Placing Identities: Transnational
Practices and Local Attachments of
Turkish Immigrants in Germany
Patricia Ehrkamp
This paper examines the ways that Turkish immigrants create places of belonging in a
German city. I suggest that transnational ties enable immigrants to forge local
attachments through the production of place. Drawing on a neighbourhood case-study
of DuisburgÁ/Marxloh, I show how immigrants’ transnational ties and practices visibly
transform their current place of residence through transnational consumption, mass
media, and the establishment of communal places such as mosques and teahouses that
also contribute to conflicts between groups. Their placing of identities also forms an
engagement with the receiving society, as immigrants are actively carving out belonging
in the face of often hostile attitudes from German residents. Viewing immigrants’
attachments from the perspective of places they create teases out the complexities of
multiple and sometimes conflicting attachments of contemporary migrants, and allows
for an understanding of transnational ties and engagement with the host society as
complementary rather than contradictory.
Keywords: Turkish Immigrants; Germany; Place Identity; Transnational Belonging
Introduction
The permanent settlement of former Turkish guestworkers in Germany has brought
about changes to Germany’s social and cultural landscapes, but has also involved
alterations of urban landscapes. Turkish cultural institutions, mosques, teahouses,
restaurants, businesses and women wearing headscarves have become integral
elements of German cities. Earlier plans and wishes of first-generation immigrants
to return to their home country have faded as their children and grandchildren grew
up in Germany and decided to stay. Changing saving and consumption patterns
Patricia Ehrkamp is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Miami University, Ohio.
Correspondence to: Department of Geography, 216 Shideler Hall, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056, USA.
E-mail: ehrkamp@muohio.edu
ISSN 1369-183X print/ISSN 1469-9451 online/05/020345-20 # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1369183042000339963
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Vol. 31, No. 2, March 2005, pp. 345Á/364
reflect these decisions. Instead of investing in Turkey and their hometowns, Turkish
immigrants are building houses, opening businesses and acquiring real estate in
Germany. They are establishing communities and changing neighbourhoods in
German cities.
At the same time, Turkish immigrants1
also maintain close ties with their home
country, and/or the places where they used to live, leading to the ‘transnationalisation
of spaces’ in German cities (C¸ ag˘lar 2001). Turkish mass media are widely available,
and most Turkish residents maintain familial ties to Turkey. The activities of
numerous Turkish and Kurdish political groups in Germany show how much
immigrants are involved in politics in Turkey, and in transnational political activities
(Østergaard-Nielsen 2000). Large numbers of travel agencies specialising in travel to
Turkey highlight the fact that Turkish immigrants are actively creating ties to Turkey,
albeit not necessarily to their actual places of origin. Travel patterns of Turkish
immigrants are changing as immigrants spend less time in their hometowns and
travel instead to coastal tourist destinations (Ehrkamp 2002), demonstrating that the
ways that immigrants enact ties to Turkey are neither fixed nor static.
Political activities, the presence of mosques, women wearing headscarves, and
other ‘traditional Turkish behavior’ (White 1998) are in the daily news. Transnational
practices and the influence of Islam on Turkish youth in particular seem threatening
(Heitmeyer 1997). Discourses about Turkish immigrants and their neighbourhoods
often portray transnational ties and visible markers of a Turkish presence in the
landscape of German cities as expressions of immigrants’ refusal to assimilate to
German society (C¸ ag˘lar 2001).
Similarly, the conceptual literature on transnationalism is far from reconciling
recent conceptualisations of transnational migration and transnational communities
with questions of immigrant incorporation or assimilation (Kivisto 2003; Nagel
2001). Scholars often emphasise dichotomies between transnational and local levels,
arguing that transnational ties may prevent assimilation; they seem to suggest that the
local and the transnational are mutually exclusive, or that identities are deterritorialised
(Appadurai 1996; Smith 2001). Campbell (1996) notes that everyday
life itself becomes transnational, but the question of how transnational ties and
practices influence immigrants’ local lives and identities in relation to the receiving
society has not yet received much attention.
In this paper, I propose that transnational ties and practices enable immigrants to
transform their current places of residence by ‘placing’ their identities, that is, by
inserting their belonging into neighbourhoods in Germany and creating local ties.
In what follows I begin with a discussion of the complexities of immigrants’
transnational ties and multiple belongings. I propose that the geographic concept of
place allows for an understanding of how immigrants’ transnational practices create
new places of belonging that allow them to engage the receiving society on their own
terms. This is followed by a brief introduction of the study neighbourhood and the
research methods. Drawing on a neighbourhood case-study of DuisburgÁ/ Marxloh in
Germany, I show in the final section of this paper how immigrants’ transnational
346 P. Ehrkamp
practices that visibly transform the material space of a neighbourhood need to be
understood as immigrants’ engagement with the receiving society.
Complex Belongings and (Multiple) Places of Attachment
With the acceleration of globalisation and migration, transnational contacts and
practices contribute heavily to constructions of immigrants’ identities, leading some
scholars to even question the notion of ‘immigration’2
(Glick Schiller and Basch
1995). Research on transnationalism finds that immigrants are increasingly able to
maintain and forge new relationships with their home country (see for example Glick
Schiller et al. 1992; Kivisto 2001; Vertovec 2001). By maintaining multiple ties to
their countries of origin, immigrants create new transnational social and cultural
spaces for themselves (Faist 2000); ‘transnational communities’ may emerge
(Kennedy and Roudometof 2001). Many immigrants in Europe remain citizens of
their country of origin (Baubo¨ck 1994), but beyond formal citizenship immigrants
engage multiple public spheres across national borders in their social practices
(Ehrkamp and Leitner 2003).
