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👻🪸🐈‍⬛ Phantomoperand 👻🪸🐈‍⬛

(German, Turkish)

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The history of counter-prestige stretching from the wooden suitcase to the Porsche, from the workers’ hostel to Kreuzberg, from firebombed homes to Cartel

The body Turkey belittles as the “vulgar German Turk” is the grandchild of the body Germany used in its factories, pushed onto a lower track at school, abandoned to skinheads in the street, and whose family it turned into suspects when that body was murdered. The German-plated Porsche, Rolex, Nike, loud volume, hard-edged speech, and distinct form of Turkish appear on the present-day face of the same historical chain. Behind that face stand medical examinations, factory hostels, night shifts, substandard housing, segregated school classes, name-based filtering in job applications, firebombed homes, neighborhood groups, boxing gyms, youth centers, and rap cassettes.

The car Turkey sees is the image of a year’s work in Europe compressed into four weeks of leave. When the camera moves behind the car, the wooden suitcase appears. Beside the suitcase stand the fitness-for-work examination in Istanbul, the factory card, and the shared dormitory. Then come the remittance sent to Turkey, the neglected apartment block, the lower school track, and the skinhead on the corner. Within this confinement, the neighborhood group becomes family, boxing becomes security, the microphone becomes the press, the car becomes room to move, and the watch becomes a public record.

The skinhead abroad closes German membership to the child of Turkish origin. The skinhead back home makes the same child’s Turkish membership conditional. One turns the accent into a sign of foreignness; the other turns the same accent into a sign of ignorance. One treats the Turkish neighborhood as a threat to the national order; the other treats the same neighborhood as low culture and kitsch. One uses migrant labor in factories, mines, and cleaning work; the other calls the owner of that labor a “toilet cleaner.” One expels Turkish identity from Germany; the other tears the “from Germany” part out of Turkish identity. Both sides ask the same question: “Are you really one of us?”

Behind that question stretch Hamburg-Halskestraße, Duisburg-Wanheimerort, Mehmet Kaymakçı, Ramazan Avcı, Schwandorf, Saarlouis, Rostock-Lichtenhagen, Mölln, Solingen, Oberwart, Lübeck, Keupstraße, and the NSU. After a racist attack, the police turn toward the victim’s circle. Prosecutors investigate family relations, drugs, gambling, honor, and the mafia. News language multiplies police assumptions. Events are presented as local tragedies scattered across different cities. Letters of solidarity are placed in archives. Survivors are pushed to the margins of official commemorations. Collective memory in Turkey settles for the names of a few major attacks and carries the long chain of violence in fragments.

The same history also produces the world of self-defense children build in the street. While mothers and fathers go to factories, textile workshops, cleaning jobs, hotels, schools, nurseries, and second jobs, the courtyard and street become an extended family. The crew provides escorts, forms a crowd, establishes deterrence against attackers, distributes prestige within the neighborhood, and eventually also produces a criminal authority. Boxing and kickboxing teach the body distance and timing. The youth center provides records, breakdance, graffiti, microphones, and a space for encounters. Hip-hop brings the history of the working-class family, the child pushed down at school, the skinhead on the corner, the mother left alone, the car heading toward Kapıkule, and the demand for money together within the same generational memory.

The faces of the skinhead back home multiply across a broad ecology. Images from border crossings in summer are framed through the language of an “influx.” A fee is proposed for the diaspora Turk’s entry into the country. Voting rights are tied to residence and taxation. The accent becomes ready-made material for television comedy. The diaspora man is compressed into the image of a crude, noisy, ultranationalist type; the diaspora woman into heavy makeup, strange clothing, violence, and cultural backwardness. The cultural critic calls neighborhood self-defense fascism. The academic framework places the worker’s child’s political speech within an early stage of identity that must be overcome. Documentary editing turns the second generation’s revolt into a brief burst of final-scene energy. Germany classifies this person as a worker, a foreigner, and a suspect. Turkey classifies the same person as a German Turk, vulgar, and uncultured. The Porsche is a noisy passage opened between the two classifications.

The Imported Body, the Deferred Human Being

The labor recruitment agreement signed between West Germany and Turkey on October 30, 1961, was founded on the logic of two-year rotation. A worker would work for two years, return to the country of origin, and be replaced by a new worker. The initial arrangement kept the family, the child, the neighborhood, and permanent social life outside the system. At the German liaison office in Istanbul, candidates’ teeth, lungs, and general capacity for work were examined. Physical endurance was measured before the worker’s personality. The original text of the agreement clearly records this regime of temporariness by linking the residence permit to a total period of two years. (🔗)

The agreement signed between Austria and Turkey on May 15, 1964, likewise placed businesses’ demand for labor at its center. The Austrian Ministry of Social Affairs and authorized recruitment agencies established a joint mechanism for selecting workers from Turkey. Professional qualifications and health assessments formed the process’s main gateways. The agreement entered into force on July 23, 1964, and regulated accelerated selection in accordance with employers’ demand. (🔗)

Germany was seeking labor for industry. Turkey aimed to reduce unemployment, earn foreign currency, and receive technical knowledge from workers who would return. These two calculations turned the human being into a temporary unit of labor. Mining, steel, foundries, automotive manufacturing, railways, electronics, textiles, and cleaning absorbed the bodies of the first generation. Four or more people shared the same room in factory hostels. Rent was deducted from wages. Steel dust settled in the lungs, high noise in the ears, and night work in sleep. Most earnings were sent to Turkey.

In 1973, approximately 226,000 foreign workers were employed in Austria; around 26,700 of them were Turkish citizens. By 1988, 70 percent of employed Turkish citizens were concentrated in the secondary sector, dominated by industry and production. This concentration explains the material foundation of the caricature in Turkey that compresses all European migration into the single word “German Turk.” Different laws, cities, and class experiences in Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and France were poured into the same mold in Turkey.

Beside the workers’ hostel stood women’s labor. Women worked in textiles, electronics, laundries, hotels, schools, nurseries, and cleaning. Housework and care began after paid labor. Hatice Alkan’s life is a stark example of this order. She left three children in Turkey when she went to Germany. Years later, her youngest daughter perceived her as an aunt. Hatice cleaned hotels, schools, and nurseries six days a week; on the seventh day she cleaned private homes. She rose at four in the morning, began work at six, and woke her children by telephone from her workplace. She learned through an institutional intervention that her son had missed school for forty days. Instead of moving toward care support, the youth welfare office moved toward separating the child from the family.

These children translated official documents at an early age, spoke to institutions on behalf of their families, and became interpreters of adult bureaucracy. In Austria, the demands of work and housing led some children to be sent periodically to relatives in Turkey. Industry purchased the family’s care time as surely as it took the worker’s muscular strength. The second generation’s sentence, “I raised myself,” is the domestic consequence of this labor regime.

The 1973 Ford strike broke the rhythm of the silent and obedient worker model. Migrant workers formed collective power against assembly-line speed, working conditions, and dismissals. In the same year, labor recruitment stopped after the oil crisis. As freedom of movement narrowed, family reunification accelerated. The temporary-worker regime produced a permanent migrant society. The cash-for-return programs of the early 1980s attempted to reverse that permanence; the second generation’s school, friendships, and city were already tied to Europe.

During the 1970s, the Turkish state developed special foreign-currency accounts to draw workers’ savings into the banking system. Worker remittances played an important role in financing the trade deficit and meeting the need for foreign currency. The 2016 calls to “convert your foreign currency” mobilized the diaspora once again as an economic resource. The same relationship thus repeated itself across generations: the money was counted as a national contribution, while the person who earned it was subjected to a cultural examination.

Ozan Ata Canani carried the guest worker’s everyday life into song. Islamic Force’s “Selamın Aleyküm” narrated, through the worker’s child, the assumption that the worker had been selected as though purchased and would be sent away after being used. Karakan’s “Hani Bana Para” recorded the experience through which the father’s road to the factory ceased to offer class mobility to the son. “Garip Anam” established the distance between the working mother and the son left in the street at night. “Çek Bir Fırt,” meanwhile, targeted the automatic diagnosis that erased every cause of the youth crisis and blamed the mother and father.

