Appropriating Differences Turkish German Rap

Appropriating Difference: Turkish-German RapAuthor(s): Heinz IckstadtSource: Amerikastudien / American Studies, Vol. 44, No. 4 (1999), pp. 571-578Published by: Universittsverlag WINTER GmbhStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41157976 .Accessed: 16/02/2015 23:27

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Appropriating Difference: Turkish-German Rap

Heinz Ickstadt

ABSTRACT

This essay tries to apply the debate on American multiculturalism to an understanding of the bi-cultural existence of a second generation of Turkish immigrants to Berlin, and the cultural ne- gotiations among several cultural traditions that gave rise to Turkish-German rap. In appropriating American hip-hop, young Turkish-German rappers make use especially of black cultural assertions of protest and ethnic difference to express their own cultural state of "in-betweenness," thus mixing- musically and verbally- elements of three different cultures. Expressing themselves in their difference, they have come to understand their existence between cultures not only as a state of deprivation but also as one of personal freedom and economic opportunity.

I

In a recent qualifying match for the European soccer championship, Germany faced Turkey in Munich's Olympic Stadium. The match ended in a draw, but the German players complained afterwards that they hadn't really had home advantage. It seemed as if there had been more Turkish spectators in the stadium than Germans: And indeed, more than half of the sixty thousand were enthusiastically waving Turkish flags and rooted for the Turkish side. Five players in the Turkish team had been born in Germany- one player, born in Turkey, had become a German citizen and played in the German team. He was booed by the Turkish fans whenever he touched the ball. Of course, there was no German who had turned Turkish citizen and played on the Turkish side to be booed by the Germans.

To be sure, some of these Turkish spectators had accompanied their team from Tur- key, but the greater majority by far had come from Munich and from all over Ger- many, where they had been living for decades, many of them having German and Turkish passports. Although some of these might eventually return to Turkey, for others such expression of cultural loyalty as cheering for their old homeland in a soccer match was a compensation for their staying in Germany, or an emotional relief from the strain of a bi-cultural or bi-national existence.

It is in view of such transnational and transcultural complexities that ongoing de- bates in American Studies add a special dimension to American Studies in Europe. I consider it interesting and useful, therefore, to apply the debate on American multiculturalism to an understanding of the European scene, or more concretely, to my own immediate social and cultural environment: i. e., to the situation of young Turkish Germans (a third generation of immigrants) in Berlin. To do this seems all the more plausible since they themselves apply the forms of American minorities' cultural expression-especially hiphop (i.e., break dance and rap)- to their own need for expressing themselves. I call this short paper "Appropriating Difference" because those


572 Heinz Ickstadt

Turkish-German rappers (in Berlin and elsewhere) have indeed appropriated especially black cultural assertions of protest and of difference to articulate their own difference from a dominant and hostile German culture. In assuming for themselves the role of Germany's "blacks," they provide a measure of their own cultural alienation. If pushed a little as to the relevance of such an analogy, they freely admit its limits but also point out its expressive possibilities, since it opens for them a wide margin of role play: of acknowledging and, at the same time, making fun of the fantasies Germans have about Turks, by playing the role of the "bad, bad Turk," a mean tough, deceit- fully clever with his knife- in any case, potentially a criminal. The names of early rap groups echo such "black" self-stylization: "Da Crime Posse," "White Nigga Posse," or "Islamic Force." The word "Kanake," which some Germans use when they want to in- sult Turks, was eventually adopted by them as a term of proud, if ironic, self-identifica- tion. Thus the group that originally called itself "Islamic Force" recently changed its name to "KanAk," and Kanak Sprak (the title of a book written by Turkish-German author Feridun Zaimoglu, one of a new generation of Turkish-German writers, artists, and film-makers) refers to a special underground lingo (neither Turkish nor German but a mixture of both) that Turkish-German rappers use as a third language.1

II

Let me pause here for a moment and supply some historical framework. There are 2.5 million Turkish people of the first, second, and third generations living in Ger- many- 170,000 of them in Berlin, making it the largest Turkish city outside Turkey. 82% of these are under 50 years old, and about half is younger than twenty-five. 70% of Berlin's Turkish population have a permission of long-term residence, 60% were born here. There is an extensive and solid infrastructure now of almost 6,000 Turkish firms and businesses with 20,000 employees. This, of course, has not always been the case.

