follow a standard question-answer formulation that Muftis, a category of Muslim jurists who issues these non-binding legal opinions, have been following for centuries

(Messick 1996:140). Each of the legal scholars mentioned in the German version is here given more space, and their individual works and arguments are addressed. For example, Ibn 'Abidin al-Hanafi work The Response of the Puzzled to Many Choices, is quoted “What must be said for the professional dilemma is: if he has sufficient support for himself and his family (children) it is not permissible for him to break the fast; because it is forbidden to beg, then breaking fast would be permissible and foremost in this situation...” (420/2). Likewise, Al-Maliki's Brief Friendly

Explanation for the Great Talents, Ibn Hajar al-Haytami “masterpiece” The Needy, and the

“masterpiece on” al-Shrawany are all quoted from as supporting arguments, some of which had

8 With many thanks to Elham Alkasimi for her translation from the Arabic. 104 been summarized in the German version9. The last paragraph is virtually the same as the

German, with one additional line following the Quran citation: “Therefore, the sin is lifted or suspended if there is no desire of transgression.” Additionally, just below the text, before the

“Secretariat of the Fatwa Al-Azhar” line, is a final note: “And Allah the Almighty and Exalted

Knows More.” The date of 8/21/2008 ends the document (FOCUS 2010).

The answer to why the date for the “Fatwa for the Soccer Player” predates the FSV controversy by a year, and the ZMD press release by two years is straight forward: The Egyptian

State Mufti “often copies his own previous fatwas on the subject, so that in practice he operates with a set of stock answers which may then be elaborated if special circumstances are involved” (Skovgaard-Petersen 1997:33). Though the press release from ZMD et al. referred to the fatwa issuer as “Al-Azhar,” in fact, it was the Dar al-Ifta, the State Fatwa Office in Egypt, which issued it. The Dar al-Ifta is now closely intertwined with Al-Azhar (for example, the latter's journal publishes many of the fatwas issued by the former as well as trains many students in a curriculum designed by Dar al-Ifta). However, the two organizations have had a long rivalry since the Dar al-Ifta's founding in 1895, with a particularly low point in the early 1990s (289).

Al-Azhar, or parts of it, have always had competing fatwa-issuing Muftis and bodies

(257)10. Nevertheless, the two institutions have sought to collaborate as well. In 2007, Al-Azhar officials claimed that the Dar al-Ifta was “the only legally recognized organization authorized

9 Two examples of details that did not make the German summary include a reference from al-Hanafi about women who thread with their mouths and what kind of (perhaps flavored) string is permissible to work with during Ramadan (Egyptian thread is not okay, but others are permitted); al-Hanafi explains that the concern for nursing is connected to its contractual nature and to the health of child, “which is more important than fasting.”

10 The Dar al-Ifta's headquarters sits in a building that “towers” over al-Azhar. It was built in the late 1980s with Mubarak's explicit support (Skovgaard-Petersen 1997:257). 105 with issuing religious edicts,” at least on the national television channels and through governmental institutions (Saleh 2007). Though this caused an uproar in certain circles, it placed the Dar al-Ifta more thoroughly at the center of discussions in Egypt about the role of Islam in society. This push began in 1978 with the inspired leadership of Jadd al-Haqq to minimized

“trivial” fatwas (on inheritance disputes, for example) and moved toward “novel and important social phenomena” like politics, medicine, and economics (Skovgaard-Petersen 1997:378).

At the time of the soccer fatwa being issued, the Dar al-Ifta was headed by the Grand

Mufti Ali Gomaa, who trained and worked as a professor at al-Azhar (aligomaa.net 2010). After being appointed in 2003, Dr. Gomaa had accomplished several notable achievements for Dar al-

Ifta. He began by forming a fatwa council that would seek to find “collective ijtihad (en:

Personal Reasoning)” and work under the guidance of the Grand Mufti to issue fatwas. He also established more independence apart from the Ministry of Justice, of which it is still formally a part (Webb 2009). As part of the Dar al-Ifta's intention to respond to concerns of not just Egypt, but the whole world, Dr. Gomaa set up multiple channels for people to ask fatwas. These included an international call center, a postal mail center, a fax center and most notably an attractive and sophisticated website in Arabic, English, French, German, Russian, Turkish, Urdu and Indonesian. On the website, one can submit a question in any of these languages and await an email response, follow Dar al-Ifta on Facebook or Twitter and search for previous answers.

If one searched for the Soccer Fatwa on the website, it is was not available in English

(initially) or German. However, a search for the Arabic brought up fatwa number 1202 with the same text as available from the ZMD website fatwa, but with a slightly different date11. That

11 I believe this discrepancy can be explained by the latter versions appearance in the Al-Azhar Journal. 106 fatwa gave the date of the question's submission and answer as August 10, 200812 (dar-alifta.org

2008). As alluded to above, this fatwa was ironically making waves in late summer 2009 during

Ramadan in its Egyptian context as the three German players were reprimanded and a year before it would do so in Germany. News reports from September 2009 about the fatwa in that context quote what is almost certainly the same text: “a player who is tied to a club by contract is obliged to perform his duties, and if this work is his source of income and he has to participate in matches during Ramadan and fasting affects his performance then he is allowed to break the fast” (Al Arabiya News 2009).

An article from The National titled “Fasting exemption for football team kicks off debate in Egypt” explains that this fatwa was posted to the front page of Dar al-Ifta's website just before

Ramadan (2009). This action set off a flurry of responses. It was seen as directed toward the

Egyptian national team’s upcoming 2009 match against Rwanda. The Egyptian Football

Association responded by claiming that the players would not fast on that game day because of the fatwa. However, the team's star midfielder Mohammed Aboutrika immediately said he would stick to the fast even on the game day. The national coach added that many other players would do the same. Sheikh Farahat el-Mongy, a senior Al-Azhar scholar, called the fatwa “rude,” and said that though God allows the sick, the pregnant, breastfeeding and menstruating women to fast, "God said nothing about allowing football players to break their fast” (National 2009).

Khaled Tawhid, the editor of Al-Ahram's sport's magazine, said that he opposes the fatwa, “as do most religious scholars.” Karam Gabr, who sits on the board of the government daily,

Roselyoussef, called the fatwa “confusing,” and asked: “Does it apply to all matches or only the

12 Fatwa 1202 was also available in Russian and Indonesian in 2010, and eventually also in English. 107 upcoming match? Does it apply to handball and basketball matches as well? What happens if,

God forbid, the national team lost while its players are not fasting?” (National 2009).

The Rwanda match was seen as very important to qualify for the World Cup. The cartoonist Amr Selim drew one Dar al-Ifta sheik telling another that 'this fatwa "is better of two evils: When 11 players break their fast is better than 80 million losing their faith while watching the match"' (National 2009). This is to underscore Skovgaard-Petersen’s point that when studying fatwas, context matters. For when the fatwa is loosed on the world, it “is not simply an outcome of the stringency of its argumentation [...] the fatwa is part of a complex world where different interests and ideologies will compete to make use of it for their own purposes” (1997:20). There was an Egyptian context in 200913 for how the fatwa was asked for and received in a different context and reaction in Germany in 2010. So for the latter, why did the ZMD go to al-Azhar at all?

I argued in part above that we should understand the ZMD's appeal to an authority that would be beyond debate, to a certain extent. Al-Azhar's authority was rarely challenged in the

German press however much the idea of a pro-Soccer player exemption to fasting was debated.

Though the ZMD does not state specifically why it consulted al-Azhar and not, say, a Turkish fatwa body (considering Germany’s large population of Turkish-descent), we do know that al-

Azhar has loomed large in Muslim Germany. In a study of German imams, Melanie Kamp reports that when faced with more complex questions from their communities that they usually consult external bodies, including al-Azhar (Kamp 2008:151), a place where many of them studied, including some Turkish imams (42,153,155).

13 And of course an unknown 2008 context when the question was originally posed, 108 In the mid-1980s, when the German school system developed curriculum for Islamic classes, it submitted it for evaluation to “theological faculties in Turkey and the al-Azhar faculty in Egypt.” (Sovik 2008:246). A 2002 Federal Constitutional Court made a landmark decision to allow halal slaughter in Germany and partially appealed to a fatwa issued by the Egyptian State

Mufti and al-Azhar in the 1980s14. The ZMD general secretary attended the Annual Islam

Conference from 2005-2009 in Cairo, partly under the auspices of the Honorary Chair and Grand

Sheik of al-Azhar Dr. Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi (zentralrat.de 2009). So though al-Azhar (and the Dar al-Ifta) is not the only authority that the ZMD could have consulted, it was one with a certain pedigree in Germany and the Islamic world at large, one which underlines the impact they hoped to have. As we saw in the reporting of the fatwa, it was an authority that went unchallenged in the mainstream press. Not least, Al-Azhar already had an agreeable fatwa ready for the taking.

German Islam?

In conclusion, what exactly is the quality of this effort at integration, which utilizes the power of German football to position Islam as a part of German life at a highly visible performative level? ZMD Charta's Article 15 declares that “it is necessary to form a European

Muslim identity.” It goes on to claim that Islam has been “saved from any serious clash between religion and science” due to its underlying rationality. It is this “tradition” that supports “a contemporary reading of the Islamic sources which takes into account both the particular

14 The issue revolved around whether was an “imperative in Islam to pre-stun animals before slaughter. The Egyptian fatwas said that there was not, so the court initially rejected the claim to an imperative need. However the court decided later it itself could what was “true” and “binding” in religion and so allowed some halal butchers to slaughter without pre-stunning with a special license (Rohe 2008:55-56). 109 problematics of contemporary issues and the development of a properly European Muslim identity” (zentralrat.de 2002). Article 16 further specifies Germany as the focus of the ZMD's activity and, by extension, other German Muslims: “For the local Muslim population Germany is the focal point of their lives, interests, and activities” (zentralrat.de 2002). For this reason, I argued that the ZMD choice of collaborators—the German soccer organizations—in finding a solution to the players' reprimands; their presentation of the fatwa as a major press release to

Germans international news organizations well beyond the sports world as well as touting its origin at Al-Azhar; and especially the topic of choice for their intervention—Ramadan and soccer—are all specific to the German context and contribute to the understanding of what they suggest it means to be a Muslim in Germany, or indeed a German Muslim and for the prospect of performative belonging.

Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Muslim scholar, and philosopher, in discussing the issue of

European Muslim identity, posed a similar problematic to our fatwa: the feeling among some

European Muslims (especially young ones) that the “only appropriate answer [to a question of

Islam] is a legal one as if Fiqh alone can solve all their problems [… and the...] unhealthy development of a complex whereby they discredit themselves and think that the right responses should come from abroad, from great ulama residing in Islamic countries” (Ramadan 1999:115).

As to the first part of this statement, my examination of German reporting on Ramadan in 2009 showed many players like Ozil and Ribery, who seemed to have come up with their own solutions to soccer and Ramadan without any apparent recourse to fiqh, or indeed fatwas. This was despite how the articles about the reprimands frequently tried to frame the issue as one of inherent conflict to the players. For many of the players, the ulema of Islamic countries mostly

110 did not come into play in their decisions. This is also true among amateur league players in

Germany, of which a much higher number are Muslim—and to whom, of course, the fatwa would not technically apply as non-professionals. Though a more in-depth study of these leagues is beyond the scope of this study, it is apparent that ad hoc solutions to the issue of fasting and soccer are the rule on team and individual bases (Tricarico 2010).

However, overall the actions of many German soccer players must allay some of

Ramadan's worries. Ramadan's greater concern is how Islam is presented in Europe. A negative presentation of Islam can put European Muslims in a “reactive and defensive posture, and this prevents them producing an original and serene attitude.” Negative presentations of Islam are still frequent in Germany, especially in connection to contentious issues such as the headscarf, as noted above. However, the Ramadan fast and professional German soccer seems to be an intersection where the presentation is not predicated on its inherent negativity, although concerns about health were especially present15. Perhaps then Özil's serene attitude on the field and in front of a microphone, talking about his faith, speaks to this opening in the German discourse on

Islam, that the ZMD assertively enjoined and attempted to leverage in a performance of inclusive belonging. In this limited scope, from our three soccer players in Frankfurt, to the fatwa a year later, I suggest a tactile German and European and Islamic possibility emerged, a “new” norm for

German national belonging was at the least discursively produced in highly visible Germand and intentional news media. The ZMD and its allies seized upon a valuable and opportune “failure”

15 Though unremarked in the newspaper articles, it is striking how closely the sports medicine doctors consulted in fact use the same fundamental arguments of health concerns and thus the necessity for exemption from fasting that are present in the fiqh. 111 of integration and conjured a distinctly German Islamic moment in the mainstream intercultural discourse, where one could imagine a player both confidently German and assertively Muslim.

112 Chapter 4: Narratives of Neukölln

Each May in Berlin, a parade winds through two of its main boroughs that are known

(for better and worse) for their diversity, Kreuzberg and Neukölln. That diversity is the central drive of this annual celebration, the Carnival of Cultures. Its celebratory tone is unmistakable as the participants of each float and gathering of a particular “culture” shout, wave flags, and dance. The spectators do the same, fed on the festive atmosphere and caipirinha, the favorite

Brazilian cocktail of cachaça, sugar, and lime, sold from temporary stands outside of non-stop shops. The carnival is meant to posit an idealized notion of cultural diversity for the city, one in which the purported cultural groups are self-organized and voluntary and where no group is emphasized over another. This perhaps also accounts for a variety of ordering taxonomies evident on the official signs for each parade group such as countries (“Tunisia”), to activity- focused groups (“Dancing Dragon”) to folkloric (“Narrenzunft” or Swabian masked jesters).

Walking against the parade’s progress so as to see all its participants, as I did each year I attended, l would arrive at the parade’s departure point in north Neukölln in a large square, transformed like the rest of the route into a day-long party zone. Yet it was this very same square and a nearby school which for some became a nationally-shared battleground for what was at stake in allowing for an inclusive vision of national belonging in Germany—a fear that it could be undermined with too much diversity.

Introduction

It is not difficult to come by officially-sanctioned displays of caring for diversity in

Berlin. From city-funded advertising such as the “Living with each other in Berlin” (Mandel

113 2008:74) to its major festivals like the “Carnival of Cultures” which “celebrates cultural diversity” (berlin.de 2018) to its office of “Diversity in Arts and Culture” with the slogan “Be

Berlin - be diverse” (berlin.de 2017), diversity is presented as a highly valuable attribute.

Diversity and its sibling concepts of integration, multiculturalism, and interculturality are not merely lauded by the city and federal governments but are incorporated into their guidelines for citizenship and their visions for their major cultural institutions. They are reinforced by the EU’s diversity-positive agenda including its official motto “United in Diversity.” These concepts are presented as pressing issues in the national media, but also significantly in the policies and approaches to education in public schools.

Interculturality in Germany at the secondary schooling level, in particular, has been the subject of almost four decades of research (Hoff 1995). Much of that research, as I review below, tends to evaluate whether a particular instance of intercultural education has succeeded or failed or whether more (rarely fewer) intercultural pedagogies are necessary. In order to explore and interrogate the premise of an intercultural approach to education at this level, this chapter utilizes a case study of Sirin, a secondary school student with a “migration background”16 who attended a Gymnasium in the Neukölln district of Berlin. It is framed around two competing narratives.

The first is Sirin’s own narrative of her educational “life history” as told to me in interviews.

This is followed by an alternative narrative of Sirin’s theater teacher in the form of a tell-all book published nationally in 2008 of her experiences at the same school, but which includes a section

16 There is confusion and debate over which term is most appropriate for those in Germany with “backgrounds” outside of the country or its former domains, but who had otherwise spent most or all of their lives in Germany (see Mandel 2008:6-8). “Migration background” while being a current politically correct term, was also the term used by the main informant of this chapter to generally describe others like her (with parents from the Republic of Turkey) though she also selectively used the term “Turk” and “German” to describe herself as well. It can also describe students from other national backgrounds. 114 about Sirin specifically. My aim is not to adjudicate the truth claims of either narrative or the sincerity of the narrators but rather to use this case study and its intersection of an individual story with a nationally distributed narrative to draw further attention to certain structural vulnerabilities of the intercultural model, here in a secondary school setting.

Interculturality can be a fragile concept. This fragility stems from its vague and contested meanings, but also from its reliance on marshaling difference as its operative mechanism, which is followed by the need to manage such difference. In the previous two chapters I have detailed a case of attempted top-down management at the Humboldt Forum, where this management was accompanied by unexpected hauntings which challenged the claims of inclusion; and, in the soccer fatwa, a small organization acting more “stately’ than the state”(Navaro-Yashin 2002:1) and leveraging a problem arising from difference (Islamic fasting) into a symbolic national act of inclusion. In the analysis of the narratives of this chapter, I argue that the fragility of intercultural education arises here (in part) from the narrative power at play in the contested claims of a student and teacher. The “truth claims” at stake for each narrator are subjected to “the place in the social field from which one spoke and which resources one commanded” (Gilsenan 1996:58).

I draw special attention to assertions of when “culture” as a normative force is evoked and by whom.

Using Sirin’s case, I expand this discussion by linking it to the critique of culture, which asks if the concept, through its reliance on difference, “always smuggle[s] in hierarchy (Abu-

Lughod 1991:146). That is, it can unwittingly recreate the hierarchies the concept meant to challenge in acknowledging that all peoples “have” culture. I do this by drawing out three themes from the two narratives and comparatively analyze the approach to each: cultural identity,

115 patriarchy, and language. I consider especially when and where (stereo)typing is located and contested, including the home and the school. Interculturality’s vulnerability and arbitrariness are shown in these themes in part due to who gets to say when “culture” or difference matters, or when to set it aside. To this end, I conclude with an interpretation of Sirin’s desire to be represented on her own terms in the “shadow” narratives she constructed as a performer

In approaching this case study, I understand Sirin’s “tale” to contain some measure of the

“interpretational vectors, patterns of association, ontological presuppositions, spatiotemporal orientations, and etymological horizons” (Crapanzano 1985:9) of living and learning in

Germany. However, that tale is also formed by the expectations and demand that I brought to it, and it is, in this sense, a “double edited encounter” (9). However, I did not select Sirin’s story because it was representative of a statistical claim. In many ways, her story operates as a “breach case” (Conley and O’Barr 2004:188). That is, she succeeds where she and many of her peers were expected to fail. Students with migration backgrounds such as Sirin are generally shown in the research to “underperform” in schools in comparison to their “native” peers (Faas 2008:109).

This is also a common understanding of mass media discussions of migrants in schools (see, for example, Thomasen 2012). Methodologically, cases of “breach” or “trouble” have been used to draw out departures from the “norms” and “right ways” of a group because something must be

“done about it” with “felt propriety” to repair the breach. Ideally, this gives us a clear insight into what the norms might be through the observation of the “remedy” applied to their violation

(Conley and O’Barr 2004:189). It is a “critical tale” that is “strategically situated to shed light on larger social, political, symbolic, or economic issues (Van Maanen 1988:127 cited in Lamphere et al 1992:17).

116 Sirin did not underperform as expected. She attended the Gymnasium against the recommendation of her primary school teacher, overcame a difficult stutter and completed her Abitur (graduation exam), and went on to attend university. It is clear from Sirin’s telling of her story that she had many educators doubt her ability to succeed, though there were one or two exceptions. Notably, and ironically, it was her theater teacher (who later authored the book at issue in this chapter), and theater in general, which became the chief encouragements for finding her voice, literally and figuratively. I develop theater and performance, and their potential effects, to provide a kind of self-representation in the dialog of national belonging as a sub-theme in this chapter, but more fully explore it in the following one on the MÄDEA youth center.

I draw on Sirin’s story, not simply because of her successful educational trajectory, but because, despite this trajectory, her teacher, Frau Gerste, represented Sirin’s story as one of failure. Furthermore, what was “done” about it was documented in an unusually public fashion.

Therefore, I utilize this heightened case as an “interpretational vector” to examine the

“ontological presuppositions” (Crapanzano 1985:9)—that is, of what is assumed to be true—of intercultural education. It is an opportunity to examine a “robust” account of how schools can shape “the parameters of social membership” (Abu El-Haj and Bonet 2011:32). The teacher’s competing narrative in the form of a book, which I present following Sirin’s own narrative (albeit presented here within my own), was composed shortly before Sirin completed her Gymnasium studies.

Frau Gerste, Sirin’s theater teacher, thoroughly disillusioned after four years as a teacher, decided to write a tell-all book about her experiences, primarily at Sirin’s Gymnasium, joining a sub-genre of front-line reports from high schools (see Freedman 1991). She was doing so from

117 ground zero of what was considered a major national crisis in the education of immigrants and belonging in Germany at that time. A nearby school in Neukölln, the Rutlischule, had come to the attention of the national media when a letter from several of its teachers was made public.

The letter alleged that classes at the Rutlischule had become characterized by “aggressiveness, disrespect and ignorance” by the majority of “non-German” students, an issue which I will address more in detail below (Young 2006). Near to the end of Frau Gerste’s book about the “war zone” (as she characterized it) of her own school, she included an extensive section dedicated to

Sirin’s case. It is clear from the book that she recognized Sirin as a special student, full of talent and promise. However, as I will show, she ultimately considered Sirin to be tragically linked to her Turkish “culture” and family and an example of wasted potential. The publication of the book came as a shock and betrayal to Sirin, not least because the teacher used Sirin’s real, full name and included details about her life that had been divulged in confidence.

Beyond the particular betrayal, I use this case study to interrogate the intercultural model within the hierarchy of the secondary school system (and with implications for national belonging writ large) and push its discussion beyond framing and evaluating it as success or failure, or too little or too much. Before proceeding to the narrative accounts, I first situate them in the broad outlines of intercultural education in Germany over the last four decades, including the critical research which has challenged and supported such policies as well as the broader intercultural and integration policies of the federal government in the last decade. Following

Sirin’s narrative (as I relate it), there is a brief interlude about the Rutlischule crisis that was unfolding in Sirin’s neighborhood and which was shaping the national dialog about integration in schools. This is followed by the narrative of Frau Gerste’s book and then a comparative analysis

118 of the two utilizing the themes of cultural identity, patriarchy, and language. I end with a coda exploring Sirin’s desire to determine the conditions of own representation, including its connection to theater and performance.

Interculturality into Schools

An exhaustive discursive or policy review of intercultural education in Germany is beyond the scope of this chapter (see Hoff 1995). Nonetheless, a review of its broad outlines in recent German history can give insight to Sirin’s case and reveal the ongoing difficulty in implementing and evaluating such a concept in practice. School officials implemented intercultural education in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)17 in direct response to the booming population of immigrant children entering its schools in the 1970s. This sudden growth was itself an ironic result to the end of the Guest Worker program (Anwerbestopp) in 1973.

Before its end, Guest Workers could return to their countries of origin with the possibility of coming back to the FRG to work in the future. However, with the program’s termination, leaving the FRG would mean leaving for good. Instead, many Guest Workers chose to stay in the host country and to bring their families or start new ones in the FRG (Green 2004:36).

The FRG school system had little experience with incorporating the needs of such students. Already in 1973, the immigrant school population was at three percent. This was a six- fold increase from eight years previous and which would more than double again by 1990 (Hoff

17 I utilize the somewhat tiresome “FRG” (Federal Republic of Germany) abbreviation instead of “Germany” in this chapter in the pre-1990 period to distinguish between it and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Too often (in retrospective discursive convenience) we collapse them, though they had very different immigration histories. Post 1990 the former GDR states were absorbed by the FRG, and for this post unification period I reserve the term “Germany.” 119 1995:826). The first policy approach in the 1970s was to try and impart a level of German- language learning to those students so they could participate in the lessons. Federal officials meanwhile continued to deny that the FRG was an immigrant-receiving country. Funds, services, and teacher training for helping migrant students remained minimal throughout that decade.

Youth “Läden” (centers) like MÄDEA (featured in the next chapter), were opened in the abandoned shops of poor areas where migrants lived and helped where they could. Only at the end of the 1970s did teacher training programs develop in response to the perceived needs of these students, with German as a foreign language remaining the central focus (826). This remained a so-called Ausländerpädagogik (foreigner pedagogy) with the assumption that its target students needed sufficient German to see them to the end of their studies. However, they were expected, like their parents, to “return” to the country of origin. Yet, this time, a new term began circulating in pedagogical circles in Western Europe: “intercultural.” It would be a conceptual frame that would increasingly shape European policy, particularly in education (Faas

2008).

The Free University in Berlin founded the first FRG “Institute of Intercultural Education” in its school of education in 1980. The proto-EU Council of Europe, an advisory (but not legislative) body, advocated strongly for such an approach to its member states, and many other

FRG universities quickly followed suit. In the FRG, Intercultural Education (Interkulturelle

Erziehung) at first connoted a contrasting approach to the compensatory foreigner pedagogy, which came to be seen as to assimilationist by those arguing for a more balanced consideration of the perceived cultures at stake. Intercultural education was instead understood as integrationist. That is, it assumed that migrant students would, in fact, remain most of their lives

120 in the FRG and therefore, would need some level of acculturation to assumed German norms while being respectfully allowed to retain some level of their supposed native culture (Hoff

1995:827). This was taken up as the progressive line. However, terminological and methodological confusion reigned from the start. For example, “intercultural” was linked with

“multicultural” approaches. Early multiculturalist researchers and advocates, however, initially stressed their difference from interculturalists by arguing that there were structural inequalities at play beyond issues of just “culture” in understanding school needs and were linked to “anti- racist” efforts. However, by the end of the 1980s, the terms would be synonymous (827). The emphasis remained on finding consideration and accommodation for “both” cultures presumed to be in play.

This balancing act was politically and practically challenging. The intercultural approach to education for many meant a need to impart a sense of the student’s assumed home culture to him or her. This could be achieved, for example, through “mother tongue” teaching. Ironically, foreigner pedagogy had sometimes provided such courses under the assumption that the students would need it for the return to their home country (827). However, such a program might be eliminated (to the protest of many immigrant parents) if the emphasis was on the successful integration of the student into German society and culture is understood to be a zero-sum game

(Klopp 2002:109-110). Researchers eventually created more workable definitions for

“intercultural,” but these were not always what ended up in practice or policy. As debates advanced and time passed their the valence of these policies fluctuated, not least following the

FRG’s absorption of the former states of the German Democratic Republic in 1990.

121 Nonetheless, an arguably “mainstream” approach evolved. Its underlying assumption was that the FRG was after all an immigrant country, and as such, those migrants’ languages and cultures were to be respected. However, it was with the understanding that those same migrants and their descendants would learn the “mores and customs” of the host country and eventually be granted citizenship (Hoff 1995:828). Though guided by a central education body, in the federated system of the FRG, each state is ultimately allowed to govern its own approach to such “culture” related policies, including in education. Hence, the level of effort and intervention varied widely in time and place (see Schultz and Kolb 2015 for a comparative example between Berlin and

Bavaria). Nonetheless, whether de facto or otherwise, this was the basic operating concept for primary and secondary schools. However, at whatever level of intercultural approach, it was always unclear what kind of “German” such a student could actually become, particularly as issues of citizenship remained tied to notions of blood descent until 2000.

Intercultural into National Integration

The jus sanguinis understanding of citizenship that governed the FRG laws until 2000 prevented many such immigrant parents and their children, the presumed main targets of intercultural education, from becoming citizens. That is, even if one was born in Germany and perhaps only had German as their sole language, yet had one foreign-born parent, they too would be classified as a foreigner by law (Hoff 1995:823). The FRG had low comparative rates of naturalization to its neighbors (France’s rate was four to five times higher (Brubaker 2009:84).

This jus sanguinis approach was underscored by the arrival of tens of thousands of “ethnic”

Germans from formally Soviet lands in the 1990s. These immigrants were granted quick

122 pathways to citizenship based on some documented “German” descent, even though many had very tenuous remaining cultural connections, such as naming practices or language (Mandel

2008:214). The 2000 citizenship law changed the blood principle to a more territorial understanding. At least legally, it was now more accessible for long-term residents, regardless of their home country of origin, to seek naturalization. However, powerful cultural (and blood- descent) understandings of what it meant to be German persisted, and the basic intercultural educational framework remained.