The wooden suitcase, medical form, worker card, time clock, factory bed, remittance receipt, cassette player, cleaning trolley, and official documents translated by children are objects belonging to the same family. The Rolex appears at the later-generational end of this sequence. While the grandfather hands his time to the employer with a time card, the grandchild publicly claims time through an expensive watch. Foreign currency has a homeland; the person who earns that currency is constantly subjected to a test of homeland.

The insult “toilet cleaner” therefore carries a class operation heavier than its crude wording. The German division of labor places the migrant in cleaning, mining, assembly-line production, and night shifts. The diaspora-hater back home turns that placement into an insult. When the worker remains poor, the worker is called ignorant and unsuccessful. When the worker’s child rises in class, the child is declared nouveau riche. Erol Mütercimler’s statements proposing an entry fee and restricting overseas voting rights, along with Fatih Altaylı’s proposal to tie voting rights to an annual tax requirement, are contemporary forms of the same mindset that grades citizenship through residence and financial contribution.

One wrote the body into the factory. The other wrote that body into the lower class through the work it performed.

The Wall That Built the Ghetto, the Language That Blamed It

The passage from workers’ hostels to family housing did not take place within a free choice of city. Low wages, an aging housing stock, landlords who refused to rent to foreigners, and proximity to industrial districts produced the same spatial concentration. Kreuzberg, Wedding, Tiergarten, Duisburg, Cologne, and Essen became products of the labor and housing markets rather than places formed by migrants’ cultural disposition.

In 1975, the West Berlin administration introduced the Zuzugssperre, restricting new foreign settlement in Kreuzberg, Wedding, and Tiergarten. At the time, more than 46 percent of West Berlin’s foreign population lived in these three districts. After the system had already produced concentration, the rhetoric of “preventing ghettos” placed foreign movement under administrative control. The policy remained in force until 1990. In 1983, approximately 27,000 residents of Turkish origin lived in Kreuzberg, accounting for roughly one-fifth of the district’s total population.

Over time, the neighborhood established a social center through its grocery shops, cafés, cassette stores, youth centers, sports halls, and networks of solidarity. Kottbusser Tor, called a “problem area” from the outside, was the center of life from within. Killa Hakan’s language, which constructs Kreuzberg as Little Istanbul and an independent city, records this transformation. The space narrowed by the administration expanded through the memories of its residents.

In Vienna, Turkish and Yugoslav families were directed toward old, substandard private rental housing. Urban renewal reduced the stock of cheap housing and intensified spatial concentration. In Ternitz, Turkish steelworkers and their families lived in old workers’ houses scheduled for demolition. Some homes lacked toilets and running water until the mid-1980s. Favoriten became the dense symbolic site of this history in Vienna. Families originating from Turkey, Serbia, Bosnia, and Macedonia continued to be concentrated in former guest-worker neighborhoods even after acquiring citizenship.

The housing corridor was followed by the education corridor. Preparatory classes began to be established in Berlin in 1971. Records from Heilbronn in 1970 show education authorities placing a fourteen-year-old child with beginner-level German directly into the eighth grade rather than building a structure that provided specialized services for guest-worker children. Preparatory classes and Ausländerklassen then became widespread. The segregated classroom reduced contact with German, pushed the student behind the standard curriculum, and carried the plan of temporariness into the school building.

A 1978 Bundestag report recorded that foreign children left school without qualifications at approximately five times the rate of German children. Transitions to Realschule and Gymnasium were extremely low among children of Turkish and Greek origin. Around half of foreign adolescents of vocational-school age did not attend Berufsschule. Only a small proportion of those who completed vocational preparation courses obtained apprenticeship contracts. The curriculum, materials, and teaching methods had been shaped within an order that treated the migrant child as a temporary visitor.

Linguistic difference was gradually converted into a judgment of ability. Turkish children were overrepresented in Sonderschule institutions. The same dictation text presented under the names “Murat” and “Max” received different scores. Essays carrying Turkish names received lower assessments from some teachers. In job-application experiments, the applicant with a German name received an interview invitation after an average of five applications, while the applicant with a Turkish name needed seven. Invitation rates diverged at 20.2 percent versus 14.6 percent. After other factors were controlled, a German name increased the likelihood of a response by 17 percent.

School thus constructed a long pipeline. The segregated class designed around eventual return reduced contact with German. Linguistic difference became a judgment of ability. Placement in Hauptschule or Sonderschule narrowed the possibility of earning a diploma. The diploma deficit passed into vocational education. The application bearing a Turkish name was filtered out again at the employer’s door. The school door opened; the staircase leading upward was removed.

Austria’s school system likewise produced early tracking through the distinction between Sonderschule, Hauptschule, and Gymnasium. Children from families whose home language was not German were held back at the beginning of school. Segregated classes and mother-tongue lessons were designed around a future return to Turkey. In 1982, 23 percent of children of Turkish origin reached ninth-grade level, while 10 percent of compulsory-school pupils were placed in Sonderschule. The gulf between families’ high educational aspirations and institutional outcomes remained pronounced into the 1990s.

The world inside the child’s home was also shaped by the horizon of temporariness. The expectation of returning to Turkey, village and small-town practices, obedience to elders, hand-kissing, family honor, codes of sexual honor, and parental authority existed inside. Outside, the name, accent, and neighborhood were treated as signs of foreignness. The state and the family held onto the same dream of return for different reasons. The child grew up inside the two systems’ shared plan of temporariness.

These children’s language was a sophisticated form of speech produced between two lives. The TuGeBiC corpus, composed of Turkish-German conversations from the 1990s, shows intensive and systematic movement between Turkish and German. Vocabulary is distributed in a roughly balanced manner across the two languages. Code-switching, word searching, and distinct intonation form the diaspora’s everyday communicative order.

Fresh Familee’s “Ahmet Gündüz” opens with the first generation’s broken German and moves into the second generation’s fluent, angry language. In the 1991 track “Bir Yabancının Hayatı,” King Size Terror consciously chose Turkish as a language for directly addressing migrant youth in Germany. Killa Hakan explains his Turkish through Berlin’s migrant working class, limited Turkish-language schooling, and the multilingual street. The formulation “Sokak, Straße, street” carries an independent rhythm established between two national standards.

Fresh Familee was founded in 1988 in Ratingen-West, where unemployment was high, by Turkish, Moroccan, Macedonian, Spanish, and German youth. The group addressed drugs, violence, criminalization, xenophobia, and life in social housing. “Falsche Politik” answered the politics that produced poverty, “Heimat” the question of belonging, “Ratingen West” the transformation of a devalued neighborhood into a cultural center, and “Fk the Skins” the skinhead threat. The titles Coming from Ratinga, Falsche Politik, Alles Frisch, and Wir sind da recorded the movement from neighborhood origin to the declaration “we are here.”

Karakan’s “Alamancı Yabancı” described the third social position formed between foreignness in Germany and being labeled a German Turk in Turkey. With “Kreuzberg,” “Üç Altı Damladı,” and “Gurbetçi Çocukları,” Islamic Force transformed the neighborhood from geography into identity. EsRAP established a post-migrant sound specific to Favoriten among Viennese Turkish, German, arabesque, and hip-hop.

Turkey turned this language from a trace of lived experience into a character defect. The phrase “broken Turkish” carried a judgment of education and intelligence. A person born in Austria was also called a German Turk. Social diversity extending into the fourth generation was represented through the crude stereotype of the 1960s. The class position produced by Germany was repeated in Turkey as cultural humiliation.

One of the sharpest examples of this educational history in cultural memory appears in Bushido and Shindy’s 2012 track “Panamera Flow.” After describing a black TechArt Panamera and its leather upholstery, Shindy delivers a harsh seven-word salute: “Schöne Grüße an den Hurensohn von Mathelehrer.” Then the woman in the passenger seat, the grandfather who came to Germany with two suitcases, the millionaire grandchild, the new Nike Air shoes, and the end of the night shift enter the same scene. (🔗)

The mathematics teacher here carries an institutional position broader than a single individual. The teacher assigns grades, ranks ability, influences the school track, and passes judgment on the working-class child’s future. Years later, Shindy confronts that judgment with another calculation: the grandfather who arrived with two suitcases, the family rising out of night shifts, and the millionaire grandchild driving a Panamera. In the teacher’s calculation, the migrant worker’s child occupies the lower track. In the grandchild’s calculation, the family has moved from two suitcases to a Panamera.

