In her book that explores Turkish migrant organizations in Germany, sociologist Gökçe Yurdakul detects a historical transformation in the political representation of migrants and minorities from the 1970s through the 2000s. She marks six historical events that lead to this transformation: labor migration (1961–1972), the introduction of family reunification law (1973–1979), post-1980 military coup asylum seekers from Turkey (1980–1988), the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath of exacerbating xenophobia against non-German minorities (1989–1998), the introduction of the new citizenship law (1999), and finally the terrorist attacks on September 11 (2001–present). According to Yurdakul, these events mark a gradual shift in the minority rights debate. While the first minority organizations were formed around labor rights, gradually, due to these landmark events and laws, their demands shifted toward political and social rights of citizenship, and identitarian rights, such as the right “to exist as Muslims and as Europeans.”Footnote 1
Fatih Akin's cinema traces a similar historical trajectory of minorities and citizenship in Germany. His films show how migrants and citizens of non-German origin, perceived as guests and workers in the 1970s and 1980s, are considered in the 2000s as asylum seekers, Muslims, and potential terrorists. His cinema traces the historical perception of minorities as it undermines easy labels attached to minority identities. Akin's early films question the perceptions of both guest and worker. His works in the 2000s inquire into the classifications of asylum seeker, Muslim citizen, and terrorist.
Akin's early films show characters who refuse to do menial work and reject playing into the cliché of the hardworking, honest, victimized, and exploited guest worker identity. Even if stereotypical guest worker family members may be in the background with their relentless work ethic, the main characters often reject crushing labor conditions. In one of his early shorts, Geturkt (Turkified, 1996), a youngster called Fatih (played by Akin himself) is on vacation in a seashore town in Turkey with his mother, who recently bought a summer house in her homeland. The building needs gardening care, which the mother constantly demands of Fatih, asking “the guest” to be a worker. Fatih, however, is evasive; he prefers clubbing and smoking weed, and defies his mother's call for work.
Such reverse “guest work” (young minorities going to their parents’ homeland and starting to work) and its rejection is also observed in Gegen die Wand (Head On, 2004). This film, which won the director the prestigious Golden Bear award, is a melodrama about a fake marriage between Sibel (Sibel Kekilli) and Cahit (Birol Unel), two Germans of Turkish origin living in Hamburg. The marriage starts off as a contract, but when they fall in love jealousy leads to an accidental murder, after which Sibel escapes to Istanbul. She starts living with her cousin Selma (Meltem Cumbul), the manager of a hotel who believes that only hard work can make you a strong and independent woman. Hired as a maid in the hotel that Selma manages, Sibel from Hamburg becomes a guest worker in Istanbul, an image that, Berna Gueneli remarks, “ironically recalls images of work migration to Germany (reminiscent of unskilled Turkish migrants working in low-paid jobs).”Footnote 2 Sibel quickly defies these conditions, however; she quits work and starts using drugs and alcohol. Sibel rejects the obedient guest worker image, “in stark contrast with most of the earlier depictions of Turkish migrant women in film.”Footnote 3
In both Geturkt and Gegen die Wand, the main characters are the children of Turkish migrants who were raised in Germany, a generation who refuses to work under conditions their parents may have accepted. Yet, in Akin's films even migrants to Germany are not represented in the manner of silent, honest, hardworking guest workers. In Solino (2002), for instance, a southern Italian family migrates to industrial Germany, to Duisburg, famous for its coal mines. The father, Alfredo (Franco Javarone), starts to work in the mines, but after his first descent into the dark gallery with fear and anxiety written all over his face, he immediately decides to quit mining and run an Italian restaurant instead. This decision leads to his wife Rosa's (Antonelle Attili) descent into a dark kitchen; toward the end of the film, however, she too rejects these conditions and goes back to her sunny hometown in the south of Italy. Both Alfredo and Rosa reject the identity of the guest worker crushed under grueling work.
