language and globalization series editors: sue wright and helen kelly-holmes

Language and Migration ina Multilingual Metropolis

Patrick Stevenson

Berlin Lives

Language and Globalization

Series Editors

Sue WrightUniversity of Portsmouth

Portsmouth, United Kingdom

Helen Kelly-HolmesUniversity of Limerick

Department of Languages, Literature, CulCastletroy Limerick, Ireland

Aims of the SeriesIn the context of current political and social developments, where the national group is not so clearly defined and delineated, the state language not so clearly dominant in every domain, and cross-border flows and transfers affects more than a small elite, new patterns of language use will develop. This series aims to provide a framework for reporting on and analysing the linguistic outcomes of globalization and localization.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14830

Patrick Stevenson

Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

Berlin Lives

Language and GlobalizationISBN 978-3-319-40605-3 ISBN 978-3-319-40606-0 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40606-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957163

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

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Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer NatureThe registered company is Springer International Publishing AGThe registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Patrick StevensonModern Languages, Faculty of HumanitiesUniversity of SouthamptonSouthampton, United Kingdom

For Jo, Rosie and Jack

vii

This book represents a distillation of research carried out in many parts of Berlin between 2011 and 2015. Some of this work was conducted in libraries, particularly in the Berlin-Studien section of the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin, and I am grateful for the free use of these facilities. However, the vast majority of the time I devoted to this project was spent wearing out many pairs of shoes tramping around the streets of the city and talking with an extraordinary range of individual people who kindly agreed to share their migration experiences with me. Since guaranteeing their anonymity was a fundamental part of our agreement, I sadly cannot acknowledge my debt and gratitude to them by name, but I would nevertheless like to record here my warmest thanks to all of them. Many of the people I spoke to don’t appear in this book, as I had to select a small number to achieve my purpose; however, these conver-sations—which may yet find their way into subsequent publications—made a deep impression on me and all of them influenced my thinking on the book’s subject. All my ‘research partners’ on this project therefore contributed to the picture I have tried to create.

Particular thanks must, of course, go to the five people whose stories form the centrepiece of the book in Chap. 4. I very much wish I could name them here, but I shall have to restrict myself to a heartfelt expres-sion of gratitude and an acknowledgement that without them there would have been no book. More than anything else, I hope they will feel

Acknowledgements

viii Acknowledgements

that I have done their stories justice and that this collective account of the experience of language in migration has furthered our understanding of complex social processes of ‘becoming’.

I would not even have met all these people without the kind and enthusiastic support of several key intermediaries, who so willingly and generously gave their time to help me find suitable conversation part-ners. Thank you, above all, Carol, Lucy, Natasha, Andrea, Gisela, Ugo; also Heike Marquard, former Integrationsbeauftragte for Lichtenberg. This is also the place to thank two friends for providing me with com-fortable accommodation during my visits to Berlin: Heike Wiese, who kindly lent me her house one summer, and my old friend and colleague Adrian Sewell, with whom I have shared a fascination for the city for over 40 years and whose flat in Schudomastraße was my home base on many occasions during this period.

On a practical note, I am hugely grateful to several people who helped me overcome some of the challenges in the preparation of the manuscript. Chris Lutton, Luke Coles and Pham Phuong Hoa (current and past stu-dents in Southampton) provided some of the photographs (in Berlin and Hanoi) and George Turner expertly prepared them for publication. Mark Dover in Cartographic Services, Geography and Environment, at the University of Southampton drew the map of Berlin. Erin Forward kindly made time in her busy schedule as our departmental adminis-trator to draw several figures. Iustin Dobrean (student in the School of Architecture at the University of Portsmouth) produced the drawings of the typical Berlin Mietshaus in Chap. 4, under the expert guidance of his tutor, Kate Baker. To all of you: thank you very much.

Finally, and very importantly, there are three groups of people who played an indispensable role in the development of my thinking on the subject of this book and on its eventual form. I very much wanted to experiment with a form of writing that would be appropriate to the sub-ject of story-telling without sacrificing academic credibility: a kind of ‘genre bending’, as Palgrave’s very helpful reviewer put it. After a lifetime of writing conventional academic prose, this came as quite a challenge for me and I’m still not sure I’ve carried it off. But it gave me a great sense of liberation and I really hope the result is a ‘good read’—if not, then it

Acknowledgements ix

is, of course, entirely my own failing. Either way, I would not have been able to get to this stage without several kinds of help and encouragement.

First, I want to thank several groups of students at the University of Southampton who allowed me to try out my ideas and some of my material in a course on Language and the City. Secondly, I am deeply grateful for the detailed and critical readings of earlier drafts offered by Annette Byford, Louise Eley and Britta Schneider and for the encourag-ing feedback from Helen Kelly-Holmes and Sari Pietikäinen, which was very motivating at a difficult moment in the writing process. And I am keeping till the end my special thanks to the editorial team at Palgrave: Rebecca Brennan swept aside my initial doubts about the viability of my proposal and was wonderfully inspiring in her enthusiasm for the project; I was dismayed when she moved on to a new post when I had barely started writing, but I couldn’t have wished for a more encouraging and supportive successor than Esme Chapman, who eased me through the remainder of the process; and Chloe Fitzsimmons was extraordinarily patient and helpful throughout the final editorial and production stages.

***I would like to acknowledge with gratitude permission to use the fol-

lowing copyright material in this book: Figure 2.6 ‘Berlin Ostbahnhof ’ is a photograph from Marco Bertram’s online archive www.ddr-fotos.de; Figure 3.1 ‘Communities’ languages in Westminster, London’ is based on Figure 6 in Multilingualism in London: LUCIDE city report by Dina Mehmedbegović, Peter Skrandies, Nick Byrne and Philip Harding-Esch (the LUCIDE Project was funded by the European Commission Lifelong Learning Programme); Figures  3.3 and 3.4 ‘Distribution of Panjabi speakers in London’ and ‘Distribution of Bengali speakers in London’ are reproduced from John Eversley, Dina Mehmedbegović, Antony Sanderson, Teresa Tinsley, Michelle vonAhn and Richard Wiggins (2010) Language Capital: Mapping the languages of London’s schoolchildren by per-mission of the Education Development Trust (formerly CfBT Education Trust); and Figure  4.3 ‘Vietnamese children arriving in Moritzburg, 1955’ (a photograph by Erich Höhne and Erich Pohl) is reproduced with kind permission of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek—Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB). Some parts of Chap. 4 previ-ously appeared in my chapter entitled ‘Language (hi)stories: Researching

x Acknowledgements

migration and multilingualism in Berlin’, which was published in Kristine Horner, Ingrid de Saint-Georges and Jean-Jacques Weber (eds) (2014) Multilingualism and Mobility in Europe; I am grateful to the publisher Peter Lang for permission to use this material again here.

Southampton, March 2016

xi

Contents

Prologue xv

1 Introduction: Finding a Way In 1

2 Berlin: City of Migrations 19

3 Berlin: City of Multilingualisms 51

4 Multilingual Mietshaus: Language (Hi)stories at Mareschstraße 74 81

Epilogue 149

Appendix: Original Extracts from Interview Transcripts in Chapter 4 155

Bibliography 175

Index 191

xiii

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Märkisches Museum U-Bahn station 1 17Fig. 1.2 Märkisches Museum U-Bahn station 2 17Fig. 2.1 Migration background categories 23Fig. 2.2 Population of Germany with a migration background

in 2012 (adapted from 10. Bericht der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Migration, Flüchtlinge und Integration über die Lage der Ausländerinnen und Ausländer in Deutschland (Oktober 2014); data from: Statistisches Bundesamt, Mikrozensus 2012) 24

Fig. 2.3 Am Haus: Turkish word forms on Kreuzberg façade 27Fig. 2.4 Chợ Đồng Xuân market and war memorial, Hanoi 30Fig. 2.5 Dong Xuan Center, Lichtenberg, Berlin 30Fig. 2.6 Berlin Ostbahnhof in the 1950s 33Fig. 2.7 Kleingartenverein Togo (allotments in the African

Quarter, Wedding) 36Fig. 2.8 Huguenot refugees arriving in Berlin

(relief in the Französischer Dom) 40Fig. 2.9 Bohemian refugees arriving in Berlin

(relief on statue of Friedrich Wilhelm I, Rixdorf ) 41Fig. 2.10 Böhmisch Rixdorf (relief on statue of Friedrich

Wilhelm I, Rixdorf ) 43Fig. 2.11 Böhmischer Gottesacker: Bohemian cemetery,

Karl-Marx-Platz, Neukölln 44

xiv List of Figures

Fig. 2.12 New Synagogue, Oranienburger Straße 45Fig. 2.13 Club der Polnischen Versager/Club of Polish Failures,

Ackerstraße 47Fig. 3.1 Communities’ languages in Westminster, London

(adapted from Dina Mehmedbegović et al. (2015) Multilingualism in London: LUCIDE city report) 58

Fig. 3.2 Schüler nichtdeutscher Herkunftssprache at state schools in Berlin (derived from data in Blickpunkt Schule—Schuljahr 2014/2015, published by the Senatsverwaltung für Bildung, Jugend und Wissenschaft, Berlin) 61

Fig. 3.3 Distribution of Panjabi speakers in London (from John Eversley et al. (2010), Language Capital: Mapping the languages of London’s schoolchildren (London: CILT)) 62

Fig. 3.4 Distribution of Bengali speakers in London (from John Eversley et al. (2010), Language Capital: Mapping the languages of London’s schoolchildren (London: CILT)) 63

Fig. 3.5 Street sign in Rixdorf: Kirchgasse 66Fig. 3.6 Shop sign in Rixdorf: Textilien 67Fig. 3.7 Gallery sign in Rixdorf: exilien 67Fig. 3.8 Haus des Lehrers, Alexanderplatz 69Fig. 3.9 Dog waste sign, Rixdorf 70Fig. 3.10 Municipal dog waste bin 71Fig. 3.11 Turkcell: Advertising hoarding

for Turkish mobile phone service 72Fig. 3.12 Advertisement for shopping centre in Polish 73Fig. 3.13 Advertisement for shopping centre in Turkish 73Fig. 3.14 Multilingual BBQ skip, Monbijou Park 74Fig. 4.1 ‘Typical’ street in Berlin 82Fig. 4.2 Architectural designs of late nineteenth-century

Mietshäuser (adapted from Johann Friedrich Geist und Klaus Kürvers (1984) Das Berliner Mietshaus Band 2 1862–1945 (Munich: Prestel-Verlag)) 84

Fig. 4.3 Vietnamese children arriving in Moritzburg, 1955 (SLUB Dresden, Deutsche Fotothek, Erich Höhne and Erich Pohl) 125

xv

‘We know a great deal about multilingualism’, German linguist Ingrid Gogolin claims, but our knowledge is strangely imbalanced (Gogolin 2010). It’s certainly true that great efforts have been devoted to identifying and counting the world’s languages: global language research organizations tell us, for example, that over 700 languages are spoken by indigenous peoples in Indonesia alone. I’ll leave aside for now the fact that many linguists are sceptical about the way we have tended to accept unquestioningly the existence of neatly bounded sets of linguistic features to which we give discrete labels like English, Czech or Urdu—or Aceh, Cia-Cia and Kalabra, to stay with the Indonesian context. Let’s accept for the time being this convenient fiction, ‘a language’. The data compiled by organizations like SIL International (see Ethnologue: http://www.ethno-logue.com/), UNESCO (on endangered languages: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/endangered-languages/) and (for the USA) the Modern Language Association (https://apps.mla.org/map_main) is impressive and the maps derived from it seem to allow us to discover which languages are spoken where. Drilling further down into the data, we can see how many speakers there appear to be for each language and we can find out its relative degree of ‘vitality’: How widely is it used in a given location and for what purposes? Is its number of speakers growing or declining? Is it used as a medium of instruction in schools?

Prologue

xvi Prologue

But interesting though these research findings are, they leave many questions unanswered. For example, Gogolin goes on to ask, in relation to her (and my) area of interest, what do we know about the number of languages and their speakers in a multistorey building in a German city? How many languages, and which ones (apart from German), are spoken by students in Germany’s schools and universities? How many languages, and which ones, must municipal authorities or hospitals be able to cope with if they are to ensure unimpeded communication with their clien-tele? I think Gogolin is right to ask these questions, as they require us to consider what kinds of knowledge about language(s) are important, espe-cially in contemporary urban societies characterized by complex patterns of migration and the concomitant confluence of multiple languages in a confined space. After all, even if we can respond to her challenge, naming, counting and mapping languages in particular locations or institutions is only the first step. What do people do with these languages, what role do they play in people’s lives, how—if at all—should they be ‘managed’?

In recent years, research on the increasing complexity of urban societ-ies has highlighted a range of dimensions of diversity in terms of language knowledge and linguistic practices (Blommaert 2010, 2013; Rindler Schjerve and Vetter 2012). On the one hand, for example, census data on languages at national and regional levels has been complemented by comprehensive ‘home language surveys’ that have revealed the vast range of languages used in European cities such as Göteborg, Hamburg, The Hague, Brussels, Lyon, Madrid and Vienna (Extra and Yağmur 2004; Brizić and Hufnagl 2011). And in Language Capital, Eversley et  al. (2010) map in fascinating detail the 233 languages attested by London schoolchildren to show their spatial distribution (I’ll return to this in Chap. 3). On the other hand, many studies have been devoted to research on hybrid urban vernaculars (or ‘multiethnolects’), blending features of different languages-in-contact in particular urban settings to create new language varieties; to innovative styles of language use (‘translanguag-ing’), spontaneous mixing of different languages to achieve particular communicative effects, both in face-to-face interaction and in mediated forms; and to improvised strategies for bridging gaps in shared language knowledge. (On these various topics see, for example, Androutsopoulos 2007, 2013; Busch 2004; Eley 2015; Freywald et al. 2011; García and

Prologue xvii

Li Wei 2014; Keim 2008; Kern et al. 2011; Kosnick 2007; Pennycook 2010; Pennycook and Otsuji 2015; Rampton 2015; Wiese 2009.)

So we are developing a deeper awareness and understanding of the scope and complexity of linguistic diversity in our cities and we have gained many insights into the creative practices which have arisen as a result of intense and sometimes fleeting language contacts. We have a better appreciation of the possibilities afforded by multilingualism that offset the obstacles it is often considered to present: ‘conviviality’ is becoming the watchword, rather than deficit or disadvantage. We have a more refined feel for what Gogolin and Meinert Meyer think we should be striving for, what they call the ‘linguistic texture of migration societies’ (Gogolin and Meyer 2010).

In this short book, I want to add a biographical dimension to these demographic and interactional studies, taking an approach that I hope is sensitive to individual responses to particular historical conditions and social circumstances and contributes, in a small, experimental way, to our appreciation of the linguistic texture of Berlin. Set in the highly diverse inner city district of Neukölln, this study explores ways in which indi-viduals with family and social histories of migration reflect on how their ‘lived experience of language’ (Busch 2010, 2015) has shaped their trans-national life worlds and ways in which they structure their life stories around these experiences, both in the present and in the past (whether directly or indirectly, through ‘handed down’ family stories).

From the researcher’s perspective, this is an empirical question: ‘how is Marie’s linguistic repertoire constituted, how does she draw on it in specific contexts of interaction?’ But I want to reverse the angle of vision and ask, from the speaker’s perspective, a reflective question: ‘how has language, or how have languages, influenced the trajectory of my life and my relationships with others in changing social contexts?’ For our linguistic repertoires, the bits and pieces of language that we acquire, accumulate and sometimes relinquish are an index of the course our lives have taken. They are what Blommaert and Backus (2011) call ‘records of mobility’: ‘Repertoires’, they say, ‘are biographically organized complexes of resources, and they follow the rhythms of human lives’ (p. 9, my italics).

I have drawn inspiration from a wide range of sources and each in its own way has made me think about how we can best understand the complexity of everyday life and individual experience. A key source of

xviii Prologue

motivation on the theme was David Block’s study of migration and mul-tilingualism in London, although his perspective, focusing on members of particular ethnic and social categories, took him in a different direc-tion from where I wanted to go (Block 2006). A major influence in terms of methods was research in the sociolinguistics of narrative, especially in the context of migration and displacement (Burck 2005; De Fina and Baynham 2005; Meinhof and Galasiński 2005; Liebscher and Dailey- O’Cain 2013; Thornborrow and Coates 2005). I benefited also from research in social anthropology (Bahloul 1996; Bezirksamt Neukölln 1996a, b; Miller 2008), and I owe the idea for the particular approach I have taken to the documentary journalism of Irina Liebmann (2002; also Hirsch and Köster 2008): I’ll say more about this in Chap. 1.

It seemed to me that getting close to individuals’ ‘lived experience of language’ would require a very personal engagement with the people con-cerned, and so I adopted a method that Jenny Carl and I had used in our study of ethnic Germans in eastern central Europe (Stevenson and Carl 2010). Over the last 15 years or so, scholars such as Brigitta Busch, Rita Franceschini, Jiři Nekvapil and Anne Betten have drawn on life history research and narrative analysis to develop techniques of doing biographi-cal work with individual research participants, focusing on their experi-ence with language (Busch 2010; Franceschini 2010; Franceschini and Miecznikowski 2004; Nekvapil 2000, 2003; Thüne and Betten 2011). Following their example, I will explore aspects of the ‘language biogra-phies’ of inhabitants of a single apartment block in Berlin, a building, which, in its changing ethnic and linguistic profile, is a metaphor for the city. The stories told here are a kind of chapter in the biography of the house and collectively constitute one way of reframing Gogolin’s first question: what can we find out about the role of language in the life expe-riences of inhabitants of a multistorey building in a German city?

***And now for a change of tack. In this brief prologue I have followed

normal academic conventions of citing sources from which I have drawn ideas in support of the points I wanted to make. In the rest of the book, I’m going to depart from this practice in order to make the text as ‘read-able’ as possible. And from now on, I’m going to talk to you, as I want to address you personally, as writer to reader, rather than directing my

Prologue xix

thoughts towards an abstract audience. For the book is a kind of story about stories and story-telling, and it’s as much about process as about outcome, so I want to take you with me along the thinking routes I have travelled in carrying out this project.

Virtually every page shows my indebtedness to the work of others and I acknowledge here this debt to the many scholars whose research has informed my own thinking and is, I hope, adequately and fairly repre-sented in my discussion. I have endeavoured to list in the bibliography all those works that I have consulted and that have contributed, directly and indirectly, to the substance of this book. If you are a student: do not imitate this practice! I am permitting myself this indulgence as part of an experiment in academic writing—a kind of ‘genre bending’, as an anony-mous reviewer helpfully put it—an exception that is not intended as a precedent, far less a model. If you are a researcher, I hope you will tolerate this unconventional approach and accept it in the spirit of openness and accessibility. Whoever you are, I hope that what follows will feed your curiosity about language and the lives of others and stimulate your own ideas on how to research them.

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1© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017P. Stevenson, Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis, Language and Globalization, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40606-0_1

1Introduction: Finding a Way In

Rachel and I were sitting in Ludmila’s bar in Neukölln, central Berlin, late one Tuesday afternoon in February and the Wirtin (landlady) was telling us about her attempts to talk to her grown-up son in Russian. ‘He understands quite a lot’, Ludmila says, ‘aber diese ganzen Sätze, also, das ist alles Karambolage’. Full sentences, well, it’s just a car crash. She’s amusing talking about her life now—she can poke fun at her neighbours in Lichtenrade, the relatively posh southern suburb she now lives in: pro-fessors and company directors, sitting surrounded by all their books and ringing up the landlord to complain when she lets her dog, ein Mops (a pug), pee all over the gardens—but it hasn’t always been so easy to see the lighter side of life, as we shall see in Chap. 4.

What strikes me here, though, is not what she says but the way she says it: alles Karambolage, where did that come from? Other, more common expressions spring more readily to mind to express what she wants to say: total durcheinander (all muddled up), ganz chaotisch (really chaotic), völlig unverständlich (completely incomprehensible). Karambolage is bor-rowed from the French caramboler meaning ‘collide’, originally in refer-ence specifically to the collision between the red ball (carambole) and the

other (white) balls in billiards: technically, a ‘cannon’. This rather exotic- sounding word was perhaps too colourful to remain confined to the arcane world of table-top games played in dark, windowless rooms and it has assumed both a more general application—the violent clash between two physical objects, especially, in media stories, motor vehicles—and a figurative sense of a pile up, a shambles, a mess.

I have translated it as ‘car crash’ here as I think this currently quite common English idiom fits both the sense and the tone of her remark. It also seems appropriate as actual road accidents figure a number of times in Ludmila’s account of her life and because accidental or unforeseen encounters punctuate her story, diverting its course rather like—to shift analogies from one ball game to another—flippers batting the ball in different directions in a pinball machine. But I’ll come back to that later. I’m still wondering why she used this expression and not another, and this sets me thinking about other questions.

What else is remarkable about her language? How has this Russian woman in her mid-40s, who arrived in Berlin aged 24 and speaking no German at all, come to speak German the way she does—heavy Russian accent, fluent and effortless articulation, a wide range of idiomatic expres-sions, extensive technical bureaucratic vocabulary, a mixture of complex and truncated syntax? And then: why do Karambolagen, both literal and metaphorical, feature so prominently in her story? Why—out of all the things she could have talked about—does she choose to tell us these par-ticular episodes and in this particular way?

By now, you may have questions of your own. Perhaps I am being presumptuous here, but I can imagine you might be thinking: who is Rachel? Is that her real name? What am I doing sitting in a bar with her in the afternoon, talking to a Russian woman I had never met before? Come to that, why was Ludmila—that’s not her real name—telling her life story to me, a complete stranger, who’d just walked in off the street? And why should you be interested in what she has to say? If I am to take you with me through the rest of this book, I realize that I must be frank with you and take you as seriously as I take the various Berliners who have confided in me and whose stories are the stuff of what follows. So before going any further, I’d better address these questions.

2 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

First of all, then, I should more properly refer to my companion in the bar as ‘Rachel’, since this is indeed not her real name either. All the peo-ple I am going to introduce in the coming pages will be given new names, in order to protect their identity, but I will not otherwise draw attention to this artifice. For I want you to see them as what they are: actual people, verifiable inhabitants of Berlin, who generously gave me their time to tell me how their experiences with language helped to shape their lives.

But who is Rachel, what were she and I doing in the bar and why was Ludmila so willing to talk to us about her personal life? Well, Rachel is an American who lives with her German husband and young family in an apartment in the same building as Ludmila’s bar and she got to know her by dropping in from time to time for a coffee and a chat. They are now quite good friends; they’re on informal du terms with each other and when we call in on that February afternoon, it’s freezing cold outside and Ludmila holds Rachel’s hand to warm her up throughout most of our conversation. So she has come to trust her young American friend and when Rachel asks her if she’d be willing to talk to this British researcher who wants to write a book about people like her, she overcomes her ini-tial reluctance and consents.

Rachel is renting her flat from the owners while they’re working abroad, and I had been introduced to them—an English woman and a German man, I’ll call them Debbie and Klaus—by a mutual acquain-tance. First Debbie and then Rachel kindly acted as go-betweens to pro-vide me with introductions to some of their neighbours, all of whom had moved to Berlin from other parts of the world (from France, England, Poland, Denmark, Turkey, Israel, India and elsewhere). They also put me in touch with people who lived in other parts of the city, and these people in turn passed me on to others. This commonly used ‘snowball’ technique enabled me to establish a small network of participants for my project, some of whom will appear at some point in the book.

But why should you be interested in the life stories of a random group of Berliners? This is the most challenging question, one that I have been asked by fellow language researchers at conferences and that I feel I need to answer quite carefully here if I am to persuade you to read on. Why have I chosen these individuals and not others? What makes their stories particularly worth retelling? Do they have some kind of broader relevance,

1 Introduction: Finding a Way In 3

and if so, what is it? These are complex issues that concern the intricate relationship between the individual and the social. To explain the way I see this I’ll need to talk you through some ideas about migration and how it’s experienced; this will take a few pages but it’s fundamental to what I’m trying to do in this book, so I hope you’ll bear with me.

Let’s go back to Ludmila. She came to Berlin from the medium-sized town Mineralnye Vody in the northern Caucasus region of southern Russia in 1995 as a Spätaussiedlerin: someone from the former Soviet Union or another eastern European state who is entitled to German citizenship through being able to document her German ancestry. About 4.5  million ethnic Germans have migrated on this basis since 1950, around 70 per cent of whom identified themselves in this way in the 2011 census. So this is a significant social category and they constitute a fairly substantial proportion of the country’s population: Spätaussiedler and their family members account for about 3.2 million out of 81 million in total. As you can well imagine, their arrival over such a long period of time has had a complex impact on the social fabric of the places in which they have settled. And in spite of their German heritage, they must have found their relocation a challenging, in some cases deeply unsettling, experience. No doubt, then, they will all have interesting stories to tell.

So is Ludmila’s story to be seen as in some way representative of the experience of all Spätaussiedler? Or—to anticipate some of the other sto-ries—does Ferhat’s narrative reveal insights into the lives of all Turkish Kurds in Germany? Is Marek or Beata a prototypical Polish migrant? Does Hoa’s story tell us everything we might want to know about Vietnamese contract workers? Surely not. Country of origin cannot be a person’s only defining characteristic—what about gender, age, social class, religion, education, occupation, urban or rural background?—and even individuals who share many such features have their own distinct per-sonal histories that will have had a bearing on their migration experience. And what of their reasons for migrating? Some move voluntarily in search of employment or a better life, others have fled persecution or seek refuge from military conflicts or natural disasters; some come as students and stay on to work after completing their studies, and others follow family members already resident in the country.

4 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

Yet, origins are important. ‘Where we come from’ is a complex constel-lation of both tangible and abstract notions—including place, certainly, but even location is a historically contingent concept: ask any inhabitant of a presently or formerly divided country like Cyprus, Vietnam, Korea or Germany, or a city like Nicosia, Jerusalem or, well, Berlin. In what sense can two people born in Berlin, one before 1990 and one after, say they ‘come from the same place’? When someone says ‘Where I come from, you could leave your door unlocked at night, that’s how safe it was’ they are talking not just about a town, village or neighbourhood but about a (possibly idealized) way of life, and more often than not such claims are made in the past tense, conjuring up an image of how behaviours and values have changed with the passage of time.

But physical displacement or relocation is important in answering the question ‘Where do you come from?’, because if the response is simply ‘here’ there seems to be no call for further discussion, while if it is not simply ‘here’ then the potential for elaborate self-interrogation and analysis is considerable. When Ludmila moved from Mineralnye Vody to Berlin, what did she bring with her and what did she leave behind? In both cases we may think first of people and objects—family and friends, homes and possessions. Only on closer reflection do we think about intangible things like customs and emotions. Ludmila talks ruefully about the warmth of community and celebratory traditions she associates with her earlier life in Russia, while Ferhat says that fear of persecution travelled with many Kurds when they left Turkey, Iran, Syria or Iraq. Whatever their experi-ence of migration, whether on balance it has been positive or negative, people who have moved from one place to another, abandoning in the process a familiar way of life and adopting or embarking on a new one, share—if nothing else—the possibility of scrutinizing and evaluating their lives from a comparative perspective, before and after a given moment, with the benefit of both physical and temporal distance.

The condition of ‘being a migrant’ is, of course, extremely complex and is experienced in many different ways depending on individual cir-cumstances. And there are now many different patterns of migration: it no longer necessarily entails a once-and-for-all move, it may be a repeated practice, ‘serial migration’ from one place to another and then to another again, or it may be a form of commuting between a family base and

1 Introduction: Finding a Way In 5

a distant place of work, often across national frontiers. However, with the possible exception of a small category of elite migrants—wealthy entre-preneurs, for example, or executives in multinational businesses—every-one who moves the centre of their existence is likely to encounter a sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity that throws their previous experience of life into sharp relief. The unequal distribution of financial resources and legal rights makes this confrontation with the new more manageable for some than for others: economists and sociologists have much to say about this. But how do people ‘process’ this experience in their minds, how do they translate the strange and the new into something that has a meaning for them, and how—if at all—do they integrate their present and their past? These are the kinds of questions I want to explore in this short book.

Now, in a city like Berlin, with inhabitants originating from every country in the world and where every conceivable form of human mobility—labour, study, refuge, tourism, whatever—is in evidence, it is clearly not possible to attempt a comprehensive survey of something as ungraspable and uncountable as these questions imply. There is no con-vincing way of carving up this highly diverse population into categories that could yield representative samples of ‘the migrant experience’. In fact, on the one hand, it is precisely the randomness and individuality of personal experience that I am trying to capture in the vignettes in Chap. 4. Not all ethnic Germans migrating from Russia or all former GDR contract workers from Vietnam have the same story to tell, and I want to illuminate the individual differences that are typically elided or smoothed out in public discourse. On the other hand, though, many Spätaussiedler will recognize elements of Ludmila’s life, and aspects of Hoa’s story resonate with what other Vietnamese Berliners have told me. There will also be features of each of these accounts that echo across the experiences of people from all kinds of backgrounds, regardless of ‘where they are from’.

So while each of these ‘Berlin lives’ is unique, each is also shaped in certain ways by things that are not unique but shared by others. Any two people moving from A to B under particular historical conditions—say, ethnic Germans migrating from Russia to Germany in the 1990s—will be exposed to particular kinds of circumstances and processes. The question, then, is how someone confronted by these circumstances and processes

6 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

responds to them at the time and how they subsequently build these encounters into their life story. This may be true of anything that occurs to us but there is a particular poignancy about moments of transition and transformation when we cross a border, visible or invisible, from one ‘place’ to another.

One item of baggage that we inevitably bring with us when we travel is our language or languages. Or, to be more precise, the set of linguistic resources—words and their pronunciation, rules for combining them into meaningful utterances, idioms and expressions, graphic represen-tations of sounds or words—that we have accumulated over time and that are available to us with varying degrees of reliability. (I, for example, can hold a conversation in German but can manage only rudimentary transactions in Italian and barely pass the time of day in Turkish.) The nature or composition of our linguistic repertoire is a key feature of our individual biographies, an indicator of our socialization and our educa-tion, and unless we have lived in a very isolated setting it is unlikely to remain entirely stable over time: new encounters augment one set of linguistic resources, while others diminish through lack of use. And how transferable our repertoire is from one location to another will obviously depend on the currency of its components in our destination. Some knowledge of Swedish, however fragmented, is likely to be useful in Stockholm but probably of no benefit at all in Buenos Aires.

That is one reason why I have chosen to focus on this particular aspect of the experience of migration: virtually all of the participants in my study had either no or very limited knowledge of German on arrival in Berlin (it turned out, as we’ll see, that Ludmila did know some German but this consisted in a passive understanding of the local variety spoken in Russia by her parents and grandparents, which was perceived as archaic by German Berliners). German had not been part of their repertoire but they were inevitably confronted by it, so what effect did that have on their migration experience? The other reason is related to the first one but was prompted by a different question: in what ways do these individuals incorporate their ‘lived experience of language’, to use Austrian linguist Brigitta Busch’s term (Spracherleben), into their life stories? I’m asking, then, not simply ‘how did language encounters impact on their lives?’ but also ‘how do they use these encounters to structure their life stories?’

1 Introduction: Finding a Way In 7

In presenting this small selection of language biographies, partial por-traits of multilingual Berliners, I hope as much to raise potentially inter-esting questions as to provide satisfying answers. The fascinating local museum in the Berlin district in which the main part of my project is located has a permanent exhibition called ‘99 times Neukölln’. It consists of 99 objects selected from its collection and uses them as ‘material wit-nesses’ to the social history of the area, collectively a ‘point of entry’ into the past and present of Neukölln (http://www.museum-neukoelln.de/ausstellungen-99-neukoelln.php). My selection of ‘material witnesses’ is much more modest but my intention is similar. My research participants, my ‘conversation partners’ (Gesprächspartner), are witnesses to particular kinds of experience and their stories are first-hand accounts or responses to this. Reading them won’t give you a definitive understanding of the complexity of the migration experience, but it might encourage you to ask, for example, what kinds of message are contained in these stories and the ways they are constructed? What lessons might we learn from them about the effects and impacts on individual lives of experiencing relocation as a translation from one linguistic regime to another? What do they tell us about the pressures and constraints imposed by the entry into a new language world, as well as about the, often unforeseen, pos-sibilities and opportunities it opens up? About, in Belgian linguist Jan Blommaert’s words, what language achieves in people’s lives?

So this was my answer to the question: why should you be interested in the lives of a random group of Berliners? The answer, as you can see, is partly in the form of further questions. But that, for me at least, is the point of doing and sharing research: the search for answers inevitably generates new lines of enquiry. My hope is that individual readers will find different things to value in these stories. Some may simply be intrigued by the intricate, intimate and sometimes moving accounts of complex lives; some may be inspired to deploy or adapt this analytical approach to other contexts and locations; some may identify connections with other kinds of research on urban life and perhaps see possibilities of mutual enrichment. Make of it what you will.

* * *So far, so good, I hope. But how and why did I end up focusing on

a single building in Neukölln? A simple answer would be that it was a

8 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

question of scale: I wanted to find a means of condensing the diffuse vast-ness and complexity of migration experiences into a localized context. But this could be achieved in many ways, as I will go on to explain. And, more importantly perhaps, it is not only a matter of size; it’s also about the historical situatedness of individual locations. I wanted to find a place that incorporated both the old and the new in a city that was in the pro-cess of reinventing itself after decades of division, and a place that was somehow both typical and specific, a place, in other words, that reflected or complemented the lives of the people I would build my study around. Here, again, I need to retrace with you the steps of my research journey. If it’s a little tortuous, that’s not accidental, it’s the nature of the process, but I hope it will make sense to you and help to justify the choices I made.

While criss-crossing Berlin to meet with my various contacts and research participants, I was constantly reminded of the particularity of the physical environment through which I was passing as a visitor and in which they lived. All cities, of course, bear traces of their past: explicitly through monuments and historic institutions, implicitly in their top-onymic markers (names of streets and squares recalling historical actors or events), as well as through their juxtaposition of architectural styles and their hidden infrastructure of cables, sewers and underground pas-sages. The remarkable thing about Berlin, given its devastation in the last stages of the Second World War and the disruption of its division into two cities for most of the subsequent years of the last century, is how intact it seems today. The public transport system has been reinte-grated, the city neatly circumscribed by an urban rail ‘ring’ that prom-ises a complete circuit in precisely 60 minutes. Ruined buildings have been removed or restored, even the smaller scars of conflict, the machine-gunned pock-marking of façades throughout the city centre, have largely been patched up. The contrasts between east and west are still there in places but they are more evident to those who knew the city before 1989 than to those who see it for the first time now. The Wall has either been dismantled and its location obliterated or retained in stylized chunks as a tourist attraction or else marked discreetly by easily overlooked lines of bricks set in the road.

And yet everywhere you look, the past is somehow embedded and embodied in the present. One of the boldest, and most controversial,

1 Introduction: Finding a Way In 9

ventures in contemporary European urban design and cultural politics is surely the rebuilding of the Berliner Schloss (city palace). First built in the mid-fifteenth century by the Hohenzollern Elector Friedrich II, it was extended and remodelled many times, eventually becoming the royal pal-ace of Prussian King Friedrich I, whose architect Andreas Schlüter made it a landmark of German baroque, and then the Imperial palace from 1871–1918. In the inter-war years of the twentieth century, it was used for various purposes both during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, but it was extensively damaged in the final years of the Second World War. As it was in the Russian-occupied sector of Berlin after 1945, which became the GDR capital, its fate was ultimately decided by the SED, the East German Communist party: as an unloved symbol of Germany’s imperial past, it was demolished in 1950 and finally replaced in the mid-1970s with the Palast der Republik, where major political and cultural events were held until the demise of the GDR in 1990. After years of hotly contested public debate, a decision was taken by the Bundestag (the German parliament) to rebuild the palace; Italian architect Franco Stella won the international competition to design it in 2008.

One of the controversial aspects of the design was the replication of three of the four external façades of the original palace as well as some of its interior spaces: a visitor approaching the new palace from the Brandenburg Gate in the west and along the boulevard of Unter den Linden will see a building strongly reminiscent of the one destroyed in 1950. However, the fourth façade, facing east across the River Spree, and much of the interior space will have a simple, modern design. The building complex will house the Humboldt Forum, named after the brothers Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose pioneering research on non-European cultures and languages, respectively, provides the intellectual inspiration for this ambitious project. Exhibition spaces will bring together mainly Asian, African and American works of art and objects from several major ethnology collections currently dispersed across the city, complementing the predominantly European focus of the museums on the ‘museum island’ on the other side of Unter den Linden in a ‘dialogue between the cultures of the world’ (http://www.humboldt-forum.de/humboldt-forum/idee/auf-dem-weg-zum-humboldt-forum/).

10 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

In its conceptualizing of the ‘new’ within the ‘old’, both in physical structure and in the purpose of the space created by it, the new Berliner Schloss will echo the emblematic building on the western side of the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag. Following the decision in 1991 to move the federal parliament from Bonn to Berlin, British architect Norman Foster was commissioned to design a new structure within the shell of the late nineteenth-century building, which had suffered extensive damage first in the infamous arson attack of 1933 and then in the intense con-flict at the end of the Second World War. This, in turn, was preceded by the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, near the Kurfürstendamm, which combines a new building (consecrated in 1961) with the ruined tower of the original church, severely damaged in a bombing raid in 1943.

The culture of commemoration in Berlin is most obviously associ-ated with political and military conflict and above all, of course, with the holocaust (e.g., the Holocaust Memorial http://www.stiftung- denkmal.de/startseite.html and the Jewish Museum http://www.jmberlin.de/). But remembering is also done on much smaller scales too—even, quite literally, under your feet: across the city, brass-plated cobblestones (Stolpersteine) set into the pavements, the most individual and localized of the city’s many forms of memorialization, mark the precise places where victims of German fascism had lived (http://www.stolpersteine-berlin.de/en). In Berlin, as indeed in other German cities, memories are inscribed in the streets.

Localization also became a key principle for the selection of participants that I would present in this book. I wanted to capture and represent diver-sity as normality and to show that, despite the tendency for people from particular countries of origin or ethnicities to gravitate towards each other and congregate in particular districts, most neighbourhoods in the inner city accommodate people from a wide range of backgrounds. Colleagues pointed me towards the work of anthropologists, such as Daniel Miller, who (with co-researcher Fiona Parrott) studied the everyday lives of inhabitants of a single street in south London. In The Comfort of Things, Miller presents 30 finely drawn pen portraits of individuals living in what he calls Stuart Street, teasing out different patterns of relationships between people and their pos-sessions. Rather than starting from given social categories like ethnicity or class, which he treats with a degree of scepticism, and seeking representative

1 Introduction: Finding a Way In 11

research participants, he began instead with a location and conducted his study ‘in that liberal spirit of taking people as you find them and letting them emerge as they would’ (p. 5). He knows that Stuart Street ‘is not a society or culture, a neighbourhood or community’ (p. 6); it is ‘a random street that [he] had no reason to choose’ (p. 5), it reflects, rather than repre-sents, in one location the disparate nature of the city’s population as a whole.

I think the focus on a single, bounded location is valuable because it provides us with a sense of scale and a context for understanding what it means to say that ‘diversity is normal’. Without some kind of defined limits to such an investigation, this claim might seem banal: do we really need researchers to tell us that big cities like London and Berlin have very diverse populations? The point I think Miller and other researchers want to make is that the self-evident nature of such observations discourages us from looking beneath the surface of this social mélange and distracts us from seeing the kinds of diversity amongst individuals that defy or tran-scend categories. We do need the big picture, the panorama of the whole city, but we also need to develop a sharpened gaze to discern the special blends of the general and the particular that constitute individual lives.

Another colleague drew my attention to a fascinating project, Sensing the street, conducted in 2006–7 by anthropology students at the Humboldt University in Berlin, exploring the colours, sounds and smells of three streets in the city (http://www.sensingthestreet.de/swf/flash_7.html). They wanted to help us experience these urban streets as some-thing more than commercial spaces: as individual sensory landscapes (Geschmackslandschaften) in their own right, each offering unlimited per-spectives for the subjective processing of a spatially delineated environ-ment. What I like about this is the idea that we can appreciate the intensity of difference that is characteristic of such urban spaces by channelling a common set of stimuli through individual senses of perception. The approach also creates intriguing comparative possibilities by presenting three different locations, each with its own particular historical and con-temporary resonance. And this work seemed to me to complement in interesting ways research on linguistic and semiotic landscapes, which I’ll come back to in Chap. 3 when I’ll talk about ways in which ‘material manifestations’ of language—from public notices to graffiti, from adver-tising billboards to signs on garbage bins—shape the urban environment.

12 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

For my own purposes, though, I wanted to focus more on living spaces, I mean the places in which people live: their homes. Why? Because these are the end point of the journey that people have made from their places of origin, the places where they have now set up home. So while Sensing the street and other projects exploring individual responses to particu-lar places—such as the quirky exhibition at the Kreuzberg Museum on ortsgespräche (local conversations: http://www.fhxb-museum.de/index.php?id=267), which invited visitors to walk around a map of the city painted on the museum floor and pause at random to listen on iPods to stories related by people living in particular streets or districts—were inspiring, I wanted to find something with a still more specific and domestic orientation. Something like the object of Joelle Bahloul’s study in her book The Architecture of Memory, which traces in great detail 25 years in the life of a single household in colonial Algeria.

I was brought closer to what I needed by two projects that took as their focus an individual apartment block in Berlin. In Skalitzer Straße 99—Biographie eines Hauses (1988) architecture students at the Hochschule der Künste (University of the Arts) compiled a historical account of a build-ing in Kreuzberg (built in 1902) from various perspectives: drawings and paintings by artist Erhard Groß, whose family had lived in the house since the 1930s; a chronicle of the inhabitants of each apartment (how long they lived there, their occupations, the size of their households); the planning, design and physical construction of the building; drawings of apartment layouts and photographs showing how they were furnished at different times; and interviews with some of the inhabitants about their experience of living in the building. A decade later, in 1996–7, anthropology stu-dents at the Humboldt University collaborated with the Heimatmuseum Neukölln (Museum of Local Life), the virtual Nachbarschaftsmuseum (Neighbourhood Museum) and the Neuköllner Kulturverein (Neukölln Cultural Society) to work on a similar multi- perspective project on a building in the neighbouring district of Neukölln: in Schillerpromenade 27. Ein Haus in Europa the authors explore how urban life has changed through a detailed investigation of the building, its inhabitants and its neighbourhood.