The accent is the trace of a life that two countries have turned into a measure of membership.

The Skinhead in the Street, the State in the File

On August 22, 1980, members of Deutsche Aktionsgruppen threw firebombs at the Hamburg-Halskestraße building housing Vietnamese refugees. Teacher Nguyễn Ngọc Châu and student Đỗ Anh Lân were killed. The building was later converted into a hotel. A permanent memorial marker appeared thirty-four years later. The graves were removed after approximately twenty-five years. When Châu’s mother said she had thought her son would be safe from bombs in Germany, flight and death merged in the same sentence.

On August 26–27, 1984, the building housing the Satır and Turhan families in Duisburg-Wanheimerort burned. Döndü Satır, Zeliha Turhan, Rasim Turhan, Songül Satır, Ümit Satır, Çiğdem Satır, and Tarık Turhan were killed; twenty-three people were injured. Swastikas and an atmosphere of racist threats surrounded the area. Police and the city administration focused on a Turkish-Yugoslav gang war and family connections. Survivors were interrogated in hospital. Approximately ten years later, the perpetrator confessed after another arson attack. The case was closed within the framework of a personal compulsion to commit arson. Rukiye Satır’s warning about racism was pushed to the margins of the institutional record.

On July 24, 1985, Mehmet Kaymakçı was followed in Hamburg by three right-wing skinheads, beaten, and killed with a concrete block. The perpetrator had openly stated an intention to target a Turk. Prosecutors pushed the political and xenophobic motive into the background and placed the incident within the framework of an ordinary tavern brawl.

In December of the same year, Ramazan Avcı was attacked by skinheads while returning to his pregnant fiancée and died several days later. Police leadership issued statements minimizing the political background. Five skinheads were tried for manslaughter rather than murder and received sentences ranging from one to ten years. One defendant knew one of the investigating police officers; the officer’s son had connections to the skinhead milieu. During the same period, Fatma T., who had also been attacked, was advised to stay away from filing a complaint. In the 1992 firebombing of an Italian restaurant, the political background was again obscured despite a swastika and the words “Ausländer raus” at the scene.

On December 17, 1988, an attacker associated with the Nationalistische Front set fire to a building inhabited by Turks in Schwandorf. Fatma Can, Osman Can, Mehmet Can, and their German neighbor Jürgen Hübener were killed; twelve people were injured. The attack took place before the post-reunification wave. A memory centered on Mölln and Solingen pushed Schwandorf into the background and reinforced the impression that racist arson attacks had suddenly begun in 1992.

In 1989, Neo-Nazis distributed leaflets in Berlin announcing that they would attack Turkish shops and individuals. The defense of the neighborhood by Kreuzberg youth took shape within this declared threat. The core of the 36 Boys’ self-defense emerged from the need to protect family members going to work in the early morning and to drive Nazi youth out of the neighborhood, rather than from a display of identity.

On September 19, 1991, a building housing asylum seekers was set on fire in Saarlouis, killing Samuel Kofi Yeboah. The investigation was quickly closed, and clues leading toward right-wing circles were pushed into the background. The perpetrator was convicted approximately thirty-two years later. Parliamentary inquiries extending into 2026 brought the authorities’ errors in the initial investigation and the premature closure of the case back onto the agenda.

Before the Rostock-Lichtenhagen pogrom in August 1992, a local newspaper placed an anonymous threat of a “hot night” in its headline. The city’s commissioner for foreigners warned that publication would fuel an attack. The language of “Das Boot ist voll” and “Asylantenflut” presented migrants as an overflowing mass. The administration left asylum seekers in the street; conditions produced by administrative decisions were framed as damage caused by asylum seekers to the surrounding area. The pogrom was broadcast live. Television crews’ floodlights supplied stage lighting to the attackers. Testimony that money was offered in exchange for footage exposed the market violence created between news and spectacle.

On November 23, 1992, two houses occupied by Turkish families were firebombed in Mölln. Bahide Arslan, Yeliz Arslan, and Ayşe Yılmaz were killed. The attackers telephoned the fire brigade, claimed responsibility, and gave the Nazi salute. Chancellor Helmut Kohl stayed away from the funeral; government spokesperson Dieter Vogel used the expression “Beileidstourismus.” Letters of solidarity sent to the families from across the country were kept in the municipal archive. The family learned of their existence approximately twenty-seven years later. İbrahim Arslan said that solidarity had been concealed from them. DOMiD now preserves an archive of hundreds of letters, cards, telegrams, and drawings. (🔗)

For İbrahim Arslan, the attack did not end on the night of the fire. Racist violence continued at school. Teachers assigned his words a low status as knowledge. Official commemorations were organized for years around municipal and state protocol. Arslan’s demand for victim- and survivor-centered commemoration revealed the institutional struggle over ownership of memory.

On May 26, 1993, the Bundestag approved a constitutional amendment restricting the fundamental right to asylum. Three days later, on May 29, the Genç family home in Solingen was firebombed. Gürsün İnce, Hatice Genç, Gülüstan Öztürk, Hülya Genç, and Saime Genç were killed; fourteen people were injured. Three of the dead were children. Four young attackers were later convicted. The attack took place immediately after months of anti-migration political and media discourse. (🔗)

On February 5, 1995, Josef Simon, Peter Sarközi, Erwin Horvath, and Karl Horvath were killed in Oberwart, Austria. A bomb was attached to a sign reading “Roma zurück nach Indien” and exploded as the victims attempted to remove it. The initial investigation into the attack, part of Franz Fuchs’s campaign of racist terror, turned toward the possibility of an internal dispute within the Roma community or that the victims had prepared the bomb themselves. The German model of turning the victim into a suspect was repeated in Austria.

On January 18, 1996, a fire in a building housing asylum seekers on Lübeck’s Hafenstraße killed ten people, seven of them children, and injured thirty-eight. Evidence concerning four young men linked to right-wing circles appeared in the file, and the youths were released. Salem El-Hajoj, who lived in the building, was declared a suspect, arrested, and later acquitted. The investigation left the perpetrator in uncertainty. The high death toll failed to place Lübeck at the center of the national memory of racist terror.

Between 2000 and 2007, the NSU murdered Enver Şimşek, Abdurrahim Özüdoğru, Süleyman Taşköprü, Habil Kılıç, and Mehmet Turgut. The later victims in the series were İsmail Yaşar, Theodoros Boulgarides, Mehmet Kubaşık, and Halit Yozgat. Police officer Michèle Kiesewetter was also murdered by the organization.

The families were interrogated about drugs, gambling, debt, honor, the mafia, and family relations. Expressions such as “Döner-Morde,” “Döner-Killer,” “Döner-Mafia,” and “Türken-Mafia” reduced murdered people’s names to the food they sold and an image of ethnic crime. Terms such as “Soko Halbmond,” “Wettmafia,” “Mauer des Schweigens,” and “Parallelwelt” presented Turkish society as the protector of crime. Police reporting converted state speculation into journalistic fact. Families’ warnings about racist attacks were assigned a lower rank of credibility.

A study prepared for the Otto Brenner Stiftung examined more than three hundred Turkish- and German-language texts as well as 290 photographs. Its findings showed the press closely aligning itself with investigative authorities. Part of the Turkish-language press translated German police and media terminology; the expression “döner-shop murders” circulated in Turkey as well. In 2006, Hürriyet reported that Turks in Nuremberg believed xenophobia was being concealed. İsmail Yozgat and other families openly voiced the possibility of a series of racist murders. That same year, marches were held under the slogan “Let us not become the tenth victim.” The warning was never elevated to the level of a national terror alert.

