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"In "Cosmopolitan Anxieties," Ruth Mandel successfully conveys the particularities of Turkish experience in the German milieu as she moves across a variety of topics, including citizenship, cultural identity, religion, transnationalism, urbanism, and racism."--Kevin Robins, author of "The Challenge of Transcultural Diversities: Cultural Policy and Cultural Diversity"

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COSMOPOLITAN ANXIETIES

Duke University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations..............................................................ixPreface and Acknowledgments........................................................xiNote on Language...................................................................xxiiiIntroduction: Germany, Turkey, and the Space In-Between............................1Berlin: A Prelude..................................................................231. Shifting Cosmopolitics.........................................................272. "We Called for Labor, but People Came Instead".................................513. Making Auslnder...............................................................804. Haunted Jewish Spaces and Turkish Phantasms of the Present.....................1095. Berlin's Kreuzberg: Topographies of Infraction.................................1416. Beyond the Bridge: Two Banks of the River......................................1557. Minor Literatures and Professional Ethnics.....................................1848. Practicing German Citizenship..................................................2069. Deracination to Diaspora: Leave and Leaving....................................23210. Reimagining Islams in Berlin..................................................24811. Veiling Modernities...........................................................294Conclusion: Reluctant Cosmopolitans................................................311Glossary...........................................................................327Notes..............................................................................329Works Cited........................................................................359Index..............................................................................403

Chapter One

The city of Berlin plays the role of a protagonist in this chapter. Its centrality is unavoidable when exploring the interplay of local and global identities at the margins of changing nation-states. It is precisely when the nation-state becomes a questionable unit of analysis that the interplay of local and global can be understood. As Ulrich Beck has written, "Globality means that the unity of national state and national society comes unstuck; new relations of power and competition, conflict and intersection, take shape between, on the one hand, national states and actors, and on the other hand, transnational actors, identities, social spaces, situations and processes" (2000: 21). An important aspect of globality for Beck is the role of technology in the service of transnational connections and networks. Televisual technology in particular dissimulates presence, communion, and immediacy, giving a deceptive sense of participating in a singular global-local event. In the case of East Berlin, this was the technology that both joined and disjoined the two parts of the city, producing an anxiety of an unresolvable distance. This was always contradictory, perceived as an impossible proximity-in other words, two sites that might topologically lay two hundred meters apart were, quite literally, of two separate worlds, east and west, both bridged and severed by radio and televisual signals. (It is not, then, by mere chance that the dismantling of the long traumatic era of a divided Germany was captured as a global televisual local event.)

The workers from Turkey who arrived in Berlin in the early 1960s entered into a radically changed and changing historical and political landscape. This was a place where the symbols and technologies of antinomian ideologies became instantiated around the Berlin Wall. Moreover, the workers from Turkey were entering into the different rhythms of two Western modernities. On the one hand their arrival into Berlin was marked by the fixed territorial boundaries delimiting the Federal Republic of Germany from the German Democratic Republic. On the other they were to be participants, even catalysts of the unmaking of the German national landscape, as they unwittingly were swept up in the repercussions of the dissolution of the boundaries of the nation-state.

The first impact of unification, this grandiose experiment in reconstruction, was a traumatic one, exposing a disjointed cityscape that was at once becoming delocalized and deterritorialized while at the same time giving rise to novel reterritorializations. These forms of reterritorialization were intimately tied to the transformation of German subjectivity and the tectonic shifts affecting national identity. Decades of dealing with processes of localization and delocalization of identity governed by the dictates of the Cold War have raised significant questions about German identity and its global aspirations. These aspirations of the Federal Republic during the Cold War, articulated in terms of a specific political lexicon of modernity, focused on the reality of the nation-state, and on the protection of its borders. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the accelerated diffusion of globalization over the following decade have radically altered the frame of the question. As Beck has observed, with the emergence of a global political culture the relationship between territory and nationhood has come "unstuck." This suggests new possibilities of thinking around cultural, national, and global identities. Elsewhere Malkki has shown "that state and territory are not sufficient to make a nation and that citizenship does not amount to a true nativeness" (1996: 446), thus challenging conventional assumptions about the relationship between national consciousness and place of nativity.

The identities of a place, as Garca Canclini has argued (with reference to another city defined by a border-Tijuana), are forged by the "relationship to other places: the rest of Mexico, North America, the wider world-it is a 'delocalized locality'" (1995: 239). Similarly the mutual reflections of Berlins East and West continually shifted according to a perspectival positioning which, in Berlin, was frequently marked by distorted geopolitical projections. Just as individuals, groups, and nations define their own identities by relating themselves to others, often through processes of mimetic reflection, given localities assume similar identifications by being placed in changing maps of meaning. As de Certeau reminds us, cities are "constellations that hierarchize and semantically order the surface ... operating chronological arrangements and historical justifications" (1988: 104). The city can be radically transformed through diverse practices of making and marking spaces. De Certeau goes on to argue that names (speaking here of the proper names of and within cities) are characterized by their ability to transcend their signification (ibid.). Nowhere has this been truer than for Berlin. In relation to Berlin, Borneman has shown to what extent this process is evident; "in an effort to create new forms of authority, the state improvised, continuously redrawing borders and boundaries, renaming persons and things, endowing them with an aura of provisionality (1998: 164).

For most connoisseurs of Berlin the city was metonymically associated with the Wall. Even before the dramatic fall of the Wall in November 1989, Berlin occupied a bizarre historical and symbolic location, representing the firing line frontier of the Cold War....