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The New Berlin Wall By Peter Schneider
4.12.2005
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On
the night of Feb. 7, 2005, Hatun Surucu, 23, was
killed on her way to a bus stop in Berlin-Tempelhof
by several shots to the head and upper body, fired
at point-blank range. The investigation revealed
that months before, she reported one of her brothers
to the police for threatening her. Now three of her
five brothers are on trial for murder. According to
the prosecutor, the oldest of them (25) acquired the
weapon, the middle brother (24) lured his sister to
the scene of the crime and the youngest (18) shot
her. The trial began on Sept. 21. Ayhan Surucu, the
youngest brother, had confessed to the murder and
claimed that he had done it without any help.
According to Seyran Ates, a lawyer of Turkish
descent, it is generally the youngest who are chosen
by the family council to carry out such murders - or
to claim responsibility for them. German juvenile
law sets a maximum sentence of 10 years'
imprisonment for murder, and the offender has the
prospect of being released after serving two-thirds
of the sentence.
Hatun Surucu grew up in Berlin as the daughter of
Turkish Kurds. When she finished eighth grade, her
parents took her out of school. Shortly after that
she was taken to Turkey and married to a cousin.
Later she separated from her husband and returned to
Berlin, pregnant. At age 17 she gave birth to a son,
Can. She moved into a women's shelter and completed
the work for her middle-school certificate. By 2004
she had finished a vocational-training program to
become an electrician. The young mother who had
escaped her family's constraints began to enjoy
herself. She put on makeup, wore her hair unbound,
went dancing and adorned herself with rings,
necklaces and bracelets. Then, just days before she
was to receive her journeyman's diploma, her life
was cut short.
Evidently, in the eyes of her brothers, Hatun
Surucu's capital crime was that, living in Germany,
she had begun living like a German. In a statement
to the Turkish newspaper Zaman, one brother noted
that she had stopped wearing her head scarf, that
she refused to go back to her family and that she
had declared her intent to "seek out her own circle
of friends." It's still unclear whether anyone
ordered her murdered. Often in such cases it is the
father of the family who decides about the
punishment. But Seyran Ates has seen in her legal
practice cases in which the mother has a leading
role: mothers who were forced to marry forcing the
same fate on their daughters. Necla Kelek, a
Turkish-German author who has interviewed dozens of
women on this topic, explained, "The mothers are
looking for solidarity by demanding that their
daughters submit to the same hardship and
suffering." By disobeying them, the daughter calls
into question her mother's life - her silent
submission to the ritual of forced marriage.
Meanwhile, the two elder brothers have papered their
cell with pictures of their dead sister.
There is a new wall rising in the city of Berlin. To
cross this wall you have to go to the city's central
and northern districts - to Kreuzberg, Neukölln and
Wedding - and you will find yourself in a world
unknown to the majority of Berliners. Until
recently, most Berliners held to the illusion that
living together with some 300,000 Muslim immigrants
and children of immigrants was basically working.
Take Neukölln. The district is proud of the fact
that it houses citizens of 165 nations. Some 40
percent of these, by far the largest group, are
Turks and Kurds; the second-largest group consists
of Arabs. Racially motivated attacks occur regularly
in Brandenburg, the former East German state that
surrounds Berlin, where foreigners are few (about 2
percent). But such attacks hardly ever happen in
Neukölln. As Stefanie Vogelsang, a councilwoman from
Neukölln, put it to me, residents talk about "our
Turks" in an unmistakably friendly way, although
they are less friendly when it comes to Arabs, who
arrived decades after the Turks and often illegally.
But tolerance of Muslim immigrants began to change
in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. Parallel to the
declarations of "unconditional solidarity" with
Americans by the German majority, rallies of another
sort were taking place in Neukölln and Kreuzberg.
Bottle rockets were set off from building
courtyards: a poor man's fireworks, sporadic, sparse
and joyful; two rockets here, three rockets there.
Still, altogether, hundreds of rockets were shooting
skyward in celebration of the attack, just as most
Berliners were searching for words to express their
horror. For many German residents in Neukölln and
Kreuzberg, Vogelsang recalled not long ago, that was
the first time they stopped to wonder who their
neighbors really were.