In the 2000s, it would be the ruling conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party that would take up the cause of intercultural education. The term “intercultural” still had currency in many circles, including in some high-level CDU-led projects, like the Turkish-

German University for which an “intercultural management” was inserted at its core18

(“Deutschsprachiger” 2018). However, for the most part, the word “integration” was substituted in its policy documents and announcements. This was done in part to contrast with a

“multicultural” approach the CDU had posited as a “failure” through that policy’s supposed creation of “parallel societies” of migrant ghettos in places like Neukölln, instead of integrating those migrants (Weaver 2010). However, the CDU’s “integration”19 in fact followed many of the same contours as the mainstream intercultural approach of the previous two decades. That is, the assumption was that the migrants were there to stay. For example, when the CDU-led coalition came to power in 2009, they did not attempt to change the 2000 citizenship law in a “monoethnic direction” (Akturk 2012:109). The goal was to “integrate” them into society with a continued

18 This was elaborated on further by members of the faculty to me on a visit to the University of Passau in 2015 where the program was developed.

19 German contains the analogous Latin-rooted “Integration”, implying a broadly similar meaning of bringing together. 123 emphasis on language competence, but notably without an insistence on total assimilation. In return for adopting certain “German” ways, including language, their culture and languages were to be respected.

A flurry of high level, high profile activity related to integration followed the CDU’s rise to power. Chancellor Merkel created the position of Commissioner for Migration, Refugees, and

Integration as one of only three Chancellery Ministers of State. In 2006 the government organized the “first integration summit” with prominent representatives from across politics and society to talk about “language learning, education, job opportunities, and equal opportunities.”

This was followed in 2007 by a “Youth Integration Summit” to discuss further “language, education, local integration, and cultural diversity” and the government’s ten-point “National

Integration Plan” (Faas 2008:108; see also Bundesregierung 2007b).

The federal government claimed, as they put in their English-language white paper about the Plan, that it “must be seen in the context of European Union efforts to promote integration” (“National Integration Plan” 2007). As described in their much longer German-

Language document, federal officials grounded some of their specific efforts in the Plan, like integration courses, within particular EU policies such as its “Common Basic Principles” for the

Policy of Integrating Immigrants (Bundesregierung 2007a:44). The Plan also drew attention to

2008 as the EU’s “Year of Intercultural Dialog” (169). An additional category of concern was added to the national discourse following the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York: religion and, more specifically, Islam (Ewing 2008:207). To the surprise of many, the CDU decided to discursively include Islam within their vision of belonging in an intercultural or integrated

Germany. Islam was a prominent feature of the 2007 National Integration Plan, with much space

124 given to discussing the “German Islam Conference,” an ongoing “dialog with migrants” (Bundesregieriung 2007a:13). However, this became more discursively notable in the pronouncement made by the German president in 2010. At the twentieth celebration of the

“unification” the FRG and the GDR, he proclaimed that “integration is the new unification” and that furthermore, “Islam,” alongside Christianity and Judaism, is “a part of Germany” (Warner and Le Bond 2010). These efforts echoed the European agendas where “since 2000 the social inclusion of young people” has been seen as “an essential element of European integration” (Faas et al 2014:308) and “education” as the best way to deliver such “‘basic norms” and “core values” (310).

Notably missing from these gestures, at least at the federal level, was the anti-racist critiques of structural inequality. This pleaded for meaningful material and economic changes to also occur and supposedly needed to address and counteract xenophobic and racist action and thought on the part of the German population (Hoff 1995:830-831). Nonetheless, in a mainstream sense, as “intercultural” concepts evolved into “integration” policies, the conceptual premises remained similar and responded to a likewise similarly conceived problem. In essence, we are faced with living in a society made up of people with assumed cultural differences who are here to stay and be respected, but who are also expected to adjust to some degree to the host country’s “mores and customs.” How do we best manage such diversity?

This ongoing focus on difference and diversity, while admirable where it seeks to respect and understand difference, also reveals the fragility of the intercultural approach because of its a priori need to assume differences, to define and articulate such differences, and finally to manage them. In situations of clear hierarchal stratification such as schooling, who has the power to

125 make these assumptions and definitions and who gets to manage them matters. In her work on managing diversity in Catalonian schools, Ríos-Rojas draws out this problem using the

Foucauldian discursive critique of governance (Ríos-Rojas 2014). Namely that the “dual function of discourse—its ability to at once mark out what counts as a ‘problem’ while conferring legitimacy and authority to those with the power to propose ‘solutions’—is a central feature of the manner in which discourses operate.” (16). In the schools studied by Ríos-Rojas, administrators and teachers spoke of the value of diversity as advocated by the European agenda.

That is, they spoke of their respect for differences among students. However, in the case of these

Catalonian schools, those same administrators and teachers revealed they worried about the possibility of “too much diversity” concentrated in a single school (11). In their efforts to acknowledge the cultural differences of students, they saw a threat that such differences could infect and take over the supposed monoculture of the majority of students. In attending to the

“work diversity discourses do,” we can understand “the ways in which these are deployed to sustain relations of power even as those powerful arrangements are increasingly more diffuse and masked by official commitments to diversity” (17). A version of this conundrum was posed early on in the academic literature on intercultural education in Germany, particularly by the anti- racists and deconstructionists (Hoff 1995:833). These early critiques worried about this over- emphasis on cultural difference would contribute to the ethnicization of Germany (Steiner-

Khamsi 2013:8), while overlooking structural inequalities between groups.

The broader field of anthropology also puts the culture concept into critical focus.

Appadurai argues that it is a “dimension that attends to situated and embodied difference

(1996:13). Utilizing a similar Foucauldian discursive methodology, Abu-Lughod scrutinizes

126 “culture” as the “essential tool” used by anthropologists “for making other” (1991:143). That is, though the cultural concept was used as a model to capture the equality of all human societies— that we biologically-alike humans all possess cultures—in its discursive formation in ethnographic writing, “culture” instead enforces “separations that inevitably carries a sense of hierarchy” (147). That is to say, that to deploy “culture,” inter-, multi-, or otherwise, and their evocation of difference risks reproducing the very hierarchies that such efforts are intended to alleviate (146). Anthropologists have applied various critical remedies to this conundrum. For example, by paying attention to how ethnographic writing is “enmeshed in local practices and institutional constraints” and understanding science itself as a “social process” (Clifford et al

1986:11) I treat “culture” (in its various incarnations) in this work in this critical manner, in part by resisting on settling upon a set way of defining or using it. Instead, I let the narratives below evoke it while I call attention to its conceptual vulnerabilities.

Evaluating Interculturality

In much of the literature on intercultural education practices in Germany, its scholars argue that these policies have met with a lack of success. They often emphasize the obvious inequality of outcome for students with migration backgrounds, for example, with nods to structural inequalities at play. However, the failure of the intercultural project, as seen in this scholarship is typically—implicitly and explicitly—attributed by researchers to a failure in education policy and delivery in the schooling context, rather than located with the concept of intercultural education itself. Hoff, for example, concludes in his 1995 summary on intercultural education in Germany that,

127 there still remains a major task for researchers in the field of multicultural education: ‘to institutionalize learning for all children, to enable them to develop their own culture— not just one adapted from a group, to communicate with other cultures, and to become self-determined in a glowingly differentiated world (Krueger-Potratz, 1993, p. 87). However, until these initiatives become compulsory components of the curriculum for all schools, they will have little effect in preventing the growing tide of racism and nationalism in Germany (836).

That is, the admirable goal to “become self-determined in a glowingly differentiated world” is to be mandatorily delivered by the schooling system. However, there has also been a sense of unease in relying on such a delivery system. Scholars like Krueger-Potratz (quoted above by

Hoff) called for equality between those communicating their cultures to one another. Yet, this is precisely the equality that schools do not deliver. The compulsory nature of schooling (as with most public schools) in Germany and elsewhere and its clearly marked power structure between students and teachers “emanates from a wider set of structural relationships that connect a political economy” (Lamphere et al 1992:26). The cultural concept, already sensitive to hierarchy, reveals its vulnerabilities in a coerced, hierarchical environment.

The scholarship on intercultural education in Germany can detail comparative examples which seem to deliver better and worse results such as school situations where teachers and their approaches are more or less “sensitive” to those deemed minority students, such as in the work of Daniel Faas (2008). No doubt, those sensitivities make qualitative differences in the experiences of students. However, they do not resolve the intercultural conundrum, and thereby leave the system vulnerable to situations that those like Sirin described in the next sections. Faas, one of the most prolific researchers working in the last decade on intercultural education in

Germany, presented a useful comparative approach using two schools in inner-city Stuttgart, between a Hauptschule and a Gymnasium (Faas 2008). Faas’ examples, as insightful as they are

128 in many ways in how they trace inter-ethnic affiliation and sensitivities in these schools, also revealed the fragility I argue is at stake with intercultural education.

Faas makes note of the class difference in the two schools he studies, the Gymnasium with a majority of middle-class students and the Hauptschule with a mostly working-class background. Faas argues that the Hauptschule “mediated citizenship agendas through a dominantly European and arguably at times, Eurocentric approach” and that “despite some intercultural teaching, the teachers I interviewed seemed to struggle to combine notions of multiculturalism or cultural diversity with a dominant European agenda” (114). That is, in the conceptual model that Faas initially constructs, it seems “European” is a category that collapses its members into a monoculture, which implies that it takes non-Europeans to constitute additional (multi) cultures or diversity. However, in an interview with Faas, the citizenship coordinator for the Hauptschule responded to the question of the European dimension’s importance emphatically: “The curriculum must have a European dimension. We are living in a united Europe, a multicultural society, especially here at this school, and the European spirit must be promoted more strongly than ever before’” (114). That is, in contrast to Faas, the coordinator understands the European project as already multicultural, rather than as a monoculture to which non-Europeans must be added to obtain multiplicity.

However, underscoring the difficulty in consistent intercultural modeling, later in the same article, Faas shows that the Hauptschule’s religious education teacher posits a “Christian

Occidental” foundation of Europe (which Faas glosses as “white and European”) as opposed to

Muslim “‘others’” (115). That is, she proposed her own monocultural European category, but with a religious bent. In response, Faas cites positive examples of integration with the “cross-

129 ethnic” friendships. These include Turks, Thai, Syrian, and Albanian students, but also Italian,

Spanish, and Greek (that is three European Union member countries) — but all of them in this instance implied a multi-cultural encounter for Faas20. In comparison, as he moves onto his Gymnasium example, Faas’ model once again seems to separate “European values” (presumably monocultural) from “multicultural values,” which he argues are promoted alongside one another in a positive sense (117). However, the Gymnasium school prospectus, which he quotes, claims “intercultural tolerance and community” are expressed through the learning of “the manifoldness of European languages, cultures, and mentalities,” that is through a multicultural understanding of Europe (117).

Faas likewise gives a positive example of a teacher promoting a “multicultural dimension” where the class went to a market hall to ask “‘Italian, Spanish and Turkish traders about the products they sell, you know, products like olives, goat cheese and so on and the kids could see that this is part of Germany’s diversity” (117). In both schools, then, diversity and difference are marked positively and negatively by evoking cultural difference. This cultural difference is understood as “ethnic” but classified by presumed nationality (“Turkish,”

“Spanish”) or super-nationality (the EU) and always contrasted to a presumed monocultural

“German” or “European” student. Sometimes Europe, for Faas and his interlopers, is understood as a monoculture that requires something non-European to make it part of a multicultural framework, sometimes it contains multi-cultures within it. At the end of his article, Faas wonders if the shift to “intercultural education” would be enough to overcome the insensitivities he

20 Faas followed the trend since the mid-1980s of using “multicultural” and “intercultural” interchangeably. Though early proponents made some distinctions (such as an anti-racism angle on multiculturalism as outlined above) the two terms (and eventually “integration” as well) came to be broadly concerned with successfully integrating two or more cultures understood as distinct. 130 perceives among the Hauptschule officials and calls for both “diversity and solidarity” in approaching “minority ethnic students” (121). Faas’ (and his interlopers’) shifting conceptual landscapes are a symptom of the very fragility of interculturality: who gets to say when culture matters. It is these vulnerabilities of intercultural belonging, and by implication, of inclusive national belonging, that I aim to draw out in Sirin’s case. This “robust” case (Abu El-Haj and

Bonet 2011:32), with its unusually heightened example of narrative contests, puts to question the reliance on the intercultural education practice and policy to deliver equitable outcomes desired by researchers and politicians and school officials.

Sirin’s Tale

Sirin21 is a university student in her mid-twenties. Though soft-spoken, she carries on a conversation with confidence and mature self-reflection. Born, raised and educated in Berlin,

Sirin, in the years I have known her, married a fellow Berliner, Murat, and tried out several higher education programs, before settling on a focus on education and pedagogy at a major

Berlin university which she is attending at the time of this writing. I was introduced to her through a theater director, Tina, who had collaborated with the girls of MÄDEA, the focus of the following chapter. In one of our interviews, she mentioned Sirin and part of the story recounted here regarding. Tina had also worked with Sirin to shape a performance based on her life experiences and agreed to put me in touch. I soon after had my first meeting with Sirin, and we would become well-acquainted over the years I returned to Berlin. Eventually, in addition to our many informal meet-ups where we primarily discussed her school experiences, from pre-K to

21 Sirin’s name has been changed along with certain details of her life, as have the names of her teacher and the teacher’s book and details of that book (hence its missing citation). 131 university, we recorded and extended long-form interview, from which I have assembled her narrative to follow.

Though passionate about theater, as will be seen below, in more recent years, Sirin concentrated her performing efforts on singing jazz. She had even spent time in formal training at a music college, where she had received special recognition for her performances. However, she told me her attention kept returning her to thoughts and studies about education. Sirin’s parents had both immigrated to the FRG from Turkey. Her father was a bookbinder, and her mother worked as a homemaker, looking after Sirin and her little brother. Until Sirin’s own marriage and a move to a northern district of Berlin, Sirin had spent most of her life in the southern borough of Neukölln. She told me her father took pride in the German he had learned as an immigrant and the friendships formed with his German coworkers. Though Sirin only attended a half a year of preschool, she said father made sure he spoke German to her, always translating the Turkish they spoke in the home. He read stories to her in German and emphasized its importance.

However, when Sirin started elementary school, an unexpected problem occurred: she began to stutter. Though stuttering is sometimes linked to traumatic events or other causes

(Borsel et al 2009), Sirin told me this was not the reason in her case. She did have an aunt with a stutter, and she speculated on a genetic component, but ultimately was unsure of its origin.

Regardless, she explained that the stutter began with school. Luckily, Sirin’s first class teacher

(whom she would have for the next three grades as is common in the German system) was sympathetic. Sirin supposed that because that teacher was young, new to the profession, and full of energy, she was inspired to find ways to help her students. For example, one evaluative

132 component of first grade was the student’s ability to read aloud. Sirin and her teacher quickly realized that her stutter made this very difficult, at least in front of other students. Her teacher then simply asked Sirin to stay in the classroom with her during recess and complete the reading aloud one-on-one. This proved much more comfortable than in a group setting. Sirin recounted to me that these sympathetic gestures went a long way in helping build her scholastic self- esteem.

However, in the fourth grade, the class received a new teacher (who would have them for the next three years). According to Sirin, there was not a set pedagogical approach to accommodating a student with a stutter, and this next teacher was much less sympathetic. Sirin speculated this time that it was because this teacher was old, bitter, and worn out from teaching too long. She also was aware in this period that most of her fellow students were “immigrant kids” like her and that there were very few “German” classmates. She also remembers that speaking Turkish (or Arabic or another non-German language) was stigmatized in the public areas of the school, but also that ironically the school offered a Turkish-language class. Sirin’s father told her she could learn Turkish at home and not to take the class. More generally, Sirin told me of how school became a struggle for her and culminated in the sixth grade with the teacher’s recommendations for Sirin’s next years in secondary schooling. Their relationship had never improved. Sirin said that, “Teachers have the mission to provide education to help develop their relationships with students. However, with the second teacher, I had the feeling she wanted to teach the material, but not to teach students. I was always so curious; I always wanted to know more. But she didn’t give me good grades.”

133 Though varying in detail from state to state in every German school in fifth or sixth grade, the teachers officially advise or recommend a secondary educational pathway for each student. Traditionally the German secondary school system was three-tiered: Hauptschule,

Realschule, and Gymnasium. The Hauptschule prepared students for blue-collar and artisan trades with a tenth-grade finish. The Realschule took students to the twelfth grade and often gave them more technical training, including in computers. The Gymnasium brought students through a thirteenth grade, which contained an important exam, the Abitur, which, if completed, was a key component to attending university. These three divisions tracked close to class level and the reproduction of class. As Germany’s immigrant population grew, immigrant-background students were disproportionately represented in the Hauptschule and Realschule tracks (Faist 1995:73).

Over the decades various fixes were made to the system to make this tracking less rigid.

This varied state to state and included the introduction of the Gesamtschule, a more inclusive school model based somewhat on the American high school model (Hoff 1995:825). In recent decades Berlin education officials have made changes to how students maneuver into and through the secondary schools in the city. The most significant change came in 2010 when the Real-, Haupt- and Gesamtschulen (but not the Gymnasium) were merged into a single Sekundarschule (“secondary school”) system (Köhler 2009). This also included making the teacher’s formerly binding recommendation amenable to parental and student petition. In

Berlin, thirty percent of Gymnasium seats are saved for a lottery for those who would like to attend but do not have the teacher recommendation (Thomasen 2012).

According to Sirin, her second primary teacher (whom she did not favor) recommended that Sirin pursue a Realschule career. Of her thirty or so classmates, most got

134 the Hauptschule recommendation, a few the Realschule, and only a couple Gymnasium. Sirin made it clear to me that her recommendation was based not on her grades, which in the end were Gymnasium-track caliber, but on her stutter. Her teacher was convinced there was no way she could succeed in that difficult academic environment without the ability to speak confidently in front of the class. Sirin brought home the recommendation to her parents. In much of the literature on Turkish youth in Germany, their parents are seen as not having the cultural resources

(including the German language) to contest or make sense of these recommendations (Hoff

1995:825). This was not the case for Sirin’s family.

Her father was shocked, and “typically” for him, Sirin explained, he decided to do something about it. He accompanied her to school the next day and demanded meetings with her principal and teacher. Her father was not convinced by their reasoning and overruled the recommendation. As noted, a certain quota of seats is held for students who are promising but had not received the official recommendation from their teachers. Sirin explained that she was granted a half-year trial start in the seventh-grade at a Gymnasium. She applied to three. Her dream Gymnasium was the Albert Einstein. It has a beautiful campus, a library, and a sterling reputation. Sirin did not get accepted there, nor at her second choice, but had to settle for her third. Its campus was small and facing a busy, dirty street. Its dark courtyard backed into a graveyard, and there was no library. However, it was a Gymnasium!

Sirin passed her trial period and had to work very hard at school, but was aware of similar dynamics to her elementary school. There was a high proportion of migrant-background students, at least initially: “There were one or two classmates without migration backgrounds.

There were students from Turkey, Lebanon, Georgia, Albania, Croatia, Ukraine. There was

135 another class with all migration backgrounds. This is what people called the “Turkish class.” It was all Turkish and Arabic students... I don’t know how such a class came to be!”Though they now rotated teachers daily, there was also a mix of those who were encouraging and discouraging of her progress, according to Sirin. One teacher had learned some Turkish and made an effort to communicate with the students in the language of their parents, but was later fired for having a relationship with a student, she told me. One ninth-grade math teacher told them that they would all fail. He explained that none of them would be able to comprehend his material and pass the Abitur, seemingly “forgetting it was his job to teach us.” Some teachers were even inspiring. Her first history teacher dazzled them with his ability to answer difficult Who Wants to be a Millionaire-style questions. It also took a couple of years for Sirin to understand what the Abitur was and that it was the goal of her current track. She said her parents had not explained it to her, though they had desired her to be in the Gymnasium. By the tenth grade, Sirin needed real inspiration if she was going to make it through.

After elementary school, Sirin told me that she finally fully grasped that her stutter was a real problem to be confronted. Her grades had fallen year to year, and in the tenth grade, they were bad. It became clear she might have to “switch,” that is, go to the Realschule. At that point, many of her friends had already given up and done so. Sirin told me she “wanted to be educated” but felt she had had the wrong teachers. She was going through a phase of “self-discovery,” but still uncertain of her place in the world. At this time in her English class, she was given an opportunity to perform a skit. Sirin wrote it. She played a boy who had lost interest in school but was convinced by a dance teacher to return and pursue what he loved, which was salsa dancing.

It was about 15 minutes long. Sirin explained to me that she discovered two surprising things

136 during this performance: first, she loved being on stage, and second, while performing, her stutter virtually disappeared. This led Sirin to join the theater class at her Gymnasium (where she had stayed on after all) and experiencing what she called her “blossoming time.” She told me that she felt lucky to land with an inspirational teacher, Frau Gerste, who would also become her school advisor.

Frau Gerste, like Sirin’s very first primary school teacher, was young and new to the profession, and so perhaps more sympathetic to her students. Though not trained initially in theater pedagogy, Frau Gerste and another teacher had done a theater-related training course and come back to the Gymnasium full of ideas, according to Sirin. The first production that Sirin participated in was called “The Loved Ones.” The students participated in the writing, and scenes were taken from their daily life of the students. I explore the implications of this self-fashioned approach in performance and its relation to belonging more in the following chapter on the after school center MÄDEA. However, in short, it instilled a powerful self-confidence in Sirin, including in a public setting. Sirin’s play included material from the U-Bahn (subway) to a couple breaking up. Everyone had to write their own monologue. Sirin had no less than four roles in the production, she told me.

Theater continued to be a revelation. It became a way for her to open up that she had never experienced before. She explained: “In performing theater, I found my inner self. Everyone has a talent. I found it on the stage. It was a chance to communicate with people. I noticed that when I play other people, I have way less of a stutter. I took that as an opportunity to talk with the audience. The same with singing. It’s not about fame. ‘That’s me; look at me!’ [Instead] I find myself there. It has always made me happy.” Frau Gerste noticed Sirin’s strengths on stage.

137 Her performances also swayed others, and she was offered a scholarship to take a theater course at a local college. In Sirin’s telling, her father did not think it was a great idea. As Sirin related, he worried that if she got the idea to pursue the arts, she might later have a hard time finding work. His own hobby time spent as a musician, including as the occasional wedding player, had convinced him of such.

Nevertheless, Sirin finished her Gymnasium career with another student-penned performance. Done in conjunction with the Neukölln Opera (a neighborhood theater), there were songs (one of which Sirin wrote) and a story about pirates. It was performed publicly at the school and local performance space and broadcast on the local television station. Shortly after,

Sirin completed her Abitur. In her remembrance, she was one of about 60 students at her school actually to finish that year. In many ways, she found herself in a place typical of her Gymnasium peers, she told me. What should she do next? To what extent should she respect the wishes of her parents, who would be worried about my pursing an unconventional path of study or career?

Sirin experimented with several higher education paths, including a preschool training program, time at a music college and a technical college, and finally enrolled at a major Berlin university and is (as of this writing) focusing on education and pedagogy.

Sirin narrated to me how her parents had encouraged her use of the German language from an early age; how she was enjoined to make “German” friends; and how she pursued and completed the highest level of secondary education possible, despite a speech difficulty which had made some of the teachers skeptical. Sirin told me she endeavored to speak German precisely, with no Turkish slang added, to give a “surprise” to her peers and other Germans (and in our many conversations she bore out this trait). She told me she worried about the lack of

138 respect that some of her fellow students exhibited in class. She wondered if they had it even worse. In her estimation, parents and school leadership played some role in the problem environment. Sirin made it clear to me that she distanced herself from those students and instead looked for those who would accept her for her identity. With hard work, determination, and the intervention of theater pedagogy, which had given her the self-knowledge and confidence to continue, Sirin’s opportunities stood open to her following her Abitur.

However, Sirin would receive a shock the year following her Abitur. Her former theater teacher, Frau Gerste, a mentor and advisor, had left the school. Unknown to most, she had accepted a contract to write a tell-all book. The book was an insider’s perspective on Sirin’s school and indictment of the school system more generally, especially where migration- background students were concerned. It was not flattering to the school. However, Sirin’s surprise was more personal. Frau Gerste had spent the majority of the final chapter writing about

Sirin. Suddenly Sirin was confronted with someone else’s narrative of her last years at the Gymnasium, and suddenly she had become a symbol for the teacher-turned-author: the problematic “migration-background” student. Following a small interlude about the nearby troubled Rutlischule, and a retelling of Frau Gerste’s narrative, I will return to Sirin’s reaction to this book in the analysis as I explore the contested intercultural themes as stake.

Rutlischule Interlude

Sirin’s final years in the Gymnasium took place adjacent to ground zero of a national crisis of immigrants in schools. It was no coincidence that major publishers were hunting for teachers to tell their stories at this time and in this district. Just a few blocks away in Neukölln

139 from Sirin’s Gymnasium was a Hauptschule, the Rutlischule. This school was set on a quiet residential street, and with a reported 83 percent of students with “non-German backgrounds” had reportedly descended into virtual chaos (Young 2006). In 2006 a collection of teachers composed a letter to their superiors alleging their work environment had become intolerable from the “aggressiveness, disrespect and ignorance” they received from the majority “non-

German” students at the school (Young 2006). The teachers placed the source of the students' unruly behavior in their homes. They wrote in the letter that “the tendency towards violence against property is growing. In most of the families of our students, they are the only ones getting up in the morning. For them, school is a stage and battleground for attention. The worst culprits become role models.” (Young 2006).

The national media went into an “uproar,” and among many of the diagnoses was “the poor integration of foreigners” (Young 2006). Some teachers alleged they would not enter a classroom without a mobile phone to use in case of assault, while others fantasized the students would “finally burn the place down” and end the teacher’s obligation to show up every day. The press doubled down on this narrative of student failure and teacher victimhood. In the most drastic instance, reporters paid students to throw stones and create a riot for the cameras. “The media had been caught in the act of stimulating a moral panic” as students were knowingly

“performing” the role of bad student for the reporters’ benefit (Ewing 2009:223). Many weighed in on solutions, which ranged for calls to curtail immigration to revamping the German school system (as it would be in Berlin in 2010). It was in the context of this Neukölln-is-burning narrative that Frau Gerste’s book was written and published.

140 Frau Gerste’s Book

Frau Gerste’s career in teaching only lasted four years, the majority of which took place at Sirin’s Gymnasium. As she relates in her 2008 book that followed that career, A Missive From the Battle Zone, (from which the following account is drawn), she began as a relatively hopeful educator. However, following her teacher training, she was placed in what was for her a new and frightening environment: Neukölln. Though located only four miles from the prosperous neighborhood in the north of the city where she lived, Frau Gerste claims that for most people she knew, Neukölln was only a place “speculated about.” Even as “Rütli” (the troubled school in the news media in the previous interlude) became a household word for many in Germany in those days of crisis, the teacher wrote in Missive of how she became increasingly “speechless” and unable to explain her professional situation to her friends or family. As she went back and forth between “her” world and the world of Neukölln, she felt like she belonged to each less and less.