Immigrants increasingly construct identities that ‘cut across fixed notions of
belonging’ (Dwyer 2000: 475). To capture attachments and identifications that span
across borders, scholars have resorted to describing transnational identities as
diasporic (Anthias 1998, 2001; Cohen 1997). Others theorise the dispersal of migrants
across the world as ‘ethnoscapes’ that allow for new forms of identification and start
to replace nation-states as geographical areas of identification, arguing that identities
and belonging become increasingly de-territorialised (Appadurai 1996).
New mass media such as satellite TV are instrumental in fostering newly emerging
cultural identities (Aksoy and Robins 1997), and provide migrants with sources of
identification that stretch beyond the national and local contexts of their old and new
homes (Becker 1996). Mass media, in particular, may contribute to the creation of
‘virtual neighbourhoods’ (Appadurai 1996). TV as source of identity and information
is important for Turkish expatriates, as Aksoy and Robins (2000, 2002) show for
Great Britain, problematising the ‘banal transnationalism’ of watching TV as often
frustrating for immigrants who become passive recipients rather than being actively
engaged in processes and events in Turkey.
While scholars insist that concepts of diaspora or transnationalism move beyond
simplistic notions of ethnicity as source for identity, some arguments fall back into
rather normative approaches that promote essentialised and bounded notions of
culture and identity (Anthias 1998, 2001). The transnational, often portrayed as
challenging the nation-state (Glick Schiller et al. 1992) or ethnicity as sources of
identity, more or less comes to replace these concepts. To avoid essentialising
identities and culture, other authors have promoted concepts of hybridity as the
‘third space’ between home and host society, or between ethnicity and assimilation
(Bhabha 1994; Kaya 2002). However, the concept of hybridity is clearly problematic
because it often celebrates newly emerging identities uncritically as inherently positive
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 347
and progressive (Mitchell 1997), and romanticises migrants’ identities whilst failing
to adequately consider uneven power relations (Morley 2000).
Scholars also often juxtapose transnational and local levels because relations to the
place of origin form an important component in immigrants’ everyday lives (Smith
2001; Vertovec 2001). While some argue that everyday life itself becomes transnational
rather than being singularly located at the local level (Campbell 1996), others
find that immigrants’ transnational cultural and social fields (Faist 2000) prevent
immigrants from adapting to their new places of residence, and therefore present
transnational and local ties as mutually exclusive. For example, Smith (2001) posits
that the transnational practices of some sending states, intended to foster attachment
to the home country, for example granting dual citizenship to citizens abroad,
prevent migrants from adapting or assimilating to the current place of residence.
Such dichotomies are problematic because they overly simplify complex processes
of identity construction, assimilation and adaptation. Claims that assimilation is not
even an option for contemporary migrants need to be questioned (Nagel 2001).
Instead, Kivisto (2003: 19) argues that ‘transnational immigration and assimilation/
incorporation . . . need to be seen as interrelated’. While assimilation theories may not
prove to be the most useful to analyse transnational immigrants’ adaptation, these
scholars rightly notice the necessity of considering transnational connections in the
light of immigrants’ lives in their new places of residence. What is needed is an
analytical engagement with the ways that immigrants construct their identities in
relation to their new and their old homes.
As Yeoh and Huang (2000) suggest ‘[e]ven as diasporic identity is shaped by
engagement with constant manoeuvrings to reconnect (and disconnect) with home,
it also undergoes complex negotiations as a result of interactions with the host
society’ (Yeoh and Huang 2000: 414). Similarly, Anthias (2001: 633) insists that
immigrants’ identities and belonging need to be considered as enactments that do
‘not entail fixity or permanence’. Conceptualising migrants’ identities as constantly
negotiated in relation to multiple societies and places enables us to think beyond
dichotomies and mutually exclusive notions of local and transnational ties, and to
recognise immigrants as agents who are able to forge their belonging and multiple
attachments.
The production of new places is a central theme in recent conceptualisations of
transnational migration (Guarnizo and Smith 1998; Vertovec 1999). A ‘focus on
location (and translocation), recognizes the importance of context, the situated
nature of claims and attributions and their production in complex and shifting
locales’ (Anthias 2001: 634). Hence, identities need to be understood in relation to
the ever-changing situations and contexts where they emerge. Too little attention,
however, has been paid to the ways that immigrants create such new places in their
transnational and local practices. Too often, scholars consider localities and places
only as containers for subject formation and the construction of identities. So-called
‘new places’ (Guarnizo and Smith 1998) are taken for granted as external to identities
and immigrants’ belonging.
348 P. Ehrkamp
Places, however, are neither simply containers that serve as platforms for the
construction of subject positions and identities; nor are places static. Being produced
and reproduced in social processes and relations at different scales, place lies at the
intersection of different spaces and moments in time. Objective and subjective
realities cannot be separated when analysing place because ‘place is both a center of
meaning and the external context of our actions’ (Entrikin 1991: 7). Social processes
and relations do not only create a place in a material sense, but they also produce
meaning that people attach to places, evoking a sense of place (Massey 1994). Place is
further not limited to an immediate, bounded locality. It ‘. . . serves as a constantly
re-energized repository of socially and politically relevant traditions and identity
which serves to mediate between the everyday lives of individuals . . . and the national
and supra-national institutions which constrain and enable those lives’ (Agnew and
Duncan 1989: 7). Hence, place provides the tools for considering the multiple scales
that impinge on immigrants’ lives, while simultaneously enabling us to consider the
ways in which immigrants use such ties in order to create places for themselves.
Identity construction is intricately linked to the social production of place(s)
(Nagar 1997a; Pulido 1997). Communal places in particular foster both expressions
of identities and reinforce them (Nagar 1997b; Nagar and Leitner 1998), but the
expression of identities is not limited to such communal places, nor is the process of
creating belonging. Expressions of identities also take place in public space,
occasionally leading to the transformation of entire neighbourhoods (Ehrkamp
2002).
