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

Writer Rafik Schami has criticized the tendency to consider literature and art by migrants or about migration in the former Federal Republic of Germany as mere documents that mainly recorded suffering, exploitation and the hardships of migration, constituting an archive of the struggle for rights and justice. This overlooks the potential of literary and artistic works to achieve much more. They can mobilize their audience, 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 examines four Turkish-German media initiatives: the collaboration between Aras Ören, Erkin Özgüç, and Friedrich Zimmermann at Sender Freies Berlin (SFB), resulting in the Kreuzberg films and the Türkische Redaktion; the Turkish-German writing, translation and publishing programs of the Dağyeli and Ararat publishing houses; Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s work with Turkish-German theater institutions and authors; and the Türkische Filmtage München, which brought together Turkish and German film and literary traditions.

Remarkable for their social diversity, these 1970s and 80s initiatives brought together students, migrant workers, political exiles following the 1980 military coup and artists. The literary and artistic works they produced addressed social injustices and created their own aesthetic standards, styles, and spaces. They engaged in dialogue with literary developments in Germany and Turkey, questioning the supposedly fixed relationship between language and belonging across generations. However, the collaborative production process, the organization of their voice, and the social relationships within these initiatives have so far remained largely outside official archives and discourse.