When a broader German public began concerning itself
with the parallel Muslim world arising in its midst,
it was primarily thanks to three female authors,
three rebellious Muslim musketeers: Ates, who in
addition to practicing law is the author of "The
Great Journey Into the Fire"; Necla Kelek ("The
Foreign Bride"); and Serap Cileli ("We're Your
Daughters, Not Your Honor"). About the same age, all
three grew up in Germany; they speak German better
than many Germans and are educated and successful.
But they each had to risk much for their freedom;
two of them narrowly escaped Hatun Surucu's fate.
Necla Kelek was threatened by her father with a
hatchet when she refused to greet him in a
respectful manner when he came home. Seyran Ates was
lucky to survive a shooting attack on the women's
shelter that she founded in Kreuzberg. And Serap
Cileli, when she was 13 years old, tried to kill
herself to escape her first forced marriage; later
she was taken to Turkey and married against her
will, then she returned to Germany with two children
from this marriage and took refuge in a women's
shelter to escape her father's violence. Taking off
from their own experiences, the three women describe
the grim lives and sadness of Muslim women in that
model Western democracy known as Germany.
Reading their books brought to mind a forgotten
scene from seven years ago. Every time my daughter,
who was 14 at the time, invited her schoolmates for
a sleepover, the Muslim fathers would be standing at
the door at 10 p.m. to pick up their daughters. My
wife, an immigrant herself, was indignant. I didn't
like these fathers' dismissive, almost threatening
posture, either, but I was a long way from
protesting. Nor did I worry much when my daughter
told me that one or another girl in her class was
not taking biology or physical education and no
longer going on field trips.
For a German of my generation, one of the most holy
legacies of the past was the law of tolerance. We
Germans in particular had no right to force our
highly questionable customs onto other cultures.
Later I learned from occasional newspaper reports
and the accounts of friends that certain Muslim
girls in Kreuzberg and Neukölln went underground or
vanished without a trace. Even those reports gave me
no more than a momentary discomfort in our upscale
district of Charlottenburg.
But the books of the three Muslim dissidents now
tell us what Germans like me didn't care to know.
What they report seems almost unbelievable. They
describe an everyday life of oppression, isolation,
imprisonment and brutal corporal punishment for
Muslim women and girls in Germany, a situation for
which there is only one word: slavery.
Seyran Ates estimates that perhaps half of young
Turkish women living in Germany are forced into
marriage every year. In the wake of these forced
marriages often come violence and rape; the bride
has no choice but to fulfill the duties of the
marriage arranged by her parents and her in-laws.
One side-effect of forced marriage is the
psychological violation of the men involved.
Although they are the presumed beneficiaries of this
custom, men are likewise forbidden to marry whom
they want. A groom who chooses his own wife faces
threats, too. In such cases, according to Seyran
Ates and Serap Cileli, the groom as well as the
bride must go underground to escape the families'
revenge.
Top
Heavily veiled women wearing long coats even in
summer are becoming an increasingly familiar sight
in German Muslim neighborhoods. According to Necla
Kelek's research, they are mostly under-age girls
who have been bought - often for a handsome payment
- in the Turkish heartland villages of Anatolia by
mothers whose sons in Germany are ready to marry.
The girls are then flown to Germany, and "with every
new imported bride," Kelek says, "the parallel
society grows." Meanwhile, Ates summarizes, "Turkish
men who wish to marry and live by Shariah can do so
with far less impediment in Berlin than in
Istanbul."
Before the murder of Hatun Surucu there were enough
warnings to engage the Germans in a debate about the
parallel society growing in their midst. There have
been 49 known "honor crimes," most involving female
victims, during the past nine years - 16 in Berlin
alone. Such crimes are reported in the
"miscellaneous" column along with other family
tragedies and given a five-line treatment. Indeed,
it's possible that the murder of Hatun Surucu never
would have made the headlines at all but for another
piece of news that stirred up the press. Just a few
hundred yards from where Surucu was killed, at the
Thomas Morus High School, three Muslim students soon
openly declared their approval of the murder.
Shortly before that, the same students had bullied a
fellow pupil because her clothing was "not in
keeping with the religious regulations." Volker
Steffens, the school's director, decided to make the
matter public in a letter to students, parents and
teachers. More than anything else, it was the
students' open praise of the murder that made the
crime against Hatun Surucu the talk of Berlin and
soon of all Germany.