Her book opens with a re-creation of her former commute from one world to another, with a vivid mental map of its last few hundred meters as she emerges in Neukölln. Berlin buildings crowd around her as part of “the somewhat inhuman size of the cities of the East.” She describes the atmospheric light near her school, which takes on an “anemic parlor” and casts

“shadows on the faces of passersby.” Though, at times, it can be “beautiful,” it has the potential to erupt into a literal battle zone. A sense of danger pervades, and violence could spring forth on the street without warning. A look or a poorly-timed walking pace can set someone off. “Your path was a stage, and if you are not careful, you might get hit,” she wrote. One only had to look around to see that this was a world apart from her “German-dominated” home district. It is

141 foreign and ruled by men: “A Turkish bank, a Turkish travel agency, a Turkish doctor and lawyer, a Turkish cultural center ‘reserved for members only,’ with the charm and furniture of a sports hall, where the only women to be seen are cleaning.” In Gerste’s description, this scene is complemented by Sinti-Roma women aggressively cleaning the windshields of vehicles trapped at the stoplights. These women dressed as “colorful crows” are in contrast to the “phalanx” of male students who strut down the street in bomber jackets with their pants tucked into their white socks. She claims that “they love white because it signals flawless cleanliness. The dirtier the borough, the whiter the uniform”. For these students of “non-German heritage,” Frau Gerste tells us, Germans are just as foreign to them as they are to the majority society. The only “Germans” these youth get to know are their teachers, the elderly (presumably pensioners unable to move away), and drug addicts on the streets in Neukölln. They may occasionally “bump into” other

German citizens on the street, experience “German weather,” and perhaps witness German culture on television. However, that is the limit of their participation in wider German society and culture in the teacher’s estimate.

Alongside this dramatic introduction, Frau Gerste explains the stakes involved with her book and the need for a change in the German school system. According to her, German education policy has mired itself in a structural crisis, and meanwhile, according to her, researchers “sit in Finnish—not Berlin—classrooms.” That is, this crisis has been ignored by those who could provide insight. Regardless, Gerste diagnoses two central problem areas affecting the school where she was ultimately stationed and its majority of non-German heritage youth: “awareness” (Aufmerksamkeit) and speech. According to her, awareness sometimes pertains to “cultural techniques” and, at other times, to a kind of self-awareness in the world and

142 outer-awareness to the world around the student. That is, “many of these students come from families that have almost no awareness of cultural techniques in relation to things like nutrition, movement, or basic forms of politeness.” Speech was a likewise problematic deficit. According to her, students spoke in a loud, aggressive, and unreflective manner, impoverishing the German language. In fact, “many students do not master their mother tongue or German. Their vocabulary is minimal, and their sentences are constructed of phrases and sounds.” Gerste tells us her time of speechlessness is at an end. This work, in her estimate, will be a chance to pull back the curtain and show what her colleagues have kept hidden. School is a “crystal ball” where you can see the future of the nation and its rapid demographic shift, where we won’t be concerned only with “Niels, Stefka, and Anna, but also with Murat, Arash, and Mariam.” It is, for her, an insight into making a new Germany with people of diverse backgrounds.

Frau Gerste’s journey as a teacher begins and ends in difficulty and frustration, as she describes in her book. The problems she identifies as originating in the home are carried into and reproduced in the school. The Neukölln Gymnasium is not simply a “problem school” academically, but the students are not capable of expressing basic politeness, such as saying

“good morning” to their teacher. In the school hallways, she feels like she is walking through a train station, where boys in baseball caps and girls in headscarves kiss each other in greeting or shake hands like “prize-fighters.” These attitudes begin in the home. Her students’ families are

“not like middle-class German families,” who could take it or leave it as far as spending time together. These strange students want to spend their time with family. It’s fun for them, according to Gerste. Their’ families “belong together” and include “diverse cousins, grandparents, landscapes, autos, and houses in far-off Turkey.” They are there only to “survive” Neukölln.

143 Frau Gerste, recognizing her predicament, decides to start with the daily greeting, to impart some “cultural technique” to students who sorely lack it. However, there are only small breakthroughs or moments where a student acknowledges the effort and says thank you. The boys provide the most “blunt” opposition. They become evasive. Echoing the letter of the

Rutlischule teachers, Frau Gerste claims that their school experience was, however, only mirroring a “bad home life.” Excessive demands put upon those boys were inversely proportional to the lack of care given to them “under the regime of patriarchs.” These men in the students’ families hide behind concepts like “honor” and “tradition” while their school counterparts (that is, school leadership) hide behind “utilization” and “austerity measures.” In turn, students are neglected at home and school under the guise of high-minded or bureaucratic excuses.

For Frau Gerste, this interplay of double failure, family and school, continued to make itself visible. She tells us in Missive that there was no library at the school, that classes were frequently cut short and that there was no computer lab or common room. “Chaos and entropy” were always expanding. She writes that the school pretended it was a “middle-class institution when, in reality, it was part of a broken system that was not getting help” and continued to fall apart. She was forced to accept failure. Parents, as we will see below, obstructed her attempts at bringing “awareness” to her students. There was, of course, the fact that the “wish of the parents” counted more than the primary school teacher’s recommendation going on the Gymnasium track.

She estimates that seventy percent of the students at this school began without the Gymnasium recommendation (including Sirin). Ironically mirroring Sirin’s comment about

144 having the wrong teachers, a colleague of Frau Gerste claims, “we are a good school, we just have the wrong students.” Of the 110 students who started, only 20 would complete the Abitur.

Moreover, all of this failure, in Gerste’s analysis, was compounded by confusing policy and directives from the Berlin school system about how to manage this diversity. Principles set out by education officials for Berlin’s secondary school curriculum included instruction to help develop each student’s “individual personality.” To accomplish this, she notes that teachers were given the directive to build upon the student’s “world-understanding” (Weltverstehen) and their past learning level and “meet them where they are at.” However, Gerste is very skeptical of this concept. She asks rhetorically, what actually is someone’s “world-understanding”? Is it a pronouncement? A phenomenon? A claim? And how do you begin where a student is? Where is the student? How do you begin with a student whose parents speak of a “home” the student has never visited because of the risks involved as stateless persons? What about the girl who returns from a summer holiday wearing a headscarf and hardly speaking? Fundamentally, Frau Gerste writes, these students come from a “different world” than she does. According to her, they grow up under the finely-tuned laws of their families and the streets of the Kiez (Berlin slang for

"neighborhood") of North Neukölln. No one from that world bothered even to speak to her. How else was she to know come to know that world?

Frau Gerste (perhaps sardonically) proposes an ethnographic solution: She would have to go “live their lives” in their homes to really know them. However, instead, she asked and asked

“stupid and clueless” questions. She implored them to disclose their hopes and desires. One on hand, she saw herself as “an ambassador from another world,” calling the students to their potential. However, on the other hand, she resented that no one had ever asked her or her

145 colleagues if they wanted to work in a “socially difficult” area and be “confronted with a foreign culture, especially a Muslim one.” In a seemingly exasperated tone, she wonders in her book why no one had asked teachers like her if they wanted to spend more time with “foreign school children” than they would with people of their own “cultural circle.”

It is into this bleak framework that Sirin appears as a character in the final chapter of Frau

Gerste’s book, primarily under a subheading of “What doesn’t fit, will be made to fit.” At this point in the book, Gerste knows her time as a teacher is up and is attempting to impart some final lessons to her most promising students. We first meet Murat, a “brilliant” student with a troubled home, but who loves the films of the auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder and other German cinema.

Things get so bad at his home (from problems only hinted at) that Gerste finds Murat crying in the foyer and thinks in shock: “Heavens, a Turkish man who cries.” As his family falls apart, he gets placed with a German family where he learns—in presumable contrast to his Turkish home

—that “if you are hungry, you cook; that you can go out on Sundays; that you can shut a door behind you without worry; that you can read books and newspapers; that besides bootlegged

DVDs there are also films and movies. He finds a new life.”

Likewise, Sirin, in Gerste’s telling, is a “German-Turk” with potential but also constrained by her culture, family, and circumstance. However, she will not have a lucky break starting a new life with a German family. Frau Gerste introduces Sirin by describing her frustrating absence from a project where Gerste is trying to help her students one last time. In her narrative, Frau Gerste in a studio waiting for her performers to arrive. She had been working on a film with her students, and there was some recording left to do with four musicians, including

Sirin. However, this final opportunity to collaborate would not happen. Frau Gerste describes

146 how she opened her email to find a message from Sirin. It had only been sent a half-hour before and explained that her father had decided “after all,” she would not be allowed to come. Sirin’s father had planned on accompanying her to the recording, but he instead had made other plans.

Sirin wishes, Frau Gerste “a very nice recording.” Frau Gerste describes how this was unfortunately followed quickly by another email from another student claiming he had to take care of his sick sister. Frau Gerste, realizing the recording session was falling apart, emails him back and told him to “come immediately, or there will be trouble.” She picks up the phone and calls Sirin’s home. She relates,

Sirin’s mother, who barely speaks German, is on the phone. I asked to speak to her husband. She held the phone close to her, and you could hear furtive voices speaking in the background. ‘No, husband is not there.’ I ask for Sirin. ‘One moment, yes please?’ The whole spiel repeats itself. Minutes later, the hand noises stopped, and as I waited to speak to someone, the phone hung up. I called back and let the phone ring until it stopped of its own accord. No one picked up.

Finally, a third student reports in as sick. Three of the four musicians are no-shows. Frau Gerste tells us it was a wasted afternoon. She has no choice but to cancel the whole recording.

According to Frau Gerste, Sirin’s family was typical of other Turkish parents who

“treated our project with skepticism.” These families feared “that this bourgeois nonsense would fill their children’s heads and suddenly make them want to become actors or artists.” These

Turkish students’ families from “traditionally-oriented” backgrounds had a series of means at their disposal to redirect their children who strayed too far from their proscribed roles. If a boy, for example, showed too much interest in “bourgeois nonsense” in Germany, he could be sent to relatives in Turkey or to military service there or even to get married to a bride of the family’s choosing. Alternatively, they can have a Turkish bride brought to Germany for him. Turkish

147 military service is not an option for the girls. However, the threat of arranging their marriage is enough to “spook” them away from not following the path set out for them by their parents. It is up to the parents to decide if their futures’ shall remain “open.” Their daughters are well aware that, come the end of summer’s vacation in Turkey, they may not be allowed to return home.

Their futures can be “closed” with confinement in Turkey. “The girls,” knowing this threat, “do not run riot.” And neither, in the end, would Sirin, despite her talent, according to Frau Gerste.

Following her story about the canceled performance, Frau Gerste steps back to give us a proper introduction to Sirin:

Sirin, the little stutter-child, is barely five feet tall. It takes her minutes to speak out one or two sentences. This is a cacophony. Her words are almost handmade. It takes a while until the throat begins to work, letter by letter, syllable by syllable. This is pure phonetics —the tough production and reproduction of the cracking hiss, the dumb tongue—that fat muscle that won’t sound the way Sirin wants it to. The listener becomes a captive audience and witness to a shameless effort to speak […] The stuttering seems to come from being trapped between two languages, both of which remain foreign.

This is the clearest example we get in the narrative supporting Frau Gerste’s initial claim that speech (along with awareness) is one of the primary deficits of her students. Sirin embodies this trapped nature of a foreign student in a school “foreign” to her. However, she also expresses her admiration for Sirin and another girl who stutters and remarks again on the “intimate bond” that forms between the stutterer and Frau Gerste as the listener for the duration of speaking. Frau

Gerste reveals to us that Sirin’s stutter conceals a wonderful secret: When in front of an audience greater than one, it seems to disappear, and instead, a confident star of the stage emerges.

Frau Gerste narrates how she had special access to this transformation as Sirin’s theater teacher. In the “hyperactive and loud” theater group, Sirin was the “queen.” According to Gerste,

“she was the one before anyone” to get the central singing and acting roles. The boys would

148 reward her with “fantastic stares” and the girls who had to watch her do everything “super well” were jealous, but without attacking her. They were so in awe; they did not even make fun of her stutter. Frau Gerste notes that “of course it wasn’t the stutter that gave Sirin her status. On the contrary, it was what one calls stage presence.” Frau Gerste was similarly affected by Sirin’s stage power. She writes of how she witnessed Sirin’s “tenderness, her distress, her temperament and the simplicity which made every word and gesture the audience’s own.” The audience would

“only have eyes for her” during her performance, and it allowed each member to feel “that each alone had witnessed something wonderful.” Sirin could, in fact, trigger such a “feeling of happiness” in an audience. Everyone was “secretly convinced to have seen more than the others” through her “ability to let the smallest expression become a messenger for the existential scope” of the theater experience.

It was not that the students’ families were fully against their children performing in theater, despite Frau Gerste’s earlier claim that they viewed it as a waste of time. For she goes on to describe how they came to the plays and gave great cheer to the performers. Parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings and cousins all were excited and made noise like a

“circus troupe” from the audience. She tells us of how these same families had been of absolutely no help to her during the rehearsals. Instead of coaching her students, she had to spend most of the time reassuring worried fathers and mothers that the play was not some “private venture with an uncertain run,” but “on the contrary, it was a required school event.”

According to Gerste’s account, Sirin’s father at first seemed a promising exception. She notes that “he had been a musician in his past,” and she figured this would have been a good way to win him over. However, his interest in his daughter’s activity turned to paranoia. “He believed

149 he could no longer let her out of his sight” and began coming to the rehearsals with Sirin. At first, this signaled intensified interest to Frau Gerste, and she was excited. However, after some time, it seemed his observation was actually encumbering Sirin and causing the other girls to be self-conscious. Frau Gerste tells of how she then tried to hinder his participation, instead of encouraging it. She told him that school-policy limited the extent of parental participation in order to keep him away. However, this seemed to make things worse. Sirin’s father canceled her violin practice and ordered her to “quit this nonsense.” He wanted her to finish school without any further music or performing arts and without her Abitur. Instead, she should go ahead and leave school to take on an apprenticeship with a tax advisor. Frau Gerste pleaded with him. She explained the theater group was an intensified course and that Sirin could not possibly leave in the middle of the year. She confronted Sirin and her stutter in the school hallway about her father. Sirin seemed to have no power in this situation. In Gerste’s narrative, Sirin manages only to stutter out a weak protest to her teacher: “‘I k-k—k-now. And I-i-i-i-i don’t wwwwwwwant to.

I haaaaaave to,’ she pauses, looks at me quietly then says fluidly, ‘But I have nothing else.’”

In Missive, Frau Gerste enlists the help of the school principal to intervene with Sirin’s father. This time it was to convince him to let Sirin stay on and finish her Abitur. They tried to convince him that his daughter would be more likely to get a position in a tax advising office with an Abitur in hand. It seemed to work. Sirin would be allowed to finish the year in school.

However, a few weeks later, she has a revealing conversation with Sirin. Sirin tells her she would be going to Ankara for the summer holidays. Her uncle is the head cook at a beautiful hotel there with a swimming pool. After her Abitur, she could apprentice with him. “What sounded joyful

150 and proud suddenly became serious. She has serious fear that she won’t be allowed to return to

Germany.” Sirin would likely become one more victim to patriarchal Turkish domination.

In Frau Gerste’s narrative, the students’ final performance then seems to be one last way for them to express their true wishes before they are “made to fit” by their families and culture.

Starring opposite Sirin in the “Freebooters,” the final play, was her boyfriend, Alp. Before they were a couple off stage, Frau Gerste explains, he had played her love interest on stage, pursuing her. Now both the on-stage and off-stage roles had been intertwined. In the final song of the play, they stood facing one another, holding hands and sang, “Freebooters, that is what they are, we want to get away from here, yes away from here,” as their families sat in the audience. Sirin, in

Gerste’s telling, came to her after the lauded performance and threw her arms around her neck, saying, “thank you, thank you.”

Neither Frau Gerste nor Sirin gets a happy ending in this book. Their last interaction is the “ugly end” on the telephone from the studio as Sirin’s mother hung up in distress, and Sirin did not show up for her recording. Sirin’s story, unfortunately, was “just one of many.” Frau

Gerste realizes in her book that as long as the “institution provided a hierarchy,” she would have a relationship with her students. However, when that is gone, she would “no longer be recognized,” because “after all,” who is she but “a German, a foreigner, an unbeliever and a prying woman”? The small space for hope and transformation for her students was closing quickly and definitively.

Of course, Frau Gerste’s ultimate surrender and decision to leave the teaching profession did not solve the issue. According to her, the root of the problem remained and would only intensify without a real remedy. She gives a final diagnosis in her conclusion of Missive,

151 In Berlin, in the meantime, every second child born is not a so-called ‘bio-German.’ So what then? We need a willingness to integrate from both sides. The children of immigrants are all our children, and we should treat them well [..] For the schools, this means we must enforce quotas and provide intermixture. For households, it means less money should be distributed to each individual and more to institutions. That is, there should be fewer child benefits but more free high quality and nutritious school meals. Less tax relief but more language help, children’s fitness, and music classes.

This was her call to reform. The book was her contribution. It was a chance to speak where so many of her colleagues had conspired to silence.

Contested Narratives

Frau Gerste’s book appeared a year after Sirin completed her Abitur. Sirin told me that it was a shock to her. Partly this was due to seeing herself portrayed in such an unflattering manner.

Sirin would later repeat to me the first harsh description of her in Frau Gerste’s book: “Sirin, the stutter-child is barely five feet tall.” There was also the fact that Frau Gerste had used Sirin’s full first and last name without asking or any other sort of permission. Sirin seemed to be the only one singled out this way in the book. Others had apparently been given pseudonyms or initials.

Furthermore, much of the interpretation of events was not accurate, at least from Sirin’s point of view, as she would later tell me. However, the most significant shock was the betrayal by a favorite teacher and mentor. Frau Gerste had been the teacher to introduce Sirin to the transforming power of performance and its passage to self-discovery. She had also served in a position as an advisor to Sirin, who had confided concerns to her teacher about her family and boyfriend. Sirin told me she and her family considered suing before deciding just to let it go.

There is clearly a contested realm between the two narratives that I have presented here as well as a clear power dynamic. Michael Gilsenan, in his work on men in the rural marches of

152 northern Lebanon, wrote that “versions of narratives and what accounts were taken to be ‘true’ emerged out of social negotiations where very unequal resources might be in play between participants. Narrative coherence might be far easier for one side to assert than for another.

Perspective, the place in the social field from which one spoke and the resources one commanded, was critical in the making of such social claims” (1996:58-59). Gilsenan was writing about a highly stratified rural society, and the narrative struggles between men fulfilling socially prescribed roles in that society. For the purposes of this chapter, I selected a heightened example of a hierarchical relationship that characterizes modern public schooling, the student- teacher relationship, and of the “social negotiations” at play between two individuals in these roles.

Certainly, most teachers do not get book deals, and most students do not have public comments written about them (or eventually talk to anthropologists). All the same, this case captures the power dynamic between student and teacher. It was one readily acknowledged by

Frau Gerste in her final lament of the book. In her view, it was only the hierarchical relationship that gave her the opportunity for a relationship with her students, and she assumed that her students would not know her once their formal relationship ended. This unequal power matters in considering intercultural education and evaluating its “success” (or “failure”), and in this case, where to locate that failure. I suggested above that in Germany, intercultural education’s fragility is revealed in such situations partly because it relies on marshaling difference, which in situations of marked unequal power can recreate the hierarchies it was meant to eliminate. However, this fragility also becomes apparent in the vague and contested meanings of interculturality. This is most evident in the arbitrariness of culture—of what it is and when it is revealed. I draw this out

153 in a comparison of these two competing narratives between Sirin and Frau Gerste’s book. They show a struggle to locate where and how one is represented into a (stereo)typical migration- background youth and where and how such a process can be shaped differently or resisted.

Sirin’s own narrative and Frau Gerste’s in Missive disagreed on what Sirin’s educational life signified. However, it was not that there was so much a factual dispute of the events that had occurred as much as a noticeable difference in attributing the causal mechanisms influencing

Sirin, in particular in matters of culture, and the suggested outcomes of those causes. In a schooling environment where “culture” had been made to matter in a variety of practices and policy directives outlined above, both Sirin and Frau Gerste used similar discursive language and concepts related to culture to discuss the school experience at Sirin’s Gymnasium, such as

“migration background,” “Turkish roots,” “Turkish families,” “typical Turkish” or “cultural circles.” However, importantly, when Sirin was telling her story, she could decide when something like “migration background” or being a “Turk” was relevant, and when it was not and what it signified. She decided when culture was evoked and when it mattered or when something else should be considered the deciding factor, such as being a teenager or life experience. Next, I draw out several of these disputed causes regarding culture in the narratives by focusing on three prominent cultural themes in the narratives: cultural identity, patriarchy, and language. I use these themes to show how Sirin’s and Frau Gerste’s narratives deemed which (stereo)typical representations were appropriate and how they contested the boundaries of belonging.

154 Cultural Identity

Cultural identity was a frequent method of establishing a social “perspective” in Frau

Gerste’s narrative. From the opening pages, she contrasted the neighborhood of the Gymnasium with its “Turkish” banks, travel agencies, and so forth to her “German- dominated” home district. Throughout the narrative, she repeatedly linked Sirin and her classmates to a “foreign” and “Turkish” culture and family in contrast to the implicit “German” middle-class readership. Frau Gerste referred to Sirin as a “German-Turk.” In her narrative, she seems to imply that the “German” refers mainly to Sirin’s birth and residence in Germany, but that her cultural constraints are solely “Turkish” (Gerste was aware Sirin’s parents immigrated from Turkey). Sirin acknowledged in speaking with me that she had the “typical problem” in school or on the street of having others not consider her to be one or the other. “In Turkey, they call me German, Almanca,” she told me, but in Germany, she was considered a Turk. Much of the literature on the second-generation has echoed this experience of inbetweenness (Mandel

2009:182), which I explore more in the following chapter on the after school center.

However, Sirin did not position herself as somehow trapped in between, but rather having cultural elements both German and Turkish. She told me about a “typically German” trait she prided herself on: “I have a German mentality. Like its typically German to be concrete. To not be late or fuzzy in your thinking. Turks say, ‘We can do it tomorrow.’ But being German has strengthened my self-confidence. I am not like my other peers, typically Turkish.” However, she described how it was disconcerting for her not to be considered German by her peers and teachers. She noticed a classmate (“German, like me”), whose family was from Ukraine but had relocated to Germany when she was six. However, Sirin explained to me that she felt that her

155 classmates and teachers thought of the Ukrainian student with her blonde hair as “more German” than Sirin with her brown hair and brown eyes. Sirin remained for them a “Turk” even though she had been born in Germany and gone to elementary school there. There is an acknowledgment here of the narrative power at play in the school and society setting. In Frau Gerste’s narrative,

Sirin’s experience is discursively formed by her “Turkishness,” or more accurately, her subjugation to her family’s Turkishness. According to Gerste, whatever talent or temporary success Sirin might display, for example, lives on borrowed time before the weight of “tradition” squashes it, and her story just becomes “one of many” like it before.

Frau Gerste posits near the end of Missive that after the formal hierarchical relationship of the school, that she will “no longer be recognized” by her students because she is nothing more than “a German, a foreigner, an unbeliever, and a prying woman.” This ironic invisibility of the teacher imposes a type of Turkish cultural blind on her students that will prevent them from acknowledging her outside of their relationship of power. Sirin described to me how such a moment actually came to pass years later (and after the book’s publication) with her former teacher. Seeing Frau Gerste crossing the square near the old school, Sirin briefly made eye- contact with her, but looked away and decided not to engage with her. For Sirin, however, this was not due to Frau Gerste being a “German” or “unbeliever.” Instead, she told me, it was in response to the very personal betrayal enacted in Frau Gerste’s book. It was this interpersonal action that removed her teacher from recognition, rather than any cultural impetus.

156 Patriarchy

The most salient facet of Turkish culture to which Frau Gerste in Missive draws our attention is the “regime of patriarchy.” Sirin’s tragic story, in the teacher’s telling, is framed by its threat over her innate talent. The regime of patriarchy that she wished Sirin to break free from was represented literally by her father. Such a representation falls squarely within a long tradition in

Germany of construing Turkish women's autonomy as violated by this regime of patriarchy

(Ewing 2009:28). In Frau Gerste’s book, Sirin’s father comes to represent an ominous and paranoid threat to the “bourgeois” tradition of arts education, but also seemingly to his theatrically inclined daughter.

Interestingly, Sirin, in her own telling, does not totally preclude culture as a contributing factor to her parent’s opposition to her pursuit of the arts. In the case of her father’s opposition to her pursuit of a career in the arts, she, on the one hand, seems to echo Frau Gerste’s account. It is a “big problem in Turkish families,” she told me, that the parents have such high expectations for prestige careers like tax advisors or the law. However, ultimately Sirin positions her father’s opposition to her becoming a musician in terms of his personal experience, not to his patriarchal

Turkish dominance or tradition-mindedness. He was actually a musician himself, which even

Frau Gerste acknowledged in passing in her book. Sirin told me he had started playing in nicer taverns at fifteen years old but had come to the conclusion that “you can’t put your bread on the table playing music.” He found a job as a bookbinder in Berlin, though he continued to play music on the side, at weddings and other occasional events. When Sirin’s interest in the arts grew serious, he would give her examples of pianists he knew or actor friends who could not get work.

His argument was about economic uncertainty. Regardless, Sirin persisted in her passion. After

157 her father attended her Gymnasium performances and saw what she could do on stage, acting and singing, she concluded that her father “understands me a bit more.” This is in contrast to Frau

Gerste’s depiction in Missive of Sirin’s father as “paranoid” and controlling and seeking to eliminate German “bourgeois nonsense” from Sirin’s life.

Sirin did evoke her “cultural circle” when explaining her mother’s exasperation when she did not want to help with the housework or wanted to cook non-Turkish food. She told me she was an “un-typical Turkish girl” in this regard. She explained that there are different norms in the home than in school, for example, with girls. At home, you were supposed to remain quiet, but at school, you were expected to give your own opinion. Her mother would implore her to “be like

Ayse or Fatima.” However, Sirin reminded her mother that she was born in Germany and had not

“spent 30 years in Istanbul.” Nevertheless, just because Sirin acknowledged some limiting cultural factors in her family, they did not then necessarily extend to a threat to cut-off her future, as Frau Gerste had indicated. Sirin had never been kept in Turkey after a summer holiday with the uncle in Ankara. This was her potential fate, as suggested by her teacher in Missive, and it was what supposedly hovered over Sirin as she bravely belted out a song with her first love from the stage about one day breaking free. Sirin pointed out that that uncle was in Antalya, not

Ankara, and that she felt no hovering threat of Turkish parental justice. As she recounted this story to me, she laughed in disbelief at Frau Gerste’s account. Theater had been a self-awakening experience for her, as she explained many times to me, but not one mostly determined by the culture of her family. These performances do have a pedagogical role in youth work and how they shape national belonging; Sirin’s theater experiences began in her school with Frau Gerste after all. Though I more fully explore the role of these types of performances in the following

158 chapter on the after school center, Sirin here interpreted them as a personal victory, not a blow against cultural tradition. It gave her a chance, she told me, to finally “speak to an audience” beyond the difficulty of her stutter.

Language

Language is one of the key elements in integration discourse. It is the apparent priority of the current government in its “integration” efforts, whose officials claim it is one of the “most important prerequisites” for social integration (Bundesregierung 2007b:47). It was a de facto concern of past intercultural and multicultural and foreigner pedagogy efforts (Hoff 1995).

Researchers have documented its discursive importance from early childhood education in

Germany (Tobin and Kurban 2009:33) to secondary-level student and teacher informants (Eksner

2006; Klopp 2002). I develop this theme further in the following chapter, but it was also clearly a priority issue for Frau Gerste. In her book, language is presented as a critical issue in the problem of schools. She relates in the book’s first pages how her students “impoverish” German in their speaking and neither master German nor their mother tongue. In the book’s conclusions, she recommends “language help” for Turkish families in place of tax relief.

For Frau Gerste, Sirin’s stutter embodies the cultural problem. She is introduced as the

“little stutter-child,” and the “cacophony” of her speech is dwelt upon extensively. Frau Gerste writes that Sirin’s “stuttering seems to come from being trapped between two languages, both of which remain foreign.” In Missive, Sirin’s cultural foreignness doubly ensnares her, keeping her from participating in her host culture and her home culture. Sirin, as she related to me, however, does not locate her stutter within a cultural framework. She mentioned a potential genetic reason.