In different ways, these two projects brilliantly bring their respective buildings to life, showing how archetypal Berlin apartment blocks from

1 Introduction: Finding a Way In 13

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have individual histo-ries and complex, diverse biographies. Two further influences, both very different kinds of venture, explored the theme of everyday life in Berlin apartments. The first is a simple and quite traditional exhibition about a cabinet-maker called Heinrich Brunzel, who built an apartment building in Prenzlauer Berg around 1900 and lived there himself with his family. The exhibition uses the rooms of the Brunzels’ own apartment to rep-resent the life of a German family in this kind of building, typical of so many from the boom times of the last quarter of the nineteenth century (Zimmermeister Brunzel baut ein Mietshaus: Dunckerstraße 77—http://www.berlin.de/museum-pankow/standorte/dunckerstrasse-77/). The sec-ond, by contrast, aims to give a flavour of the multicultural world of contemporary Berlin. A modest, low-budget exhibition mounted by the Jugend Museum (Young People’s Museum) in Schöneberg, Villa Global (http://jugendmuseum.de/villa-global.html), occupies one floor of the museum and consists of a series of small, interconnecting rooms, each of which is a reconstruction of a young person’s bedroom. The participants all live locally and have a ‘migration background’, either through direct personal experience or as children of migrant parents.

So my thinking began to crystallize around the idea of finding an apart-ment building like those investigated in these various projects and exhibi-tions and concentrating one part of my own project on the inhabitants of this one house. The five-storey Mietshäuser are Berlin’s counterpart to London’s two-storey Victorian and Edwardian terraces: households live above, below and behind each other, rather than side by side in a row. Years ago, long before I came across Daniel Miller’s London project, I had read Berliner Mietshaus, Irina Liebmann’s collection of portraits of ordi-nary Berliners, all of whom lived in a single apartment block in Prenzlauer Berg, in what was then (in 1980) East Berlin. Liebmann is a writer and journalist, not an academic researcher, and her portraits are based not on recorded interviews but on her notes and recollections of conversations with her participants and on observations of their homes. The book is constructed in the form of a guided tour through the building, and each story is as much that of an apartment as of its (present) inhabitant: a typical chapter title is ‘Front building, first floor left, Erika and Peter B’.

14 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

I rather liked this touch and have copied it in the titles of the stories in Chap. 4.

The building was chosen as randomly as Miller’s street, and Liebmann engagingly describes what happens when you ring one doorbell after another and begin chatting to the inhabitants in a way that I think con-cisely captures the essence of the exercise and, for me, its appeal. What you get, she says is:

eine aus dem Einmaligen ins Unendliche gespiegelte Montage solcher Lebensausschnitte, zusammengefasst durch den gemeinsamen Wohnort, eine Klammer, die zufällig und zwangsläufig ist wie die Berichte selbst. (p. 7)

a montage of [such] life episodes, refracted from the unique to the infinite, combined by a shared living space, a frame which, like the accounts them-selves, is coincidental and inevitable. (My translation)

The conversations she conducted were unprepared—either by her or her participants—and consisted of a spontaneous ‘combination of biography, recollection and commentary’. Like Miller, she is at pains to stress that she took her participants seriously and made no attempt to ‘check’ their stories:

Der Erzähler hatte die Wahl zu treffen, ich nahm die Variante ernst, die er für mich im Augenblick unserer Begegnung gefunden hatte: seine Darstellung des eigenen Spielraums und dessen gelegentliche Berührung mit der Weltgeschichte, beides im Bratkartoffelgeruch des Alltags. (p. 7)

The narrator could make his [sic] own choice, I took seriously the version he had found for me at the moment we met: his presentation of his own space and its occasional contact with world history/events, both in the everyday aroma of roast potatoes. (My translation)

This, then, was how I worked my way towards the idea of writing my story around the life stories of inhabitants of a single, very typical Berlin building. Following Liebmann’s casual and personal approach, but basing my discussion on a close analysis of recorded conversations, and adapting Daniel Miller’s aims (p. 7) to my area of interest, I offer these short biog-raphies with two purposes in mind: first, to undertake an experiment in

1 Introduction: Finding a Way In 15

learning how to read people’s experience of migration through the way they articulate their encounters with language and how they make these relevant to their life stories, and secondly, to help us appreciate the cre-ativity and diversity of contemporary Berliners so that we can chip away at the lazy assumptions and superficial stereotypes that characterize so much public discourse on ‘migrants’.

* * *When I first visited the Mietshaus that I’ll talk about in Chap. 4 and

that I’m calling ‘Mareschstraße 74’, I talked to an elderly German cou-ple who had lived there since the late 1980s and seen many neighbours come and go. They recalled German-run businesses—a baker, a butcher, even a blacksmith—all of which have now gone. There had been a time when most of the inhabitants were German but now they are in a small minority. The building is over 100 years old and has witnessed two world wars and both the division and the reunification of the city. Its structure and fabric testify to this long history, but its inhabitants reflect the con-temporary Berlin. The new within the old again.

Ludmila’s bar is on the ground floor. I asked her about her clientele: who are her customers, are they all locals from nearby? ‘Alles multikulti’, she replied, ‘was auf die Straße läuft’: all very multicultural, whoever hap-pens to walk down the street. She has her Stammkunden, her regulars, but all sorts of people—workers, shoppers, visitors, tourists—drop in for a coffee, a beer or something to eat. The bar, the building and the neighbourhood are all typical not only of the diversity of Berlin’s popula-tion but of its constantly changing composition (several apartments in the building changed hands in the time I was working on this project). That’s why, if we must have a visual metaphor for the city, I prefer the image of the kaleidoscope, with its shifting shapes and patterns, than the misleadingly permanent image of the mosaic.

Along both walls on either side of the platform in the Märkisches Museum underground station there is a series of specially commis-sioned representations of Berlin at different stages in its development, from its origins in the thirteenth century to the late twentieth century (see, for example, Figs. 1.1 and 1.2). Each one uses different materials and creates a different kind of composition, but throughout the evo-lution of the emerging city a recognizable shape provides a sense of

16 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

Fig. 1.1 Märkisches Museum U-Bahn station 1

Fig. 1.2 Märkisches Museum U-Bahn station 2

1 Introduction: Finding a Way In 17

continuity. Similarly, through most of its long history, Berlin has been a diverse city, attracting people from other parts of Germany as well as from neighbouring countries and further afield in constantly changing constellations, although its diversity has arguably become more com-plex in the 25 years since the transformative events of 1989–90 acceler-ated social and economic change. And as Sensing the street showed, you can see this increased diversity, you can hear it, smell it and taste it.

To provide a context for the language biographies in Chap. 4, I’ll begin now with two chapters sketching the evolution of Berlin’s diversity in two particular respects that are central to the theme of this book, migra-tion and multilingualism. First, in Chap. 2, I’ll outline the historical dimension to the German capital’s contemporary boast of being a city of immigration, and then, in Chap. 3, I’ll consider the sociolinguistic consequences of this complex social structure in terms of the confluence of myriad languages in a global city.

18 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

19© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017P. Stevenson, Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis, Language and Globalization, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40606-0_2

2Berlin: City of Migrations

Migration Backgrounds

Speaking at an event in his official residence, the Schloss Bellevue in Berlin, to celebrate the granting of German citizenship to successful applicants in May 2014, Federal President Joachim Gauck told his audience:

Einwanderung wurde zuerst ignoriert, später abgelehnt, noch später ertragen und geduldet, und schließlich als Chance erkannt und bejaht. Und in diesem Stadium befinden wir uns heute. Heute weiß ich: Wir verlieren uns nicht, wenn wir Vielfalt akzeptieren. Wir wollen dieses vielfältige ‘Wir’. Wir wollen es nicht besorgnisbrütend fürchten. Wir wollen es zukunfts- orientiert und zukunftsgewiss bejahen. (http://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Reden/DE/Joachim-Gauck/Reden/2014/05/140522-Einbuergerung- Integration.html)

At first, migration was ignored, later it was rejected, later still it was endured and tolerated, and finally it was recognized as an opportunity and wel-comed. And that’s the stage we are at today. Today I know: we won’t disap-pear if we accept diversity. We want this diverse ‘we’. We don’t want to fear it with a festering feeling of anxiety. We want to look to the future, to feel confident of the future, and embrace it. (My translation)

His speech was offered as a reflective and inspirational address, directed ostensibly at the 23 new German citizens in front of him but intended also of course for consumption by a much wider public. Born in 1940 in Rostock on the Baltic coast, Gauck grew up after the war in the GDR, where he later became a Lutheran pastor and a prominent advocate of reform during the Wende (the period of transition in 1989–90) before overseeing public access to the vast collection of private files assem-bled by the former GDR Ministry of State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, colloquially referred to as the Stasi). In his speech, he acknowledges the challenge he had faced with the idea of a German ‘we’ that could comfortably accommodate both easterners like himself and westerners, not to mention the many categories of incomers from beyond the German borders. The ‘we’ in the lines quoted here is therefore a com-plex and multilayered emblem that—potentially, at least—both encom-passes a diverse range of contemporary constituents and embodies a historical legacy of conflicting experiences and interests.

In these few lines he treads delicately through a conceptual minefield, skilfully deploying grammatical resources that permit him to articu-late an appropriately statesmanlike message inflected with a personal perspective. Decades of struggle over the idea of immigration are con-densed into the most laconic formulation imaginable, a sequence of six verbs in agentless passive constructions, before he freezes his review in the present moment and expressly asserts ‘our’ active presence. He com-mits himself explicitly to a stance that leaves no room for argument and alludes subtly but unmistakably to one of the most ferociously divisive debates in Germany in recent years, triggered by Thilo Sarrazin’s now notorious book Deutschland schafft sich ab (‘Germany Is Digging Its Own Grave’, published in 2010), which attributes an alleged national malaise to a combination of a declining birth rate, a growing ‘underclass’ and increasing immigration, in particular from Muslim countries. In this con-text, ‘we won’t disappear if we accept diversity’ is not simply an anodyne assertion, it’s a firm rebuttal of Sarrazin’s thesis. Gauck’s counterclaim is rhetorically reinforced by the third step in this short paragraph, from the past through the present to the future, with the anaphoric repetition of the positive wollen (want), first as a full verb (we want this diverse ‘we’), then as a negated modal verb (we don’t want to fear it) and finally as an affirmative modal (we want to embrace it).

20 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

Lurking inside or beneath this heavily laden text, unspoken but ominous in its absence, is what may appear like a mere termino-logical quibble. On 18 occasions in the speech, Gauck uses the word Einwanderung (immigration), both as a free-standing noun (as in the pas-sage quoted here) and in compounds such as Einwanderungsgesellschaft (immigration society). Just once, he uses the similar-looking word Zuwanderung, referring to people who have a Zuwanderungsgeschichte (a history of immigration). A deliberate choice or an editorial oversight? It’s impossible to say, but the almost exclusive use of Einwanderung in his speech is surely both a gesture towards the protracted agonizing over the nature of migration in Germany and an expression of intent, a com-mitment to the conception of Germany as a society characterized by settled immigrant populations rather than (merely) transient and tem-porary migrants. Zuwanderung implies arriving, Einwanderung implies staying. An awareness of this apparently small difference is crucial to understanding the transformation of public discourses on migration in Germany in the quarter of a century since unification in 1990. What does this mean?

In spite of the established presence of millions of people with family ori-gins in other countries, successive governments had insisted that Germany was ‘not a country of immigration’ (kein Einwanderungsland). Set up in 2000 by the then Social Democrat Interior Minister Otto Schily and chaired by the Christian Democrat politician and former speaker of the Bundestag Rita Süssmuth, the Independent Commission on Immigration (Unabhängige Kommission Zuwanderung) submitted in the following year a report enti-tled Zuwanderung gestalten—Integration fördern (‘Shaping Immigration—Promoting Integration’), which contained in its preface the unequivocal refutation of the prevailing position, insisting: ‘Deutschland ist faktisch ein Einwanderungsland’ (Germany is de facto a country of immigration). One of the key proposals in the report, foreshadowed in its title, was the drafting of an ‘immigration and integration law’ (ein Zuwanderungs- und Integrationsgesetz) and after several years of intense political wrangling—the Süssmuth report was published just two months before 9/11, which radically recast the context in which the issues were debated—an Immigration Act was finally passed and came into effect on 1 January 2005. It had been heralded as a modernization of migration policy in Germany and did indeed introduce

2 Berlin: City of Migrations 21

some relatively liberal measures building on the 2000 reform of citizenship legislation. Nevertheless, the short title of the law (Zuwanderungsgesetz) again retains the more cautious term and even this belies the conservative nature of the reform revealed in the full title: Gesetz zur Steuerung und Begrenzung der Zuwanderung und zur Regelung des Aufenthalts und der Integration von Unionsbürgern und Ausländern (Act to Control and Restrict Immigration and to Regulate the Residence and Integration of EU Citizens and Foreigners). Gauck’s colourful expression besorgnisbrütend (‘with a festering feeling of anxiety’) concisely captures this tortuous and tortured process of confronting and acknowledging, yet not fully accepting, the reality of immigration.

In the ten years since the Act came into effect, less attention has been paid to the distinctions between Ein- and Zuwanderung than to the no less complex and contested concept of ‘integration’. The possibility of moving to the next level of legislative accommodation by introducing an Einwanderungsgesetz has entered the public discussion, although the parameters of the debate are defined more by economic priorities than by questions of integration or social cohesion: the current Interior Minister at the time of writing, Thomas de Maizière, has argued, for example, that what is needed is not a new law but better ‘immigration marketing’ (Zuwanderungsmarketing) to attract the highly skilled migrants that the German economy needs. Nevertheless, the total number of migrants of all categories entering Germany in 2014 was second only to the figure in the USA (as it had been in the early twentieth century) and about one fifth of the overall population has a ‘migration back-ground’. Which introduces another layer of conceptual complexity to an understanding of the contemporary migration configuration of Germany and of its capital city. What does ‘having a migration background’ mean?

Reliable demographic data in this respect is difficult to find, as differ-ent surveys use different methods and categories, but the task is further complicated by the formal distinction over the last ten years or so between residents who have personal experience of migration themselves (i.e., they were born in another country and moved to Germany) and those who have no direct migration experience (i.e., they were born in Germany) but do have at least one parent who has. This statistical practice is designed to take account of the fact that, alongside the continuous influx of new migrants, the first generation of migrants now recognized to have arrived and settled in Germany from the 1950s has been followed by a second, a third and a fourth generation born in the country. Additional distinctions

22 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

are drawn between people who have become naturalized as German citi-zens and those who remain classified as ‘foreigners’, and there is a special category of Aussiedler (and Spätaussiedler: see Chaps. 1 and 3), migrants from eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (especially Kazakhstan) who are entitled to German citizenship through being able to document their descent from Germans who had settled in these countries over the preceding centuries. ‘Having a migration background’ may therefore entail belonging to one of these sub-groups (see Fig. 2.1).

On this basis, a relatively refined (if still fairly approximate) picture can be established of the proportions of Germany’s overall population who have different kinds of migration background based on figures gathered from the periodic national census (the most recent being in 2011) and the annual microcensus (figures extrapolated from a sample of 1 per cent of the total population). Of around 80.5 million residents, about 64 million (ca 80 per cent) have no migration background. Of those who do have a migration background, about 10.5 million have personal migration experi-ence (i.e., they are first-generation migrants, roughly equal numbers being foreigners and naturalized German citizens), and about 5.4 million have no personal migration experience (i.e., second, third or fourth generation, in a ratio of approximately four to one naturalized Germans to foreigners).

The raw numbers, however, only tell part of the story. More important for our purposes, perhaps, are three interesting trends. First, the balance between residents with and without personal migration experience is shift-ing: the latter—the settled population of people whose parents moved to Germany—is smaller but growing in relation to the former, evidence that

Fig. 2.1 Migration background categories

2 Berlin: City of Migrations 23

supports the claim that Germany is established as a country of immigration. The majority of people with a Turkish family background, for example, were born in Germany. (As I write, in the autumn of 2015, the scales may be tilting back the other way due to Chancellor Merkel’s policy of accepting large numbers of migrants from the Middle East in the current refugee crisis. It’s too soon to say what the long-term consequences of this may be.) Second, there are significant differences in the age structure of the populations with and without a migration background: the former are overrepresented in the younger age groups (their average age is 35, com-pared to 46 for those without a migration background—that is, Germans with no history of migration in the immediate family). And third, while people with family origins in Turkey, Poland and Russia still account for the largest proportions of the population with a migration background, 43 per cent of this category come from 180 other countries (see Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.2 Population of Germany with a migration background in 2012 (adapted from 10. Bericht der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Migration, Flüchtlinge und Integration über die Lage der Ausländerinnen und Ausländer in Deutschland (Oktober 2014); data from: Statistisches Bundesamt, Mikrozensus 2012)

24 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

To this we could add that not only the duration of migration has changed over the last 25 years or so but the range of reasons or motiva-tions has increased to encompass many different kinds of mobility: as well as economic migrants, working in local businesses and public ser-vices, in many cases now joined by their families, there are employees of myriad multinational companies and organizations; entrepreneurs large and small, themselves employers of significant numbers of Germans and non-Germans; refugees from military conflicts and natural disas-ters and asylum seekers fleeing political persecution; (Spät)Aussiedler and Jews from eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union; illegal and undocumented migrants, who are invisible in official statistics but ser-vice the economy in diverse ways; and many more or less temporary sojourners, from artists and performers of various kinds, through stu-dents to tourists and short-break weekenders. What this all adds up to is not only, indisputably, an Einwanderungsland but also one with a vastly more complex demographic and social profile than just one or two generations ago: a prime exemplar of what is now often referred to as the ‘diversification of diversity’.

What is true for the country as a whole applies also to Berlin, and it’s not shy about saying so. In 2012 the city celebrated the 775th anniversary of the first documented reference, in 1237, to the twin towns of Berlin and Cölln, straddling the River Spree, colonized by settlers from all over the German lands. The predominant image that was projected in this year-long birthday party was of a contemporary ‘city of diversity’ (Stadt der Vielfalt: see http://www.berlin.de/775/stadt-der-vielfalt/) that had evolved through an 800-year Zuwanderungsgeschichte (history of immi-gration): the theme of the celebrations was ‘775 Jahre gelebte Vielfalt’ (775 years of lived diversity). Over a quarter of Berlin’s population today have a migration background and the proportion is growing. These Berliners with a migration history have origins in over 190 countries and represent all the kinds of mobility referred to above.

This vast synchronic range of origins and mobilities creates a new layer of diversity superposed on top of existing—and in some cases very long-standing—social stratifications, a process that has given rise to intricately structured ‘globalized neighbourhoods’ (almost half of the population of the historic centre, the district Mitte, has a migration background) and

2 Berlin: City of Migrations 25

new local constellations (a third of the inhabitants of Helle Mitte, an area in Marzahn-Hellersdorf in the east of the city, have origins in the former Soviet Union). Berliners with Turkish origins, for example, are involved in a complex matrix of social relations—with other German-Turks in Berlin from different migrations, generations, social classes and trajectories; with Turks in Turkey (both those who have never left and those who have returned from abroad, whether from Germany or elsewhere); with Turks in other parts of Germany and the wider diaspora; and of course with other Berliners—participating in strictly local interactions and practices, but also initiating and maintaining translocal and transnational contacts through travel, social media and cheap international phone calls.

But all this is new only in the ‘intensity of difference’, for Berlin has always attracted incomers from all points of the compass and with very different motivations, circumstances and ‘arrival scenarios’. It is a spec-tacularly open city. The ‘new migrations’ of the last 25 years, since the fall of the Wall, were preceded by many other migrations: from southern European ‘guest workers’ in west Berlin and ‘contract workers’ from socialist states in east Berlin in the years after the Second World War, to Russians in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolution, Jews and Poles in the industrial expansion of the nineteenth century, and Huguenots and Bohemian protestant refugees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All of these movements of people, and more, have shaped Berlin, both physically and culturally, and have left their traces in the landscape of the city. What kind of thing do I mean? How can we read these aspects of the city’s past from its contemporary face? Let me give some examples.

Migration Landmarks

On the corner of Oranienstrasse and Heinrichplatz, in the heart of Kreuzberg, the Istanbul artist Ayse Erkmen’s installation Am Haus (On the house/building) offers passers-by a kind of cultural grammar of remembering (Fig. 2.3). The individual linguistic forms painted on the building’s façade appear to have something in common, perhaps vari-ants of a particular word or set of words, and the initial hyphen seems

26 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

to indicate that they are not full lexemes but suffixes, components with a grammatical function. Linguistically, they are markers of a past tense: in Turkish, the suffix –di (and its variants) is used to articulate a past event or action that you have experienced directly, while –miş (and its variants) represents a sense of uncertainty or vagueness associated with more distant or indirect memories. The –di form expresses the narrative of everyday life and is more widely used, the –miş form is used in story-telling and likely to be familiar only to more educated Turkish-speakers. So for some, this bare linguistic recital of –miş forms may act as a visual reminder of how to remember, of a way of speaking which invokes a past that is now perhaps remote in both time and place, a nostalgic nudge. For others, who speak the language but find these forms strange, it may stir a sense of alienation or dislocation: these bits of Turkish language are attached to the physical fabric of the most Turkish part of Berlin but they don’t seem to belong here, pointing to another place and another time that the viewer has not witnessed or has left far behind.

In a wider sense too, through its name and its emplacement Am Haus draws attention to locality and perhaps to domesticity, for these are important dimensions of differentiation and identification. The ‘Turks’ counted by Berlin’s statisticians—whether they are catego-

Fig. 2.3 Am Haus: Turkish word forms on Kreuzberg façade

2 Berlin: City of Migrations 27

rized now as naturalized Germans with a migration background or as foreigners—are subsumed under this label as a political concept on grounds of present or former citizenship/nationality: they all are, or were, citizens of the Republic of Turkey. However, ‘Turkish’ is a superordinate term that embraces over 40 different ethnicities and may or may not represent a significant level of identification for indi-viduals. More likely than either nationality or ethnicity as first-order identification categories, especially for those first-generation migrants who came from rural locations, are family and place: for them, this is what ‘where are you from?’ means and this question underpinned the formation of personal bonds that were reproduced in the estab-lishment of local networks in Berlin, with people from the same vil-lage often congregating in the same neighbourhood. For subsequent generations, born in Berlin, a wide array of localized self- ascriptions is available: Germans/Berliners of Turkish descent, German- Turks, Turks in Germany/Berlin/Kreuzberg.

So not all Turks in Berlin are ‘Turks’—many, for example, are or prefer to call themselves Kurds—and not all who came to the city from Turkey arrived as labour migrants under the terms of the arrangement between the Turkish and FRG (West German) governments. Between the signing of the agreement in 1961 and the end of formal recruitment of foreign workers in 1973 following the global oil crisis and the slowdown in the German economy, tens of thousands of Turkish citizens came to work in Berlin; some returned, but despite the intended rotation principle many stayed and either established families or brought their family members over to join them. However, both before and after 1973, people moved to Berlin from Turkey for many reasons: some came as students (many of whom then stayed on to work), some fled rural poverty exacerbated by devastating earthquakes, and others came as political refugees following military coups in 1971 and 1980.

Similar agreements were signed with other Mediterranean countries between 1955 and 1968—first with Italy, then with Spain, Greece, Morocco, Portugal, Tunisia and the former Yugoslavia—and although they came in smaller numbers than those from Turkey, migrants from these states (and others, such as India and South Korea) are firmly

28 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

embedded in the Berlin population. The original demand for foreign workers was particularly strong here since the general labour shortage in the Federal Republic was exacerbated in West Berlin by the effects of the building of the Wall in 1961, which—as was of course the inten-tion—choked off the supply of workers from the east of the city. By the same token, the severe depletion of the GDR workforce through emi-gration to the west meant that foreign workers, albeit in smaller num-bers and with a lower public profile, were also recruited by the GDR government during the same period and indeed right up until the end of the 1980s. They came from other socialist states, including Poland, Hungary, Cuba, Mozambique, Angola and Vietnam; in the framework of ‘international solidarity’, contract workers (Vertragsarbeiter) from the non-European countries were brought to the GDR for limited peri-ods, in principle for specialist training in order to return with advanced skills to their home countries, in practice increasingly to cover the need for unskilled workers, especially in the construction and manufactur-ing industries.

Chợ Đồng Xuân is a large, congested, bustling covered market in Hanoi. The current building, constructed after a fire in 1994, replaced the original structure, which was built by the French colonial administration in 1889. An early engagement in the first Indochina War between French forces and the revolutionary Viet Minh took place near here in 1947 and the battle is commemorated by the memorial placed outside the mar-ket gate in 2005 (Fig. 2.4). The market is therefore a site of memory in Hanoi, representing both the earlier commercial interests of the colonial power and the later military struggle against it. The Dong Xuan Center in Herzbergstrasse, in the east Berlin district Lichtenberg, has a shorter history and no such associations (Fig. 2.5). Yet it is a representative site for the Vietnamese communities in Berlin, as it was established in the years after the Wende when many of the temporary contract workers from Vietnam found themselves stranded and forced through sudden unem-ployment to become self-employed, and it also constitutes an important hub for creating and maintaining transnational ties. Between them, the two markets with the same name symbolize the parallels between the two states, divided by ideological conflict and then reunified, and both

2 Berlin: City of Migrations 29

Fig. 2.5 Dong Xuan Center, Lichtenberg, Berlin

Fig. 2.4 Chợ Đồng Xuân market and war memorial, Hanoi

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Germany as a whole and Berlin in particular remain home to two distinct populations of Vietnamese migrants.

Over a million refugees from the defeated south (some in fear of persecution as political opponents of the communist government or as members of ethnic minorities, others driven by extreme poverty) fled by sea in the years after the end of the war in 1975, and by the mid-1980s about 38,000 so-called Boat People had settled under the terms of the Geneva Convention in the Federal Republic and West Berlin. As early as the late 1950s, large numbers of ‘ideologically reliable’ students and apprentices from the north were invited to the GDR to train and prepare to build their country’s future; with the GDR economy in the doldrums in the 1980s, even larger numbers (about 70,000  in total) came as workers, most of whom stayed after unification. Today there are estimated to be between 25,000 and 40,000 Vietnamese in Berlin, some with a double migration background (first to the GDR, then to the ‘new’ Germany), perhaps joined by their family members, some are more recent arrivals and others were born in the city. The two groups still tend to inhabit different parts of the city and are represented by different associations: the former Boat People by the Vietnamhaus in Kreuzberg and the former contract workers by the Vereinigung der Vietnamesen in Berlin und Brandenburg in Lichtenberg, where the largest concentra-tion of people with a Vietnamese background can be found.

The Vertragsarbeiter in East Berlin, most of whom were members of the Party or its youth organization, were subject to a strict regime. They were housed in hostels on new estates in Marzahn and Hohenschönhausen with limited contact with the local German population, who had little information on the reasons for their presence in Berlin, and this exac-erbated resentment at the contract workers’ perceived privileged access to scarce resources of food and other consumer goods; under the terms of the agreement between the governments, they were allowed to send quite high levels of remittances to their families in Vietnam as well as substantial high-value items, from sewing machines to motorbikes. Although they were promised 200 hours of German language tuition, in practice they often had very little and were reliant on so-called language mediators (Sprachmittler), many of whom had earlier studied in the GDR, for communication with German co-workers. They were overseen

2 Berlin: City of Migrations 31

by Vietnamese group leaders (Gruppenleiter), who were responsible for mediation between the workforce and the management as well as for maintaining ‘work discipline’ and organizing political education and cul-tural activities.

When their contracts became invalid with the demise of the GDR in 1990, many found themselves unemployed and caught in a double bind: the German government was keen to repatriate them but the Vietnamese government was unwilling to accept them. Various incentive schemes were introduced to encourage them to return but only around a quarter of them took advantage of the offer, not least because their prospects back in Vietnam were bleak, and the vast majority of asylum applica-tions in Germany were refused. As a result, many became self-employed, including in the notorious illegal cigarette trade, and conditions in the early years after unification were hard—and made worse by the hos-tile social climate, as the previously latent racism amongst parts of the German population exploded into violent attacks. After years of legal struggles, the law was amended to allow their full period of residence in the GDR before 1990 to be included in calculations of the duration of their stay so that they could then be granted full right to remain. Strong networks, especially amongst entrepreneurs, have since developed, both within Berlin and throughout Germany as well as across central and eastern Europe and with Vietnam. These transnational business links are reinforced by cultural traditions, especially the Tet (new year) celebra-tions, when many return to Vietnam for large family reunions.

The Ostbahnhof (East Station)—previously, until 1950, the Schlesischer Bahnhof (Silesian Station)—is historically the gateway to and, above all, from the east (Fig. 2.6). It reminds us that Berlin is stra-tegically situated within the corridor through which central European migrations have passed for centuries. Barely had the many thousands of Russian troops who had been stationed in East Berlin since 1945 disman-tled their bases and departed to the east in the early 1990s than a new, civilian, wave of Russians arrived to take advantage of what the reunified city had to offer. Or rather, two waves, channelled predominantly into the western and eastern ends of the city. Tourists and wealthy business people brought the resources to create what German historian Karl

32 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

Schlögel calls a ‘new topography’ of Russian shops, galleries, publishing companies, restaurants and clubs in Charlottenburg, especially around the Kurfürstendamm, where their every need was catered for, often by Russians in Russian. At the same time, tens of thousands of Spätaussiedler moved into large housing estates on the eastern outskirts in areas such as Marzahn-Hellersdorf. This ‘Russian Berlin’ is therefore far from homoge-neous and many ‘Russian Berliners’ are subsumed in this complex social and cultural category through their shared use of the Russian language rather than a common nationality—there are many Russian-speakers (official and unofficial workers, students, refugees, asylum seekers as well as the tourists and Spätaussiedler) not only from the Russian Federation but also from other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, especially Kazakhstan. Exact numbers are hard to determine but estimates range from 100,000 to 200,000.

Substantial though this contemporary Russian presence is, however, it is only the most recent manifestation of an association that shaped the cultural and political history of Berlin in the twentieth century. Schlögel identifies three such ‘Russian Berlins’:

Fig. 2.6 Berlin Ostbahnhof in the 1950s

2 Berlin: City of Migrations 33

Keine andere Stadt war – im Guten wie im Bösen – so sehr verwoben mit dem Russischen. In den zwanziger Jahren wurde Berlin zum Ankerplatz für Hunderttausende russischer Emigranten, russischer Verlags- und Zeitungsort Nummer eins…. Doch auf das russische Berlin der Emigranten folgte ein anderes: Nach dem Überfall auf die UdSSR füllten sich die Katakomben der Stadt mit den Elendsgestalten sowjetischer >Ostarbeiter<, die Berlin noch in Gang hielten, als die Bomben fielen. Und als auch dieses russische Berlin untergegangen war, folgte ein drittes: das Berlin der Rotarmisten. Niemand kannte die Stadt so gut wie sie. Meter für Meter, Keller für Keller, Haus für Haus hatten sie sich zu den Bunkern der Reichskanzlei und zum Reichstag vorgearbeitet. Als die Fahne auf der aus-geglühten Kuppel gehisst war, ging ein Kapitel in dem deutsch-russischen Roman zu Ende. Das russische Berlin hatte den Weg vom >Charlottengrad< der Emigranten nach >Pankow<, dem neuen Machtzentrum in der sowje-tisch besetzten Zone, zurückgelegt. (Karl Schlögel, Das Russische Berlin: Ostbahnhof Europas, 2007:12)

No other city was—for good or ill—so closely bound up with all things Russian. In the 20s Berlin became the hub for hundreds of thousands of Russian émigrés and the prime location for Russian publishers and news-papers…. But the Russian Berlin of émigrés was followed by another: after the attack on the Soviet Union the city’s catacombs filled up with the wretched figures of Soviet forced labourers (‘workers from the east’), who kept Berlin functioning when the bombs fell. And when this Russian Berlin had perished too, a third followed: the Berlin of the Red Army sol-diers. No one knew the city as well as they did. Metre by metre, cellar by cellar, building by building they had worked their way through to the bun-kers of the Reichskanzlei (Chancellery) and the Reichstag. When their flag was hoisted on the burned out cupola (of the Reichstag) a chapter of the German-Russian novel came to an end. The Russian Berlin had moved on from the ‘Charlottengrad’ of the émigrés to ‘Pankow’, the new centre of power in the Soviet occupied zone. (My translation)

For even longer than this, Berlin has been the main point of entry to the west from Russia, both a centre of attraction in itself and a transport hub for onward travel to Paris, Rome or London. It was therefore a magnet for émigrés leaving Russia in the turbulent aftermath of the 1917 revo-lution: somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 settled there in the early 1920s, mainly in Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf and Schöneberg, a

34 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

concentration that gave rise to the colloquial toponym Charlottengrad referred to by Schlögel. The Russian ‘colony’, as it was sometimes called, was a model of ‘superdiversity’: intellectuals and artists of all kinds, many of whom were already familiar with the city, created a new cultural infra-structure of bookshops, publishing houses, clubs, restaurants and art centres. But they were not alone. New Russian Berliners included also members of the Provisional Government (toppled by the Bolsheviks in 1917), members of democratic and monarchist political parties and non- Bolshevik socialists, as well as other public oppositional figures, such as newspaper editors, aristocrats, industrialists, landowners, lawyers and doctors. These in turn were followed by defeated troops of anti-Bolshevik armies, Russian Germans, Jews fleeing pogroms in White Russia and Ukraine, peasants ruined by the disastrous harvest in 1921, and deported philosophers, writers and journalists opposed to the regime.

This large population was not sustainable under the economic conditions of the time and by the end of the 1920s their numbers had dwindled to about 75,000—still a not inconsiderable size. But they were succeeded by a very different influx of Russians in the early years of the Second World War: men, women and children deported from areas occu-pied by the German army and sent as forced labourers—Ostarbeiter—to Berlin. Between 1940 and 1945 about 700,000 were incarcerated in a thousand camps in the city. Their compatriots in the Red Army, of course, entered the city in 1945 not in subjugation but in conquest and paved the way for the establishment of the security apparatus that underpinned the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) regime over the subsequent four decades. The Russian political and military presence in the eastern part of Berlin during that period was pervasive but most evident in the form of the vast Russian Embassy on Unter den Linden and the headquarters in Karlshorst of the Soviet Military Administration (from 1949 the Soviet Control Commission), which is now the German- Russian Museum.

These various Russian Berlins are retrospective constructions, each of which appears to supersede and obliterate the other, although in reality they overlap and all have left traces that are more or less recoverable today. And the term itself, Russian Berlin, is a catchy confection that seductively, misleadingly, suggests a discrete, self-contained world, a

2 Berlin: City of Migrations 35

city within the city. Its value here though is that it draws attention to two things. First, it indicates that there is what we might call a Russian footprint in Berlin—just as we could also talk of, say, a Polish, French or Turkish Berlin but not, with the exception of very localized cultural scenes, a Japanese, Argentinian or Australian Berlin—a distinctive pres-ence that somehow seems to attenuate, or at least qualify, the equalizing effects of superdiversity: even in this bewilderingly intricate demographic fabric some strands stand out more than others. And secondly, it shows that our synchronic gaze tends to merge or, as Jan Blommaert puts it, synchronize different layers of space and time. We may ‘know’ that our urban environment is the result of a highly complex process of accretion of different elements built up over time, but we don’t ‘see’ it that way: in our perception the product trumps the process.

Here is another example of historical synchronization, merging two very different migrations between Africa and Berlin in the past and in the present (Fig. 2.7):

Fig. 2.7 Kleingartenverein Togo (allotments in the African Quarter, Wedding)

36 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

Allotments are an important feature of the urban landscape in German cities, as most people live in apartments with limited out-door space. This one, in the inner city area of Wedding (Mitte), seems unusual until you wander round the neighbourhood and discover that many of the surrounding streets and squares also have names relating, in one way or another, to Africa: the main road leading through the area is called Afrikanische Straße and it intersects with streets named after African countries and towns. The neighbourhood has a flourish-ing African infrastructure—food shops, restaurants and cafés, special-ist hairdressers, clubs and associations (such as the Mano River Multi Cultural Organization)—supporting a substantial population of resident Africans and African- Germans, estimated at several tens of thousands. But an information panel erected outside the U-Bahn station Rehberge in 2012 disabuses the visitor of the idea that Berlin’s African Quarter (as it is generally known) and its constituent streets owe their names to the contemporary cultural milieu. They don’t represent a celebration of African culture in twenty-first- century Berlin—they are a reminder of imperial Germany’s colonial ventures in sub-Saharan Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The glorification of Germany’s colonial history is in this way inscribed in Berlin’s landscape, and the modest information panel (itself the contentious product of a long and bitter local debate) is a belated attempt, as some at least would see it, to ‘decolonize the public space in Wedding’.

Overseas territorial ambitions of German rulers can be traced back even further, at least to the late seventeenth century. In 1683 Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg (the ‘Great Elector’) sent two ships on a mission to establish in his name ‘Groß-Friedrichsburg’ in what is now Ghana, and there is evidence of significant German involvement in the Atlantic slave trade from then until the early eighteenth century. Paintings from that time show Hofmohren, Africans brought to the royal court of the Hohenzollern to work as pages and to act as status symbols of wealth and far-reaching power. In the late nineteenth century, Africans were brought to Berlin as ‘exotic’ human exhibits and presented to the city’s public at Völkerschauen (ethnological exhibitions—or human zoos), most famously at the Erste Deutsche Kolonialausstellung (First German Colonial Exhibition) in Treptower Park in 1896, where over a hundred

2 Berlin: City of Migrations 37

Africans from Togo, Cameroon and German East Africa acted out scenes of daily life in an ‘African village’ before the fascinated gaze of tens of thousands of spectators. These grotesque ‘entertainments’, legitimized as ‘cultural encounters’, were presented to their white audiences as demon-strations of human evolution and a justification for colonial adventures.

When the western colonial powers launched the ‘scramble for Africa’, Berlin played a key role as the location of the 1884–5 West Africa Conference at which representatives of 12 European states, the USA and the Ottoman Empire, at Bismarck’s invitation, met to negotiate and legitimize the carving up of the continent. This is where the naming in 1939 of the ‘“Togo” Allotment Association’ loses its innocence. Germany’s own stake in Africa began when Gustav Nachtigal forcibly claimed Togo and Cameroon for the Empire in 1884 and in the same year, following a fraudulent land purchase by businessman Adolf Lüderitz, the impe-rial flag was hoisted in what subsequently became German South-west Africa (today’s Namibia). These ‘pioneering’ acts of German colonialism were commemorated in the imperial capital’s topography, mapping Germany’s African land grab onto a neat grid of streets and squares in the newly developed north-west of the city—Nachtigalplatz, Lüderitzstraße, Togostraße, Kameruner Straße, Windhuker Straße—more than 20 between 1899 and 1939, long after Germany had lost its colonial ter-ritories at the end of the First World War. In the same year that the Togo Allotment Association was founded, the former Londoner Straße was renamed Petersallee after the notorious Carl Peters, also known as ‘hanging Peters’ (Hänge-Peters) for his brutal treatment of the local population in German East Africa. Attempts to have these toponymic emblems of colonialism expunged (e.g., by renaming Togostraße after Ella Trebe, a communist murdered in Sachsenhausen concentration camp) were consistently rejected by the local authority: the only exception has been the bizarrely disingenuous ‘compromise’ of rededicating Petersallee in 1986 to Dr Hans Peters, an academic and local conservative politician. The last street in the district to be given an ‘African’ name, however, is Ghanastraße (1958), in recognition of the first country in sub-Saharan Africa (on the territory where German colonial ambitions had first taken hold) to gain independence from a European power.

* * *

38 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

These urban landmarks are material manifestations of some of Berlin’s diverse forms of involvement with people from other parts of the world in the hundred or so years between its emergence as imperial capital and its reinvention as capital of contemporary Germany. They inhabit today’s cityscape alongside markers of earlier migrations, stretching back a further 200 years. By the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, the population of Berlin (the old twin settlement of Berlin and Cölln) had shrunk from about 8–9000 to around 3–4000. But despite large-scale emigration from all of Germany, in particular to the USA, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, by 1905 the city’s population had grown to over 2 million: how did Berlin become the central European metropolis that drew in, and continues to draw in, so many and such diverse migrations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Throughout its history, Berlin has attracted incomers from all over the German lands and they constitute the largest source of population growth. But others came too, some invited, others merely tolerated—much the same story as has characterized the revitalization of the city after the devastation of the Second World War following death, deportation and flight.

Again, the numbers alone, while important, reveal nothing of the dif-ferent conditions and motivations underlying these various movements of people. For example, as migration historian Stefi Jersch-Wenzel points out, the Huguenots and Bohemians had a Heimat with which they could identify but to which they couldn’t return; the Poles had a Heimat to which they could return (they have a long tradition of ‘shuttle migration’) and maintained a strong religious and national consciousness; while the Jews had no Heimat but were in perpetual search of a safe space to settle and practise their religious and social customs. Similarly, Huguenots and Bohemians came in more or less homogeneous social groups in a short space of time; Jews arrived over a much longer period and with differing, sometimes conflicting, traditions; and Poles also came over a protracted timespan and underwent a process of internal ‘dissimilation’. Human descendants and physical reminders of these migrant groups of past cen-turies remain in Berlin today, and we can unpick them a little in order to identify the different strands they represent in the fabric of this migration society.