The NSU collected newspaper clippings about its own attacks as propaganda material. The media’s false framing served the organization’s psychological operation. Approximately forty intelligence informants surrounded the NSU. Money was channeled into these networks; connections involving false identities, passports, weapons, accommodation, and vehicles emerged. Files were destroyed only days after the organization was exposed in 2011. In the process known as “Aktion Konfetti,” the Michael See file was among the documents shredded. Bundestag inquiries recorded systemic failure within the security institutions. (🔗)

In 2006, a Bavarian profiler raised the possibility of far-right perpetrators; Hamburg investigators rejected that assessment. Hamburg police consulted a clairvoyant during the investigation. The state remained for a long time the one that had failed to establish a parliamentary committee of inquiry. After 2011, informant networks, support circles, and file destruction entered public view. The expressions “total failure” and “systemic failure” were used in Bundestag debates. Gamze Kubaşık objected to a memory regime in which much was said about the perpetrators and little about the victims.

On June 9, 2004, a nail bomb planted on Cologne’s Keupstraße injured more than twenty people. Hundreds of nails had been positioned to reach as many bodies as possible. The investigation turned toward shopkeepers and their families. Undercover officers were sent into the victims’ circle. One family member was told, “Your father worked with the mafia.” Within the institutional mind, the assumption that the neighborhood had attacked itself carried greater weight than the possibility that a German Neo-Nazi organization had attacked a Turkish neighborhood.

The same process repeated itself in all these events. The racist motive was minimized. The victim’s circle was investigated. Police rumors were passed to the press. The attacks were separated from one another. Survivors’ words were subordinated. Cases were steered in the wrong direction. Solidarity and commemoration were placed under state control. The murders were removed from the national history of terror and fragmented into local tragedies.

Turkey’s memory heard Mölln and Solingen at length. Duisburg, Kaymakçı, Avcı, Schwandorf, Saarlouis, and Lübeck never became a lasting shared chronology. When the NSU emerged, memory reopened; the accusatory vocabulary of the German police had already circulated in Turkish. Reports often remained within the diplomatic formula “attack on Turkish citizens in Germany.” The chain connecting the working class, housing, education, the neighborhood, the police, the media, and culture was conveyed in scattered fragments.

The skinhead burned the house; the institution obscured the perpetrator; the headline darkened the family; memory back home broke the chain apart.

The Neighborhood Became Family, the Microphone Became the Press

In the years when swastikas became a routine sight on Kreuzberg’s walls, members of the 36 Boys described themselves through three experiences: growing up constantly outside, becoming family to one another, and driving Nazis out of the neighborhood. Physical clashes took place with Nazi youth around Ku’damm. The neighborhood group escorted family members to work at four in the morning. Routes were guarded against harassment by American soldiers and other aggressors. Coming collectively to someone’s aid during a fight, deciding who would be protected in the neighborhood, and making the young people’s names and nicknames known were among the group’s everyday functions.

The neighborhood distributed the status that school withheld. Merely carrying the name “36 Boys” could generate respect. The group brought together members of Turkish, Kurdish, and other backgrounds. The neighborhood was called territory, the group family, and Nazis the enemy. Tim Raue emphasized the need to be seen, to be regarded as human, and to belong somewhere within this environment. Sinan Tosun recounted 125 unexcused absences and the experience of leaving school without a diploma. Some members finished school; some turned toward fighting, theft, and robbery. Some young people used only the prestige provided by the group’s name. Self-defense, belonging, street sovereignty, and criminal economy converged in the same structure.

Boxing and kickboxing were this environment’s concrete forms of physical training. The word karate appeared in some testimonies as a broad sign of self-defense; the archival weight centered on boxing, kickboxing, street fighting, collective escorting, and crew protection. Muzaffer “Muci” Tosun combined membership in the 36 Boys with a boxing career at German championship level. Later plans for youth-center and basement boxing clubs turned the gym into an institution where young people preparing against attack could be protected, seen, and guided.

Muci Tosun explained that discrimination had once arrived as physical attack in the street and now operated through names, recruitment, and promotion. The boxing gym carried the idea of an institution responding to that change. The punch never becomes the article’s central symbol; knowledge of distance, timing, and guard remains the physical counterpart of a security intelligence acquired in the street. A detailed framework concerning the distinct principles of conflict in martial arts has been developed elsewhere. (🔗)

Killa Hakan described this world as “the German-Turk thing” and “this matter of the German Turk.” The generation born in Berlin, treated as belonging to Turkey, lacking command of Istanbul Turkish, and excluded from German membership established a distinct sphere of life. Parents’ plans to return led some young people to leave school at fifteen or sixteen. When the horizon of return became permanent settlement, these young people remained in Germany with limited education and at a distance from institutional language.

Killa Hakan experienced a closed institution and then prison at the age of fifteen. Prison functioned like an alternative school that transferred knowledge of larger crimes to a young person who had arrived through a minor offense. Music took him away from the street and turned criminal experience into an insider’s warning directed toward peers. Album titles such as Çakallar, Semt Semt Sokak, Kreuzberg City, Volume Maximum, Orijinal, Son Mohakan, and Fight Kulüp placed the neighborhood, continuity, and memories of struggle ahead of individual pop stardom. “Bir Ara Bir Daha Sor” turned Kottbusser Tor into the center of the world; “İlk Kural Saygı” established street prestige as an alternative system of value.

Fresh Familee held its first rehearsals in the Ratingen-West youth club. It distributed its first records through its own network. The 1991 WDR documentary Coming from Ratinga carried the group beyond the social-housing neighborhood. The Mercury/Phonogram deal, television programs, and the Ice-T tour brought this independent production into broader circulation. The youth club and hand-distributed record gave young people pushed downward by school a channel of cultural mobility.

In 1991, King Size Terror consciously switched from English to Turkish with “Bir Yabancının Hayatı.” Turkish became a language of publication that reached migrant youth in Germany. Karakan, which emerged from King Size Terror, turned migration, the mother, the factory, the street, money, the car, the road to Turkey, and the skinhead threat into chapters of the same life on the album Al Sana Karakan.

“Defol Dazlak” was recorded with the group’s own resources after Mölln and Solingen and circulated like an anthem among Turkish youth in Germany. Members sometimes traveled to jam concerts in exchange for travel money, slept on mats in venues, and worked in factories to pay for recording equipment. The hardness was produced through factory wages, the youth-center stage, and an atmosphere of racist attacks before it became an image designed by a major company for the Turkish market.

“Kan Kardeşler II” described the mutual protection of Turkish, Kurdish, Laz, and Circassian youth. The racist gaze in Germany had pushed different origins into a single category of foreigner; the song turned that shared condition of being targeted into solidarity. “Garip Anam” carried the emotional distance between the working mother and the son in the street. “Kapıkule’ye Kadar” described a year’s labor transported within the car, gifts, food, the motorway, and four weeks of leave. “Hani Bana Para” established the material demand of the son who rejected his father’s road to the factory. “Araba Yok” turned the car into a measure of male prestige and mobility. “Evdeki Ses” transformed bass, a house party, the microphone, the crowd, and dance into a form of public existence.

Islamic Force was the transformation of the street institution surrounding the 36 Boys into a musical institution. Boe B carried knowledge acquired from hip-hop films, records, and neighborhood experience to younger people. Killa Hakan became the later bearer of memory along this line. The 1997 album Mesaj created an eighteen-track archive of life extending from migration to migrant children, from mothers’ pain to money, and from the neighborhood code 36 to Kreuzberg.

“Selamın Aleyküm” described the worker selected as though purchased and the permanent generation that followed. “Gurbet” carried the first generation’s separation, “Gurbetçi Çocukları” the second generation’s distinct identity, “Anaları Ağlatan” the family cost of criminal life, “Para” material recognition, “Üç Altı Damladı” the Kreuzberg 36 code, and “Kreuzberg” the neighborhood’s identity. “Arabesk Rap” brought the parents’ cassette and the child’s beat together in the same recording.

In “Yağma Sofrası,” Sezen Aksu’s pop melody, Erkin Koray’s Anatolian rock sound, and Lafayette Afro Rock Band’s funk horn met within the same sample arrangement. Accounts of Turkish youth joining hands and forming a halay when early recordings such as My Melody/Istanbul played in discos bring the breakdance crowd and the wedding crowd together on the same floor. The father plays a cassette from Turkey in the car; the child listens to American hip-hop in the street; Islamic Force brings the two sounds into the same recording.