159 However, she also made a point to me of emphasizing her father’s work to make sure she felt at home in the German language. Instead of dwelling on its cause, she cited the arbitrariness of how her stutter was handled and how it depended on the sympathy of the teacher in question.

Regardless, she noted that there was no formal pedagogical approach to assisting her.

As Sirin came to master her stutter, she actually used language as an arena to challenge what she understood as cultural stereotypes. This challenge was framed as a way to give a surprise to other Germans who may not expect such precise speech from a German with a migration background. She told me how she decided to speak German without Turkish words mixed in. She said this was a respect for the language and the country which she grew up in, but also a way to counter the prejudice even of friends and neighbors. She would speak precisely and clearly (and it was how she spoke to me in our interviews) even if this irritated her peers who admonished her to “speak normally.” That is, even as certain identities might be imposed on her,

Sirin felt “German” and chose ways to explore and emphasize this in her interactions in daily life.

On stage too, Sirin was able to use language to make a claim. However, it was not one that she posited as culturally oriented, still less some veiled protest against her impending surrender to the regime of patriarchs. Instead, it was a process of self-discovery. Sirin told me that, “in theater, I found my inner self. Everyone had a talent, and I found mine on stage. It was a chance to communicate with people. I noticed that when I play other people, I have way less of a stutter. I take that as an opportunity to talk with the audience. The same is true with singing. It’s not about fame, about ‘look at me, that’s me.’ I found myself there. It has always made me happy.” Those were moments of heightened performance where Sirin was able to tell and re-

160 tell her story, to shape it after her own design. That is, for Sirin, culture mattered sometimes, but not always, and it is not the ultimate limiter of her experience or future life.

Conclusion

My aim here is not simply to present Sirin’s tale as a “corrective” to a misinformed teacher. I am, of course, sympathetic to Sirin’s own narrative. Women’s narratives are underrepresented in research on youth in Germany (Eksner 2006:13), including in the anthropological literature (Abu-Lughod 1993:16). I do believe Sirin’s own tale has value as a counter-narrative as an alternative point of access to the point of view of young women in a similar way to the first two chapters of this project. Indeed, in some ways, Sirin is, of course, un- typical. She goes on stage, she sings bravely, she finishes her Abitur. Her “breach” was to persevere, to sing, to graduate. Her education path ultimately did not follow an expected downward trajectory. Her ongoing success was a breach that brought about a narrative

“remedy” (Conley and O’Barr 2004:189) through Frau Gerste’s book, which regulated her once more within the normative understanding of migrants girls. She was reframed as an object of the

Turkish patriarchy and of the cultural limitations, which would be her undoing. This is a heightened example, but the hierarchal relationship between the teacher and the student in the formalized school setting means that the teacher gets the final say in what matters when evaluating her students. However, this hierarchical narrative contest also reveals the acute fragility of interculturality as an evaluative mechanism for the interrelated goals of diversity and integration.

161 If indeed this kind of cultural evaluation is arbitrary, then we can imagine a scenario where a teacher of Sirin could have written a positive cultural portrayal of Sirin that was in agreement with Sirin’s narrative (perhaps not unlike what I have attempted here in my narrative).

As we saw with the Faas comparison above, undoubtedly, there are better and worse environments for “minority ethnic students” in regards to how they are treated (Faas 2008:121).

However, both of Faas’ schools rely on “cultural” differentiation based on ethnic/nationality conceptions but which are also contested and vague. Positive or negative (market hall visit or possible Islamaphobia in Faas’ schools), such conceptions do not eliminate the fragile ontological status of intercultural education. I suggested above that it is not merely fragile in the structural arbitrariness—of when culture matters and who gets to say so—but its definition is vague and contested.

Such difference-making likewise obscures other diversities by, for example, homogenizing “German” culture. This is hinted at in the scholarship on German interculturality.

Faas, drawing from the same data set of students in Stuttgart, but in a different article, mentions in passing some of the “German” students’ claim a “Swabian" identity (Faas 2009:307). Petra

Kuppinger has pointed out in her work on Stuttgart Muslims that Catholic workers once posed a

“cultural novelty and challenge” to the Protestant city, but which presently attracts little comment

(Kuppinger 2014a:146). In other words, these identities are optional to each person. It is about who gets to say when and which difference is significant and when and which it is not. And not least such difference-making can obscure the diversity of the individual herself.

Gilsenan, even while demonstrating how “narrative coherence” might be easier for one side to assert, makes note that there “were always, at least potentially, multiple and opposing

162 voices which were shadow presences in the most apparently unchallenged narratives” (1996:59).

Part of anthropology’s power is being attuned to the imbalance in the discursive power of narrative and drawing out these shadow presences. There are multiple narratives in Sirin’s life which form counter-narratives to Frau Gerste’s book. There were the theater and singing performances that would become leitmotifs for Sirin beyond her school experiences. She continued to discover herself before an audience. She was introduced to Tina, a playwright, and director. With the support of the Neukölln Opera, Tina recruited two other actors.

The four of them together developed a theater project based on the girls' lives. It would be about their experiences, as they told them. They visited Tina at her home, and she helped them shape these experiences into stories. They eventually realized they were not going to stage a traditional play. Instead, they thought up a performance where they were each concealed in a type of Automaten box with only their eyes visible, a performative inversion of object status. The audience member could approach a booth of choice and then would have to look into the actor’s eyes. On Sirin’s booth, they could see a list of tracks with themes like “first love.” After the audience member lifted a receiver and pressed a button, Sirin would see the corresponding signal, and she would sing. She would sing of the first fight with her boyfriend. She would sing about the time her father wanted the family to move the family to Stuttgart, but she wanted to stay in Berlin. Just that one person with the receiver would hear her singing as they looked in her eyes. Her friends and her father came to see the performance. Those were moments of heightened performance where Sirin was able to tell and re-tell her story, to shape it after her own design. Perhaps the essential narrative performance of Sirin’s life is her life as she lives and performs it each day. It was hardly bookended by a final chapter or her Abitur or by my own

163 renderings here. It is an ongoing process enacted each day with choices about how to be acknowledged as a self and the presentation of that self to the world. It is the potential of every encounter not to notice the difference for a moment and to acknowledge another self looking back, to hear a story, and listen.

164 Chapter 5: MÄDEA: After-School Center22

The students run around the classroom, terrified, screaming. Some seek shelter behind chairs; others tremble on the floor where they have fallen. The teacher waives a pistol at them.

The German teacher demands that her unruly Turkish-German students read Schiller or suffer death. This dramatic scene unfolded on the stage of the Ballhaus Naunyritze theater in the

Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin. The play began on a humorous note. Each of the five students displayed behavior familiar to the audience as stereotypical of certain groups of Turkish-German youth with street-tough talk, loud cellphone conversation, and gossip. Each actor further typified certain Turkish-German youth in costume choice: the gangster girl, the gangster boy, the wanna- be rapper, the soft nerd, the pious girl. A classroom of out-of-control migrant youth is a reoccurring nightmare of the tabloid newspapers. They bully and curse one another, and notably, they disrespect and do not listen to the representative of the German state, their teacher. She tries in vain to gain control of the classroom, pleading, and begging to be obeyed. It is only when the gangster boy accidentally reveals that he has brought a pistol, and she can take it from him that the classroom dynamic changes. Now she demands they read Schiller to one another as she intermittently scolds and berates them for everything from not respecting German women to wearing a headscarf to squandering their parents’ efforts to make a better life for them by immigrating. After the gun gets passed around and the characters confront one another, the play ends when the teacher in the heat of emotion begins yelling in Turkish, revealing that she was a fully assimilated “Turk” masquerading as “German” all along.

22 Portions of this chapter appeared in the Journal of Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hdim20/current (Burnside 2015) and is reproduced with permission, Copyright © 2015 Taylor & Francis. 165 Introduction

This dissertation began by describing the “problem” posed to new concepts and practices of German belonging following the change in the citizenship law in 2000. That is that many young people with “migrant” or “foreign” backgrounds may be legally German citizens, speak the language, have been born and live in Germany and participate in its institutions (or some combination of these things), but appear as other-than German to themselves and others. The challenge for the models of interculturality that have been investigated in the various case studies throughout these chapters has been how their proponents and targets of these models manage difference, however such differences are perceived or articulated. In the last chapter, I argued that the secondary school system encouraged teachers and administrators to utilize an intercultural-like model with its students that acknowledged and respected difference. However, I showed how certain perceived differences could be marshaled by a teacher within the hierarchal structure of the school to narratively reveal the “failure” of the model, students, and the school itself. Sirin’s story was not as dramatic as the play “Crazy Blood,” which opened this chapter.

Her teacher Frau Gerste did not suddenly reveal her hidden Turkishness, nor did she point a weapon at her students. Nonetheless, “Crazy Blood” captures this discourse about managing difference and the anxiety of belonging in a theatrical performance. Indeed it was in theater that

Sirin (including under Frau Gerste’s guidance) that Sirin maintained she learned self-confidence and to express herself in a way that had not been possible in other school settings.

Theater formed a significant part of the web of my fieldwork. As I tell below, I first heard the girls from MÄDEA, the youth center at the center of this chapter, singing and rapping on a

CD at the house of a playwright named Tina, who would also be the one to eventually introduce

166 me to Sirin, with whom she had worked with after Sirin finished her Abitur. This chapter expands upon the possibilities for a more robust intercultural model revealed by Sirin in theater and other such performances by young migrant-background Berliners, including theatrical, singing, and other related productions. These performances also occurred within an institutional and pedagogical context, an after-school center in Wedding called MÄDEA. MÄDEA is free and open to girls aged 8-18 on a voluntary basis. Its scale is small, and its aims relatively local and modest. The performance that began this work of the stone-laying ceremony was grand in its scale (a giant stone, federal and city officials, an audience of hundreds and a live national broadcast); the discursive performance of the fatwa and Frau Gerste’s book about her Gymnasium teaching experience were nationally distributed; while the MÄDEA performances related here are small and intimate (such as a theater piece performed for an audience of a dozen or so or a CD distributed to friends and family). Nevertheless, the models of interculturality offered by these performances are related.

Difference was celebrated (or meant to be respected) as part of a new national belonging and inclusiveness was emphasized (even if it was evaluated as a failure as in the previous chapter) at these different scales. However, the position of the performers changed. Significantly those marked as different (that is of “migration background”) in the stone-laying ceremony were regulated to the margins of the performance; in the soccer fatwa chapter, they were behind the scenes or became symbolic actors; and in Frau Gerste’s book, they became contested objects.

However, here in the types of performances, I consider the girls of MÄDEA are considered by themselves and their pedagogues (the teachers and directors of the center) as the primary actors.

167 Using ethnographic data and other materials gathered about the after school center, this final case study investigates how Berlin youth with Turkish and other migration backgrounds utilize theater and performativity in an after-school educational setting to negotiate and shape the intercultural model designed for them. The previous three cases have revealed different dynamics and difficulties in controlling the narrative of that change, or the direction of change itself, and alternatively, the vulnerability of the intercultural model to subversion, whether regarded as positive or negative. At the center of this chapter are the most-peripheral and least powerful active agents from a position of social hierarchy within the context of German national belonging: young migration-background girls. I expand upon the kind of performances revealed as a kind of counter-measure in the previous chapter on Sirin, but which are here at the youth center is the centerpiece of their pedagogical efforts. I show how the scale of these performances at a local (often) interpersonal level as well as the relative (though not total) parity of power of those involved in their creation allows for a more robust manifestation of the intercultural model.

It is one whose emphasis on inclusivity and respect and acknowledgment of difference is less easily subverted. That is to say, the “narrative coherence” used to make “social claims” by the girls is more consistently sustained (Gilsenan 1996:58-59) within this context.

In the opening chapter, I introduced Turner’s concept of cultural performance, which emphasized the dynamism involved in ritual performances, which included the possibility for effecting change through the performance itself (Turner 1986:24). Building on his own work on ritual, Turner argues that we should consider “cultural performance” not as, “unidirectional and

‘positive’ —in the sense that the performative genre merely ‘reflects’ or ‘expresses’ the social system or the cultural configuration, or at any rate their key relationships—but that it is

168 reciprocal and reflexive —in the sense that it grows out of, an evaluation (with lively possibilities of rejection) of the way society handles history” (22). That is, we should not merely look at a ritual or other performance such as a wedding or a song as an expression of a “culture,” even a “changing culture,” but we must also be tuned into the dynamic possibilities of such a performance. In other words, there is creative potential for such acts. These performances then may “themselves be active agencies of change, representing the eye by which culture sees itself and the drawing board on which creative actors sketch out what they believe to be more apt or interesting ‘designs for living’” (24). What is key here for this chapter and work is the argument that there are “creative actors” at the center of performances, which understand themselves (and their performances) to be “active agencies of change,” whether in tension or collaboration with pedagogical forces. Therefore, I carefully situate the center within the history of the youth work of the 1990s, where multiculturalism was foregrounded by pedagogues and scholars alongside Mädchenarbeit (or “girl work”), a pedagogical approach to girls that grew out of the

German feminism of the 1960s and ‘70s.

Following an introduction to the social and scholarly context of youth centers in Berlin and to the neighborhood of Wedding and MÄDEA itself, I examine this robust model of interculturality in three parts, each grounded in interviews with the girls and officials of MÄDEA and the ethnographic context of the center itself. In the first section, I draw upon two recorded songs from the girls of MÄDEA to illustrate the nuanced creation process, which consists of girls and instructors, and produces a product reflecting the complexity of difference without that difference being leveraged against the girls. Next, I use a play written and performed by the girls, which I attended to explicate the relationship to a prominent theme of German national

169 belonging introduced in the previous chapter, the emphasis on the German language. Finally, I examine the more direct negotiations for belonging that the performance allows with the girls' families and the local public.

Youth Work, Pedagogy and Betweenness in Berlin

As outlined in the first chapter and elsewhere in this work, intercultural models developed in the FRG in the 1970s and 1980s within the context of federal officials refusing to designate theirs as a “country of immigration” even as migration increased (Aktürk, 2012: 59). In the 1980s, a series of policies followed in dealing with the “foreigners question” (Ausländerfrage), including giving state support for sending the Turkish-origin population “back” to Turkey. This “ironically, produced some of the most seemingly liberal and multiculturalist policies,” like providing Turkish lessons in schools to children to ease their repatriation supposedly (80). The repatriation program did not meet its goals, and paths to citizenship remained difficult. The growing migration-background residents faced new existential questions following the absorption of the former residents of the German Democratic

Republic in 1990 who were granted immediate, unequivocal citizenship in the FRG along with increasing amounts of “returned” “Germans” from the former Soviet Union. This was compounded with a series of high-profile and violent attacks on Turkish-background residents in the early 1990s in a spate of anti-foreigner violence (95).

It was in this context that several youth centers in immigrant-rich neighborhoods in

Berlin and elsewhere became the target of focus for pedagogues and eventually, researchers. A large amount of fanfare—much of it appraising though sometimes critical—appeared in local

170 and national media and eventually in the scholarship about these youth centers throughout the

1990s and early 2000s. Attention was primarily centered around the borough of Kreuzberg in

Berlin and, more specifically, the area around Kottbusser Tor, known as “Kotti” or “Kleine

Istanbul” (Little Istanbul). This fetishized area borders North Neukölln, home to the school featured in the previous chapter on Sirin, whose center is reached by a short walk down the

Kottbusser Damm.

Many scholars were not unlike Eksner, who, in her work on stylized Turkish-German speech used among “Turkish” youth, confesses to picking Kreuzberg because it is the

“‘heartland’ of Turkish culture in Berlin.” (Eksner 2006:10). She writes that she chose the

“toughest” youth center (as opposed to other more “middle class” centers), which she owns as an

“epistemological problem” where “I presupposed the specific kinds of otherness to be found there” (10). The neighborhood center is the focus of the youths’ (mostly boys’) lives she is studying; it is their “only accessible indoor [public] location” (37). Like many social workers, teachers, and other scholars (and often the youth themselves), Eksner frames the migrant experiences she observed within an African-American cultural framework, which included markers such as “ghetto” speech, gang violence, graffiti, and hip-hop. Hip-hop, in particular, became a keystone for approaching the subject of young people in places like Kreuzberg in this period. Soysal characterizes this period as the “hiphop episode” in Berlin (Soysal 2004:68).

Eksner argues we should attune ourselves to the performative way language was deployed, including the stylized Turkish-German of the “ghetto” she focused on (however full of braggadocio or fantasy in the stories it related), in particular how it was utilized and deployed in previously unchallenged power fields (43). In one of the most indicative studies of this era (and

171 also accomplished within the context of a Kreuzberg youth center), Kaya similarly argues that hip-hop for “ethnic minority youths” becomes a means of resistance—whether through rap, graffiti or breakdance. The youths resist “dominant regimes of representations” and ultimately expand and broaden their own living boundaries whereby they can incorporate themselves into the mainstream on their own terms (2001:165). For Kaya, the youth achieve this incorporation through hip-hop by creating distance between “the already-excluded youth group and the legitimate forms of institutions such as police, education and media” (165). The youth are architects of their own identities in the face of an ambiguous policy of integration, suddenly confronted with dangerous xenophobia following unification. They “construct a form of culture bricolage,” a Bhabhaian “third space” (173), made possible by their “multicultural competence” (175). Ultimately they become “organic intellectuals” who “struggle to assemble a

‘historic bloc’ capable of challenging the ideological hegemony of German cultural domination

(175). Furthermore, rap music, as a popular cultural form, becomes a powerful vehicle, which allows today’s Turkish youth to gain a better understanding of their heritage and their present identities when official channels of remembering and identity formation continually fail to meet their needs” (203-204). National media at the time articles echoed this, arguing, for example, in a piece from the Spiegel called “Agitpop from the Ghetto,” that in Berlin, rap “is the folk music of marginalized youth” (1995). According to the Spiegel, rap blazes path to future of liberation for those like the rapper Sinan and promises a “multicultural future of rap,” where “our origin does not play a role any more” (1995).

This straightforward valorization of hip-hop as resistance and creative-identity making would soon be challenged. Both Eksner and Kaya made clear in their studies that their

172 ethnographies were set and organized around youth centers and acknowledge the various ways hip-hop and related performances were formally encouraged and executed (Kaya 2001:20-21).

They both mention the youth center in Kreuzberg that was the origin of Islamic Force, a major

Berlin hip-hop group in the 1990s. This same center, Naunyritz, is actually featured in a photograph in the Spiegel magazine article, behind a group of boys described in the caption as the “headquarters” of this “Turkish gang” (Spiegel 1995). However, the institutional presence of the youth centers, how their teachers, structures, and pedagogies might have shaped these youth’s resistance art of posturing in the world recedes quickly to the background of these scholars.

Çağlar composed the most strongly formulated redress to this obfuscation in order to disrupt a too-simplified valorization of hip-hop culture among Turkish-German youth by mainstream media and scholarship (1998b). She cautions against celebrating such culture as “spontaneous” expression of a marginalized community, such as in the Spiegel article. Instead, she argues, we must look to the context in which such a kind of music emerges. In such a context, the

“institutional framework, structures, and the agencies of this mediation set the boundaries, conditions, and the categories of the hybridized cultural forms that result” (244). Examining these frameworks disrupts the reporting of hip-hop culture in Berlin’s ghettos as places necessarily opposed to the center and instead shows how wedded youth culture is to state policy:

From the beginning of the 1990s, some youth centers and social workers working in these youth centers (particularly in the areas populated by immigrants in general and by German-Turks in particular) were involved in initiating and organizing hip-hop performances for the youngsters affiliated with their centers. Hip-hop was promoted together with other expressive art workshops (like breakdance and graffiti) to promote alternative forms of communication. These youth centers offered and still offer breakdance and hip-hop courses (and even separate courses for girls and children) and graffiti workshops (249).

173 Targeting the integration problem of foreigners and monitoring and controlling cultural difference is done as a “pedagogical project,” with teachers, pedagogues, and social workers at the forefront (250). Çağlar shows how these projects were directly connected to directives from the Berlin government. The Office of the Commissioner of Foreigners’ Affairs of the Berlin

Senate (Ausländerbeauftragte) began in the early 1980s, alongside local ethnic organizations, to promote legal and economic integration of migrants. After 1991 they worked under the policy of the Berlin government regarding the integration of foreigners where a ‘cosmopolitan, tolerant and liberal Berlin’ was the end goal. Berlin and Germany spent extra effort to promote such integration activity, especially following the waves of anti-foreigner sentiment in the years after

Unification (251). Music and other performative arts became an important focus for the integration of young immigrants.

However, I relate this here not only as general background but also because it mirrors my entry to youth work and MÄDEA and the tension I present in my argument. I first encountered the girls of the center through a CD recording played for me by a friend. In a rap-inspired track, I heard the girls singing about themselves, seemingly taking their identities in hand, constructing a new way of being in the world. My interest piqued, it did not take long for it to lead me to

MÄDEA, that is to say to a government-funded youth center. Though I explore the intercultural model at MÄDEA and the narratives being put forth in a less hierarchical manner, I continue to draw attention to the institutional traces present in the negotiation of these performances while also understanding the emphasis of the directors of the center put on the agency of the creators

(the girls) themselves. As the head director, Ursula, or Ulla, as she was known to the girls, explained to me the substantial migrant populations in Berlin and the situation of youth and girls

174 and women came under particular scrutiny in the 1990s. Their fundamental approach, Mädchenarbeit (or “girl work”), grew from the 1968 student protests around the world and was linked to feminism and the autonomous women’s movements. Its proponents argued that in order for girls to have equal opportunity in Germany, they needed special attention and spaces in which to cultivate qualities which are in everyday life denied to them as females. The first practical Mädchenarbeit projects appeared in Germany in the mid-1970s (Wallner 2006:9). As

Ulla framed it for me, the goal was to move the girls away from “Fremdbestimmung” (or alienated determination) of the self to “Selbstbestimmung” (or self-determination) and thus “be able to take part in society.”

As many scholars have noted, particularly in debates over young Muslim women (and often around the issue of headscarves), perceptions of agency matter and their work goes a considerable way in nuancing agency as a concept (Abu-Lughod 1999, Scott 2010, Mahmood

2011). The “strongly contested sartorial symbol” of the headscarf for some in Germany symbolizes those who lack agency (Mandel 2008:307-308). For many pious young women in

Germany, the headscarf then becomes a symbol of choice in defiance to those who would deny their agency (Mandel 2008:305 and Ewing 2006:81). This often draws on a feminist discourse of agency, where it is understood as a universal embodied by the “experiential idea of choice” (Nussbaum 1998:11). This is the tradition most aligned with the youth center and its sensitivity to the backgrounds of the girls it oversees. This chapter’s purpose, however, is not to evaluate the degree of “agency”—however defined—on the girls’ part, but to mark its evocation in text and performance by the girls and staff of the youth center as a sign and strategy of the

175 process of negotiating belonging in Germany.

A Youth Center in Wedding

Walking to MÄDEA through the neighborhood of Wedding, one can identify many of the characteristics associated with other migrant-rich neighborhoods in Berlin. Like the two most well-known, Kreuzberg (home of the Ballhaus Naunyritze of the opening vignette) and Neukölln

(as featured in the last chapter), there are Turkish supermarkets chains and greengrocers, Arab hairdressers, Lebanese social clubs, hand-written signs offering translation services in travel agent windows, döner kebab stands, cafes with family rooms, and signs directing one toward courtyard mosques and steam baths. However, Wedding never experienced the scale of the influx of Greens and students and anarchists that came to characterize Kreuzberg over the last four decades, and more recently, Neukölln. Wedding was part of West Berlin, and a long section of the wall ran along its eastern border. It had long been an industrial area, attracting the poor and those newly arrived at its factories. Though much of that industry has left, many of the old factories’ shells remain, a few converted into community centers and modern offices.

Despite a handful of new art galleries opening at the southern end of Wedding, close to the (old)

Mitte’s neighborhood border, Wedding has not undergone as much gentrification as those neighborhoods either. The notable exception is a new shopping mall, located at the

Gesundbrunnen S-Bahn station, a modern facility with international brands. Though it seemed mostly directed towards current residents, rather than attempting to lure new ones. Many of the girls I spoke to at MÄDEA named it as a highlight of their week and of Wedding. They liked to go shopping there or, perhaps more often, just strolling, with their parents or friends. A much

176 more obvious influx is a plague of 24-hour casinos, their bright signs, and windowless fronts beckoning to passersby. A local weekly, deploring the casinos, updated readers on efforts to have them banned, as well as the sketchy international financing behind them (Ecke 7:2011). The weekly also informed its readers of the ongoing efforts to clean up Leopold Square in the neighborhood, where homeless men urinating near the playground raised the concern of parents and where it worried about the summer influx of “Romanians” (most likely Roma Gypsies) hanging about (Ecke 3:2011). While primarily industrial and working-class in feel, Wedding includes many beautiful spots, including an imposing gothic town hall, art deco buildings surrounding a nineteenth-century healing spring, quiet greenways along the old transport canal, lovingly executed graffiti, two enormous city parks, and even (at the far end from the youth center), a full-fledged Berlin lake, with paddle boats.

It is important to note, that as mentioned in the first chapter, Wedding had been redistricted a decade ago and included in a super-borough along with Tiergarten and Mitte known as “Mitte.” Thus, while it was common for people to speak of “Wedding” as where they lived, it was to the Mitte borough council that their well-being depended on a variety of matters, including the center’s funding. The demographics of the area reflect a diverse make-up of backgrounds plus large amounts of poverty. For example, in a 2009 report, the representative

Sprengelkiez neighborhood within Wedding had 15,000 residents, 59 percent who were

“German,” and 41 percent were “Foreigners.” The former category includes children of foreign parents, who make up 16 percent of the total. The “background” of the population is broken down as 46 percent “from Europe,” 21 percent “from Asia,” 18 percent “from Turkey,” 7 percent

“from Arabian states,” 6 percent “from former Yugoslavia,” and 2 percent from the former Soviet

177 Union. Sixty percent of the children live in poverty. The report points out that though the neighborhood has a reputation as unsafe, it “statistically it is not a criminal hot spot” (Kiezbote

2009:4-5).

On my way to my first visit to MÄDEA with Anne, a staff member, and musician, we ran into a group of MÄDEA girls on the main thoroughfare, which runs through Gesundbrunnen.

They were heading to the center and remained a swirl of activity all the way to the front door.

Like many Berlin buildings, I first entered through a set of large double doors that open to a passageway to the Höfe (series of courtyards) that characterize much of the early twentieth- century city planning in the city. In the passageway was the actual door to MÄDEA, decorated in colorful, painted faces of the girls inside. Its sign clearly identified itself as an “Intercultural

Center.” Once I entered, I quickly found myself in a hive of activity and energy. The space was not extensive. There was a large common room, big enough to host dances and theater (though no stage), and a spacious central hallway and series of three rooms running along the other side, including an office and kitchen.

Before long, I was in the kitchen as the girls and the youngest full-time staff member, a

20-something Kurdish-German woman, helped prepare dinner of salad and soup. They set the table, made tea, and conversed loudly. The girls immediately had a barrage of questions for me.

As an American, I was seen as having special access to many of their pop culture interests, music, movies, and New York City. When I told them I was there to study “identity,” they told me to guess where they were from. I answered, “Germany, of course!” —Most of the girls, in fact, were born in Germany. However, they looked at me funny and clarified, “No, where our parents are from!” Turkey, Ghana, Kosovo, Bosnia, Portugal, and the Dominican Republic were

178 just some of the places told to me. They told jokes, we ate, and afterward, they all cleaned up.

Though it is open to girls of any background, because of the make-up of the neighborhood, there are seldom “German” girls there, though indeed many of these girls with “migration- backgrounds” hold German passports.