* * *

2 Berlin: City of Migrations 39

The melting pot metaphor applied to many cities that have developed through long processes of migration is always an oversimplification, espe-cially since some individuals and groups retain the distinctive markers of their origins and heritage longer than others and all adapt in different, complex and not necessarily consistent ways to their new environment and conditions. The images of flight and reception represented in these Berlin memorials (Figs. 2.8 and 2.9) remained for generations important features of the cultural memory of the groups of Protestants forced into exile from France in the west and Bohemia in the east in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, respectively. Conventional historiography has fore-grounded the fear of religious persecution that drove these social groups to leave their home and the benignly welcoming attitude of religious tolerance that drew them to Brandenburg and Berlin. It’s certainly true that follow-ing the revocation of the 1598 Edict of Nantes, which had ensured reli-gious equality in France, through the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685 the Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm reacted swiftly by issuing in turn the Edict of Potsdam in the same year, legislation that offered favourable conditions to fellow Protestants. However, this benevolent gesture needs to be under-stood in the context of Brandenburg’s economic and political priorities.

To address the catastrophic collapse of the indigenous population in Brandenburg following the Thirty Years War and to tighten his grip on power over a populace scattered unevenly over a wide territory from

Fig. 2.8 Huguenot refugees arriving in Berlin (relief in the Französischer Dom)

40 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

Fig. 2.9 Bohemian refugees arriving in Berlin (relief on statue of Friedrich Wilhelm I, Rixdorf)

the River Memel in the east to the Rhine in the west, Friedrich Wilhelm embarked on a policy of Peuplierung (repopulation). Internal reconstruction alone was not sufficient, due to the sheer lack of numbers and the shortage of skills to regenerate the economy, so he adopted a strategy of controlled immigration, inviting skilled craftsmen and merchants from different parts of Europe: Dutch, Swiss, Austrian Jews, French Huguenots (or réfugiés, as they preferred to call themselves). The Huguenots in particular were offered significant inducements in terms of land and tax privileges, and they enjoyed a high degree of autonomy—retaining the right to establish their own schools, churches, cemeteries and courts, which in turn enabled them to maintain the public use of the French language for several generations.

The Huguenot diaspora was substantial: around 200,000 abandoned their internal exile—the clandestine église du désert—and dispersed across Europe in the years after 1685: 20,000 settled in Brandenburg, over 5000 of them in Berlin, constituting about one fifth of the city’s population by the turn of the century. So the last third of the seventeenth and the early years of the eighteenth

2 Berlin: City of Migrations 41

centuries saw a massive expansion of Berlin into a Residenzstadt, a power base of Brandenburg-Prussia’s rulers, the population growing to around 50,000 in 1710, and the city limits extended to incorporate the new towns of Friedrichswerder, Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichstadt and various suburbs. Huguenots made a significant contribution to this development, both economically and culturally, and they were particularly concentrated in Friedrichstadt, which by 1725 had become a ‘French Quarter’. This area, now part of the district Mitte, still bears the footprint of this migration: the Huguenot Museum is housed inside the Französische Friedrichstadtkirche church on the Gendarmenmarkt (French etymology here too, of course) in central Berlin.

Tucked away behind a side street in Neukölln, in stark contrast to the magnificence of the Friedrichstadtkirche, is a small farmyard. This is one of a number of locations in this part of the city that points to the other major settlement of Protestant refugees in Berlin, an incongruous reminder in this grittily urban district of a rural past. Centuries of religious conflict in Bohemia had come to a head in the early seventeenth century with the repression of Protestants, especially after the annexation of Bohemia to Austrian lands and their absorption into the process of Habsburg state formation, which entailed the obligation of all subjects to have the same—that is, Catholic—faith as their ruler. A mass exodus beginning in 1622 took many religious refugees into exile, first in Saxony and then, after further tensions there, on to Brandenburg in 1732.

The plaque commemorating their arrival in Berlin is a few metres away from the farmyard on the side of a memorial to Friedrich Wilhelm I (King in, not of, Prussia, since his territory covered only part of Prussia), grandson of the Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm. In welcoming the Bohemian exiles, he was motivated by the same economic and military imperatives as his grandfather—more trade meant more taxes, and more taxes meant more soldiers. The Bohemians were in this sense useful since they brought valuable skills in manufacturing (especially textiles) and commercial experience. They were provided with land in two main loca-tions, one of which—where the farmyard and the memorial now stand—was adjacent to the village of Rixdorf, which subsequently became known as Deutsch-Rixdorf to distinguish it from the new Böhmisch-Rixdorf (Fig. 2.10). In addition to land, the Bohemian immigrants—like the Huguenots before them—were granted privileges and rights, including religious freedom, tax breaks and exemption from military service.

42 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

Rixdorf today is part of the highly multicultural and multilingual Neukölln, but in the eighteenth century the arrival of monolingual Czech-speakers amongst monolingual German-speakers added to tensions arising from the special conditions given to the incomers and from reli-gious differences (most of the Germans were Lutherans, a different branch of Protestantism). In 1762 a ‘commissar’ was appointed to act as transla-tor and intermediary with the Prussian authorities, but in spite of the tensions the use of the Czech language and Bohemian religious and educa-tional traditions were tolerated and no top-down pressure for ‘integration’ was exerted on the Bohemians as long as they remained ‘good citizens’. Nevertheless, language shift through generational acculturation was more or less complete by the end of the eighteenth century except for cere-monial purposes. The gravestones in the Böhmischer Gottesacker (God’s acre—the Bohemian cemetery) are evidence of this process: uniformly in Czech until around 1800, then in some cases bilingual, and finally entirely in German from about 1820 (Fig. 2.11).

Fig. 2.10 Böhmisch Rixdorf (relief on statue of Friedrich Wilhelm I, Rixdorf)

2 Berlin: City of Migrations 43

The New Synagogue in Oranienburger Straße (Fig. 2.12) was so called at the time of its consecration in 1866 to distinguish it from what had previously been the only synagogue in Berlin, which the Jewish commu-nity had outgrown. It’s also ‘new’ today in the sense that it was partially rebuilt in the early 1990s after it had been largely destroyed first by an arson attack by members of the SA in November 1938 and then by the British aerial bombing campaign five years later. Restoration of the build-ing was a low priority for the GDR government—the synagogue was situ-ated in what was then the eastern part of the divided city—and work only began very shortly before the Wende. The surrounding area, historically

Fig. 2.11 Böhmischer Gottesacker: Bohemian cemetery, Karl-Marx-Platz, Neukölln

44 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

known as the Scheunenviertel (‘barn quarter’, after the barns built here in the seventeenth century to protect grain stores from fire) and now part of the Mitte district, is beginning to regain some features of Jewish commu-nity life; after its almost total annihilation in the Holocaust, it may well seem surprising to find that there is a Jewish population at all in Berlin.

Accurate numbers are very hard to determine, but the Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin (Jewish Community of Berlin) estimates there were around 160,000 Jews in Berlin in 1933; by 1945 only about 8000 had survived. In the post-war years and during the Cold War there were many movements of Jews, especially from eastern Europe, into and out of Germany, many of them ‘displaced persons’ and refugees fleeing renewed persecution; some stayed to begin a new life, and others moved on to Israel, the USA and other countries. Under new arrangements follow-ing unification in 1990, Jewish migrants from the former Soviet Union were able to settle in Germany in large numbers, which significantly increased the overall size of the Jewish population; according to the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Committee of Jews in Germany) about 10 per cent of the 100,000 members of Jewish com-munities in Germany today live in Berlin.

Jews have been part of Berlin’s history from its beginnings: the first documented reference to them dates from the late thirteenth century,

Fig. 2.12 New Synagogue, Oranienburger Straße

2 Berlin: City of Migrations 45

shortly after the twin towns of Berlin and Cölln were founded. But persecution and banishment have also been integral to their story—they were driven out of the city three times in the fifteenth and six-teenth centuries, the third time ‘auf ewige Zeiten’ (forever, for all time). Once again, however, economic conditions in Brandenburg after the Thirty Years War prompted the Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm to offer ‘protection’ to a small number of (mainly wealthy) Jews who had been expelled from Vienna in 1671. Their conditions were significantly less favourable than those offered to the Huguenots around the same time or to the Bohemians 60 years later: they were subject to a particu-lar tax regime and they were expected to pay for and maintain their own schools, hospitals and institutions for the poor. Nevertheless, they settled in slowly growing numbers over the next 150  years, reaching about 3300 (3 per cent of the total population) by 1812 when the Emancipation Edict granted them improved (if not equal) rights as Prussian citizens.

Most of the Jews who migrated to Berlin during this period came from other parts of Brandenburg and neighbouring lands in the east, the majority of them German-speakers. The period of industrializa-tion and urbanization in the mid-nineteenth century saw rapid growth in the Berlin population, rising from 170,000 in 1812 to 423,000 in 1849, and the Jewish population almost trebled in that time to 9600. In the second half of the century the population explosion continued, and by the time the city’s total reached 2 million in 1905 there were about 90,000 Jews living in Berlin. This was the largest Jewish community in Germany at the time (about 23 per cent of German Jews lived in Berlin in 1910) and an increasing proportion of them were new migrants from eastern Europe, fleeing the pogroms in Russia and Poland.

The Club of Polish Failures (Fig. 2.13) is in Ackerstraße, just north of the city centre, in Mitte: a small, scruffy venue for a random assortment of cultural events organized sporadically by a group of Polish Berliners. It declares its ‘official language’ to be ‘German and all other foreign lan-guages’ and claims to be a Berlin institution ‘in which knowledge of Polish is not necessary and sometimes even a hindrance’. Lurking behind its wry self-image is an ironic sense of centuries of failed relationships between Germans and Poles in the centre of Europe. Yet despite the brutality and

46 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

savagery that characterized their shared history in the first half of the twentieth century, when hundreds of thousands were dispossessed and displaced, forced into labour, incarcerated and murdered in concentra-tion camps, the number of residents with a migration background in Berlin today whose country of origin is Poland—about 104,000  in 2014—is exceeded only by those with origins in Turkey and the former Soviet Union.

The club in Ackerstraße could also be seen as a kind of satirical twist on the tradition of cultural, religious and political associations that have acted as urban hubs for the Polish population dispersed around Berlin and other German cities. Although there are a few concentrations of Poles in parts of Berlin (such as in the so-called Thermometersiedlung, an estate with streets named after the physicists Celsius, Fahrenheit and Réaumur, in Lichterfelde on the southern outskirts of Steglitz-Zehlendorf ), they are more widely distributed around the city than some other migrant

Fig. 2.13 Club der Polnischen Versager/Club of Polish Failures, Ackerstraße

2 Berlin: City of Migrations 47

groups and tend to associate through informal network ties connected with clubs and organizations rather than coalescing into a ‘Polish com-munity’. These local social networks also facilitate social and physical mobility between the neighbouring countries: cross-border commuters (GrenzgängerInnen), echoing the seasonal Wanderarbeiter of the past, form ‘transnational households’ with bases in, say, Berlin and Poznań.

Polish Berliners today resist simple classification. This is in part a legacy of the disputed status of individuals after 1945, when the Polish govern-ment, in its drive to construct an ethnically homogeneous state, denied the existence of a German minority, while the Federal Republic estimated there were about 1.7 million Germans in Poland, mainly in Upper Silesia: who was German and who was Polish was both an issue of individual and collective rights and a question of historical interpretation. Positing Poles in Berlin as a unitary category also overlooks the complexity of the social and historical conditions under which they arrived in the city. The older generations of former forced labourers and concentration camp inmates, deportees, refugees and displaced persons were later joined by large numbers of Aussiedler and others who took advantage of the more relaxed relations between the two states after the 1970 Warsaw Treaty, in which the Federal Republic formally recognized Poland’s western border. Spasmodic periods of liberalization in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s also offered opportunities for artists, musicians, writers, journalists and other ‘creatives’ to join the cosmopolitan cultural scene in Berlin.

However, this diversity is not solely a contemporary phenomenon. Highly complex migration and settlement patterns, different customs, traditions, languages and religions, repeated political and territorial reconfigurations: all these forces of social change over many centuries shaped the area of central Europe covered by Poland today and this in turn fed into the Polish populations that converged, over time, in Berlin. After Poland was annexed by the great powers of Prussia, Russia and Austria in the late eighteenth century, there were about 1.5  million people with a Polish background living in Prussia, and in 1871 around 2.5  million Poles were living in the new Germany as Reichsdeutsche, German citizens. Some Poles moving to Berlin during its massive expan-sion in the second half of the nineteenth century were therefore ‘inter-nal migrants’, others—coming from the Russian and Austrian parts of

48 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

the former Poland—were foreigners. Regardless of their status, their motivations were many and varied: the city offered the lure of higher pay, shorter working hours, opportunities for training and greater social mobility, better living conditions, greater independence, liberation from the constraints of conventional behaviour patterns, cultural activities and the conviviality of clubs and societies.

The surge of immigration at that time also had a marked impact on the linguistic texture of the burgeoning metropolis and this was reflected in the inclusion, for the first time, of a language question in the 1890 Prussian census (not repeated in 1895 but posed again in 1900, 1905 and 1910). The responses to such questions are notoriously difficult to inter-pret—many Polish-speakers, for example, may have preferred to record themselves as German-speakers due to the more advantageous residence conditions—but while 12 ‘mother tongues’ were reported in 1910 over half of the respondents indicating a language other than German named Polish. Polish-speakers therefore accounted for a significant proportion of the ‘foreign’ population of the imperial capital and on the basis of these statistics and other data it’s estimated that there were around 100,000 Poles in Berlin at the outbreak of the First World War—about the same number as today.

Berlin Re-diversified

With a population of about 3.5 million, Berlin today is not a world city on the scale of Tokyo, New York, Mexico City or Mumbai, but in its own historical space, in central Europe, it is the second largest city after St Petersburg. It grew from a provincial town with a few thousand inhabitants in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War in the mid-seventeenth century to the highly industrialized capital city of the German empire by the end of the nineteenth century. Much of this growth was due to the influx of workers from across the German lands, but a large and increasing propor-tion of incomers were migrants from other countries in west and east. A hundred years ago Berlin was not only already one of the largest cities in Europe but ethnically, culturally and linguistically highly diverse.

2 Berlin: City of Migrations 49

The catastrophic ‘Germanization’ policies of the Nazi period obliterated this diversity through expulsion, exile and mass murder. Yet when we observe the arrival of foreign workers to support economic growth on either side of the Wall during the Cold War and then the extraordinary diversification of Berlin’s population over the last 25 years, we should rec-ognize these social transformations not as peculiarly modern phenomena but, in the broader historical context, as a process of re-diversification, a revival of the centuries-old tradition of renewal through migration. In this chapter, I’ve tried, very briefly, to conjure something of the complex contemporary legacy of this tradition. In the next chapter, I want to turn your attention to one particular consequence of Berlin’s migrations: the collision between German and myriad other languages.

50 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

51© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017P. Stevenson, Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis, Language and Globalization, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40606-0_3

3Berlin: City of Multilingualisms

The ‘Language Question’

Social historians refer to the questione della lingua to help explain the rise of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe. They mean by this the mobilization of standardized linguistic varieties in the struggle for political unification, in which artefacts called ‘Italian’ or ‘German’ could be brandished, like flags, as emblems or icons of the ‘nation’ to convince a highly disparate populace that, whatever their differences, they all ‘saluted the same language’, even if they couldn’t understand each other. But the ‘language question’, in different guises, tends to surface at all moments of social or political crisis, especially in Germany. During the Cold War, for example, asserting the right to custodianship of ‘the German lan-guage’ was a proxy for political action in the ideological struggle between political commentators and intellectuals in east and west over the claim to the inheritance of the German cultural tradition and the right to speak for ‘the German people’: ‘they’ are desecrating the national language, ‘we’ alone are acting as its guardian, therefore we are the sole legitimate representatives of the nation. This dispute had atrophied long before the Wende, but the rapid social transformations of the post-unification years,

in particular the ramifications of increasingly diversified migration, soon threw up a new language question in its place: how, or what, should a German citizen speak?

Ten years ago a spectacularly vehement controversy was ignited by an apparently simple statement about language use in the regulations of a secondary school in inner city Berlin. The Herbert-Hoover-Schule is in Wedding, which is one of the poorest areas of the city and is characterized by high unemployment, low rents and an ethnically highly diverse popu-lation. According to the Berlin Senate Department for Education, Science and Research, over 90 per cent of the students had a Herkunftssprache (literally: language of origin—taken to mean language spoken within the family) other than German, including Turkish and Arabic, the most frequently spoken in students’ homes, as well as, for example, Kurdish, Albanian, Bosnian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Polish, Czech and Armenian.

As part of a process of organizational reform intended to improve working conditions and relationships within the school, the governing board together with the teaching staff and student representatives agreed to a set of ‘rules of acceptable behaviour’, which was published in February 2005. Paragraph 1 (Grundsätze or Basic Principles) deals with a variety of issues including equality, tolerance, language and the right to learn. On language use, the rules stipulate:

Die Schulsprache an unserer Schule ist Deutsch, die Amtssprache der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Jeder Schüler ist verpflichtet, sich im Geltungsbereich der Hausordnung nur in dieser Sprache zu verständigen.

The school language at our school is German, the official language of the Federal Republic of Germany. Within the area in which these regulations apply, every student is obliged to communicate only in this language. (My translation)

In fact, constitutionally the German language doesn’t have ‘official’ sta-tus other than in legal proceedings, but that wasn’t the contentious issue. The regulation was determined by an internal process within the school, involving both students and teachers, and its rationale was the perceived need to improve communication and mediation in the event of disputes or disruptive behaviour between students. Nevertheless, the publication of this particular rule was criticized by the local education authority on the

52 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

grounds of potential discrimination and provoked hostile reactions from representatives of minority groups both locally and in the Berlin Senate.

The policy had been in place for some months before it entered the public domain outside the school, but once launched the debate esca-lated rapidly, giving rise to headlines such as ‘At this school you may only speak German’, in the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet, and ‘Berlin school forbids foreign languages’ in the local daily Der Tagesspiegel. Within a week, the story featured throughout the national press as well as on tele-vision news and talk shows, and this very local issue became embroiled in national debates surrounding the recently passed Immigration Act (Zuwanderungsgesetz), which had come into effect on 1 January 2005 (see Chap. 2). What does this tell us about the condition of German, or Berlin, society in the early twenty-first century?

At the broadest level, this furore is not about language at all but about what counts as ‘appropriate and acceptable behaviour’ and what consti-tutes a ‘good citizen’: ideas and beliefs about language and language use have been conscripted into debates on citizenship. But the question, as far as language is concerned here, doesn’t seem to be ‘do the students know German?’; the question is ‘do they use German?’ No one disputed the exclusive use of German in the classroom, and we can assume that all of the students—no doubt with widely varying degrees of proficiency—were able to participate in lessons on this basis. The conflict revolved around language behaviour outside the classroom, in the playground. Why should this matter? The answers to this question reveal fundamental differences of perspective on social life in contemporary Berlin and open up conflict-ing stances on what language and language use represent.

The playground is an ambiguous space: both public and personal, col-lective and individual, at the same time. It’s a zone within the physical bounds of the institution but it’s typically occupied outside the tempo-ral scope of the school’s educational remit, when the main business, the teaching and learning, is temporarily suspended. So for the advocates of the ‘German only’ position, on the one hand, the institutional location requires the observation of the school’s language policy, which foregrounds the students’ responsibility to use the ‘national’ language. For their oppo-nents, on the other hand, duty is displaced in the students’ ‘free time’ by their right to make their own language choices. Simmering beneath these

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two stances are radically opposed orientations towards what it means to be a Berliner.

Speaking German under these conditions may, of course, be an act of choice, but if not, then it’s an act of submission to authority and implies acceding to a requirement for sameness and subordinating individual differences. As another newspaper headline thundered ironically: ‘Thou shalt integrate!’ Speaking a language other than German—or, as is often the case in Berlin playgrounds, creatively merging features of German and other languages—isn’t necessarily an act of resistance, but exercising the ability to be different is surely an assertion of autonomy: ‘we may acknowledge the obligation to conform to the ‘one language’ rule in the classroom’, the students seem to be saying, ‘but in the playground we use our various linguistic resources to create our own space’.

This, too, may be part of an integrative process but it derives its meaning and value from identification with local, rather than national, customs and traditions: it’s about Beheimatung, finding or styling your own place in society, rather than the docile acceptance of the place allo-cated to you. For while dominant public discourses on integration stress demands for commitment and loyalty to the state and active participa-tion in the (German-speaking) workplace and democratic processes, some people may have different priorities, for which a multilingual portfolio may be vital: Massoud, for example, a Kurd from Baghdad, told me that he’d been awaiting the outcome of his asylum application for 8 years and had found solace in being able to participate in the international cultural scene in Prenzlauer Berg with its convivial atmosphere and its patterns of informal and transient association, using German as a lingua franca alongside Kurdish and Arabic.

The tension between these two stances is part of the enduring legacy of the monolingual ideology of nineteenth-century nationalism in Europe and the demonization of multilingualism as deviant, illegitimate and dangerous. Part of the late twentieth-century European project, a hundred years on, was to relegitimize linguistic pluralism, but this well- intentioned aim continues to be hampered by the jostling of different kinds of multilingualism and different conceptions of the multilingual individual.

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At one extreme is elite multilingualism that draws on a small pool of global and powerful national languages, its origins rooted in the ideals of humanist education. Here the multilingual individual is a comfortable cosmopolitan with a consciously and expensively accumulated knowledge of culturally accredited languages with high symbolic value: no need for surtitles at the opera. This is the strategic multilingual, who relies on deploying translatable knowledge and operates within their comfort zone, at work and at leisure. At the other extreme is disruptive multi-lingualism, deriving from varied patterns of migration and consisting in an unpredictable and unstable constellation of linguistic forms drawn from multiple languages whose value is highly context-dependent. Here the multilingual individual is a subversive itinerant of no fixed linguistic abode with a complex and uneven collection of linguistic resources, often seen as out of place, and of skills acquired and developed through expe-rience rather than through formal learning. This is the tactical multi-lingual, who navigates everyday life instinctively by deftly adapting all available resources at their disposal to meet their needs.

Denizens of Berlin, as of other European cities, cover the full spectrum between these two prototypical extremes and the most striking aspect of the sociolinguistic profiles of these highly diverse urban societies is their complexity. This derives in part from the layering of multilingualisms that corresponds, to some degree, to the layering of migrations I discussed in Chap. 2. Drilling down through the linguistic stratigraphy of Berlin we will find, for example, Polish, Russian and French beneath Turkish, Italian and Croatian beneath Tamil, Dari and Twi. If multilingualism is perceived as new here, it’s partly because of the entrenched monolingual disposition we’ve inherited and partly because of the exponential growth in the number of languages audible and visible in the streets of the city over the last 25 years. Yet from a deeper and wider historical perspective, this is a return to the ‘old normal’: the linguistic ‘superdiversity’ of Berlin today is a throwback to the highly multilingual regimes commonplace across central Europe, the Middle East and around the Mediterranean before the First World War.

At all events, multilingualism is a reality in contemporary Berlin: so what do we know about it—and what do we not know?

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Counting and Mapping Languages

We could start by establishing how many languages we might encounter in Berlin and how their speakers are distributed across the city. Digital technologies offer a quick way in here: Twitter maps, for example, can reveal interesting concentrations of tweets in particular languages in cer-tain parts of a city in a given time frame (see, for example these maps for London and New  York: http://twitter.mappinglondon.co.uk/ and http://ny.spatial.ly/). But this doesn’t give us any systematic insights into the language profile of a city’s inhabitants—an intriguing snapshot, but nothing more than that. To grasp the dimensions of multilingualism in Berlin, we’d need a more rigorous approach, but any attempt to iden-tify and count the numbers of languages spoken in any given society or community is inevitably beset by highly problematic methodological and conceptual issues. This is the case even if we accept what some would see as the convenient fiction of discrete languages in the first place. What is the ‘unit’ of analysis: that is, what counts as a ‘language’? Who decides on how to name these units—what if someone says ‘I speak Indian’?—and on the boundaries between them: what is Bosnian? Croatian? Serbian? Who do you ask and what question(s) do you pose: ‘which languages do you know? speak? understand?’ What kinds of answer are possible: single? multiple? Let’s consider a concrete example.

After prolonged lobbying by language professionals a question about language was finally included in the 2011 census in the UK. Following nationwide consultation and vigorous campaigns by linguists and others, two questions on language were included in the census for England (more complex sets of questions were posed in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland):

Question 18 What is your main language?EnglishOther, write in (including British Sign Language)

Question 19 How well can you speak English?Very wellWell

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Not wellNot at all

The results for London, as analysed by the LUCIDE project (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60974/), showed that 26  per cent of households had members who didn’t consider English to be their main language. Just under two thirds of the speakers of languages other than English were accounted for by 15 ‘community languages’, each with at least 50,000 reported speakers in the city (the three largest being Polish, Bengali and Gujerati). A further 58 languages were named in the published census data, spoken by about one third of the respondents whose main language wasn’t English, and an unspecified number of other languages were reported but not named in the published figures. Figure 3.1 shows the results for the central London district of Westminster. It illustrates the very high degree of linguistic diversity in the city, the most remarkable feature perhaps being the fact that almost a quarter of the respondents identified a range of ‘other languages’, each with too few speakers to be represented on the chart.

These findings, and other analyses published by the Office for National Statistics (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171776_302179.pdf), are obvi-ously very revealing. For all the detailed information it may produce, though, this kind of survey, based on just two or three questions, is still a relatively blunt instrument. Not to mention the fact that the formula-tion of the questions left a great deal to individual interpretation (e.g., in the Scottish version, what does it mean to ‘understand’ Scots?) and that self-reported data on knowledge and behaviour is notoriously unreliable. Nevertheless, to have even approximate data is an important step in raising public awareness of the nature of linguistic diversity in the UK.

One of the striking aspects of the politics of language in Germany, by contrast, is that national and local authorities either haven’t posed a language question at all in the course of gathering social data on their respective popu-lations or appear to be content to accept the equivalence of language and country of origin. Maybe there is only so much diversity a government can bear. While statistics are gathered on variables such as religious beliefs, mari-tal status, education, occupation and—in the case of migrants—parents’ country of origin, neither the most recent national census (2011) nor the periodic ‘microcensus’ asks about language knowledge or use.

3 Berlin: City of Multilingualisms 57

Data on numbers of migrants by their countries of origin is routinely gathered both nationally and in individual federal states (Bundesländer), including Berlin, where official registration figures for 2014 show that the capital’s population includes foreign residents from 169 named countries, while over 11,000 individuals are classified as ‘unspecified’ and a further 1200 are stateless. The numerical data is enriched by cartographic representations of the distribution of migrants across the city based on data from the Statistical Office of Berlin-Brandenburg

Fig. 3.1 Communities’ languages in Westminster, London (adapted from Dina Mehmedbegović et al. (2015) Multilingualism in London: LUCIDE city report)

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(http://interaktiv. morgenpost.de/migranten-in-berlin/#11/52.5000/13.3200). But the dangers of extrapolating numbers of languages (and their speakers) from this data are considerable: for example, 43 lan-guages have been attested in surveys in Turkey over the last 25 years, about half of which are each attributed over 10,000 speakers in that country. To assume that the only, or even main, language of a Berliner from Turkey is Turkish is therefore far from safe.

So there’s no reliable official data on the language knowledge of migrants in Berlin or in Germany as a whole; at best, a partial picture can be assembled on the basis of various institutional tests of language pro-ficiency and self-reported survey data. A review of available research by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, for example, is limited to data on the five most numerous groups of migrants by country of origin (Turkey, former Yugoslavia, Poland, Italy and Greece), and even this con-centrates on knowledge and use of German amongst children and adults and in the family. One chapter is devoted to multilingualism amongst adult migrants, but—although the misleading nature of such categories is acknowledged—it’s discussed in terms of knowledge of German and the Herkunftslandsprache (language of country of origin—why only one?) or Muttersprache (mother tongue—can we be sure what that means?). The inclusion, in the same chapter, of data on levels of illiteracy (as opposed to literacy) reinforces the no doubt unintended indexing of linguistic diversity as problematic and disruptive. More promisingly, ‘home lan-guage surveys’ have been conducted as academic research projects—for example, in Essen, Hamburg, Freiburg, as well as Vienna—and they offer a far more detailed and differentiated account, but they are still small in number and no such research has yet been carried out in Berlin.

Language knowledge apparently becomes relevant as an official sta-tistical category only in relation to education, not least in the wake of the so-called PISA shock, public reaction to a large-scale study which revealed remarkably low levels of academic performance by students in German schools in relation to international comparators, and in studies concerned with integration and social cohesion. However, when a ‘lan-guage question’ is asked in official surveys, it often appears to be directed less towards meeting the needs of children to study their ‘other’ languages

3 Berlin: City of Multilingualisms 59

than towards the political imperative of targeting resources on those per-ceived to be in particular need of support in German.

In Berlin, for example, detailed data—broken down by school type and district (Bezirk)—is available on the numbers of children who don’t have German as their first language, but all are subsumed under the umbrella category of SchülerInnen nichtdeutscher Herkunftssprache (students with non-German language of origin) or ndH for short: no figures are available for individual languages. While overall student numbers have declined over the last 20 years, they are rising again now and the proportion of students attending state schools in Berlin and classified as ndH rose from 16 per cent in 1996–7 to 37 per cent in 2014–2015 (see Fig. 3.2). And this global figure masks substantial differences between areas and indi-vidual districts. Not surprisingly, the numbers are higher in the inner city than in the more outlying areas and generally higher in the west of the city than in the east: for example, while the proportion of ndH stu-dents in Neukölln was 67 per cent, in neighbouring Treptow-Köpenick (formerly in East Berlin) it was only 9 per cent.

Some Bundesländer do count the languages claimed as ‘home lan-guages’ by students in state schools and this is interesting up to a point. It’s important and potentially useful to know, for example, that 115 ‘family’ languages are named by students at Hamburg schools in the Education Department’s annual survey. But in the absence of more detailed analysis and empirical investigation of patterns of language use, such data is of limited value: what does it tell us about the kinds of linguistic knowledge individual speakers have, about the nature of their repertoires, or about the social practices this knowledge and these repertoires make possible for them (or prevent them from engaging in)? Nothing at all.

A more ambitious project, conducted in London, shows how it is pos-sible to represent the linguistic composition of populations of individual districts and the distribution of languages across the city. The Language Capital project elicited self‐reported home language use by over a million schoolchildren, who named 233 languages, 30 of which were each cited by more than 1000 respondents. The results have been published in the form of a series of maps, such as Figs. 3.3 and 3.4, which provide a remarkable visual representation both of linguistic diversity in contempo-rary London and of striking patterns of local concentration and density.

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Yet, this is problematic too. By foregrounding the most widely used language in any one location this approach may underrepresent local diversity in what are in fact highly globalized neighbourhoods, and there is a further risk of exaggerating the settled nature of what may be quite mobile and changing populations (not least since data gathered from schoolchildren skews the results towards families and therefore fails alto-gether to register groups such as young single men and women, who con-stitute a significant proportion of the city’s migrant population—as the

Fig. 3.2 Schüler nichtdeutscher Herkunftssprache at state schools in Berlin (derived from data in Blickpunkt Schule—Schuljahr 2014/2015, published by the Senatsverwaltung für Bildung, Jugend und Wissenschaft, Berlin)

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census data shows). Furthermore, the procedure of mapping speakers of named languages onto physical/geographical space constructs a kind of social coherence that privileges language over other dimensions: for exam-ple, Polish-speakers who settled in London after the Second World War, those who came on visitor permits before Poland joined the EU in 2004 and stayed on illegally to work, and those who have arrived since then as legitimate EU economic migrants may live in the same area but may not have much else in common.

And residents of a particular district or neighbourhood may partic-ipate in various forms of social engagement both locally and in other parts of the city, creating for themselves in this way different social networks or social spaces, each of which may be partly constituted by particular language practices. For example, members of a boules club who congregate on the banks of the Landwehrkanal in Berlin on Friday

Fig. 3.3 Distribution of Panjabi speakers in London (from John Eversley et al. (2010), Language Capital: Mapping the languages of London’s schoolchildren (London: CILT))

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evenings converge from many districts to play; at any one time, a game may include Berliners of various nationalities—say, a German, an Italian, a Haitian, an Argentinian—and alongside German as the lingua franca of the boules terrain other languages come into play for tactical exchanges between teammates or banter with spectators. At the end of the game, the players disperse, temporarily disbanding this highly localized ‘com-munity of practice’ and separately re-enter some other ‘zone’ of their indi-vidual life worlds where different language practices apply.

A further unintended consequence of counting and mapping lan-guages may be to reinforce or corroborate public policy discourses that depend on the acceptance and credibility of fixed social categories, such as ethnicity or ‘mother tongue’. The ‘heteroglossic’ life world inhabited by many who live in metropolitan cities is at odds with consensus-oriented perceptions of integration and social cohesion and with the perceived

Fig. 3.4 Distribution of Bengali speakers in London (from John Eversley et al. (2010), Language Capital: Mapping the languages of London’s schoolchildren (London: CILT))

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political imperative—especially at times, such as the present, of extreme economic pressures and stringent control of public finances—of ‘con-trolling’ and ‘managing’ diversity. Such policy objectives are facilitated by the use of regimented conceptions of language knowledge, measured by inflexible criteria of proficiency in standardized linguistic varieties, and by corralling individuals into homogenizing categories—whether social (ethnicity, origin, occupation), spatial (community, district, neighbourhood) or motivational (integrative, instrumental, affective).

The effects of this are far reaching: reducing individuals to ‘speakers of a given language’—even if situated in a particular place: Spanish-speakers in New York, for example, or Turkish-speakers in Berlin—not only over-looks both the opportunities and the constraints that shape their actual language worlds, ignoring the fact that contextual and biographical con-ditions may be salient for them. It also inevitably misrepresents unique repertoires of linguistic resources, individually acquired under particular social and historical conditions, eliding both the stylistic richness of these repertoires and the disparate patterns of social engagement and interac-tion (some fleeting, some enduring) that they may serve. Even the most sophisticated survey techniques, therefore, leave us ignorant of how lan-guage is used, perceived and represented in everyday life. We need differ-ent kinds of information to gain a more sensitive feeling for the ‘linguistic texture’ of a society. What other dimensions are there in the linguistic diversity of the urban environment?

Visual and Aural Dimensions of Linguistic Diversity in the Cityscape

The exhibition Sensing the street, that I referred to in Chap. 1, encourages us to observe and absorb the plethora of sensory phenomena that col-lectively constitute the special nature of particular urban environments. Some of these may be more or less constant—the smell of freshly brewed coffee or freshly baked bread, for instance, or the taste of a Currywurst—and some may recur but only at certain times of the day or in certain seasons and, in doing so, indicate the regular rhythms of city life: the sound of road-sweeping vehicles early in the morning, the sight of patio

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warmers outside cafés in the autumn or parasols in the summer. But others may change with the influx of new inhabitants or visitors bringing different customs, traditions and practices. Most immediately striking, perhaps, are those innovations that impact our senses of sight, smell and taste—passers-by with new styles of dress and ways of arranging their hair, new aromas drifting out from restaurants, new flavours of street food. If we’re alert to our auditory environment, we also register new sounds in the form of music playing in bars, say, or locally unfamiliar languages being spoken by people beside us in the train or at the bus stop.

These sensory changes are always an indicator, occasionally even an instigator, of social change. Sometimes they augment the existing array of features in the environment, adding to the sights and sounds, smells and tastes, already there and sometimes they are experienced through an absence, rather than a presence. One of the most readily perceptible differ-ences in Berlin in the first decade after unification was the disappearance, in the eastern part of the city, of the previously ubiquitous odour of exhaust fumes from two-stroke car engines, and the most notorious instance of visual change was the proposed, but successfully resisted, replacement of the much cherished eastern Ampelmännchen, the red and green figures on pedestrian crossing signs. But the post-Cold War era has brought a new dynamic to the urban environment in Berlin that embraces social change at two levels: first, a reconfiguration or realignment of traditions and prac-tices associated with the eastern and western parts of the city, and secondly, a rapid diversification of influences from all parts of the world. The Berlin I visit now looks, sounds, smells and tastes radically different from the one I first encountered over 40 years ago.

As we saw in Chaps. 1 and 2, Berlin is replete with visual or semiotic emblems of the past: not only artefacts and structures explicitly created to memorialize—the monuments and museums, the Stolpersteine (cob-blestones commemorating individual victims of Nazism) and Mauerreste (Wall fragments)—but also many other, less conspicuous, reminders of recent or distant history. Kirchgasse (Church Lane), for example, is a small and unremarkable side street in Rixdorf, Neukölln, and most peo-ple who pass by probably don’t even notice the small appendage attached to the top of the street sign (see Fig. 3.5). Even fewer may be interested in what it tells us: that until 1909 the street bore the Czech name Mala

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ulicka (Enge Gasse in German, Narrow Lane). For the more curious, however, this information may be the first step in a journey of discovery that takes them down the lane past the monument to Friedrich Wilhelm I (see Chap. 2) and then on to the little Bohemian Museum and the farmyard, hidden away behind the street, a remnant of the seventeenth-/eighteenth-century village Böhmisch Rixdorf.

Sometimes the historical layering of the visual environment is even more discreet. In a street on the other side of Richardplatz from Kirchgasse there’s a small art gallery. Its name—exilien (an invented word that could be taken to mean something like ‘exile land’)—hints at some kind of exotic connections, perhaps exhibits imported from the owner’s home-land. Its actual derivation from the former name of the premises—a shop called simply Textilien (Textiles)—is available only to those who have been in the area long enough to notice the change (see Figs. 3.6 and 3.7). Not only is the new name formed by deleting the two letter t’s from the original, but the same actual letter forms, a typeface that looks dated now but was widely used 50–60 years ago, have been removed and remounted to form the new sign. The restyled gallery incorporates an almost secret

Fig. 3.5 Street sign in Rixdorf: Kirchgasse

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Fig. 3.6 Shop sign in Rixdorf: Textilien

Fig. 3.7 Gallery sign in Rixdorf: exilien

acknowledgement of its past by recycling the components of its name sign in what may appear like whimsically retro branding.

A more overt, yet still arcane, reference to the past is the retention of the name Haus des Lehrers (The Teacher’s Building) on a prominent edifice on Alexanderplatz, the former hub of East Berlin. Renovated in 2002–5, it’s marketed today as a prestigious office block but its name and the iconic mosaic tile frieze (‘Our Life’) wrapped around its third and fourth floors point towards a quite different status and purpose in the past. The original Art Nouveau building was con-structed in 1908 for the Berlin Teachers’ Association but was badly damaged by Allied bombing in the Second World War and later demolished. It was rebuilt in the early 1960s as a landmark structure in the heart of the GDR capital. The current developers, the WBM Wohnungsbaugesellschaft, describe it like this:

When the Haus des Lehrers was constructed in the early 1960s, it wasn’t just a building – it was a vision of the future: a strategically positioned symbol facing out onto Alexanderplatz that aimed to demonstrate that the GDR was a progressive state that was more than capable of keeping up with the West. A ‘herald of the future’ that was visible from afar: the high- rise tower and the accompanying congress centre occupied an extremely prominent position  – right at the point where Stalinallee (now called Karl-Marx- Allee), a monumental boulevard extending from the east, met Alexanderplatz, the city’s up-and-coming centre. The prestigious property was intended as a work of architectural art that paved the way for interna-tional modernism. For this reason, it is now a listed building. (http://www.hausdeslehrers.de/en/building/)

The frieze, designed by Walter Womacka, depicts in a series of scenes a bold and confident image of a successful and industrious socialist society, thrusting the façade today into a starkly ironic confrontation with the spirit of free enterprise that characterizes the contemporary interior (Fig. 3.8).

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Many of these visual manifestations of language, with or without accompanying non-linguistic features, are monolingual in the dominant language, German, especially when their authors have the authority both to make declarations or issue instructions and to determine the place-ment of the signs: Access restricted to permit holders, Keep off the grass, No smoking. Even in this domain, though, recent years have seen the devel-opment of a less tight-lipped manner of addressing the public. Berlin is a very dog-friendly city and this, of course, has consequences: Berliners tend to walk the streets with one eye on the ground. Local initiatives adopt a playful approach to encouraging good citizenship amongst dog owners (see Fig. 3.9), but their municipal counterparts are no less light- hearted (see Fig. 3.10).

Even monolingual signs manifest the linguistic diversity of the population. Alongside texts in standard German are representations of non- standard varieties: for example, an advertisement for a locally produced soft drink Spreequell (incorporating the name of the river Spree that flows through the city) has a Berlin skyline in the background behind the colloquial slogan

Fig. 3.8 Haus des Lehrers, Alexanderplatz

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Fig. 3.9 Dog waste sign, Rixdorf

‘VOLLE PULLE LEBEN!’ (live life to the full!). A sign promoting a hotel on an island in the Baltic Sea proclaims its message in Low German, widely spoken in rural areas in northern Germany. The local urban speech variety Berlinisch is frequently used in graffiti: ‘für meine Geschwistä’ (‘for my bro-thas and sistas’, perhaps, representing the local pronunciation of the final syllable in the word Geschwister), ‘Suse ick liebe dir’ (‘Suse I love you’, with non-standard phonological and grammatical features). And some texts cre-atively exploit the possibilities of both linguistic and cultural influences from beyond the city: an advertisement for Lieferando, a fast food home delivery service, juxtaposes an image of a plate of farfalle (a type of pasta) with the slogan ‘Isch bin dir Farfalle’, combining a pun on farfalle and the German verb verfallen (‘ich bin dir verfallen’, I’m addicted to you) with the pronunciation of ich (I) as isch (a non-standard variant common in other parts of Germany and now localized in Berlin, particularly in the speech of people with non-German backgrounds).

The diversification in visual manifestations of language in the last two decades is most evident, however, in the presence of languages other

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than German. Their physical distribution is uneven. Many non-German signs are, as we’d expect, concentrated in  locations with a correspond-ingly high density of speakers of other languages and most typically serve conventional functions of providing information (signs on shops, restau-rants and services, such as advice centres, or warning notices on public facilities). This in itself is not new, although the sheer number of such signs and the range of languages used have increased substantially. More striking, perhaps, is the growth in signs placed strategically (e.g., by train lines) to catch the eye of readers on the move and of monolingual signs, in languages other than German, targeting particular audiences. This, again, is most evident in advertising, such as in the advertisement for a

Fig. 3.10 Municipal dog waste bin

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mobile phone service aimed specifically at Turkish consumers (which also appears in a German version) and in the adjacent billboards at S-Bahn stations in Polish and Turkish promoting the same shopping centre (see Figs. 3.11, 3.12 and 3.13).

