Fatih Akin’s Soul Kitchen
Unlike Head On and The Edge of Heaven, Fatih Akin’s most recent film Soul Kitchen is a comedy. The film focuses on Zinos, a restaurant owner who is forced to employ a drunken chef played by Head On‘s Birol Unel. The chef insists on cooking “real” food, and while this appeals to Zinos he loses […]
Mean streets and macho violence on Berlin stages
In many smaller theaters in Kreuzberg and Neukoelln, a different type of play is starting to take hold. Instead of classic or even contemporary works, these new works being displayed can be called “street works.” These productions focus on the problems that are going on in many immigrant neighborhoods, such as violence, alcoholism, family and […]
German State Appoints First Minister of Turkish Origin
Aygül Özkan, a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union party, was recently appointed the minister of social affairs. Özkan was born in Hamburg and is the daughter of Turkish guest workers who arrived in Germany in the 1960s. Özkan does not want to be seen as a “token immigrant” in the world of politics, […]
„Wulff holt türkischstämmige Ministerin ins Kabinett“
The article “Wulff holt türkischstämmige Ministerin ins Kabinett” details the new Executive Cabinet in Lower Saxony’s CDU lead government. Christian Wulff, who has been the prime minister of Lower Saxony since 2003, has created a new cabinet that includes for the first time an ethnically Turkish minister, Aygül Özkan. Noticeably, the new cabinet also includes […]
Poetry Without A Face
Full Story Here Since the age of 12, Hissa Hilal has been writing poetry, although secretly in the years of her childhood. A Saudi Arabian woman, she is not allowed to sit in public without her husband or another family-related male, is prohibited from driving, and must cover her entire body and face with the […]
Erdogan urges German Turks not to integrate
This article is very interesting because the Turkish government, and particularly the Turkish prime minister urged Turks living in foreign countries not to integrate. He was also quoted as saying assimilation was a “crime against humanity” during a speech in 2008. It is interesting to speculate what affect this sort of rhetoric will have on […]
Germany’s Turks don’t need Papa Erdoğan or Mutti Merkel
This article is interesting because it touches upon the fact that both the German and Turkish governments argue about how to best serve the Turkish immigrants in Germany without really knowing exactly what that entails because both sides are so far removed from the realities of being Turkish in Germany that the only thing they […]
Ossis Aren’t Indians
The court reached its verdict on the Gabriela S. Ossi dispute on Thursday, saying that “East Germans could not be seen as a tribe-like group.” Gabriela S., born in the German Democratic Republic, was declined from a window manufacturing job and her application was returned with “Ossi” written across the front. Gabriela S. took the […]
Court Rules that East Germans are not an Ethnic Group
This Der Spiegel article follows up on the Stuttgart labor court case charging a West German company with discriminating against a woman born in the former GDR. The court ruled that East Germans are not an ethnic group, a conclusion that many journalists seem to support. (See the excepted reaction articles.) However, as the writer […]
Gedenken an Befreiung der Konzentrationslager
Memorials were held at Germany’s concentration camps in Brandenburg and Niedersachsen to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the liberation. Spokespeople from the CDU and SPD were present to give speeches about how critical the National Socialist reign was in defining modern German identity and the lessons it taught the nation. Read the full article here.