A life-time of discrimination and disrespect

Yesterday I had a long chat with a Turkish migrant about how he had been discriminated against by Germans over the 33 years he’s been living in Berlin.  For all this talk about Turks and Germans living in parallel worlds, it was a disheartening reminder that worlds do collide and sometimes it’s not very pretty.

Osman (not his real name) is fifty years old, has three children, and worked most of the last three decades as a truck driver running international routes across Europe.  He was proud to be from Istanbul and distinguished himself from Anatolian Turks.

Osman knew I was interested in hearing his stories, but he still apologized frequently during our 2-hour talk.

“I’m really sorry for troubling you with all this,” he said.  “It’s just that I’ve had it up to here and the only guys I talk to are the people in this place.”  (We were in the teahouse of a DITIB mosque.)

There were times when I wondered why I was still sitting there when I had only swung by to ask the imam a question and still had other errands to run.  But I realized that after two months in Berlin I hadn’t heard anything about discrimination.  Sure, I speculated about it when I wrote on education, but it was rare to hear nitty-gritty details.

Examples

Here are a few of the stories that Osman told me:

His most straightforward example was of responding to a help-wanted ad by phone.  Everything was going fine until the employer asked him what nationality he was.  When he said he was a Turk, the guy hung up.

He was stabbed in the chest (he showed me the scar) by a German who told the police that the only reason he did it was because Osman was a Turk.

Osman was hired as the first Turk on a work crew of 9 Germans at a worksite near the new main train station in Berlin.  Over time, ten more Turks came and, no surprise, they started hanging out on breaks and speaking Turkish together.  One of the German workers complained to the boss about this and the boss approached Osman.  Osman said to him, “Fine, we won’t speak Turkish.  We’ll just wear armbands, like the Jews did, that say “Turk” on them.  No problem.”  The boss got really embarrassed and dropped the subject.

Osman has three children.  When the oldest boy was six years old, he started at a German school.  Six months later, he told his dad that he was stupid, because that’s what the teacher had told him.  Osman didn’t take this lying down.  He had his son examined by a school psychologist who concluded that the boy didn’t belong in first grade, but rather had the capacity to be in second grade.  Osman said he didn’t know whether to strangle the teacher, beat his kid, or hang himself.  What he did was send his son to Turkey to go to school.  He did the same thing with one of his daughters.  The other daughter who studied in Germany got some of the highest grades in her class, but no recognition for it like other non-Turkish students.

Love it or leave it?

I think if Osman could start getting his pension and continue receiving it in Turkey he would take off in a second.  After paying in taxes for 33 years you don’t just get up and leave that money behind.  But he’s still got two years to go.

Osman said he didn’t want me to misunderstand him; it’s not like Germany is all bad.  He told me a story that comes from the life of the Prophet Muhammad to illustrate.

One day, the Prophet and his followers came across the rotting carcass of a dog.  All of the followers complained about the horrible smell and disgusting sight of the carcass, but Muhammad said, “Look at how white its teeth are.”

Germany as rotting carcass.  Wow.

Integration

Osman previously held a leadership position at the mosque and once went to a roundtable meeting with government representatives from the Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain district of Berlin.  One of the subjects discussed was integration.

At the meeting he said, “Just show me a list of criteria for integration.  A list that, when all the items are checked off, you could say, okay, this person is integrated.”

They said they didn’t really know what integration means either…and he got furious.

“You’re telling us we have to do something that you don’t even understand!”

His conclusion was that Germans want all the Turks to go back to Turkey or to assimilate, not integrate, into German society.  At least this is the case now that the German economy isn’t so hot.  Now that you have unemployed Turks around, they’ve become the problem.

All he says is that it wasn’t his decision to exchange East German money 1-to-1 even though it was worth 8-to-1 back when the wall came down.  He didn’t decide to move factories to the East or farther away to Poland or China.  Why should he, and other Turks, become the scapegoat after advancing the Germany economy for over 30 years?

Is it any surprise that he and his children were happy when Germany lost the World Cup?

His wife was happy, too, but what might leave you scratching your head is that she’s German.