The effect of this more widespread visual representation of other languages is to create different kinds of urban space: either reinforcing local ties of language, people and place (as in the Turkish verb endings adorning the façade of a building in Kreuzberg: see Fig. 2.3) or trans-forming an otherwise unattributed space (such as a department store in the city centre) into a location privileging nominated groups (e.g., through the use of English and Polish on the floor guide of the Galeria Kaufhof store on Alexanderplatz).

The important general point, I think, is that the public sphere, broadly understood, is no longer an entirely German domain. Unregulated and unfettered linguistic behaviours outside mainstream institutional contexts—from graffiti to stickers and flyers promoting local cultural

Fig. 3.11 Turkcell: Advertising hoarding for Turkish mobile phone service

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Fig. 3.12 Advertisement for shopping centre in Polish

Fig. 3.13 Advertisement for shopping centre in Turkish

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events—are increasingly heteroglossic. Beside a barbeque site in a central park (Monbijoupark, Oranienburger Straße), officially sanctioned for this purpose by a metal sign with the single German word Grillplatz, a rubbish skip has the word ‘ash’ daubed on it in Russian, French, Turkish, Spanish and English, as well as German (see Fig. 3.14). The semiotics of the scene suggest that while cooking in the open air is legitimate as long as it’s done in an authorized place, for the recognition of which a knowledge of German is both necessary and sufficient, the activity itself is practised by Berliners with multiple origins. What might in other contexts be deemed a subversive act—‘defacing’ public property—seems here to be a public-spirited initiative, a gesture of social and linguistic inclusivity. (The genuinely subversive, but playful, feature of the object is in fact the amendment, in a contrasting colour, of the German word Asche (ash) to Ärsche (arses/asses).)

Furthermore, the co-mingling or co-location of features from different languages is not confined to visual, graphic representations. For the urban youth in Berlin and many other German cities, crossing language bound-

Fig. 3.14 Multilingual BBQ skip, Monbijou Park

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aries in everyday spoken interaction is a commonplace vernacular modus operandi. But language mixing on the streets of Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Stuttgart is more complex and more differentiated than the simple blending of German and (say) Turkish (Türkendeutsch) or the pidgin-like learner varieties of first-generation migrants widely studied in the 1970s and 1980s. The current second-, third- and fourth-generation Germans with a migration background have been socialized in Germany and their rep-ertoires therefore include standard and non-standard varieties of German, as well as, typically, other languages. Kiezdeutsch (literally ‘neighbourhood German’)—much like so-called multiethnolects evolving in other western European cities, such as straattaal in Amsterdam or Antwerp, Rinkeby sven-ska in Stockholm or Multicultural London English—entails a dynamic blending of features from German and various other languages, most fre-quently Turkish or Arabic, and is used by monolingual speakers of German as well as speakers with more diverse repertoires.

This creative bricolage is more elaborate and sophisticated than conventional ‘code-switching’ between distinct languages or language varieties, with speakers drawing in imaginative ways on whatever lin-guistic resources are available to them to achieve particular effects and construct new spaces for interaction. While researchers argue over the appropriate characterization of the phenomenon—is it, as Berlin linguist Heike Wiese claims, a ‘new dialect’ of German, or is it, as others insist, a ‘speech style’, an ever-changing ‘manner of speaking’?—media debates predictably rage around polarized views on the ‘debasement’ or ‘enrich-ment’ of the German language. The important point, perhaps, is that there seems to be something systematic, rather than random, about the way different language resources are drawn together and the resulting way of speaking is recognized, both by the speakers themselves and by others, as distinctive: it’s certainly not ‘standard German’ but neither is it conventionally non-standard Berlinisch nor simply ‘ungrammatical’.

These new forms of creative orality are complemented in turn by new, multilingual literacies and multimodal online practices. German is securely in the list of Facebook’s Top Ten Languages, and the increasingly multilin-gual Internet offers a space for Germans of whatever ethnic or linguistic background to engage in a practically limitless array of forms of expres-sion, exchange and experimentation in different languages (and mixtures of languages). For example, although the pioneering radio station Radio

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Multikulti is now defunct, online stations such as Berlin’s multikult.fm broadcast in a wide range of languages. Multikult.fm declares that ‘diver-sity is our program’ and its aim is to contribute to a ‘postmigrational’ multicultural metropolis—not simply through its content but by enabling consumer choice through interactive technologies. As they put it on their website (my translation):

We are the multimedia platform of a vibrant region. We do radio – it’s multicultural, interactive and visionary.

multicult.fm because it’s multicultural. Current media provision for the multicultural communities is not sufficient…. We want to portray cultural diversity as normality, to demonstrate the opportunities of an immigration society and to explore the origins of conflict and ways of resolving it. Our aim is to expand the intercultural orientation of journalists both with and without a migration background. Our potential for achieving this is clear. Many members of our team are experienced journalists with roots in differ-ent cultures. For many years they have reported on migration policy for Radio Multikulti and other media.

multicult.fm because it’s interactive. Using innovative technological approaches, we want to create a completely new form of media. Radio that everyone can help to shape and that is accessible to all. In every respect: software will make broadcasts in different languages comprehensible for all. For our listeners this means being able to decide with a click of the mouse whether to listen, for example, to an Albanian programme in the original or in a German, English etc version.

multicult.fm because it’s visionary. We have clear ideas about our future. In the long term we will open up new directions for radio. Listeners will be able to influence which programmes are broadcast when – for example, being able to choose between local information programmes or recordings of concerts. Alternative multicult streams will be available, such as an early riser version or a Kreuzberg version.

Interaction, of course, is the essence of all digital social media, and the opportunities that platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube offer for multilingual engagement have led to complex patterns of online linguistic behaviour (including the use of different orthographies and scripts), which German linguist Jannis Androutsopoulos captures in the term ‘networked multilingualism’.

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Whether they’re ‘networked’ or not, and whether they’re multilingual or not, Berliners clearly live in a highly diverse linguistic environment. As I’ve tried to demonstrate here, a journey in more or less any direction across the city will bring you into contact, visually or aurally or both, with many languages other than German. We’re beginning to gain a more concrete and a more refined sense of the linguistic texture of the city, accumulating different dimensions of language use. But at least one fur-ther perspective is still missing that I feel we need to take into account if we’re going to get anywhere close to understanding life in the multilin-gual metropolis: how do individual people experience these multiple daily encounters between languages and how does this impact on their lives?

The Lived Experience of Language

We’ve gained an impression, at least, of the sheer range of languages spoken in Berlin and the distribution of their speakers, and we’ve gleaned something of the diverse ways in which these languages are used in day-to- day interactions and to shape the urban space visually. But I wanted to find out more about the speakers themselves, how they reflect on their linguistic encounters and how they embed these experiences in their individual biographies. Brigitta Busch calls this the ‘lived experience of language’ (Spracherleben):

Mit dem Begriff Spracherleben umreißen wir einen Ansatz, der danach fragt, wie Menschen in mehrsprachigen Lebenszusammenhängen ihre Sprachlichkeit wahrnehmen und bewerten und welche Erfahrungen, Gefühle oder Vorstellungen sie damit verbinden. Oder andersherum gesagt: wie sie sich – gegenüber anderen oder sich selbst – in ihrer Mehrsprachigkeit erfahren, positionieren und darstellen. Gefragt wird nach dem Bezug des Spracherlebens zur individuellen Lebensgeschichte einerseits, zu historisch-gesellschaftlichen Konfigurationen mit ihren Zwängen, Machtgefügen, Diskursformationen und Sprachideologien andererseits. (Busch 2010: 58)

The concept of ‘the lived experience of language’ refers to an approach that explores how people living in multilingual contexts perceive and evaluate the particularity of their linguistic knowledge and what experiences, feelings or ideas they associate with it. Or to put it another way: how they – in relation to others or to themselves – experience, position and represent themselves as

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multilingual. What we’re concerned with is the relationship between the lived experience of language and individual life stories on the one hand, and social and historical configurations with their constraints, power structures, discourse formations and language ideologies on the other. (My translation)

This approach is not concerned with enumerating and cataloguing a set of discrete languages or varieties that an individual can be said, in some sense, to ‘know’. Nor is it about how people use language, in whatever form. It’s about perceptions and evaluations, about feelings and ideas that we associate with being language users in particular social and historical contexts. Understanding someone’s lived experience of language means exploring the effects of language on their own unique life (hi)story, but this also entails identifying the many external pressures that constrain and shape this (hi)story and the ways in which it can be constructed and told. In this way, individual ‘language biographies’ may reveal something not only about one person’s particular experiences but also more generally about ways in which the possibilities and limitations of language condi-tion the experience of moving from one social space to another.

I’ll quote directly from Busch again here because I think her words are important in making the case for this kind of approach, which requires a particular orientation towards the individual:

Ausgangspunkt sind nicht voretablierte Kategorisierungen, Abstraktionen und Quantifizierungen, sondern die Lebenswelt. Diese Lebenswelt, die – übertragen auf das Spracherleben – immer eine heteroglossische ist, wird nicht als statischer Hintergrund verstanden, sondern als dynamischer Horizont, als kollektiver intersubjektiver Pool der Wahrnehmungen, als gemeinsames Erfahrungsfeld und Feld transformierender Handlungen. (Busch 2010: 59)

The starting point is not pre-established categories, abstractions and mea-surements, but the life world. This life world, mapped onto the lived experi-ence of language, is always heteroglossic. It is understood not as a static backdrop but rather as a dynamic panorama, as a collective inter- subjective pool of perceptions, as a shared domain of experience, a domain of transfor-mative actions. (My translation)

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I will, of course, want to know where my research participants ‘come from’, in the geographical sense, since this is undoubtedly an integral and important part of their biographies. But I don’t want to define them by this classification or bind them tacitly into a taken-for-granted ethnic or national category. The focus will be on their ‘life world’ and that is for them to determine. What are the individual and social forces that drive the dynamics of these life worlds? What perceptions and experiences do the narrators draw on? What kinds of ‘transformative actions’ direct and structure their stories?

In Chap. 4, I’m going to try to show what it can mean to do ‘bio-graphical work’ of this kind with five inhabitants of the house that I’m calling Mareschstraße 74, based on extended conversations with them at various times over a period of 4 years between 2011 and 2014. These conversations were conducted in German, a second language both for the other participants and for me. What effects this had on the way we related to each other and the ways in which the stories unfolded, it’s hard to say, although I’m quite sure it created an additional element of emotional uncertainty, at least in some instances. At all events, I think it’s important for you to hear them speak in their own words, and so while I’ve translated extracts from our conversations into English in the discus-sion below, you’ll find the original passages in German in the appendix at the end of the book.

In what follows, my main aim will be to explore ways in which the narrators organize their life stories around transformative events in which language is in some way implicated, directly or indirectly. I’ll try, tenta-tively, to ease apart, to delaminate, some of the experiences and percep-tions, the patterns and contradictions, that are melded together in the narratives. There could, of course, be other ways of reading the stories I was told, different emphases could have been made and different angles explored. My guiding principle, however, was to identify in each case the particular nature of the story world that was being composed for, and to some extent with, me and to situate it in a wider historical context in order to understand a little better what it can mean, under different conditions, to be a multilingual migrant.

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81© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017P. Stevenson, Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis, Language and Globalization, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40606-0_4

4Multilingual Mietshaus: Language

(Hi)stories at Mareschstraße 74

Gerda Lauffer was born at 10 o’clock in the morning on 27 January 1912. She thereby became the first citizen of Neukölln, the newly named suburb of Berlin that had previously been the town of Rixdorf, which in turn had been formed through the merger in 1874 of the neighbouring villages of Deutsch-Rixdorf and Böhmisch-Rixdorf. These twin communities, as you may recall from Chap. 2, had arisen when King Friedrich Wilhelm I had granted land and building rights to 18 migrant families from Bohemia seeking refuge from religious persecution in their homeland. In October 1920, eight years after the christening of Gerda and of her home town, Neukölln (together with several neighbouring municipalities) became one of 20 new districts of the enlarged city of Berlin under the terms of the Greater Berlin Act (formally: Law on the Formation of a New City Authority Berlin/Gesetz über die Bildung einer neuen Stadtgemeinde Berlin) and is now one of the 12 boroughs of contemporary Berlin, fol-lowing the post-unification administrative reforms in 2001. However, local traditions persist and the historic neighbourhood of Rixdorf is still known by its original name today.

Mareschstraße is a small street in Rixdorf which leads onto Sonnenallee, tucked into the south-eastern corner of the western part of Berlin,

between where the Wall used to be and Tempelhof airfield. There is, in fact, no number 74 and the house whose inhabitants I’ll introduce in this chapter isn’t in this street at all. I’ve relocated it here to protect the identity of the people whose stories I’m going to tell, but I want to help you form an impression of the place and so I’ve chosen a street that is as unremarkable as the one where the house is actually situated. It looks something like this (Fig. 4.1).

Many streets in and around the centre of Berlin ‘look something like this’ because, despite the destruction of so much of the city towards the end of the Second World War and the different approaches to recon-struction adopted by the post-war regimes in east and west, much of the contemporary cityscape still owes its appearance to the 1862 master plan of the Prussian urban planner James Hobrecht.

Fig. 4.1 ‘Typical’ street in Berlin

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The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of unprecedented growth in Berlin, with booming industrialization sucking in rural work-ers in vast numbers: from a population of around 400,000  in 1850 it grew to over 2 million in 1905 and, following the extension of the city limits under the Greater Berlin Act of 1920, to over 4 million—one of the largest cities in the world at the time (see Chap. 2). Hobrecht’s plan was a blueprint for urban design, both in its conception of the use of space and—in intention, at least—in its aim of dismantling the segrega-tion of social classes. The physical scale that is still characteristic of many Berlin streets today was established at that time, as was the architectural template for residential and commercial buildings (see Fig. 4.2).

Parcels of land were sold to individual developers and speculators. Different permutations were possible but the vast majority of houses built between 1860 and 1914 were variations on the same fundamental configuration of five-storey tenement blocks: by the turn of the century this was the normal accommodation for many, if not most, Berliners. In addition to the building facing onto the street, one or more adjoining buildings were constructed behind, either perpendicular or parallel to the street, with access via a vaulted passage through the ground floor of the main building. This created one or more courtyards (Hinterhöfe), in a few cases as many as six. The height of the eaves was not to exceed 22 metres and the courtyards were required to have an area of at least 28 m2 in order to allow fire engines room to manoeuvre, although this was later increased to 60 m2 to allow more light and air to penetrate into what must have been extremely cramped and dingy spaces.

While the structure of the buildings was more or less uniform, there was considerable scope for internal differences in the size of rooms and apartments. Rooms facing the street had more light than those looking onto the courtyards and the front building, especially the lower floors, often with higher ceilings and balconies, provided comfortable accom-modation for the prosperous. At the other extreme, poor families often lived in single rooms with little natural light and no amenities; some even let out beds during the daytime to so-called Schlafgänger (shift workers sub-letting sleeping space as they had no home of their own). It was these often severely overcrowded and insanitary conditions that undermined Hobrecht’s social plan and gave rise to the pejorative description of these

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apartment blocks (Mietshäuser) as Mietskasernen, or rental barracks. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, these solidly built apartments found a new popularity, at first because their often unreno-vated condition, especially in the less upscale parts of the city, made them relatively affordable as rents in newer buildings rose, and later because they offered potential for lucrative modernization, which in turn has led to the contentious gentrification of whole districts.

The larger Mietshäuser were home to considerable numbers of people and, hidden away from view behind the front building, often constituted neighbourhoods within the neighbourhood, with laundries, workshops, outhouses and small shops. The ground floor at the front was typically given over to commercial premises such as shops and restaurants. Which is where I’ll begin: in Ludmila’s bar.

Front Building, Ground Floor, the Kneipe: Ludmila’s Story

When Ludmila, whom I introduced briefly in Chap. 1, arrived in Rostock on 4 December 1995, she was following in the footsteps of thousands of other Russians who had made a similar journey from all corners of that vast land and she was thereby participating in a long and complex historical process. As a Spätaussiedlerin who—as is typically the case—had never been to Germany before and, she says, ‘only knew “Bonn” and “Berlin”’, she was taking part in a very special and unusual kind of ‘return migration’. She was entitled to German citizenship not because she or her parents had been born in Germany—they weren’t—but because she could trace and document her ancestry to descendants of the 30,000 or so Germans who had accepted the invitation issued on 4 December 1762 by Empress Catherine II (Catherine the Great) to leave their homeland and populate under-developed Russian lands. She was therefore ‘returning’ to Germany in much the same sense as Ulster Protestants, in my homeland, even today ‘remember’ the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

For me, as her storytelling partner and with a very different personal and family background, both the multiple Russian Berlins I described in

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Chap. 2 and the history of Russian Germans are inevitably implicated in Ludmila’s story, the ‘life’ she and I construct in our conversations: inevitably, because they are part of the ‘knowledge’ that I bring to the business of processing the elements of her narrative. What role they play, if any, in her reflections can’t be taken for granted and can only be inferred from the ways in which, if at all, she makes them relevant in her account. What is important, I think, is that while I can only develop a (version or fragment of a) life for Ludmila by acknowledging that her personal trajectory is embedded in the social history of Russlanddeutsche in general and Russians in Berlin in particular, her life story should not in any way be taken as representative of anything other than a particular way of man-aging memories. What kinds of choices does she make in selecting from her memory bank and how does she process, articulate and arrange them?

Journeys of different kinds and durations are the stuff of all migrants’ stories but there is often no direct relationship between the distance cov-ered or the apparent significance of the journey and the amount of time or attention devoted to it in the telling. It’s nearly 3000 kilometres from Mineralnye Vody in the northern Caucasus to Rostock in north-eastern Germany and the decision to make this trip must have been a momen-tous one for a young widow with a three-year-old son. Yet Ludmila passes swiftly over the journey itself, alluding to it only implicitly by recollecting with precision the day of her arrival in Germany as she exchanged her family home for the transit camp (Übergangslager) in Dranse, in the then new federal state of Brandenburg. After spending two weeks there being processed by the immigration authority, she travelled a further 140 kilometres south to a second transit camp in Marienfelde on the south- western outskirts of Berlin.

The biography of the camp in Marienfelde reflects the post-war history of particular forms of migration to Berlin, recorded today by a museum on the site, although the English version of its name (Marienfelde Refugee Center Museum) overlooks both the camp’s function in the 1990s as a temporary home for Aussiedler and the museum’s official role in commemorating the site itself as a lieu de mémoire. In German, it is the Erinnerungsstätte Notaufnahmelager Marienfelde (Place of Remembrance for the Marienfelde Emergency Reception Camp), and together with the Berlin Wall Memorial (Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer) it

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forms part of the Berlin Wall Foundation (Stiftung Berliner Mauer). The camp was opened in 1953 and until 1990 served the purpose of accom-modating refugees and Übersiedler from the GDR (GDR citizens who had been granted permission to move to the Federal Republic, including West Berlin): about 1.35 million of the 4 million in total passed through the camp. This is the function which the museum is intended to mark. Its website (www.notaufnahmelager-berlin.de/en/) explains that as ‘the central site dedicated to the history of flight and emigration in divided Germany … the museum preserves and memorializes the causes, process, and consequences of inner-German flight, exploring not only flight from the GDR itself, but also the official process of emigration and the subse-quent integration of refugees into the FRG’.

Its mission is presented as an attempt to give an impartial representation of life ‘on the front lines of the Cold War, where the competing systems of capitalism and communism collided’:

The museum allows visitors to explore perspectives from both sides of the German-German border. Unlike any other site, Marienfelde portrays the history of divided Germany as a narrative shared by East and West. Emigration out of East Germany to West Germany was an ever-present and complicated issue for both German states, albeit with differing effects on their respective politics, economy, and society.

At the opening ceremony of the camp in April 1953, however, the Governing Mayor of West Berlin, Ernst Reuter, declared that its aim was to offer refugees ‘despite the tragedy of their fate … a positive memory of the free West Berlin’ (bei aller Tragik ihres Schicksals … eine positive Erinnerung an das freiheitliche West-Berlin). The official record docu-menting the laying of the foundation stone goes further, describing the camp as ‘a testament to the close bonds with the enslaved brothers in the East and to the free world of the West’ (ein Zeuge der engen Verbundenheit mit den versklavten Brüdern im Osten und der freiheitlichen Welt des Westens), and it was frequently cast in the media as the ‘gateway to free-dom’ (Tor zur Freiheit). The plan was to convert it, once the struggle for unity in Germany was over, into a normal housing estate, a ‘home for free and happy people’ (Heimstatt freier und glücklicher Menschen).

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German unification in 1990 rendered the camp’s original purpose obsolete, but since 1968 some Aussiedler from eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had been accommodated there, and for the first two decades after the fall of the Wall the camp became a temporary housing facility (Übergangswohnheim) for (Spät)aussiedler under the auspices of the Central Reception Centre for Aussiedler in Berlin (Zentrale Aufnahmestelle des Landes Berlin für Aussiedler). By the time this arrangement ceased in 2010, 96,000 (Spät)aussiedler had been received there. Since then, the camp has had a new lease of life as a temporary home for asylum seekers and refugees from conflicts in other parts of the world, especially the Middle East.

This, then, was where Ludmila and her son Andrei arrived shortly before Christmas 1994 and this is where she chooses to begin her story. What lay ahead was completely uncertain: the first steps for all new arriv-als were complex bureaucratic procedures, culminating in their allocation to accommodation in an unknown place. How did she cope with this challenging situation? Did she know any German at this stage? Had she been used to speaking it at home? She says (original extracts from the interview transcripts in German are in the Appendix at the end of the book):

Ludmila 1Ludmila: We spoke Russian at home but our parents spoke German with us. And with each other, when they wanted to keep something secret.

P: Yes yes, exactly.

Ludmila: We children were smart, still understood everything, because children understand everything they’re not supposed to. We always heard the German language … we always replied in Russian.

But this preparation for life in Germany served her less well than might be imagined. Even her parents, who, she says, have spoken German all their lives, struggled to understand what people were saying when they later followed her to Germany, as the variety of German they knew and brought with them to Berlin was a legacy from their ancestors. This is how Ludmila explains the entanglements of this sociolinguistically com-plex situation:

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Ludmila 2Ludmila: That was the German language, that they had from their parents, two three hundred years ago from grannies and grandpas … My father was a Volga German, my mama was from Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan German, born in Kazakhstan and grew up in Kazakhstan, but father was born in Stalingrad and then in the wartime, 1940 he was born, and in ’42 they were deported to Kazakhstan … They, how do you call it, they deported or whatever all of them to Siberia, Kazakhstan from Stalingrad, they were expelled … My father was a German but from Stalingrad, my mama was a German from Kazakhstan. And they both met, both spoke German but they didn’t understand each other, because it was two different German languages, completely different dialects, because from papa the roots came earlier from Swabia, Stuttgart, from there … and my mother, she’s from Saxony. My father always says to me, you know, my mother’s roots, my father always says to her now in Germany ‘Ossi woman [as if she came from the GDR]’ [laughs] … But later my father spoke this language like my mother speaks, he learned this German from my mother. And then with this German language they came to Germany and they still didn’t under-stand these German programmes … My mama speaks her own language fluently, but of course that’s a completely different dialect too. But as chil-dren we are always used to hearing that dialect and we understand what they say, my aunts, when they’re chatting with my mother, that was German language for me in those days.

So the ‘German language’ that Ludmila brought with her from Russia was rooted in another time and another place and it was not common currency in Berlin, except amongst other Russian Germans. Twenty years later, her spoken German is fluent and confident enough to relate movingly her experience of having virtually no linguistic resources of her own to navigate her way through her first encounters with the state of which she had just become a citizen. On arrival in Marienfelde, she was assigned to a flat in Spandau, in the north-west of the city, but on the advice of other Russians she had met in Dranse she used her mini-mal German to insist on being placed in Marzahn in the east, where a very large number of Russian Germans had settled. The relatively short journey by public transport to her new accommodation was taxing but she got there with the help of yet more Russians she met on the way. More stressful, and more poignant in the narration, was her even shorter

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but almost disastrous journey the same day to the registration office (Meldestelle) at the local police station.

Ludmila 3Ludmila: We received another piece of paper that said we must do police registration, immediately. At 2 o’clock we arrived there, got keys, dumped bags, and we had to go straight to the police station and register. I had to take the bus for about four or five stops and at that time it was still the desolate part in the east there, there were no buildings no bus stops, nothing … So like they told me, you get bus number so and so, you go five stops, you get out and you see grey building, that’s the police, you go there, you do registration. And me with my son, it was 3 o’clock, it was even darker, we got out of the bus one stop early, and then it was dark and deserted. That side no houses just fields, and that side no houses, one stop further. Every time I go past there, I can’t forget that stretch, I always say ‘that stu-pid registration office’. So we got out one stop too soon and then we didn’t know where to go. And we were completely shattered, not eaten anything yet, left Marienfelde early in the morning, dumped bag and straight out again. It was so cold, my son was so done in … That day there were no buses, no cars on that road, it snowed, power cut or whatever, all those buses just not running. He was done in and he said, I can’t go on, and I didn’t know what to do. I sat down somewhere or other beside the road and then I took him in my hands and he was really cold, he had some kind of shoes, plastic, those sport shoes from Russia still at that time, from China, proper plastic, when it’s cold that makes it hard, you know what I mean? I took my son to me like this and my hood like that and we sat there and we didn’t know where to go … And then a man came along and he saw that there were people there and sort of woke us up a bit, and I can’t speak German and that man couldn’t speak German either, but he was a Croat or Yugoslavian or something I think, so he was a foreigner too, and thank God this person lived in the same hostel. And somehow or other he asked us, where do you live or something. I didn’t even know this street here, I’ve just moved in, I’d hardly been in there two hours, and such a difficult word, that street, X Street, just think, you can’t even pronounce it properly now, but then! I just said hostel, hostel, hostel and the man just took us with him and thought at his own risk I’ll take you to a hostel somewhere where I live myself and then you’ll have to manage and warm up a bit with other people and then find address where you come from. And he brought us to exactly that hostel where we’d got accommodation.

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This extended account of a traumatic experience, with its drama and pathos, the desolation of the physical surroundings internalized by mother and son in their helplessness, is the low point of her story. But she relates this episode now as a survivor, sitting in the bar that she runs as a thriving business, relaxed and in control. And this chapter in her life story encapsulates, both in its substance and in its delivery, the contradic-tions and paradoxes in her particular way of doing biographical work: Glück im Unglück (finding fortune through misfortune), the solidarity of strangers, how a little language can go a long way.

Scarcely pausing for breath, and with no audible contributions from me, she develops an orderly chronological account of this winter after-noon, as spare and stark in its expression as the cityscape in which it is set and yet with just the right amount of detail to create a vivid image of the scene from 20 years earlier: dark, barren, snow-covered surroundings, empty streets, mother and child huddled beside the road exhausted, fro-zen and hungry, his cheap Chinese plastic shoes brought from Russia and her hood transferred to his head for warmth, the kind-hearted man, another foreigner, who rescues them. The story has a classical structure: it is triggered by an unexpected event (the receipt of a piece of paper instructing her to go to the police registration office), which necessitates a course of action (setting out on the bus journey), which is then disrupted by an unplanned and unforeseen occurrence (getting out at the wrong stop), which creates a crisis (realizing she is lost and feeling helpless), which is then resolved (through the intervention of a benign stranger). So Ludmila is a ‘good’ storyteller: her narrative is lively and engaging and from the multiple memories of this chaotic day she assembles a clear and coherent account.

Listening to her at the time in the bar and again later at my desk, however, I couldn’t help but be struck by the idiosyncrasies of her speech. There are syntactically reduced or inconsistent passages: noch nix gegessen (not eaten anything yet); morgen früh [sic] weggefahren von Marienfelde (left Marienfelde early in the morning [literally: tomorrow morning]); Tasche abgestellt und sofort wieder raus (dumped bag and straight out again). However, abundant well-formed sentences, in the technical sense of conforming to the norms of standard German syntax, are evidence of an advanced level of linguistic competence: wir haben

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einen Zettel bekommen (we received a piece of paper); sofort mussten wir zur Polizeimeldestelle und uns anmelden (we had to go straight to the police station and register); ich bin neu eingezogen (I’ve just moved in). Which gives the grammatically truncated sentences—Die Seite keine Häuser nur Felder, und die Seite keine Häuser (that side no houses only fields, and that side no houses)—a sense of narrative energy rather than indicating a lack of linguistic knowledge or proficiency. A similar effect is created by the ‘quotation’ of anonymous advisors, presumably other foreigners, using non-standard structures to give instructions: steigst du in Nummer so und so Bus, fährst du fünf Stationen, steigst du aus und siehst du graue Gebäude, das ist Polizei, gehst du da, machst du Anmeldung (literally: get you in bus number so and so, go you five stops, get you out and see you grey building, that’s police, go you there, make you registration).

Yet, the frequent non-conformity of morphological patterns—such as non-standard inflection for articles and adjectives: an diese Tag (on that day); auf diese Straße (in that street); diese ganze Busse (all those buses); diese Mann konnte auch keine Deutsch (that man also knew no German)—strikes a discordant note. And sophisticated vocabulary—ver-wüstet (desolate); Stromausfall (power cut); Unterkunft (accommodation); sich erwärmen (get warm/warm yourself up)—and idiomatic expressions—auf sein Risiko (at his own risk)—sit alongside simple colloquialisms: wir waren schon ganz kaputt (we were really shattered/done in); diese blöde Meldestelle (that stupid registration office); hat uns so bisschen wach gemacht (sort of woke us up a bit); (er war) irgendwie (glaub ich) Kroate (he was a Croat or something I think); in another conversation she com-ments wryly on the inequalities of life in Germany: Hunden und Rentnern gehts gut in Deutschland (dogs and pensioners have it good in Germany).

Such hybrid speech patterns are familiar to scholars of second language acquisition, who can explain them in terms of developmental sequences. But I was curious to understand where this particular German had come from. What part did the acquisition of this personal variety of German play in Ludmila’s biography? And how does it relate to other experiences with language in her life, before and after moving to Germany? What role, if any, has her knowledge of Russian played in Berlin?

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In the episode we’ve been discussing, she says categorically, when the man appears at the end, ‘I can’t speak German’. She understands somehow that he is trying to find out where she lives, but all she can do is repeat the one word ‘hostel hostel hostel’. This may be a good moment to remind ourselves that we have no way of knowing what the extent of Ludmila’s knowledge of German was at that time. All I have to go on is what she tells me in our conversations, and at this point in her story her focus was on representing for me the desperate situation she had been in on that day and more generally the challenges she faced through the first period of her life in Berlin. So as with all the other aspects of her life story, my task here is not to recover the ‘real’ nature of her linguistic proficiency at that time or find some means of measuring it. What I can do is listen to the ways she talks about her experiences of, or with, language and try to understand how she considers them to have shaped the course her life has taken.

Given what she had said earlier about her socialization in Russia, where a local variety of German was routinely used by her parents and their gen-eration, and her own and her siblings’ ability to understand this, ‘I can’t speak German’ appears to mean either ‘I can’t speak German (although I may understand it to some extent)’ or something like ‘I don’t know a form of German that is useable here in Germany’. Either way, she posi-tions herself here as starting linguistically from scratch. Her first steps towards developing an active proficiency in a form of German appropriate to her needs in Berlin were at the six-month language course provided (and obligatory) for all Spätaussiedler at that time. However, she says nothing about this as a language learning experience. Its relevance for her narrative lies in the acquaintances she made there: first, with her kindly elderly teacher, who encouraged his class to maintain their ‘mother tongue’ and pass it on to their children, as it was a ‘present from God’; and secondly, with other newcomers, who sustained her through her first five years in Berlin, when she was unable to find work and was struggling to establish a new existence for herself and her young son:

Ludmila 4P: That must have been hard at the beginning?

Ludmila: Well yes, the move, especially if you, after all that huge stress as a young mother with a little son, and your soul’s in shreds because before you

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left your husband had a fatal accident, died, and then you come here, you have no relatives, no friends, no money. I brought 300 Marks with me … and those 300 Marks, in one week I phoned my parents in Russia because I still had this longing, you know? And in those days 5 Mark coins, that size, and if you two three minutes you say hello, bye bye, goodbye, how are you, it’s swallowed up the 5 Mark pieces. We always changed five of them so that we could have that little conversation … always five coins, 25 Marks, only two three minutes, it was those telephone boxes, you know?

The aim of the introductory language courses for Spätaussiedler and other migrants was to provide them with sufficient proficiency in German to manage independently the demands of social life in Germany (work, institutional transactions, shopping) and to engage with other mem-bers of German society. Ludmila’s story is peppered with references to institutions—Meldestelle (registration office), Polizei (police), Arbeitsamt (employment office), JobCenter, Kindergarten, Schule (school)—but since she was unable to find work in the first five years her social world consisted largely of (mostly Russian-speaking) neighbours and friends from the language course (and a subsequent one provided for free by the church). Her active knowledge of German therefore stemmed from the limited amount of formal learning in the classroom and evolved primarily through the acquisition of language specific to bureaucratic registers. How, then, did she eventually become so fluent?

The acquisition of the bar was the transformative event in her life in Berlin, in terms both of her existential security and of her language develop-ment. This crucial turning point rests on two key moments in early 2000.

Ludmila 5Ludmila: For five years I didn’t get a single offer, not even as a cleaner somewhere, not a single one. Then I thought to myself, I’m 29 now, from 30 you can forget it, if you haven’t got anything at 20 or 30, from 30 you can forget it. And then by chance I made up my mind, I was doing a temp job as a waitress for two weeks, through someone, they told me, this woman’s worn out, the owner, she really wants a break but she hasn’t got anyone to help out. You need money, do you want to take over for a bit? I said yes, and from Marzahn for the first time in my life I land in this area. So then I temped for this woman and at that time she’d already put an ad

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in the paper that she wants to sell the bar. And then when she went out to eat during the lunch break, customers came, people, buyers came, and they asked me where’s the boss, we have an appointment with her. And imme-diately in my head like, it was a Russian family, mother and daughter, daughter was about the same as me and mother older, but I understood at once that they were Russian, speaking Russian. I answered in Russian that the bar’s gone already, sold already. And then when the boss came back I spoke to her, are you selling the bar? She said yes, why? Are you interested? I said of course and we spoke with her and that was that [everyone laughs] and since then I’ve been here.

‘Then by chance I made up my mind’: this sounds like a contradic-tion, but in the context of her narrative it succinctly articulates the consistent sense of tension between external and internal forces in her life, between chance and decisive action in her struggle to gain control. The narrator of every story occupies the privileged position of omni-science with regard to their own tale and can use this knowledge to exert a degree of control over the telling of their life story that they are unlikely to have enjoyed over the events out of which the story is constructed. Ludmila is able to create a sense of coherence in her story by selecting and ordering the memories she wants to knit together to represent her transformation from bewildered migrant to independent businesswoman. Yet there is an apparent randomness about some of the narration that is puzzling.

At one point, for example, she digresses from her methodical exposition of her early journey through the institutions of the migrant’s life to tell the story-within-her-story of Natalia, a fellow student at the language course. She doesn’t explain this choice, but within the logic of the overall narra-tive it reinforces or validates the theme of good coming out of misfortune that permeates her own life story. Natalia’s story is a concatenation of chance events—starting with a tragic road accident in which her children were killed in the car she was driving and culminating in a second mar-riage, to a man who had been blinded (bizarre coincidence) in yet another car accident, and a new family—that is resolved in an almost unfeasibly neat ‘happy ending’. Ludmila makes no explicit connection between Natalia’s story and her own life, but her own husband’s death, also in a

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road accident, left her a young single parent and she recounts the decision to leave Russia in the form of an announcement to her family: ‘I said: I’m going to Germany’ (Ich hab gesagt: ich ziehe nach Deutschland). This is the first in a series of decisive actions she claims for herself, sometimes in response to unexpected events, sometimes when faced with difficult choices, always, apparently, as an act of self-determination.

In the brief but life-changing episode in Extract 5 above, there are two such moments. First, after years of failing to find work through official channels, an opportunity arises through an acquaintance for her to do two weeks’ work as a barmaid in a Kneipe. She seizes the opportunity, even though—as she goes on to say—she had never been in a Kneipe before and there was no equivalent in Russia (nothing between restau-rants and nightclubs on the one hand, and the pivnushka, dive or boozer, on the other). Then, hardly had she taken this bold step than she did something even more spontaneous and risky. Happening to overhear two potential Russian buyers, who are responding to the For Sale notice in a newspaper, she is able to take advantage of the shared language to forestall their meeting with the owner and create an opening for herself to intervene and stake her own claim.

There is an irony here, of course, in that her attempts to acquire the ‘official’ language German in order to meet the demands of ‘integration’ and make herself employable proved less useful in this respect than the language of the world she had left behind. Her knowledge of Russian had been a means of sustaining a social life in Marzahn but it now turned out to have indirect economic capital too: an unpredictable dimension of the new ‘Russian Berlin’. But this isn’t ‘Charlottengrad’ and her clientele doesn’t consist of Russian tourists or émigrés: most are Germans, others are from elsewhere—‘very multicultural, whoever happens to walk down the street’ (alles multikulti, was auf die Straße läuft). Knowing German was therefore indispensable for running the business—dealing with sup-pliers and the authorities, talking to customers—and Ludmila embarked on a process of learning by doing, expanding her existing knowledge from all available sources: listening repeatedly to traditional German folksongs on the music machine, conversing with her Stammkunden (regulars), working through endless forms with the help of friends.

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So now German is the language of Ludmila’s public, working life but Russian remains the language of her social world, although both co-exist in an uncomfortable compromise with her son:

Ludmila 6P: Do you speak German with your son?

Ludmila: I speak Russian with him. He understands a lot in Russian but full sentences, well, it’s just a car crash. If you want to understand him properly, you have to talk with him in German. He can speak Russian with you, but then it’s like, I think differently, I think in Russian, and he thinks in German and speaks in Russian. Then there’s a bit of a problem.

Like many children growing up in families with migrant backgrounds in Germany, Andrei developed a repertoire consisting largely of German and a more or less passive knowledge of his ‘family language’, but began to take a more active interest in Russian in adolescence, studying it at school and learning it socially through friends, films, music and the Internet. His spoken Russian may be garbled, in his mother’s critical judgement, but Ludmila still uses it with him at least to some extent, encouraging his own initiative and enabling him to sustain this bond with his grandpar-ents’ generation.

Ludmila’s social world is divided between Berlin and Mineralnye Vody, where she returns every two or three years to visit. Russian provides her lifeline to the cultural traditions of conviviality and contentment that she associates with this other world, both locally in her Russian Berlin and translocally in the Caucasus. Her parents eventually followed her to Germany and now live in Marzahn, where she started her life in Berlin, and are ‘happy and healthy’ there (glücklich und gesund). When the flat below her became available in the greener and more well to do suburb of Lichtenrade where she now lives, she persuaded them to take it but they moved back after two years, missing the social contact and sense of community; for them, Lichtenrade was ‘a living graveyard’ (ein lebendiger Friedhof). For her part, when she visits them in Marzahn, she says ruefully:

Ludmila 7Ludmila: I feel like I’m at home there, it really lifts my spirits. All those streets there, it’s all so familiar to me because I lived in Marzahn from my

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first day in Germany and it’s like home for me there. Really lovely. All those people are completely different from here, completely different, completely different. All family people, say hello to each other, get together a bit on the playground, when they meet up they all know each other. Here I’ve become lonely where I live now. Lichtenrade is a disaster.

Ludmila’s Russian Berlin today is where it has always been since her arrival over 20 years ago, physically and socially. Ironically, perhaps, she lives a stone’s throw away from the Marienfelde reception camp where she spent her first day in the city, now though in very different circumstances. What if she’d gone to live in Spandau rather than Marzahn? What if she hadn’t taken the temporary job in the bar? What if she hadn’t overheard the Russian women coming to view the bar and what if she hadn’t manoeu-vred into a position to take it over herself? Every life story is likely to blend external forces and individual actions, and Ludmila exploits the tension between the two to generate a compelling and dynamic narrative. Like Marek, whom we’ll meet in another part of the house, she constructs a story world in which she is integrated and at home in two distinct spaces, in her case both locally and transnationally—one German-speaking and one Russian-speaking.

Front Building, First Floor: Ferhat’s Story

Ferhat ‘assumes’ his first language was Kurdish. He’s not sure, as he was born and grew up in Istanbul speaking Turkish—his father insisted all the children should learn ‘proper’ Turkish (sauber Türkisch sprechen)—but his mother could only speak Kurdish, the language she had brought with her from their village in the east of the country. So his earliest recollec-tions of home communication are of a pattern common to many bilingual families: his mother spoke to him in Kurdish, he replied in Turkish. Why, then, has he brought up his own son speaking Kurdish—in Berlin?

To understand this, we need to unpack some of these key words in Ferhat’s story—Turkish, Kurdish, even Berlin perhaps—and assemble both the chronology and the topography of his life. What complexities are condensed into simple naming terms and what effects do they have

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on our interpretation of Ferhat’s experience? What is the relationship between languages, times and places in Ferhat’s biography and how are these features woven together to form the fabric of his life?

Both Turk(ish) and Kurd(ish) are highly contested categories, reducing and concealing historically rooted diversity in misleadingly homogenized concepts (see Chap. 2). Politically, for example, ‘Turkish’ may be applied to all citizens of the present-day Turkish Republic, but the citizenry of the state encompasses nearly 50 ethnic groups, who may or may not identify themselves as ‘Turks’. And while there is a beguiling neatness and economy in seeing ‘Turks’ and ‘Turkish-speakers’ as isomorphic social clusters—‘all Turks speak Turkish’ and ‘all Turkish-speakers are Turks’—the equation turns out to be false or at least oversimplified: more than 40 other languages are indigenous to Turkey and both the legacy of the Ottoman Empire and the global Turkish diaspora mean that the foot-print of the Turkish language extends very far beyond the borders of the Republic to citizens of many other countries.