The first generation of guest workers arriving in the sixties were totally alienated from German society and culture, and not only for linguistic reasons, since they were completely unprepared for the change from a pre-modern agrarian to a thoroughly urban existence and into a geographical, social, and cultural climate that appeared ex- ceedingly cold to them. In addition, the Germans were not particularly interested in their successful cultural transplantation. The Turks were worked hard, and although they received the benefits of the German social system in compensation for the physi- cal and emotional damage they might experience, they were expected to go back to Turkey. In fact, German industry preferred a system of fast turnovers, until it realized

1 Feridun Zaimoglu, Kanak Sprak: 24 Mitne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rot- buch, 1995); see also Zaimoglu's novel Abschaum (1997) and his latest book Koppstoff (1998). As to "The New German Cinema- made by young Turks," I owe almost all my information to Deniz Gktrk and her paper on "Turkish Women on German Streets: Closure and Exposure in Transnational Cinema" (ms. to be published in Myrto Konstantarakos's Space in European Cin- ema). Gktrk especially mentions Sinan Cetin's Berlin in Berlin (1993) and Hussi Kutlucan's comedy Ich Chef Du Turnschuh (1998).


Appropriating Difference: Turkish-German Rap 573

that it might yet be cheaper to make use of the acquired expertise of those who had come earlier. In any case, migrant workers slowly became foreign co-citizens, with per- mits of residence but without German citizenship (since citizenship was granted only after 15 years of residence). The children they had brought with them from Turkey and who now grew up in Germany inevitably became a problem: for their Turkish parents, because they wanted to escape from the restrictions of Turkish cultural and religious customs. (I remember vividly the tragic figure of a Turkish father desperately going from one Turkish restaurant to another in search of his daughter who had run away from home.) Yet Turkish adolescents were also considered a problem by the Germans because they seemed unruly and unmanageable, preferring the street to home and school. In the seventies, over 80% of the Turkish children did not finish school; by the end of the eighties, however, that rate was down to 24%.

In other respects also, the situation has eased: Many of the first generation, after having lived in the country for the required 15 years, made use of their option to become German citizens. Since 1991, young foreigners have been able to become Ger- man citizens if they are younger than 23 and if they can give proof of eight years of residence and six years of school. When, or if, the new laws of the Social Democratic and Green coalition will come into effect, all Turkish children born in Germany will automatically become German citizens, i.e., they will have dual citizenship until the age of 18, when they will have to decide for either one or the other. If the problem of the second generation in the 1980s was illiteracy and existence in a no-man's land between two cultures, that of the third generation in the 1990s is one of unemployment. Unemployment among young Turkish-Germans is more than twice as high (30%) than that among young Germans.2

Nevertheless, it is this third generation that does not consider the state of cultural in-betweenness primarily in terms of alienation but in terms of opportunity and en- richment. If their parents and grandparents were marked by a sense of loss, of having given too much and gained too little, of being cut off from their former home as well as from the still alien environment they now lived in, these children consider Berlin their home and see no reason for going back to Tlirkey- except to go there on vaca- tion or on visits to their relatives. And it is this third generation that uses American hip-hop to create its own cultural identity, which is neither German nor Turkish, but between "the norms both of the 'host culture' and the parental culture," in other words, specifically Turkish-German.

2 1 want to thank Ms. Selver Wesenack from the Berlin Senate's Office of the Auslnder- beauftragte for giving me not only a two-hour interview but also a great amount of material on the Turkish population in Berlin, especially on the situation of the young, the various programs to further integration, on existing laws, and on Turkish cultural life in Berlin: Bericht zur Integra- tions- und Auslnderpolitik, 1996/97; "Berliner Jugendliche trkischer Herkunft," Pressemittei- lung, 12 December 1997; Einbrgerung: Hinweise fr den Erwerb der deutschen Staatsange- hrigkeit (1998); Martin Greve, Musik aus der Trkei in Berlin (1997); Martin Greve and Tlay Cinar, Das Trkische Berlin (1998). The dedication of Barbara John, Berlin's Auslnder- beauftragte, and her staff is impressive. Unfortunately, her office does not have any political power and depends on the goodwill of the Berlin politicians to listen and be persuaded.


