White ghettos: The ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ in post-unification Germany

Germany, Europe and the ‘ghetto’

The notion that the German ‘multicultural experiment’ failed began to gain currency in the late 1990s. Media reports described a tendency among ethnic groups to isolate themselves in certain neighborhoods, a rise in Islamic fundamentalism and an increase of violence in schools with large proportions of students with migration backgrounds. ¹ At the same time, critical voices countered the opinion that multiculturalism was in crisis in Germany. However, these critical perspectives run the risk of either promoting a vision of Germany and German urban landscapes as hip, hybrid, transnational spaces, or of presenting a one-dimensional understanding of how racist and nationalist politics in Germany ghettoize, marginalize and victimize cultural Others. The difficulties of developing a productive anti-racist response to racist discrimination in Germany are a result of what Masoud Kamali has called the ‘European Dilemma’: ‘the paradoxical declaration of universalism, human rights, democracy and so forth on the one hand and the existence of institutional discrimination on the other’ (Kamali, 2009: 15). Similarly, Aykac describes Europe as reproducing ‘inequalities and trends that exist at national levels … while trying to pursue its anti-racist agenda’ (2008: 132). A discussion countering the assessment that multiculturalism has failed in Germany needs to try to capture both, evolving transnational and hybrid spaces and the presence of old and new forms of racialized exclusion. German cityscapes in the 21st century are ‘a stage for racism, violence and confrontation; yet the same streets and neighborhoods provide a place for dialogue, communication, encounter and refuge’ (Back, 2003: 341).

In this article, the metaphor of the ghetto serves as an organizing trope to trace the complex mechanisms of dialogue, contention and spatial inclusion and exclusion in discussions about multiculturalism and its perceived failures in Germany. In the German context, the term ‘ghetto’ conjures images from the past: Jewish ghettos, genocide and Nazi racism. Nonetheless, since the 1970s German media have engaged in a racialized discourse about emerging ‘immigrant ghettos’ that threaten social cohesion and security in German city-spaces (see Caglar, 2001; Stehle, 2006). This article sets the stage by briefly sketching out media discourses about immigrant ghettos. In the second part of this article the discussion shifts to a description of counterpolitics: artists and activists who challenge anxious media discourses about ghettoization by redefining ghettos, cityscapes and German spaces. In some cases these interventions are reactionary, in other cases they are playful; regardless, the focus on artistic and activist responses to media constructions of a crisis of multiculturalism aims to highlight the tensions and subtleties in the debates about diversity, multiculturalism and social order in 21st-century Germany. This shift in focus from media discourse analysis to playful, activist anti-racist interventions achieves two goals. First, it allows for an analysis that moves away from describing ‘Otherism’ in its institutional form that makes immigrants an object (see Kamali, 2009) and frames immigrants as problems. Second, in these interventions ‘Europe’ emerges as an unstable concept which can take on a variety of political meanings. They directly challenge ‘The division of Europe’, ‘European Us’ and ‘non-European Others’ (see Kamali, 2009).

In the 1990s, the decade following German unification, concepts of political identity and national culture underwent significant redefinition, ² a process reflected in contentious debates about ‘foreigners’ in Germany. The debates revolved around an increasing resentment towards foreigners that was believed to have motivated the physical assaults and arson attacks on asylum residences and homes in East and West Germany. After the arson attacks on residences of asylum-seekers in Hoyerswerda (Ausschreitungen, 1991) and Rostock-Lichtenhagen (Sonnenblumenhaus, progrom, August 1992) and the houses of Turkish-Germans in Mölln (November 1992, nine injured) and Solingen (May 1993, five deaths), to name the most infamous examples, images of foreigners as victims of neo-Nazi violence dominated media reports. Young male neo-Nazis were depicted as the violent perpetrators and the victims were foreign women wearing headscarves, frightened, dark-eyed children and disheveled-looking, olive-skinned and black men. Images often showed the victims and the German citizens and politicians mourning and protesting together peacefully, with German racism placed on the periphery of society. In 1992, headlines in the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel read: ‘After Mölln: A People in Shock’ (‘Nach Mölln: Ein Volk im Schock”) and ‘The Soul of a People Deformed’ (‘Die Seele des Volkes verbogen’). Against this shock and as a display of tolerance, most politicians propagated a peaceful togetherness of a people in a multicultural German society that is securely integrated into Europe. However, what ‘Europe’ is, how a European identity can be defined and by whom, remained vague. Europe is clearly connected to values such as peace and tolerance ³ but simultaneously, the ‘major political parties were calling for a constitutional amendment to implement strict limits on claims for asylum’ (Göktürk et al., 2007: 13) and tighter security at Europe’s borders.