MÄDEA is open in the afternoons to girls ages eight to eighteen. Though open to any girls of any background, it almost exclusively attracted girls with migration-backgrounds, a large portion of which whose parents immigrated from Turkey. Of the eighteen girls I interviewed, thirteen had parents from Turkey, and half of those girls identified as Kurdish. The remaining five had parents from Portugal, Ghana, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Only one was born outside

Germany. On a daily basis, there might be anywhere from 5-30 girls there at any one time. Some might stay only for a few minutes, while others would spend hours there. The total pull was higher, I estimate probably closer to hundred girls who potentially dropped by, but a formal attendance record was not kept. I regularly visited during fieldwork but distinctly remained a visitor. As a male, an American, and a researcher, I was marked clearly as an outsider. The space normally operated as female-only, it was essential to its founding pedagogy in Mädchenarbeit.

Ulla and Eva, MÄDEA’’s directors, chose to continue the work they previously had been doing with young girls in a similar manner by opening MÄDEA in 1997. Its ongoing operation involved a complicated (and evolving) understanding with the Mitte super-borough. Part of the negotiation involved meeting certain legal and pedagogical standards set by the federal government, namely the Children and Youth Welfare Law (Kinder und

Jugendhilfegesetz (KJHG). The KJHG came into law in 1990 and was added onto as recently as

2005. Ulla mentioned three specific paragraphs from this law as especially relevant. Paragraph

179 11, “Youth Work,” formed part of the legal justification for providing a youth center: “Youth work provides the necessary services for young people to enhance their development” and is offered by “youth organizations, groups, and initiatives, as well as other sources of ‘youth work’ and the sources for the public welfare of youth” (Bundesministerium 2010:76). While this paragraph addresses generally all youth (up to the age of 27), paragraph 13, “Youth Social Work” designates a specific group for intervention: “Youth who need to compensate for social disadvantages or to address individual impairments to a greater degree of support should be offered as part of Youth Welfare social and educational aids aimed at improving their educational and vocational training, integration into the world of work and their social integration” (76-77).

This justifies providing youth services to girls with migration backgrounds in a social “hotspot” neighborhood and the public aid to fund such a venture. Paragraph 27, which Ulla expressed as having been “received later” makes the financial support more explicit: “A parent or legal guardian in the raising of a child or youth is entitled to assistance (Welfare for Raising Children) if appropriate education for the welfare of the child or youth is not guaranteed and aid for his/her development is appropriate and necessary” (85). Ulla explained that a borough must provide certain social services, including unemployment, for example. There are certain priorities in funding such services, but “if money is left over, they can fund such a task [as a youth center]”

This is funding MÄDEA must battle for every other year, justifying its existence to the borough and the state.

MÄDEA is further embedded in a number of state and federal structures, including sitting on the youth welfare committee of the Berlin’s Youth Department (Jugendamt) and as a member of the federal group Girl Politics (Mädchenpolitik). At one point in my fieldwork, Ulla handed

180 me a booklet to which she contributed that MÄDEA published in 2000 in conjunction with the

Federal Ministry of Family, Seniors, Women, and Youth, Mädchen in Sozialen

Brennpunkten (Girls in Social Hotspots)(2000). Chapters address such topics as “Girls in Social

Space,” “Girl Poverty and City Neighborhood Development,” and “Girls in Violent Groups.”

The brochure was “conceptualized as a guide for the social and political praxis to optimize the chances for girls and young women with current contributions from research and praxis, strategic projects, reflective experiences, and differentiated proposed solutions” (Bachor 2000:6). The publication forms part of a federal-level discourse, often in the form of these brochures, which addresses the “problem” belonging of youth—and girls—in Germany, especially those with migration backgrounds. MÄDEA staff and the girls understood that part of its mission was to spread the word on the work being done there in successfully achieving “social integration,” among other goals, in part to justify its legal and financial survival. So I, like the occasional journalist and politician, was welcomed in the center’s door for a time.

I conducted semi-structured interviews with eighteen girls, six staff members (including theater practitioners and musicians), as well as three teachers, all who volunteered to speak with me. I asked about themes of belonging, identity, being German, and performances at the center.

As a frequent visitor, I was able to observe a number of theater performances, practices of plays and dance, video editing, tea times, and eat with the girls as part of a free Wednesday night meal program. I also conducted observations at city theater performances, in the neighborhood, including arrival and departures outside youth center, sanctioned graffiti displays (by the youth center), non-sanctioned graffiti (by others); performances by a neighboring youth center (at a cafe) and interviews with its founder; at the editing lab of a documentary maker focusing on

181 MÄDEA; and at the Archives of Youth Culture where some key items generated by the youth center are for sale. Besides photos and audio I made, I utilized a documentary in production about the center (including an interview with the filmmaker)—in particular interviews, practices, and performances it filmed to showcase the center.

In 2013 MÄDEA had moved a few blocks from its older location. The new space was part of a years' long effort to gain some additional room and to find a new home after the borough sold off the former property that had housed them. Though this location was not as visible, it was pointedly across the street from a large piece of commissioned graffiti that featured MÄDEA. The new space was also notably larger. It occupies two stories of a standard

Berlin five-story building. This division allows for both a quieter zone and an active zone that was not possible in the old space. Upstairs is the office, a comfortable reading room, and two workrooms, one oriented towards painting and another towards homework, though in practice, both were quite multi-functional. Downstairs, one finds the kitchen, supply rooms, and the performance space where the play, such as the ones featured below, like When the Girls Still

Wore Headscarves, and other performances would be held.

Mädchen von MÄDEA

I was sitting in a kitchen in Kreuzberg when I first heard the MÄDEA girls rap. I was at the apartment of Tina Müller, a playwright, and friend of a friend, and reading a play she wrote called “Turkish Gold.” The play was commissioned by the Swiss government and was primarily performed by high school youth in Germany and Switzerland. It was relatively easy to stage

(there were only two parts and almost no sets). The theme involved minorities and a young

182 romance (Interesting neither character is Turkish—the boy is German, the girl Brazilian—but

Turkish identity in Europe is a key thread). Tina would write many plays around these themes and indeed would eventually introduce me to one of her collaborators, Sirin, the subject of the previous chapter. During this reading and the typical coffee drinking and hanging out that characterizes Berlin’s artists’ daily culture, another mutual friend Anne entered with a CD in hand. Anne is a fashion designer, painter, and musician. Her music duo’s repertoire consisted mainly of old shanty songs from Hamburg’s harbor and French chansons with lots of accordion and swaying back and forth. Anne had been working at a youth center for about a year and told us she had something for us to hear. Anne put the CD in the small kitchen jukebox. The first song, “Mädchen von MÄDEA” (Girls from MÄDEA), was backed by an old-school hip-hop beat with several girls rapping in a throwback cadence. The lyrics rhymed the girls' names with their interests and personality traits: “Esra wird immer besser” (Esra is always becoming better),

“Ayse magt Pferde sehr” (Ayse loves horses a lot) and the refrain “Wir sind die Mädchen von

MÄDEA” (We are the girls from MÄDEA). The song finishes with an invitation to join them:

Wir sind völlig da, hier kannst du was erleben, komm vorbei ab zwei und dann kannst du was erleben, lebst du mit uns wir drei. Wir kommen von über all her, jetzt sind wir alle Freundin. Manchmal aus Senegal.

(We are all here/ you can experience something here/ come by after two and then you can experience something/ You’ll live with us three/ we come from everywhere/ We’re now all friends/ Sometimes from Senegal).

I was intrigued. The second track, “Amiga Boa” (Good Friend), dealt with a similar theme of belonging and subjectivity and friendship. It begins with the refrain in Portuguese, “Quero uma amiga boa” (I want a good friend). The first verse then asks a question in Turkish: “Senin adı

183 ne?” (What's your name?), followed by the same in German: “Wie heisst du?” A back and forth begins between two girls:

B: Ich bin Emine und ich mag viele (I am Emine and I like a lot of things… )

A: Wo kommst du her mit dem schwartzen Haar? (Where do you come from with that black hair?)

B: Ich bin Berlinerin und dazu Griechen. (I am a Berliner and also a Greek)

A: Kannst du tanzen? (Can you dance?)

B: Gar keine Frage! (Without question!)

Everyone: Dann lass uns tanzen…(Then let’s dance…).

The recording delighted me. Immigrant youth are, in particular, associated with “unending” debates about integration on the one hand and with crime stories, gangland fables, and “brazen otherness” on the other (Soysal 1999:13). It was refreshing and exciting to hear migration- background girls singing about themselves and seemingly claiming a layered sense belonging. It also sounded like they were having fun. On that initial listening, any pedagogical guidance or institutional role did not occur to me, despite knowing the recording’s connection to a youth center.

In contrast to the very official and top-down modeling of intercultural difference at the

Humboldt Forum performance, for example, this remarkable exchange in “Amiga Boa” seemed to be young Germans with migration backgrounds playfully handling the very complicated issue of national belonging. The girls singing on the track structure this belonging as a conversation between coevals. The first question from one girl to another is, “Who are you?”, which is asked in Turkish and German. Difference is not only recognized as layers (with multiple languages) but

184 acknowledged as potentially marked on the body. Deniz’s “black” hair in this song, for example, marks her as different, hence the connected question “where do you come from?” Deniz's answer is two-tiered: “I am a Berliner, and also a Greek.” Here then, two belongings are structured as multilayered but seemingly compatible. However, Nelly’s follow up does not ask for clarification. Rather more to the point of an after school center and for friendship's sake, she asks: “Can you dance?/ [D]: Without question! /Then let's dance!” The song’s chorus then pleads in Portuguese, “I want a good friend.” The MÄDEA girls answer in German: “You are not alone, you can be our friend, tell us who you are, and you are a friend of us all. Don’t remain alone, we can be friends. You are our wind, weather, and sunshine.”

These verses from “Amiga Boa” raised several questions for me. The girls singing on this song were engaged with issues of identity and belonging, issues that the girls clearly see in this song as important, as they differentiate themselves by their bodies and language. However, they did not simply accept the terms of identity that structure belonging as static or singular. My first listen of the song—in the playwright’s apartment—understood the girls as making positive, active claims on their subject formation in the face of a society that often silences them as passive victims to be rescued by Western liberalism (Ewing 2008:186). Claim who you are, the girls in the song seemed to be saying, and join us, even if you are marked as different. However, were the girls in the song simply speaking back to the hegemonic demands of the state, to

German mass media and society, ready to consider them only as silent (potential) victims?

During my fieldwork, I met with Anne, the music teacher in her flat in the borough of

Neukölln for tea and to talk about her experiences at MÄDEA. Neukölln, featured in the previous chapter on Sirin, is one of the largest and most impoverished neighborhoods in Berlin,

185 with a visible migrant makeup and a notable influx of artists and young entrepreneurs in recent years. Several years previous, Anne had sent out her portfolio to youth centers all over the city seeking work. Though she had no experience with youth centers, Anne had conducted several youth workshops at an arts camp in western Germany. MÄDEA was one of the few to respond to her application. They told her they had enough money for an arts program and that they liked her work, which included music, video, and fashion samples. Anne began at the center with a video project, and it became immediately apparent to her that the working conditions there were different from those at the camp. At the camp, the kids had elected to leave home for several days to actively participate in a media project of their choosing for its duration. At MÄDEA, the girls also participate voluntarily, but the day-to-day reality was one of inconsistent interest and participation. One day those present would come up with a story; however, the next day, a whole different set of girls would be there, making it very difficult to continue effectively. Eventually,

Anne decided on a non-narrative approach: a video of two rival “girl gangs” who battle through dance. Two of the rival members become friends. She only needed two committed girls; the rest could participate in the background as they wished. When asked what the theme was, Anne responded with a smile, “Friendship, they’re all about friendship.”

“Mädchen von MÄDEA” was the first song Anne wrote with the girls. The full-time staff at MÄDEA had not instructed her on any themes to address, but Anne figured since it was her first song for the youth center, it should be about the youth center. Anne had initial hopes similar to the video, that the girls would be involved in every aspect of what happened. She bought and brought to MÄDEA a number of small instruments. Although the girls were initially enthusiastic about learning them, those she taught one day would not be there the next. Anne decided to give

186 the song a push and some structure. Anne composed the music and the refrain, “We are the girls from MÄDEA.” She then had the idea to have each girl rhyme her name with an activity or attribute she identified with, taking each aside one by one to compose. This was a very guided approach. Anne, though by no means a trained social worker or teacher, set the tone for a kind of positive roll call for the girls of MÄDEA, each claiming an individual attribute reflecting the self-determination mission of the center. Likewise, Anne was the one to set the song to a hip-hop beat.

Several of the girls I spoke with at the center identified hip-hop outright as a music of choice, and hip-hop also influenced and shaped much of the American and European pop that was the favorite of many of the girls. I asked if Anne had also composed the refrain to “Amiga

Boa,” the second song she produced as I knew she had spent significant time in Portugal as a visiting artist. I wanted to understand better the agency of the girls “self-determining” in the song’s lyrics and performance. Anne explained:

“Amiga Boa” was a bit different. Because Nelly is Portuguese. Earlier she was friends with another girl who was at MÄDEA. She had written these lyrics about herself and the friend, mixed in Portuguese and German. I found it lovely—this was on paper. I let it inspire me.

Bruce: So they wrote it?

A: I had said every time: write lyrics! Just write something. Or sing something into my Mp3 recorder. I tried to capture something. It hadn't functioned so well with structure.

B: Because there were different girls there every day?

A: Exactly. It was easier first to have a song. Say, “Listen to it—it needs lyrics.” Then I’d look to see who’s participating. Then I could take that.

B: Then it is extended, like with Nelly and her friend?

187 A: Yeah, it was really Nelly's lyrics. Seldom was this done with two or more people.

B: Then you composed the music?

A: The melody came from Nelly. I said, sing it more or less how you like. I translated it a bit [musically], and it sounded good. Most of the other songs I developed this way. They would sing something first, and I would take it from there.

They wrote the verses together. Deniz sang the line, “Ich bin Berlinerin, und dazu Griechen,” though, as Anne pointed out, Deniz is not Greek or of Greek background. Perhaps it was a playful approach on Deniz’s part to the subject of belonging or perhaps simply a better rhyme.

Anne explained that the “colorful mixture” of the girls themselves informed the underlying meaning of the song. That is, she, in a pedagogical role, also presumed certain culturally-marked differences, but in the collaborative environment, there was room for the girls to play with these differences. The girls' “narrative coherence” in Gilsenan’s terminology was readable, not in spite of, but in addition to the pedagogical guidance that was also evident.

One can see the pedagogical traces of Mädchenarbeit in the affirming lyrics and images of young immigrant girls portrayed as creators of media and their own subject formation. The youth center is a medium which brought these girls together into this “colorful mixture.”

Wedding’s historical role as an entry neighborhood for newly arrived immigrants, MÄDEA’s free services (a factor which several girls explained was important to their parents in choosing it over other after school centers that charge a fee), its girls-only policy and its location near to a number of primary and secondary schools determine to a large extent which girls actually come to the space. Yet the center is voluntary, as are all its arts activities. Pedagogy or individual creativity?

Soysal responds to this frequent question of youth work by holding this “or” in tension:

188 As subjects of the protracted and stable life-course stage between childhood and adulthood, the youths, however, are neither passive recipients and beneficiaries of these grandiose societal projects, nor are they, in fact, expected to be passive. They not only partake in the civic and cultural projects designed for them, but also contrive interventions, disrupt scripts, alter the courses demanded, and act out transformations. The institutionalized domains of youth work and consumption “supply young people with material with which to construct the image of their present and future, [and] the languages with which they can design their experiences in all of its aspects” (Melucci 1996: 126). The youths exploit these materials and languages as both makers and consumers of youth cultures. They fashion and implement their own projects and confront hegemonic designs and discourses of culture, as well as accommodating cultures projected for them. Their productions form an (in)formal topography of cultural work and enjoy differential degrees of visibilities—at times heralded as ingenuity, and at other times proscribed to marginality (1999:11).

Though Soysal makes several compelling arguments throughout his work for understanding the institutional interventions in youth culture, here he suggests a significant degree of active counter-hegemonic work on the part of youth, who “confront hegemonic designs and discourses of culture.” This indeed was my first response to hearing the MÄDEA girls singing. However, this confrontation also happens to resemble the design of MÄDEA’s own pedagogy, which seeks to situate the outspoken girls against the mainstream discourse that awaits passive, victimized, and silent female migrant subjects.

As Anne’s delineation of the creation process makes clear, the girls have not merely taken the “material and language” supplied to them by MÄDEA and fashioned on their own a front line of immigrant-girl-power songs. It was a collaborative project between the girls and MÄDEA staff, which, in the case of the songs produced a material product, a CD, which forms part of the

“(in)formal topography of cultural work.” The CD for “Amiga Boa”/“Mädchen von MÄDEA” has a professionally printed color cover, featuring seven of the girls posing in pop-star fashion, in colorful clothing and costume jewelry. The CD was produced with the support of MÄDEA and

189 intended, as Ulla explained, to be taken home by the girls to share with their families. The

“visibility” in this case was limited mostly to parents and siblings and the other girls of MÄDEA.

However, the girls from MÄDEA had been part of other CD productions, including a project,

Mädchenpop 3, made with girls centers from two neighboring boroughs, its songs addressing issues regarding school, bullying, boys and friendship. The quality of the CD, including a professionally designed CD case, marks it as intended for wider distribution than the family.

Brian Larkin, in his work on Nigerian video, citing Keane, writes, “Embodying a value in material form necessitates bundling that value with other material qualities an object possesses, shaping its capacity to create meaning and social action.” A MÄDEA song, a message, bundled with a CD may circulate to parents, friends, to an ethnographer, to a reporter, local politician, or perhaps to be filed at the Archive of Youth Culture in Kreuzberg. Entering the public sphere as a

CD limits it also to its CD-ness, a plastic consumer product, one more among thousands of similar that fade in and out of view each day. It also joins the MÄDEA distribution material, including glossy postcards depicting some of the girls’ arts, calendars, and books intended to represent the center’s mission by depicting the image and sound of self-determining girls. The music and lyrics and CD themselves not only speak to the girls' ability to create art, but also help to position the girls in public as claimants on their own belonging: I am a Berliner, and also a

Greek. In the next section, I interrogate this claim further in a study of one of the live theatrical performances I observed at MÄDEA. Similar contentions about self-creation and a more nuanced and multilayered understanding of belonging are present. However, I use it to trace a particular theme of intercultural modeling that has been present through several of these case studies, the role of the German language.

190 Language

In 2013 I was encouraged by the director of MÄDEA to come to watch the girls’ newest play, When the Girls Still Wore Headscarves, and I also received an invitation for the same event. The invitation was a color-printed flyer, proclaiming, “MÄDEA invites you!” This flyer once again foregrounded a central message of the center, that the play and two songs to be performed were “self-written” (selbstverfassten). That is, the girls themselves marshaled the performance we were going to see. The invitation also featured six photographs of the girls performing, smiling, and engaged in each one.

On the day of the play’s debut, the audience of about twenty people filed into the new performance space, which had been divided into two sections, one half with chairs, which were on a level with the second, the stage area. The windows had been blacked out for the play, with professional lights set up toward the stage. On all the walls were several paintings done by the girls. Some were individual self-portraits, others were large canvas group scenes from around

Berlin. They lent a colorful tone to the room and gave ownership to it. It belonged to the “girls from MÄDEA,” as the invitation called them. The girls marched out in a line, twelve of them.

The oldest, Yağmur, made the introductions: “Ladies and gentlemen, parents and children,” she began. She then extended a special welcome to myself and a man from visiting from the borough council. They launched directly into their first song, and then into the play itself.

Interestingly, despite the title of the play touching on what is a hot-button issue in

Germany (and in academic work on Turkish youth), headscarves, and that some girls regularly wore them, it was perhaps an unintentional misdirect at least concerning my own expectations.

191 For the girls, the “headscarf” in this play functioned mostly as a prop. Nazik, one of the five central girls who wrote the play, explained to me later in an interview that she just wanted to wear a headscarf for the play, and another suggested the play should be “set in another time.”

Thus the play's title for her translated to something more like “once upon a time.” Its central theme, like the songs and video mentioned above, was actually friendship. There was no heavy- handed attempt to send a message, as in “Crazy Blood”, about the state of migrant youth in

Germany. Instead, it was about a father who left for a time to work and returned home with money for the family. The invitation had promised that the material would be “drawn from experience,” and some of the girls had witnessed versions of parents drawn far away by economic necessity. However, the play revolved mostly around what happened when the new money came to the family. One friend stole it and misspent it at the store. The police were involved, the money was returned, and all was well again at the end. However, as performativity theory suggests, we should not only be looking for a window into a culture.

As Turner argued, the performances “themselves can be active agencies of change, representing the eye by which culture sees itself and the drawing board on which creative actors sketch out what they believe to be more apt or interesting ‘designs for living’” (1967:24). Rather than concentrate on the content, I examine in this section what the girls did. These are the “acts,” the “symbolic social signs,” to which Schein draws our attention. In short, the girls put themselves in front of a public audience as actors of their own “self-written” performance. The performance conveyed that the girls are subjects to heard and seen and are not silent nor passive.

Importantly the girls speak German throughout. This is no small consideration as speaking

German is of central concern in “integration” discourse. I turn here to show the centrality of

192 speaking German to integration discourse and demonstrate how such discourse can circulate nationally and locally through the lives of MÄDEA girls. This circulation of this discourse from the state in the form of documents and more to the everyday world of MÄDEA allows us to consider the importance of the performative effect of speaking German during When the Girls

Wore Headscarves and other plays staged by the girls.

As introduced in the previous chapter with the discourse about Sirin’s stutter, when discussing national belonging in Germany—what it means to be German—one of the most frequently mentioned topics is the German language. It was a long-running concern directed at those with migration backgrounds. In a speech to the Bundestag in 1982, a CDU representative asked: “Do we really want... Germans who can only speak a broken German?... Because what happens.... [if they] become German citizens with all the rights and duties, even though they are not integrated and assimilated?... It would be naïve to think to believe that these groups are politically oriented only to the interest of our country” (Akturk 2012:77). Four decades later, it remained a focus of integration efforts. An instructor for an “integration course” (required for those seeking citizenship) revealed to me in an interview, that despite a few gestures towards cultural matters it was a fundamentally a course to teach and assess the learners’ German- language skills.

Language was also a cause of concern of many of the girls I spoke with at MÄDEA, and they often mentioned anxieties about the German language. Ezgi, an eighteen-year-old, reflected on what she perceived as the problem of Wedding being a neighborhood too saturated with those with migration backgrounds. As an example, she evoked her cousin’s young daughter’s problem at her Kita (daycare), where, according to Ezgi, she has problems with German that a six-year-

193 old child should not have as she was born and raised in Germany. Her German was

“catastrophic” and not “accent-free” because she is only in school with “foreign children.” For

Ezgi, language is important, and “one must be able to speak German in order to live here.”

Language, along with living in Germany, makes one German. Selen echoed this point: to be considered German, one had to be born in Germany and be able to speak “good German,” which she felt she herself did not. MÄDEA offered assistance to girls who wanted to improve their

German. Fatma explained it was through MÄDEA that she learned German. She moved to Berlin from Turkey with her mother when she was eight, and for the last nine years, the youth center had been instrumental in teaching her German and having that translate into success at school.

When I spoke with the music teacher Anne and asked her if she believes the girls feel German, she guessed they would not, because “one can’t feel German if one hasn’t mastered German.”

The issue of language subtly and not subtly permeated the youth center.

A handwritten poster in the main common room of MÄDEA contained the center’s rules.

Rule number four (following “No Insults,” “Hear Others Out,” and “Let Others Listen”) is

“Speak German.” Eylül, the main assistant to Eva and Ulla, the co-directors, explained this rule was only in effect when there was a problem of comprehension. That is, girls could speak

Turkish, but if a non-Turkish speaker was nearby, they should switch to German so as not to exclude anyone. This, of course, privileged German as the common denominator, though it was only expressed in terms of practicality, first of pure understanding, but also to help the girls improve their performance in school. This was the “background” to the rule, Ulla explained. The girls do not understand a lot in school, and they need help “translating” their school texts into

“simpler language.” This is the help that Fatma spoke of receiving. The language issue was not

194 simply a foreigner issue, but one compounded by the fact that, as Ulla put it, “Berliners don’t speak correct German” and “language is a burning issue.” Ultimately helping the girls learn

German serves the pedagogical project of Mädchenarbeit. Ulla explained when a teacher tells a girl, “you are not good at school, you are not good at German,” MÄDEA helps that girl learn

German and to produce quality writing projects they can take to the school to prove them wrong.

The girls' confidence and “self-determination” are strengthened, and what she called the

“negative picture” is corrected.

In the brochure Girls in Social Hotspots co-published with the Federal Ministry of

Family, Seniors, Women, and Youth, Ulla reflects in her introduction on the discussion of youth welfare at a conference at Wedding in 1998. The first problem identified was a “language deficit of migrants in German and in their mother tongue” (Bachor 2000:6). Speaking German or the inability to do so is a frequent topic of discussion when talking about migrants. In many casual conversations in Berlin about migration, people brought up the issue of how many Turks in

Germany spoke German or the poor quality of the German they spoke. Proper language acquisition was a central concern of the mayor of Neukölln’s borough bestseller Neukölln is

Everywhere (Buschkowsky 2013), and as I showed in the previous chapter it was of central concern to Sirin’s educational life course

During my fieldwork, billboards appeared around Berlin, including in Wedding, with a new slogan “Raus mit der Sprache, rein ins Leben” (“Out with language, into life”). The first one

I saw featured a soccer star from the Women’s National team, Fatmire Bajramaj, a German of

Albanian background (whose soccer jersey was featured at the beginning of the previous chapter in the Ethnographic Museum). Pictured in her uniform, Fatmire kicks one leg in the air above the

195 slogan. Looking closely, Fatmire had her tongue out in the photo, and the colors of the German flag were photoshopped across it. Several other stars appeared in similar billboards with their painted tongues out, including athletes, musicians, and actors, almost all with migration backgrounds. There was a simultaneous print-ad campaign, and on each image was the website address: “www.ich-spreche-deutch.com” (“I-speak-German.com”). The website directed users to a number of places to take German lessons and an embedded YouTube video, “Making-of ‘Raus mit der Sprache, Rein ins Leben.’” The video featured a custom-made campaign song by the

Sinti-German rapper Sido and footage of the various stars having their photos taken and the

German flags photoshopped onto their protruding tongues.

The campaign was put together by a non-profit foundation called the German Integration

Foundation, launched in 2008 by the German Magazine Publishers Association. They explain on their website that, “Language is of particular importance for participation in society for a successful education and, thus, for integration into the labor market. This speech and language ability are key to greater equality of opportunity. Language is the linking element of our society - an element that allows for dialogue between different cultures in Germany and contributes to tolerance and peaceful coexistence” (deutschlandstiftung.net 2009). Though the state did not direct the campaign, it was profusely praised by certain ministries. On the “Language” page of the Commission for Migration, Refugees, and Integration, the campaign was featured, noting that it received the German Language Culture Prize and that the state minister who oversees the commission sits on the foundation’s board. A photo showed this minister, Maria Böhmer, standing in front of one of the billboards smiling (bundesregierung.de 2011). This is only one

196 example, but it is to illustrate how speaking German continues to circulate as a powerful citation of national belonging.

German language is a citation that is available to the girls of MÄDEA. To speak German with confidence in front of an audience, of parents and children, and an ethnographer and a borough official then was to perform an act that “cited” (Schein's term for the reiteration and reinforcement of social norms on a minute level (2000:20-21) their participation in “integration,” in German life. However, as Schein cautions us, we must not be overeager to ascribe a subversive quality to these performances. The girls are after all forming into a model defined by the authorities: “It is not that an a priori social order demands that its drones slavishly repeat its substantiality, but rather that these myriad moments of reiteration are what give the prevailing order its authority, its aura of inevitability” (20-21). This context informed by the nuance of ethnography helps us retain an ambiguity about assigning agency. The girls did write this play.

