[Bilimsel Haber] A New Book: Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany Ruth Mandel

[Besim Can ZIRH]

Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany
Ruth Mandel, Duke University Press.

In Cosmopolitan Anxieties, Ruth Mandel explores
Germany’s relation to the more than two million Turkish immigrants and
their descendants living within its borders. Based on her two decades
of ethnographic research in Berlin, she argues that Germany’s reactions
to the postwar Turkish diaspora have been charged, inconsistent, and
resonant of past problematic encounters with a Jewish “other.” Mandel
examines the tensions in Germany between race-based ideologies of blood
and belonging on the one hand and ambitions of multicultural tolerance
and cosmopolitanism on the other. She does so by juxtaposing the
experiences of Turkish immigrants, Jews, and “ethnic Germans” in
relation to issues including Islam, Germany’s Nazi past, and its
radically altered position as a unified country in the post–Cold War
era.

Mandel explains that within Germany the popular
understanding of what it means to be German is often conflated with
citizenship, so that a German citizen of Turkish background can never
be a “real German.” This conflation of blood and citizenship was
dramatically illustrated when, during the 1990s, nearly two million
“ethnic Germans” from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union
arrived in Germany with a legal and social status far superior to that
of “Turks” who had lived in the country for decades. Mandel analyzes
how representations of Turkish difference are appropriated or rejected
by Turks living in Germany; how subsequent generations of Turkish
immigrants are exploring new configurations of identity and citizenship
through literature, film, hip-hop, and fashion; and how migrants
returning to Turkey find themselves fundamentally changed by their
experiences in Germany. She maintains that until difference is accepted
as unproblematic, there will continue to be serious tension regarding
resident foreigners, despite recurrent attempts to realize a more
inclusive and “demotic” cosmopolitan vision of Germany.

http://www.dukeupress.edu/cgibin/forwardsql/search.cgi?template0=nomatch.htm&template2=books/book_detail_page.htm&user_id=28843&Bmain.item_option=1&Bmain.item=11511


      
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