Germany

I went back to the years between 1977-79. Because the effects of these two years on me have been so deep that they still affect my life today. In June 1977, when we flew from Istanbul to Munich with Lufthansa and went to Regensburg by train from Munich and settled in the Regensburg University campus a few months later, those days brought both beautiful and unpleasant and thought-provoking events and people to my life. In September of the same year, my education life began in a Turkish class at the primary school called Gerhardinger Schule. Everything was very different and as different as it was beautiful and fun.

The difference in development and economic power between Turkey in 1977 and Germany in 1977 was huge. It is huge today. As a 6-year-old child, I could observe this gap from the world of my changing toys. Remote-controlled cars, a car race track game called “rehnbahn”, battery-powered trains, etc. fascinated me. My only problem in the first months was that I could not speak German, but this problem was solved within a few months and everything was going well. However, especially with the start of my school life and as I started to enter more social life, some problems began to arise.

A few months after starting school, when we started taking off our shoes in front of the classroom door and wearing only the shoes we wore at school, and my feet got cold due to the cold weather, the German discipline hit me in the face first. If the shoes we wore only at school were forgotten at home, we would enter the classroom with socks.

Over time, the German kids in the other classes started picking fights with me, sometimes even beating me up. I didn’t understand why at first, but when I realized what the slogan “Türken Raus” meant, I started to realize how the world around me looked at me. With the courage of childhood and the reflex to respond in kind to anyone who was being rude to me, I would fight back and constantly struggle with my situation on my own. None of the other Turkish kids would come to my aid. In fact, during a festival in one of the central squares (Dom Platz) in Regensburg, I saw Germans who had drunk liters of beer using the portable toilets set up in the square and turning the streets into a cesspool, and I told a German girl what I had seen. She told me that the Turks were responsible for all this filth and drove me crazy. I remember having a terrible fight with this red-haired girl like it was yesterday.

Photo: Tunca Family archive.

I still remember one very cold and snowy winter day when one of the female teachers at my school resisted my father, who was trying to take me into the schoolyard and up to the door of the building, by telling him that the cars used by Turks emitted more carbon dioxide gas, and not allowing our Volkswagen into the schoolyard. However, German families were bringing their cars up to that door.

One of the scenes of daily life that I remember is that when we went out on the street, the Germans approached my brother Tuna in a stroller with very sympathetic attitudes at first, but when they realized that we were Turks, they looked at us and my brother as if they were disgusted and walked away from us.

German society in the 1970s was a sick society. If we consider that in those years, World War II had ended about 35 years ago, the generation that had fought in the war was between the ages of 55 and 60 and had a considerable influence and influence in society. The Germans that my family raised were the children and grandchildren that I met every day on the streets and at school.

There was another side to this story. There was a large Siemens factory in Regensburg, and a significant portion of the employees of this factory were Turkish workers. They lived in a large apartment block of 100 flats called “Heim” and only saw each other. Their integration into German society was almost non-existent. The corridors of this building were full of clothes hanging from the lines and clothes hanging from the lines.

The streets of cities like Adana, Urfa, Bitlis, Sivas were literally transported into a building in Regensburg. The Turkish workers living in this building worked night shifts all the time and spent the day sleeping. In other words, these people had never seen daylight and had no intention or opportunity to integrate into German society, both in terms of the culture they came from and the working hours.

There were many Turks who came to Germany in the 1960s, could not speak German at all and could only do their shopping with the help of their children who were going to school. Most of the workers had gone to Germany from the eastern and southeastern regions of Turkey and were transferred to German society in an isolated social structure without changing their local culture. Within the same society, on one side, Nazi officers from the 1940s, their children and grandchildren, and on the other side, people who had left Adıyaman, Trabzon, Malatya and Antep and found themselves in the middle of Europe without even seeing Istanbul, Ankara or Izmir, were trying to live together. As a six-year-old child, it was impossible for me to have this social perception, but as our return to Turkey in June 1979 approached and the impatience of the excitement of returning increased, I remember constantly regretting, “Why don’t we live in our own country anymore?” Although I could not have foreseen that I would regret this regret at that time, that was the mood of those days.

Germany's sickly environment was now putting a strain on me. After all, I had had my fill of new toys. We could now return to Turkey.

I remember very clearly our mother and father entering Turkey with tears streaming down their faces from longing for their country as we saw the waving Turkish Flag in the distance as we approached Kapıkule in June 1979. I had no tears but a big dream had come true.

A newspaper in Regensburg (Mittelbayerische Zeitung) came to our classroom on June 30, 1979 to conduct research on Turkish children living in Germany. They talked to me at length and took many photographs of me. When they asked me if I missed Turkey, I had shed all my anger at the journalists, because of the unpleasant events I had experienced up until that day and because they told me that my photograph would be in the newspaper the next day. During the interview, I had said that I wanted to return to Turkey, that I did not want to live in Germany, and that I wanted to go to my grandmother, grandfather and grandmother. I also remember that the woman who conducted the interview kept smiling as I spoke. An important reason why the woman was particularly interested in me was that I was the only Turkish student who said, “I will leave Germany one day.”

Photo: Tunca Family archive.

There were many examples of children of families who had gone to Germany to work and earn money, but there were not many examples of children of families who had gone to a university campus with an Alexander Von Humboldt scholarship. For this reason, they looked at me as if they were looking at a laboratory animal, trying to analyze and understand what I said. In addition, since our family contact with Turks was limited due to my father's job, my German skills were at a higher level than the other children. We were living on a university campus. My first foreign friend in my life was a black boy from Ghana (Johnny). Although we lived in much more advantageous conditions than other Turks, the general social structure we were in was still not very pleasant. Despite everything, living in Germany provided an enjoyable year or two, an experience whose contributions I would later understand, and a broader perspective. Of course, I reached these conclusions when I evaluated my experiences years later.

Yes, we had returned to Turkey, but returning had also brought with it a different painful process. In the Fatih district of Istanbul, in the 3rd grade, I started at İskenderpaşa Elementary School, thinking that the fraction lines were ornamental, and despite my best intentions and careful coloring of the fraction lines, it had taken me a year to understand why I could not please anyone, and I would go to school crying every day. Life in Germany was not easy, but it was not easy in Turkey either. My classes were going terribly, and I could not adapt to the new order. In short, I was a foreigner in my own country.

One day, I was talking to Karen Krueger, who edited the culture and travel pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She said that she occasionally did cultural studies on Turks living in Germany. I told her about my own experience at length. We also talked about how, although I was a minority in the world of the 1970s, I had rights protected by law and the right to receive education in my native language, but how the daily attitudes of both German and Turkish societies towards each other made integration impossible. Moreover, I told her that I had experienced great difficulties as a Turk who, again because of my father’s job, had the chance to enter the German presidential palace and talk to the president of the day, Walter Scheel.

Ultimately, we discussed the issue that laws contain measures to prevent primitives from being primitive, but that the approaches within the society and the attitude it takes towards different cultures are the main determinants of social order.

How these personal experiences left their mark on my later years deserves another and very long article.