German home - happiness alone. How Turks see Germans
German home - happiness alone. As Turks Germans see is a German-language text collection by Dursun Akçam . The much-cited book, published by Lamuv in Göttingen in 1982 , contains voices from Turks living in Germany in the early 1980s on their image of the Germans after twenty years of labor migration from Turkey to the FRG . Mainly workers but also members of other groups of people, for example students or doctors, have a say.
The texts of the book are printed in both German and Turkish. The work comprises 285 pages in its first edition.
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The descriptions of the workers sometimes anticipate the results of Wallraff's research Ganz unten (1984), for example when a worker thinks “in the classification of workers, German workers take first place. Then come the Greeks, Italians, Yugoslavs and Spaniards. The Turks stand on the lowest step. The hardest and most dangerous jobs are for us. ", But paint a more differentiated picture than the well-known bestseller because of their polyphony:" In every country, in every state there are good and bad people. (The Germans) didn't do me any harm. The Germans are like a picture to me. I see it, it moves and speaks, ”says another worker. Voices of intellectuals complete the presentation: a Turkish doctor working in Germany sharply criticizes, among other things, that the German image of the Turks has meanwhile been shaped primarily by the guest workers who immigrated from rural areas , with whom he himself cannot get along, and finds hardly any conciliatory words for his compatriots: "Everywhere I look, I sink into the ground and am ashamed to be a Turk."
Mark Terkessidis sees similarities in the tone of the texts, which were often quoted in works on migration research , to the later published Kanak Sprak - 24 discordant tones from the edge of society (1995) by Feridun Zaimoglu :
“(…) One (…) attitude of the Germans cannot be understood. They do everything they can to keep the Turks away and then complain that 'the Turks don't want to integrate '. "
“I've been working in this country for 14 years. I tried hard. But I have not found access to this society. I didn't get warm with these people. The more I toiled, the more likely I was to be thrown away like a squeezed lemon. I have always felt like an unpleasant slave, like an extra, being pushed off the stage. This society does not accept the Turks, the people, our people. I realized this fact very late. "
"Dear Sir, do not listen to the talk of the" xenophobia of Germans ". This country has been invaded by foreigners. Gangs of robbers have messed up the way of life of the German people. Nevertheless, with great tolerance they distributed work and bread that foreigners want to help foreigners to make a living. However, the predators consider those who have their stomachs filled, the people who feed them, enemies. This enmity is the enmity of primitiveness against civilization. What is the German people's fault? Is it that they have science, art, culture and advanced technology? "
The contemporary blurb advertised the work with the words “The Turks who live in the BR have something to say: They have pains, sympathies and longings! So what do the people think who have been the target of attacks for years, how do they rate the society in which they live and the German people? "