574 Heinz Ickstadt

III

Throughout Europe, American popular culture has been used by the young to mark the difference between generations, the break with the cultural habits and mores of their parents. This was true of postwar West Germany as much as it is now true of post-Wall Poland or Russia. In addition, it is now also increasingly used to mark ethnic or cultural difference on top of marking the generational gap. Hip-hop especially "lent itself to becoming a vehicle of ethnic minority and allied youth protest against . . . discrimination anywhere. British Black and Asian, Franco-Maghrebi, German Turkish, and other bi-cultural (or rather, in view of their appropriation of trappings of Ameri- can culture, tricultural) rappers in Europe are seen and heard as 'voices from the ethnic ghetto,' speaking out on behalf of new generations of post-migrant 'communi- ties.'"3 All Turkish-German musicians I talked to emphasized the importance that Af- rican-American music had for them. They all believed that there was a great affinity between African- American musical culture and Turkish musicality (a sense of rhythm and melody) but also a shared cultural appreciation of sensuousness and laid-back- ness which they did not find in the dominant culture surrounding them. As long as the American Army was in Berlin, they did not go to German but to American dis- cos-because the music and the dancing were more to their liking, to be sure, but perhaps also because there they did not experience the discrimination they might encounter in German discotheques. (A well-known rapper of the group "Islamic Force," Boe B., recalls how he heard his songs played in the same German disco that refused to let him in.)

Most of the rappers I talked to began their careers by singing in English (imitating their respective favorite African- American singers), then changed to Turkish, and fi- nally sang in Turkish and German. When the hip-hop scene established itself in the eighties, Turkish rappers and break dancers frequently cooperated with German social workers: They used government-financed youth and community centers as perform- ance spaces (like the "Naunynritze" in Berlin) and did not mind cooperating with social workers at all to keep Turkish kids away from drugs and off the street. One of the songs of "Da Crime Posse," "Der Weg" ("The Way"), plays with the sinister and blood-curdling macho stereotype of the "bad" Turk only to persuade its audience that this is not the "right way."

However, their ambition very soon went beyond social work and its local venues. In 1994, a Turkish manager of the Berlin hip-hop scene suggested that the local rapper ERCI.E, the Nuremberg rap group KARAKAN, and "Da Crime Posse" from the Northern German city of Kiel merge to form one group which called itself CARTEL.

3 Tom Cheeseman, "Hip Hop in Germany," Debatte: Review of Contemporary German Affairs 6.2 (Nov. 1998): 191-214. 1 also got some information from a lengthy seminar paper by Ulf Lip- pitz, Isabell Hoffmann, Steffen Hallaschka, and Steffanie Metz on "Rap Music in Germany: A Case Study," written for Gnter Lenz's Hauptseminar on "Transnational American Culture Studies" (Humboldt Universitt, SS 1998). I am grateful to Prof. Lenz for allowing me to read it. I am also indebted to Dr. Sabine Sielke for giving me all the considerable material she had on African-American rap. And, of course, I thank especially AMIGO, ERCI.E, and AZIZA-A for the long interviews they gave me in September and October 1999.



They made a CD which was moderately successful in Germany but became a huge success in Turkey after a triumphant tour of the group which filled several soccer sta- diums and established hip-hop in Turkey. Musically, they combined an insistent hard- driving beat with Turkish melodic arabesques, which makes for a kind of rap you may never have heard before and seems to bely their claim of musical affinity between Af- rican Americans and Turks.