German as the common-denominator language of MÄDEA constricted the language possibilities of expression and aligned it within integration discourses. The theater pedagogues helped to

“edit,” reducing its time from thirty to twenty minutes. It was the girls who wrote in the

“headscarf” but also to then disregard it, to posit headscarves as “once upon a time,” even as many of the girls wore one on a daily basis.

The girls wrote a fast-moving tale of friendship lost and gained, with lots of laughter and enthusiasm throughout. The sheer joy expressed in the shrieking girls as they ran back and forth in chaotic costume changes, conveyed not merely an active group of newly allowed citizens, but a room of exciting, dynamic young humans capable of creating their own worlds—perhaps even creating a play in which they “sketch out what they believe to be more apt or interesting ‘designs

197 for living’” (Turner 1967:60). The play was then a kind of “message,” to be received by the audience, by the borough council member, by me. It allowed for nuance to emerge, as when I pointedly asked Nazik why she chose to wear a headscarf when she did not “actually” in real life.

She corrected me: she does wear a headscarf—at the mosque, “when I read the Quran, for example.” Headscarves are situational, not fixed. “And anyway, it's not the point of the play,”

Nazik admonished me.

Reiterations continue at different levels after the play’s end. The title of the play will stand after the content fades. Its political tinge might resonate after all. I do not know what results this particular performance brought by way of the borough council member, for example.

However, after the play was over, I was incorporated into the extended performance, in a manner of speaking. Tea and cookies were served in the kitchen, as family and friends congratulated the players. In the hallway, Ulla, the director, made a point of introducing me to the borough council member, a white-haired man in his 60s. She emphasized my location, New York, and affiliation,

Teachers College, Columbia University, and that “he is here doing a project on MÄDEA.” That is, I was part of the performance of MÄDEA as a worthy place of study and borough investment.

The borough council member revealed his own creative misunderstanding, as he commented,

“Ah, finally an international presence at MÄDEA.” That is, somehow, the girls of MÄDEA were too local, or their actual international qualities – their multiple citizenships and multilingualism, for example, did not measure on his scale of “international” the same way New York might.

Structural pieces were clearly in place, but the friction of negotiating the center's place, as

“worthy,” was evident through the enacted self-determination of the girls performing belonging

(in German, in public) and the bearing witness by the families, myself and a representative of the

198 borough. That is, “speak German,” while undoubtedly a reflection of the highest underlining notions of interculturality, is present at the youth center, when seen at the level of everyday engagement, it reveals a more frictive encounter. It shapes the girls’ performances, but it is not their sole purpose either. Even as they engage with the most powerful theme of national belonging in Germany, their own narratives still emerge as valuable and visible at this scale. In the final section, I examine further how these performances of belonging can operate on a localized scale, which preserves their robustness and allow for negotiating transformative effects.

The MÄDEAs Grow Up

A key narrative told to me in my interviews with the girls of MÄDEA was how they used their performances to negotiate various positions in social interactions and entanglements. The fact that they performed on a stage in public view and speaking German, as in When the Girls

Still Wore Headscarves, was a key to understanding how these performances “work” for almost all of them. However, the girls often cited more specific goals and transformative encounters that came about due to their performances, sometimes relating to the content itself. As indicated in the previous sections, these were goals that were also shaped by the pedagogical contours of

MÄDEA.

On a typical day, the main room on the entry floor would be used by girls trying out different types of performances, especially dances, songs, and theater. As Yağmur, who at sixteen was one of older girls, explained to me, “the little ones” do theater in their everyday lives. “They think up a story and put it on once or twice. They want to show us everyday” what they have

199 done. Others might be upstairs doing homework or making tea. Frequently MÄDEA would contract an artist to work with the girls on a specific project, who would be hired to write a song or produce a video with the girls such as Anne introduced above. These artists, though often having extensive experience in working with children, did not necessarily have any formal social work or educational training. The girls were regular self-generators of performance, but as

Yağmur indicated, it could be fleeting, especially with the younger ones: “They don't practice or improve it. It's a bit annoying. The little ones have no patience; they don't see how practice can make it better.” In my invitation to When the Girls Still Wore Headscarves, proclaimed that the theater piece and songs were “self-written” by the girls. It also indicated that they were respectively “under theater pedagogical direction” of two theater workers and under “musical direction” of two musicians. These intersecting points of “self-written” yet “under direction” draw our attention to the dynamic negotiation of performativity. Having a guide in the form of a staff member or a visiting artist was always a key component in producing a CD or a theater piece meant for public viewing, however, the narrative emphasis was given most prominently to the girls themselves.

I spoke with several older girls about a theater production they had put on a year before that was presented as their own creation, many brought it up in interviews with me. The performers consisted of a group of four sisters and a handful of other girls, who wrote and produced a play called The MÄDEAs Grow Up. The piece was meant to reflect the girls’ lived experiences and was performed at MÄDEA. Fatma, one of the participants, framed it as taken directly from their experiences: “What we performed was our life,” she told me. Her contribution, a “small scene,” reflected a concern not uncommon to teenagers, her desire for her

200 own bedroom. She shared a room with her three younger siblings, and in the performance (with actors playing her siblings), she showed the audience how difficult it was for her to concentrate on her homework and find quiet time. This was done in a humorous way, but its point was clearly made. The audience included her parents, who realized the situation at hand immediately and gave her her own room shortly after. Though Fatma could verbalize her frustrations to her parents in daily life, acting them out in a public setting, with an audience laughing along with her troubles, provided her petition with accountability that demanded recourse. She had, in Schein's terms, made her situation an “object of reflection” and gained a social effect.

The theater was often used in this way to talk to parents—families being the primary audience—where in other situations, it seemed too difficult. Ezgi, one of the four sisters, explained, “We live between two worlds, we children who grow up here, who are born here. On one side is our culture, our nationality, but on the other is Germany. We must get along here, integrate here. We live between two worlds. It’s hard to hold both at the same time. In daily life.

We wanted to show our parents what we have to say about that, how we feel, how we are in between.” That is, according to Ezgi, these performances were also about speaking to their parents. However, the implication of communicating to their parents this way underscored their position within the broader concern of belonging in Germany. Other parts of that same play included scenes about having boyfriends, smoking, arranged marriage, and tension in the classroom. The theater was used as a way to talk about things kept secret or off-limits otherwise between parents and children. Ezgi did not believe parents, in general, heard them under day-to- day circumstances. The girls made clear to their parents that they seriously engaged with these issues at MÄDEA, and the theater would be a platform for further conversation. That is, as the

201 girls themselves (along with the help of MÄDEA’s teachers) presented themselves as self- confident citizens, they were making themselves into particular kinds of subjects. They found new ways to not only express their place within the structure of belonging in Germany but to potentially to transform that position (if only to one’s own bedroom).

Yağmur made this point clear when she discussed a recent play on the theme of bullying.

Yağmur had experienced a particularly tough time in school, including bullying, and had recently left at sixteen without a certificate. MÄDEA had been a critical resource in finding well-being in the world. In the play about bullying, she was a central creator, but also had a theater pedagogue to help guide the procedure—including resolving disputes, encouraging ideas, and keeping things moving at rehearsal. Yağmur told me that the performances at MÄDEA gave her more confidence. They enabled her to speak in front of others and helped in overcoming her former shyness. In the bullying play, which I watched footage of from an in-production documentary,

Yağmur booms onto the stage and begins “bullying” the audience and admonishing their non- interference. She says she was sending a message about the danger of standing by. She then launches into a commanding monologue, beginning with the Nietzsche quote, "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster” and continues into an elegy about a bullied classmate who committed suicide. This (temporary) inhabitation and citation of the role of bully allowed her to stage a small scale intervention and affirmed her own self-determination. It also made a moral claim on the proper comportment of a MÄDEA girl: to actively intervene in wrong-doing, particularly that which targets the weak, but also to publicly to claim and express that role.

202 For the girls, the plays and songs became part of the process of self-reflection on their role with one another, with their families and with the public beyond the center. They were performativity geared towards a transformation in the relationship between parents and children, in what is allowed to be discussed and how. They drew upon powerful “universals,” human rights discourses, or different conceptions of romantic life in Germany, for example, to negotiate new or different terms of belonging. At MÄDEA, they were presented as (and often presented themselves) as agents, as girls with a voice. They had the power to create “acts” enabled by the resources, both pedagogical and material at the youth center, to intervene in their lives. Ezgi framed the conversation that they wanted to initiate from one of their theater pieces as specifically gender-related and a way to shift the position of girls: “We see that arranged marriages happen in our culture. That we, for example, can’t have a boyfriend. That we cannot go out, that we can’t party. That we are not accepted as humans. I am not talking about me, but generally. That we as women are not accepted. As girls. You are a girl; you have to do that; you are not allowed to do that; this, that.’ That we have things that are forbidden that we can’t cope with.” Ezgi was very thoughtful about how these types of performances entered the public sphere, first by way of their parents.

When I first met Ezgi, she was university-bound, headscarfed, and described her self as

“a bit of revolutionary” in regards to Kurdish rights. She elaborated on how she understood the process of performing and negotiating this belonging:

We want to show our parents what we have to say about it, what we feel if we are there between. Then we got to writing. First, we learned the technical things [about writing a play], how one speaks, how one does this, or that. Then we wrote. I wrote most of the scenes. They were all actually real; they happened... [For example] in the school, the scenes were comedic. A bit of irony, I would say. We turned things a bit upside down.

203 The students were smart, and they want to learn a lot and very intensively participate. However, the teachers were fed up. “We don’t have any interest in teaching you anything more.” A small irony. About friends, normal problems, youth problems, love. That for example, one begins to smoke, that one has whatever secrets from one’s parents or the things one does that one is actually allowed to do. Something like that. We also had a scene about a forced-marriage, where the girl must marry. Of course, this was an arranged marriage. We performed this. It’s often that girls can’t push through in our culture. They simply go along. The parents say this is the way it will be. They [the girls] don’t say anything, because they don’t have the courage to. We have shown it so in the theater, that the bride was tearing apart, summoned her courage, and fled the wedding.

Here Ezgi depicted herself in the context of the play as a social bridge. The bridge metaphor and being “in-between,” has been a common rhetorical tool used by social scientists in understanding the role of second- and third-generation migrants in Germany. This was a common understanding by MÄDEA staff as to what the performances of the girls were accomplishing. The girls would provide a bridge to their parents and families and act as positive agents of integration (speaking

German, talking in discourses of human rights, providing examples of girl self-determination), and then also the public at large. They would use a variety of media to showcase a dynamic

“colorful mix” (as Anne, the music teacher had put it) of politically and socially engaged young women capable of intervening in national debates about belonging and, in turn, being shaped into ethical subjects. Theater, songs, painting, and other performances were being generated every day at MÄDEA to, as Ezgi framed it, “send a message.”

The pedagogical intention of this was illustrated by Ulla, one of the two directors of the youth center in an article she wrote about “intercultural youth work,” where she describes a meeting that occurred between a journalist and a group of girls at MÄDEA (Bachor 2007). The journalist had just returned from Paris, where she found the youth with migration-backgrounds

“hopeless, without orientation, and without perspective” (270). The journalist had come to

204 MÄDEA to discover if Berlin youth were in a similar state. The director Ulla set the scene of the interview:

Six girls in the ages from 12 to 17 years sit in the painted-pink kitchen and provide answers. All except one were born in Berlin. Their families almost all belong to educationally-deprived strata. One mother is illiterate; one did not graduate high school; at least one has graduated from Realschule [intermediate-level secondary school]. The girls and their families are education-oriented and happily take the opportunities that MÄDEA, the intercultural center for girls and young women, offers. As occupational prospects, they list pharmacist, teacher, and writer. They don’t want to live like their mothers. They want to go their own way. They know that they must be smart about it. (Bachor 2007:270).

Ulla goes on to list an impressive array of undertakings, including a poetry and prose calendar, a

CD, tolerance workshops, projects about AIDs outreach, a political education lesson, and artistic presentations on human rights issues. She continues describing the girls in the circle: “Four girls wear a headscarf. In response to a follow-up question comes the declaration: ‘Done out of free will!’. The girls without a headscarf seem to have to explain themselves: ‘Not now, but maybe later!’ That includes a girl whose mother does not wear a headscarf.” (271). Ulla indicated that the girls’ responses had captured the mission of MÄDEA. “In their [the girls’] statements, the conception of the [youth center’s] project’s theme is developed as a subtext.

Intercultural Mädchenarbeit [girl work] is an illustrative process which encourages participation in immigration society, and equal opportunity and gender rights between the cultures” (271).

That is, it is not just about claiming belonging in the German public sphere, but acting as bridges to the cultures of origin.

However, as mentioned in the previous chapter, Soysal cautions us not to succumb too easily to the trope of a “bridge” and says he writes against “in-betweenness.” By this, he means migrant youth being seen as “suspended in a state of being in-between two cultures—the

205 “traditional” culture of their home country and the “modern” culture of the host society” (Soysal

12). He argues that we should not be quick to assume that Germany is simply shaping the youths and to consider the dynamic relationship: “For migrant youths are not passive recipients of change in an unfamiliar landscape of modernity. On the contrary, as active participants at several social and cultural borders, they talk about, interact with, negotiate, and enact change” (13-14).

However, Ezgi, in her formulations of “between” nonetheless resembles this “active participant” who engages with the issues of belonging and otherness. That is, at this scale, we can see the complexity and possibility of performing as both “actor” and “in-between”. Explaining her relationship to belonging in Germany, Ezgi said:

We are the youth that have grown up here; we are the future of Germany. Naturally, I don’t require that whichever Turk or Kurd, that they say, “I am German” or something. Everyone can decide for themselves. But for me, our future will play out here. We are the future of Germany. Therefore, I call myself... I am, well, German [...] One is free here, one is independent, that is actually really important. [...] One can live out one’s religion here. In Turkey, girls with headscarves cannot go to university. Although Turkey is an Islamic country. But here, it’s not that way and I am proud that it is how it is here, this religious freedom, that one is not extremely marginalized as a foreigner.

This is the productive local scale of national belonging at work, where new arrangements of belonging were being negotiated. Ezgi was claiming pride in the perceived religious freedom of

Germany. She could live out her life as a Muslim in Germany in a way she assumed she could not in Turkey. Without underestimating the challenges she would face in Germany, Ezgi claimed a position as the “future” of Germany, one that would make her readable and visible as a

“German” citizen. That is, the differences that are normally separated by a “between” are here (at least discursively) being reconciled as of the same side. Significantly, it was Ezgi, who at this

206 scale, at a voluntary after-school intercultural center, in a one-on-one interview, was able to robustly assert and maintain narrative coherence about her position.

The work the girls did at MÄDEA daily was, of course, beyond making music and performing theater and frequently traveled beyond the center itself. The center’s staff frequently organized small exercises. For example, the girls would design surveys around themes of human and women’s rights and conduct impromptu research outside MÄDEA’s door on the busy

Badstrasse or in a nearby square. They built a beautiful colorful papier-mâché girl with an opening at the top to receive votes as part of an effort at election time to encourage under-18s to begin thinking about politics. They would discuss the political parties' platforms and how they related to their lives with MÄDEA staff and then extend the discussion to the street or into the primary school. Many of the girls became “ambassadors” to their schools, where they would talk about MÄDEA itself and inform teachers and students about what they were doing. Though in most of my interviews there was a fair amount of shyness or meandering answers to my questions, when I asked “How would you describe MÄDEA?” even the youngest could launch confidently into a small speech about the great activities they do, how much they love it, and opening times. A nearby park was overlooked by a six-story building with an enormous piece of

(presumably city-sanctioned) graffiti, featuring an eclectic mix of youth and popular cartoons. In the back of the group, standing tall and smiling, is a girl holding a “MÄDEA” sign.

Sometimes the girls would travel to the borough town hall to speak for MÄDEA and themselves. A recent trip to the borough town hall, as part of a locally organized “World Girls

Day,” was captured in video footage by their usual music director, Anne, for a documentary under production. The work of performance was quite evident. The girls clearly connected their

207 concerns spatially with other girls in the world and temporally with those in the past. For example, in the stairs leading into the hall where they would speak, they had taped placards with information like: “In the 1960s women could not open a bank account without the permission of the husband or father” and “In the 1950s women had to give up teaching when they got married”—each was tagged with the MÄDEA logo. In the hall itself, ten of the girls and the director sat on a stage, in two rows of chairs facing six borough representatives. The girls hosted the day. They wore matching green t-shirts and carried small signs with their speeches printed on them. They welcomed the borough members, the audience (who clapped repeatedly), with the exhortation that they were here to open the first World Girls Day and to speak about the

“problems of girls around the world, and about ours, here in the borough.” They noted that the first World Girls Day explicitly proclaimed that girls have the same rights as boys, and followed by reading off a list of world-wide statistics of how far they were from this goal.

Behind the MÄDEA girls’ chairs stood a row of avatars, paintings the girls had done of themselves, or girls like them, holding protest signs with their demands. As if cheering them on the signs called for: “Freedom,” “good teachers,” “loving families,” “respect,” “own room,”

“space for girls,” “good education,” “friends,” “love,” “happiness,” and so on. As Schein wrote about a performance by Miao youth: “To the extent that performance drew upon dominant styles, we may say that it represented a coming to terms with the outside. At the same time, it identified the performers as producers. As members of a putatively backward minority group, commonly portrayed as unselfconscious and tradition-bound, they performed in ways that marked them as active and aware, in charge of defining themselves, dominated neither by their weighty past nor by the subsuming mainstream” (Schein 2000:271). The acts of performance also portrayed the

208 girls as “in charge,” at least of this day, and this performance, dominated by their own concerns.

Here again, then we have the performance of the girls of MÄDEA, standing visible in public,

“active and aware” performing belonging, proclaiming in confident German that they lay claim to certain rights and demands.

What is German?

This group of girls is growing up in a Germany that in 2000 made it noticeably easier for them to become citizens, at least legally. Pedagogies embedded in youth work and art programs give force to certain means of engaging in the discourse of belonging. They are growing up in a long moment where the public sphere is full of the rhetoric of integration, directed at them with great expectation, and in a shifting landscape where much remains inscribed in the idea of

German “essence”; especially when someone asks or answers: Who is German? Slowly that who is becoming a question of What is German? What values, ethics, claims? This chapter has shown the complex engagement that happens when “integration” touches down and encounters the sticky negotiation of belonging for young migrant girls. It puts caution to those calling simply for “integration,” without attention to the power at play or the potential for integration to be shaped by those for whom it is intended. It reveals how through performance, these girls help to create remarkable moments that speak to possibilities and openings, textures, and fissures of belonging in the Germany of today, sometimes only visible at the level of day-to- day life. I finally suggest that we take the opportunity to listen to these voices rising up to tell us about friendship, belonging, and asking us to listen.

209 Chapter 6: Conclusion

On Museum Island, across the Unter den Linden boulevard from the emerging Humboldt

Forum palace is a cluster of the country’s world-class museums: The Pergamon (housing its namesake altar and a Gate of Babylon and the Islamic Art Museum), the Bode (a sculpture museum), the Old National Gallery, the Altes Museum (Originally known as the Royal

Museum), and Neues Museum. Objects in all of these museums stem from the Royal and

Imperial periods, including the “old” and “new” and house a wide variety of precious objects.

However, it is in the Neues Museum that one can view what is perhaps the most famous and prized object of the Prussian Cultural Foundation (who oversees these museums and the collections of the Humboldt Forum): the bust of Queen Nefertiti. It is common knowledge that this magnificent thousands-year old sculpture originated in ancient Egypt, that its origins lie outside of any past or present Germany. Nonetheless, Nefertiti offers us its own case of contested national belonging in Germany since its arrival in the early nineteenth century in Berlin, in still-

Imperial Germany, and, as such, will serve as a useful foil for these final reflections.

A short history of the bust will be illustrative. In 1345 BCE, the sculptor Thatmose made the bust of Nefertiti, the wife of Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten. During their reign, the couple had constructed a monotheistic religious cult centered around Akhenaten. This led to the construction of a massive temple complex to venerate Akhenaten. However, following the death of the couple, their now-reigning son soon abandoned the new religion along with the temple complex. The temple site was not hidden and was known to many, but remained relatively undisturbed for a few thousand years. Prussian researchers had been present at the temple site since 1843 CE, but it was Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt, who uncovered Nefertiti’s bust in 1912. He did so on

210 behalf of the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft or DOG), of which Kaiser

Wilhelm was a prominent founder and supporter. The DOG was entitled as the excavation permit holder to half the value of their finds, the other half to go to the government of Egypt, then still theoretically under Ottoman suzerainty, though more directly under the control of the British military occupation since 1882. The bust (whose value was perhaps concealed by the DOG) went to Berlin to James Simon, a DOG co-founder.

Simon kept the bust in his private residence for a decade, where he showed it to the

Kaiser, but eventually donated it to the Neues Museum in 1920. It went on public display in

1923, and the newly independent Egypt began negotiating for its return (Tyldesley 2018).

However, throughout the 1920s, Nefertiti’s popularity had grown with the Weimar German public, and it remained in Berlin. Claudia Breger argues that Nefertiti had become a “‘metonym of the state’ an emotive stand-in for the abdicated and exiled emperor following the loss of World

War I (2006:291). That it is even though its origin in Egypt was well known and (obviously) undisputed, its residence in Berlin and (perhaps) its striking beauty as well as her royal role, helped to propel it into the unlikely role of an ersatz German monarch. The “‘colorful queen’ functioned,” according to Breger, “as an insignia of national identity” (291).

During World War II, the bust was kept safe in Thuringia, which meant that at the war’s end, it was under the control of the American occupiers, and then the newly-founded Federal

Republic of Germany. However, soon after its own founding, the communist German

Democratic Republic demanded the “return” of the Nefertiti bust to Museum Island. The island and the Neues Museum was after all, now within their territory. The FRG refused. In a lecture to the Berlin Juridical society, Reinhard Mussgnug defended the FRG’s claim to Nefertiti by linking

211 the country’s cultural tradition to the Prussian cultural tradition, to which the Queen now formed a part. In his argument, the communist GDR had taken on “new” symbols, including the hammer and sickle, which, according to Mussgnug, implied a break with the (royal) Prussian heritage and thus forfeiture of its accompanying objects (1977:37). Thus, the bust remained in the FRG and made its way through a series of West German institutions, and finally, in 2009, it was “returned” to the Neues Museum. However, not before it had served time as an FRG stamp in 1989 and ten years later in 1999 as the poster image for the Green party’s election campaign. Her image was a

“promise for a cosmopolitan, potentially multicultural and egalitarian city — with the slogan:

‘Strong women for Berlin!’ (Breger 2006:292).

Perhaps what is most indicative of this rich history of Nefertiti’s symbolism in Berlin over the last century is how the Prussian Cultural Foundation currently displays the bust in the

Neues Museum. It rests on a pedestal encased in a large protective glass display in the dead center of a classically apportioned room. The domed ceiling admits a shaft of light to the otherwise darkened room with only Nefertiti’s bust lit in a reverential, almost glowing light.

Visitors can circle and admire the object from all sides but are not permitted to take pictures. Tellingly in the room itself, there is no additional information or context for the bust for viewers. Museum officials are, of course, well aware of the controversial history of its continued residence in Berlin, and it is not that they are not visibly engaged in the historical contests over the disputed possession of similar objects. Consider that only a few rooms away in the same museum the text accompanying a displayed set of (replica) bronze-age horns called lurs.

Following an initial introduction to the objects and their purpose, the text explains (in German and English): “The original pair of lurs belonging to the Museum of Berlin from Daberkow in

212 Mecklenburg was taken as war loot to Russia at the end of World War II. The lurs seen in this exhibition are reconstructions of a blowing horn from Garstadt in Lower Saxony…”. The lurs are only one of the millions of objects taken from German museums to Moscow at the war’s end.

Irina Antonova, director of Moscow’s Pushkin Museum, frames their possession of these objects as “moral compensation” for German atrocities in the war (Spiegel 2012). That is in the case of the lurs, Neues Museum officials have opted for a stickier engagement with the (absent) object in question.

Hypocrisy aside, the tension between these two approaches models the difficulty encountered by museum officials at the Humboldt Forum stone-laying ceremony featured in chapter two. At that large-scale ceremony, museum and federal officials attempted to utilize the

“non-European” (as they formulated it) objects of the anticipated Asian Art and Ethnographic collections as performative stand-ins for the Berlin and Germany’s “non-European” citizens as they made the Forum’s case to the public. I argued that this revealed a fragility in the inclusive intercultural model of belonging at this scale, because it was vulnerable to others’ conjurings, in

Barak’s formulation (2013). I specifically drew out the case of the conjuring of the “colonial” by palace critics. Interestingly, this conjuring was self-inflicted as officials attempted to “conjure it away,” they ended up by “conjuring it up.” By attempting to dismiss the colonial connection to many of the objects, they first had to discuss colonialism.

That is, if I may be permitted an additional metaphor, Humboldt Forum officials attempted to “flatten” difference (museum objects) to make them workable as symbolic and discursive interchangeable stand-ins for Berlin and Germany’s “colorful” residents. Nefertiti’s current display is the flattened ideal. It models this approach: it stands alone, contextless, and

213 ready to serve as a convenient, to-be-determined symbol. However, this flat, placid surface is threatened with the unexpected eruption of its complex or “fractal” entanglements. That fractal quality does not lurk far from Nefertiti’s sanctuary, of course, and, as is shown with the lurs horns, it can be arbitrarily (and intentionally) deployed by those in a position of narrative power.

Those with “migration-background” present on the stage that day at the Humboldt Forum construction site (respectively as the moderator and as a musician) operated as flattened symbols, meant to stand for the “World” that had already “come to Berlin,” in the words of one speaker.

They represented on stage the wish for the world to see Berlin as a cosmopolitan city and the

Humboldt Forum, not as a retrograde effort to restore royal legitimacy. The fractal quality of migrants (that is, considered in fuller individual and group complexity) and their engagement with German history is something that I gesture towards in that chapter, and which I take up more fully later in this work (in Sirin’s chapter and the final chapter on MÄDEA), but remained a potent potential for further criticism of the Humboldt Forum project.

Interestingly, in the stone-laying performance, the royal history was also partly evoked by

Museum officials as they willingly conjured Prussia as one of its models, in addition to the modern city. The protestors (in a flyer distributed to those attending the stone-laying) referred to a flat negative “hegemonic” Prussia. However, the Prussia evoked in the Humboldt Forum performance was not one of increasingly tyrannical militarism that could only lead to world- devastating wars. Rather it was a less-common image of Prussia as a repository of tolerance, learning, and other enlightenment values, of the Humboldt brothers, Leibniz, and Berlin

University scholarship. (Interestingly, one can imagine a reversed situation where protestors, in order to conjure away “tolerant” Prussia, must first conjure it up). Using conjured Prussia and the

214 ruins of the palace site, I argued that an excess of meaning was present, a fractal quality ready to disturb the placid surface of managing diversity, though not necessarily to the detriment of the

Humboldt Forum. That “multiple pasts are always somehow present in how people understand their current situation, imagine their possibilities, and make claims for their futures” (Liu

2012:17) serves as a reminder that the fractal, even non-linear qualities of the past can rupture forth unexpectedly and without warning.