I take issue with the notion that transnationalisation of immigrants’ lives leads to
an increasing de-territorialisation of belonging and identification, and with such
arguments that characterise transnational ties and practices as preventing immigrants
from creating belonging in the receiving society. As immigrants are negotiating their
belonging, they engage in creating places, transforming the urban landscape of
contemporary cities. Urban space therefore becomes ‘a negotiated reality’ (Anderson
1991: 28), that involves both symbolic and material expressions of local and
translocal connections that immigrants create, as well as their engagement with the
receiving society*/ as I show below.
Case-Study Neighbourhood and Research Methods
This paper draws on a neighbourhood case-study of Marxloh, a northern
neighbourhood in the city of Duisburg. Located at the confluence of the Ruhr and
Rhine rivers and with around 515,000 inhabitants, Duisburg is one of the major
urban centres in the heavy industrial Ruhr conglomeration. The city has undergone
drastic economic restructuring over the past few decades due to the decline of the
steel industries. Until the early 1990s, Marxloh was a thriving industrial neighbourhood
that housed many of the local workers from nearby steelworks and coalmines.
These industries left their imprints on Marxloh’s urban landscape in a variety of ways.
Company housing dominates the residential streets, and two blast furnaces tower
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 349
above the neighbourhood. Economic restructuring and downscaling of the regional
economy in the mid-1990s (despite new production facilities) brought thousands of
job losses in local industries, contributing to a surging unemployment rate and high
numbers of welfare recipients. Many retailers and residents have left the neighbourhood
in search of better housing and economic prospects. At the end of 2000,
Marxloh had 18,900 residents. The population has been decreasing for a number of
years while the neighbourhood’s foreign population share has been growing.3
Former
guestworkers who originally settled close to the steelmills and coalmines where they
worked (and often their children and grandchildren) did not move far away from
their initial homes. Since the 1970s, family members from Turkey have followed the
original guestworkers, and in the 1980s and 1990s asylum-seekers of the political left
and of Kurdish origin have contributed to the growth of the local immigrant
population. In 2000, residents holding a Turkish passport accounted for some 26 per
cent of the neighbourhood’s population, a rather high number for a neighbourhood
in a German city.4
Duisburg’s overall foreign population (which includes all residents
without a German passport, not just Turks), by comparison, is only about 10 per
cent, which reflects the spatial concentration of Turkish immigrants in specific
neighbourhoods.
DuisburgÁ/ Marxloh was chosen as the case-study neighbourhood because of its
high Turkish population share and the enormous diversity of the resident Turkish
population that sometimes lead to conflicts, catapulting Marxloh into the national
news in Germany. An in-depth case study of a place like Marxloh allows for
considering immigrants’ multiple and interconnected practices and attachments in
order to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities and complications of
immigrants’ negotiations with their current and past places of residence.
The ethnographic research for this study was conducted during ten months
stretching between July 1998 and June 2000. From January to June 2000 I lived in
Marxloh and was able to participate more fully in neighbourhood life as a resident,
for example through volunteering in neighbourhood institutions, attending neighbourhood
gatherings, and reciprocating interviewees’ contributions to this study by
providing homework tutoring.
Narratives in this article are those that Turkish neighbourhood residents5
produced
in 39 intensive, unstructured interviews that were tape-recorded and transcribed
verbatim. Quotes from interviews in this article are my translation. Interviewees
chose the locations for these interviews, and often invited me to conduct the
interview in their home, thus permitting insights into their home spaces and everyday
private lives. In addition, participant observation and more than 200 informal
conversations with local German and Turkish residents inform this article. Informal
conversations were not tape-recorded, but careful notes were taken during and/or
immediately after these conversations took place. The sample aimed to capture the
diversity of the local Turkish population according to such axes of difference as age,
generation, gender, class, regional origin, religious belonging and political persuasion.
350 P. Ehrkamp
Transnational Practices and Local Attachments
Approaching the question of Turkish immigrants’ identities and multiple attachments
from the perspective of the place where they live makes it possible to consider
the intricate linkages between material practices and cultural productions that shape
local neighbourhood space and enable immigrants to negotiate their multiple
belongings.
Consumption
Research on transnationalism often highlights the importance of consumption for
new cultural production, for example TV and music (see Aksoy and Robins 2000;
Kaya 2002), but the impacts of such consumption on material space and on
immigrants’ relationship with the receiving society are usually neglected.
In Marxloh, transnational consumption is highly visible in the urban landscape
through store signs and shop fronts. Marxloh’s two main shopping streets convey the
impression of a well-established Turkish economy that offers a variety of stores and
services. Marxloh’s Turkish residents have been taking advantage of the large number
of empty stores in Marxloh to start their own businesses. Many of them have opened
fast-food restaurants that serve simple meals (Do¨ner Kebab) or greengroceries.
Specialised businesses are importing jewellery, textiles and clothes, music CDs and
videos, as well as household goods and satellite dishes from Turkey. A number of
specialised Turkish physicians practice in Marxloh, allowing local residents to visit
medical experts who speak Turkish. Two financial consulting agencies and lawyers of
Turkish origin are present as well, and many of these services and businesses attract
clients and customers from the entire northern part of the Ruhr region. Marxloh thus
has grown into a regional Turkish centre that not only serves the local residents.
Turkish businesses provide a way for immigrants to maintain lifestyles that they or
their families were either familiar with in Turkey or grew accustomed to in Germany.