During 50 years of continuing immigration, the
Germans, most of the time under conservative
governments, deluded themselves that Germany was not
a country of immigrants. Suddenly, the obvious could
no longer be denied. Alarmed by the honor killings,
Germans began to investigate the parallel society: a
society proud of its isolation; purist and
traditional yet, in its own terms, creative,
forward-looking and often contemptuous of the German
host society. The recent riots in France have
increased the sense of alarm. German politicians and
experts lined up in the news media to point out why
such riots are unlikely in Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart
or Hamburg. They claimed that young Muslims in
Germany (although up to 50 percent of them are
unemployed) had full access to the German welfare
state and were not isolated in high-rise projects as
in the suburbs of Paris. True, there were some cars
set on fire in Berlin, but such incidents were
interpreted as purely imitation crimes, nothing to
be taken seriously. Yet in all these official
declarations you sensed an undertone of panic.
Germans' confidence that their nation can continue
as it had been - integrating immigrants without an
integration policy, remaining true to the
traditional German identity, preserving the
reassuring post-1945 chronology of advancing
modernism - is on the line. It turns out that in the
heart of German cities a society is growing up that
turns modernity on its head.
How could this happen? The Turkish writer Aras Oren,
who has been living in Berlin for 40 years, once
told me about one of his first plane trips from
Istanbul to Berlin. He was sitting next to a farmer
from Anatolia, who had evidently never been in an
airplane before. The man had no idea what to make of
the seat belt, the overhead warning lights, the tray
table - nor did he understand his neighbors'
explanations. When Oren saw him sitting there, in
his sandals, with his cap on his head and his prayer
beads between his thick fingers, he was suddenly
overwhelmed by the feeling that his fellow
countryman was enclosed in an invisible time capsule
he wasn't going to leave even after he landed in
Germany. It made no difference whether the man was
traveling to Istanbul or to Berlin. This farmer had
never seen a city; he was living in the 18th or 19th
century and would carry the customs and rites of his
homeland with him to his living room in Berlin. And
he would cling to them doggedly if the Western
democracy where he was living and working did not
make a determined effort to acquaint him with its
rules and laws. For decades, Oren has been preaching
that it has never been so much a question of
multicultural sensitivity as of turning peasants
into city dwellers.
After 1945, Germany, in the process of
reconstruction, needed great numbers of workers and
initiated recruitment campaigns in the poor
countries of Europe and on the Mediterranean rim: in
Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Tunisia and Morocco.
The arrival of the 100,000th immigrant worker, in
the 1950's, was cause for celebration; the exhausted
man climbed out of a train at a German station and
was immediately handed a check. But from the
beginning, the invitation came with a certain
reservation on the part of the host and the proviso,
often repeated, that Germany was not really a
country of immigrants, not a melting pot. It was no
accident that the foreign workers were called
gastarbeiter, guest workers. Guests are expected to
leave after a while.
The first Muslim immigrants came without their
families. They slaved away repairing streets or
working below ground, generally slept in men-only
dormitories and for the most part had the same
expectations for themselves as their employers had
for them: they would work for a few years, send as
much of their earnings home as possible and then, if
all went well, drive back to their villages in a
used Mercedes with enough capital to buy a house.
Naturally, things did not work out as expected. The
Swiss author Max Frisch recognized the contradiction
early on: "Workers were called," he wrote, "and
human beings came." These were people who wanted
their families to join them, people who after a
long, hard working life wanted to spend their
remaining years in Germany, people who wished to
provide their children with an education and a
better future in that country. Germany did not give
guest workers passports or the vote, but it did
repay them by incorporating them into the social
system and giving them the opportunity for social
advancement. A result was the rise of a Muslim
middle class - relatively broad in comparison with
those in France or in England - contributing around
39 billion euros annually to the gross national
product and billions to the national pension funds.
But as the German economic miracle came to an end,
the most important condition of this precarious
idyll changed. Although active recruitment was
stopped as early as 1973, more and more Turks and
Kurds moved to Germany, in accord with a ruling on
reuniting families. And these parents, wives,
husbands and children took their traditional
lifestyle onto the German streets. Whereas during
the first years of immigration, Turkish women wore
Western clothing, they now appeared in long flowery
skirts, hand-knitted jackets and tightly bound head
scarves. The plastic trunks in which they had
brought sacks full of dry beans, bulgur wheat and
chickpeas metamorphosed into Turkish grocery stands.