Murat G described rap as an attempt to be heard against racism and defined Turkish-language rap as a child born in Germany. DJ Mahmut and Murat G founded Looptown Records in 1994. Looptown Presents Turkish Hip Hop and Garip Dünya brought Turkish-language rap production from different cities into the same independent distribution circuit. EFA distribution carried this music into record shops.

Microphone Mafia brought Turkish, German, Italian, and other languages together in 1989. Its production took on a more explicitly political direction after Rostock-Lichtenhagen. The group appeared on anti-racist compilations in 1993, organized jams, and participated in commemorations of racist murders and youth work. While official media fragmented the attacks, music brought cities, names, and generational memory together in the same repertoire.

Neighborhood culture produced a field of subjectivity broader than the male crew. Aziza A’s 1997 album Es ist Zeit combined Turkish and German while addressing generational conflict, family expectations, the male-dominated neighborhood, and a young woman building her own path. The distribution problems she faced in Turkey demonstrated the difficulty two national music markets had in carrying a hybrid voice. In Vienna, EsRAP established a fusion of Turkish-German, arabesque, and hip-hop. The woman moved from being an object in the subcultural display to a cultural subject carrying the microphone.

Music was heard on cassette at home and in the car. It circulated at weddings, birthdays, and family gatherings. The Turkish market, cassette shop, record shop, wedding hall, and nightclub became a distribution network. In youth centers, one person brought a record, another demonstrated a breakdance move, another painted on a wall, another held a microphone, and another recounted an encounter with a skinhead. NaunynRitze continues today as an institution combining sport, education, and culture while carrying hip-hop history in the center of Kreuzberg. (🔗)

Jam events brought crews from different cities together. Listeners copied cassettes for friends, carried news of concerts, wrote slogans on walls, and placed group names on their jackets. The SO36 concert became one of the strong stages of this local network. Television, major record companies, and İnönü Stadium formed the later rings of expansion. YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, and independent reissues carried old recordings to new generations.

Short declarations such as “Defol Dazlak,” “Cartel bir numara,” “Hani Bana Para,” “Araba Yok,” “İlk Kural Saygı,” and “Semt Semt Sokak” became neighborhood slogans. Ratingen-West, Kreuzberg 36, Kottbusser Tor, Nuremberg, Kapıkule, and the E-5 formed the generation’s map of life. The cassette player became the sampler, the wedding melody the breakbeat, the father’s migration the child’s ghetto, the mother’s arabesque the son’s rap, and private sorrow public anger.

This culture did not fit within individual consumption through headphones. Halay, breakdance, battles, collective choruses, raised fists at concerts, and heavy bass inside the car formed part of the mode of listening. While racist attacks targeted people one by one, rap reconstructed them as a collective body. The park, the space outside the Späti, the kiosk, the parking lot, the back courtyard, and the car became low-cost third places.

While the same group provided security, it also produced a street economy, theft, robbery, and domination. Prison became a school of criminal knowledge. The crew combined protection and the use of power within the same structure. Rap turned this life into experience narrated from within and into a warning among peers rather than romantic scenery.

The material basis of this culture was women’s invisible labor. The mother worked in textiles, hotels, schools, nurseries, and cleaning. Care and housework began when she returned home. The son constructed a public scene of success through the car, watch, sneakers, and the image of a woman. The mother carried the paid and unpaid shifts that supported that scene. While the subculture revolted against German authority, it also produced its own patriarchal authority.

The son turned the Porsche into a counter-diploma; the mother carried that diploma’s invisible shift.

You Are Turkish, from Germany: Cartel’s Second Word

Cartel was formed through a structure different from that of a conventional group growing within a single city. Karakan from Nuremberg, Da Crime Posse from Kiel, and Erci E. from Berlin joined in a common album project while preserving their own identities. The formation also included German and Cuban members. The launch concert at Berlin’s SO36 moved from separate crews’ sets toward a joint finale. This organization constituted an intercity alliance of defense and publication.

The album was produced by German Turks in Germany for German Turks. For the group members, Turkey was the country of origin, family, and holidays; school, the street, racist conflict, and musical production were centered in Germany. Kabus Kerim said the principal target was Germany. Erci E. explained that the album had been made for German Turks. Murat G emphasized that Turkish-language rap was a culture born in Germany.

Cartel’s central statement stood on two feet: “Turkish” and “from Germany.” The first word brought together people whom racism had turned into a shared target in Germany. The second word carried a claim to permanent rights over the country in which they lived. The words “This country is ours” constituted a declaration of social ownership within Germany rather than a call to return to Turkey. “Yetmedi Mi?” presented the account of people who were still treated as foreigners after the labor of workers, family life, and generations of history.

The album brought money, cars, drugs, house parties, television, roads, and common identity together within the same repertoire. Hani Bana Para, Araba Yok, Evdeki Ses, and Çek Bir Fırt carried Karakan’s world of class and neighborhood into the common project. Kankardeşler addressed solidarity among different origins, Televizyon the system of cultural representation, and Der Weg den du gehst the migrant youth’s path. The declaration “Cartel is number one” was the child placed at the bottom by school and mainstream society naming itself at the top.

The album was released by Mercury/PolyGram in Germany and RAKS/PolyGram in Turkey. It sold approximately 30,000 copies in Germany and 180,000 in Turkey during its first month. Period studies recorded official Turkish sales exceeding 300,000. Tunç Dindaş cited an industry estimate of 1.5 million pirated copies. The video received heavy rotation on Turkish television, the track topped the charts, and a movement began from SO36 to İnönü Stadium. The group gave approximately twenty-five concerts in Turkey within a short period.

The stadium crowd gave the members a powerful sense of a public collective body. The nationalist airport reception and the appropriation constructed around the crescent and star by the MHP and other right-wing circles descended upon Cartel’s original German context. The group members were surprised by this appropriation. They defended nonviolence as the first solution and self-defense when life and family were threatened. The Malcolm X reference was used alongside an emphasis on common oppression and solidarity with Arabs, Africans, and other minorities.

The German mainstream magnified the word “Turkish” and pushed “from Germany” into the background. Nationalist reception in Turkey turned the first word into a sign of national triumph. Anti-nationalist commentary in Turkey treated the same word as evidence of fascism. All three circles erased the second word. A detailed analysis of Cartel through historical context, power relations, and the authority to name has been developed in another article. (🔗)

The publishing ecology carrying out this erasure extended across the decades after 1995. In issue 80 of Birikim, published in December 1995, Aras Özgün’s article “Cartel: Mad Fascism Straight Out of Hell!” appeared. The article interpreted attachment to Turkish identity as an obsession with identity, hip-hop’s directness as a lack of irony and aesthetic complexity, and the demand for collective strength as a will to power. Anti-fascist statements were subjected to suspicion as marketing and promotional strategy. The power asymmetry between the skinhead and the migrant youth under attack was dissolved within a single image of hardness.

Özgür Kaya’s article in Birikim recorded the humiliation at the German border while treating the diaspora as a community inclined toward cultural ghettoization. It explained the desire for a powerful Turkey as a need to mask a feeling of being a tolerated dependent. Political speech was thereby transformed into a psychological symptom.

Express established a more contradictory archive. Issue 80, dated August 5, 1995, published a dossier titled “Cartel and Real Rap.” Alp Tamer’s article “Das Kartell” treated the group as the manifesto of Europe’s excluded youth and made working-class children, ghettos, and Europe’s stepchildren visible. The same article employed the metaphor of “swastika-like discipline of the throat,” contaminating Cartel’s aesthetics with Nazi associations.

An unsigned editorial analysis in the same issue interpreted “You Are Turkish” as a declaration of cultural identity rather than biological superiority. German and Cuban members were treated as elements that disrupted the interpretation of blood nationalism. Turkish-Kurdish brotherhood was read as an anti-discrimination appeal. A common working-class fate was established among Turkish, Kurdish, Hispanic, Arab, Greek, African, and Asian “dark heads.” A class parallel was drawn between the white German in Germany and the white Turk in Turkey.