There is, however, a respect for those who do such menial work in Solino. Alfredo and Rosa's son, Gigi (Barnaby Metschurat), makes a prize-winning documentary about guest workers and their life in Duisburg, from which we repeatedly see one scene. This scene in Gigi's documentary shows his friend Jo standing in front of the camera, with the industrial background in the distance, talking about her father who worked in the mine: “When I was little I always thought that my father was exceptional, ’cause he went to hell and came out living. And what is he without his hell? Poor devil!” The mineworker remains in the background, like a mythical creature descending into the underworld every day. The depiction of workers’ struggles and strife wins film awards, yet the miner is a character belonging to documentaries, not a character developed in the fiction film, a “poor devil” who becomes vacuous when you take away the labor that defines him. Solino starts with this documentary and ends with Gigi's new film, a comedy of quotidian life in Italy, which may not win awards but gets audiences’ warm applause. The guest worker and his life in Germany do not belong to the narrative of Akin's fiction film.
Right after Solino, Akin shot a documentary, Denk ich an Deutschland—Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren (I Think of Germany—We Forgot to Return, 2003) about his family's story of migration to Germany, recalling the documentary in Solino. This relatively cheap production, shot mainly with a steady cam, moves among three different subjects: the memories of Akin's guest worker parents who still live in Germany, the life of Akin and his friends in Altona (Hamburg), and the difficulties faced by “guest worker” relatives who returned to Turkey. Akin's father, who started to work as a cleaner and retired as a foreman in a factory, does not talk about his work conditions. Both parents focus on the difficulties they had with language and adapting to life in Germany. Defying the audience's expectations, these difficulties are not related to moving from rural areas to a more modern city setting; on the contrary, being a “guest” in Hamburg meant living in smaller apartments without basic facilities. The narratives of Akin's parents are in conversation with later scenes set in Turkey, in which his relatives who “returned” relate their problems of adaptation in Turkey, how they had trouble understanding Turkish and adapting to the culture. The idea of being guests who need to adapt to their context is carried from Germany back to Turkey.
In between these scenes, Akin drives around Altona greeting his friends, hanging out in Adam Bousdoukos's (actor in many of his films) restaurant listening to Serbo-Croatian and Spanish music, showing his proud multicultural heritage connected to the location where he grew up. The film ends in Adam's restaurant, where another multicultural Altona story, Soul Kitchen (2009), will begin. Akin explains while driving in Altona: “My parents were younger than me now and they moved to a foreign country.… I wanted to make a film about my family. I wanted to show: they came here, they didn't even have a john and now their kids work at the consulate or are filmmakers.…” These words, the film's ending, and Soul Kitchen (in which the parents’ generation is completely absent) mark the end of menial guest work and the move toward the service industry and creative jobs for the multicultural Hamburg youth.Footnote 4 Even in Solino, the sons of Alfredo and Rosa prefer to work in film and television.
Hard menial work does not completely disappear from Akin's films, but after Solino and Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren, it is pushed further into the background. In The Edge of Heaven (2007), two related stories, one set in Bremen and one set in Istanbul develop simultaneously. The first episode starts with May Day celebrations in Bremen tracing the relationship between two Turkish migrant workers, the sex worker Yeter (this Turkish name ironically means “enough”) and the retired guest worker Ali, a relationship that will lead to Yeter's death. The second episode starts on the same day, during May Day celebrations in Istanbul, tracing the movement of Yeter's daughter Ayten, a political activist, from Istanbul to Hamburg, Bremen, and back. Ayten describes her cause as fighting for “hundred percent human rights, freedom of speech, and social education.” The depiction of May Day celebrations in Istanbul also suggests that her organization fights for Kurdish independence. The simultaneous narratives that start on May 1 are not focused on labor rights and relations. The guest worker characters are either dead (Yeter) or imprisoned (Ali). The political fight is now about ethnic and social rights for minorities. Ayten refuses to be a guest worker in Germany; she does not want to work in a restaurant owned by a fellow activist. She demands political refugee status in Germany. The story is no longer about economic migration but about political refuge.
