Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [125]
In 1998, their eldest daughter was permanently disabled in a car accident. Erhan wanted nothing to do with this “cripple”—the girl spent a year in treatment in Hamburg, and he didn’t visit her once. She now lives in a clinic in Berlin. In 2000, Alara left her husband, taking the children with her. They lived in a hospice, in single rooms, with friends. He regularly threatened her life. In 2003, she divorced him. Two years later, in the culmination of a long-simmering family feud, he murdered his cousin on the street outside her apartment, then shot himself in the head. “I wasn’t shocked. I was relieved,” Alara says. “I knew he had a pistol—he had threatened me with it many times. He often told me who he wanted to kill—first the cousin, then me, then himself. My two decades with him had been a nightmare.”
I am using Alara’s story not because it is shocking and extreme, but because—with the possible exception of its bloody climax—such tragedies are a familiar part of the Turkish experience in Kreuzberg and in similar Turkish arrival cities across Germany. Physically, these neighborhoods should not be scenes of deprivation and violence. Compared to their French counterparts, these would seem to be ideal locations: in the center of the city, closely tied to the broader German community and economy, generously provided with social services. But Kreuzberg is not a functioning arrival city by any means. Rather than becoming urban and German, many of its residents seem to become more rural and Turkish and increasingly further removed from the center of society.
The marriage-breakdown rate among Turks in Kreuzberg, according to neighborhood officials, is around 80 percent. And no wonder: An extraordinary 49 percent of Turkish women in Germany say they have been subjected to physical or sexual violence by their husbands, according to a study by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs; a quarter did not meet their husbands until their wedding day, and 17 percent said their marriages were forced—a practice that is dying fast in Turkey but was revived in Germany in response to immigration policies. Rates of alcoholism and violent crime are far higher than elsewhere in Germany. And the German language isn’t spoken. One survey found that 63 percent of children born to Turkish parents in Berlin do not speak any German when they enter their first year of school, and 80 percent of Turks cannot participate in parent-teacher meetings, because their German is not good enough. A 2003 educational survey found that Turkish children are two years behind their German classmates. More than half the Turks in Kottbusser Tor, the Turkish-dominated area of central Kreuzberg, are unemployed; jobless rates for Turks of all ages in Kreuzberg are at least twice the rate for Germans. And Turks are retreating into religion: Fully 29 percent of adult Muslims (the majority of whom are Turks) in Germany attend mosques regularly, higher than the rate for Turks in the rest of Europe or in urban Turkey.13
It has become a commonplace in the German media to refer to Kreuzberg as a “parallel society” or an “urban village,” where non-integrated Turks preserve their traditional village ways—sacrificing sheep in their bathtubs, covering their heads, forcing their wives into marriage, and sometimes engaging in the lurid honor-killing murders of miscreant women that frequently occupy the German media. This image has, to a large degree, turned the German public and its leaders against “Turkish culture” and persuaded many people that Turks are conservative traditionalists who cannot be made into good European and, more broadly, that Turkey ought not to enter the European Union.