One of the limits of the study has been the reproduction of marked differences. That is, I have, one way or another, constructed difference along a fault line defined by extra-territorial origins of the Germans I have featured throughout, even as I have shown their own and others’ efforts to include them as “German.” The question of Prussia, however, along with Liu’s claim to further the notion of multiple pasts within Germany as “always” present, offers a potential opportunity to explore inclusive national belonging and difference beyond the alterity enmeshed within the context of the lives of Germans with migration-backgrounds. Kuppinger’s comment that the former “novelty” that Catholic workers posed to Protestant Stuttgart now attracts almost no notice (Kuppinger 2014a:146). That is, that (without assimilation as a final goal) certain differences can be included within an intercultural fold to the degree that they do not cause a

“problem” in regards to belonging in Germany. While it might be a facile observation, a

Schleswig-Holsteiner commenting on the “wrong” German and "funny" manners of a Bavarian is not necessarily impugning her Germanness even as she calls attention to difference. If the exclusive strain of Prussian hegemony that dominated over the German Reich led it to insist on the suppression of difference (under the anti-Catholic and anti-Polish Kulturkampf campaign), a

215 strain which undoubtedly extended its legacy into post-Imperial German nationalism, a comparative approach with recent heimat studies of other German regions could be fruitful.

Celia Applegate’s work on heimat societies in the nineteenth and twentieth-century

Germanys has made a compelling foray into this area (Applegate 1990). She argues that an alternate approach to German belonging was developed alongside the more-well known aggressive and militaristic one, where diversity was claimed and emphasized as part of that belonging. Her work has a more historical-scope, but it is enticing to consider it in a modern context. The FRG current federated organization encourages a certain amount of decentralization among its states. Within diversity studies, this usually serves to offer up comparisons of the perceived strengths and failures between states as they attempt to manage interculturality (that is

Baden-Wuttermberg’s citizenship test is less progressive than Berlin’s requirements, but Berlin does not allow teachers to wear headscarves; whereas Lower Saxony now does). Beyond these differences are there within the various German states heimat organization or their modern descendants who continue to produce a notion of cultural diversity as a means to inclusive belonging in Germany? What can the folk groups, shooting societies, small museums, theaters, lecture circuits, etcetera illuminate about inclusive national belonging? That is, is there a longer practice within the German national tradition of diversity promotion? Even if their efforts did not become the dominant trend, was there a certain success that renders itself nearly invisible, such as between Protestant and Catholics in Stuttgart, which presents attract little comment to those in the city (Kuppinger 2014a:146)?

In even beginning to look into such a possibility in our contemporary context, it is no surprise that even here, we find alluring connections to “migration-background” Germans. In

216 these case studies, the comparative approach could be contained within themselves. Such seems the controversy over Mithat Gedik, crowned as the “Muslim Shooting King” of his local

Catholic shooting club in the village of Werl (Spiegel 2014). The broader organization, whose motto is “Faith, custom, heimat,” took exception, and that exception became a national controversy (Diehl 2014). The Historic German Sport Shooting Federation perhaps did not manage their controversy as well as the one over the soccer players fasting that I detailed in

Chapter Three. After Gedik was hailed as an intercultural success in national media, the federation decreed that though they would let Gedik retain his title, he could not remain in his club, as he was not Catholic (Spiegel 2014). They did not have a third party to see the controversy as an opportunity to strategically leverage the situation as the ZMD did regarding the soccer players.

In that chapter, I examined a related quality (to those of the museum) of inclusive intercultural practices of belonging in Germany at a national scale. This strategic intervention, which I characterized as an elevation of a “breach” or “trouble case” in order to direct and disseminate its own solution, and thereby establishing a new “norm,” in this case the reconciliation of an Islamic practice, Ramadan, with a central German cultural symbol, soccer.

This strategy’s success to a large extent (to draw on my new descriptors) required its discursive symbols remain flat. The fractal seemed to bubble all around it and threaten to break forth. I pointed out, for example, that many players reported in the press that the fatwa would not affect them as they had already devised their own solutions or that they outright disagreed with it. Even the coach for the original team that was implicated in the controversy, FSV Frankfurt, decreed that if a player wanted to fast, he would let them (the fatwa had affirmed that players did not

217 need to fast during Ramadan if they had a game). The fatwa’s fractal history was flattened, as was dissent even within ZMD, as an interview with one of its senior members soon after appeared. My emphasis was on how a group could muster the flattening of interculturality that occurs at this scale for its own ends to make what I argued was a state-like national statement about inclusiveness. They were able to leverage the uncertainty about who gets to decide which differences matter to make their claim. However, structural fragility remained. On any kind of closer scrutiny, the fractal threatened to rise, and disturb the placid, firm conclusions of the new norm.

Arguably within the bounds of the DFB/DFL (the leagues which oversee German professional soccer), new standards and heightened awareness about Ramadan and fasting were put in place from this issue, as ZMD involved those organizations formally in the issue of receiving and disseminating the fatwa and affirming its conclusions. However, the ephemerality of the symbolic impact is uncertain. Did it survive beyond a news cycle? More importantly, did it extend to or expand the inclusive possibilities of other Islamic practices or Muslims in Germany.

I showed how Ramadan was already before the controversy seen as (at least within the German national press) a relatively benign practice and was often discussed with a fair amount of nuance.

There was seemingly, in this sense, no need (at least in those moments) to conjure “away” something that would interrupt the ZMD’s message and strategy.

I suspect, then, that had this or a similar strategy been attempted with a more hot button issue regarding Islam and Muslims in Germany, such as with Shariah (as it relates to family law, for example) it might pose greater occasion for contentious fractal qualities to interrupt the flatness of a large-scale intercultural intervention. Something of this was apparent in the Mithat

218 Gedik case with the shooting club, though from the “other side.” As news spread of his new title as the “Shooting King” of his local club, the first reaction by the national press was to promote him as a national example of a successfully integrated person of migration-background. His life- long residence in Germany, his Catholic wife and children, and his victory as part of the rural shooting club were all evidence of this (Spiegel 2014). It was perhaps ironically this notoriety that led to the national federation to uphold the title (out of “a respect for all religions”) but to revoke his membership due to the fact it is a Catholic shooting league (Spiegel 2014). This is where the outrage erupted, though in this case, there was no edict or special dispensation sought from the Vatican to bring about a new harmony.

Gedik continues to serve as a kind of example of almost-tolerance in Germany, but one that is highly desirable for many. The uniform of a “Shooting King” was represented in the

Ethnological Museum in the same exhibit as the jerseys of the two migration-background national soccer players that I described at the beginning of Chapter Three. One of the exhibit’s subtitle was “Cultural Unity Through Diversity.” The “failure” in the case of Gedik was laid

(implicitly) with the intractable Catholic organization rather than with Gedik himself. What is perhaps also interesting here for our purposes is that Gedik’s fraternal brothers in his local shooting club clearly had included him as part of their club even though he was not Catholic.

They had decided that difference did not make (enough) of a difference for them to exclude him.

Was this part of the legacy suggested by Applegate of an older story about German nationalism experienced through local diversity? Perhaps his other qualities as a man with a Catholic family, his childhood in the area, and his great skill at shooting were plenty. Regardless, as his renown

219 scaled up to a national profile, the hierarchy of the larger federation interceded and decided his non-Catholicism rendered him unacceptable as a club member.

In my chapter on Sirin, I attempted to draw out a similar dynamic revealed in the effect of scale and narrative power in the relationship between the narrative of Sirin’s school experience in her teacher’s book and Sirin’s own telling. I suggested that interculturality meets a challenge in relationships of unequal power, because even if integration is affirmed as a positive principle, deciding what differences matter and what they mean can be arbitrarily decided by the more powerful party. That is, though Sirin might meet many criteria that even her teacher valued as part of a successful experience of belonging in Germany (participation in theater life, a desire for an ambitious arts career, teenage romantic engagement), her teacher narrated Sirin’s experience as ultimately bound to the confines of her patriarchal and backward culture. Similarly, Gedik's very Muslim-ness prevented him from adequately performing fully as German at a scale beyond his village.

However, my ultimate intention was not to merely impugn the teacher’s shortsightedness and her underestimation of Sirin’s ability but to underscore the fragility of the intercultural concept in this situation as it is subjected to the arbitrariness of the hierarchical relationship inherent in government schools between teachers and students. I showed that even as many education scholars argue (explicitly and implicitly) for more intercultural education as a remedy to unequal educational outcomes based on ethnicity, that the power differential will prove the intercultural model fragile. My counterpoint, so to speak, was in part to highlight a more fractal and complex picture of Sirin’s educational life, as was told to me in our interviews by her. What this in part revealed was a shadow narrative of Sirin finding her “inner self,” in her words. This

220 was her process of self-discovery, which occurred primarily through the arts, in particular theater and singing. Though ironically, this began with the very teacher who would betray her trust later in a book, it continued after secondary-schooling, and I suggested, took a more robust life as

Sirin collaborated with writers and directors who were seeking more parity and equality in their working relationships.

What Sirin and her teacher did agree on in their respective post-high school analyses was that there were structural problems in place in the school. These had over-determined its ethnic make-up and inadequately provided the material support and training necessary for teachers to teach and nurture these students. Even as well-meaning pedagogues, administrators, and teachers search for ways to redress these inequalities and deliver on the promise of education for all, as a leveler of opportunity, they gravitate towards the already-marked differences of ethnicity and culture. Indeed, even in my own attempt at redress, I have done so, posing once again, at some level, “German” versus “Turk.” Gedik, one imagines, was simply the “shooting king” of his local club until his fame grew, and he inevitably became the “Muslim shooting king.” However, all the same, in anthropology, we have nuance on our side. It allows us to speak about differences by suggesting that we are undermining common generalizations.

With this in mind, my final chapter continued and exploration of the “robust” interculturality hinted at in Sirin’s story. At the local level, that is to say, in situations of (relative) parity and equality, inclusive intercultural practices can perform German national belonging where which differences make a difference (and which do not) make a difference are negotiated and decided together. I showed that many differences are determined at a much larger scale (such as the importance of speaking German), which also played a role for the girls of MADEÄ, not

221 least because the girls and their families and the center’s pedagogues knew what kind of pressure they felt to speak “good” German. (The head of MADEÄ clarified that the German the girls spoke was Berlinisch, or a working-class German, not necessarily an immigrant-German).

Nonetheless, at the center itself, speaking clear “high” German became part of their everyday negotiations, one difference among others to be thoughtfully considered and handled between the girls and center’s teachers and directors. In line with the principle’s of Mädchenarbeit MADEÄ hoped for the improved German that the girls spoke to be used as a tool by the girls in their school lives, but also particular in situations where they publicly represented MADEÄ, such as during on-the-street ballots or to the members of the local Mitte borough council.

However, for all the girls’ participation, and though MADEÄ was intensely crucial for many of them, it was only a part of their wider lives. Complicated family situations, economic pressures, citizenship issues tied up into property inheritance abroad, alienation at school, the difficulties and joys of becoming tweens and teenagers, boys, friendships, and more all played their part. That is to say, MADEÄ clearly did have an impact on the girls’ lives, but it was not the only factor. By my final round of fieldwork and check-in with the directors of MADEÄ, much of the social inequalities, sexism, and family pressure that the girls faced remained formidable.

Ezgi, the “Kurdish revolutionary” and self-described “future of Germany,” had moved to Turkey married before she finished university. Fatma had left school at 16, having met repeatedly with negative academic pressure. Others had simply stopped coming to MADEÄ, sometimes when family demands had become too much at home, such as taking care of younger siblings. At least one had finished her Abitur, the immense pride of the directors. She had told me how her teachers had encouraged her year after year to leave school and not bother with the final

222 university-path exam. However, with the direct support of MADEÄ, she had made it through. It is essential, I believe, to tell the stories of places doing this kind of nuanced work, but also to acknowledge the larger picture, the larger world that the girls and others like them must continue in, despite the good results within the center. As Bartlett and Garcia acknowledged at the end of the work on additive educational practices at a Washington Heights School, even with all the benefits the students accrue with such practices, the lager reality of socio-economic inequality is daunting and can seemingly overwhelm the advantages gained (2011).

Much of what the case studies in this work describe reveals a still-piecemeal approach to inclusive belonging in Germany. Perhaps that is a legacy not only of the federated system but the long resistance to officials understanding the country as one of immigration and providing the goods and services to make the most of that fact. However, just as my fieldwork was winding up, the country was embarking on one of its most ambitious projects of inclusion: Syrian refugees.

Chancellor Merkel’s commitment to refugees was massive and received world-wide comment

(Bennhold et al 2015). As she attempted to provide an example of best practice for other EU nations, she was drawing on the FRG’s long history as a country with special provision for allowing refugees in its constitution (GG Article 16a), even as they had discouraged the image as an immigrant-welcoming country, lacking even official legal terminology or a concept for

“immigration” or “ethnic minority" (Mandel 2008:81).

The provisions provided for those arriving from Syria in Germany were staggering: language training, housing, participation in schooling, and more. However, I want to reflect on two refugee-oriented programs I encountered that hint at a related approach to inclusive belonging, that might serve as the beginning of a larger comparative model, here between a

223 piecemeal approach to interculturality and what might seem a more holistic, integrated approach to two somewhat distinct populations, long-term immigrants and recent refugees. One encounter was on Museum Island and one in Neukölln. The first was an Arabic-language tour group encountered in the Islamic Art Museum within the Pergamon Museum. This group, I later learned, was part of an effort of the Cultural Ministry to provide an introduction to refugees from

Syria to “find a way to the Museum” and “open up new public spaces for them,” according to the

Islamic Art Museum’s director, Stefan Weber (Donadio 2016). The free Arabic-language tours were offered twice-weekly at the Islamic Art Museum, the Museum of the Ancient Near East, the

German National Museum, and the Byzantium section of the Bode sculptural museum. The program, called Multaka, or “meeting point,” was designed to train refugees to become professional museum guides as well as showcase Germany’s “cultural heritage,” even when that heritage comes from the Near East (Donadio 2016).

However, it seems the museums' guides were encouraged to make a dialog of this

“heritage,” of the objects' status of belonging, of emotional links to the viewers’ homelands, as well as their presumed prospects in their host country. That is, it seems to me that this high- profile endeavor financed in large part by the federal government and overseen by the Cultural

Ministry (themselves directly under the auspices of Chancellor Angela Merkel) was making room for some kind of equity in the narrative of belonging. They were promoting a “dialog” about its objects meant to stand for inclusive national belonging. Additionally, for this to be true, those actual refugees are present for that dialog, not merely quiet props they government hopes to interchange at its convenience. That is, there may be a fractal, dimension-rich possibility for intercultural national belonging at a “national” or large scale, robust within the encounter itself—

224 one which promotes difficult questions and dialog for all parties. Though, of course, the federal government set the initial parameters of the exchange within the context of the museums.

Interestingly, this approach was strangely mirrored in a second encounter I had with

Syrian refugees. I joined a public tour hosted by two Syrian refugees in the Neukölln neighborhood. Though the tour was hosted through a neighborhood-based organization that provided services to Syrians refugees, called Refugio, the tour was designed by a wife and husband from Damascus. They billed it as a Syrian-tour of Neukölln for Berliners. That is, they used the sights in the neighborhood that impacted the first year of their stay in Berlin, such as

Neukölln’s town hall, where they had to wait for permits, cafes that catered to Syrians, cheap places to buy phone cards as well as homemade maps detailing their harrowing journeys from

Syria to Berlin. The encounter was intended to transform the Berliner’s perception of her city by witnessing it through the narrative of those who had more recently arrived. It spoke to a powerful, direct way for inclusive belonging to be performed together. It was at the scale I argued for a more “robust” intercultural engagement. However, these were well-promoted tours, and the one I accompanied also had a film-crew joining us. Their film was to be later edited and produced for a national television audience. That is, the fractal and robust performance (perhaps) could be shared at a national scale through the medium of television.

These encounters with refugees hinted at what Sirin had called “the chance to communicate with people” and perhaps could reveal additional angles on a primary challenge for those promoting inclusive national belonging practices in Germany: how to communicate differences and similarities to others successfully. This includes the potential opportunities for such communication, its venues, and reception, of course. But importantly for researchers like

225 myself, Sirin, in particular, reminded me that singing, for her was “not about fame, about ‘look at me, that’s me.’” Rather in singing, she explained, “I found myself there. It has always made me happy.” Ourselves, upon closer inspection, up close and fractal are extra-vagant (Boon 1999), and often escape the categories of differences, they are exuberant and bind to one another in the strangest and most unexpected ways.

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244 Appendix A: Methods

The undergirding methodological approach to this study came to be informed by what

Bartlett and Vavrus call the “vertical case study.” The challenge they faced in their own work in educational policy and practice was “how one might explore the complex assemblages of power that come to bear on policy formation and appropriation across multiple sites and scales” (2014:131). In other words, while retaining the qualitative approach as central to their work, they were seeking a way to give simultaneous attention to power and sweep of policy decisions and their complex entanglements across various scales of study. However, it was not merely a vertical comparative method but also horizontal and transversal. That is, it is not only about observing the “micro- meso- and macro-levels,” but also about similar policies unfolding in distinct “socially produced” situations and ultimately to consider how the policies and practices we study are produced through time and space, how the “intersect” and

“interconnect” (131). I have followed this in its broader implications, both between the chapters and within them. For example, I have treated intercultural inclusive national belonging practices in Germany as directly connected to and practiced by federal officials in their highly symbolic stone-laying performance at the Humboldt Forum as a type of “macro” scale. Though I also situate this grounded ceremony and its implications within historical and global processes.

Chapter Three on the soccer fatwa operates in this sense as a kind of “horizontal” comparison similar in scale to the Humboldt Forum ceremony, though it focuses on a distinct case. However, I situate it also horizontally within the historical context of soccer in Germany, for example. Chapter Four regarding the teacher’s book and Sirin and Chapter Five about

MÄDEA move closer to the “meso-” then “micro-“ levels in terms of the scale of the institutions

245 which help to frame each case study, a secondary school and an after school center respectively.

However, they also function partly horizontally to one another in their locations in comparatively peripheral neighborhoods with similar populations. I also established a historical context and comparison for each of these cases within my own framing of each, such as intercultural education practices and youth centers in Berlin.

I follow Bartlett and Vavrus in understanding this approach as grounded in “multi-sited” ethnography, first formalized by Marcus (1995). Though “multi-sited” often implies research in places some distance from one another (such as country-to-country), its most significant contribution was encouraging researchers to see the “local” situations and actors they investigated as imbued and animated also by larger complex and global forces. In this sense,

“research design proceeds by a series of juxtapositions in which the global is collapsed into and made an integral part of parallel, related local situations, rather than something monolithic of external to them” (Falzon 2009:1-2 cited in Bartlett and Varvus 2014:134). I have endeavored to show the complex and global entanglements of each of these case studies. Though my “spatially dispersed” field sites were mostly in Berlin (with the soccer chapter more in the “mediascape” around soccer and Islam in Germany (Appadurai 1990), my residence and then fieldwork in

Berlin understood these various places as distinctly socially produced. I also drew attention to how policy was not always merely given or forced “down” the scales, but how the “sticky materiality of practical encounters” (Tsing 2005:3 cited in Bartlett and Vavrus 134) can affect and shape the “seeming universalizing” policies of the state.

In the first stages of my fieldwork, I explored the peripheral areas of Berlin, namely

Wedding, and Neukölln, where the latter chapters of this study are set. It was in those

246 explorations that I began visiting the local borough museums, including the Mitte Museum

(featured in the opening vignette), the Neukölln Museum, and the Kreuzberg Museum. Those museums all had direct references to and engagement with the local migration-background population alongside more traditional exhibits on local history (such as the Berlin Wall) and collections stemming from their time as heimat museums. In a comparative mode, I decided to visit the museums in the center of the city, which are overseen mainly by the federal government, including the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Though not as explicitly or directly, those museums also sometimes addressed the city and country’s migration-background population. For example, the German Historical Museum featured an extensive exhibit on the migration to

Germany called “Immer Bunter” (“More and More Colorful”), largely around the twentieth- century migrant experience in the FRG and the Islamic Art Museum had some of its exhibit information in Arabic and Turkish. However, the prospect of a new major national museum under construction was enticing. I had long been aware of the debates over the Humboldt Forum site since my first visit to the city in 1995 when the former communist parliament building of the

GDR was still standing. In 2007-2008 when I was working as a sightseeing guide, I led groups back there and discussed the then demolished parliament and the prospects for and controversy over the new museum.

However, my exploration of discourse around intercultural education came as I first learned about an “Intercultural Management” program overseen by the German and Turkish governments for a joint state-university project in Istanbul called the Turkish German University.

I met with professors at Passau University in Bavaria who helped create the program as well as

Turkish officials and professors in Istanbul in 2013 and 2015 to better understand the creation of

247 such as a program as the “heart” of an international project like that. That university program was slow to start and ultimately effected by political trouble in Turkey. I began looking for a similar “macro” scale project that engaged with intercultural concepts but was in response to the particular challenges of inclusive national belonging within Germany. To that end, the summer of

2013 offered a unique event in the stone-laying ceremony at the Humboldt Forum. It would allow me to observe a symbol-rich ceremony which brought together key national figures to attempt to perform and manage the “otherness” of the incoming collections from the

Ethnographic and Asian Art Museums, the symbol of the city’s cosmopolitan population with their promotion of Berlin as a “World City.”

Though the ceremony was held down in the construction site itself, among the ruins of the original palace, the public was invited to watch from a window in the Humboldt Box. The

Humboldt Box was a long-running effort that stood at the site during the majority of the construction period. Inside were several floors, including one featuring details about the site, the former palace, the reconstruction of the palace’s facade. The other floors displayed select objects from the Ethnographic and Asian Art museums and an exhibition from the Humboldt University, one of the other partners in the Forum. From the second-floor window, alongside the display models of the coming palace, photos from the former palace, the small book shop, and plaster casts of the Prussian eagles, the staff had set up chairs next to the window which overlooked the construction site and the performance that date. For convenience, they also set up a television streaming a live broadcast of the stone-laying and another set of chairs.

I was able to return to the contents of the stone-laying in three ways. I possessed my own audio recording of the event, as well as the full video of the event posted by Phoenix Television,

248 and a specially produced booklet from the Humboldt Forum Foundation itself, which included speeches given there, photos as well as some additional content. Though I remained focused on the event itself, the Humboldt Forum Foundation was a proliferate publisher. I paid special attention to the material that was intended for the general public (such as was available at the

Humboldt Box book store) including a booklet about its planning processes, a general introduction to the Forum called “Humboldt Forum - A Palace in Berlin for the Whole World,” and its magazine Berliner Extrablatt. I also followed their monthly digital newsletter, which gave updates and promoted events about the palace itself. All of these help to situate the stone-laying ceremony within an evolving, complex organization with many major stakeholders.

I made many return visits to the Humboldt Box and the evolving construction site in 2013 and 2016. I also made several trips to the Ethnographic and Asian Art Museums in the suburb of

Dahlem to see the collections in their previous home to understand the context of their then- current display. Visits were made as well as to the other museums on Museum Island mentioned above, and eventually, I also sought out other borough museums in Zehlendorf and

Charlottenburg. For more context about the concept of the Humboldt Forum itself, I developed a relationship with members of the European Ethnological department of the Humboldt University, who had an increasingly active role in studying the new Humboldt Forum and the controversial collection it indented to house. In 2016 I visited with the Humboldt Forum lab at the department overseen by Sharon McDonald and joined in their weekly discussion group. Their critical but ultimately sympathetic perspectives towards the curators, in particular, helped shape my own approach to the stone-laying event.

249 In 2010 I watched and followed close the Men’s World Cup closely and the discourse in the newspaper about the multicultural German team. Some years later, I began encountering the national soccer stars with migration backgrounds as images promoting the new inclusive belonging. I was particularly interested in the jerseys from men’s national player Mesut Ozil and the women’s national player Fatmire Bajramaj in the Ethnographic Museum’s temporary exhibit.

As I began researching how the 2000 law change effected that 2010 squad, I came across the story of the soccer fatwa in newspapers published at that time. I grounded my approach to the

“mediascape” (Appadurai 1990) surrounding the soccer fatwa in a discursive strategy summarized by Nordtveit in his work on the World Bank as “an “understanding about reality” (2012:21). That is, I focused on the texts of the various documents, and I examined how those discourses are situated in “dynamic, flexible and changing” practices and how they are

“used to create a reality of the world… that is translated into implementation strategies” (22). For my purposes, the “reality” created was about the effect of the fatwa as part of the ZMD’s own framing strategy in attempting to solve the “problem” of Islam and German national belonging.

To that end, I expanded on the “breach” case theory to understand its implementation, as I explained and explored in that chapter. However, with each of the texts, I considered and examined, I aimed to understand and show in my interpretation these texts “relation with social practice, and on the way they are made and disseminated in the world.” (22)

For context in understanding the fatwa, the ZMD I drew on their Charta and other publicly available documents on their website. For the fatwa itself, I followed Skovgaard-

Peterson’s approach, which led to trace the fatwa beyond its part in the press-release and discussion about German soccer in 2010. That approach following Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen

250 (1997) method for understanding fatwas. As I explained, he argues that we must look beyond the language and content of the fatwa to understand how they work in the world: “A fatwa is part of a complex world where different interests and ideologies will compete to make use of it for their own purposes” (20). Therefore I treated this fatwa not only as a set of words but also as an object whose “life,” in particular in the portion where it appeared couched in a major press release, can tell us something about the ongoing position of Islam in the discourses over national belonging in Germany. The press release included one of its older versions in Arabic and a recently translated German version (also a part of this appendix). In following the fatwa to Egypt, I found its Arabic version and a Russian and Indonesian version through the Dar al-Ifta’s interactive website.

I first met Sirin concurrently and in connection to my work with the after school center

MÄDEA. As I met several of the teachers hired to help the girls with arts and performance- centered projects, I had several meetings with a theater teacher named Tina. During our long semi-structured interview in 2013, as she told me more broadly about the work she did, she recounted a play she had co-written with several young women in Neukölln, including Sirin. She offered to introduce me, and soon Sirin, and I met for the first time. We met several times informally to build rapport in cafes in Kreuzberg and eventually recorded a semi-structured long- form one and a half-hour interview in 2013 from which I drew in constructing my version of

Sirin’s “shadow” narrative to the one in Frau Gerste’s book. I also interviewed her current boyfriend (and eventual husband) for more context and would meet with Sirin informally during my fieldwork in 2016 for follow up and to socialize. I also took the opportunity to get to know her singing through publicly available performances that she had made available on the internet.

251 I was living in Neukölln during my fieldwork, and I had lived their previously when I worked in Berlin. Sirin’s story presented an interesting way to investigate and understand an intercultural case through a heightened narrative contest. My intention was not to undertake a truth-seeking investigation but rather to use her case to better understand the fragile (as I argued) parameters of intercultural inclusive national belonging in a formal school setting. My emphasis was on the narrative element of this heightened example, and to that end, I allowed Frau Gerste’s book to stand on its own as far as the dominant narrative was concerned. I attempted to allow

Sirin’s narrative (as told to me and then written and edited by me) to “speak.” Engaging with

Spivak's claim that the subaltern's displacement is characterized by silence, Louisa Schein, in her work on the Miao minority in China, draws our attention to the potential for ethnography to capture the subaltern's “mute hypervisibility” (234). If the historian limits herself to the archive and the sociologists to broad statistics or the traditional anthropologist to a village, Schein as an ethnographer, seeks to remain open to the subtle and shifting “fragments of discourse,” which often circulate unobserved through a nation (27). Following Schein, I, too, tried to remain open to these “fragments of discourse,” given here as educational life history. However, as I wrote above, I understand Sirin’s “tale” to contain some measure of the “interpretational vectors, patterns of association, ontological presuppositions, spatiotemporal orientations, and etymological horizons” (Crapanzano 1985:9) of living and learning in Germany. However, that tale is also formed by the expectations and demand that I brought to it, and it is, in this sense, a

“doubly edited encounter” (9).