In The Cut (2014), a film about the dispersal of a family and their forced separation from their roots during the Armenian Genocide, Akin also shows characters who travel from one country to another, through the Middle East and the United States, in search of refuge. Menial labor is not represented as something that one takes on in order to enjoy better economic conditions but as something that is forced upon the main character. Nazareth Manoogian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, first endures forced labor by Turkish soldiers, then has to work in harsh conditions on the US railroads in order to survive. The main narrative, though, is about the extreme form of violence he and his family experience as discriminated against, racialized, and targeted citizens of the Ottoman Empire, a violence that “cuts” him from his home and family. Nazareth, named after the holy city with the highest minority Arab population in Israel, is not an economic migrant—he is a genocide survivor forcefully displaced, a refugee whose political and social existence and citizenship rights are denied in his country.
Akin's films start to contemplate citizenship rights and the denial thereof even before The Cut, exploring this question first with the position of Muslims in Germany. In 2009, Akin contributed to Deutschland 09–13 kurze Filme zur Lage der Nation (Germany 09–13 Short Films about the State of the Nation) with a short film titled Der Name Murat Kurnaz (The Name Murat Kurnaz), based on a real interview with the title character. Murat Kurnaz is a Turkish citizen and a resident of Bremen who traveled from Germany to Pakistan in 2001, was detained by the Pakistani police, then transferred to the custody of US forces in Afghanistan. Even though there was no evidence regarding his involvement with al-Qaeda or any other fundamentalist terrorist organization, without any official charges Kurnaz was detained for five years in Guantánamo. When he was finally released and made his way back to Germany, he published Fünf Jahre meines Lebens. Ein Bericht aus Guantánamo (Five Years of My Life: A Report from Guantánamo), a memoir of his detainment between 2001 and 2006. Kurnaz's memoir revealed the alleged involvement of the German government in the continuation of his detainment in Guantánamo. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who was the former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's chief of staff and intelligence chief in 2002, has been accused of turning a blind eye to the CIA's abuse of a German resident and rejecting a US offer to release Kurnaz, instead trying to deny his right of entry into Germany.Footnote 5
When Akin was asked, “Why is the Kurnaz case so relevant for German society?” the director answered: “Because it's the story of a great injustice. And because there was a big lie that Murat Kurnaz fell victim to. In Germany, politicians like the former US president are considered liars for deceiving the world to wage war on Iraq. But German politicians also lie; we also have Bushes. The Kurnaz case proves this. The man was alone; he had no one to lobby on his behalf … It should not be forgotten that the responsible politicians did not take Kurnaz out of Guantánamo and instead made him into a criminal.”Footnote 6 Akin's film restages one of the first interviews made with Murat Kurnaz when he returned to Germany (with journalist Oliver Das Gupta for the Suddeutsche Zeitung, published on October 18, 2008), giving Kurnaz another chance to give voice to the injustice that he suffered. Rather than Kurnaz's ordeal in Guantánamo, Akin focuses on the part of the interview about how Kurnaz holds German officials responsible for knowing that he was being tortured and held in the US prison camp without trial or formal charges, and not trying to get him out, and then once he is back in Germany not apologizing for their decision. “It's amazing that politicians who support torture get voted into office,” Kurnaz says in the film.
Akin ends the short film with Kurnaz's dreams: how instead of his terrible experiences in Guantánamo, food appears constantly in his dreams. “Since I was held there I understand some things better … Like if I see a film about hunger in Africa, I used to watch things like that and felt affected for a while. But that was all. A short time later I'd forget, like most other people.” Exactly at this point, Akin cuts to a black screen, and the interview and the film ends. The film contemplates “the state of the nation” by examining the denial of political refuge to a resident, born and raised in Germany, and therefore, watching the pain of the “other” from a distance and attempting to forget about it. The interview with the so-called terrorist ironically ends with contemplation of global hunger.