‘Kurdish’ is equally challenging to define. The very existence of a Kurdish ethnicity was denied for a long time by successive Turkish gov-ernments, but even though they are now acknowledged and have gained modest political and educational reforms the Kurds too are a diverse social group. For example, they have different religious affiliations (Shia and Sunni Muslims, Alawites and Yazidis) and there is no standardized lin-guistic form of Kurdish: the common label embraces three main varieties (Kurmanci, Sorani and Zaza/Dimili), which are distributed across different geographical territories and represented graphically in three dif-ferent scripts (Latin, Arabic/Persian and Cyrillic). For ‘Kurdistan’ is not (yet) a state but a cultural region straddling the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. And there are also Kurdish populations in other countries in the region, including members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (such as Armenia and Azerbaijan) and Lebanon. Kurds in Germany have their origins in all of these countries and represent diverse migration patterns: students, labour migrants, asylum seekers and refugees from oppression and conflicts in several states.

Lift the lid on these simple terms in Ferhat’s story, then, and a complex set of interlacing sensitivities springs into view. But there was a time when even these labels were not available to him, a time of innocence before he

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became fully aware of the political motivation for naming ‘languages’, of the implications of ‘knowing’ a particular ‘language’ or of the potential consequences of declaring yourself a speaker of it. His parents and older siblings had moved to Istanbul shortly before he was born in 1963, and through them and the social environment in which he grew up he was exposed in particular ways to two different languages (or ‘linguistic vari-eties’). How far was he aware of this? How did he conceive of them?

Ferhat 1Ferhat: So I had two languages but not consciously, I mean I had this awareness through the discrimination of being a Kurd, sort of concealed, I didn’t say in public that I know er [that] language, and I knew nothing at all about Kurds, Kurdistan. In my mind I thought, in our village we speak like this, I mean this language is ours, particular to us and nowhere else. What are we, which language do we speak? I knew, I was never informed: are there Kurds? What is that? I knew that my mother only spoke Kurd-, I mean only spoke a language that er we actually called it Kurmanci, amongst ourselves, that’s what the language is called, Kurmanci, I thought, in our village they speak this language, I mean area around the village, and that was that.

P: So you didn’t have a name for this language?

Ferhat: The local language, I mean not Kurdish but we said Kurmanci, a dialect of Kurdish language, Kurmanci, that’s what I heard.

Recounting his early experience of language in Istanbul now, in his late 40s, Ferhat the narrator brings both specialist knowledge about language and an ability to rationalize thought processes to his expla-nation of how young Ferhat, the protagonist in his story, responded to what he heard around him. Turkish is not mentioned at all at this point, its presence is only implicit in the claim that he didn’t openly reveal his knowledge of Kurdish. In fact, he may not even have used the name ‘Kurdish’. For the child, there was simply ‘a way of speaking’ that was particular to the people in and around the village that his family came from: ‘in our village we speak like this’ (in unserem Dorf spricht man so); and we have a name for the way we speak there, we call it ‘Kurmanci’.

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Now, in retrospect, Ferhat can apply the concept of ‘a language’, that may be seen as incorporating different varieties or ‘dialects’, to bring this individual perception of speech practices into a wider analytical framework. And the narrator attributes to himself-as-protagonist a strong sense of linguistic ownership that is associated, exclusively, with his fam-ily and its place in the world: ‘In my mind I thought, in our village we speak like this, I mean this language is ours, particular to us and nowhere else … I thought, in our village they speak this language, I mean area around the village, and that was that.’ Narrator and protagonist momen-tarily trip over each other when Ferhat corrects himself as he is about to use, anachronistically in the context of his story, the term ‘the Kurdish language’ to refer to his awareness as a child of the extent of his mother’s linguistic repertoire. He replaces this with ‘a language that we actually called Kurmanci’ and then confers legitimacy on this naming practice by asserting ‘[and] that is what the language is called’.

Ferhat had, he says, two languages, ‘but not consciously’. What can he mean by this? It seems clear from what he goes on to say that alongside the taken-for-granted Turkish language of his native city he was aware of the quite distinct Kurmanci that is, from the child’s perspective, con-fined to the family’s home village. But there is a nascent sense that lan-guages or ‘ways of speaking’ have to do with something more than place. ‘Kurdishness’ and ‘being Kurdish’ are portrayed as emergent concepts, perhaps present in his lexicon but not yet defined. What does seem to have been evident to the young Ferhat is a sense of peril attached to identifying with these concepts and that knowing what he can now call Kurdish would indicate a dangerous affiliation, exposing him to risk. His elder siblings had spoken Kurdish in the village but abandoned it on moving to Istanbul: ‘you were afraid, you’d be laughed at if you spoke differently’ (man hatte Angst, man wurde ausgelacht, wenn man anders spricht). The fear of ‘speaking differently’, of not conforming to a strongly dominant norm, of making yourself conspicuous, was compelling.

So in the course of his socialization Kurdish acquired for Ferhat three associations: it was a localized ‘village language’, a private ‘domestic language’ and an emblematic ‘political language’. It came to represent intersecting spatial, social and political worlds. He also became aware of another dimension, an extension of the others, as his father had to learn Turkish when he was called up for military service:

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Ferhat 2Ferhat: The [Turkish] language was a man’s language and the women’s lan-guage was Kurdish. When men achieved something, for example, only then was Turkish spoken. It’s, I mean women, the language was, in that sense too had a female status, in a negative sense, the language. And if you had a job you always spoke Turkish.

What he had thought of as his mother’s language appeared, then, to be generalized as ‘the women’s language’, and Turkish was ‘the men’s lan-guage’. But more than that: the ‘gendering’ of the two languages was part of an ideology that attributed inferior social value to women and reserved the possibility of individual achievement to men. Women were trapped inside the social position allocated to them and confined to—or perhaps by?—the language associated with that position. Men had the opportu-nity to ‘improve’ their social standing through gaining employment and then publicly confirming, or ratifying, their personal advancement and change of status by adopting (however imperfectly) the more highly val-ued, non-local language.

However, the subsequent subversion of this language ideology by the political activism of women in the Kurdish movement is one of the ways in which Ferhat charts the revaluation of the Kurdish language. It is recontextualized in his story precisely by the actions of ‘very open, strong women’, who become engaged in the political process:

Ferhat 3P: Did women’s social status change?

Ferhat: Yes. And especially in Kurdistan because the movement, Kurdish movement, because the women were very active. There were these military conflicts, that’s to say it was mainly men who were involved in them, Kurdish men too, but then Kurdish women came too, they have their own army, I mean entirely women, they took on a lot of responsibility. That was on the one hand, and secondly on the legal level too, because the men weren’t there, they took on a lot of active responsibility. For example, I can remember, about 15 years or so ago, the demos, it was overwhelmingly women and children, because the police, Turkish police, of course if there are men there, then they take them away at once, to prison, torture, killing, everything. And so the women said of their own accord, we’ll do it. I think, the movement, there are a lot of active women there.

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He invokes ‘Kurdistan’ here not primarily as a geographical location but as a site of struggle and radical social realignment, in opposition to the Turkish state, which figures—here and elsewhere in his narra-tive—in the guise of authority (‘the police’, emphatically ‘the Turkish police’) associated with extreme political violence. And yet Ferhat doesn’t represent himself in his story as unequivocally committed to a radical Kurdish identity and, as we’ll see, Kurdistan for him is variously a space for political action, a physical space to visit as an outsider-insider and a virtual space, an idea.

I’ve dwelt on Ferhat’s experiences in Turkey, before he moved to Berlin, because this is where the development of what he repeatedly calls his consciousness of linguistic and ethnic difference begins or, to be precise, where Ferhat the narrator situates it in his story. He began to wonder why his mother should have to struggle with another language to manage her shopping and now he rationalizes his tentative efforts to start speaking Kurdish with her in Istanbul as being motivated by a growing political awareness. Not only that, he also historicizes his actions and their motiva-tions more broadly by placing them in the context of comparable politi-cal movements in western Europe that I, as his audience, would be more familiar with:

Ferhat 4I think my Kurdish was a bit political, it developed for political reasons. I mean, I can remember when I was in Istanbul, before I came [here], I had started, tried, to talk Kurdish with my mother, but that was really purely political, because I think at that time, I mean the 70s, ’68 movements [P: Mhmm], exactly, you had that in Turkey too, there was, exactly, this leftist movement and then also Kurdish, and this leftist movement was pro- Kurdish. They made an issue of it, I mean this taboo.

Gaining knowledge about discrimination, oppression and political violence put an end to Ferhat’s innocence. He came to realize that knowing what it meant to ‘be Kurdish’ in Turkey bestowed a certain value on ‘speaking Kurdish’ in Turkey. He began to speak his mother’s tongue, the ‘village language’, as an adolescent in the city of Istanbul, but his move as an adult to the metropolis Berlin was decisive not only in his personal development but also in the emergence of Kurdish as an active

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element in his linguistic repertoire. He came to Berlin as a student in the early 1990s, first studying electronics and computer science, but this was interrupted by a period of illness and he ‘fell into’ work with the Red Cross, supporting Kurdish refugees. He subsequently trained as a social worker and now manages educational projects for young refugees from many parts of the world.

Here, in Berlin, he learned German, which he unquestioningly accepts as normal and as necessary:

Ferhat 5Ferhat: There are automatically languages that you speak. If you’ve grown up here, you speak German … We live in Germany, the German language must be perfect, that’s clear.

But it was here, too, that he found the right conditions to develop greater fluency in Kurdish, which in terms of the requirements of daily life he didn’t strictly need. On the one hand, both as a student and in his sub-sequent working life, German was the dominant ‘public’ language and, on the other hand, most of his friends were ‘Turkish’. The drive to revive his dormant knowledge of Kurdish seems to fulfil some other, perhaps emotional, need. Although he says the lingering fear of personal sanc-tions against Kurdish-speakers was hard to shake off, his early experience in Berlin was liberating:

Ferhat 6Ferhat: Then I came here, then again I think more through political, I developed a bit. I started listening to Kurdish music, and then I went quite often to Kurdish cultural clubs, we played Kurdish music, came into con-tact like that, for a long time.

The contact with cultural traditions, uprooted from their geographical origins but also liberated from political constraints on practising them, created new opportunities for Ferhat to encounter the language associated with them. He also gradually learns to read Kurdish, a skill previously precluded by the fear of surveillance but one that becomes possible in the

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‘free space’ of Berlin and that will become important to him in bringing up his children:

Ferhat 7P: You hadn’t read Kurdish before that?

Ferhat: No, because it was forbidden. Kurdish literature, perhaps there were a few but if there were then we were afraid to buy, I mean, we were afraid, secret police, if I buy that at a stall then it’s noted straight away. So that’s why I never had that in Turkey … Here of course there was a free space for Kurdish and Kurds, and here my language developed.

Since Kurds of all nationalities come together in the diaspora in Berlin, he finds that Kurmanci is a lingua franca he shares, for example, with Syrian Kurds, so that communicating with them is easier than with Turkish Zaza- or Sorani-speakers. And the ‘free space’ he now inhabits allows him to explore political territory into which he had previously lacked the linguistic means and the confidence to venture in Kurdish:

Ferhat 8Ferhat: You can have a conversation, but beyond that, I mean if you’re talk-ing about politics for example, that came very very late with me. Whether you know the words, mentally I wasn’t so prepared to talk about political things in Kurdish, in a serious way, I mean on an intellectual level. It wasn’t, you know, switch over straight away, even if he’s er a Kurd we still switched automatically into Turkish, although we’re Kurds. And so in that sense the language became higher because it has a different value in Turkey now, I mean estimation, through the movement, parties and so on the language became more legitimate. It’s not just a village language. On Turkish televi-sion now there are Kurdish speakers right up to professors, you know, speak-ing Kurdish, they say academic things in Kurdish, and at first I had to laugh.

What he perceives as the new legitimacy of Kurdish, no longer ‘just a village language’ but a broadcastable idiom for serious scientific dis-course, conjures the prospect of a new option, a new form of identifi-cation. Speaking Kurdish in Berlin is not a communicative necessity,

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it’s a creative act that enables, or facilitates, the construction of a more complex self. But why should this matter to Ferhat? Developing and sustaining a third language alongside the languages of local belong-ing requires a considerable investment of time and energy. He talks a number of times about the ‘political motivation’ for his language learning, so does this imply a growing attachment to some form of Kurdish identity?

Perhaps. But the indications in his narrative are ambivalent in this respect. In the passage above he says that switching into Turkish to discuss political issues had been an automatic procedure ‘even if we are Kurds’; in the context, though, this could be shorthand for ‘even though we are Kurdish-speakers’. On another occasion, when explaining to me the rela-tionship between the different varieties of Kurdish, Ferhat says, appar-ently distancing himself from ‘the Kurds’: ‘There are, well, the Kurds say dialect, I say language, the Kurds don’t want to call it that’ (Es gibt, also die Kurden sagen Dialekt, ich sage Sprache, die Kurden wollen sie nicht so nennen). And this impression is reinforced when he seeks to position himself more explicitly:

Ferhat 9Ferhat: In terms of mentality, I’m still an Istanbuler, I mean, I don’t call myself a Kurd but an Istanbuler, so in terms of mentality I’m from the city. And I always made friends in that way, overwhelmingly Turkish friends. But once I was here we often discussed Kurds and Kurdistan. But I didn’t leave, there are people who leave and really move into the Kurdish milieu. I stayed here, for a long time I had almost only Turkish friends, but still acknowledged.

Here, ‘Kurds’ and ‘Kurdistan’ are objects of discussion, not of identifica-tion, and there is a ‘Kurdish milieu’—a looser concept than ‘community’ and one that doesn’t seem to imply or require membership—to which he could have access and in which he could immerse himself, but he chose not to do so. And he is, categorically, ‘not a Kurd’ but ‘an Istanbuler’, a city person. So, I asked in another conversation later, just to be clear about this, would he call himself an ‘Istanbuler’?

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Ferhat 10Ferhat: Not really, Istanbul Kurd, I mean, not Kurdistani … My town, the way the migrants live here, you know, in Berlin, they say I’m a Berliner of Turkish descent, you know, you can put it like that, Istanbul mentality and so on, because in Istanbul many people congregated there, Istanbul Lasa [people from the southern Caucasus, mostly now living in north- eastern Turkey], ethnic, or Arabs, you can also say Istanbul Arabs, that’s how I label myself. But not from Kurdistan, saying I come from Kurdistan, I can’t, I don’t say that.

P: You wouldn’t say that?

Ferhat: No no, I’m not from Kurdistan, I’m from Istanbul. I’m a Kurd from Istanbul.

On reflection, then, he prefers the more complex, composite category of ‘Istanbul Kurd’ or, on further consideration and with a slight shift of emphasis, ‘Kurd from Istanbul’. At all events, he is insistent in his rejection of Kurdistan as his place of origin or a place to which he owes allegiance. However, this is not to say that Kurdistan has no place in his life. It recurs in his story as what I’d like to call a ‘locus of orienta-tion’, a point around which he assembles formative experiences that give meaning and coherence to the disparate components of his sense of self. We’ve already seen how Kurdistan became an object of discussion for him amongst his social circle in Berlin and how he refers to it more concretely, if still not in a clearly defined way, in the context of political conflict and social change in Turkey. It assumes additional significance when he talks about his travels with his children, visiting parts of Turkey and northern Iraq, as—this is my formulation—a ‘Kurd from Istanbul living in Berlin’.

If the move to Berlin opened up the ‘free space’ for Ferhat to develop his active use of Kurdish, a visit from his new Berlin home to ‘Turkish Kurdistan’ revealed to him previously unsuspected possibilities with the Kurdish language:

Ferhat 11Ferhat: I went on a trip to Kurdistan once with my friends, for the first time a trip to Kurdistan back home in Turkey, and I noticed ‘Oh, the lan-guage is being used very well’ [e.g., in local elections].

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This direct exposure to increased use of Kurdish in the region, comple-mented by its growing media presence, seems to have encouraged his personal project, but he realized that the lack of institutional support—in Turkey, let alone in Berlin—meant that sustaining this language required substantial individual motivation and determination: ‘You have to make a conscious decision, because there is no school, no institutions to give automatic support, you have to decide, I want to maintain this language, you know?’ (Man muss bewusst entscheiden, weil es gibt keine Schule, keine Institutionen, die automatisch unterstützen, man muss Entscheidung treffen, ich möchte diese Sprache pflegen, ja?). German and Turkish can take care of themselves, but Kurdish needs to be nur-tured. For Ferhat, the turning point, he says, came with the birth of his children: the Kurdish language project on which he had tentatively embarked himself years earlier was converted into a policy for the next generation. But if Kurdish was—in practical terms—a superfluous lin-guistic resource for Ferhat, in which he had chosen to invest for his own purposes, why would he impose this burden on his Berlin-born children?

The plan was ambitious and would demand commitment and consistency of application, not least since Ferhat was still in some sense a ‘learner’ himself and opportunities for his children to use Kurdish in Berlin were relatively limited. Nevertheless, he used exclu-sively Kurdish (which was ‘very hard work’) with his first child, his son Zoran, and his wife spoke only German, her first language. He was confident that Zoran would learn Turkish ‘one way or another’ (irgendwie), as it was a ‘dominant language’ in the neighbourhood, and when the time came Zoran attended a German-Turkish bilingual primary school. At first, Ferhat was apprehensive about the school’s attitude towards his language practices, but: ‘So far I’ve had no nega-tive experiences, I still speak Kurdish with him, even when I’m pick-ing him up from school, everyone knows it’s my language’ (Bisher hab ich nichts Negatives erlebt, ich spreche mit ihm immer noch Kurdisch, auch dort beim Abholen, alle wissen, ist meine Sprache). ‘It’s my language’: speaking Kurdish openly with his son in the institu-tional context of a school privileging Turkish alongside German, and acknowledging or even claiming it as his own, is a declaration of loy-

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alty to the language that shows how far his confidence and conviction have risen since leaving Istanbul.

This ‘one parent, one language’ model is, of course, widely used in bilingual families. But here there is a twist:

Ferhat 12Ferhat: Then my daughter was born and then, this time, that was a bit of a test for me. I sort of felt my Turkish was under pressure, my Turkish. But this, Turkish was of course an important language for me.

Having ‘banned himself ’, as he puts it, from speaking Turkish or German to his son, he now felt himself pulled in another direction: ‘And after that I said to myself it’s a bit hard but I must bring the language into the family somehow, the Turkish language, you know?’ (Und danach hab ich mir gesagt, es ist bisschen schwer, aber ich muss die Sprache reinbringen in die Familie, die türkische Sprache, irgend-wie ja?) In his determination to promote Kurdish as a family language, he had inadvertently relegated his other legacy language, Turkish, out of the home into the street and the classroom. His solution? To com-plicate his policy further by speaking only Turkish with his daughter, resulting in trilingual conversations around the breakfast table and both children developing partially overlapping repertoires, speaking German to each other and acquiring a passive knowledge of each oth-er’s ‘father language’.

When I first spoke with Ferhat, his son and daughter were seven and five years old, respectively. Three years later, I was curious to know how his plan was working out. His son has now moved to a Gymnasium (a secondary school leading to the Abitur, the university entrance qualifica-tion), where all the teaching is delivered in German, but Ferhat is pleased with his son’s progress:

Ferhat 13Ferhat: My son speaks Kurdish now and can also understand Turkish. That’s achieved what I wanted. He has Turkish friends, neighbours, so the Turkish language isn’t completely lost to him. He can even say a few things, but he can certainly understand.

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The perhaps surprising development is that he is now also speaking some Kurdish with his daughter, a change that he negotiated with her:

Ferhat 14P: She always heard Kurdish.

Ferhat: Yes yes, she understands when someone speaks Kurdish, then she definitely understands. I said, at school you’re learning Turkish very well [she is now at the bilingual primary school], she also speaks Turkish, and then I said, so that you also get to be strong in Kurdish I’ll speak Kurdish to you, ok? She says yes, she was pleased.

But he takes a cautious approach in this respect, because Turkish is still ‘more dominant’ in Berlin, and he wants to leave language choices to the children themselves: ‘they have a free choice, so the pressure is on me really; I made the offer, I’ll speak Kurdish, you can answer in German’ (die haben eine freie Wahl, die Last also habe ich getragen sozusagen. Ich habe Angebot gemacht, ich spreche Kurdisch, du kannst Deutsch antworten).

The real measure of the success of Ferhat’s language policy, in his terms, becomes apparent when he talks about his travels with his son to Turkey and Iraq. Ferhat’s experience of migration—the indirect experience of his family’s internal migration from the rural east to cosmopolitan Istanbul, then his own move to Berlin—recontextualized his knowledge of Turkish and Kurdish twice. In Istanbul, Turkish was unchallenged as the default language of the public sphere; the family language Kurdish/Kurmanci was stigmatized and marked as rural, backward and politically suspect, and so it became confined to the domestic domain. Ferhat then found that Turkish retained a dominant status in his Berlin social world, along-side the state language German, but here Kurdish was liberated from the denigration to which it was subjected in Istanbul and he felt able to embrace it more confidently. The displacement of the language made it possible for him, for the first time, to own it. For Zoran, however, whose experience of migration is entirely second-hand, Kurdish has always been simultaneously a domestic language—through his father’s choice, as an act of affirmation rather than as an act of protective seclusion—and a lan-guage out of place. For him, therefore, Kurdish needed to be ‘emplaced’ in order for it to achieve something meaningful in his life.

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Creating what for me was an unexpected symmetry in his story world, Ferhat enacts this emplacement or relocation of Kurdish by narrating not only (unsurprisingly) his visits with his son to the family village but also several trips to Iraqi Kurdistan:

Ferhat 15Ferhat: I’ve often gone to Kurdistan with him. Iraq had a big influence on him. I mean, I’m fine with the language, you know, but I’ve never had a Kurdish flag and so on, I mean, I’m not like that, flags and so on, but chil-dren have a different perspective. When we were there: ‘Kurdish flag, what is that?’ For him that was sort of another world. I always offered him theo-retical, language and so on, but he couldn’t picture how it functioned like that, that society. And then of course they saw: ‘Soldiers!’, you know, Peshmerga, ‘Kurdish, they’re Kurds, wow’. They’d seen Turkish things, and German, but never Kurdish. Then they spoke Kurdish with them, amaz-ing, you can’t imagine, and of course they were nice, you know, played with the children and so on, so it was a pretty good experience, that Kurdish is spoken everywhere.

The endorsement of Kurdish that Ferhat had experienced on his travels with his friends in parts of Turkey where the language was becoming more widely used in public life had allowed him to recalibrate the lan-guage in relation to others. Here he lets Zoran voice his sense of wonder, curiosity and excitement at hearing his private, family language trans-ported from the banality of domestic discourse to a wholly new world of public experience. Suddenly, ‘Kurdishness’ is translated from the abstract ‘theoretical’ domain to a physical realm replete with the powerful sym-bolism of flags and soldiers’ uniforms, offering an entirely new source of identification—‘so they are Kurds’—and they are speaking his language.

What was the impact of this experience, I wondered, and I asked: ‘Until then he’d only spoken Kurdish with you?’ (Bisher hatte er nur mit Ihnen Kurdisch gesprochen?’)

Ferhat 16Ferhat: With me or within a small group … And when we came back I noticed that his interest in Kurdish was higher. He started to answer in Kurdish, that was a step up. Until then he’d said very little, just words, not sentences, but since then he’s started to speak Kurdish.

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Both father and son had encountered Kurdish through parental input, in the one case by necessity, in the other as a matter of policy. Both father and son developed their fluency and proficiency in the parent’s language only when it acquired a political dimension—in the broadest sense of the term—and in both cases this metaphorical journey required a physical journey, but in opposite directions.

In Istanbul, Ferhat stumbled awkwardly onto his mother’s linguistic territory, but he found his feet when he discovered that Kurdish was a Berlin language, one of many, one that allowed him to bridge the geographical distance separating him from the Kurdish homeland by using it to explore the previously suppressed part of his family’s life remotely, from afar. Zoran’s visits with his father to Iraqi Kurdistan ignited his Kurdish consciousness and aligned the language with other symbolic representations of Kurdishness. These different experiences appear in Ferhat’s narrative as similarly transformative moments that gave him and his son a licence to speak in a new way.

These episodes and these experiences ultimately lead both father and son ‘back’ to ‘our village’, the village where neither of them was born and that neither has lived in but which Ferhat’s family left to move to Istanbul and where he and his siblings are now building a shared house. Here, Zoran discovers that his knowledge of Kurdish constitutes a form of local social capital:

Ferhat 17Ferhat: It’s good that he had very little Turkish, he’s still only got a little, because he can express himself very well in Kurdish but not in Turkish, and that’s good because in our village they also speak Turkish but they can speak Kurdish too, and through my son they’re forced to speak Kurdish … And I think he influenced the others.

Many other families have followed the same route as Ferhat’s had taken, migrating to Turkish-speaking cities and leaving Kurdish behind. And when they return with their children in the summer, they bring Turkish with them. But Zoran’s relative lack of proficiency in Turkish is—from his father’s perspective at least—an opportunity to exploit his knowledge of Kurdish and even to encourage others to do so too. So at the end of

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Ferhat’s story, Kurdish/Kurmanci has become, again, but now in a posi-tive way, a ‘village language’. And it concludes, poignantly, with an image of the young Berliner Zoran breezily chatting to his grandmother in their shared local language in a way that Ferhat had not managed with her in his childhood:

Ferhat 18Ferhat: My aim was that they should enjoy the language, now they enjoy the language. And with my mother for example [he] has a very good relationship. I always listen to them talking in the kitchen, in the house in the village, he tells her Kurdish things. If it wasn’t for this language, he would never have got to know my mother, I mean not really got to know her intimately.

* * *For many migrants, there used to be an apparently simple dichotomy

of ‘then’ and ‘now’, which mapped directly onto ‘there’ and ‘here’: ‘in those days, where I came from’ articulates and encapsulates a defined chronotope, a time-space, that is clearly distinct from ‘today, where I am’. Since distances in time and space have been shrunk by modern technologies of travel and communication, the discreteness of these two lifeworlds has in most cases been qualified and the sense of per-manent separation attenuated. Even when the act of migration marks a definitive move from one place to another, the migrant may remain mobile and in a constant state of transition, moving physically and virtually back and forth. But while alleviating the effects of separa-tion, this mobility reinforces its meaning: every phone call or Skype conversation and each vacation visit affirms the reality of a life divided between locations.

Many, of course, choose to return but they are not turning back the clock or retracing their steps, for the place they return to is not the same as the place they left and both they and the people to whom they return have changed. Returnees typically bring with them both material objects, especially prized consumer goods, as emblems or icons of the success of their foreign sojourn, and often unconsciously acquired habits, customs and values or attachments. In Turkey, a distinction is often made between the gurbetçi, or expatriate living abroad in the diaspora, and the almancı,

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the German-Turk represented stereotypically as returning ‘home’ with a big Mercedes and speaking Turkish with an accent that betrays their prolonged absence from the homeland. Ferhat still identifies himself with Istanbul, not least because of its cosmopolitan population, but he sees it now from the perspective of his domicile in Berlin. ‘Istanbul’, he says, ‘is not really Turkish, it’s a mixture, it’s like Kreuzberg’ (Istanbul ist für mich nicht türkisch, es ist eine Mischung, es ist wie Kreuzberg), neatly turning on its head the trite media cliché of Kreuzberg as ‘Little Istanbul’. And when he attempted a return to Istanbul after his studies he felt alienated by the experience:

Ferhat 19Ferhat: And then when I’d finally managed to graduate, I tried to go back to Istanbul, I mean, I think I stayed there twice for four months, you know, I tried to go back again. And then somehow, funny, I saw it was strange or something, you know, many things for me. And then I came back here again, and then, well, I stopped doing that. From that moment I said, I belong here. For me it was, how do they say? Home is not tied to a place so much as to relationships … Since then I’ve felt better here.

P: You feel more at home here?

Ferhat: Exactly.

There are apparent inconsistencies, perhaps even contradictions, in Ferhat’s narrative—the Istanbuler who can’t live in Istanbul, the urbanite with one foot in the village—and the tensions between ‘then and now’ and ‘there and here’ in his life story are not fully resolved. His migration from Turkey to Germany appears to be permanent and he feels ‘at home’ in Berlin, and yet he is building a house in ‘our village’. The life he constructs in his story moves between three locations—the family village, Istanbul and Berlin—and the three languages in his repertoire jostle with each other for significance in relation to the places and relationships that matter to him. Maintaining his complex linguistic repertoire, and transferring it in a different configuration to his children, has imposed a substantial burden on him. But his multilingual project and his efforts to sustain it provide a common strand through his narrative and create a sense of coherence across the disparate elements of his experience.

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Side Building, Second Floor: Hoa’s Story

Fairy tales are stories that have their own existence outside historical time and geographical space. They take place at some unspecified moment in the past—once upon a time—and in some loosely specified topographical location: in a village, in a forest, in a castle. The power of the tale’s moral import depends on our inability to tie the protagonists down in a world that we know, in the sense that we can’t construct an interpretive framework for the tale out of our knowledge of social conditions and social norms that we associate with particular times and particular places. The opposite is true of life stories, which are told in ‘real time’ in a known setting—in what I’m about to discuss, this is Hoa’s apartment on various occasions between July 2011 and July 2014—and about events and experiences that are inscribed into an explicit chronology and mapped onto specific locations.

Each story needs to be understood in the frame of this double tempo-rality: the time of the telling—when the story is narrated—and the time of the told—when the narrated events took place. For the moment of narration provides part of the context for understanding what is being narrated: ‘right now, as I’m talking to you’ is the end point of the story, to which the whole narrative leads and where it has to finish. The storyteller is the authority on their ‘life’ and can make every component, every epi-sode, fit between a point in the past and the present moment. And this is the vantage point from which I, the listener, attempt to process what I’m being told, adding into the mix, often unconsciously, what I (think I) know about the world that is being conjured for me.

Each story also establishes relationships between the places that are construed as the scenes in which the selected life events unfold. But what is the nature of these ‘places’? Are they simply physical settings, points on a map, relevant to the story only as cartographic coordinates to help me get my bearings? Or are they historically charged locations, their names weighty indices of local, national or global events that may resonate in very different ways for the narrator and for me, the listener? Or are they created afresh as part of the story in themselves, turning out to be not just ‘stage sets’ after all, but places with special personal associations for the narrator that I need to identify if I am to understand the kind of ‘life’ she is constructing for me? Or—as I suspect—all of the above?

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And now I’m adding another temporal layer, with its own spatial dimension. I’m writing some months after my last meeting with Hoa, on the 40th anniversary of the end of what we in the West most commonly call the Vietnam War, with the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It may not be evident in the way I tell Hoa’s story, but I know I can’t think away as I do so the place of this appalling conflict in my own biography. Like many in my generation, I attribute to that war the role or status of a forma-tive influence in my adolescence, a period in my life richly imbued—or so it seems now, in distant retrospect—with powerful sentiments of the injustice of the world we were inheriting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The visual memories that most immediately spring into my mind are not—I should probably be ashamed to admit—the photographs of destruction and suffering in a faraway and completely unfamiliar part of the world, vivid though those are in my recollection. Instead, I think of images of protest marches on the streets of London, Paris, Berlin and other western European cities. ‘Vietnam’ was, of course, about death and devastation, brutality and cruelty. But it was also, like the Shah’s regime in Iran during the same period, a cipher for unbridled Western imperialism and a motive for a visceral anti-Americanism.

Many of us were probably only dimly aware that, for the Vietnamese, this American War was a continuation of a much longer, revolutionary conflict with complex roots in French colonial dominion in Indochina and the aftermath of the Second World War. From Hoa’s perspective, however, it is this older struggle, the war of resistance against the colo-nial power, that provides the context for events that shaped her life: in particular, an astonishing childhood journey overland from Vietnam to Germany and a second socialization through the medium of German. When I first met her, many years later, she had retired from a job as a social worker, engaged in projects supporting and advising immigrant women in Berlin. But that had not been the plan. What, then, was the plan, why did things turn out the way they did, and what has language got to do with it?

Sometimes conversation partners can wrong-foot you with unexpected revelations: talking about criminal convictions, for example, or suddenly referring to a previously unmentioned personal relationship. I certainly

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wasn’t prepared for Hoa’s quiet remark, at the very start of our initial meeting, that she had first arrived in Germany in 1955. Really? 1955? So long ago?

Hoa 1Hoa: Yes. After the war against the French. We are a group of 150 children who came to be educated in Germany, you know? In the war we were all so dispersed and we couldn’t learn properly. And so they, we were, well, you know, children of the freedom fighters.

Throughout our conversations, Hoa positions herself, quietly, almost pro-saically, not simply as a figure in her own story but as a historical actor par-ticipating in wider social processes that in different ways bind the country of her birth with the country to which she migrated not once but three times in the course of her life. Historians’ First Indochina War, that ended after the victory of the Viet Minh forces in the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954, was for Hoa simply the ‘war against the French’, at other times in her narrative just ‘the war’. She was born in 1943 and so was only 11 when the war ended, but it had had an impact on her in two significant ways. First, the military conflict had made conventional family life difficult and, like many other children, she and her siblings had been dispersed around the country, often living with relatives and family friends, away from her parents. This meant that a normal schooling was impossible and learning was a haphazard affair. Secondly, however, her father’s political involvement in the struggle for independence gave her a privileged status belonging to what for her seems to be a self-evidently legitimate category: ‘we were, well, you know, children of the freedom fighters’. This, as we shall see, was a double-edged sword.

It was on the basis of her special status that she was selected to be part of an elite group of children to be sent to a residential school in rural Germany to complete their education. But not just to compensate for missed opportunities—Hoa says: ‘We were to be trained as future cadres for the (re)building (of the state)’ (Wir sollten als zukünftige Kader für den Aufbau ausgebildet werden). So they didn’t simply ‘go to Germany’, they were on an official mission, implicitly positioned here by the sense of imposed duty in the modal construction ‘were to be’ (sollten) and by the ideologically

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freighted term ‘cadre’ (Kader); sent to the Socialist brother state, the GDR, not merely to learn but to be prepared for service in building a state for the liberated nation. The slogan in their classrooms was ‘We are learning in order to serve the people’ (Wir lernen, um dem Volk zu dienen).

From their host’s perspective, the invitation to visit the GDR was an act of ‘international solidarity’:

Die Aufnahme dieser Kinder in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik und ihre schulische und berufliche Bildung wären eine Hilfe für die Regierung der Demokratischen Republik Vietnam in ihrem Kampf um die nationale Einheit und den friedlichen Aufbau des Landes und würden dazu beitragen, den Gedanken der internationalen Solidarität zwischen den Völkern zu vertiefen und die freundschaftlichen Beziehungen zwischen dem deutschen und vietnamesischen Volk weiter zu festigen. (From a memorandum from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, cited by Mirjam Freytag in Die ‘Moritzburger’ in Vietnam, p. 45)

Receiving these children in the German Democratic Republic and giving them an education and occupational training would help the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in its struggle for national unity and the peaceful development of the country and would contribute to rein-forcing the idea of international solidarity between peoples and to further strengthening the friendly relations between the German and Vietnamese people. (My translation)

On their arrival at the Käthe-Kollwitz-Heim, the Director of the school welcomed them explicitly in the same vein:

Wir versprechen Euch heute, am Anfang unserer Arbeit, daß wir Euch im Geiste des proletarischen Internationalismus erziehen wollen. […] Wir werden Euch beim Lernen helfen, damit Ihr in einigen Jahren ausgerüstet mit einem großen Wissen in Eure Heimat zurückfahren könnt, um mit-zuhelfen Euer Vietnam schöner aufzubauen. (Also cited by Freytag, p. 20)

We promise you today, at the start of our work, that we will educate you in the spirit of proletarian internationalism. […] We will help you to learn so that in a few years’ time you will be able to return to your country equipped with great knowledge in order to help build your Vietnam more beauti-fully. (My translation)

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Bear in mind: the children in his audience were all aged between 8 and 14. In case they had been in any doubt, the revolutionary leader and President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam Ho Chi Minh himself had met them before their departure and he visited them at their school in Germany two years later, in July 1957. And this journey was no simple undertaking. It was a daunting, 14-day expedition overland in the com-pany of their Vietnamese teachers, described by Hoa in characteristically unadorned, dispassionate terms:

Hoa 2Hoa: The German school head teacher picked us up in the town of Brest, that’s on the border between Poland and Russia [in fact between Poland and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, now Belarus]. Then we came to Germany during the night. We went by train from Hanoi to Berlin, stopping over in Peking [Beijing] for a few days and in Moscow for a few days, via Mongolia. That was a very long journey.

The Käthe-Kollwitz-Heim, named after the famous painter and sculp-tor who spent the last years of her life in the small Saxon town, is in Moritzburg, near Dresden; the Vietnamese students became known as die Moritzburger Kinder. Hoa says the children were well looked after and the school catered for all their needs: ‘The school took care of everything from A to Z’ (Die Schule hat für alles gesorgt von A bis Z). It was, I sug-gested, a kind of substitute family (eine Art Ersatzfamilie).

Hoa 3Hoa: Yes, and the teachers were sort of our mothers. In the evenings they would sing us to sleep with a kind of lullaby.

P: In German?

Hoa: Yes.

P: So this period had a big impact on your life?

Hoa: Yes. And we were brought up on discipline. Tidiness, punctuality, cleanliness.

P: Was that different from what you were used to?

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Hoa: Yes, in Vietnam we were [laughs] so-called neglected, you know? That’s to say we do what we want, no one pays any attention.

P: Because of the war?

Hoa: Yes, because of the war, not normally.

They were ‘mothered’ by their German teachers, who sang them to sleep with German lullabies, and by day they were brought up to respect the ‘German’ virtues of tidiness, punctuality and cleanliness. Most of their lessons were in German and she picked up the language very quickly. This seems to have been a happy period in her life, tinged perhaps with some degree of ambivalence (maybe it wasn’t so bad being ‘neglected’, doing as you pleased?), the unruliness and chaos of the war years replaced by security and discipline. The tension between order and disorder, so starkly evident here, is a recurrent theme in her story, one feature of the way she develops a contrast between her two life spaces, Germany and Vietnam. There’ll be more to say about this later.

At this stage in her life story, Hoa seems to accommodate her-self unquestioningly to the expectations of ‘the system’. She arrived in Moritzburg with no knowledge of German but completes her schooling bilingually, studying most subjects in German, others in Vietnamese, and living a largely institutionalized life in which both cultural traditions were fostered. After school, some of the ‘children’ move on to training college and are dispatched to companies in different towns to undertake apprenticeships, in Hoa’s case as an optical technician (Optiker) with the famous lens manufacturer Carl Zeiss in Jena.

Hoa 4P: How did that come about?

Hoa: You see, education was different there from with the communists, you know? At home they said they were training us for building [the state] after the war. And you know, that was heavily emphasized, you have the working class, and so first of all we have to be trained as workers, as skilled workers, we have to learn an occupation, everyone has to learn an occupa-tion. That’s what the training is like, first occupational training and then work for a few years and after that study. That’s how we were trained, everything prescribed. And then I did an apprenticeship for three years and after the apprenticeship I went back.

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After seven years in the GDR, she returns to Vietnam to work as a weapons technician in the army, but then, following the prescribed path, she goes back to Saxony a second time to study chemistry at the Bergakademie in Freiberg (University of Mining and Technology: an ancient and renowned institution, where Alexander von Humboldt had studied mining in the 1790s). Again, her route is determined for her:

Hoa 5Hoa: I didn’t want to study chemistry, I wanted to study physics. All day in the lab, that’s not for me. But they said the state doesn’t need any more physicists, we need chemists, that’s what I have to do. That’s the way it is. We didn’t have a free choice.

The structured orderliness of a tightly planned system seems to leave no room for individual aspirations or initiative. But things take an unexpected turn as she is about to return again to Vietnam after completing her stud-ies in 1971. In transit through Berlin, she is asked to put her language skills to work by spending three weeks as an interpreter in the Vietnamese Embassy. The three weeks become six months; she isn’t keen, but the Ambassador is a friend of her father’s:

Hoa 6Hoa: Under communism duty is duty, I can’t refuse, I can’t damage my father’s reputation. So I said, well OK, I’ll just have to put up with it. […] My father was a senior official, he worked in the office of the Prime Minister. That’s why! Because I wanted to do something different but I couldn’t because of my father. My father said, if you don’t set an example we can’t demand from the others. I didn’t do it gladly but I went along with it out of a sense of duty.

So Hoa’s path through life is constrained by two external pressures: on the one hand, the demands of the state and the Party and, on the other, the requirements of her father’s position as a senior government official. Schooled in the ‘German’ qualities of tidiness, punctuality and cleanli-ness, she is now additionally subject to the imperative of duty imposed by the political order that had replaced the chaos of the ‘liberation’ period in Vietnam. Her analysis is simple, concise and categorical: ‘In war time everything is mixed up, you can’t plan anything. And under communism

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everything is arranged, who does what, whether it works or not, you have to go along with it’ (Im Krieg ist alles durcheinander, da kann man gar nicht planen. Und im Kommunismus wird alles angeordnet, wer was macht, ob das geht oder nicht, das muss man mitmachen). It is a very disciplined life now. And yet the role to which she is assigned, her con-tribution to the construction of the new state, is not what she had antici-pated. Her father wanted her to be a doctor but she is ‘afraid of blood’ so thinks instead of becoming a pharmacist. Again, however, she is directed down a different track.

Hoa 7Hoa: I planned to go into a pharmacy business but that didn’t work out either. Again I had to, it was like this, it’s called an expert and consultant group. They needed ten interpreters and there were women there, and they picked me out again because I’d already interpreted, that’s why. And so I worked there for almost ten years. […] And then I had to learn again from scratch, sit down after work and learn about various areas of business, of business management, of banking, finance, philosophy, law, linguistically very hard too, old technical terms from Chinese or old Vietnamese. That was a foreign language for me again. No free time.