For further context, I attended (then current) plays directed by Tina in 2013 and 2016 as well as other theater performances that concerned themselves with “migration background” in

252 Kreuzberg (such as the vignette that opened the MÄDEA chapter) and in Neukölln. Through my connections during my former residence in Berlin, I sought out a working Gymnasium teacher

(who was a different, but similar school to Sirin’s) for a more general and comparative perspective on teaching. I also visited another Gymnasium in Neukölln for an exhibition on migration-background youth and the excellent Neukölln Museum for a better understanding of the contemporary more “local” borough context for intercultural discourse around its residents.

The seeds for this project in many ways began during my residence in Berlin in

2007-2008, previous to my graduate studies. I lived in Neukölln during that time, and in my day- to-day interactions with Turkish Germans and Arab Germans, I witnessed local everyday

“intercultural” competence. However, in my passing conversations with many other Germans, I encountered a casual framing of migration-background Germans almost only in terms of a problem that had failed so far to be solved. This was on my mind during a visit in 2009 as I was applying for anthropology programs and looking for future potential field sites or subjects to explore this in a way interesting to me. It was then that I was introduced to MÄDEA by way of a

CD they had produced with their music teacher Anne. When I returned in 2011, and then in 2013, it was Anne who brought me to MÄDEA to discuss my project with its directors. It was then that

I began exploring their neighborhood of Wedding within the Mitte borough, including its museums, residential streets, shopping malls, and parks, and anywhere else mentioned by the girls in interviews.

MÄDEA always welcomed me warmly as a guest. One of the clear limits for me, however, was that it was an after school center for girls and functioned most of the time as a female-only space. Their reasons were grounded in the principles of Mädchenaribeit, as detailed

253 above. However, I was invited to return repeatedly beyond my first rapport-building visits

(where I drank tea and ate with the girls, for example) to conduct my interviews with the staff and the girls. In 2011 and 2013, I conducted interviews with 21 of the girls of MÄDEA, four of them twice. Typically the younger girls' interviews were shorter (10-20 minutes), but the teenagers' interviews were longer (20-45 minutes). Most of the interviews were conducted solo, but if the girls requested to interviewed with others I did that in groups of 2 or 3. I also interviewed the two directors and full-time staff members together in a 90-minute interview. I conducted two extended semi-structured interviews with Anne, the music teacher, and as we became friends over the years, many, many informal conversations about the center. I also spoke with Anne about the documentary she was making about MÄDEA and watched hours of the raw footage she used, primarily interviews with the girls and performances they put on.

Of course, I drew upon the performances I attended as an invited member of MÄDEA’s community, particularly in 2013. Functionally, because of my gender, I always remained a guest, rather than a participant. I attempted to attune myself to the way my presence shifted what I was observing when visiting, including, for example, that girls who might otherwise have removed a headscarf at the center (when no male visitors were present), would put them on when I was there. Also, the directors had a pedagogical intent when I visited. It was, I observed, a chance for the girls to practice welcoming and hosting a high-status guest and a chance to speak about

MÄDEA to someone who would potentially represent the center to the broader world. In the time

I had with them, I encouraged the girls to ask me questions about me, many of them were very curious about the USA and New York in particular. However, my relationship remained that of male interviewer/guest and female interviewee/host.

254 For further context on youth centers in Berlin, I conducted an interview with the director of a Kreuzberg-based mixed-gendered youth center and attended a poetry-night that center put on. I made repeated visits to the Archive of Youth Culture in Kreuzberg, which keeps extensive records of youth work in Berlin and even sold some material (including a book) produced by

MÄDEA. This, together with the media I gathered from MÄDEA, helped me form a fuller picture of the center and included books, postcards, CDs, short videos, flyers, pamphlets, policy guides from the Federal governments. Much of the theater I attended mentioned above also fed into my understanding of MÄDEA and the role of theater and performance in youth work. Parts of my extended interview with Tina, who sometimes acted as a theater teacher at the center, also helped to inform my perspective.

255 Appendix B: Map of Central Berlin

256 Appendix C: Berlin Boroughs Map

257 Appendix E: Fatwa for the Soccer Player - Arabic Version

ﻓﺘﻮى ﻻﻋﺒﻲ ﻛﺮة اﻟﻘﺪم

وردت اﻷﺳـﺌﻠﺔ اﻟـﺘﺎﻟـﯿﺔ إﻟـﻰ اﻹدارة اﻟـﻌﺎﻣـﺔ ﻟﻤﺠـﻠﺔ اﻷزﻫـﺮ، ﻟـﻺﺟـﺎﺑـﺔ ﻋـﻠﯿﻬﺎ ﻓـﻲ ﺑـﺎب "اﺳـﺘﻔﺘﺎءات اﻟﻘﺮاء ": اﻟﺴﺆال اﻟﺮاﺑﻊ: ورد ﻣﻦ اﻟﺴﯿﺪ/ ر. م. ن. ﯾﻘﻮل ﻓﯿﻪ : ﺳـﻤﻌﻨﺎ ﻋـﻦ ﺑـﻌﺾ اﻟـﻼﻋـﺒﯿﻦ أﻧـﻬﻢ ﻻ ﯾـﺼﻮﻣـﻮن رﻣـﻀﺎن ﺑـﺤﺠﺔ ﻣـﺸﺎرﻛـﺘﻬﻢ ﻓـﻲ اﻟـﻤﺒﺎرﯾـﺎت أو اﻟـﺘﺪرﯾـﺒﺎت ﻓـﻲ رﻣـﻀﺎن ﻟـﻌﺪم اﺳـﺘﻄﺎﻋـﺘﻬﻢ اﻟـﺼﯿﺎم ﻣـﻊ اﻟـﻤﺠﻬﻮد اﻟـﻤﺒﺬول ﻓـﯿﻬﺎ. ﻓـﻤﺎ ﺣـﻜﻢ اﻟﺸـﺮع ﻓـﻲ ذﻟﻚ؟ اﻟﺠـــــــــــــــــــــــــــﻮاب : اﻟـﻼﻋـﺐ اﻟـﻤﺮﺗـﺒﻂ ﺑـﻨﺎدﯾـﻪ ﺑـﻌﻘﺪ ﻋـﻤﻞ ﯾـﺠﻌﻠﻪ ﺑـﻤﻨﺰﻟـﺔ اﻷﺟـﯿﺮ اﻟـﻤﻠﺰَم ﺑـﺄداء ﻫـﺬا اﻟـﻌﻤﻞ، ﻓـﺈذا ﻛـﺎن ﻫـﺬا اﻟـﻌﻤﻞ اﻟـﺬي ارﺗـﺒﻂ ﺑـﻪ ﻓـﻲ اﻟـﻌﻘﺪ ﻫـﻮ ﻣـﺼﺪر رزﻗـﻪ وﻟـﻢ ﯾـﻜﻦ ﻟـﻪ ﺑُـﺪﱞ ﻣـﻦ اﻟـﻤﺸﺎرﻛـﺔ ﻓـﻲ اﻟـﻤﺒﺎرﯾـﺎت ﻓـﻲ ﺷﻬـﺮ رﻣـﻀﺎن وﻛـﺎن ﯾـﻐﻠﺐ ﻋـﻠﻰ اﻟـﻈﻦ ﻛـﻮن اﻟـﺼﻮم ﻣـﺆﺛـﺮًا ﻋـﻠﻰ أداﺋـﻪ ﻓـﺈن ﻟـﻪ اﻟـﺮﺧـﺼﺔ ﻓـﻲ اﻟـﻔﻄﺮ ﻓـﻲ ﻫـﺬه اﻟـﺤﺎﻟـﺔ؛ ﻓـﻘﺪ ﻧـﺺ اﻟـﻌﻠﻤﺎء ﻋـﻠﻰ أﻧـﻪ ﯾـﺠﻮز اﻟـﻔﻄﺮ ﻟـﻸﺟـﯿﺮ أو ﺻـﺎﺣـﺐ اﻟـﻤﻬﻨﺔ اﻟـﺸﺎﻗـﺔ اﻟـﺬي ﯾـﻌﻮﻗـﻪ اﻟـﺼﻮم أو ﯾُـﻀﻌِﻔﻪ ﻋـﻦ ﻋـﻤﻠﻪ، ﻛـﻤﺎ ﻧُـﺺﱠ ﻓـﻲ ﻓـﻘﻪ اﻟـﺤﻨﻔﯿﺔ ﻋـﻠﻰ أن ﻣـﻦ آﺟـﺮ ﻧـﻔﺴﻪ ﻣـﺪة ﻣـﻌﻠﻮﻣـﺔ -وﻫـﻮ ﻣـﺘﺤﻘﻖ ﻫـﻨﺎ ﻓـﻲ ﻋـﻘﻮد اﻟـﻠﻌﺐ واﻻﺣـﺘﺮاف- ﺛـﻢ ﺟـﺎء رﻣـﻀﺎن وﻛﺎن ﯾﺘﻀﺮر ﺑﺎﻟﺼﻮم ﻓﻲ ﻋﻤﻠﻪ ﻓﺈن ﻟﻪ أن ﯾﻔﻄﺮ وإن ﻛﺎن ﻋﻨﺪه ﻣﺎ ﯾﻜﻔﯿﻪ : ﻗـﺎل اﻟـﻌﻼﻣـﺔ اﺑـﻦ ﻋـﺎﺑـﺪﯾـﻦ اﻟـﺤﻨﻔﻲ ﻓـﻲ ﺣـﺎﺷـﯿﺘﻪ "رد اﻟـﻤﺤﺘﺎر ﻋـﻠﻰ اﻟـﺪر اﻟـﻤﺨﺘﺎر" (2/420): "واﻟـﺬي ﯾـﻨﺒﻐﻲ ﻓـﻲ ﻣـﺴﺄﻟـﺔ اﻟـﻤﺤﺘﺮف.. أن ﯾـﻘﺎل: إذا ﻛـﺎن ﻋـﻨﺪه ﻣـﺎ ﯾـﻜﻔﯿﻪ وﻋـﯿﺎﻟـﻪ ﻻ ﯾﺤـﻞ ﻟـﻪ اﻟـﻔﻄﺮ; ﻷﻧـﻪ ﯾﺤـﺮم ﻋـﻠﯿﻪ اﻟـﺴﺆال ﻣـﻦ اﻟـﻨﺎس ﻓـﺎﻟـﻔﻄﺮ أوﻟـﻰ وإﻻ ﻓـﻠﻪ اﻟـﻌﻤﻞ ﺑـﻘﺪر ﻣـﺎ ﯾـﻜﻔﯿﻪ, وﻟـﻮ أداه إﻟـﻰ اﻟـﻔﻄﺮ ﯾﺤـﻞ ﻟـﻪ إذا ﻟـﻢ ﯾـﻤﻜﻨﻪ اﻟـﻌﻤﻞ ﻓـﻲ ﻏـﯿﺮ ذﻟـﻚ ﻣـﻤﺎ ﻻ ﯾـﺆدﯾـﻪ إﻟـﻰ اﻟـﻔﻄﺮ، وﻛـﺬا ﻟـﻮ ﺧـﺎف ﻫـﻼك زرﻋـﻪ أو ﺳـﺮﻗـﺘﻪ وﻟـﻢ ﯾﺠـﺪ ﻣـﻦ ﯾـﻌﻤﻞ ﻟـﻪ ﺑـﺄﺟـﺮة اﻟـﻤﺜﻞ وﻫـﻮ ﯾـﻘﺪر ﻋـﻠﯿﻬﺎ; ﻷن ﻟـﻪ ﻗـﻄﻊ اﻟـﺼﻼة ﻷﻗـﻞ ﻣـﻦ ذﻟـﻚ، ﻟـﻜﻦ ﻟـﻮ ﻛـﺎن آﺟـﺮ ﻧـﻔﺴﻪ ﻓـﻲ اﻟـﻌﻤﻞ ﻣـﺪة ﻣـﻌﻠﻮﻣـﺔ ﻓـﺠﺎء رﻣـﻀﺎن ﻓـﺎﻟـﻈﺎﻫـﺮ أن ﻟـﻪ اﻟـﻔﻄﺮ وإن ﻛـﺎن ﻋـﻨﺪه ﻣـﺎ ﯾـﻜﻔﯿﻪ إذا ﻟـﻢ ﯾـﺮض اﻟﻤﺴـﺘﺄﺟـﺮ ﺑـﻔﺴﺦ اﻹﺟـﺎرة ﻛـﻤﺎ ﻓـﻲ اﻟـﻈﺌﺮ؛ ﻓـﺈﻧـﻪ ﯾـﺠﺐ ﻋـﻠﯿﻬﺎ اﻹرﺿـﺎع ﺑـﺎﻟـﻌﻘﺪ, وﯾﺤـﻞ ﻟـﻬﺎ اﻹﻓـﻄﺎر إذا ﺧـﺎﻓـﺖ ﻋـﻠﻰ اﻟـﻮﻟـﺪ ﻓـﯿﻜﻮن ﺧـﻮﻓـﻪ ﻋـﻠﻰ ﻧـﻔﺴﻪ أوﻟـﻰ ﺗـﺄﻣـﻞ ﻫﺬا ﻣﺎ ﻇﻬﺮ ﻟﻲ واﷲ ﺗﻌﺎﻟﻰ أﻋﻠﻢ" اﻫـ . وﻗـﺎل اﻟـﻌﻼﻣـﺔ اﻟﺤـﻄّﺎب اﻟـﻤﺎﻟـﻜﻲ "ﻣـﻮاﻫـﺐ اﻟﺠـﻠﯿﻞ ﺷـﺮح ﻣـﺨﺘﺼﺮ ﺧـﻠﯿﻞ" (441/2): "وﻗـﺎل اﻟـﺒﺮزﻟـﻲ: ﻣـﺴﺄﻟـﺔ: اﻟـﺤﻜﻢ ﻓـﻲ ﻏـﺒﺎر اﻟـﻜﺘﺎن وﻏـﺒﺎر اﻟﻔﺤـﻢ وﻏـﺒﺎر ﺧـﺰن اﻟـﺸﻌﯿﺮ واﻟـﻘﻤﺢ ﻛـﺎﻟـﺤﻜﻢ ﻓـﻲ

258 ﻏـﺒﺎر اﻟـﺠﺒﺎﺳـﯿﻦ ﻗـﺎل: وﻋـﻠﻰ ﻫـﺬا ﯾـﻘﻊ اﻟـﺴﺆال ﻓـﻲ زﻣـﺎﻧـﻨﺎ إذا وﻗـﻊ اﻟـﺼﯿﺎم ﻓـﻲ زﻣـﺎن اﻟـﺼﯿﻒ ﻓﻬـﻞ ﯾـﺠﻮز ﻟـﻸﺟـﯿﺮ اﻟﺨـﺮوج ﻟـﻠﺤﺼﺎد ﻣـﻊ اﻟـﻀﺮورة ﻟـﻠﻔﻄﺮ أم ﻻ؟ ﻛـﺎﻧـﺖ اﻟـﻔﺘﯿﺎ ﻋـﻨﺪﻧـﺎ إن ﻛـﺎن ﻣـﺤﺘﺎﺟـﺎ ﻟـﺼﻨﻌﺘﻪ ﻟـﻤﻌﺎﺷـﻪ ﻣـﺎ ﻟـﻪ ﻣـﻨﻬﺎ ﺑـﺪ ﻓـﻠﻪ ذﻟـﻚ وإﻻ ﻛـﺮه وأﻣـﺎ ﻣـﺎﻟـﻚ اﻟـﺰرع ﻓـﻼ ﺧـﻼف ﻓـﻲ ﺟـﻮاز ﺟـﻤﻌﻪ زرﻋـﻪ وإن أدى إﻟـﻰ ﻓـﻄﺮه وإﻻ وﻗـﻊ ﻓـﻲ اﻟﻨﻬـﻲ ﻋـﻦ إﺿـﺎﻋـﺔ اﻟـﻤﺎل وﻛـﺬا ﻏـﺰل اﻟـﻨﺴﺎء اﻟـﻜﺘﺎن وﺗـﺮﻗـﯿﻖ اﻟـﺨﯿﻂ ﺑـﺄﻓـﻮاﻫـﻬﻦ ﻓـﺈن ﻛـﺎن اﻟـﻜﺘﺎن ﻣـﺼﺮﯾـﺎ ﻓـﺠﺎﺋـﺰ ﻣـﻄﻠﻘﺎ وإن ﻛـﺎن دﻣـﻨﯿﺎ ﻟـﻪ ﻃـﻌﻢ ﯾﺘﺤـﻠﻞ ﻓﻬـﻲ ﻛـﺬوي اﻟـﺼﻨﺎﻋـﺎت إن ﻛـﺎﻧـﺖ ﺿـﻌﯿﻔﺔ ﺳـﺎغ ﻟـﻬﺎ ذﻟـﻚ وإن ﻛـﺎﻧـﺖ ﻏـﯿﺮ ﻣـﺤﺘﺎﺟـﺔ ﻛـﺮه ﻟـﻬﺎ ذﻟـﻚ ﻓـﻲ ﻧﻬﺎر رﻣﻀﺎن ". وﻗـﺎل اﻟﺸـﯿﺦ اﺑـﻦ ﺣﺠـﺮ اﻟﻬـﯿﺘﻤﻲ اﻟـﺸﺎﻓـﻌﻲ ﻓـﻲ ﺗـﺤﻔﺔ اﻟـﻤﺤﺘﺎج (429/3-430): "(وﯾُـﺒﺎح ﺗـﺮﻛُـﻪ) أي رﻣـﻀﺎن وﻣـﺜﻠﻪ ﺑـﺎﻷَوْﻟـﻰ ﻛـﻞ ﺻـﻮم واﺟـﺐ (ﻟـﻠﻤﺮﯾـﺾ) أي: ﯾـﺠﺐ ﻋـﻠﯿﻪ.. (و) ﯾـﺒﺎح ﺗـﺮﻛـﻪ ﻟـﻨﺤﻮ ﺣـﺼﱠﺎد أو ﺑـﻨﱠﺎء ﻟـﻨﻔﺴﻪ أو ﻟـﻐﯿﺮه ﺗـﺒﺮﻋًـﺎ أو ﺑـﺄﺟـﺮة -وإن ﻟـﻢ ﯾـﻨﺤﺼﺮ اﻷﻣـﺮ ﻓـﯿﻪ؛ أﺧـﺬا ﻣـﻤﺎ ﯾـﺄﺗـﻲ ﻓـﻲ اﻟـﻤﺮﺿـﻌﺔ- ﺧـﺎف ﻋـﻠﻰ اﻟـﻤﺎل إن ﺻـﺎم وﺗـﻌﺬر اﻟـﻌﻤﻞ ﻟـﯿﻼ أو ﻟـﻢ ﯾُـﻐْﻨِﻪ ﻓـﯿﺆدي ﻟـﺘﻠﻔﻪ أو ﻧﻘﺼﻪ ﻧﻘﺼﺎ ﻻ ﯾﺘﻐﺎﺑﻦ ﺑﻪ ﻫﺬا ﻫﻮ اﻟﻈﺎﻫﺮ ﻣﻦ ﻛﻼﻣﻬﻢ وﺳﯿﺄﺗﻲ ﻓﻲ إﻧﻘﺎذ اﻟﻤﺤﺘﺮم ﻣﺎ ﯾﺆﯾﺪه ". ﻗـﺎل اﻟﺸـﯿﺦ ﻋـﺒﺪ اﻟﺤـﻤﯿﺪ اﻟﺸـﺮواﻧـﻲ ﻓـﻲ ﺣـﺎﺷـﯿﺘﻪ ﻋـﻠﯿﻪ: "(ﻗـﻮﻟـﻪ وﯾـﺒﺎح ﺗـﺮﻛـﻪ ﻟـﻨﺤﻮ ﺣـﺼﺎد إﻟـﺦ) أﻓـﺘﻰ اﻷذرﻋـﻲ ﺑـﺄﻧـﻪ ﯾـﺠﺐ ﻋـﻠﻰ اﻟـﺤﺼﺎدﯾـﻦ ﺗـﺒﯿﯿﺖ اﻟـﻨﯿﺔ ﻓـﻲ رﻣـﻀﺎن ﻛـﻞ ﻟـﯿﻠﺔ ﺛـﻢ ﻣـﻦ ﻟـﺤﻘﻪ ﻣـﻨﻬﻢ ﻣﺸـﻘﺔ ﺷﺪـﯾﺪـة أﻓﻄـﺮ وإﻻ ﻓﻼ. ﻧـﻬﺎﯾـﺔ. زاد اﻹﯾـﻌﺎب: وﻇـﺎﻫـﺮ أﻧـﻪ ﯾـﻠﺤﻖ ﺑـﺎﻟـﺤﺼﱠﺎدﯾـﻦ ﻓـﻲ ذﻟـﻚ ﺳـﺎﺋـﺮُ أرﺑــﺎب اﻟــﺼﻨﺎﺋــﻊ اﻟــﻤﺸﻘﺔ، وﻗــﻀﯿﺔ إﻃــﻼﻗــﻪ أﻧــﻪ ﻻ ﻓــﺮق ﺑــﯿﻦ اﻟــﻤﺎﻟــﻚ واﻷﺟــﯿﺮ اﻟــﻐﻨﻲ وﻏــﯿﺮه واﻟـﻤﺘﺒﺮع، وﯾﺸﻬـﺪ ﻟـﻪ إﻃـﻼﻗُـﻬﻢ اﻵﺗـﻲ ﻓـﻲ اﻟـﻤﺮﺿـﻌﺔ اﻷﺟـﯿﺮة أو اﻟـﻤﺘﺒﺮﻋـﺔ وإن ﻟـﻢ ﺗـﺘﻌﯿﻦ ﻧـﻌﻢ ﯾـﺘﺠﻪ أﺧـﺬا ﻣـﻤﺎ ﯾـﺄﺗـﻲ ﻓـﯿﻬﺎ ﺗـﻘﯿﯿﺪ ذﻟـﻚ ﺑـﻤﺎ إذا اﺣـﺘﯿﺞ ﻟـﻔﻌﻞ ﺗـﻠﻚ اﻟـﺼﻨﻌﺔ ﺑـﺄن ﺧـﯿﻒ ﻣـﻦ ﺗـﺮﻛـﻬﺎ ﻧـﻬﺎرا ﻓﻮات ﻣﺎل ﻟﻪ وﻗﻊ ﻋﺮﻓﺎ" اﻫـ . ﻫـﺬا ﻋـﻦ اﻟـﻤﺒﺎرﯾـﺎت اﻟـﺘﻲ ﻻ ﻣـﻨﺎص ﻟـﻼﻋـﺐ ﻣـﻦ أداﺋـﻬﺎ، أﻣـﺎ اﻟـﺘﺪرﯾـﺒﺎت ﻓـﻤﺎ دام أﻧـﻪ ﯾـﻤﻜﻦ اﻟـﺘﺤﻜﻢ ﻓـﻲ وﻗـﺘﻬﺎ ﻓـﯿﺠﺐ أن ﺗـﻜﻮن أﺛـﻨﺎء اﻟـﻠﯿﻞ ﺣـﺘﻰ ﻻ ﺗـﺘﻌﺎرض ﻣـﻊ ﻗـﺪرة اﻟـﻼﻋـﺐ ﻋـﻠﻰ اﻟـﺼﯿﺎم، وإذا ﺧـﺎﻟـﻒ اﻟـﻤﺴﺆوﻟـﻮن ذﻟـﻚ ﻣـﻊ ﻗـﺪرﺗـﻬﻢ ﻋـﻠﻰ ﺟـﻌﻠﻬﺎ ﻟـﯿﻼً ﻓـﻬﻢ آﺛـﻤﻮن؛ ﻷﻧـﻪ ﻻ ﯾـﺨﻔﻰ أن ﻣـﺎ ﺟـﺎز ﻟـﻠﻀﺮورة أو اﻟـﺤﺎﺟـﺔ اﻟـﻘﺎﺋـﻤﺔ ﻣـﻘﺎﻣـﻬﺎ ﻻ ﯾـﺠﻮز أن ﯾـﺘﻌﺪاﻫـﺎ، واﻟـﻀﺮورة ﺗـﻘﺪر ﺑـﻘﺪرﻫـﺎ، واﷲ ﺳـﺒﺤﺎﻧـﻪ وﺗـﻌﺎﻟـﻰ ﯾـﻘﻮل: ﴿ﻓَـﻤَﻦِ اﺿْـﻄُﺮﱠ ﻏَـﯿْﺮَ ﺑَـﺎغٍ وَﻻَ ﻋَـﺎدٍ ﻓَـﻼَ إِﺛْـﻢَ ﻋَـﻠَﯿْﻪِ﴾ [اﻟـﺒﻘﺮة: 173]، ﻓﺄﻧﺎط ارﺗﻔﺎع اﻹﺛﻢ ﺑﻌﺪم اﻟﺒﻐﻲ واﻻﻋﺘﺪاء . واﷲ ﺳﺒﺤﺎﻧﻪ وﺗﻌﺎﻟﻰ أﻋﻠﻢ أﻣــــــﺎﻧﺔ اﻟﻔﺘــــــﻮى

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259 Appendix F: Fatwa for The Soccer Player - German Version

Fatwa der El-Azhar für den Profifußball im Monat Ramadan Frage: wir haben es gehört, das viele Fußballspieler im Monat Ramadan nicht Fasten, mit der Begründung, dass sie wegen der Leistung die sie erbringen müssen, nicht fasten können. Was sagt die Scharia in diesem Fall. Antwort Der Arbeitsvertrag zwischen dem Spieler und dem Verein, zwingt den Spieler zu einer bestimmten Leistung und wenn diese Arbeit, laut Vertrag, ( nicht für Amateur – Hobbyfußball ) seine einzige Einkommensquelle ist und wenn er im Monat Ramadan die Fußballspiele bestreiten muss und das Fasten Einfluss auf seine Leistung hat, dann darf er das Fasten brechen. Die Gelehrten haben dem Arbeitnehmer oder dem Arbeitgeber, der anstrengende Arbeit leisten muss und für ihn das Fasten ein Hinderungsgrund darstellt oder ihn schwach macht, das Fasten brechen erlaubt. Wie es in den Hanafia Fikh vorgesehen, wenn jemand sich durch einen Arbeitsvertrag verpflichtet hat - in diesem Fall durch den Profivertrag – und wenn der Ramadan kommt und er aufgrund seiner Arbeit nicht fasten kann, dann darf er das Fasten brechen, auch wenn er genug zum Lebensunterhalt besitzt. Viele Gelehrten von verschiedenen Rechtsschulen haben in diesem Zusammen- hang ihre Meinung geäußert z.B. der Gelehrte ibn Abedin Al-Hanafi, der Gelehrte Al-Hattab Al- Maleki, ibn Hager Al-Haeichami Al-Schafie und Abdullhamied Al-Schruani das diejenigen Arbeitnehmer oder Arbeitgeber die anstrengende Arbeit verrichten müssen, oder die Frau die für andere Stillen

260 muss oder die Bauern und ihre Mitarbeiter die Getreide ernten oder andere landwirtschaftliche Erzeugnisse ernten, wie auch die Kranken oder der Bauarbeiter, für alle gilt die Regel, wenn sie durch das Fasten im Monat Ramadan auf ihren Lebensunterhalt verzichten müssen und andere Leute um Spende bitten, dann sollen sie das Fasten brechen und ihre Arbeit verrichten. Wenn die Fußballspiele im Laufe des Tages gespielt werden müssen, und der Spieler mitmachen muss, dann kann man das Training zu später Stunde, z.B. in die Nacht verlegen, damit der Spieler mit trainieren kann, sollten die Verantwortlichen dazu nicht bereit sein, dann ist ihnen die Sünde zuzuschreiben. Allah sagte: ( Wer sich aber in einer Zwangslage befindet, ohne zu begehren oder das Maß zu überschreiten, für den ist es keine Sünde ) 2 / 173 Fatwa Sekretariat El-Azhar 21 / 08 / 2008 Übersetzer vom 23 / 07 / 2010 Omar Soufan

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