Express 82, dated August 19, 1995, appeared with the cover line “From Cartel to Express: As Malcolm X Said.” MC Zımba described the audience at the first concert in Turkey knowing the songs by heart. The harshest passage directed at skinheads was omitted from television and concert presentations. In “Turkish-Style Hip-Hop,” Tunçay Kulaoğlu called Turkish-language hip-hop a “freak of nature” and Karakan an expression of “blind Turkish identity.”

The grounds for this indictment included clothing bearing the crescent and star, audience members making the Grey Wolves salute, the Nuremberg Turkish Hearth, allegations concerning the circle around Musa Serdar Çelebi, album acknowledgments, rhetoric of permanently returning to Turkey, and appropriation by nationalist circles. The political identity of the audience became the artist’s essence. Karakan member Alper explained that King Size Terror consisted of two Black Americans, one Peruvian, and himself; he rejected claims of a relationship with the Turkish Hearth. His response was placed in a short box, while contradictory factual claims remained unresolved by the editors.

Derya Bengi’s interview with Ozan Sinan and Alper recorded in detail their encounter with rap in Germany, samples from Barış Manço and Cem Karaca, the influence of Public Enemy, everyday racism, whispering on the metro, fights, self-defense, the difference between educated migrants and the working class remaining in the neighborhood, the difficulty of writing in Turkish, and solidarity with other minorities. Express made the artist visible while simultaneously placing a subtitle of suspicion over the artist’s words. The positive discovery in issue 80 destabilized the indictment in issue 82 from within the publication’s own archive.

In Express 136 in 2013, Erci E.’s words “We need wisdoms like Nâzım’s” were used positively in the context of Gezi. The same words were mentioned again in relation to Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. In Roll, Fatih Altınöz offered self-criticism of the “fascist” judgment drawn from a single video, the crescent, a male crowd, and hard imagery. A 2011 interview with Erci E. in Bir+Bir recorded that Cartel’s members held political positions different from the right-wing bloc imagined in Turkey.

Published between 1994 and 2000, Die Beute: Politik und Verbrechen was associated with Western Marxist, autonomist-left, and pop-left circles. İmran Ayata’s article “Cartel sieht das aber anders. Der Medienerfolg eines HipHop-Projekts” viewed the distinction between anti-fascism and Turkish identity through suspicion of market strategy. It produced the assumption that anti-fascism was offered to the European market and Turkish identity to the German-Turkish audience. Aras Özgün drew on this framework.

The “Hip identity geht Hops” conference held on January 8, 1997, brought together discussions of the ghetto, racism, Turkish power, identity chatter, sexism, and antisemitism. A field of reaction emerged that extended to some DJs refusing to play Cartel tracks. İmran Ayata’s later work with Kanak Attak and Songs of Gastarbeiter made the anti-racist cultural figure’s early tension with self-defense emerging from a working-class neighborhood even more striking.

The Hamburg-based 17°C – Zeitschrift für den Rest carried a radio debate surrounding a Karakan concert in Nuremberg. Karakan was accused of being proto-fascist, glorifying hardness and struggle, and forming a male club. Grey Wolves among the audience were treated as the artist’s political essence. Reporting on the debate in a taz article dated June 27, 1995, Annette Weber developed a counter-critique that preserved the asymmetry of power: the national slogan of a German skinhead and the solidarity appeal of a migrant child under attack operated from different positions of power.

The fourth issue of Kırkbudak’s first year, published in 2005, was devoted to the theme “Nationalism and Alevis.” Tunca Arıcan’s article “Tough Guys in the Turkish-Language Hip-Hop Scene” presented Islamic Force as a positive example because it was universalist, transnational, anti-racist, included women, and had Alevi origins. Cartel was turned into the opposing example, said to produce an ultranationalist discourse with an Islamic synthesis. A moral hierarchy was established between acceptable migrant rap and objectionable migrant rap.

Tunca Arıcan carried this scheme into an academic narrative of development in the article “Transitions in the Phases of Turkish Rap’s Transformation: Resistance, Marginalization, and Style” in the Eurasian Journal of Music and Dance. The Cartel period was associated with German-Turkish identity, nationalism, and conservatism; the later period was positioned as cosmopolitan maturity. Diasporic self-defense became an early stage of consciousness that had to be surpassed.

Artizan republished the Kırkbudak article online, continuing circulation of the scheme that cast Cartel as ultranationalist and Islamic Force as the universal alternative. A 2019 Patron/Ege Erkurt interview in Diken acknowledged Cartel’s pioneering role while treating sections other than Bektaş’s as ultranationalist. It said early Turkish rappers influenced by Cartel had held fascist attitudes and that the German-Turk accent had improved over time. The progress narrative in which Turkish rap matured by cleansing itself of German-Turk influence appropriated the form of diasporic foundation and left its subject outside.

A counter-archive developed alongside these judgments. In taz, Annette Weber preserved the asymmetry of power. In Roll, Fatih Altınöz questioned the early verdict. Spex positioned Cartel as “the Germans of tomorrow”; in Lars Freisberg’s interview, Ozan Sinan said they were not begging Germans for acceptance. In Doğu Batı and Middle East Report, Alev Çınar established the difference in power between a minority sign in Germany and a majority sign in Turkey. Bir+Bir opened a space for belated correction through Erci E. Murat Meriç, while recounting that Cartel had been rejected as nationalist and fascist in its own period, emphasized that the work had emerged as a response to anti-Turkish hostility in Germany.

The chain of publications thus followed a distinct movement. 17°C circulated the debate over proto-fascism. Die Beute constructed the language of suspicion. Express opened the trial in the Turkish cultural sphere with all its contradictions. Birikim carried the definitive verdict into the headline. Kırkbudak turned the distinction between the good migrant and the bad migrant into a permanent classification. The Eurasian Journal placed it within a developmental scheme. Artizan continued its digital circulation. Diken produced its generational continuation inside the rap scene.

Cem Kaya’s documentary Love, Deutschmarks and Death created a powerful counter-archive extending from workers’ hostels to arabesque and from wedding halls to the cassette market. The director knew that Turkish-language hip-hop had been born in Germany and exported to Turkey, that arabesque no longer sufficed for the second generation’s life, and that hip-hop had become the youth’s manifesto. He also clearly defined Cartel’s meaning as empowerment, liberation, and self-defense.

The film placed Boe B at the center of its portrait and kept Cartel brief within MTV footage and final-scene energy. The first generation’s history of longing, family, cassettes, factories, and sorrow received extensive treatment. The second generation’s organizing against skinhead attacks, youth centers, the birth of Turkish-language rap, neighborhood alliances, and claim to Germany were compressed into an intense conclusion. The imbalance of weight and the interview framework in the film have been analyzed in detail in previous texts. (🔗) (🔗)

Muhammed Said Tuğcu’s 2024 academic article foregrounded the documentary’s archival and editing achievements. Cartel’s duration and function within the film, the shortened conflict, and the imbalance between first-generation sorrow and political rap did not move to the center of the analysis. Festival and award circles endorsed the film as a comprehensive history. Through academic canonization, the editing choice acquired the seal of a complete historical account.

The skinhead abroad wanted to expel the word “Turkish” from the country. The gatekeeper back home tore the words “from Germany” out of the identity.

Porsche as Counter-Diploma, Rolex as Public Record

The first generation was placed in arduous, low-paid jobs on the bottom rungs of the social ladder. It lived in poor neighborhoods. Its children were directed downward through education and professional pathways. The second and third generations declared forms of advancement outside education through objects legible to everyone.

In German gangsta rap, the large car, expensive jewelry, attractive woman, and intimidating entourage work together as symbols of social mobility. This repertoire is directly connected to the guest-worker history of hard labor, low wages, and poor neighborhoods. The feeling that members of the established majority lived within ready-made homes, educational networks, and status, while migrant children had to struggle for every step, settled into family memory.

