Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [124]
THE PROBLEM OF CITIZENSHIP
Kreuzberg, Berlin
When Sabri Koçyigit, the Turkish radical-turned-prisoner-turned-bourgeois we met in chapter 6, made the journey from his village in remote Sivas, Turkey, to the ramshackle outskirts of Istanbul, he was to experience three decades of sometimes painful advancement. For more than two million of his erstwhile rural neighbors, the journey has been equally arduous and the distances even greater, taking them not to the edge of the Bosporus but even farther westward, into the very heart of Europe. The Turkish villagers of outer Istanbul and the Turkish villagers of inner Berlin began from the same location, at the same time, with the same ambitions, but their contrasting arrival cities have shaped them into very different people.
Alara Bayram was 15 in 1979, the youngest of nine children born to the baker in a poor village near Sivas. Her father took her aside one Friday afternoon and told her that she had been engaged to marry a neighbor 10 years her senior. Erhan, her absent husband-to-be, wasn’t especially prosperous or talented, and he came from a family known for its brusque and violent ways. But he possessed something more valuable than any dowry—a German working visa. With this, it did not need to be said, her family could gain its first foothold in the West, a possible escape from the severe economic and political deprivations that continually plagued their mainly Alevi and Kurdish village. While dozens of their neighbors were moving to the gecekondu outskirts of Istanbul, Alara was to join the 2.6 million Turks and their children who would spend those same decades establishing themselves in the arrival cities of Germany.
Her journey was not to be a quick one. While she toiled at the bakery for the next eight years, Erhan shuttled between Germany and Istanbul and the village, ostensibly securing a better job and saving money, before finally returning to turn their religious wedding into a legal marriage in 1987. “I didn’t want to marry him,” Alara told me, “but I was afraid for my family.” Later that year, she followed him to Frankfurt, where he had landed a job in a car-parts factory. She was four months pregnant when she got there and learned that he had, until the previous year, been married to a Turco-German woman and fathered a child with her. That explained both the mysterious interval and the rare German visa. Somehow, she came to terms with this secret history and moved into the spartan workers’ dormitories with him. For the next few years, life was austere but stable—he drank heavily in the evenings, but the tight-knit community of Turkish migrant workers kept his worst instincts reined in. Alara stayed home, raised the children, watched Turkish TV shows on the satellite TV, obeyed his orders to stick to the housework, and didn’t learn German.
Then, when she was pregnant with their fourth child, Erhan decided it was time for them to progress to the second stage of arrival, to make their break from the dormitory compounds and move to the Turkish enclave of Kreuzberg, in what was then still known as West Berlin. Beginning in the 1960s, Turks had flooded into this run-down neighborhood adjoining the Berlin Wall, drawn by its large apartments, its low rent, and the fact that its landlords would rent to Turks—something that was far from guaranteed in most German neighborhoods. After the Wall came down, shortly after their move, Berlin’s center of activity shifted to the East, neatly leapfrogging Kreuzberg and leaving parts of it poor and neglected, home to anarchists, pacifists, ecologists, and other members of the urban subaltern—and to the largest urban population of Turks in the Western world.
Erhan had come to Kreuzberg because he had some relatives there and hoped to make more money. Alara had looked forward to the less stifling urban surroundings. Instead, she says, “as soon as we got there,