In The Name Murat Kurnaz, Akin also starts to question assumptions about who is a terrorist, which he continues in the Golden Globe winner (Best Foreign Language Motion Picture) Aus dem Nichts (In the Fade, 2017). This powerful drama tells the story of Katja (Diane Kruger, Best Actress award in Cannes), who loses her son and Turkish-German husband in a neo-Nazi terrorist bomb attack. The film is all the more timely in a context of growing anti-immigrant and anti-minority sentiments in Germany—the crowds at PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) rallies, the increasing popularity of the anti-immigrant, far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) that wants to seal off EU borders against migrants, the 2018 #Metwo racism debate that received thousands of Tweets revealing the extent of everyday racism in Germany: “The German ministry of the interior counted around 14,000 far-right-related crimes in 2015, about 30% more than in the previous year. By April 2016, police counted three attacks per day against housing facilities for asylum seekers … The savage anti-immigrant climate of the 1990s is making a return.”Footnote 7
Aus dem Nichts hints at the links between fascist movements in Europe (German neo-Nazis’ connections with the Golden Dawn in Greece), suggesting that xenophobia is not only a German problem but also a wider European phenomenon. The film, however, mainly focuses on the incompetence of the German police and justice system in dealing with xenophobic terrorism. Akin admits that his story is loosely based on real events, the neo-Nazi terror group NSU's murders of nine people of minority origin in seven different German cities over a period of seven years (2000–2007). The investigation of these murders was “riddled with errors and faulty assumptions,”Footnote 8 which lead the German police to assume for years that the killings were committed by the Turkish mafia. During the press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, Akin explains, “The real scandal was not that the German neo-Nazis killed 10 people, 9 immigrants and 1 police officer, the scandal was that for 10 years the German police, the German society and the German press thought the murderers were Turkish people or Kurdish people, it's something with the mafia. So these people were killed two times … they couldn't be victims … because they're Turkish they must have something to do with drugs … that was the real scandal about that case.”Footnote 9
In Akin's film, the German police and courts prove to be inefficient in punishing the criminals behind this xenophobic hate crime. The police first accuse the victims, Katja and her husband, of being part of a Muslim fundamentalist terrorist cell, and then during the trial Katja's testimony against the neo-Nazi bomber is annulled because of her past drug use. At the end of the film, Katja decides to take justice into her own hands. She finds the neo-Nazi couple on a Greek beach and plants a handmade bomb under their caravan, intending to kill them in the manner that they killed her family. Soon she changes her mind and removes the bomb. At the end of the film, she goes ahead with the bombing but decides to kill herself along with the neo-Nazi couple. This gesture—Katja's choice to be a suicide bomber rather than a bomber who flees the crime scene—and the film itself make the audience question not only the definition of a terrorist (white Germans) but also whether there is an ethical difference between a bombing attack and a suicide bombing.
In retrospect, Akin's filmmaking, which stretches over a twenty-five-year period, has always undermined generic portrayals of migrants and minorities, and questioned the associated definitions of guest, worker, Muslim, and terrorist. Tracing his films also shows how the political struggles of refugees, migrants, and minorities in Germany have shifted from labor to social and political citizenship-rights activism. Akin's work traces a historical transformation in the identification of minorities in Germany from potential guest workers to potential Muslim terrorists. While his early film Solino and documentary Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren undermine cliché understandings of guest workers, his later works such as his short films Der Name Murat Kurnaz and Aus dem Nichts inquire into the concept of who may be a terrorist and how complicated a Muslim's relationship with the German state can be. His films reveal the ongoing failures of the German state in its relationship with minorities, its turning a blind eye to the torture of a German resident in Guantánamo, or the murder of its citizens in German cities. Akin's cinema is fundamentally about the defense of minority rights of citizenship, from the right to reject grueling work conditions to the right to refuse discrimination and demand justice.