The success of local businesses that sell such mundane goods as yarn or teapots
demonstrates the close links between economic and cultural practices. How
important such mundane aspects are to immigrants from Turkey is shown by the
example of three women who drove more than 30 km to Marxloh in order to buy a
specific type of water kettle. The owner of the store shrugged his shoulders and said
They want that particular kind of kettle. That’s what they’ve known forever, and
that’s what they stick with. I don’t think they can get it where they live, so they
come here. See, all the stuff I sell [pointing to the shelves], that comes from Turkey.
Yarn, cups, glasses, tablecloths, coffee-makers, even coffee . . . (Mehmet, conversation,
August 1999).
Mehmet’s assortment of goods imported from Turkey is geared towards the needs
and wants of his customers who appreciate these products because they create
familiarity and comfort in the most mundane aspects of everyday life such as
housekeeping and cooking.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 351
Cultural commodities in particular contribute to the economic success of some
local Turkish stores. Mehmet inherited his store from his father who had started an
import business in the 1980s. He described how his father became successful as a
retailer.
You know, the videos of Turkish movies, like the old ones that I have [in the back
room of the store], that’s why my dad was so successful with the store. He saw the
opportunity in the 80s, and went for it. People couldn’t watch any Turkish shows
on TV then, and they wanted to see what was going on in Turkey, all the movies
that were playing there. That’s how he made his money. Now it’s changed. I sell the
satellite decoders [and dishes] (Mehmet, conversation, July 1998).
Movies, music, as well as satellite TV enable their customers to keep up with current
events and developments in Turkey. Mehmet’s family’s business success has been built
on importing goods from Turkey that local residents were looking for, thus bringing
fragments of Turkey to Marxloh, one at a time. The presence of a store that has
specialised exclusively on importing Turkish music CDs further speaks to the great
demand for such pieces of Turkey. Mehmet’s story also shows that important changes
are taking place over time as technologies and demand change, which clearly
demonstrates that ties to Turkey are constantly (re)negotiated rather than fixed.
But shopping in Turkish stores is not just about transnational ties and the
consumption of Turkish goods. Even in immigrants’ descriptions of their everyday
shopping habits their engagement with the local German population becomes
obvious. Most (Turkish) interviewees bought all fresh produce and specific foods
such as yoghurt, cheese and olives exclusively in Turkish stores or from the Turkish
farmers’ market on Saturdays. Like many other interviewees who referred to local
German residents when describing their shopping habits, Orhan reasoned:
It’s cheaper. And they have everything we need. Plus, you get really good produce,
ripe tomatoes, not that Holland stuff, it’s so much better than what you get in the
supermarket. I often go to the [farmers’] market and buy a large crate full of
tomatoes, and then I give a couple of kilos to my parents, to my brothers, and then
that’s a really good deal. I don’t understand why the Germans don’t do that (Orhan,
32, interview, March 2000).
For him not only do Turkish stores offer produce that immigrants like to consume,
but it is also economically more sound to buy there since they can purchase goods in
bulk. In turn, he rationalises his shopping habits to depict German residents as not
very rational because they do not take advantage of such opportunities to save
money.
For Ferdane, a 31-year-old educator, it was no wonder that Turkish immigrants
preferred to shop in Turkish stores. She pointed out that German stores ignored their
Turkish customers:
None of the big chain stores carries any goods that we [Turks] like. I don’t get it.
There are so many immigrants here, wouldn’t that make sense? They don’t adapt to
352 P. Ehrkamp
new customers. I asked in Aldi [discount grocery store], and they just said they
don’t do that (Ferdane, 31, interview, August 1999).
For her, the chain stores’ refusal proves that Germans ignore the needs of immigrants,
and their unwillingness to acknowledge that the neighbourhood is changing. Her
reference to German stores shows that Turkish immigrants are not simply looking to
Turkey for goods, and that they are not just constructing their identities in relation to
Turkey. They also refer to local German residents, which demonstrates that
transnational practices such as the consumption of Turkish goods are only one
aspect of the ways in which Turkish immigrants in Germany negotiate their everyday
lives and identities in relation to German society and the local neighbourhood.
This is not to say that such belonging is free of conflict or creating a homogeneous
community. Rather, immigrants negotiate multiple local and transnational attachments.
This becomes particularly obvious in their establishment of communal places,
which I discuss in the next two sections.
Complicating Belonging: Faith-Based Communities
Turkish immigrants’ involvement in communities of faith and their perceptions of
other religious communities form some of the most clearly uniting and dividing
factors in the construction of identities. Such communities are instrumental in
establishing belonging in Marxloh and creating local attachments.
A variety of religious communities maintain mosques and other places of worship.6
The local religious communities differ both in their interpretations of the Sunni faith,
identities and practices, and in their organisation. Some are independent and local
Moscheevereine (mosque associations), while others are linked to national German
umbrella organisations and/or are part of transnational organisations that the
Turkish Ministry for Religious Affairs maintains for its citizens abroad.7
Although some local religious communities maintain strong transnational
connections, belonging to the communities is not simply transplanted from Turkey.
Membership in a particular local community depends on a number of aspects, as
Hanife elaborates:
P: Why is it that people go to a particular mosque? Is this still something from
Turkey?
H: No, no, it’s because of interpretations. . . . One is more strict about enforcing the
rules/commandments, and then you think, yes, that’s a good fit, I think like they do,
so that will work for me. And then that’s where I go. . . . That’s how the different
mosques and the different communities come about (Hanife, interview, August
1999).
Hanife chose her community because it strictly follows and enforces the rules of the
Koran, which she prefers to other communities, but she emphasises that all the local
mosque communities are essentially interpreting the Sunni faith.
Most often, immigrants establish their ties to the mosque through their families:
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 353
P: Which mosque do you go to?
O: Pollmann, Diyanet. Because, my father used to go to Pollmann, and my uncle
goes. . . . It just turned out that way, that we became here, um, members. And I’ve
gone there ever since (Osman, interview, April 2000).
