Back in the days of the West
Yade Kara?s Wende novel is about a Turkish man in Berlin and about the cliches that won?t die.
Cornelia Geissler
von Cornelia Geissler
[…] She tells the story of a young man in Istanbul during the fall of the Wall and who decides to go to Berlin to witness it himself. “Selam Berlin” means “Welcome to Berlin.” The 19-year-old Hasan Kazan wants to know what is happening goes to his old neighborhood in Kreuzberg. His father, who has a travel agency on Adalbertstra?e, has changed.... “Maybe Berliners don’t see it this way,” she said, “but outside the city many people think Turk=Kreuzberg.” “I don’t want such ideas to be chiseled into stone.”...The book can be read as a picaresque novel. The ingenuous Hasan slides through the events of reunification. … When I ask Kara about her home, she responds “What kind of question is that? Do people ask you about your home?” … In Istanbul Hasan Kazan feels like a Berliner and in Berlin he feels reduced to his Turkish heritage. When he meets a group of people he tries to say who’s from the West and who’s from the East. He is shocked to find out that his father had a secret relationship in the East in the days of the Wall, and now he has a fully grown brother. And while he wonders about his identity, the city changes around him. As the first Golf War nears, his father’s agency can’t keep up with all the requests from Istanbul. Is Hasan a Turk? A German? A German Turk? “People have lived here for 40 years, and the Germans still make all this fuss about ethnic background. Does it really matter whether someone has German or Turkish roots?” In Great Britain, one speaks of the “third culture generation.” The term refers to the generation of people born in Indian or Indonesian who possess a British passport. “For them, the question of home is irrelevant,” argues Kara. “Now with new Europe, this will soon be true for Germans as well. People from France or Spain will live here and no longer have to explain themselves.” Kara, herself of Turkish descent, says the novel has nothing to do with her. “Nothing, absolutely nothing.”
Berliner Zeitung, March 11, 2003 (in German)
http://www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung/archiv/.bin/dump.fcgi/2003/0311/seite3/0001/index.html
