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But Kreuzberg, like most arrival cities, is not a reproduction of the homeland. The Turks in Berlin are forced into a grotesque caricature of their home country’s life, one built on primitive traditions that no longer exist in much of Turkey, one that is as alien to most citizens of Turkey as it is to Germans. The figures cited above, both for spousal abuse and for forced marriage, are significantly higher than those reported in surveys of Turkish women in Ankara, even though a sizable part of Ankara’s population has migrated from the same regions of Turkey.14 The Turkish writer Dilek Gügö reports that Turkish women moving to Berlin are “shocked to find themselves forced to wear headscarves by their mothers-in-law, sharing a flat with their husband’s family, and to see that Turks in Germany were 20 years behind those in Istanbul.” The Ankara scholar Mehmet Okyayuz, who lived in Berlin for 33 years before returning to Turkey, finds that Berlin’s Turks are “caught in a time warp.”15

Women have fared better in the squatter outskirts of Istanbul than they have in the Turkish neighborhoods of Berlin. While both neighborhoods tend to be more religious and conservative than their larger cities, the Turco-German scholars Şule Özüekren and Ebru Ergoz Karahan made a detailed study of both and found that women in the outskirts of Istanbul are more likely to be employed, educated, and in contact with the larger world: Turkey’s arrival cities are often pathways to liberation, helping their residents “change their sides from losers to winners.”16 The German neighborhoods often lead in another direction.

Something happens to Turks when they come to Kreuzberg, freezing them in a now non-existent Turkish rural past. This is not the intrinsic nature of Turkish society or the inevitable fate of Turkish villagers arriving in the West. In France, almost all second-generation Turks are fluent in French. In the Netherlands, home ownership and upward social mobility are far more prevalent. In London and Stockholm, Turkish neighborhoods blend successfully into the city’s mainstream.17 A major comparison of Turks in Britain and Germany found that, even though they have the same backgrounds, unlike their German neighbors the British Turks soon fall into the same career paths as native-born Britons, melting easily into the working population.18 Another study found that Pakistanis in Bradford, England, have a far easier time entering mainstream society through small-business accomplishment than Turks in Kreuzberg, where licensing and bank policies often prevent them from starting businesses.19 It isn’t Turkishness that is preventing success here nor is it the physical nature of the neighborhood. Kreuzberg has none of the physical or logistical problems of the French banlieue. And like many arrival cities, its arrivals are a minority, accounting for only 18 percent of the population. In short, segregation is not the problem here.

What is missing from the German arrival city, what prevents most of its citizens from experiencing any kind of arrival, is citizenship, in both the legal and the cultural sense. Turks, even into the third generation, are perpetually treated as temporary visitors or “foreigners” in German society, and, in return, see themselves that way, so neither group tries to improve the arrival city. That attitude is a reflection of actual citizenship, which has historically been unattainable by Turks. In 2002, after Turks had been coming to Germany for 41 years and numbered 2.5 million, only 470,000 had managed to attain German citizenship. The proportion of Turks who become naturalized Germans has never exceeded 3 percent each year, an extraordinarily low number by European standards. This means not only that a large majority of Turks in Germany don’t become citizens, even after four decades, but that a substantial number of their German-born children and grandchildren also remain Turkish, even though most of them have never seen their country of citizenship. The German experience provides a bracing lesson in arrival-city politics