Belonging to a particular mosque community is thus in part a way of connecting with
other family members. Families actively construct such connections over several
generations. Hanife, for example, was trying to bind her children to her mosque.
At the time of the interview her youngest son was only six years old, but had been
attending Koran school for a while already:
My son, he’s been going to the mosque for one year, but not regularly for that year.
He’s still too young for the mosque . . . even if he doesn’t really learn anything.
[I send him there so] that he gets the feeling that, um, that we are Muslims, and
that ‘this is where I belong!’ (Hanife, interview, August 1999).
Hanife underscores the centrality of the mosque and its religious community for
evoking in her son a sense of belonging that is not necessarily rooted in ties to Turkey.
Instead, Hanife actively engages in shaping her son’s identity and self-confidence as a
Muslim in the local mosque.
Belonging and religious practice are often complicated by the organisational
structure of mosque associations. While the mosque associations themselves are not
necessarily transplanted from Turkey, their spiritual leader, the hoc¸a, often is. He
comes to Germany for a limited number of years, which poses particular problems
for some members of local communities because the hoc¸a lacks insights into life in
Germany. When local Turkish immigrants ask for guidance in questions of everyday
life and raising children in Germany, the hoc¸a does not know enough about the
circumstances of immigrants’ local lives, and thus is not always able to provide
members of the community with the guidance that they need.
Religious communities and the communal places they maintain are important
aspects of placing Turkish identities in Marxloh. They contribute to religious
identification, and they allow immigrants to feel a sense of belonging in the
neighbourhood although religious leaders are not necessarily bound to or involved in
the local place. Difficulties arising from the transnational organisational structure of
religious communities thus highlight the complexities of immigrants’ negotiations
and practices beyond simple dichotomies of transnational and local ties. Religious
practice, while sometimes connected to Turkey through institutional structures, is
about expressing identities locally and creating local belonging to a community that
is neither limited to national boundaries nor entirely fixed to a locally bounded place.
Teahouses
Some 25 teahouses further define and divide Marxloh’s landscape of communal
places. As ‘an extension of people’s living rooms at home’ (Osman, interview, April
2000), teahouses in Marxloh are important spaces for socialising and conversations.
354 P. Ehrkamp
They offer TV, games and Turkish newspapers to their customers. Teahouses in
Marxloh are cafe´s that are for the most part geared towards the needs of the male
immigrant population.8
Customers often spend large portions of time, up to entire
days, in the teahouses. During the weekends, some teahouses show the games of the
Turkish soccer league that are limited to Cine5, a pay-TV channel that most
immigrants cannot afford for their own households.
Each teahouse caters to a different group of immigrant men, reflecting the great
heterogeneity of the local Turkish population. Several teahouses are closely associated
with sports clubs or with fan clubs for a certain team in the Turkish soccer league.
Others are organised around immigrants’ regions and places of origin. For example,
the teahouse ‘Karadeniz’ (Black Sea) attracts men from the region of the Turkish
Black Sea. Increasingly, the competition between teahouses is growing fiercer. When a
new teahouse was about to open, Ahmet, a local social worker, commented:
Now they are already divided by the villages where people came from originally.
These are simply marketing strategies. I have no idea how they [teahouses] manage
to survive financially (Ahmet, 37, conversation, May 2000).
Teahouses, in Ahmet’s opinion, evoke belonging on the basis of regional or village
origin only to attract customers, and to remain competitive among the numerous
teahouses in the neighbourhood. But the economic strategy of evoking such
belonging can only be successful because their transnational and translocal ties
matter to local Turkish residents. Teahouses then, in a sense, are visible expressions of
the transformation of the local place through material insertion of transnational and
translocal belongings.
Yet the region or place of origin is only one aspect of differentiation among the
teahouses. Some teahouses only cater to older men, while in others ‘you will never
find anyone who is over thirty!’ (Osman, conversation, March 2000). Mustafa, a
member of the older generation, picked a teahouse where most other customers were
also from his generation as the location for our interview. When his son Bozkurt
arrived, Bozkurt asked to leave the place, because (as he told me later) he felt ‘terribly
uncomfortable and watched’ in this teahouse (Bozkurt, interview, July 1999). He was
eager to leave because he felt he did not belong there. Belonging to specific places thus
is negotiated locally and across generations, an aspect that studies of transnational
practices often neglect.
The diversity of teahouses reflects the multiple differences that exist in the Turkish
population, and their large number shows both the need to establish local places of
belonging, as well as the diversity of how such belonging is negotiated across scales
and between different groups and places.
Conflicting Attachments
The availability of mass media and communication technologies (cellular phones in
particular) enables local immigrants to enact transnational ties with Turkey and with
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 355
friends and families there. Influences of Turkish mass media are widely visible in
Marxloh. Turkish daily newspapers are available at kiosks, and satellite receivers
enable Turkish residents to watch several private Turkish television stations in their
homes. Numerous buildings and homes have satellite dishes attached to roofs or
fac¸ades. While the satellite dishes themselves have nothing obviously Turkish about
them, they transform the fac¸ades in the neighbourhood and have become a defining
characteristic of its urban landscape. They illustrate that the neighbourhood is subject
to impacts that originate at different geographic scales. The satellite dishes thus gain
significance in the neighbourhood as symbols of a Turkish diaspora or ‘ethnoscape’
(Appadurai 1996: 33) that transcends boundaries of the nation-state, and intersects
with Marxloh’s local population and space.
Aksoy and Robins (1997) show how new media and TV stations have helped
transform Turkish national identity. Outside of Turkey, new opportunities brought
about by satellite TV create alternatives to the official Turkish TV channels available
through cable. According to Konrad, a local journalist, only up to four of the available
cable channels are designated for international TV. TRTint, the international version
of official Turkish national TV, takes up the channel reserved for Turkish television.