With the exception of Da Crime Posse's "Der Weg," the texts were all in Turkish with a few German phrases and sentences strewn in here and there. Despite- or because of- its success, the group dissolved very quickly- partly because of divergent personal interests but also because it got into political trouble. The militant texts, especially of KARAKAN, which exploited the Turkish-German situation on the margins by preaching a gospel of symbolic rebellion and subversion, was misunderstood by the Turkish nationalist right-wing (the "Gray Wolves") as a call for action. ERCI.E cer- tainly didn't want to have anything to do with this. And I think one can safely say of the present Turkish-German hip-hop scene in Berlin that its protagonists are more concerned with finding a place through achieving individual expression than with politics and ideologies. As AZIZA-A, the "queen of oriental rap," said to me: She would die if anyone should force her to decide to be either German or Turkish. Her place was in-between- a situation she enjoyed not only in terms of personal enrich- ment but as a chance to find a professional career. Let me illustrate this with the brief discussion of three individual examples- all of them representatives of this third generation I talked about: a break dancer, a male rapper and a female rapper. They are all of about the same age (i. e., in their mid twenties) and are all local heroes in the Turkish-German hip-hop scene.

IV

Kadir Memis came to Berlin when he was ten. He has been in Germany for fifteen years now and is yet unable to get a German passport- in all likelihood because the German bureaucracy doesn't consider his status of independent artist as a steady enough source of income (one of the requirements for gaining citizenship). He very much wishes he had been born in Berlin because then he would be a German citizen and would have no trouble getting an American visa. After elementary school, he wanted to be trained as technical designer but then decided that dancing was more important to him. He began "hype dancing" and "electric boogaloo" in 1987, then specialized in "B-boying," "Locking," and "Popping." He is extremely proud of the fact that he acquired most of his moves by himself. He is known under his artist name AMIGO and is co-founder of a break dance group, "Flying Steps" (a multinational group of four Turks, one German, one Russian, one Arab, one Filipino, and one Swiss), which has performed on German television and at break dance events throughout Europe. (A few days after I interviewed him, he and his group went to a two-month engagement in Paris.) There are, he told me, break dance battles every year, huge con- tests-like this year's in Leipzig- among European break dance groups. The point of these battles is to create figures of danced aggression without touching the antagonist. "Flying Steps" has won these battles several times.


576 Heinz Ickstadt

AMIGO is obsessed with the idea of doing something that would distinguish him from others. He believes that most of his Turkish-German peers are lost somewhere in a cultural no-man's-land. He therefore wants to know about his cultural roots. That is why he studies Turkish history, customs, and folklore; and yet he does not want to go back to Turkey. To be proud of his Turkish ancestry is one thing, to go back there quite another. Berlin is his home. His main concern is to create "respect": to gain the respect of his parents, to be sure; or the respect of his German environment. But most of all, he understands "respect" as a commitment to a sense of craftsmanship. He con- siders himself an artist with a distinct signature. It consists in his introducing Charly Chaplinesque pantomime into his repertoire of movements- as a comic and ironically distanced subtext to the aggressive and distinctly male moves of break dance battles. I should add that AMIGO is also a gifted painter mixing graffiti techniques with Turk- ish mythological motives, thus creating a strange surrealism, between dreamlike sug- gestiveness and allegorizations of time, death, and regeneration.

Through AMIGO I met ERCI.E (Erci Ergn), the well-known Berlin rapper and co- founder of CARTEL. Although he hates American commercial culture ("the destroyer of everything authentic including rap"), he says that listening to "Gangsta" rap or to groups like "Public Enemy" and "Native Tongue" has helped him form a style. But after the disappointment with CARTEL he now wants to move away from group produc- tion in order to develop a distinct individual signature. He feels that he isn't quite there yet. What he dreams of is not a collage of styles and languages but a unified style that contains different cultural elements. He totally agrees with AMIGO about the importance of "respect." He fervently believes in artistic integrity: the "scene" only keeps you from doing what you ought to do since it offers more pose than substance. To be open enough to learn and to develop is more important than anything else.