And with the food and the family members,
traditional celebrations in the Muslim districts
gradually became more and more like those back home
as well. In the back rooms of the vegetable stands
and halal butchers, prayer rooms sprang up, and in
time these rooms became mosques. The German-Turkish
author Necla Kelek sums it up this way in "The
Foreign Bride": "The guest workers turned into
Turks, and the Turks turned into Muslims."
Growing unemployment in Germany (now 4.8 million
people, roughly 12 percent of the work force) hit
the Muslim immigrants doubly hard - especially the
youth, who frequently drop out of school before
obtaining a diploma. "Seventy percent of the
newcomers," according to Otto Schily, a former
minister of the interior, referring to the period
since 2002, "land on welfare the day of their
arrival." Whole enclaves sprang up consisting of
extended families living on the dole.
Necla Kelek asked a group of "import brides" who had
been living in Germany for years how they had
actually prepared for their future in Germany. Their
answer: incredulous laughter. Prepare? How and for
what? "But how can you stand living here?" Necla
Kelek went on. "You don't have anything to do with
this country, you despise its culture and the way
people live here." But we have everything we need
here, was the answer; we don't need the Germans.
Those with no work and no future were looked after
by the mosques, which increasingly became the most
important place of communication. Inside their
apartments, women resumed their traditional ways -
apart from the "unclean" who ate pork, drank beer
and let their daughters go unchallenged to parties
and discos. Amid the German refrigerators,
televisions and mobile phones, a rural culture was
celebrating its resurrection, where Turkish was
spoken, where people ate, prayed, fasted and
celebrated according to custom, and where the
surrounding local culture of unbelievers and the
unclean was looked down upon. The riddle of the time
capsule brought up by Aras Oren came to an
unexpected solution. Some hundred thousand Muslim
immigrants were able to take up, in Germany, the
life of their ancestors in Anatolia. Indeed, maybe
life in Anatolia was meanwhile more modern and
secular than in the Muslim districts of Berlin.
Many sociologists attribute the growth of a Muslim
parallel society to the discouraging social
circumstances of the third Muslim generation of
immigrants - high unemployment, high dropout or
failure rates in public schools. But this
explanation is incomplete, to say the least. It
turns out that the Muslim middle class has long been
following the same trend. Rental agencies that
procure and prepare rooms for traditional Turkish
weddings and circumcisions are among the most
booming businesses in Kreuzberg and Neukölln.
Cem Ozdemir, a German deputy (of Turkish origin) to
the European Parliament, tells two different stories
concerning ritual circumcision. He himself grew up
in the south of Germany; his own circumcision three
decades ago was an absolute nightmare. It took place
in a gymnasium, where six boys between 4 and 9 years
old lay stretched out in six beds, and was performed
by the local Turkish doctor, who took his
instruments out of the tool case he'd brought along
and started cutting away. He made a wrong cut on
Ozdemir and sewed up the wound after the local
anesthetic had worn off. To drown the child's
deafening cries, a Turkish band started up with
traditional music, and relatives danced in honor of
the circumcised.
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More recently - in other words, some 30 years later
- Ozdemir took part in another, more modern type of
circumcision, this time as a godfather. The parents
had the operation performed by a doctor in a
hospital. There was no ritual, and the patient went
home the same day. Some days later, when the boy was
fully recovered, the parents gave a party that, as
Ozdemir explains, "really was for the circumcised,
and not for the relatives." All the participants,
the boy included, enjoyed themselves.
For Ozdemir, the difference in these two stories
showed that Muslim immigrants can hold onto their
rituals by transforming and modernizing them. But
there is a third story unfolding today in the rented
halls of Kreuzberg and Neukölln, a story that
emphasizes separateness and a communal rejection of
compromise. The technical standard of the
circumcision might be of the highest order, but it
will have to happen in the presence of family and
friends. The father of the circumcised might carry a
German passport and run a successful company; but he
will also worry about how his son's circumcision is
judged by his friends and neighbors.
This conservative, fearful trend is likely to guide
the next generation. For more than 20 years the
Islamic Federation of Berlin, an umbrella
organization of Islamic associations and mosque
congregations, has struggled in the Berlin courts to
secure Islamic religious instruction in local
schools. In 2001 the federation finally succeeded.