Many immigrants prefer to watch private satellite channels, however.
In almost all families that I visited the TV set was switched on at all times and
tuned to Turkish channels, indicating that Turkey is present and plays a role
throughout immigrants’ everyday life in Marxloh. When I asked Ferdane whether she
watched Turkish television at all, she started laughing and replied:
I mean, I have the [satellite] connection [she keeps laughing]. I have, I bought the
satellite decoder. We bought that immediately after our vacation [laughs again].
I guess, then it was quite acute, our homesickness. . . . And since then we’ve been
getting the Turkish channels. Well, that’s a way of, so that we aren’t all that isolated.
So that we still know what’s going on there. For example, what kind of music or
what movie is ‘in’ at the moment. . . . But, it’s simply like this, you always keep in
touch [with Turkey], other than being on vacation. Other than actually being there
(Ferdane, interview, August 1999).
Watching satellite TV allows Ferdane to ‘be’ in Turkey without physically being there.
Television thus becomes a surrogate for travelling to Turkey, and a remedy for
homesickness. By way of the TV screen, immigrants’ everyday lives become
transnational not only in thoughts or material possessions in Turkey, but also
through participation in events that live TV programmes bring to their homes in realtime.
The experienced or imagined ‘home’ country thus is no longer just a memory
in immigrants’ minds and narratives, it is present and part of their everyday lives. The
transnational is inserted into and shapes the local place.
But watching TV is more than just the passive consumption of ‘home’, that Aksoy
and Robins (2000) suggest it is. Transnational Turkish or Kurdish TV are intricately
linked to political identities, and the multitude of news, information and
commentaries that television conveys provoke differentiated reactions in viewers.
356 P. Ehrkamp
TV is not simply a good for (passive) consumption, but is one of the many complex
negotiations of local and transnational lives and social relations that immigrants
engage in, as the following episode shows.
I spent time at Osman’s house to help him and his friend Kaya prepare for exams at
school. While we sat in the living room, the TV was tuned to one of the Turkish
channels, but muted. The news started. When Osman and Kaya noticed pictures
about Kurdish demonstrators in Turkey erecting street barricades, burning car tyres,
and shouting anti-government chants, the two young men jumped off their seats,
turned up the volume and yelled at the TV set:
Osman: They should just kill them [Kurds] all. If I was there and had a gun, I would
have done that a long time ago!
Patricia: Are you crazy? You can’t just kill people!
Kaya: Why do they do that anyway, burn tyres, all that drama. They do that here
too, in Marxloh. They [Kurds] claim that Newroz is their holiday. But Turkey has
that too, even officially. It’s the beginning of spring and is called Nevruz not
Newroz. They just want to cause trouble. No one is oppressed there! (Osman, 20,
and Kaya, 20, March 2000).
They kept swearing for a few more minutes, as long as the report continued, and then
finally returned to their work. Their reaction to the news report underscores the
immediacy of transnational influences, enhanced by technology, and how they
reverberate with local expressions of identity.
Political provocations and struggles, and even open conflicts, are neither limited to
news on the Turkish channel, nor solely directed at Turkey. In Marxloh, Kurdish
demonstrations on the Kurdish New Year’s Day have been occurring almost annually;
hence neighbourhood residents are familiar with these demonstrations, both from
direct local experience and from the images and reports that they watch on TV.
Turkish politics thus have become integral elements of neighbourhood space through
the expression of political animosities.
Local encounters and even disagreements between rival political factions appear
much more toned down and less aggressive than the spontaneous out-breaks in front
of the TV set (where the potential opponent is far away). When I interviewed Osman
a few weeks after the incident described above, he talked about politics and how
much easier international relations would be if nations kept their peace with one
another, which prompted the following question and reply:
P: How about Kurdistan?
O: [started laughing] I know why you’re asking me that! [Referring back to the
incident described above.] I have no problem with the Kurds. In fact, I have
Kurdish friends. The KurdsÁ/Turks problem is because of the PKK people. Not
every Kurd is immediately a member of the PKK! That’s what most people don’t
differentiate and get mixed up. Because, TurkÁ/Kurd, that’s images of the enemy.
That’s not at all what it is. That’s TurkÁ/PKK, not TurkÁ/Kurd. Because, I really have
many Kurdish friends, and there are entire families, Kurdish families, that I’m in
touch with and so on, although, um, I’d say I’m a bit of a fascist . . .
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 357
Here, Osman makes sure to differentiate between Kurds and members of the Kurdish
Workers Party (PKK) that he deems too radical and out of control, while his outburst
in front of the TV set seemed much less discriminating. Clearly, watching
transnational TV and everyday life friendships and contacts are not the same, and
political struggles are not simply transplanted from Turkey, even if they may be
fuelled by TV.
In the interest of his own well-being, Osman takes a pragmatic approach to dealing
with political opponents locally:
I don’t really have a problem with these people from the [PKK] party. They know
very well that I’m a Grey Wolf, and I still get along with them really well. . . .
Because, if they don’t attack me, they know really well, I won’t attack them. Then
we live together in tolerance.
Here, Osman’s thoughts reveal the careful and complicated negotiations that take
place between groups, and individual immigrants, about social relationships and
everyday life in the neighbourhood, because of and despite transnational influences.
Osman’s personal political persuasion could hardly be more distant from the political
goals the PKK pursues, and yet he describes himself as capable of tolerating PKK
members. This points to the multiplicities of identity as Osman finds ways of relating
to political opponents despite political animosities. Furthermore, this example shows
that political conflicts in Turkey are not simply replicated at the local level; they are
negotiated and mediated in the context of the local place of residence.