P: And so you didn’t use your training?

Hoa: Not at all, not one day. That’s how it was.

For the first time in her narrative, she articulates a personal plan, a means of asserting individual agency in order to make sense of her scientific training and restore a kind of coherence to her trajectory. But this is not what’s required. Her value for the state lies in the by-product of her aca-demic and occupational training in Germany, her language skills. And these skills not only take her to a position that enables her to play a medi-ating role in collaborations between representatives of the two countries whose cultural traditions have formed her, but are also directly instru-mental in thrusting her into first-hand experience of a new theatre of war. For social and political normalization after the end of the American War was disrupted by renewed conflicts with neighbours in the region, with China and Cambodia.

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Hoa 8Hoa: In 1979 the Chinese invaded us, you know? So then I accompanied the journalists to the Chinese border where the battles were. I was in Cambodia too, after the war, I sort of travelled around everywhere. I’m always … on the move [laughs].

P: With which journalists?

Hoa: It was always a group of several journalists from various countries—from Germany, there were some from West Germany there too, and from Cuba, from Russia, France.

P: So you travelled with the journalists as an interpreter?

Hoa: Yes. I was in Cambodia for a week. I witnessed everything the Khmer Rouge did. It was in a school, there was, I can still picture it, saw a lot of blood, and such huge chains, that was terrible. It was terrible in Cambodia, it’s mass destruction, genocide. And at the border between China and Vietnam I saw the burned heads of Chinese soldiers. Then I saw the Vietnamese soldiers, they have a passport photograph, two passport photo-graphs, before the soldier was dead and the next picture, with the head separated from the body, the second picture beside it.

The child of ‘freedom fighters’, who was sent halfway round the world to receive a secure and stable upbringing, far from the chaos and strife of her homeland, finds herself as an adult confronted with the grotesque and bloody realities of another conflict in her own and a neighbouring country. Deployed as an interpreter to assist German journalists to bear witness to terrible military atrocities, she now appears as a historical wit-ness herself in the story she tells me 30 years later.

Reflecting on this experience in one of our conversations, Hoa talks in simple terms about the importance of language—meaning, in par-ticular, ‘foreign’ languages—in her life. Language, she says: ‘It’s a means for us, a means that you can achieve a lot with’ (Das ist ein Mittel für uns, ein Mittel, wo man viel erreichen kann). Not primarily, as people so often maintain, a form of communication, a way of expressing ideas or a key to accessing other cultural traditions—although all of these could be intended in her statement. Language is about doing. Learning German enabled her to gain an education that would otherwise have been denied

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her under the conditions in which she grew up. Knowing German gave her a form of social capital that was relatively rare in Vietnam and there-fore had a high value; it was convertible into a currency that allowed her to achieve things in the second half of her life that she hadn’t anticipated when she was being ‘trained as a future cadre for rebuilding the state’. Her parents, no doubt, didn’t foresee this either, but she derives from her mother a different understanding of privilege than the political influence she associates with her father. Her mother, she says, came from a ‘noble family’ that had lost its financial wealth but, in an echo of the Moritzburg head teacher’s promise, offered knowledge as its legacy:

Hoa 9Hoa: My mother comes from a noble family, dynasty, she values knowl-edge. She said to us we were rich once, we had everything, but now we don’t have anything, apart from knowledge. We can only give you knowledge. Once she said if you have knowledge you can live in any social system.

Hoa acquired different forms of knowledge in the course of her studies, but in spite of her training in the optical industry and in chemistry, her language skills have always been the determining factor in charting the route of her working life. So far, following her first two sojourns in the GDR, we’ve seen her working as an interpreter at the Embassy in Berlin, in the Office of the Prime Minister and the Institute for Economic Leadership in Hanoi, and with German journalists in the theatre of war on the borders with China and Cambodia. But why and how did she find herself embarking on a third expedition to Germany in the 1980s?

The photograph taken of the children on their arrival in Moritzburg in September 1955 (see Fig 4.3) shows them dressed in GDR Pioneer uniforms, and many (but not all) of them were, or became, members of the Vietnamese counterpart organization that prepared children for their development as young members of the socialist society. And the version of Hoa that was presented to me, and that I have tried to re-present here, is a young person who conformed, albeit reluctantly, to the expecta-tions of the patriarchal system in which she grew up, moving within the boundaries that were constructed for her by the state/Party and by her powerful father. But the hints at resistance to these constraints that we

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have already seen—‘I wanted to do something different but I couldn’t’, ‘So I said, well OK, I’ll just have to put up with it’—begin to emerge more strongly when she talks about her insistence on volunteering for a posting to the GDR in 1987.

By this point, she had been working at the Ministry and the Institute in Hanoi for 16 years, since completing her studies in Freiberg in 1971. She had also married and had two young children. In the mid-1980s, the GDR economy was in trouble and the government entered into agreements with Vietnam and other socialist states to recruit tempo-rary labour on short-term contracts in order to reinforce the domestic workforce and boost productivity (see Chap. 2). These teams of workers, who almost invariably knew no German at all, were offered limited

Fig. 4.3 Vietnamese children arriving in Moritzburg, 1955 (SLUB Dresden, Deutsche Fotothek, Erich Höhne and Erich Pohl)

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language training on arrival but in practice had little time to devote to this and were dependent on the language knowledge of the so-called Sprachmittler (language mediators) and Gruppenleiter (group lead-ers) who were assigned to each group. Hoa had the necessary language knowledge and extensive interpreting experience for such roles, but what incentive could she have, aged 44, to leave her government job and her family in Hanoi to oversee the work of her compatriots in East Berlin? Was this another offer she couldn’t refuse or was it her own decision?

Hoa 10P: Did you come back to Germany voluntarily?

Hoa: Yes.

P: You had a young family, you could have stayed in Vietnam?

Hoa: Yes, I can. But I work in the office of the Prime Minister, nearly ten years. And an institute grew out of that, it’s called Institute for Economic Leadership. And I wasn’t satisfied with the work. That’s to say, if I want to stay in the Institute I have to be admitted to the Party.

P: So you weren’t in the Party?

Hoa: No, I wasn’t in the Party. I was a candidate for 17 years, as a Party member, and I’m, well, I’m quite direct—if I don’t like something I say so straight away. And I oppose the rules, you know? What’s prescribed. That’s a problem. […] They set up criteria and I didn’t fulfil them blah blah. In hindsight I said it was fortunate that I wasn’t in the Party, you know? [laughs]

P: Why?

Hoa: If you were in the Party you’re always under pressure. What you do, what you think isn’t right. That’s the problem.

She doesn’t say why she didn’t meet the criteria for Party membership or in what ways she opposed the rules. But it seems that while her position as the daughter of an important official had imposed a sense of duty and acquiescence on her, it also gave her, even after his death, the confidence and the entitlement to voice her dissatisfaction: ‘I was so stubborn too, you know, at work. That’s what they always told me’ (Ich war auch so stur, na, bei der Arbeit. Das haben die mir immer gesagt). And she com-plained about being passed over for a pay rise:

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Hoa 11Hoa: And I said: this can’t go on. But actually I was privileged. My father was a senior official and so I can say what I think.

P: And what happened when you said that?

Hoa: I said I want to go to Germany. At first they said that’s not possible, you have a good job. I said, my father has died and I have earn in order to support my mother, I gave as a reason, and so I can’t do anything in this Institute. And then I was lucky, I turned to a friend of my father’s and he supported me and then I got out of the Institute. […] And then I said, I want to leave.

The repeated use of the first person in this narrative segment and the foregrounding of the narrator-as-actor through the supposed quotations in direct speech (‘I said …’, ‘they said …’) articulate an assertiveness that was absent in the earlier parts of Hoa’s story. She positions herself now not simply as a figure in history or an observer of history but as a maker of history. Hoa the narrator begins to represent Hoa the character as an actor who is no longer entirely subject to external forces but capable of operating with a higher degree of autonomy than before, who says ‘I want to leave’ and then leaves.

So she returns once more to Germany, going first, for the third time, to Saxony (to a shoe factory in Dresden, then a machine-tool works in Leipzig) before moving on to a laundry in Berlin, using her knowledge of German to mediate between the enterprise and the workers and deploy-ing her ‘German’ principle of discipline:

Hoa 12Hoa: Group leaders had to deal with everything. I’m to look after the con-tract workers. I have to make sure that they do the job, discipline and everything, and explain everything. […] But I said, I’ll attend to the work discipline, nothing else, you can do what you like in your free time.

But this orderly existence is short-lived. Three years into her 5-year con-tract, unification pulls the rug from under her feet: her contract is null and void as it was made with an employer, a state, that no longer exists. She and the other foreign contract workers are in limbo. She reviews her options. She could return to Vietnam, to her children, who had stayed

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there with relatives, but this would mean complicity in a social order that she saw as despotic and corrupt: ‘I can live in Vietnam but then I’d have to fit in. I’ll be corrupt too if I want to do something for my children. […] I don’t want to be like that.’ (In Vietnam kann ich auch leben, aber ich muss einfügen. Ich werde auch korrupt sein, wenn ich für meine Kinder was machen will. […] Ich will so nicht.) She could bring her children and join her husband, who had gone to work in Moscow. But there is ‘chaos’ there too, and when he tries to exert his authority, she resists:

Hoa 13Hoa: In Russia conditions are similar to Vietnam, in the mentality and … very primitive and quite conservative. I said, I can’t accept that. He said, you must accept. He was brought up conservatively, Confucian, in the old way. I mean, in Vietnam it used to be, like, if the man says the buffalo has three legs then three legs it is, not four! That’s what it’s like in Vietnam, and I said no, I’m not having that.

So she reconsiders, following the advice of her German supervisor, whom she wryly refers to as a ‘Stasi-Mann’:

Hoa 14Hoa: So I thought, OK, I’ll think about it. And then I said, in Vietnam I worked in the most important offices, and for women, we don’t have equal rights like in Germany. For my daughter, Germany’s better. So I did a sort of analysis for myself, for my son it doesn’t matter where he, but for women in Vietnam it’s, for my daughter it’s better. She’s intelligent, sensitive, I said, she can go places. So OK, I’ll stay in Germany then, because of my daughter. Children’s education is also better than in Vietnam.

Staying in Germany was fraught with risk and obstacles: the conse-quences of being unemployed and grappling with the complex legal arrangements over rights to remain. She would have been able to resume her work back in Vietnam but she chose to give priority to what she perceived as better prospects for her children, especially her daughter, in Germany. With the help of the integration officer for the district of Lichtenberg, for whom she subsequently works, Hoa is able to apply for German citizenship under the then still valid 1913 nationality law, the Reichs- und Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz. In 1995, 40 years after being sent

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by her parents to Moritzburg in the GDR to embark on an education in preparation for future service to her country, Hoa brings her own chil-dren to Berlin in the newly unified Germany to complete their education and prepare for an independent future.

Hoa has known two Germanys but, curiously perhaps, doesn’t distin-guish between them in her story. For her, the Wende seems to be an anom-aly, an interruption in her experience of German life. The contrast that is salient in her life story is between ‘Germany’ and Vietnam, two spaces that represent radically different constellations. The Vietnamese space mutates in her lifetime from one kind of order-in-disorder to another, both defined by others, both patriarchal and hierarchical. Under the military command structure of the ‘freedom fighters’ during the struggle for liberation a select few children were plucked from the chaotic conditions of war and trans-lated to a safe institutional environment, an ersatz family, where they were to be nurtured and trained for a life of service to the cause. ‘Freedom’ from the ‘colonial oppressors’ then led to a regime of internally exercised con-trol, where the state/Party determined whether you became a physicist or a chemist or an interpreter. It’s an imperfect and confining space, character-ized by ‘corruption’, requiring ‘conformity’ and restricting individual and collective rights: ‘There’s still no rule of law there, more despotism than law’ (Da ist noch kein Rechtsstaat, mehr Willkür als Recht).

By contrast, Germany is cast in Hoa’s story as a space of order and opportunity, especially for her as a woman. From her ‘unruly’ childhood in war-torn Vietnam, her story tracks her orderly progression in Germany from school, through college and apprenticeship to university. Her chil-dren also spent part of their childhood without their parents, who had gone to work in Berlin and Moscow, but now have flourishing careers in Germany. Her daughter, who (like Hoa herself ) arrived in Berlin with no knowledge of German but now ‘speaks perfect German’ (spricht per-fekt Deutsch), fits the popular media stereotype of young Vietnamese Germans: she is, Hoa says, ‘an ambitious, pushy sort of person’ (ein Strebertyp); top of her class at school, she gained a prized traineeship with a large Berlin energy company and now works for the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt. Probably not the kind of contribution to national reconstruction Ho Chi Minh had had in mind.

Liberation and struggle are important themes in Hoa’s story but her personal liberation is achieved through her third and final migration from

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Vietnam to Germany. The turning point for her precedes the Wende; the pivotal moment in her narrative is surely when she declares: ‘I want to go to Germany. […] I want to leave’ (Ich will nach Deutschland kommen. […] Ich will raus). The GDR’s economic problems are her opportunity, the chance, after 20 years of reluctant acquiescence, to make a decision about the direction of her own life. At the time, she may have had cause to regret this: unification was a calamity for the foreign workers, who suddenly found themselves redundant. But in the temporal context of her narration, this catastrophic event paves the way for Hoa as protag-onist to demonstrate resilience and determination in the face of what was—from the forward-looking perspective within the story—a precari-ous and uncertain future.

Having surmounted the first hurdle, securing her own right to remain in the country, Hoa finds a position as a social worker on a Berlin Senate- funded project in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. Her task? To represent the interests of other women, former contract workers from Vietnam, Cuba, Angola and Mozambique who don’t have her key asset, her knowledge of German:

Hoa 15Hoa: I was to give the Vietnamese women advice on social matters, on resi-dence, on family matters, everything to do with the authorities.

P: So you mediated between these women and the authorities?

Hoa: Yes, mediated and sometimes fought with them [the authorities]. For example, if they have to fill out a form, you know, and then isn’t linguisti-cally capable. Can she work, there is the word ‘available’, and they didn’t know what available means. Und so they ticked ‘no’, you know, and there was a case that came to the employment tribunal because she ‘doesn’t want to work’, and I said that’s out of ignorance because she doesn’t know the language. I was actually there in the court and I said, no no, she does want to work but she doesn’t have the linguistic [knowledge] so she filled the form in wrong.

She advises, she mediates, she fights. She performs important integration work. ‘Language’, she had said to me earlier, ‘is a means with which we can achieve a lot’. It is also, as she shows here, a means of exclusion, however unwitting. A form that requires quite sophisticated linguistic knowledge,

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the ability to understand the meaning and implication of a term like ‘available [for work]’, can have potentially damaging consequences for a person’s life chances. But possessing adequate linguistic resources enables Hoa to intervene and forestall this unintended outcome.

There is a curious, almost ironic, symmetry about this final chapter of Hoa’s story. Investing in the Moritzburger Kinder was part of a long-term strategy to develop the human resources that would be necessary to build a new and unified state in Vietnam after years of conflict and division. As an interpreter in Hanoi, Hoa played her part in maintaining important working relationships with an influential European ally in the spirit of ‘international solidarity’. And then, at the end of her working life, she uses her linguistic resources to contribute in small, unexpected ways to resolving obstacles to the building of a new and unified state in Germany.

Rear Building, Third and Fourth Floors: Marek’s and Beata’s Stories

Marek and Beata are both first-generation Polish migrants in Berlin, but apart from living under the same roof they have little in common and barely know each other. I’d like to bring them together here though, because when I talked to them, and when I listened to the way they told their stories, I felt there was something about the choices they made—what they chose to talk about and how—that was mutually reinforcing. The idea struck me while talking to a colleague about how Eva Hoffman talks of ‘leaving’ Polish and ‘coming into English’ in her memoir Lost in Translation. Marek and Beata both ‘came into German’ at an early formative stage in their lives and they have both developed a strong attachment to this learned language. However, in their stories they also use their intermittent contact with their first language, Polish, to configure their personal trajectories in different ways: Marek in the form of a dramatization of his life unfolding on either side of the Wende, and Beata in the form of a therapeutic dialogue, as a means of working through her fractious relationship with her mother.

So I’m going to describe what I think was happening in the conversa-tions I had with Marek and Beata in terms of how they each created ‘a life’ around their experiences with language. Both stories deal with particular

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language practices in particular places, and how the association between practices, places and people is either enabling or inhibiting or, in quite complex ways, both. These are intimate and emotional stories about ways in which language figures almost physically in the narrators’ lives—there are moments when ‘German’ or ‘Polish’ became part of the story. Maybe that sounds fanciful, but it’s the way it felt to me.

* * *Marek is 41, a moderately successful businessman (a used car dealer

and property owner). He first came to what was then West Berlin in 1977 at the age of seven, initially staying—like Ludmila—in the transit camp in Marienfelde. His father had defected during a business trip two years earlier and finally managed to bring his wife and son to join him. Apart from a period of about 18 months in the 1990s, Marek has lived in Berlin since that time. However, his life story evolves around two cycles of migration, each one shaped by moments of rupture and crisis and their resolution. In one way or another, all of these moments entail lin-guistically mediated actions—actions performed through language that change the configuration of his life world.

The first cycle begins with his arrival in Berlin, the first major disloca-tion in his life. At that time, he only spoke Polish but his father arranged daily German lessons with a nun after school and himself spoke German with his son to help him learn. Marek’s mother never learned German and so spoke only Polish with him; Polish is, quite explicitly and tellingly for him, his mother’s tongue. He settled well and eventually left school at 16 to join the police force, his ‘dream job’ (mein Traumberuf ). However, the end of his training coincided with the Wende, which turned out to be a significant turning point for him too. This was, he says, ‘a very tough time’ (eine heftige Zeit): in the space of 3 to 4 years both of his parents died, he left the police, returned to school to do his leaving certificate, began and gave up studying and had a short-lived marriage. He then had a chance encounter with an older Polish couple, and went to live with them in Poland for a year and a half, doing odd jobs involving translating and interpreting on a casual basis.

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The second cycle begins after he married again (a young Polish woman he met during his short stay in Poland) and returned to Berlin. He began to re-establish himself there in a catering business but then suffered ‘the most important event in my life’ (das wichtigste Ereignis meines Lebens), a work accident that resulted in permanent injury and the loss of his job. He and his wife had a daughter, Ania, but this marriage also ended in separation, and he became socially withdrawn. From this point, his life world becomes focused sharply on the development of a new busi-ness (exporting used cars to Poland) and sharing the upbringing of his daughter with his ex-wife. Both of these activities involve maintaining close translocal relationships in Poland.

The narration of these two migratory cycles binds time and place tightly together in a way that creates a narrative space in which Marek is able to smooth out the rough surface of his memories. This is where I think the transformative effects of his story-telling become apparent: the life he constructs is composed of fragments or episodes that are knitted together with a kind of spatial and temporal logic, and this is built on repeated border crossings, both physical or social ones and lin-guistic ones. In popular and even in academic discourse, migrants such as Marek are often positioned as inhabiting a liminal space between two societies, not fully belonging in one or the other. But he draws a sharp line between his Polish and his Berlin worlds, and it’s this caesura that gives meaning to the repeated acts of border crossing. He positions himself in his narrative securely within both social milieus, but in dif-ferent ways, and he ties them together through personal, affective prac-tices on the one hand and (as we’ll see later) professional, transactional ones on the other.

At two points in his story, he talks about language practices in his fam-ily that seem to have the status of policies:

Marek 1Marek: Well, whenever I was together with my Dad, German would be used, but as soon as my Mum came into the room then Polish would be spoken, that was the rule. And now it’s similar, you know, my wife, we’re separated now, and whenever my daughter goes to my wife she speaks Polish with her, and when she comes to me she speaks German with me.

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Marek 2Marek: In Poland, Ania speaks Polish, here she speaks German. […] She switches over, we drive across the border into Poland and then we start speak-ing Polish with each other, you know, it’s a smooth transition, sometimes we don’t even notice that we switch languages, that was very important to me.

In the first instance here, Marek characterizes language choice in his fam-ily in terms of interlocutor, regardless of place: so speaking to one person creates a German space, speaking to another creates a Polish space. In the second instance, he seems to turn this principle on its head: even with the same pair of speakers, physical place determines which language is used, and this seems to have the force of a rule that he and his daughter have internalized—crossing a physical boundary automatically triggers a change of language, without negotiation or conscious decisions. So language, people and place seem to be locked into an intricate web of associations. How have Marek’s relationships with these two languages evolved? What do they contribute to his biography? Here is how I think he plots his life in his story on the basis of the two cycles of migration, like a play in two acts.

Act 1 Marek today is in a permanent state of transition between two life worlds, shuttling between the highly diverse metropolitan environ-ment of his adoptive Berlin and the tightly networked social domain of the small Polish town that has become his second home. His fluency in both German and Polish is a facility that creates two kinds of mobility for him: within Berlin, he uses his two languages in both private and public spaces to manoeuvre between social groups, to maintain his personal bonds with childhood friends and to manage his business; travelling to Poland, he is able to leave behind the constraints of his Berlin life and adopt a more gregarious Polish persona. This asymmetrical arrangement seems to have developed as a result of moving between two places that have changed in character for him with each turning point in his life. The Polish neighbourhood of his childhood is idealized as a harmonious world of community and trust:

Marek 3Marek: That was a very tough time, I have to say. I was taken out of Poland, that was possible, the permission for us to go was there within two weeks.

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Before that it had always been no no no no. And then basically it meant leaving my old class completely, all my friends, the whole family—I come from P., I was born in P. We lived very harmoniously there, the whole fam-ily, my mother had, the whole family was there, it was in an older part of town, just like here really, she knew everyone there. When I was a little boy, I would go into a shop and get the food on a tab, without paying. That was just such a harmonious way of life, and then suddenly it was gone, com-pletely completely gone. […] Then my life consisted only of school and going home. […] So yeah, it was a really tough time.

From here he was abruptly extracted and deposited in the strange social and linguistic limbo of Berlin, where he was ‘completely without lan-guage’ (komplett ohne Sprache), with no appropriate linguistic resources, and reliant on older, bilingual children to understand the world around him:

Marek 4Marek: At the beginning, I can remember sitting there in the class, I mean I’ve got all my friends from primary school, I’m still in touch with my best friends, and they still remember the time when I would sit there in the school and didn’t know anything, and at break time I didn’t know what to do and they still remember that. […] And the memory keeps coming back, you know, they remember that time when I came into the class and, com-pletely without language, and I would sit there amongst them basically completely helpless and so someone from one of the older classes had to come and tell me what was what.

So Marek’s move to Berlin was a leap into an alien and confining world, where his knowledge of Polish was worthless and where his ignorance of German rendered him helpless. But it gradually evolved into a space of opportunity and self-fulfilment as he gained confidence and his develop-ing bilingualism acquired value as social capital. He is at pains to stress the ‘normality’ of his passage from school into working life:

Marek 5Marek: After the 10th grade [age 15–16], so after the Realschule [general secondary school], I applied, I mean then I also did the entry exam right away, completely normally, passed, and I wasn’t yet 17, you know, and then

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I started my training already. It lasted three years and then I started working. So basically that was all unproblematic, completely normal, completely nor-mal training, everything went completely normally, you know. The initial period with the police was also completely normal.

However, his training in the police coincided with the period of turmoil immediately before, and then during, the Wende and the next step in his story marks the beginning of the end of ‘normal’. In the late 1980s, the Polish government had loosened travel restrictions for its citizens and large numbers took advantage of short-term visas for West Berlin to buy all kinds of goods cheaply at home and in East Berlin and sell them at a profit in the Tiergarten district in the western half of the city. From January 1989 until the summer of 1990, the informal and unregulated ‘Polenmarkt’ was hugely controversial and the subject of heated debates in the West Berlin media and the Senate. Ken Smith paints a lurid picture of this energetically entrepreneurial activity in his eye-witness account:

Up to 10,000 Poles crossed through East Germany every day, most of them trading in something […]. In West Berlin they had established the Polenmarkt, originally by the Potsdamer Platz, its stalls plastic sheets on the ground or the bonnets of cars. They sold anything: butter, sausage, salami, shoes, sugar, sweets, flour, cheap clothes, dodgy digitals, domestic articles, cigarettes, booze, sometimes an ornament that looked as if it had just come off the man-telpiece. Later, because food sales broke EC regulations, they were barred. Eventually they were moved off by the police and the space was fenced. For a while then they were everywhere else, all over West Berlin, Poles in their cars looking for a place to stop and set up shop, women signaling between the trees in the Tiergarten. Eventually they re- established the market behind the state library and, following complaints about the use of the library’s toilets, were given a couple of Portakabins. In such tiny ways, recognition was estab-lished. (Ken Smith, Berlin: Coming in from the Cold, 1990: 82)

Despite complaints from the Berlin business community, not all public reaction was hostile and indeed the market became a kind of tourist attraction, but it was an embarrassment to the Senate and the police were required to take action. This in itself posed potential

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communication problems for the authorities, and the freshly trained officer Marek appeared to provide a solution:

Marek 6Marek: The Poles came with products from Poland and set up those basi-cally illegal markets, where they sold things, meat, all sorts of handmade things, and that wasn’t allowed, in such large groups like that, and they were probably trading in cigarettes too, which was prohibited, and alcohol, which was prohibited. And then of course an interpreter was always needed, you know, who would talk to the people with the micro- with the mega-phone. And I took on that role, which was hard for me because, well, they were sort of my fellow countrymen, you know, and you often had to shoo them away. But I did that with the megaphone and then after three months I got a language badge, that I could work with the police as an official interpreter. I mean, there was nothing written down but I was allowed to do that with the megaphone, I could interpret at the police station, and I was really proud because I was about 18, I think, and suddenly I was with the boss on the truck. And it [i.e., being bilingual] was an advantage for me at that time, you know … and the knowledge, it was an advantage for me to have that, at the level of perfection that I had through my mother, that I hadn’t forgotten it.

But this opportunity came at a cost. He had had to renounce his Polish citizenship to join the police force, and his first chance to exploit his bilingual repertoire required him to act, quite literally, as the voice of the German state authority by controlling illegitimate cross-border trading by his erstwhile compatriots. In his story, the traders are positioned as others (‘the Poles’, die Polen) and his relationship with them is ambiva-lent (‘sort of my fellow countrymen’, irgendwie auch meine Landsleute). He had to tell them to leave, a ‘German’ police officer issuing commands in Polish through a megaphone. In the context of his narrative, there is also an ironic foreshadowing here of his own later, legitimate, cross- border trading activities.

The deaths of his parents in rapid succession immediately after the Wende are represented in his story as the first of two calamities (the sec-ond being the workplace accident) that determined his subsequent life

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course. This is followed by a series of crises, mentioned earlier, which is condensed into a short passage in the narrative, before he dwells at greater length on his first return to Poland in his mid-20s. The country of his birth is accessible to him thanks to his knowledge of Polish, that his mother had so assiduously helped him to maintain, and Poland now becomes, as we shall see, a place of refuge, security and family warmth.

Act 2 Following this interlude in Poland, the second act of migration begins with his return to Berlin with his second wife, with whom he later had his daughter Ania. Berlin is rediscovered as a place of opportunity, as he tries to build a new career as an entrepreneur and develops a thriv-ing social life through sport. However, both of these are cut short by the second calamity, the accident in which he suffered permanent injury and which resulted in the loss of his job, the loss of his self-esteem and social withdrawal.

Marek 7Marek: As for friends, I really only had the three, four people that I knew from primary school. They’re the only ones that I still, I don’t have the confidence to go out, you know, because people always did activities and I couldn’t join in, you know? […] I realized that I wasn’t on an equal footing.

At this point, Berlin again becomes a tightly circumscribed space in his life world; public and private seem to merge in the house, where he is property owner (several of the flats belong to him) and house commit-tee member, and where his own flat is both his office and a home for his daughter:

Marek 8Marek: And so, well, my life is basically based on sitting at the computer all day running my business and looking forward to the time when I have my daughter for a week.

But now, both public and private ties link him with Poland in ways that create spaces of mutual dependency. This complex turn in his life story is facilitated by the sophisticated linguistic resources at his disposal and underpinned by a personal language policy—a policy through which he

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is replicating with his daughter (now the same age that he was when he first arrived in Germany) the same process of bilingual development he had experienced himself. With her father she speaks only German, with her mother she speaks only Polish—he attaches great weight to this bilingual upbringing and is sensitive to what he perceives as short-term deterioration in Ania’s German in the time she spends with her mother:

Marek 9Marek: And I notice that when she comes back from her mum’s her lan-guage has really declined in that week, I mean, her German gets worse just in this one week, you know?

Berlin is Ania’s multicultural and multilingual home (her schoolmates are mostly Russians, Arabs, Argentinians, Italians) and Marek’s business base. The small Polish town that is Ania’s grandparents’ monolingual home is also the base of Marek’s commercial partner; and it is a lively, gregarious, social space for Marek. His personal relationship to a prominent local figure (his father-in-law) and his business activities, offering job oppor-tunities in Berlin to local workers, provide routes to social engagement that are not available to him in Berlin. What’s it like for him there now? How does he feel about it? I tentatively try out the word Heimat, home (country), to see whether it works for him:

Marek 10Marek: Well, it’s still the case that I, whenever I go to Poland, still, well it varies, I really feel different when I’m there. I mean, my behaviour changes a bit, I notice that myself, like, when I speak to people, it’s partly because I have several people around me there, you know, here I’m more of a loner, and there this person comes along, and then this person

P: you have more company

Marek: more company. This person greets me, this one sees me, another one stops me, ‘come with me’, and it’s just a completely different way of living together, because I know the people, it’s a small village, a town, 4000 people, my father-in-law, grandpa, he’s the [job title], so people know me, everyone knows my face basically, and so when I’m there I feel completely different from here, because there everyone wants to talk to you, everyone has something to say. I’ve also done up the apartment a bit, and I took on

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that worker from Poland, from W., where my wife comes from, then I took on that worker, I sorted something out for them. I’m just the sort of person who can’t say no and I’ve done people so many favours that they all have positive memories of me, and so maybe that creates a stronger sense of Heimat than is really there, you know.

P: mhm, mhm.

Marek: But when I went back to Poland that time it was nice. My parents were dead, my relationship here had broken up, and there, with my friend, he had a mother, he had a father, and they took me in like their own son. We would sit together over lunch, we would sit at the breakfast, have breakfast together, and I did feel at h- more at home, perhaps not in Pol-, in my Heimat, but at home, well probably also a bit in my Heimat, but sitting together at the breakfast table, at lunch, you were cooked for, it was just a different life from here in

P: a nice sense of family

Marek: exactly exactly exactly. The Poles are very hospitable. Although I was a stranger they welcomed me with open arms, and for a year I really enjoyed that life, with their son, it was a sort of Heimat, that’s true.

I think this passage in our conversation is important because it shows how Marek scrutinizes his experience and takes seriously the analytical task of identifying appropriate ways of describing it. Although he says elsewhere that he is more comfortable speaking German than Polish, he appears to be more at ease in the Polish social environment. Yet the country of his birth has a particular meaning for him now that has to be worked out through narrative means. He is at first discomfited by the offer of Heimat as a descriptive cat-egory, it doesn’t appear to be a ‘good fit’ for his experience: more important are concepts such as home, the communal meal table, recognition and accep-tance, and the ability to play an active role in the construction of community.

The development and deployment of his linguistic repertoire both influence and reflect the ‘rhythm’ of Marek’s life, indexing the evolution of a complex sense of self at crucial moments in his life story. Like Hoa, in the telling of her story, Marek constructs himself in his narrative as a historical actor: participating in repeated acts of migration across the German-Polish border under radically changing historical conditions, playing an active part in regulating this border during the Wende, and

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subsequently engaging in transnational, or rather translocal, practices across it in both personal and professional capacities.

At the same time, however, his narrative relates to the wider social dis-courses of integration and belonging. His life world becomes first more diffuse through his Berlin socialization, then more focused through his injury and subsequent isolation and withdrawal, and finally bifurcated into a spatially differentiated existence as self-conscious ‘loner’ in Berlin and busy, social ‘man of action’ in Poland. He represents himself as fully integrated into the Polish community where his daughter’s grandparents live and fully integrated into the hyperlocal community of the Berlin apartment block as inhabitant, landlord and house committee member.

* * *Beata is about the same age as Marek, also in her early 40s, but first

came to Berlin as a young woman in 1991, not long after the Wende. After a truncated period at university back in Poland, she returned to Berlin in 1994 and spent the next 13 years studying and working part-time in various casual jobs, before finding a home in the art scene. On the face of it, a very common and unremarkable biography, a single person from the (in this case Polish) provinces seeking a fresh start in the metropolis. But Beata constructs her life as a story of alienation and personal reinven-tion, in which her experience with language is intricately implicated. If Marek’s story is a drama, Beata’s is a Bildungsroman.

As with Marek, place and physical relocation play an important role in her story, but in her case in the (re)negotiation of personal relationships. In almost every respect, her life world diverges from Marek’s. It’s true that, like him, she also depicts her move to Germany as an act of flight but for her this is not a journey with her mother to re-form a family unit, it’s an escape from her mother—‘I ran away, from my family, from my mother’ (ich bin geflüchtet, von meiner Familie, von meiner Mama)—and from her mother’s tongue. Listening to her, I kept thinking of Canadian writer Nancy Huston, who chose to write in French in order to detach herself from her mother, who had abandoned her:

La langue française était … moins chargée d’affect et donc moins dangereuse. … Elle m’était égale. C’était une substance lisse et homogène, autant dire neu-tre. Au début … cela me conférait une immense liberté dans l’écriture – car je

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ne savais pas par rapport à quoi, sur fond de quoi, j’écrivais. … La langue française … ne me parlait pas, ne me chantait pas, ne me berçait pas, ne me frappait pas, ne me choquait pas, ne me faisait pas peur. Elle n’était pas ma mère. (Nancy Huston, Nord perdu suivi de Douze France 1999: 64)

The French language was … less emotionally charged and therefore less dangerous. […] It didn’t matter to me. It was a smooth and homogeneous substance, neutral in other words. In the beginning … that gave me a huge sense of freedom in writing – for I didn’t know what I was writing in rela-tion to or on what basis. […] The French language didn’t speak to me, didn’t sing to me, didn’t cradle me, didn’t hit me, didn’t shock me, didn’t frighten me. It wasn’t my mother. (My translation)

And she, too, develops a closer affinity to the German language than to Polish, a kind of intimacy that she had never felt with her first lan-guage, but she goes further than Marek and presents it as a refuge and a new home, positively attributing to the learned language the concept of Heimat that Marek finds problematic:

Beata 1Beata: I know I have a very strong accent but I think I found a particular way into the German language and it’s sort of become my Heimat. I mean, I feel much better disposed towards German than Polish. … I feel very good in the German language, it’s, the Polish language is not a Heimat, it’s a demand, a challenge.

For Beata, in fact, the move to Berlin appears to be a definitive and per-manent resettlement. Her emergent linguistic repertoire does enable her to (re-)establish ties with the country of her birth, but Poland and Polish seem to remain distant and foreign. She studied German and art history in Berlin, which led her to discover a vocation in contemporary art, and to her first work experience, at an institute for cultural exchange in a small university town in southern Germany. This opportunity resulted in an unexpected encounter with Polish, which by this time had become an unfamiliar language:

Beata 2Beata: My first task there was to hire out an exhibition to Poland, I actually had to make phone calls, I’d never talked about costs in Polish before, and

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having to translate everything into Polish, I’d never done that. And that was the first time, in my favourite area, that I was suddenly confronted with the Polish language.

Unlike Marek, Beata doesn’t experience the move between German and Polish here as a ‘smooth transition’ (fließender Übergang) and being called upon to exploit her bilingual knowledge as a professional asset is less an opportunity than a challenge. And yet this disconcerting con-frontation with Polish is later replaced by a form of reconciliation—on her own terms and in her own space, back in cosmopolitan Berlin. How do her shifting relationships with language emerge in her story? How do they give it its shape?

Beata begins and ends her story with accounts of linguistic failure. Each of these is related, directly or indirectly, to her problematic personal rela-tionship with her mother. Why did she move to Berlin? To get away from her mother, but also, she says, to compensate for the inadequate proficiency in German that had given her a poor result in her school- leaving certificate:

Beata 3Beata: It really was quite an achievement to speak German, to learn German, because it was a totally foreign language for me when I arrived here.

Since then she has studied and worked for 20 years in a German-speaking environment, and this has enabled her to acquire a high level of flu-ency and confidence in German. This sophisticated linguistic knowledge also equips her with a ‘metalanguage’ to articulate her own earlier expe-riences: her account is peppered with analytical concepts in German: matriarchal (matriarchal), Macht ausüben (exercise power), Mechanismen der Unterordnung (subordination mechanisms), Schicksal (fate, destiny), Hemmungen (inhibitions), Versöhnung (reconciliation).

What I find interesting here is that the development of emotional maturity and of emotional literacy seem to go hand in hand. She charac-terizes her family childhood as a time of speechlessness, when the power to use language was almost driven out of her, or perhaps deep within her, while school seemed to offer a kind of respite or refuge.

4 Multilingual Mietshaus: Language (Hi)stories... 143

Beata 4Beata: Well, my mother stood there so to speak with really strong muscles [P: yeah?], she used force and so on, so I just didn’t dare to speak, to express my wishes and, um, I won mainly when I said nothing at all, when I was completely quiet, silent.

P: Right, mhm, you withdrew?

Beata: Exactly, but that’s also to do with the fact that I never really learned the Polish language naturally [P: mhm], the Polish language was always more linked with school, where you had to write, where you had to put on performances [P: mhm], although I loved reading, I just absorbed everything.

At the end of her story, she talks of how she remains on mutually unfa-miliar territory with her mother when she tries to engage with her on an emotional level in Polish, which ends quite literally in tears.

Beata 5Beata: Well, for example, that reconciliation with my mother was actually absurd. We, she visited me once and we had a conflict

P: She visited you here?

Beata: Yes, very often, but one time when she visited me there was a con-flict situation, and she can’t speak at all, she cried and left, you know, and I can’t cope with that any more, it was, she treated me like when I was little, but that’s not on any more. Then I bring her back and try to console her and I work with a dictionary, you know, [P: mhm] because I, because everything I want to say, about feelings, I have to translate from German.

So the emotional distance between Beata and her mother doesn’t appear to have diminished in the intervening time. But what has changed is that Beata now positions herself as an active ‘figure’ in her own story world, rejecting the passive stance of the child and adopting instead the parental stance of controlling and consoling; a biographical shift that seems to be underscored in her narration by the move from past to present tense. And she may still lack the linguistic knowledge to freely express her feelings in Polish but she now has the interlingual skills and the experience of moving between languages to manage the situation.

144 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

Between these two points of conflict, Beata develops a narrative in which her experience with language is conditioned by discrete social spaces and intimately bound up with emotional and intellectual confine-ment, on the one hand, and liberation, on the other. Poland is repre-sented as the problematic family space in which both she and her mother grew up in a linguistically impoverished environment, and in her Polish life world men are figures who are either inarticulate or silent or else leave; it’s the women who act.

Beata 6Beata: Well, I prefer to talk in German rather than in Polish.

P: You prefer that?

Beata: Because it doesn’t take so much effort, I mean, … but it may be partly because when I left Poland I had a language problem, you know, well, not a language problem but … I was conscious that I couldn’t articulate myself, I didn’t know how to express my ideas, I wanted to draw all my ideas out of myself all at once because at home I was never really allowed to speak properly, you know. … My mother can’t talk either, I mean in her relation-ship with her mum there was always something that, her mother put herself in the centre and had no one around her but was always alone and always talked about herself. … She had three children and all of the children suf-fered from language problems. One of them, my youngest uncle, stammers, a lot. My mother, she hardly says anything, I mean when she does say some-thing, when she wants to get her way, it’s mostly by shouting. … And my mother’s oldest brother, I don’t know, he can’t express himself, he’s always searching for words and then he gives up, because he lacks the words.

Beata 7Beata: My family was always somehow, well, bereft of men, I mean con-demned to being robbed of men, it was robbed by fate. My grandma lost her husband in the Second, after the Second World War, well not after it but he died quite early, then she was alone the whole time and brought up the chil-dren without their father. And then my mum also, well my father also didn’t […] with my mother, he also left her, and then she married another man, but he also comes, I think they were together for 15 years, then he also left her. And in this relationship, I mean my relationship with my mother, he really had no voice, I mean I wasn’t his child, he had no say in my fate, at that time.

4 Multilingual Mietshaus: Language (Hi)stories... 145

Talking of this troubled childhood in Poland, Beata creates a claustrophobic world, in which her own voice is muted and stifled, and she populates it with people who experience language as a permanent struggle and with people who are either silent because they are absent—the dead grand-father, the disappearing father—or silenced because they don’t have a legitimate voice.

By contrast, her Berlin life world is a kind of emotional exile. By learning the foreign language German, Beata finds a means of establishing a new level of personal autonomy, first as a student and then as an independent curator of art exhibitions. What begins as a place of refuge becomes a space of discovery and opportunity, and the void left by the missing men in her Polish world is filled here, not by men, but by an engagement with creative and ‘intellectually active’ Polish women, whose creative work also draws heavily on their experience as artistic outsiders in Germany.

Beata 8Beata: Well, for example, we’re working now on an exhibition … and it’s called ‘From Woman to Woman’ and altogether six women will take part, six female artists, who are active in different art forms. We have painters, photographers, we have sculptors, performance artists [P: mhm], so six, three come from Poland and three are Poles but they live in Germany [P: mhm]. And then we want to bring them together and see what topics they work on and because they express how important it is, what it means, to be a woman in art. … Polish women who live in Germany, and how they accepted what was offered to them here and how they remained together.

