Cologne, Bonn, and Essen

My trip to Cologne last week went well.  Even though many DITIB workers were away on holiday I managed to interview DITIB’s general secretary, Mehmet Yildirim, and DITIB’s director of interfaith dialogue, Bekir Alboga.  I also met again briefly with Ridvan Cakir, DITIB’s outgoing president.  Although everyone was super busy and only had 3-days notice of my visit, they were generous with their time.

The facilities at DITIB’s headquarters in Cologne were quite impressive.  There were classrooms, a youth center, a library, a market, quite a bit of office space, and of course a mosque.  I never saw anything like it in Berlin, which probably has a lot to do with Berlin being located in former East Germany.  Another reason might be that when you combine all the towns and cities in North Rhein-Westphalia, the state that includes Cologne, Bonn, Dusseldorf, etc., there are more Turkish migrants living there than in Berlin.

There were architectural drawings on the wall of the main building showing designs for a new complex that will replace everything I saw during my visit.  If I ever visit again chances are I won’t recognize the place.

Bonn & Essen

On Monday night I took a train over to Bonn to meet with New York Sun journalist Daniela Gerson.  She’s been covering immigration issues in the U.S. and recently came to Germany on a Humboldt fellowship to write on similar topics here.  She has a great idea for a story on illegal immigration that I’ll be sure to point you to when it’s published.

My other trip outside of Cologne was to the Foundation Center for Studies on Turkey located in Essen.  The Center was also in European holiday mode, meaning hardly anyone was there, but I still managed to chat with Dirk Halm, who has written widely on Turkish migration in Germany.  Unfortunately the datasets from the telephone surveys I mentioned early aren’t publicly available and may never be, so I came back to Cologne empty handed.  It was still good to see the place and meet a couple folks studying Turkish migrants.

Cem Again

Just to underscore that I wasn’t making up the “I thought you were a Turk…” story, I had two similar experiences on my trip last week.  First, the person who let me into the Center in Essen thought I said my name was Cem, and when I didn’t know the meaning of one of the words he used, he asked me how I could forget my Turkish in the U.S.

Second, I had been chatting with one of the office workers at DITIB for about 10 minutes when he asked if I still had family back in Turkey.  He didn’t mean Pinar’s family; he was asking about all those long-lost Gibbon ancestors from the plains of Anatolia.