Making Marxloh Their Own
If communal places and religious communities are means of creating local
attachments, individual home-ownership is even more important for Turkish
immigrants. The stories that interviewees told reveal that decisions to invest in the
neighbourhood (financially and emotionally) are complex and ambiguous. A number
of Turkish interviewees in this study already owned property in Marxloh, and others
were in the process of buying houses in the neighbourhood. For S¸u¨kre and her
husband, the question of whether to buy a house in Marxloh or elsewhere was very
important. They were considering buying a home when I met her in 1998. She
originally looked for houses outside of Marxloh, but explained that:
We looked at a house on the other side of the Rhine. It’s pretty there. But I don’t
know anyone there. There aren’t any Turks who live there. And although that may
sound weird, then I get the feeling that, well, fear. Then I’ll be lonely there, and who
knows what might happen there (S¸u¨kre, interview, August 1998).
Her statement illustrates the strong feeling of safety that Marxloh provides for its
Turkish residents. While she originally considered moving away from Marxloh, her
own fears and desire for comfort and security led to the decision to buy a house in
Marxloh in 2000. The local place rather than the larger German host society becomes
358 P. Ehrkamp
a point of attachment, and it is this particular neighbourhood with its other Turkish
immigrants where she feels comfortable and wants to live.
Ferdane and her husband were also ambiguous about buying a house in Marxloh
when I first talked to them in 1999. When we spoke again in early 2000, Ferdane was
getting ready to move.
It is quite a decision. Do I really want to live here, forever? Buy a house here, in
Marxloh? But my parents are here, and they can come visit us, walk here . . . and the
houses are such a good deal (Ferdane, 31, conversation, April 2000).
Ferdane is neither sure about buying property in Marxloh, nor about living in
Germany for an extended period of time. Her description of feeling uneasy about the
commitment of buying a home illustrates how immigrants are constantly grappling
with the idea of living and investing in the local neighbourhood, but buying a house
is also a way of making Marxloh their own.
Even if some ambiguity remains about buying a home in Marxloh, immigrants’
narratives reflect how much they are creating local attachments. While they pointed
out problems of poverty, unemployment and language barriers, most interviewees
feel at home in Marxloh:
Marxloh is my village. This is where I grew up, where I know everything and
everyone (Murat, 36, interview, March 2000).
Murat considers the neighbourhood as his home, his village, which becomes a
synonym for familiarity and belonging, as well as ownership of the local place:
my village.
However, feelings of belonging are mixed with perceptions of rejection by the
receiving society, for example for Nuray who had moved back to Marxloh in 1997
after her divorce:
Here in Marxloh, some Germans say, this is the Turkish quarter [Tu¨rkenviertel].
I like it here. There are many Turks here, many of my friends. I live here the same
way as I live in Turkey (Nuray, 32, interview, March 2000).
Having friends in the neighbourhood is an important factor that makes Marxloh a
good place to live, but it is equally important to note that Nuray refers to the ways
that Germans perceive the neighbourhood as the ‘Turkish quarter’, a derogatory term.
Clearly, immigrants are aware of and engage with attitudes of the host society. But
rejection by German residents does not prevent Nuray from feeling comfortable or
attached to the local place.
Even more drastically, Ferdane’s decision to move back to Marxloh after having
been harassed by right-wing parties in another neighbourhood of the city shows how
much immigrants are confronted with hostilities of the receiving society:
At that time, I started. . . . so, where do you move now? Well, and then there was the
possibility, Neudorf . . . I have lots of acquaintances in Neudorf, and thought,
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 359
Neudorf is a place where I can move freely as foreigner. Well, or Marxloh. Well,
Marxloh had a number of points where I thought yes. My work is here, my parents
are here, and I basically grew up here in Marxloh. And in Marxloh those kinds of
things that I experienced before didn’t happen. . . . And this [Marxloh] is like a
protective wall. Like it or not. It is a fact that in Marxloh, Nazis rarely ever dare to
come here (Ferdane, 31, interview, August 1999).
Not only does Marxloh offer comfort, but in particular the aspect of feeling secure
made Ferdane choose Marxloh as a safe place away from xenophobia and open racism
and threats she encountered elsewhere. Most clearly, the hostility of the host society
prompted her decision to move back to Marxloh. Her case illustrates that immigrants
cannot exclusively draw on their transnational practices since they cannot always
escape or avoid the host society, even if they might wish they could. Furthermore,
Ferdane’s experience also illustrates that assimilation might not be the best way of
conceptualising immigrants’ relationship with the receiving society since a prerequisite
for assimilation is an openness of the host society to immigrants, which is
clearly lacking here.
Other immigrants are highly critical of the host society. For Bahar, for example, a
sense of local belonging is not enough. She feels that the built environment does not
sufficiently reflect Turkish immigrants’ impact on the neighbourhood. She is acutely
aware of the positive contributions that immigrants have been making to the
declining neighbourhood and would like to see more opportunities for Turkish
immigrants to shape the neighbourhood visually through their way of life. During the
interview, she commented on a local urban renewal programme that provides funds
to local property-owners for restoring the fac¸ades of the buildings they own.
Why do they have to restore them to ‘Germanness’? Couldn’t they use some
different colours? Why are they trying so hard to suppress anything Turkish here?
In other countries, cultural differences are valued, just look at Chinatown in San
Francisco. Here, they won’t even paint the facades differently. They keep trying to
deny that we’re here! (Bahar, 34, interview, August 1999).
Bahar was adamant about changing the fac¸ades to better represent the tastes and the
presence of Turkish immigrants. She wants them to be visible, to remind German and
other residents that immigrants also belong to Marxloh, and call it their home.
Her statement calls attention to the close links between material and symbolic space.
It is not enough to symbolically create the neighbourhood as a place of belonging, as
a home place that is narrated. The built environment needs to reflect immigrants’
identities as well.