Having extricated herself from the constraints and the trauma she asso-ciates with her problematic Polish family life, Beata now chooses to immerse herself in a new Polish environment of her own making. In this way, Beata is able to interrogate her own gendered experience of other-ness—both in Poland and in Berlin—by transforming it into an artis-tic exploration: the themes of the exhibitions she curates are the central themes of her own life story. And at the same time, she creates a particular social category—Berlin-Polish art curator—within a particular cultural milieu into which she can narratively insert herself. ‘The exhibition’, she says, ‘is about integration’ (in dieser Ausstellung geht es um Integration),

146 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

but this seems to apply both to the subject of the exhibition and to the process of curating it. For like Marek, in his story, Beata has found a way not only to integrate herself into a particular segment of Berlin society and but also to integrate her Berlin and her Polish selves.

* * *Both Marek and Beata have experienced migration from Poland to

Berlin as ‘flight’, but under different historical conditions and for different purposes: Marek was taken from Poland as a child during the Cold War to start a new family life in West Berlin, Beata made her own decision as a young adult to leave her family and move to the newly unified Berlin. Both, in due course, constructed themselves anew, Marek by necessity, Beata by choice. Both develop accounts of their migrations that show the transformative effects of linguistic actions, but in different ways. And both, in their narratives, create a sense of self that is built around linguis-tically mediated experiences.

At first, Marek’s knowledge of Polish was useless to him and his igno-rance of German isolated him from his new environment. But despite ‘coming into’ German as a child, he has remained with both languages, and his bilingual proficiency has allowed him both to sustain his own life-in-two-places and to reproduce in his daughter the same facility and opportunities for mobility. German has a largely pragmatic function for him, it’s the means by which he can perform ‘being the businessman’ in Berlin. Polish has more complex associations, expressed first in elegiac reminiscences of the past he left behind and then in confident acknowl-edgement of the conviviality of the present he has created.

Beata’s desire to disconnect herself from the person and the place that she associates with unhappy childhood experiences entails provisionally relinquishing the language that tied her to them. The sense of inarticu-lacy that many of us feel in the early stages of acquiring a second language is linked in her story, unusually, with her first language, and Polish for her is not a medium of intimacy or emotional expressiveness. On the con-trary: performing intimacy, in the sense of discussing painful memories, seems to be easier for her in German, perhaps because of the distance it places between the experiences and the telling. Her learned second lan-guage also equips her with the linguistic resources to analyse the past that

4 Multilingual Mietshaus: Language (Hi)stories... 147

had been lived in Polish, but her lack of an emotional lexicon in her first language creates an obstacle for converting therapeutic understanding into beneficial action in her attempts to build bridges with her mother. Beata eventually comes to ‘own’ German, in much the same way as Marek does, and she feels at home in it despite being aware of the ‘inauthentic-ity’ of her accent. She is also able to find a way of rehabilitating Polish by recontextualizing it as a Berlin language that she associates now, not with her family and the past, but with her artistic community in the present.

Leaving the Building

I’m tempted to leave Mareschstraße now, without further comment. I want these five short life stories to stand on their own, although I hope they have given you food for thought. Yet, as I acknowledged in the Introduction, I’m aware that there needs to be something more: what is the bigger pic-ture, you may be asking, what are the lessons learned? I tried to explain my purpose at the outset, and I hope I’ve gone some way towards justi-fying that, but I can see that it’s not enough to close the Mietshaus door and leave the stories to speak for themselves. At the same time, I don’t feel I can offer anything as definitive as a chapter headed ‘Conclusions’ might suggest, for the project was always more about processes than about outcomes. So I’ll finish the book instead with some reflections on this research experience, which I hope will provide at least a partial resolution of the question of what I wanted to achieve and perhaps also a stimulus for your own further engagement with the subject of language and migration.

148 Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis

149© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017P. Stevenson, Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis, Language and Globalization, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40606-0

Epilogue

When I embarked on this book, my aim was to place at its heart a story about stories about language: a kind of sociolinguistic novella, as one colleague put it.

But this is not a work of fiction: it’s based entirely on the narrators’ own words. What I have offered is one way—only one way—of address-ing the challenge of representation and I acknowledge that this puts me in a precarious position. For how do you fairly process what someone tells you, in good faith? All (auto)biographies are creative acts—we choose what to relate and how to relate it—and attempts to organize retrospec-tively a set of episodes into a coherent ‘life’. So my aim was modest: to construct a plausible account of different ways in which language has shaped individuals’ lives and ways in which they use their experiences with language to structure their life stories.

In bringing these stories together in a single account, there is of course a risk of what you might call ‘narrative synchronization’. Gathering or generating life stories of different individuals at about the same time—that is, under broadly the same historical conditions at the point of nar-ration—could distract us from the specificities of the very different and particular historical conditions of the place-times, the story worlds, being

150 Epilogue

narrated. Ludmila and Beata came to the recently reunified Berlin in the early 1990s, one as a Spätaussiedlerin from post-Soviet Russia, the other as a student from the newly democratized Poland. As an adult, Marek made the same transition as Beata in the 1990s but only after having previously moved as a child to West Berlin from Communist Poland in the 1970s. Ferhat was born in Istanbul but he was the first in his family to be born outside a Kurdish village in eastern Turkey, near the Armenian border: his family had migrated internally within Turkey from the village to the metropolis, where Turkish was the dominant language; he then moved in the 1990s as a student to Berlin, where he stayed and became an educational social worker. And Hoa moved from Vietnam to the GDR three times, during and after the ‘struggle for freedom’—as a schoolgirl in the 1950s, as a student in the 1960s and as a ‘group leader’ of a cohort of contract workers in East Berlin in the 1980s—before finally ‘relocating’ from there to the new Berlin in the 1990s.

I’ve done my best with this conjuring trick of simultaneously merging the stories and keeping them clearly apart. What I hope has emerged is a set of different ‘Berlin lives’, versions of how five people each became in some sense a ‘Berliner’. There is, of course, much more that could be said about the lives I’ve talked about in Chap. 4 and I know that many other versions could have been told, other emphases proposed. But in doing detailed ‘biographical work’ with the stories that Ludmila, Ferhat, Hoa, Marek and Beata told me, however partial and provisional it may be, I’ve tried to tease out some of the sociolinguistic complexity of their individual life stories and also to show how reflections on language use can help us peel away historicized layers of experience with language that might otherwise remain submerged inside the homogenizing synchronic wrapping of the ‘multilingual migrant’.

I conceded at the outset that reading these stories wouldn’t give you a definitive understanding of the complexity of the migration experience. I can’t claim to have represented in any adequate way the range of back-grounds or experiences of migrants in Berlin—this would have been the case even if I had included the stories of other people I talked to across the city: an Iraqi asylum seeker, for example, or a Chinese student, a retired Indian industrial worker with 40 years’ experience of living and working in Berlin, a young Polish and Turkish couple, a German woman

Epilogue 151

who grew up in the Middle East. However, it might encourage you to ask yourself now the questions I posed at the beginning: what kinds of message are contained in these stories and the ways they’re constructed? What lessons might we learn from them about the effects and impacts on individual lives of experiencing relocation as a translation from one linguistic regime to another? What do they tell us about the pressures and constraints imposed by the entry into a new language world, as well as about the, often unforeseen, possibilities and opportunities it opens up? About, in short, what language achieves in people’s lives?

Rather than offering my own answers to these questions directly, I’d like to close with some reflections that relate to them a little obliquely. Throughout my discussions of migration and multilingualism in Berlin in general (Chaps. 2 and 3), and of individual life stories in particular (Chap. 4), I’ve emphasized the complex historical layering of social and linguistic processes in urban contexts, the sedimentation of human experience over long periods of time. I’ve also paid close attention to physical location as a dimension in these processes, both in the sense of locales, or sites of (inter)action, and as sites of memory. I described in the Introduction my search for ‘a way in’ to the life worlds of people who have experienced the disruptive effects of relocating from one social and linguistic regime to another, effects that are experienced and recalled as arising from a combination of the move from ‘there’ to ‘here’ and of the contrast between ‘then’ and ‘now’.

The challenge was to capture, on the one hand, the merging or coin-cidence of these twin dimensions of time and place, and, on the other hand, the nature of the spatial and temporal moves entailed in relocation. For mobility is difficult to track—we observe it most readily at the point of departure or at the point of arrival, paradoxically studying mobility in stasis. So stories could be one way of gaining access to the dynamics of mobility, of reviving the processes of transition in order to under-stand better the change that has occurred in people’s lives as a result. And gathering stories from under one roof seemed to provide a means of representing in a manageable and digestible form the internal diversity of Berlin’s population.

The Mietshaus lent itself as a—crude but convenient—kind of meta-phor for the horizontal (spatial) and vertical (temporal) structuring of the

152 Epilogue

city’s biography. Apartment buildings embody some of the fundamental characteristics of the city: they combine order and disorder (through communal rules and individual behaviours), they embody the urban paradox of fixity and dynamism (with long-term residents on the one hand and irregular flows of occupants on the other), and their random assemblage of inhabitants exemplifies the archetypal ‘intimate strangers’, living—in Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost’s succinct characterization—‘in close physical proximity and distant social propinquity’.

A brilliant fictional exploration of these possibilities, published in 1978, is Georges Perec’s extraordinary novel La Vie mode d’emploi (Life A User’s Manual), in which the narrative takes us around a huge Parisian apartment block and its inhabitants, creating an array of colourful characters. Alaa al Aswany conjured a similarly flamboyant microcosm of contemporary Cairo society in his novel The Yacoubian Building (first published in Arabic in 2002 as Imarat Yaqubyan). More recently still, in her play 3 Winters, Croatian writer Tena Štivičić has used the constraints of the stage to construct a claustropho-bic atmosphere in a family house in Zagreb, taking a single apartment at three historical moments (1945, 1990 and 2011) to work out themes of individual belief, loyalty, commitment and struggle in the context of social transforma-tions and political change in the Balkans. In one scene, personal and political tensions are reignited through the accidental utterance of a single German word, in which the historical weight of multiple antagonisms is distilled.

In this scene, shortly after the end of the war in 1945, a young Croatian woman (Rose), her husband and baby have been allocated an apartment in a former private house commandeered by the new regime, the house in which Rose had lived as a child when her mother (Monika) was a servant there. They have just discovered that the daughter of the former owners of the house (Karolina) has been living there unknown to the authorities.

Karolina: I came home, in the hope that I might die. I have no one, no vocation, no husband, no children, no purpose, so I thought I’d come home, lie down on my bed, and attempt to die. I have so far been unsuccessful. I suppose you have come to kick me out.

Monika: We haven’t come for that—have we?Rose: We have come to live in an empty house!Karolina shrugs by way of apology.Rose: You will have to go to the nearest RIC and register.

Epilogue 153

Karolina: Where?Rose: Regional Intelligence Centre—they’ll decide where to put you.Monika: What do you mean, where to put her? Rose: I’m not sure. She has this … aggravating father circumstance.

She’ll receive a file. Probably. Have you any useful skills?Karolina: Bitte? Was für eine—[Sorry? What kind of -]Rose: No, not ‘bitte’. Absolutely not ‘bitte’ and the like.Monika: Ma’am, you mustn’t speak German. Karolina: I’m sorry. It’s when I get nervous. Old habits. I was raised in the

Monarchy. German was my first language. I’m sorry.Monika: It’s alright ma’am.Rose: Listen to me, comrade Karolina. You are the daughter of a

bourgeois Nazi collaborator who escaped being brought to jus-tice. That he would leave you behind in a mental institution only goes to show that he deserves no mercy. However, as he is unavailable to receive punishment, some of our comrades who suffered a great deal under the Nazi boot might be perfectly happy to take restitution from you. I suggest you convince them that the time in hospital was self-reflective, healing you of all bourgeois convictions, and I suggest that you think of some-thing socially constructive you are capable of doing which you might contribute to building the new Yugoslavia.

In the context in which it’s uttered here, the single German word bitte (sorry? pardon?) has, in Jan Blommaert’s term, a heavy ‘indexical load’—referencing, at one level, most obviously and most recently the defeated Nazi enemy, but also, at another level, the class enemy, the German- speaking bourgeoisie, and at another, still deeper, level the whole tangled central European history of the Habsburg Empire.

The palpable frisson in the audience watching this scene during the play’s premiere in London’s National Theatre in December 2014 reinforced my interest in what Brigitta Busch calls the ‘experiencing’ or ‘speaking subject’ who is ‘formed through and in language’ and in this way becomes—or makes herself—a historical figure, a person in history. For the speaking/experiencing subject is not only relating a small piece of their personal his-tory but also, in doing so, locating or inserting themselves in(to) a wider and deeper social history. This is why I’ve focused my biographical discussion

154 Epilogue

on Busch’s notion of Spracherleben, the lived experience of language. The approach is, literally, self-centred: it seeks to understand how individuals develop a sense of a historically situated self by talking, not about their lin-guistic knowledge or skills, but about moments or phases in their lives (what psychotherapist Charlotte Burck refers to as ‘languaged periods’) when lin-guistic actions have had (potentially) transformative effects or when cer-tain kinds of language knowledge have created or obstructed opportunities, and about ways in which they have developed their own ‘(socio)linguistic regime’ as a means to find their own place in the social worlds they move into. The German term Selbstverortung—locating your self yourself—cap-tures very well this active process of accommodation or ‘becoming at home’: of Beheimatung, as psychologist Beate Mitzscherlich calls it, understanding Heimat not as a place but as a condition, a state of mind.

Talking to these five individuals (and the many other participants in my research elsewhere in Berlin) I gained the strong sense that they had ‘found a place’ for themselves in this highly diverse and cosmopolitan city. They had all, to different degrees, rehearsed (aspects of ) their life stories with other people before they met me—with family, friends and neighbours, with employers, clients and customers—but this was almost certainly the first time they had consciously knitted together some of the ‘languaged periods’ in their lives, identifying and connecting iso-lated episodes and incidents in which language knowledge, of one kind or another, determined the course of their lives. This was, at times, an emotional experience and there were moments of revelation and evident re-evaluation—both for them and for me.

To modify the words I quoted from Jan Blommaert and Ad Backus in the Prologue, language biographies are ‘records of mobility’ and can help us discern the many ways in which our linguistic repertoires and our encounters with those of others influence the trajectory and the rhythm of human lives. The linguistic texture of migration societies like Berlin is highly complex and very difficult to model in all its dimensions—histori-cal, spatial, cultural, visual, experiential. I don’t pretend to be the first to adopt a biographical approach to this task—far from it—but I hope that this short exploration of collective and individual language (hi)stories has made a small contribution towards answering Ingrid Gogolin’s question and perhaps stimulated your curiosity and your desire to investigate your own (socio)linguistic environment.

155© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017P. Stevenson, Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis, Language and Globalization, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40606-0

Appendix: Original Extracts from Interview Transcripts in Chapter 4

Ludmila 1Ludmila: Wir haben Russisch gesprochen aber unsere Eltern haben mit uns Deutsch gesprochen. Und unter sich selber, wenn die was verheimli-chen wollten.

P: Ja ja, genau.

Ludmila: Wir waren als Kinder schlau, trotzdem haben alles verstanden, weil Kinder verstehen alles, was sie nicht dürfen. Gehört haben wir immer deutsche Sprache […] aber wir haben immer Russisch geantwortet.

Ludmila 2Ludmila: Das war deutsche Sprache, was sie von ihren Eltern vor zwei drei hundert Jahren von Omas und Opas […] Mein Vater war Wolga-Deutscher, meine Mama aus Kasachstan, Kasachstan-Deutsche, in Kasachstan geboren und in Kasachstan groß geworden, aber Vater war in Stalingrad geboren und dann in dieser Kriegszeit, 1940 ist er geboren, und ’42 waren sie nach Kasachstan abgeschoben […] Die haben ganze nach Sibirien, Kasachstan von Stalingrad alle, wie nennt man das, abgeschoben oder so was, ver-trieben waren die. […] Mein Vater war Deutscher aber aus Stalingrad, meine Mama war Deutsche aus Kasachstan. Und die beiden haben sich

156 Appendix: Original Extracts from Interview Transcripts in Chapter 4

kennengelernt, alle beide Deutsch gesprochen, aber sie haben sich auch nicht verstanden, weil das war zwei verschiedene deutsche Sprachen, ganz andere Dialekte, weil von Papa Wurzeln kamen früher von Schwaben, Stuttgart, von da, […] und meine Mutter, die ist aus Sachsen. Mein Vater sagt immer zu ihr, also Mutter seine Wurzel, mein Vater sagt immer jetzt in Deutschland ‘Ossi-Weib’ zu ihr [lacht] […] Aber später hat mein Vater diese Sprache wie meine Mama redet, diese Deutsch hat er gelernt von meiner Mutter. Und dann mit dieser deutsche Sprache sind die nach Deutschland gekommen und trotzdem haben sie diese deutsche Sendungen nicht verstanden. […] Meine Mama redet ihre eigene Sprache fließend, aber das ist natürlich ganz andere Dialekt auch. Aber dieser Dialekt wir sind gewöhnt als Kinder zu hören und wir verstehen, was sie da reden und so, meine Tanten, wenn die mit meiner Mutter quatschen, das ist für mich deutsche Sprache gewesen damals.

Ludmila 3Wir haben wieder einen Zettel bekommen, wo stand, Polizeianmeldung müssen wir machen, sofort. Um 14 Uhr sind wir da gekommen, Schlüssel gekriegt, Taschen abgestellt, und sofort mussten wir zur Polizeimeldestelle und uns anmelden. Mit dem Bus musste ich ungefähr vier fünf Stationen fahren und das war noch verwüstete Ostseite da, waren keine Häuser keine Haltestellen, gar nichts […] Na so wie die mir erzählt haben, steigst du in Nummer so und so Bus, fährst du fünf Stationen, steigst du aus und siehst du graue Gebäude, das ist Polizei, gehst du da, machst du Anmeldung. Und ich mit meinem Sohn, es war 15 Uhr, ist noch mehr dunkel, wir sind eine Station früh ausgestiegen aus dem Bus, und dann war dunkel und Wüste. Die Seite keine Häuser nur Felder, und die Seite keine Häuser, noch eine Station weiter. Jetzt jedes Mal wenn ich da vorbeifahre, ich kann diese Strecke nicht vergessen, ich sag immer ‘diese blöde Meldestelle’. So sind wir eine Station früh ausgestiegen und dann wusste wir nicht wo wir gehen. Und wir waren schon ganz kaputt, noch nix gegessen, morgen früh [sic] weggefahren von Marienfelde, Tasche abgestellt und sofort wieder raus. Es war so kalt, mein Sohn war auch schon so kaputt. […] An diesen Tag lief keine Bus, keine Autos auf diese Strasse, es hat geschneit, Stromausfall oder ich weiß nicht, diese ganze Busse liefen gar nicht. Er war kaputt und hat gesagt, ich kann nicht mehr, und ich wusste nicht, was ich mache. Ich bin irgendwo seitlich von Straße so mich gesetzt so, und dann hab ich ihn in meine Hände genommen und er hat auch gefroren, er hat irgendwelche Schuhe gehabt, Plastik, diese Sportschuhe noch aus Russland damals, aus China, richtige Plastik, wenn’s kalt ist dann macht’s hart, weißt du. Ich hab

Appendix: Original Extracts from Interview Transcripts in Chapter 4 157

meinen Sohn genommen bei mir so und meine Kapuze so und wir saßen so und wir wusste nicht, wo wir gehen. […] Und da kam ein Mann vorbei, und er hat erkannt, dass Menschen sind und hat uns so bisschen wach gemacht, und ich kann nicht Deutsch und diese Mann konnte auch keine Deutsch, aber er war irgendwie glaub ich Kroate oder Jugoslawe, so auch ein Ausländer, und Gott sei Dank diese Person wohnte im selben Heim. Und er hat uns irgendwie gefragt, wo wohnst du oder so. Ich wusste nicht mal diese Straße hier, ich bin neu eingezogen, nicht mal zwei Stunden war ich drin ja, und so eine schwierige Wort, diese Straße, X-Straße, stell mal dir vor, jetzt kannst du das nicht mal richtig aussprechen aber damals! Ich hab nur gesagt Heim Heim Heim und der Mann hat uns einfach mitgen-ommen und auf sein Risiko hat gedacht, ich bringe irgendwo in einen Heim, wo ich selber wohne, und dann müssen Sie schon da klarkommen und mit anderen Menschen bisschen sich erwärmen und dann Adresse rausfinden, wo Sie kommen. Und der hat uns gebracht genau in diesen Heim, wo wir so Unterkunft bekommen haben.

Ludmila 4P: Das war wohl schwierig am Anfang?

Ludmila: Na ja, Umzug, besonders wenn du nach diesem großen Stress als junge Mutter mit kleinem Sohn, und deine Seele ist zerrissen, weil vor dem Abreise ist dein Mann verunglückt da, verstorben, und dann kommst du hier, hast du keine Verwandte, keine Bekannte und keine Geld. Ich hab 300 Mark mitgebracht […] und diese 300 Mark ich hab in einer Woche telefoniert mit meine Eltern nach Russland, weil ich immer diese Sehnsucht hatte ja? Und damals waren 5-Mark-Stück, so groß, und wenn du zwei drei Minuten sagst du hallo, tschüss, auf Wiedersehen, wie geht’s, es hat geschluckt diese 5-Mark-Stücke, wir haben immer fünf Stück gewechselt, damit wir so dieses kleine Gespräch noch führen könnten […] immer fünf Stück 25 Mark nur zwei drei Minuten, es waren diese Telefonzellen ja?

Ludmila 5Ludmila: Ich habe fünf Jahre nicht ein einziges Angebot bekommen, nicht mal als Putzfrau irgendwo, nicht ein einziges. Dann hab ich mir gedacht, ich bin jetzt 29, ab 30 Jahren kannst du schon vergessen, wenn ich schon mit 20 bis 30 nichts kriege, ab 30 kannst du vergessen. Und dann durch Zufall hab ich mich entschlossen, ich hab hier zwei Wochen als Kellnerin Aushilfe gemacht, über eine Person, damals hat mir erzählt, diese Frau ist

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kaputt, die Besitzerin, die will unbedingt in Urlaub aber die hat keine Aushilfe, du brauchst Geld, willst du bisschen aushelfen? Ich hab gesagt ja, und von Marzahn erstes Mal im Leben bin ich in diesem Bezirk gelandet. Ja, und dann hab ich bei dieser Frau ausgeholfen, und diese Zeiten hat sie schon Annonce gegeben in Zeitung, dass sie dies Laden verkaufen will. Und dann als sie bei Mittagspause draußen war, essen, schon Kunden gekommen, Leute, Käufer gekommen, und sie haben bei mir gefragt, wo ist die Chefin, wir haben ein Termin mit sie. Und bei mir sofort in Kopf so, und das war eine russische Familie, Mutter und Tochter, Tochter war so wie ich und Mutter ältere, aber ich hab sofort verstanden, dass sie russisch sind, auf Russisch sprechen. Ich hab auch auf Russisch geantwortet, dass dieser Laden ist schon weg, ist schon verkauft. Und dann als die Chefin zurück-kam, ich hab sie angesprochen, sag mal, verkaufst du dein Laden, hat sie gesagt ja, wieso, hast du Interesse? Ich hab gesagt natürlich, und haben wir mit ihr gesprochen und so war’s. [alle lachen] Und seitdem bin ich hier.

Ludmila 6P: Reden Sie Deutsch mit Ihrem Sohn?

Ludmila: Ich rede mit dem auf Russisch. Der versteht viel auf Russisch, aber, diese ganze Sätze, also, das ist alles Karambolage. Wenn du richtig ihn verstehen willst, dann musst du mit dem Deutsch unterhalten. Auf Russisch er kann mit dir sprechen, so, aber dann ist es dann, ich denke anderes, ich denk auf Russisch, und er denkt Deutsch und redet auf Russisch. Dann kommt bisschen Problem.

Ludmila 7Ludmila: Da fühle ich mich wie zu Hause, meine Seele geht so auf. Diese ganze Straßen da, das ist alles mir so bekannt, weil ich von erster Tag in Deutschland in Marzahn gewohnt habe und das ist wie meine Zuhause da. Richtig schön. Diese ganze Menschen sind ganz anders da als hier, ganz anders, ganz anders. Sind alles Familienleute, die grüßen sich auch, biss-chen miteinander auf Spielplatz, wenn die sich treffen, dann kennen die sich untereinander. Hier bin ich einsam geworden, wo ich jetzt wohne, Lichtenrade ist eine Katastrophe.

Ferhat 1Ferhat: Da hatte ich also zwei Sprachen gehabt, aber unbewusst, also diese Bewusstsein hatte ich durch diese Diskriminierung, Kurde zu sein, so

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bisschen versteckt, ich hab nicht öffentlich gesagt, dass ich öh Sprache kann, und über Kurden, Kurdistan wusste ich überhaupt nicht. Meiner Vorstellung nach dachte ich, in unserem Dorf spricht man so, also diese Sprache es ist unsere, speziell bei uns und sonst nix also. Was sind wir, welche Sprache sprechen wir? Ich wusste, ich war nie informiert: gibt es Kurden? Was ist das? Ich wusste, dass meine Mutter sprach nur Kurd-, also nur eine Sprache, die öh, wir nannten das Kurmanci eigentlich, intern, die Sprache heißt so, Kurmanci, ich dachte, in unserem Dorf spricht man diese Sprache, also Umgebung vom Dorf, und das war’s.

P: Sie hatten also keine Bezeichnung für diese Sprache?

Ferhat: Der lokale Name, also nicht Kurdisch sondern man sagte Kurmanci, eine eine Dialekt von kurdischen Sprache, Kurmanci, ich hab das gehört.

Ferhat 2Ferhat: Die [türkische] Sprache war Männersprache und die Frauensprache war Kurdisch. Als die Männer zum Beispiel etwas erreicht haben, dann erst Türkisch wurde gesprochen. Das ist also Frauen, die Sprache so, in dem Sinne auch so, weiblich gestellt, in negativem Sinne, die Sprache. Und wenn man einen Job hatte, hat man immer Türkisch gesprochen.

Ferhat 3P: Hat sich die soziale Stellung der Frauen geändert?

Ferhat: Ja. Und in Kurdistan besonders, weil durch die Bewegung, kurdische Bewegung, weil die Frauen waren sehr aktiv. Es gab diese kriegerische Auseinandersetzungen, das heißt in erster Linie waren also Männer da beteiligt, auch kurdische Männer, aber danach kamen auch kurdische Frauen, sie haben ihre eigene Armee, so völlig Frauen also, die haben viel Verantwortung über-nommen. Das war einerseits, und zweitens auf der legalen Ebene auch, weil Männer nicht da waren, die haben große aktive Verantwortung übernommen. Zum Beispiel, ich kann mich erinnern, vor 15 Jahren oder so, die Demos, über-wiegend Frauen und Kinder haben gemacht, weil die Polizei, türkische Polizei, natürlich wenn Männer da sind, dann nehmen sie sofort weg, ins Gefängnis, Folter, töten, alles. Und deswegen haben die Frauen von sich alleine gesagt, wir machen das so. Ich glaube, die Bewegung, da sind viele aktive Frauen drin.

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Ferhat 4Ferhat: Ich glaube, mein Kurdisch war bisschen politisch, es ist aus poli-tischen Gründen entwickelt. Also, ich kann mich erinnern, als ich in Istanbul war, bevor ich kam, hatte ich angefangen, versucht, mit meiner Mutter Kurdisch zu sprechen, aber das war wirklich rein politisch, weil ich glaube damals also siebziger Jahre, 68-Bewegungen, [P: Mhmm] genau, in der Türkei gab’s auch, gab’s, genau, diese linke Bewegung und dann auch nebenbei auch kurdische, und diese linke Bewegung war pro-kurdisch. Die haben es thematisert, also dies Tabu.

Ferhat 5Ferhat: Es gibt Sprachen automatisch, die man spricht. Wenn man hier aufgewachsen ist, spricht man Deutsch. […] Wir leben in Deutschland, die deutsche Sprache muss perfekt sein, das ist klar.

Ferhat 6Ferhat: Dann bin ich hier gekommen, dann ich glaub wiederum durch politische mehr hab ich bisschen entwickelt. Ich hab angefangen, kurd-ische Musik zu hören, und dann hab ich, kurdische Kulturvereine bin ich öfter hingegangen, wir haben kurdische Musik gemacht, so in Berührung gekommen, lange Zeit.

Ferhat 7P: Sie hatten vorher Kurdisch nicht gelesen?

Ferhat: Nein, weil das war verboten. Kurdische Literatur, vielleicht gab’s ein paar, aber wenn’s gab, dann hatten wir Angst zu kaufen, also wir hatten Angst, Geheimpolizisten, wenn ich das vom Kiosk kaufe, dann ist das sofort abgestempelt. Deswegen, das hab ich nie gehabt in der Türkei. […] Hier war natürlich die freie Raum für Kurdisch und Kurden, und dort hat meine Sprache so entwickelt.

Ferhat 8Ferhat: Man kann sich unterhalten, aber weiter, also wenn man zum Beispiel über Politik sprechen, das kam sehr sehr spät bei mir. Ob man die Wörter kennt, psychisch, ich war nicht so vorbereitet, kurdisch über poli-tische Dinge sprechen, ernsthaft, also intellektueller Niveau. Es war nicht, also sofort umschalten, auch wenn er öh Kurde ist, trotzdem wir sind umgeschaltet automatisch in Türkisch, obwohl wir Kurden sind. Und in

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dem Sinne ist Sprache also höher geworden, weil in der Türkei hat einen anderen Wert jetzt, also Schätzung, durch die Bewegung, Parteien und so weiter, ist die Sprache legitimer geworden. Es ist nicht nur Dorfsprache. Es gibt jetzt im türkischen Fernsehen, Kurdischsprechende bis zu Professoren, also die sprechen Kurdisch, die erzählen wissenschaftliche Dinge auf Kurdisch, und erstmal musste ich lachen.

Ferhat 9Ferhat: Von Mentalität her ich bin immer noch Istanbuler, also ich bezeichne mich nicht so als Kurde, sondern ich bin Istanbuler, also ich bin von Mentalität aus Großstadt. Und ich hab immer so in der Richtung Freunde gehabt, überwiegend türkische Freunde. Aber als ich hier war, wir haben öfter diskutiert über Kurden und Kurdistan. Aber ich bin nicht weggegangen, es gibt Menschen so, die weggehen und dann richtig ins kurdische Milieu. Ich bin dort geblieben, ich hatte lange Zeit fast nur türkische Freunde, aber trotzdem anerkannt.

Ferhat 10Ferhat: Eigentlich nicht, Istanbuler Kurde, also, nicht Kurdistaner […] Meine Stadt, wie die Migranten hier leben, in Berlin also, man sagt ich bin Berliner türkischer Abstammung, also, kann man bezeichnen, Istanbuler Mentalität und so weiter, weil Istanbul es sind viele Menschen dort zusam-mengefunden, Istanbuler Lasa, ethnische oder Araber, kann man auch sagen, Istanbuler Araber, so bezeichne ich mich. Aber nicht Kurdistan, ich komme aus Kurdistan sagen, kann ich nicht, sage ich nicht.

P: Das würden Sie nicht sagen?

Ferhat: Nee nee, ich bin nicht aus Kurdistan, ich bin aus Istanbul. Ich bin ein Kurde aus Istanbul.

Ferhat 11Ferhat: Ich hab eine Kurdistan-Reise gemacht einmal mit meinen Freunden, zum ersten Mal Kurdistan-Reise bei uns in der Türkei gemacht, da hab ich kennengelernt, ‘oh die Sprache wird sehr gut benutzt.’

Ferhat 12Ferhat: Dann kam meine Tochter zur Welt, und dann, diese Zeit, das war für mich ein Prozess. Da hab ich mich so bisschen gefühlt mein Türkisch

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unter Druck sozusagen, mein Türkisch. Aber diese, Türkisch war für mich natürlich wichtige Sprache.

Ferhat 13Ferhat: Der Sohn spricht Kurdisch jetzt und kann auch Türkisch verste-hen. Dadurch ist erreicht, was ich wollte. Er hat türkische Freunde, Nachbarn, also türkische Sprache ist nicht so ganz weg bei ihm. Er kann einige Sachen sagen sogar, aber verstehen tut er ja sowieso.

Ferhat 14P: [Kurdisch] hat sie immer gehört.

Ferhat: Ja ja, versteht sie, wenn jemand Kurdisch spricht, dann versteht sie auf jeden Fall. Ich hab gesagt, in der Schule lernst du Türkisch sehr stark, sie spricht Türkisch auch, und dann hab ich gesagt, damit du auch Kurdisch stark wirst, spreche ich mit dir Kurdisch, ja? Sie sagt ja, hat sich gefreut.

Ferhat 15Ferhat: Ich bin oft in Kurdistan gewesen mit ihm. Irak hat auf ihn sehr großen Einfluss gehabt. Also ich bin mit Sprache ok, ja, aber ich hab nie kurdische Fahne und so, also ich bin nicht so in diese Richtung, Fahnen und so weiter, aber Kinder haben andere Zugang. Als wir dort waren: ‘Kurdische Fahne, was ist das?’ Für ihn war das so, irgendwie, andere Welt. Ich hab ihm immer theoretische angeboten, Sprache und so, aber nicht vorstellbar, dass es so funktioniert, diese Gesellschaft. Und dann haben sie natürlich gesehen: ‘Soldaten!’, also die Peshmerga da so, ‘kurd-isch, sind Kurden, aha’, sie haben türkisch Dings gesehen, deutsche auch, aber kurdisch nie. Dann haben sie mit denen Kurdisch gesprochen, gibt’s nicht, ist nicht vorstellbar, und natürlich die waren sympathisch ja, mit Kinder gespielt und so, ganz gute Erlebnis also, dass überall Kurdisch gesprochen wird.

Ferhat 16Ferhat: Mit mir oder im kleinen Kreis. […] Und als wir zurückkamen, hab ich gemerkt, ist sein kurdisch Interesse höher. Er hat angefangen, Antwort zu geben auf Kurdisch, das war Stufe höher. Bis dahin hatte er so wenig gesprochen, nur so Wörter, Sätze nicht, aber seitdem hat er angefangen, Kurdisch zu sprechen.

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Ferhat 17Ferhat: Gut, dass er sehr wenig Türkisch hatte, hat jetzt auch wenig, weil er kann sich Kurdisch sehr gut artikulieren aber nicht Türkisch, und das ist gut, weil in unserem Dorf sprechen auch Türkisch aber Kurdisch können sie auch, und durch meinen Sohn sind sie gezwungen, Kurdisch zu spre-chen. […] Und ich glaube, er hat Einfluss gehabt auf die anderen.

Ferhat 18Ferhat: Mein Ziel war, sie sollen genießen die Sprache, jetzt genießen sie die Sprache. Und mit meiner Mutter zum Beispiel sehr gute Beziehung. Ich höre immer zu, in der Wohnung in dem Dorf da sprechen sie in der Küche, er erzählt ihr so kurdische Sachen. Wenn diese Sprache nicht da wäre, hätte er meine Mutter nie kennengelernt, also innerlich nicht kennengelernt.

Ferhat 19Ferhat: Und dann als ich abgeschlossen habe mit Ach und Krach, dann hab ich auch versucht, nach Istanbul zurückzugehen, also ich bin ich glaube zweimal vier Monate dort geblieben, ich hab versucht also wieder zurück. Und dann irgendwie, komisch, ich hab gesehen es war fremd oder so, also viele Sachen für mich. Und dann bin wieder zurückgekehrt hier, also das hab ich dann aufgehört. Ab dem Moment hab ich gesagt, ich gehöre hier. Für mich war das, wie sagt man, Heimat ist nicht so gebunden mit dem Ort sondern mit Beziehungen. […] Seitdem fühle ich mich hier wohler.

P: Sie fühlen sich hier mehr zu Hause?

Ferhat: Genau.

Hoa 1Hoa: Ja. Nach dem Krieg gegen Franzosen. Wir sind eine Gruppe von 150 Kinder, die nach Deutschland gekommen sind zur Ausbildung, ja? Im Krieg waren wir alle so zerstreut und wir konnten nicht so richtig lernen. Und da haben sie, wir waren ja Kinder von den Freiheitskämpfern.

Hoa 2Hoa: Der deutsche Schuldirektor hat uns abgeholt in der Stadt Brest, das ist an der Grenze zwischen Polen und Russland. Dann sind wir in der

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Nacht nach Deutschland gekommen. Wir sind mit dem Zug von Hanoi nach Berlin gefahren, mit Zwischenhalt in Peking ein paar Tage und in Moskau ein paar Tage, über Mongolei, das war eine sehr lange Reise.

Hoa 3Hoa: Ja, und die Erzieherinnen waren so unsere Mütter. Abends singen sie zur Nachtruhe so ein Schlaflied.

P: Auf Deutsch?

Hoa: Ja.

P: Diese Zeit hat Ihr Leben also stark geprägt?

Hoa: Ja. Und wir waren auch zur Disziplin erzogen. Ordnung, Pünktlichkeit, Sauberkeit.

P: War das anders, als Sie’s gewohnt waren?

Hoa: Ja, in Vietnam waren wir [lacht] sogenannt verwahrlost, ne? Das heißt, wir machen, was wir wollen, keiner passt auf.

P: Wegen dem Krieg?

Hoa: Ja, wegen dem Krieg, normalerweise nicht.

Hoa 4P: Wie sind Sie darauf gekommen?

Hoa: Wissen Sie, da ist die Bildung anders als von den Kommunisten, ja? Zu Hause haben die gesagt, sie bilden uns aus für den Aufbau nach dem Krieg. Und wissen Sie, das ist hochgeschrieben, da ist die Arbeiterklasse, und deswe-gen müssen wir erst als Arbeiter ausgebildet werden, als Fachkraft, müssen wir einen Beruf lernen, und jeder muss einen Beruf erlernen. Die Ausbildung sieht so aus, erstmal Berufsausbildung und dann paar Jahre arbeiten und dan-ach studieren. So sind wir ausgebildet worden, so alles vorgeschrieben. Und ich hab dann drei Jahre Lehre und dann nach der Lehre bin ich zurück.

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Hoa 5Hoa: Ich wollte nicht Chemie studieren, ich wollte Physik studieren. Den ganzen Tag im Labor, das ist nichts für mich. Aber die haben gesagt, der Staat braucht keine Physiker mehr, wir brauchen Chemiker, da muss ich hin. So ist das. Wir konnten nicht frei wählen.

Hoa 6Hoa: Im Kommunismus, Pflicht ist Pflicht, ich kann nicht widersetzen, mit dem Ruf meines Vaters da kann ich gar nicht schaden. Da hab ich gesagt, na ja, muss ich hinnehmen. […] Mein Vater war hoher Beamter, arbeitete im Amt des Ministerpräsidenten. Deswegen! Weil ich wollte was anders machen, aber ich konnte nicht wegen meinem Vater. Mein Vater hat gesagt, wenn du nicht vorbildlich bist, kann man nicht von den andern verlangen. Mit Freude gemacht hab ich nicht, aber ich hab pflichtbewusst mitgemacht.

Hoa 7Hoa: Ich hab vorgesehen, dass ich in einem Pharmazieunternehmen komme, aber das ging auch wieder nicht, ich musste wieder, da kam so, das nennt sich Experten- und Konsultantengruppe. Da brauchten sie zehn Dolmetscher und da waren noch Frauen, und da haben sie mich dann ausgewählt wieder, weil ich schon vorher gedolmetscht habe, deswegen. Und da hab ich dort gearbeitet fast zehn Jahre. […] Und da musste ich wieder von vornherein lernen, nach der Arbeit hinsetzen und lernen auf den verschiedenen Bereiche von Wirtschaft, von Betriebswirtschaft, von Bankwesen, Finanzen, Philosophie, Jura, auch sprachlich sehr schwer, alte Fachbegriffe aus Chinesisch oder Alt-Vietnamesisch. Das war wieder Fremdsprache für mich. Keine Freizeit.

P: Und da haben Sie also Ihre Ausbildung nicht benutzt?

Hoa: Gar nicht, kein Tag. So wars.

Hoa 8Hoa: 1979 haben die Chinesen uns überfallen, ne? Da hab ich die Journalisten dann begleitet zur Grenze zu China, wo Kämpfe waren. Da war ich in Kambodscha auch, nach dem Krieg, ich bin so überall rumge-fahren. Ich bin immer … unterwegs [lacht].

P: Mit welchen Journalisten?

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Hoa: Das war immer so eine Gruppe mit mehreren Journalisten aus ver-schiedenen Ländern – aus Deutschland, da waren auch von Westdeutschland welche da, und da warn aus Kuba, aus Russland, Frankreich.

P: Sie sind also als Dolmetscherin mit den Journalisten gefahren?

Hoa: Ja. Da war ich eine Woche in Kambodscha. Da hab ich alles miter-lebt, was die Rote Khmer angerichtet haben. Das war in der Schule, da war, das kann ich mir noch vorstellen, eine Menge Blut gesehen, und solche riesigen Ketten, das war schlimm. In Kambodscha war schlimm, das ist eine Massenvernichtung, Völkermord. Und an der Grenze zwischen China und Vietnam, da hab ich die verbrannten Köpfe der chinesischen Soldaten gesehen. Ich hab dann gesehen die vietnamesischen Soldaten, die haben ein Passbild, zwei Passbilder, bevor der Soldat tot war, und das nächste Bild, wo der Kopf von der Hals getrennt war, das zweite Bild daneben.

Hoa 9Hoa: Meine Mutter ist aus einer Adelsfamilie, Dynastie, die achtet auf das Wissen. Die hat zu uns gesagt, wir waren mal reich, wir hatten alles, aber jetzt haben wir nichts mehr, außer Wissen. Wir können euch nur Wissen geben. Die hat mal gesagt, wenn man Wissen hat, kann man in jeder Gesellschaftsordnung leben.

Hoa 10P: Sind Sie freiwillig nach Deutschland gekommen?

Hoa: Ja.

P: Sie hatten eine junge Familie, Sie hätten in Vietnam bleiben können?

Hoa: Ja, ich kann. Aber ich arbeite im Amt des Ministerpräsidenten, fast zehn Jahre. Und aus dem ist ein Institut entstanden, das heißt Institut für Wirtschaftsleitung. Und ich war mit der Arbeit nicht zufrieden. Das heißt, wenn ich im Institut bleiben will, muss ich in die Partei aufgenommen werden.