When I asked him about the specific function hip-hop might have for the Turkish community in Germany, he emphasized the fact that it allows the second and third generations to vent their protest against a culture that does not want them or is un- willing to accept them on an equal footing. Of course, their parents are of no great help either since they are even more alienated from Germany than their children. Many of them went back when the German government offered them a golden hand- shake. ERCI himself was born in Berlin shortly before his parents went back to Tur- key. After several years, they decided that they couldn't live there either and returned to Berlin when ERCI was four. He has dual citizenship, two homes and two cultures: In Berlin he feels strange and yet at home, in Turkey he feels at home and yet strange. Nevertheless he cannot imagine that he will ever go back to Turkey. His German is absolutely flawless (of which he is very proud). He once studied Political Science at Berlin's Free University but gave it up for a career in rap.

He has two projects. One is collective: he believes that many of his generation suffer from not really belonging to either place or culture. Therefore his rap- like related developments in literature, film, and the arts- is to help create a third culture in-between. His second project is more personal: he dreams of making use of his bi-cultural abilities by succeeding in two markets, in Turkey and in Germany. His song "Weil ich ein Trke bin" ("Because I Am a Turk") has been recorded in German and in Turkish- all in all in two versions in each language which are musically quite different from each other. The Turkish versions contain more arabesques to a different degree of orientalization.



In a fifth version, without text, the Turkish elements cover the rap elements almost completely. The song is emblematic in its linking deep anger about experienced discrimination with a self-ironic revenge dream of success. The third stanza ends: "It's quite simple- I live here and come from there / 1 shall stay, and I don't see why you should care / Where were you when they made ERCI chancellor."

I had heard AZIZA-A at a German American Studies conference on multiculturalism several years ago, where I found her mixing of African- American and Turkish musical styles and of German and Turkish texts most fascinating. However, I had no idea how to contact her until I was lucky enough to encounter a salesgirl in a music shop who casually said that she might be able to help because AZIZA was her best friend. We met in a Turkish Caf much frequented by mixed German-Turkish couples and their children. I was immediately struck by the unassuming ease with which she dealt with her considerable local reputation. A7XA was born in Berlin to parents who had come to the city in 1967 and returned to Turkey- after retiring- more than thirty years later, in 1998. Both their children, however- AZIZA and her brother- decided to stay in Berlin. AZIZA, who was trained to be a nurse and worked in a photo store before she gave everything up to start a career in music, tried for half a year to establish herself in Turkey but failed. She now calls Berlin her city and sees no reason why she should live anywhere else. She likes Turkish music even at its most sentimental, but also grew up on black music and once sang the blues in English. Until some friends persuaded her to do rap and cooperated with her to record a first CD three years ago. She has performed in diverse places in Berlin, appeared on German Television, and is a well-known figure in the Berlin hip-hop scene. Her music, like all rap music, is not com- posed, of course, but mixed from pre-recorded sounds and samples of musical phrases. It is, however, softer than that of her male colleagues, and she tries to get away from what she calls early rap's hard and raucous beats, and to become more melodic and lyrical by absorbing non-rap styles.

She writes her own texts, mixing German with Turkish folk sayings or children's rhymes. When I said that her texts show how much care she takes with them, she con- fessed that- although she doesn't read much and is not greatly interested in literature-she wants her texts to be poems and carry a lyrical mood. When I told her that ERCI had objected to some of her feminist texts (for example, "Es ist Zeit," the title song of her first CD) because they confirmed German notions of Turkish machismo and patriarchy, she was sorry but thought it couldn't be helped. Since she is Turkish- German and a woman, her expressing herself as a woman is part of her identity. Her modest and yet almost exuberant self-confidence seems to issue from the knowledge of her bilingual and bicultural abilities. While we talked, her cell phone rang several times and, when answering, she drifted easily from one language into the other. She calls herself AZIZA-A because she does not consider herself a self-serving rapper but something like a community-builder, "A" standing for "abla" ("big sister"). When I left, there were people waiting to talk to her. Like AMIGO and ERCI, she insists on the importance of respect, and like ERCI she sees nothing wrong with trying to serve two markets. Her next CD will be in German because, so she said, the words she wrote happened to come to her in German. But there is no reason why she would not also write in Turkish or Kanak- to her mind, at this particular moment, everything seems possible.