Hence, Marxloh becomes a place of local attachment in immigrants’ narratives
and the ways in which they express their identities. Immigrants feel at home in
Marxloh because its Turkish character provides them with a feeling of comfort and
security that is not limited to specific communal places or sites. The neighbourhood
as a whole is turned into a place of belonging that is not tied to particular
360 P. Ehrkamp
communities or activities. In this sense, placing identities leads to place-based
identity: attachment to Marxloh.
Conclusion
In the stories that Marxloh’s immigrants tell about Marxloh and their everyday lives,
the intricate connections that exist between material practices and symbolic
productions of belonging emerge. Turkish businesses, religious communities, and
the establishment of communal places such as teahouses reflect transnational
practices as well as local attachments through immigrants’ investments in the
local neighbourhood. Watching TV, for example, highlights the ways that immigrants
create transnational ties as they consume Turkish pop culture. However, they
do so in their homes in Marxloh, where they negotiate transnational ties and
local belonging.
Transnational practices may provoke struggles among the neighbourhood’s Turkish
population, in particular as transnational political ties influence identities and social
relations between immigrants in Marxloh. Osman’s and Kaya’s reactions to Kurdish
demonstrations in Turkey and Osman’s careful negotiation of political identities and
difference at the local level, however, complicate simplistic notions of dichotomies
between ‘here’ and ‘there’, or local versus transnational. Political persuasions and
religious identities and belonging further demonstrate that transnational practices do
not necessarily lead to the establishment of homogeneous or stable communities, as
some suggest (Kennedy and Roudometof 2001). Rather, transnational practices
contribute to heterogeneity and struggles between conflicting identities and groups
that are (re-)negotiated in the local place.
Transnational ties and multiple attachments enable local attachment rather than
preventing it. Beyond the material changes in the neighbourhood it is important to
note how immigrants narrate Marxloh as the place where they belong, where they feel
safe and comfortable. But creating a home in the city is neither limited to alterations
of the material landscape, nor to communal places. Turkish immigrants narrate
Marxloh as home, and enact the neighbourhood as ‘Turkish’ by placing their
identities both in the public and private spaces of the neighbourhood. Rather than
creating binary oppositions or contradictory attachments, Turkish immigrants
negotiate different scales of belonging.
Turkish immigrants’ transnational practices also engage the receiving society.
Immigrants’ narratives make clear how much the local context and relationships
to members of the host society influence notions of belonging and home.
Differential power relations between the receiving society and immigrants are
negotiated through placing the latter’s identities locally, sometimes in the face
of open rejection and racism by the receiving society. As Turkish immigrants
transform the neighbourhood into Turkish space, they take ownership and feel
more comfortable being Turkish in the local place. Transnational ties and engagement
with the receiving society are thus complementary rather than contradictory. Placing
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 361
their identities enables Marxloh’s Turkish immigrants to create a new place of
belonging. Placing identities, therefore, leads Turkish immigrants to construct a
(new) place-based identity.
Immigrants’ everyday lives are ongoing negotiations of both transnational
belonging and local attachments as they construct their identities across national
borders and across societies in their daily practices. A focus on place rather than on
community does not gloss over existing differences and conflicts. Rather, conceptualising
immigrants’ attachments through the production of place teases out the
complexities of multiple and sometimes conflicting attachments of contemporary
migrants, and of their engagement with the receiving society.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a US National Science Foundation Doctoral
Dissertation Improvement Grant (BCS-0000282), the Association of American
Geographers, and the Graduate School and the Department of Geography of the
University of Minnesota. The author wishes to thank Bruce D’Arcus, Helga Leitner,
Richa Nagar, David Conradson and Alan Latham for their comments on an earlier
version of this paper.
Notes
[1] For lack of a better term, I am using ‘Turkish’ as a shorthand for former guestworkers from
Turkey, their children, grandchildren etc., as well as for Kurdish immigrants who left Turkey
as refugees and entered Germany as asylum-seekers. I do not mean to simplify or neglect the
differences that exist between immigrants from Turkey, of Turkish origin, and/or holding a
Turkish passport.
[2] Given the self-depiction of persons interviewed and the long struggle of immigrant groups
and NGOs in Germany to make politicians and society accept and acknowledge that
Germany is a country of immigration, I prefer to use the term immigrant.
[3] Foreign (ausla¨ndisch) or foreigner (Ausla¨nder) are legal terms used by the German state to
describe and categorise residents in Germany without German citizenship that are subject to
the Foreigners Law (Ausla¨ndergesetz).
[4] By comparison, BerlinÁ/Kreuzberg, one of the most widely-known ‘Turkish’ neighbourhoods
in Germany, has a Turkish population share of only 15 per cent.
[5] For the larger research project, narrative interviews were also conducted with local German
residents, but this paper only draws on interviews with Turkish residents.
[6] The majority of Turkish immigrants in Germany, and in Marxloh, are Muslims, and adhere
to the Sunni faith. Among the Sunni Muslims, there are several strands of beliefs, and a
variety of religious institutions that immigrants hold membership in. Six mosques in the
neighbourhood are formally registered as so-called Moscheevereine (mosque associations),
non-profit organisations of faith.
[7] Different organisational structures and connections to national organisations and the
Turkish state are important; these connections not only impinge on the interpretation of
Islam that is practised and taught, but also on the financial situation of mosque
communities, and perceptions of these communities as transnational extensions of the
Turkish state or of extremist Turkish religious groups.
362 P. Ehrkamp
[8] These teahouses are different from restaurants and bars described by C¸ agˇlar (2001) in that
they are exclusively male spaces; women are not welcome. Other cafe´s like the ones C¸ agˇlar
describes are located in the larger city of Duisburg, so that women need to leave the
neighbourhood in order to frequent them.
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