P: Sie waren also nicht in der Partei?

Hoa: Nein, ich war nicht in der Partei. Ich war 17 Jahre lang Kandidat, als Parteimitglied, und ich bin so ich bin ganz gradlinig, wenn mir was nicht gefällt, das sag ich gleich. Und ich widersetz wider den Regeln, ja? Was

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man vorschreibt. Das ist das Problem. […] Sie haben Kriterien aufgestellt, und ich hab sie nicht erfüllt blah blah. In Nachhinein hab ich gesagt zum Glück, dass ich nicht in der Partei war, ne? [lacht]

P: Warum?

Hoa: Wenn Sie in der Partei waren, da stehen Sie immer unter Druck. Was Sie machen, was Sie nicht für richtig halten. Das ist das Problem.

Hoa 11Hoa: Da hab ich gesagt: So gehts nicht weiter. Aber eigentlich ich hab Privileg gehabt. Mein Vater war hoher Beamter, ja, und deswegen kann ich sagen, was ich denke.

P: Und was ist dann passiert, als Sie das gesagt haben?

Hoa: Ich hab gesagt, ich will nach Deutschland kommen. Zuerst haben die gesagt, so gehts nicht, Sie haben eine gute Arbeit. Ich hab gesagt, mein Vater ist schon gestorben und ich muss verdienen, um meine Mutter zu unterstützen, ich hab als Grund ausgegeben, und deswegen kann ich in diesem Institut gar nichts machen. Und ich hab dann Glück gehabt, ich hab mich an einen Freund von meinem Vater gewandt, und er hat mich dann doch unterstützt, und dann bin ich aus dem Institut rausgekommen. […] Und dann hab ich gesagt: Ich will raus.

Hoa 12Hoa: Gruppenleiter mussten sich um alles kümmern. Ich soll die Vertragsarbeitnehmer betreuen. Ich muss aufpassen, dass sie die Arbeit aus-führen, Disziplin und alles, und erklären alles. […] Aber ich hab gesagt, ich pass auf die Arbeitsdisziplin, mehr nicht, ihr könnt dann in euren Freizeit frei bewegen.

Hoa 13Hoa: In Russland die haben ähnliche Verhältnisse wie in Vietnam, in der Weltanschauung und … sehr primitiv und ganz konservativ. Ich hab gesagt, ich kann das nicht akzeptieren. Er hat gesagt, du musst akzeptieren. Er ist konservativ erzogen, konfuziistisch, nach dem alten Bild. Das heißt, früher war in Vietnam so, wenn der Mann sagt, der Büffel hat drei Beine,

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dann eben drei Beine, nicht vier! So ist das in Vietnam, und da hab ich gesagt, nee, das geht bei mir nicht.

Hoa 14Hoa: Da hab ich gedacht, gut, ich werde das überlegen. Und da hab ich gesagt, in Vietnam hab ich in den höchsten Organen gearbeitet, und für Frauen, wir haben nicht so eine Gleichberechtigung wie in Deutschland. Für meine Tochter ist Deutschland besser, da hab ich eine Analyse für mich gemacht, für mein Sohn ist egal, wo er, aber für Frauen in Vietnam, das ist, für meine Tochter ist besser. Sie ist intelligent, empfindlich, ich hab gesagt, die kann was werden. Na gut, dann bleib ich in Deutschland, wegen meiner Tochter. Die Ausbildung der Kinder ist auch besser als in Vietnam.

Hoa 15Hoa: Ich sollte die vietnamesischen Frauen beraten in Sozialsachen, in Aufenthalt, Familiensachen, alles, mit Ämtern.

P: Sie haben also zwischen diesen Frauen und den Ämtern vermittelt?

Hoa: Ja vermittelt und manchmal mit denen gekämpft. Zum Beispiel wenn sie ein Formular ausfüllen sollen, ja, und dann sprachlich nicht mächtig ist. Ob sie arbeiten kann, da steht das Wort verfügbar, und da wusste sie nicht, was verfügbar ist. Und da haben sie nein gekreuzt, na, und da war schon ein Fall, kam zum Arbeitsgericht, weil sie so nicht arbeiten will, und da hab ich gesagt, das ist aus Unwissenheit, weil sie die Sprache nicht beherrscht. Ich war schon am Gericht drinne, und da hab ich gesagt, nee nee, die will schon arbeiten, aber sprachlich beherrscht sie nicht, deswegen hat sie das Formular falsch ausgefüllt.

Marek 1Marek: Also wenn ich mit meinem Papa zusammensaß, dann wurde Deutsch gesprochen, aber sobald meine Mama mit ins Zimmer trat, dann wurde dann halt Polnisch gesprochen, ja, das war so die Regel gewesen, ja. Und jetzt ist es auch so ähnlich, ja, so meine Frau, die, wir leben jetzt in Scheidung, und wenn meine Tochter zu meiner Frau geht, da spricht sie mit ihr Polnisch, und wenn sie zu mir kommt, dann spricht sie mit mir Deutsch.

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Marek 2Marek: In Polen spricht sie Polnisch, hier spricht sie Deutsch. […] Sie stellt sich da um, wir durchfahren die Grenze nach Polen und dann sprechen wir auf einmal Polnisch mit einander, ja, das ist so fließender Übergang, ja, das merken wir manchmal gar nicht, dass wir einmal die Sprache wechseln, ja, das war mir sehr wichtig.

Marek 3Marek: Es war schon eine heftige Zeit, muss ich sagen. Ich wurde da aus Polen rausgezogen, das ging ja, die Erlaubnis, dass wir fahren durften, war innerhalb von zwei Wochen da gewesen. Davor war immer nein nein nein nein, und dann war das im Grunde die alte Klasse komplett verlassen, ja, die ganzen Freunde, ja, da war auch die ganzen Familien-, ich komme aus P., bin also in P. geboren, ja. […] Wir lebten da einfach so in einer Harmonie, die ganze Familie, meine Mutter hatte, auch die ganze Familie war da gewesen, das war so in einem Altbaugebiet so wie hier so ähnlich, da kannte sie halt jeden da, ins Geschäft ging ich als kleiner Junge, da bekam ich das Essen aufgeschrieben, ohne zu zahlen. Das war schon ein-fach so eine Harmonie gewesen, die dann hier auf einmal abrupt komplett komplett weg war, ja. […] Mein Leben bestand dann nur aus Schule und nach Hause zurückgehen, ja. […] Also es war schon eine heftige Zeit, ja.

Marek 4Marek: Am Anfang, ich kann mich erinnern, wie ich da in der Klasse saß, also ich hab ja meine ganzen Freunde aus der Grundschule, da hab ich noch, also zu den besten Freunden hab ich noch Kontakt, ja, und die erin-nern sich immer an die Zeit noch, wie ich da in der Schule saß und von nix wusste, wie ich (xx) wenn Pause war, wusste ich nicht mehr in Pause, was ich machen sollte und die erinnern sich immer noch dran, ja. […] Und die Erinnerung kommt immer wieder, ja, dass sie sich da erinnern an diese Zeit, wie ich da in die Klasse kam und und komplett ohne Sprache und in den Reihen saß im Grunde völlig hilflos und da musste jemand von den höheren Klassen kommen und mir Bescheid sagen, was jetzt Sache ist, ja.

Marek 5Marek: Nach der 10. Klasse, also nach der Realschule, bin ich dann, hab mich beworben, hab dann auch gleich also die Einstellungsprüfung ganz normal, hab die bestanden, und dann war ich noch nicht 17, ja, und hab da schon angefangen mit der Ausbildung, die ging dann drei Jahre lang, und

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dann hab ich angefangen zu arbeiten. Also im Grunde war das alles ohne Probleme, ganz normale, ganz normale Ausbildung, lief alles ganz normal, ja. Die erste Anfangszeit bei der Polizei war auch ganz normal gewesen.

Marek 6Marek: Da kamen die Polen mit den Waren aus Polen und haben dann diese im Grunde illegalen Märkte dann eröffnet, wo sie die Sachen verkauft haben, Fleisch, irgendwelche handgemachte Sachen, und das war halt nicht erlaubt, in so einer großen Masse wie es da war, und es wurde wahrscheinlich auch mit Zigaretten gehandelt, was verboten war, und Alkohol, was verboten war. Und dann wurde natürlich immer einen Dolmetscher gebraucht, ja, der mit dem, öh, der mit dem Mikrof- mit dem Megafon da die Leute, und dann hab ich da diese Rolle übernommen, was für mich auch schwer war, ja, weil das warn ja irgendwie auch meine Landsleute, ja, und man musste sie oftmals wegscheuchen oder so, ja. Aber ich hab das dann mit dem Megafon gemacht und dann hab ich, nach drei Monaten hab ich öh ne Sprachspange bekommen, dass ich als offizieller Dolmetscher bei der Polizei arbeiten darf, ja, zwar nix Unterschriebenes aber ich durfte öh halt dieses mit dem Megafon sprechen, ich durfte die Leute öh, auf der Dienststelle durfte ich dolmetschen, ja, und da war ich ganz stolz, weil da war ich, glaub ich, achtzehn Jahre oder so, und auf ein-mal war ich mit dem Chef da auf dem Wagen gewesen. Das [die Zweisprachigkeit] war ein Vorteil für mich damals, ja […] und auch die Kenntnisse, das war ein Vorteil für mich, dass ich die hatte, auch in der Perfektion durch meine Mutter halt, dass ich das nicht verlernt habe.

Marek 7Marek: Freundschaften hab ich wirklich nur die drei vier Menschen, die ich aus der Grundschule kenne. Das sind die einzigen, wo ich noch so, ich trau mich auch nicht raus, wissen Sie, weil die Leute machen immer halt Aktivitäten und ich kann das nicht mitmachen, ja? […] Ich hab schon gemerkt, dass ich da nicht gleichwertig bin.

Marek 8Marek: Und deshalb, also mein Leben beruht wirklich darauf, dass ich ja im Grunde den ganzen Tag am Computer sitze und meine Geschäfte mache und dann halt auf die Zeit mich freue, wo ich meine Tochter habe für eine Woche.

Appendix: Original Extracts from Interview Transcripts in Chapter 4 171

Marek 9Marek: Und ich merke auch, wenn sie von ihrer Mama kommt, dass ihre Sprache wirklich in dieser Woche abnimmt, also das Deutsche wird schlechter, durch diese eine Woche, ja?

Marek 10Marek: Also es ist ja jetzt immer noch so, dass ich, wenn ich nach Polen fahre, immer noch so ’n, also es wechselt wirklich, ich hab da wirklich so ne andere Empfindung, wenn ich denn da bin, ja, also mein Verhalten ändert sich auch ein bisschen, ich merk das selber, ja, also wenn ich mit den Leuten spreche und so, ja, es ist halt, aber es kommt auch dadurch, dass ich da halt mehrere Menschen um mich habe, ja, hier bin ich eher so ’n Einzelgänger, ja, und dort ist halt, da kommt der, und da kommt der

P: mehr Gesellschaft

Marek: mehr Gesellschaft, der begrüßt mich, der sieht mich, der hält mich an, komm mal mit mir, und es ist halt ein ganz anderes Nebenherleben, ja, weil ich die Leute, das ist ein kleines Dorf, wo, so ’ne Stadt, viertausend Leute, ja, der Papa [sein Schwiegervater], der Opa, ist [Beruf], also man kennt mich, jeder kennt mein Gesicht da im Grunde, ja, und es ist halt so, dass wenn ich dann da bin, dann ist halt ein ganz anderes Gefühl für mich als hier, ja, weil da einfach jeder will mit dir sprechen, jeder hat irgendwie was zu sagen. Ich hab ja auch die Wohnung ein bisschen renoviert, da hab ich den Arbeiter aus Polen, aus W., also wo meine Frau herkommt, genommen, dann hab ich mal den Arbeiter hergenommen, denen hab ich was erledigt, ich bin so ’n Typ, ich kann nicht nein sagen und öh hab so viele Gefälligkeiten den Leuten getan, dass sie jeder mich in positiver Erinnerung hat, ja, und vielleicht verstärkt das dann dieses Heimatgefühl mehr, als es in Wirklichkeit ist, ja.

P: So, mhm, mhm.

Marek: Aber als ich damals nach Polen gezogen bin, war halt schön gewesen, war ich dann auch, waren meine Eltern tot gewesen, hier ist meine Beziehung in die Brüche gegangen, und dort, bei dem Freund, der hat eine Mutter, der hat einen Vater gehabt, öh, und die haben mich da eingegliedert wie ihren eigenen Sohn, ja. Wir saßen zusammen am Mittagstisch, haben gegessen, wir saßen am Frühstücks-, haben zusammen gefrühstückt, und es war halt so, da hab ich mich schon wie zu h- eher wie zu Hause gefühlt, vielleicht nicht wie in Pol- wie in der Heimat, aber wie zu Hause gefühlt, ja, na wahrscheinlich

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auch ein bisschen wie in der Heimat, aber es war halt dieses, dass man zusam-men am Frühstückstisch saß, zusammen am Mittagstisch saß, ja, es wurde für einen gekocht, es war halt ein anderes Leben als hier in in

P: ein schönes Familiengefühl

Marek: genau genau genau. Die Polen sind halt sehr gastfreundlich. Obwohl ich ein Fremder war, haben die mich da mit offenen Armen angenommen und ich hab da ein Jahr wirklich dieses Leben genossen, ja, mit dem Sohn von ihnen, ja, ist wahrscheinlich auch ein bisschen Heimat, das stimmt.

Beata 1Beata: Ich weiß, ich habe einen sehr starken Akzent aber ich glaube, ich habe einen besonderen Zugang zu der deutschen Sprache gefunden und es ist sozusagen meine Heimat geworden, also ich fühle mich im Poln- im Deutschen viel öh viel gewogener als im Polnischen. […] Ich fühle mich in der deutschen Sprache sehr wohl, es ist, also die polnische Sprache ist keine Heimat, das ist eine Aufforderung, Herausforderung.

Beata 2Beata: Dort war meine erste Aufgabe, eine Ausstellung nach Polen zu ver-mieten, wo ich tatsächlich telefonieren musste, [hab ich nie] über Kosten auf Polnisch geredet habe, ja, und wo ich es immer [auffassen] musste, übersetzen musste auf Polnisch, hab ich nie gemacht. Und das war der erste Moment, wo ich auf einmal in meinem Lieblingsbereich auch in der pol-nischen Sprache konfrontiert wurde.

Beata 3Beata: Es war schon eine große Leistung, Deutsch zu sprechen, Deutsch zu lernen, weil das war auch eine total fremde Sprache für mich, als ich hierherkam.

Beata 4Beata: Ja, meine Mutter stand sozusagen da mit so ganz kräftigen Muskeln [P: ja?], die hat auch Gewalt angewendet und so, also schon ich hab mich einfach nicht getraut zu sprechen, meine meine Wünsche zu äußern und öhm am am am meistens hab ich gewonnen, wenn ich gar nichts gesagt habe, wenn ich ganz ruhig, still war.

Appendix: Original Extracts from Interview Transcripts in Chapter 4 173

P: So, mhm, du hast dich zurückgezogen.

Beata: Genau, aber das hängt tatsächlich damit zusammen, dass ich die polnische Sprache öh nie so öh so unbefangen gelernt habe [P: mhm], sondern die polnische Sprache war immer eher mit der Schule verbunden, wo man schreiben musste, wo man Auftritte halten musste [P: mhm], obwohl ich geliebt habe zu lesen, ich hab alles nur aufgenommen.

Beata 5Beata: Also auch zum Beispiel bei dieser Versöhnung mit meiner Mutter ist eigentlich absurd. Sie, wir haben, sie hat mich mal besucht und wir haben da einen Konflikt gehabt, ja

P: Sie hat dich hier besucht?

Beata: Ja, sehr oft, aber einmal als sie mich besucht hat, da gabs eine Konfliktsituation, ja, und sie kann überhaupt nicht reden, also sie [weinte] und ging weg, ja, und öh und ich kann das nicht mehr aushalten, das ist auch als sie, sie ist mit mir umgegangen als wie ich klein war, aber das geht jetzt nicht mehr. Dann hole ich sie zurück sozusagen und versuche [sie zu trösten] und ich arbeite dann mit einem Wörterbuch [P: mhm], weißt du, weil ich, weil ich alles, was ich sagen will, über die Gefühle, aus dem Deutschen übersetzen muss.

Beata 6Beata: Also ich öhm es ist mir angenehmer, mich auf Deutsch zu unter-halten als auf Polnisch.

P: Angenehmer?

Beata: Weil das nicht so anstrengend ist, ich meine, […] aber es kann auch sein, dass es damit zusammenhängt, weil, als ich Polen verlassen habe, ich auch ein öh öh Sprachproblem hatte, ja, ich hatte öhm, oder nicht Sprachproblem sondern es war so mit meinem Bewusstsein verbunden, dass ich mich nicht zu artikulieren wusste, ich wusste nicht, meine Ideen zu äußern, ich wollte die Ideen alle, die Ideen öhm so geballt aus mir her-ausbringen, weil ich eben zu Hause zum Beispiel nie [lernen] nie sprechen so richtig durfte, ja […] Also meine Mutter kann auch nicht reden, also in

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ihrem Verhältnis mit ihrer Mama war wieder mal so was, dass die, ihre Mutter, hat sich im Mittelpunkt gestellt und hat niemanden um sich, sondern alles alleine und immer um sich geredet. […] Sie hatte drei Kinder und alle Kinder leiden unter Sprachstörungen. So der eine, der jüngste Onkel ist öh hat, stottert, sehr, ja. Öh meine Mutter, die sagt kaum was, also wenn sie was vermittelt, wenn sie sich durchsetzen möchte, dann ist das meistens durch Schreien. […] Und der älteste Bruder meiner Mutter, das ist öhm, also bestimmt, weiß ich nicht, er wurde, er kann sich nicht ausdrücken [P: mhm], er sucht immer nach Wörtern, dann dann gibt er den [?] auf, weil ihm die Wörter fehlen.

Beata 7Beata: Meine Familie war irgendwie, so, öhm, männerberaubt, also ver-dammt zu zu dieser Beraubung von Männern, oder vom Schicksal wurde sie beraubt. Also meine Oma hat ihren Mann im zweit- nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg verloren, also nicht [?] nach aber ziemlich früh ist er gestorben, da war sie die ganze Zeit alleine und hat die Kinder großgezogen ohne den Vater [P: mhm]. Und dann meine Mama hat auch, so mein Vater hat sich auch mit meiner Mutter nicht öh hat sie auch verlassen, ja, und dann hatte sie zu einen anderen geheiratet, aber der kommt auch öh also fünfzehn Jahre glaube ich waren sie zusammen, dann hat er sie auch verlassen, und in unserem Verhältnis, also meine Mutter und ich Verhältnis, er hatte öhm eigentlich keine keine Stimme, also ich war nicht sein Kind, er hatte nichts zu bestimmen über mein Schicksal, damals.

Beata 8Beata: Also, wir arbeiten zum Beispiel jetzt an einer Ausstellung […] und das heißt ‘Von Frau zu Frau’, und das, es werden sechs Frauen insgesamt, sechs Künstlerinnen, teilnehmen, die in unterschiedlichen öhm öhm Bereichen der Kunst tätig sind. Wir haben Malerinnen, wir haben Fotografinnen, wir haben öh Bildhauerinnen, öhm Performerinnen, ja [P: mhm], sechs also, drei kommen aus Polen, und drei sind Polinnen aber sie leben in Deutschland [P: mhm] und dann wollen wir sie zusammenstellen und gucken, mit welchen Themen sie sich beschäftigen und öhm und weil sie [?] ausdrücken, wie wichtig ist, was das ist, Frau sein in der Kunst. […] Polinnen, die in Deutschland leben und wie sie das angenommen haben, was ihnen hier angeboten wurde und wie sie bei sich geblieben sind.

175© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017P. Stevenson, Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis, Language and Globalization, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40606-0

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191© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017P. Stevenson, Language and Migration in a Multilingual Metropolis, Language and Globalization, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40606-0

AAfrican colonies, 36–8African migrants, 36–8Al Aswany, Alaa, 152Am Haus installation (Erkmen),

26, 27Architecture of Memory, The

(Bahloul), 13arriving (Zuwanderung), 21Aussiedler, 23, 25, 48, 86, 88Austria, 49

BBackus, Ad, xvii, 154Bahloul, Joelle, xviii, 13barbeque skip sign, 74Beata. See multilingual Mietshaus

project, Beata’s storyBeheimatung, 54, 154

Bergakademie, Freiberg, 121Berlin

Berliner Schloss, 10, 11commemoration, culture of, 11diversity, xvii, 11, 12, 16, 18–20,

25, 48, 50, 57, 59–61, 64–9, 76, 151

Dunckerstraße 77 project, 14globalized neighbourhoods,

25, 61Mietshäuser, 14, 84, 85migration landmarks (see

migration landmarks)multilingualism, xv, xvii, xviii,

51–79, 151 (see also multilingualism; multilingual Mietshaus project)

past, embodiment of the, 9, 20population

Index

192 Index

Berlin (cont.)in 1648, 39in 1905, 46, 83in 1800s, 44

post-Cold War changes, 65present day, 99public transport system, 9re-diversification, 50Schillerpromenade 27 project, 13Sensing the street project, 12, 13,

18, 64Skalitzer Straße 99 project, 13775th anniversary, 25typical street, 82urban design, 10, 83Villa Global project, 14Wall, 9, 26, 29, 50, 65, 82, 86–8

Berliner Mietshaus (Liebmann), 14, 84

Berliner Schloss, 10, 11Berlinisch, 70, 75Berlin Wall Foundation, 87Block, David, xviiiBlommaert, Jan, xvi, xvii, 8, 36, 153,

154Boat People, 31Bohemian migrants, 26, 39, 41, 43,

44, 46, 66Böhmischer Gottesacker, 44Böhmisch Rixdorf, 42, 43, 66, 81Brandenburg, 10, 11, 31, 37, 40–3,

46, 58, 86Brunzel, Heinrich, 14Burck, Charlotte, xviii, 154Busch, Brigitta, xvi, xvii, xviii, 7, 77,

78, 153, 154

CCambodia, 122–4Cameroon, 38Carl, Jenny, xviiiCatherine II of Russia, 4census questions

England, 56Germany, xvi, 4, 23, 49, 57

Charlottenburg locality, 33, 34, 61Chợ Ðồng Xuân, Hanoi, 29, 30citizenship, 4, 19, 22, 23, 28, 53, 69,

85, 128, 137Club of Polish Failures, Ackerstraße,

47Cold War, 45, 50, 51, 65, 87, 147colonialism, 38Comfort of Things, The (Miller), 11counting/mapping languages

census questions, xvi, 56, 57, 62dangers of homogenizing, 64dangers of zoning, 53, 63digital technologies, 56Federal Office for Migration and

Refugees, 59home language surveys, xvi, 59immigration statistics, 53Language Capital project, xvi, 60,

62, 63ndH students, 60public policy objectives, 63

creative orality, 75

DDe Maizière, Thomas, 22Der Tagesspiegel newspaper, 53

193 Index

Deutschland schafft sich ab (Sarrazin), 20

diversitydiversification of, 25history of, 16, 18, 25, 39, 65linguistic (see multilingualism)as normality, 11, 76re-diversification, 50

division of Germany, 16, 131dog waste signs/bins, 70, 71Dong Xuan Center, 30double temporality, 115

EEdict of Fontainebleau, 40Edict of Nantes, 40Edict of Potsdam, 40Einwanderung (immigration), 21Einwanderungsgesetz (Immigration

Act), 22Einwanderungsland (country of

immigration), 21, 25England

census language questions, 56Comfort of Things, The (Miller), 11Language Capital project, 60mapping languages in London,

xvi, 56, 63Erinnerungsstätte Notaufnahmelager

Marienfelde, 86Erkmen, Ayse, 26Erste Deutsche Kolonialausstellung,

37Eversley, John, ix, xvi,

62, 63exilien art gallery, 66, 68

FFacebook, 75, 76Federal Office for Migration and

Refugees, 59Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)

foreign workers, 28GDR refugees, 87Polenmarkt, 136

Ferhat. See multilingual Mietshaus project, Ferhat’s story

forced labourers, WWII, 35foreign workers, 28, 29, 50, 130Foster, Norman, 11Friedrich I, 10Friedrich II, 10Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district,

61, 130Friedrich Wilhelm I, King

in Prussia, 41–3, 66, 81Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg,

Great Elector, 37, 40–3, 46

GGauck, Joachim, 19–22German Democratic Republic

(GDR)Berliner Mietshaus (Liebmann), 14birth of, 20communist solidarity, 10, 29,

118, 131, 150foreign students, 28, 29foreign workers, 29, 130Haus des Lehrers, 67Palast der Republik, 10refugees to FRG, 87Soviet presence, 45, 150

194 Index

German East Africa, 38‘Germanization’ policies, Nazi, 50Ghana, 37Gogolin, Ingrid, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii,

154graffiti, 12, 70, 74Groß, Erhard, 13

HHaus des Lehrers (The Teacher’s

Building), 67, 69Heimat, 39, 118, 139, 140, 142, 154Herbert-Hoover-Schule controversy,

52Herkunftssprache, 52, 60, 61Hoa. See multilingual Mietshaus

project, Hoa’s storyHobrecht, James, 82, 83Ho Chi Minh, 119, 129Hochschule der Künste, 13Hoffman, Eva, 131Hohenschönhausen locality, 31Holocaust Memorial, 11home language surveys, xvi, 59Huguenot migrants, 26, 39–43, 46Humboldt, Alexander von, 10, 121Humboldt Forum, 10Humboldt University, 12, 13Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 10Hürriyet newspaper, 53Huston, Nancy, 141, 142hybrid urban vernaculars, xvi

Iidentity, 3, 82, 103, 106idiomatic expressions, 2, 92immigration. See also migrants;

specific migrant groups

arriving and staying, 21, 41foreign worker arrangements, 28,

29, 50, 130Gauck’s diversity speech, 20–2integration, 21migrants’ motivations, 25, 49migrant sub-groups, 23natives’ perceptions, 101numbers, 24, 41trends, 23

Immigration Act, 21, 53Independent Commission on

Immigration, 21Indochina Wars, 30, 116, 117integration, 21, 22, 24, 43, 54, 59, 63,

87, 96, 128, 130, 141, 146Internet, 75, 97Iraq, 5, 99, 107, 110Istanbul, 26, 98, 100, 101, 103, 107,

109, 110, 112, 114, 150, 160, 161, 163

Ferhat’s failed return, 113, 114Ferhat’s identification with, 105,

106, 111Ferhat’s language experience,

98–114Ferhat’s youth, 100, 101

JJersch-Wenzel, Stefi, 39Jewish migrants, 45Jewish Museum, 11Jugend Museum, 14

KKaiser Wilhelm Memorial

Church, 11Karambolage (car crash), 1, 2, 158

195 Index

Karlshorst locality, 35Käthe-Kollwitz-Heim, Moritzburg,

118, 119Kazakhstan, 23, 33, 89Kiezdeutsch, 75Kirchgasse, Rixdorf, 65, 66Kreuzberg locality

Am Haus installation (Erkmen), 26, 27

Kreuzberg Museum, 13ortsgepräche (local conversations)

exhibition, 13Skalitzer Straße 99 project, 13Turkish migrants, 27, 28, 72, 114Vietnamese migrants, 31

‘Kurdish,’ defining, 99Kurdish migrants, 99, 113. See also

multilingual Mietshaus project, Ferhat’s story

Kurdistan, 9, 100, 102, 103, 106, 107, 111, 112, 159, 161, 162

Llanguage biographies, xviii, 8, 18, 78,

154Language Capital (Eversley), xvi, 62,

63Language Capital project, London,

xvi, 60, 62, 63‘language question,’ 51–5, 59

during Cold War, 51Herbert-Hoover-Schule

controversy, 52language spoken at home, 52multilingualism, 54, 55, 59nationalism, 51, 54

language research, xvLauffer, Gerda, 81

Lichtenberg district, 30, 31, 61, 128Lichtenrade locality, 1, 97, 98, 158Lichterfelde locality, 48Liebmann, Irina, xviii, 14, 15Lieferando advertisement, 70linguistic repertoires, xvii, 154lived experience of language, xvii,

xviii, 7, 77–9, 154. See also multilingual Mietshaus project

Londoncensus language questions, xvi,

56, 57, 62Comfort of Things, The (Miller), 11Language Capital project, 60mapping languages, xvi, 56, 63

Lost in Translation (Hoffman), 131Lüderitz, Adolf, 38Ludmila. See multilingual Mietshaus

project, Ludmila’s story

MMac Giolla Chríost, Diarmait, 152mapping languages. See counting/

mapping languagesMarek. See multilingual Mietshaus

project, Marek’s storyMarienfelde Refugee Center

Museum, 86Marienfelde transit camp, 86, 132Märkisches Museum underground

station, 16Marzahn-Hellersdorf district, 26, 33,

61Marzahn locality, 26, 31, 33, 61, 89,

94, 96–8, 158Massoud, 54Mauerreste (Wall fragments), 65Merkel, Angela, 24

196 Index

Meyer, Meinert, xviiMietshäuser, 14, 84, 85migrants

African, 10, 36–8background categories, 23Bohemian, 26, 39, 41–3, 46, 66foreign workers, 28, 29, 50, 130handling the ‘new’, 26‘having a migration background’,

22, 23Huguenot(s), 26, 39–42, 46Jewish, 45Kurdish, 99, 113 (see also

multilingual Mietshaus project, Ferhat’s story)

migrant status, 37motivations for migration, 25, 26,

39, 49natives’ perceptions, 101participation in international

culture, 54Polish, 4, 131 (see also

multilingual Mietshaus project, Beata’s story; multilingual Mietshaus project, Marek’s story)

2012 population with migrant background, 24

returning to homeland, 85, 114, 123

Russian, 48, 86, 94 (see also multilingual Mietshaus project, Ludmila’s story)

stories, individual (see multilingual Mietshaus project)

time-space, 113Turkish, 24, 28, 59, 75, 99, 107,

150 (see also multilingual

Mietshaus project, Ferhat’s story)

Vietnamese, 31 (see also multilingual Mietshaus project, Hoa’s story)

migration. See immigrationmigration landmarks, 26–49

Am Haus installation (Erkmen), 26, 27

Böhmischer Gottesacker, 43Böhmisch Rixdorf, 42, 43, 66, 81Club of Polish Failures,

Ackerstraße, 47Dong Xuan Center, 30New Synagogue, Oranienburger

Straße, 44, 45Ostbahnhof (East Station), 32Togo Allotment Association, 38

Miller, Daniel, xviii, 11, 12, 14, 15Mineralnye Vody, Russia, 4, 5,

86, 97Mitte district

barn quarter, 45Club of Polish Failures,

Ackerstraße, 47French Quarter, 42population with migrant

background, 34Mitzscherlich, Beate, 154Modern Language Association, xvmonolingual ideology, 54multikult.fm, 76multilingualism

aural dimension, 64–77counting/mapping languages (see

counting/mapping languages)

demonization, 54elite, 55

197 Index

in England, 56imbalanced understanding, xvKiezdeutsch, 75layering, 55literacies, 75networked, 77visual dimension, 64–77, 116,

154multilingual Mietshaus project

author’s reflectionsaim, 83fictional works, 152individuality of stories, 83, 98,

101, 102, 108, 121, 122, 129

language biographies, 81–148limitations, 83, 94, 108, 126lived experience of language,

77–9memories of Vietnam War, 116metaphor for city’s biography,

112sociolinguistic complexity, 88time-space, 113

Beata’s story‘coming into German’, 147compared/contrasted with

Marek’s, 131–48emotional maturity and

literacy, 143family’s language and

relationship problems, 131, 133–5, 137–41, 143, 145–8

‘From Woman to Woman’ exhibition, 146

German language as refuge, 142, 146

integration, 141, 146

mother, relationship with, 131, 132, 135, 137–45, 148

overview, 131–48using Polish for work, 131–48

biographical research, 148double temporality, 115Ferhat’s story

childhood languages in Turkey, 113

children’s choice, respecting, 98, 102, 105, 108–12, 114

contradictions, 114daughter’s languages, 95, 109,

110emplacement of Kurdish for

son, 98, 109–12gendering of languages, 102home, 98, 101, 107, 109, 114identity, 103, 106Istanbul, 98, 100, 101, 103,

107, 109, 110, 112, 114‘Kurdish’, defining, 99Kurdish language, 100–2, 107Kurdistan, 99, 100, 102, 103,

106, 107, 111, 112migration to Berlin, 98,

103–5, 107, 108, 110, 112–14

son’s languages, 98, 102, 108–12

speaking German in Germany, 109

speaking Kurdish as political action, 103

speaking Kurdish only with son, 98

speaking Kurmanci in Turkey, 99, 105, 110

198 Index

multilingual (cont.)speaking/reading Kurdish in

Germany, 98, 105speaking Turkish only with

daughter, 109‘Turkish,’ defining, 101women’s political action, 103women’s social status, 102

Hoa’s storyapprenticeship, 120, 129arriving in Germany, 117, 118,

120, 124, 127, 129background, 115–31Communist Party, 121, 124–6,

129daughter, 126, 128, 129as daughter of freedom

fighters, 117, 123, 129decisions after re-unification,

127, 130duty, 117, 121, 126German learned at school, 117,

118, 120, 123, 131German space, 120, 129interpreter work for business,

115, 121–25, 129, 131interpreter work for journalists,

123, 124interpreter work in embassy,

121, 124journey to Germany, 116, 119,

123, 124at Käthe-Kollwitz-Heim,

Moritzburg, 118–20, 124, 126, 129

knowledge’s importance, 115, 118, 120, 124, 126, 127, 129, 130

language’s importance, 123liberation, 121, 129

order-disorder, 120, 129returning to Germany, 127social work, 116, 130university, 121, 129Vietnamese space, 129war with China, 122, 123war with US, 116,

122, 123location of study, choosing

Berliner Mietshaus (Liebmann) influence, 14

Berlin’s culture of commemoration, 11

diversity as normality, 11, 76living spaces, 13projects influencing, 14

location of study, overview, xv, xvi, 9, 12

Ludmila’s storyarriving in Germany, 85, 86,

89, 98buying the bar, 1–3, 16, 85,

95, 98clientele at bar, 16, 96German, competence in, 91German ineptitude on arrival,

86, 88, 89, 98German, learning, 88, 93, 94,

96, 97idiosyncrasies of speech, 91individuality, 98integration, 87, 96, 98Lichtenrade, move to, 97, 98Marienfelde transit camp, 86Marzahn flat, move to, 89, 97Marzahn, love of, 98migration to Berlin, 4, 5, 86Natalia, 95parents’ German, 7, 85, 88, 89,

93, 94, 97

199 Index

parents’ move to Berlin, 88, 93, 94

phone calls home, 94Rachel, friendship with, 1–3registration office journey,

90–2, 94Russia, connection to, 95social circle, 4, 86, 94, 96–8son’s multilingualism, 1, 86,

88, 90, 91, 93, 97Spandau flat, assigned, 66,

89, 98Spätaussiedlerin, 4, 85, 150use of expressions, 21, 22, 91,

92Marek’s story

‘coming into German’, 131, 135, 136

compared/contrasted with Beata’s, 131–48

daughter’s languages, 131, 138, 139, 141, 147

Heimat, 139, 140, 142language’s importance, 134,

140, 141, 146migration to Berlin, first,

131–3, 138, 147migration to Berlin, second,

133, 134, 138parents’ deaths, 137person-based language, 134,

139–41, 147place-based language, 133,

134, 136, 138, 141, 146, 147

Poland-Berlin worlds, 132–4, 136–8, 141, 142, 147

Polenmarkt, 136police entry exam and training,

132, 135–7

Polish-German fluency, 132–4, 139–43

school years, 132, 135, 138, 143, 144

social interaction in Poland, 133, 134, 140, 141, 145, 146

social withdrawal in Berlin, 138, 141

Mareschstraße, 16, 79, 81–148methodology, 95Mietshäuser, 14, 84, 85participants

choice of, 9, 84finding, 14individuality and

commonalities, 14, 101, 102, 108

knowledge of German on arrival, 126, 132

places, 99, 101, 114, 115, 128, 132, 134, 147

typical street in Berlin, 82

NNachtigal, Gustav, 38Namibia, 38nationalism, 51, 54ndH students, 60Neukölln district, xvii, 13. See also

multilingual Mietshaus project

Böhmisch Rixdorf, 42, 43, 66, 81Kirchgasse street sign, 65, 66Ludmila’s bar, 1, 3, 16, 85ndH students, 60origins, 60Schillerpromenade 27 project, 13‘99 times Neukölln’ exhibition, 8

200 Index

New Synagogue, Oranienburger Straße, 44, 45

‘99 times Neukölln’ exhibition, 8Nord perdu suivi de Douze France

(Huston), 142

Oorigins, 5, 16, 21, 24–6, 40, 47, 55,

74, 76, 99, 104ortsgespräche (local conversations)

exhibition, Kreuzberg, 13Ostbahnhof (East Station), 32–4

PPankow locality, 34, 61Parrott, Fiona, 11Perec, Georges, 152Peters, Carl, 38Peters, Dr Hans, 38Peuplierung (re-population policy),

41‘PISA shock,’ 59places. See spacesPoland, 3, 24, 29, 46–9, 59, 62, 119,

132–4, 137–42, 145–7, 150Polish migrants, 131. See also

multilingual Mietshaus project, Beata’s story; multilingual Mietshaus project, Marek’s story

Prenzlauer Berg locality, 14, 54Prussia, 42, 48

RRachel, 1–3radio, 75Reichstag, 11, 34

re-population policy, 40research project. See multilingual

Mietshaus projectReuter, Ernst, 87Rixdorf, Neukölln, 41–3, 65–8, 70,

81Russia, 4–7, 24, 34, 35, 46, 48,

89–91, 93, 94, 96, 119, 123, 128, 150

Russian migrants, 49, 86, 94. See also multilingual Mietshaus project, Ludmila’s story

SSarrazin, Thilo, 20Saxony, 42, 89, 121, 127Scheunenviertel (Barn Quarter), 45Schillerpromenade 27 project, 13Schily, Otto, 21Schlögel, Karl, 33–5Schlüter, Andreas, 10Schöneberg locality, 14, 34, 61SchülerInnen nichtdeutscher

Herkunftssprache (ndH) students, 60

Second World Warbombing, 11, 68concentration camps, 38, 47forced labourers, 35, 48holocaust, 11, 45

Selbstverortung, 154Sensing the street project, 12, 13, 18,

64‘Shaping Immigration-Promoting

Integration’ report, 21shopping centre advertisements, 72,

73signs, 12, 65, 69, 71SIL International, xv

201 Index

Skalitzer Straße 99 project, 13slave trade, 37Smith, Ken, 136social media, 26, 76spaces

finding one’s own, xvi, 54living spaces, 13origins, 104social spaces, 62, 145time-space, 113two life spaces, 120urban spaces, 12

Spandau locality, 61, 89, 98Spätaussiedler, 4, 6, 23, 33, 85, 93,

94, 150. See also multilingual Mietshaus project, Ludmila’s story

Spracherleben, 7, 77, 78, 154Spreequell advertisement, 69Stalingrad, 89, 155staying (Einwanderung), 21, 128,

132Stella, Franco, 10Štivičić, Tena, 152Stolpersteine (cobblestones), 11, 65Süssmuth report, 21Süssmuth, Rita, 21

TTextilien shop, 66Thermometersiedlung estate,

Lichterfelde, 47Thirty Years War, 39, 40, 46, 493 Winters (Štivičić), 152Tiergarten locality, 136Togo, 38Togo Allotment Association, 38

Treptow-Köpenick district, 60, 61Turkcell advertisement, 72Turkey, 3, 5, 24, 26, 28, 47, 59,

99, 103, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 114, 150. See also Istanbul

defining ‘Turkish,’ 28discrimination against Kurds,

100, 103expatriate distinctions, 113Ferhat’s family background, 112Ferhat’s travels with son, 110Kurdish language’s legitimacy,

107, 108language surveys, 59

‘Turkish,’ defining, 28Turkish migrants, 24, 28, 75, 99,

107, 150. See also multilingual Mietshaus project, Ferhat’s story

VVie mode d’emploi, La (Perec), 152Vietnam

Chợ Ðồng Xuân, Hanoi, 30Communist Party, 31, 150Hoa’s work, 4, 6, 115–31wars, 116women’s social status, 102

Vietnamese migrants, 31. See also multilingual Mietshaus project, Hoa’s story

Villa Global project, 14visual multilingualism, 16, 27,

60, 65, 66, 69, 70, 72, 74, 116, 154

202 Index

WWall

building, 9, 29fall, 26, 88fragments, 65Memorial, 86

Warsaw Treaty, 48WBM Wohnungsbaugesellschaft,

68websites

Berlin’s 775th anniversary, 25distribution of migrants in Berlin,

58Dunckerstraße 77 exhibition, 14England census language

questions, 56Erinnerungsstätte

Notaufnahmelager Marienfelde, 86

Gauck’s diversity speech, 20Haus des Lehrers (The Teacher’s

Building), 68, 69Holocaust Memorial, 11Humboldt Forum, 10Jewish Museum, 11language research, xvmapping languages, xvi, 56–64multilingualism in London,

xviii, 58

ortsgespräche (local conversations), 13

Sensing the street project, 12, 13, 18, 64

Statistical Office of Berlin- Brandenburg, 58

Stolpersteine (cobblestones), 11, 65

‘99 times Neukölln’ exhibition, 8Villa Global project, 14

Wedding locality, 36, 37, 52Wende, 20, 29, 44, 51, 129–32,

136, 137, 140, 141

West Africa Conference, 38Wiese, Heike, xvii, 75Wilmersdorf locality, 34, 61Womacka, Walter, 68

YYacoubian Building, The

(al Aswany), 152

ZZimmermeister Brunzel baut ein

Mietshaus exhibition, 14Zuwanderung (arriving), 21, 22, 25