578 Heinz Ickstadt

V

All the young Turkish Germans I talked to were most impressive in their uninhibited friendliness and easy readiness to communicate. (However, there are others, as AZIZA pointed out with some emphasis.) When I asked her about her relation to German musicians and rappers, she said that, sure, she would like to cooperate with them but, although they were friendly, they were not interested- perhaps too shy, perhaps simply not curious enough. She seemed almost amused about this, but also somewhat hurt. It reminded me of what Du Bois said about "double consciousness," as a knowledge from "behind the veil."4 This new generation of hyphenated citizens knows at least two cultures, whereas the Germans know (and want to know) only one. From such double knowledge, these Turkish-German rappers draw confidence and a sense of freedom-perhaps even superiority- together with a sense of playfully ironic distance. Their playing with stereotypes (i. e., of how Germans stereotype Turks and vice versa, or of how Turks stereotype themselves), their assumption of different roles, and their putting on of masks: all that describes the measure of this freedom, a freedom which their parents never had and which they can't imagine ever to have should they choose (or be forced) to go back to Turkey. As one young Turkish-German woman said, this sit- ting between two cultural chairs does not necessarily imply falling into empty cultural space but is a challenge to find a third chair to sit upon comfortably.

It will probably still take some time until Germans fully understand how much their own culture has been enriched by these developments. On the other hand, one might well ask how stable that third cultural chair really is. Is it a transitional phenomenon bound to disappear with the next generation of fully integrated Germans with Turkish names? Or will it be kept in place by a global tendency toward a bicultural existence (through the coming into being of a united transnational/transcultural Europe, for example)? Or will it be taken out of the logic of an ongoing generational adjustment by the demands of a global market favoring a multilingual and multicultural "youth culture"? As a kind of professional role-play, quite regardless of whether its protagonists still regard themselves as culturally "hyphenated" or not? The future should, in any case, be fascinating.

4 "... the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil and gifted with second-sight in this American world,- a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity" (W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie McKay [New York: Norton, 1997]: 615). That there is also wisdom and supe- rior knowledge (the power of the powerless) gained from this "double consciousness" is implied in Du Bois's book, and it showed in the sad pride of those I interviewed.


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Issue Table of ContentsAmerikastudien / American Studies, Vol. 44, No. 4 (1999), pp. 1-7, 459-651Front MatterPublic History and National Identity in the United States [pp. 459-475]"Gone, but not forgotten"But Almost: The German Heritage of Arkansas [pp. 477-496]Music, Religion, and Darwinian Science in "The Damnation of Theron Ware" [pp. 497-517]"The Varieties of Human Experience": Sexual Intimacy, Heredity, and Emotional Conflict in Gertrude Stein's Early Work [pp. 519-543]The Un-American Dream [pp. 545-553]Haunted by Ghosts of a Dream: Thomas Pynchon's "Mason &Dixon (for Peter Freese, who knows all about Pynchon and entropy") [pp. 555-568]Forum[Editor's Note] [pp. 569-569]Report from the Annual Convention of the ASA and CAAS, Montreal, 28-31 October 1999 [pp. 569-570]Appropriating Difference: Turkish-German Rap [pp. 571-578]

ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 579-581]Review: untitled [pp. 581-583]Review: untitled [pp. 583-585]Review: untitled [pp. 585-586]Review: untitled [pp. 586-587]Review: untitled [pp. 587-588]Review: untitled [pp. 588-590]Review: untitled [pp. 590-590]Review: untitled [pp. 590-592]Review: untitled [pp. 592-594]Review: untitled [pp. 594-596]Review: untitled [pp. 596-603]Review: untitled [pp. 603-605]Review: untitled [pp. 605-608]Review: untitled [pp. 608-610]Review: untitled [pp. 610-612]

BIBLIOGRAPHYPublications in American Studies from German-Speaking Countries, 1998 [pp. 613-644]

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