Since then, several thousand Muslim
elementary-school students have been taught by
teachers hired by the Islamic Federation and paid by
the city of Berlin. City officials aren't in a
position to control Islamic religious instruction.
Often the teaching does not correspond to the lesson
plan that was submitted in German. Citing the
linguistic deficiencies of the students, instructors
frequently hold lessons in Turkish or Arabic, often
behind closed doors.
Since the introduction of Islamic religious
instruction, the number of girls that come to school
in head scarves has grown by leaps and bounds, and
school offices are inundated with petitions to
excuse girls from swimming and sports as well as
class outings.
There are no reliable figures showing how many
Muslims living in Germany regularly attend a mosque;
the estimates vary between 40 and 50 percent.
Councilwoman Stefanie Vogelsang stresses that the
majority of the mosques in Neukölln are as open to
the world as they ever were, and that they continue
to address the needs of integration. But the radical
religious communities are gaining ground. She points
to the Imam Reza Mosque, for instance, whose home
page - until a recent revision - praised the attacks
of Sept. 11, designated women as second-class human
beings and referred to gays and lesbians as animals.
"And that kind of thing," she says, fuming, "is
still defended by the left in the name of religious
freedom."
This is the least expected provocation of the three
author rebels: a frontal assault on the relativism
of the majority society. In fact, they are fighting
on two fronts - against Islamist oppression of women
and its proponents, and against the guilt-ridden
tolerance of liberal multiculturalists. "Before I
can get to the Islamic patriarchs, I first have to
work my way through these mountains of German
guilt," Seyran Ates complains.
It is women who suffer most from German sensitivity
toward Islam. The three authors explicitly accuse
German do-gooders of having left Muslim women in
Germany in the lurch and call on them not to forget
the women locked behind the closed windows when they
rave about the multicultural districts.
German immigration policies (and liberal
multiculturalism) are only one side of the problem.
The other side is the active refusal of many in the
Muslim community to integrate. It is an illusion to
believe that a German - or French or Dutch -
passport and full rights of citizenship are enough
to make all Muslims loyal citizens. "The attacks in
London," Seyran Ates says, "were in the eyes of many
Muslims a successful slap in the face to the Western
community. The next perpetrators will be children of
the third and fourth immigrant generation, who -
under the eyes of well-meaning politicians - will be
brought up from birth to hate Western society." It's
only a question of time, Ates says, before Berlin
experiences attacks like those in London and Madrid.
When we spoke, the riots in France had not yet
happened.
It is encouraging that some Muslim residents of
Germany are forcefully calling on Germans to defend
our democratic achievements against Muslim
traditionalists and fanatics who incite hatred of
democracy under the banner of respect for cultural
difference. "What I am asking of the Germans," Necla
Kelek says, "is nothing more and nothing less than
equal treatment. I'm entitled to the same rights as
any German woman."
Merely citing "lessons from the German past," as
Germans tend to do, does not guarantee that these
lessons are correct. It is a perversion when, out of
respect for the "otherness" of a different culture,
Germans stand aside and accept the fact that Muslim
women in Germany are being subjected to an archaic
code of honor that flouts the fundamental human
rights to dignity and individual freedom. This has
nothing to do with Germany or the "guiding German
culture" that German conservatives want to put
through; it has simply to do with humanity, with the
protection of basic human and civil rights for all
citizens of all ethnic backgrounds.
Politicians and religious scholars of all faiths are
right in pointing out that there are many varieties
of Islam, that Islamism and Islam should not be
confused, that there is no line in the Koran that
would justify murder. But the assertion that radical
Islamic fundamentalism and Islam have nothing to do
with each other is like asserting that there was no
link between Stalinism and Communism. The fact is
that disregard for women's rights - especially the
right to sexual self-determination - is an integral
component of almost all Islamic societies, including
those in the West. Unless this issue is solved, with
a corresponding reform of Islam as practiced in the
West, there will never be a successful
acculturation. Islam needs something like an
Enlightenment; and only by sticking hard to their
own Enlightenment, with its separation of religion
and state, can the Western democracies persuade
their Muslim residents that human rights are
universally valid. Perhaps this would lead to the
reforms necessary for integration to succeed. "We
Western Muslim women," Seyran Ates says, "will set
off the reform of traditional Islam, because we are
its victims."
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