Early Turkish-German Media Initiatives: An Archive of Joy, Artistic Production, and Everyday Life

Writer Rafik Schami sharply criticized the tendency in the former Federal Republic of Germany to regard literature and art by migrants or about migration as mere documents chronicling suffering, exploitation and the hardships of migration. This attitude overlooked the fact that  these literary and artistic works went—and indeed continue to go—far beyond that. They mobilize their audiences, draw on different aesthetic traditions, and reject monolingualism and reductionist multiculturalism.

This project aims to create an archive of positive aesthetic experiences to counter the narrative of “survival literature” with lived aesthetic practice. The project analyzes four Turkish-German media initiatives: the collaboration between Aras Ören, Erkin Özgüç, and Friedrich Zimmermann at Sender Freies Berlin (SFB), which produced the films later know as the ‘Naunynstraßen-Filme’ and the Türkische Redaktion; the writing, translation, and publishing programs of the Turkish-German Dağyeli and Ararat publishing houses; Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s collaborations with Turkish-German theater institutions and authors; and the Türkische Filmtage München, which brought together Turkish and German film and literary traditions.

These initiatives of the 1970s and 1980s were remarkable for their social diversity. They brought together students, migrant workers, artists, and political exiles following the 1980 military coup. The literary and artistic works they produced addressed social injustices while establishing their own aesthetic standards, styles, and spaces. They engaged in dialogue with literary discourses in Germany and Turkey, questioning the supposedly fixed relationship between language and belonging across generations. However, the knowledge and memory of a joyous, collaborative production process, of the articulation of their own collective voice, and of the social relationships within these initiatives have so far remained largely absent from official archives and discourse.