In this world, the Porsche is a counter-diploma. It is a mobile private room offering an exit from the crowded family home. It is a meeting place for friends and a music room. It provides temporary distance from family supervision. It crosses the boundary of the neighborhood, moves into the city center, claims volume in public space, and signals class. On the journey to Turkey, it carries gifts, savings, and a year’s labor. Within four weeks of leave, it makes the family’s historical ascent visible.

The car is also a space of flirtation and male prestige. It is the moving stage of loud rap. The Späti, park, Hinterhof, parking lot, Bahnhof, shisha bar, Turkish market, wedding hall, school exit, and holiday in Turkey are tied into the same regime of visibility. “Piyasa gehen” describes a public circulation in which clothing, the friend group, the car, speech, and the social-media profile are displayed together. The Kiez operates as a neighborhood, a field of solidarity, street knowledge, and aesthetics.

The Rolex represents the passage from the time clock to one’s own time. It becomes a public certificate of value in place of institutional recognition. It provides visible status in place of an official title. It declares that the grandchild has claimed the time that the grandfather sold under the labor regime. It becomes a record of success directed toward the teacher and the employer.

Nike marks the working-class and migrant body’s membership in global youth culture. The sneaker carries street mobility, rap aesthetics, and a class signal on the same body. Cartel and Karakan’s stage clothing popularized this code. Cultural criticism in Turkey turned sneakers and the collective body into part of a diagnosis of fascism. The repertoire of brands supplied a universally legible status to young people whose access to official cultural capital had been restricted.

In Karakan’s “Kapıkule’ye Kadar,” the car carries the holiday earned after a year of work. “Hani Bana Para” establishes a direct demand for material recognition. “Araba Yok” records the car’s transformation into a measure of mobility and prestige. Cartel’s declaration of being “number one” voices a public value rising from below. Islamic Force’s “Para” and “Kreuzberg” combine material recognition with neighborhood identity. Killa Hakan’s repertoire of the district, respect, and the criminal economy carries this line into later generations.

“Panamera Flow” is the concentrated scene of this counter-diploma. After describing a black TechArt Panamera, Shindy sends an obscene greeting to his mathematics teacher. Within a few lines, he places his grandfather arriving with two suitcases, the millionaire grandchild, new Nike Air shoes, and the end of the night shift within the same scene of ascent. The mathematics teacher evaluates through numbers; Shindy presents a different total. The grandfather’s two suitcases, the family’s night shift, the grandchild’s millions, the market value of the car, and the school’s prediction meet within the same calculation.

The two suitcases carry the plan of temporariness, the workers’ hostel, the factory, the shift, the thought of returning to Turkey, and the money saved. The Panamera carries permanence, freedom of movement, private space, a claim over the city, and the public magnitude of the worker’s grandchild. The class distance between grandfather and grandchild becomes visible in the car’s body.

After the new Nike Airs, the end of the night shift is proclaimed. The night shift is a broad generational time rather than an individual employment preference. The grandfather sells his time to industry. The grandchild gains money and visibility through music. The shift is severed in the family’s generational history. For the same reason, the Rolex and Panamera carry a meaning broader than the display of wealth: departure from workers’ time.

The woman in the passenger seat is placed in the same display of success as the car and clothing. The expensive vehicle, expensive clothing, sexual access, and intimidating male body converge within the same scene of social advancement. The invisible labor of the grandfather and mother makes the car possible; the woman in the rap scene is turned into an accessory of male success. The culture of counter-prestige carries historical power and patriarchal authority in the same verse.

Aziza A and EsRAP establish the female subject against this display. They give a bilingual answer to male authority within the neighborhood. They reveal the tension between the subculture’s revolt against German authority and its own patriarchal order. The first-generation woman’s labor in textiles, hotels, schools, nurseries, and cleaning meets the image of the woman in the gangsta display within the same historical scene.

This culture is transmitted across generations through family history, material position, a repertoire of behavior, and a cultural archive. The workers’ hostel, the shift, the landlord’s refusal, and the dream of return establish family memory. The same neighborhood, lower school track, and restricted employment network carry the material position. Hardness, refusal to retreat, protection of the family, the demand for respect, and the magnification of visibility constitute the behavioral repertoire. Cartel, Killa Hakan, the 36 Boys, neighborhood names, the car, clothing codes, and rap songs form the cultural archive.

The “collective unconscious” is the combination of these four channels of transmission. The memory of humiliation passed through the family, inherited class position, repeated discrimination, and ready-made symbols of defense and success produce the same field of behavior. Even when the grandchild knows every detail of the grandfather’s experiences, the family’s guard and language of success continue to live in everyday life.

In Turkey, the holiday moment replaces the entire year. Rent, taxation, shifts, debt, and the working year in Europe are pushed out of frame. The lira’s loss of value and the wage crisis are personalized in the European-plated car. Housing and car prices are blamed on diaspora investment. The consumption of local wealth is treated as taste and success, while diaspora wealth is treated as vulgarity.

The German product becomes a symbol of high quality; the German-Turk body carrying the same product is treated as low culture. The diaspora Turk is simultaneously constructed as a “toilet cleaner” doing low-status work in Europe and as a privileged euro-rich person in Turkey. Sending money is treated as fulfilling a duty. Spending it produces an accusation of showing off. Investment makes the person responsible for rising prices. Directing investment elsewhere makes the person useless to the homeland. Structural economic crisis is personalized in the visible minority’s car.

The grandfather sold his time on the shift. The grandchild claimed time with a Rolex. The Porsche declared in the middle of the street the promotion certificate that school had withheld.

The Skinhead Back Home

In summer, images from border crossings establish the annual stage of hostility toward the diaspora. Expressions such as “the German Turks are here again,” “the influx has begun,” “they have filled the place again,” “keep the diaspora Turks out,” “seasonal patriots,” and “the toilet cleaners are coming” turn human movement into an image of invasion. In the summer of 2025, the same language was reproduced beneath a post announcing the entry of 6,192 vehicles within sixteen hours. Comments waiting for reports of accidents on the return journey placed the desire for disaster inside humor.

Inside those vehicles are people traveling for family visits, cemetery visits, weddings, visits to the sick, and the desire to show their children the environment of their origins. The frame of “influx” reduces people to a number of vehicles. The German skinhead’s slogan “Ausländer raus” and the words “keep the diaspora Turks out” back home rest upon the same assumption of territorial ownership. “Deutschland den Deutschen” and “a real Turk lives in Turkey” make citizenship dependent on approval from the majority.

Money establishes this mindset’s most visible contradiction. During the 1970s, the Turkish state drew workers’ savings into the country through special foreign-currency accounts. Worker remittances were used for foreign trade and foreign-currency needs. In 2016, the diaspora was called upon to send money in response to economic crisis. Proposals were developed to charge the same people hundreds of euros to enter the country. A thread titled “charging diaspora Turks an entry fee” was opened on Ekşi Sözlük. Erol Mütercimler advocated abolishing overseas voting rights and charging an entry fee to those arriving in the country. Fatih Altaylı proposed tying political participation to an annual tax requirement.

The common verdict of these proposals is clear: the diaspora Turk is valuable as a financial resource and subject to conditions as an equal owner of the country. The person is graded through voting, residence, taxation, and political preference. Citizenship is turned into a temporary license issued by the majority. The diaspora Turk’s money is treated as belonging to the country; the diaspora Turk’s words are presented as foreign interference.

The word “toilet cleaner” is a concentrated expression of class sadism. Cleaning, mining, refuse collection, assembly-line production, and night shifts are turned into material for insult. The lower class constructed by the German division of labor is belittled again in Turkey. The diaspora Turk is called ignorant when poor and vulgar after rising. Peasant and working-class origins are demeaned by metropolitan, center-oriented culture. The narrative “they used to be peasants, workers, and ignorant; now they have money but remain uncultured” prevents economic class mobility from becoming cultural equality.

The test of the “real Turk” turns every possible response into a field of guilt. The diaspora Turk who praises Turkey is told to “return.” The one who criticizes Turkey is declared ungrateful. The person who regards Germany as home is accused of assimilation. The person who strongly carries Turkish identity is called a nationalist from afar. The person who comes to Turkey becomes a seasonal patriot. The one who stays away is said to have forgotten the homeland. The Turkish speaker’s accent is mocked. The use of a German word is treated as evidence that Turkish has been lost.

Belonging to two places at once disrupts the order of cultural purity. The German skinhead says a passport does not confer German membership. The skinhead back home finds the Turkish passport insufficient and establishes new tests through residence, accent, political preference, and clothing. The third generation born in Germany is excluded from German membership; upon arriving in Turkey, its Turkish membership is questioned.

Language policing is the everyday arm of this examination. German-Turk Turkish is turned into an object of comedy. Examples of accent and mixed vocabulary are collected for years on Ekşi Sözlük. Code-switching, word searching, and distinct intonation are presented as intellectual defects. In Germany, a trace of Turkish is treated as a sign of failed integration; in Turkey, a trace of German is treated as a sign of cultural corruption. In both countries, the diaspora is forced to erase the sound of its lived life from its language.

Popular representation carries this caricature to millions. The character İmdat Amca in Gülse Birsel’s Avrupa Yakası combines accent, exaggerated gestures, a coarse voice, comical German, misinformation, extreme nationalism, and a display of masculinity within the same German-Turk type. A local character’s ignorance remains an individual trait, while the diaspora character’s ignorance becomes a specimen representing the entire group.

The character Şahin in Seksenler, created by Birol Güven with Murat Aras and Eray Yasin Işık on the writing team, reduces the diaspora Turk from a historical subject of migration to several codes of speech and behavior. Diversity extending to the fourth generation is presented through a fossilized stereotype from the 1960s.

In Uğraş Güneş’s Ulan İstanbul, the character Maşuka, directed by Murat Onbul, separates the diaspora woman from her history of class and migration. Accent, gesture, and appearance are converted into signs of comical foreignness. Being a German Turk becomes costume and performance. The diaspora woman’s makeup, clothing, body, and Turkish become ready-made surfaces for ridicule on social media.

The character Abidin in Acil Aşk Aranıyor, created by Gökhan Horzum, written by a team including Cihan Çalışkantürk and Emine Yeşim Aslan, and directed by Hakan İnan, combines the German-Turk mode of speech with comic incompatibility, exaggerated behavior, and cultural strangeness. The diaspora Turk is reproduced as uneducated, ridiculous, belated, crude, and strangely spoken.

Menekşe ile Halil represents the family of Turkish origin in Germany through forced marriage, confinement, violence, and murder. The problem of the patriarchal family is expanded as though it were the natural structure of the entire diaspora family. Discrimination in German society is pushed into the background, and the diaspora is presented as a community that chose to retreat into its own patriarchy. The language of women’s rights becomes a vehicle for cultural generalization.

The common function of these characters is to make one person a specimen for millions. The most provocative street interview is used on behalf of the entire diaspora. Statements such as “Turkey is paradise,” “Germany is finished,” “there are no poor people here,” and “be grateful” are turned into a collective character certificate that erases differences of class, generation, country, and political milieu. A local person’s crude behavior is individual; a diaspora person’s crude behavior is treated as group character.

The climate of identity-based hostility on Turkish-language Twitter provides a ready circulation space for this generalization. A study by the Hrant Dink Foundation identifying 1,124 examples of hateful or discriminatory discourse among 2,395 tweets demonstrates a wider ground of hostility rather than a measurement specific to the diaspora. Within this ground, one video, one accent, and one car become evidence concerning an entire population.

The language of dirt and civilization carries economic resentment into biological and cultural classification. The diaspora Turk is constructed as noisy, disruptive to traffic, littering, badly dressed, carrying viruses, disturbing the urban order, and showing off in a luxury car. The language of biological threat joined this repertoire during the pandemic. A grammar of contamination related to the German far right’s notion of Überfremdung emerged: “We are civilized and measured; they are crude and excessive.”

This hierarchy creates a striking distinction between German goods and the German-Turk body. The car, watch, and shoes are treated as signs of German quality. The German Turk carrying the same objects becomes a symbol of low culture. The product’s prestige is preserved, while the worker’s grandchild’s prestige is diminished.

The wish for death is normalized within humor. Words anticipating reports of accidents on the return journey turn harm to the targeted group into collective entertainment. The sentences “What are they doing here?” and “the problem will be solved when they leave” create an emotional preparation that lowers human value before open physical violence. The selection performed by the skinhead abroad in the street becomes a wish for disaster in the language back home.

The debate over voting rights is the legal face of this mindset. The political choices of citizens abroad can be criticized; removing the entire population’s voting rights through residence, taxation, and preference produces first- and second-class citizenship. The diaspora electorate is presented as a single political will. Differences of country, generation, class, and political milieu are erased. Right-wing and left-wing circles turn the same diaspora population into a political object for different reasons.

Open resentment and polite curtailment of rights reach the same result: tying a person’s citizenship to approval from the majority. The skinhead abroad says, “A passport does not make you German.” The commentator back home says, “A passport does not give you the right to decide about Turkey.” The two sentences converge within the same mindset.

Cultural gatekeeping forms the refined face of this membership regime. Aras Özgün turns the language of defense into a diagnosis of fascism. Cem Kaya shortens the history of conflict through dramaturgy. Muhammed Said Tuğcu records the success of the editing while pushing the difference in historical weight into the background. Özgür Kaya explains political speech as psychological masking. İmran Ayata subjects anti-fascism to suspicion as a market strategy. Tunçay Kulaoğlu condemns neighborhood rap through the expressions “freak of nature” and “blind Turkish identity.” Tunca Arıcan constructs a moral hierarchy between an acceptable Islamic Force and an objectionable Cartel. Patron/Ege Erkurt produces a progress narrative in which the diaspora accent and fascist attitude improved over time. 17°C circulates the verdict of a proto-fascist male club.

These figures occupy different political positions. The common operation consists of placing the diaspora’s own explanation beneath external commentary. The difference in power between attacker and defender is dissolved within hard imagery. The minority sign in Germany is equated with the majority sign in Turkey. Nationalist appropriation is treated as the artist’s essence. The alliance of Turkish, Kurdish, Laz, Circassian, German, and other origins is converted into homogeneous Turkish nationalism. Racist violence remains in archival footage; the organization it produced is transferred into a cultural criminal file.

The open nationalist back home annexes Cartel to a national cause. The anti-nationalist gatekeeper back home expels the group from the gatekeeper’s moral territory. The first circle erases the words “from Germany.” The second turns the word “Turkish” into a suspect. Both circles close the independent social position of the Turkish subject from Germany.

The skinhead abroad expels the body. The skinhead back home prunes the name, accent, voting rights, class memory, and authority to tell one’s own story.

Two Countries, One Yardstick

The first generation carried the factory, dormitory, remittance, migrant song, and dream of return. The second generation built the street, conflict at school, the skinhead threat, the boxing gym, the crew, the youth center, rap, and collective identity. The third generation grew up within brands, cars, watches, weddings, holiday routes, social media, neighborhood loyalty, and heightened visibility.

This transmission contains stories of humiliation told within the family, a class position remaining in the same neighborhood, discrimination based on names and accents, memory of skinhead attacks, the history of women’s invisible labor, the common enemy transmitted through songs, the guard learned in the neighborhood, success coded through the car, and the experience of being cast out again in Turkey as a German Turk. Cultural control over a person’s right to tell their own history also becomes part of generational memory.

The skinhead abroad and the skinhead back home use different instruments. One advances through physical assault, arson, and street terror. The other works through mockery of accents, class insults, curtailment of voting rights, media caricature, and cultural condemnation. The instruments change; the measure of membership remains the same. Both sides condition equal membership on the human being entering their prescribed form.

Germany called this person a worker, foreigner, and suspect. Turkey called the same person a German Turk, toilet cleaner, and vulgar. Two countries pushed the same body downward through different words. The neighborhood gave that body a guard, boxing gave it distance, and rap gave it a voice. The Porsche broke through the boundary of the neighborhood that had confined it. The Rolex seized time measured by others. The skinhead back home who calls the child beaten by skinheads vulgar carries the attacker’s class yardstick in hand.