While from the perspective of other European countries, especially the UK and France, violent neo-Nazi attacks and the mob’s support in Germany signified that the unified Germany was far from being ‘European’, within Germany they served both as a sign that German mainstream society was not yet tolerant enough, and that there was a limit to how many foreigners with whom Germans could and should have to cope. At the same time, German media pointed out that other Western Europeans have problem with neo-Nazi violence: for example ‘in France’s suburban ghettos around Paris, skinheads and Arab gangs are involved almost daily in bloody fights’ (‘Lieber Sterben als nach Sachsen’, 1991: 34). ⁴ The concepts of social integration and multicultural togetherness were applied mostly to people with migrant backgrounds who had lived and worked in Germany already for a few decades – mostly so-called ‘guest workers’ – or to ‘desired’ immigrants such as highly skilled, educated high-tech workers. However, protests against new immigration laws and the restriction to the right to political asylum, as well as more general discussions about racism, were rather scarce. Reports about asylum-seekers and racialized ‘Others’ as victims of violent neo-Nazi attacks went hand-in-hand with a rhetoric of ‘floods’, ‘streams’, and ‘waves’ of foreigners trying to enter the already ‘full’ boat called ‘Europe’. Reports evoked the changing cityscapes as a focal point of social, cultural and political tension.

In the early to mid-1990s, discussions about ethnic and cultural diversity in Germany revolved around two main poles: the liberal-Left demanding intercultural and multicultural togetherness, and the neo-conservatives calling for ethno-pluralism. ⁵ The liberal-Left position suggested that Germany’s integration into Europe might offer a solution: by integrating Germany into Europe and developing a ‘European identity’, a more worldly, unified and democratic Germany could emerge. The conservative position was influenced by traditional right-wing ideas of cultural, ethnic and religious identity and difference combined with Samuel Huntington’s thesis of the clash of civilizations, which was (and still is) discussed widely in Germany. ⁶ In this context, Europe’s civilization is more or less explicitly defined as white and Christian, and ‘civilization’ is used interchangeably with ‘culture’.

However, as Mark Terkessidis has argued, both sides seemed to be in agreement that ‘culinary diversity and non-white TV moderators are good, headscarves and other signs of fundamentalist pre-modernity are not good’ (1998: 11). Gradually, these two only seemingly disparate positions were replaced by the ‘common sense’ that ‘the multicultural experiment’ had failed (Terkessidis, 1998). Immigrants and non-Germans had excluded themselves by living in parallel societies and ghettos within German cities, where social order and cohesion could no longer be guaranteed. Conservatives felt that their position had been validated and many liberals admitted that their multicultural Eurovision was ‘too naive’. As an effect of this shift, Europe once again had a different function. In the German press, debates and tensions in other European countries, the UK, France and the Netherlands, served as examples of the failure of the European experiment with multiculturalism. Both ideologies – the intercultural mixing and sharing that defined the liberal-Left ideology and neo-conservative cultural essentialism – merged into the consensus that in order to make the project of Europe work, the ‘Others’ of and in Europe needed to integrate, assimilate or leave. Since the late 1990s, religion has joined and increasingly replaced culture as a marker of essential and irreconcilable difference. This consensus about the failure of multiculturalism emerged regardless of the fact that it was neither clear how to define non-Germans or immigrants, nor what constitutes the values and commonalities of German, European or western culture. ‘Our society’ served as a more or less empty signifier that continued to be described almost exclusively by what it was not, by a vague idea of an ‘Other’ who ghettoize themselves and cannot or do not want to participate in ‘our culture’. At the same time, governments discussed a framework needed to foster a certain kind of controlled – ideally temporary – immigration of highly-educated high-tech workers (for a description of these programmes see for example, Back, 2003).

As this cursory discussion of the discursive landscape in the 1990s illustrates, Europe served and serves a complex and contradictory function in politics and media in Germany. The gradual shifts in German discourses about Europe are symptomatic of the increasing anxieties that emerged with the introduction of a common currency, the Euro, and the growing political power of the European Union (EU) in Brussels. As the idea of Europe became a political and economic reality, local fears of globalization and loss of identity began to overshadow the fantasy of a worldly, peaceful and prosperous Europe. Both the fantasy of a civilized and civilizing Europe and anxiety over a loss of power and influence have defined and guided politics in the name of Europe since the birth of the nation-state and European colonialism (see Gilroy, 2004). Starting in the 1950s, West German discussions about Europe were intended to steer clear of a nationalist course evoking a past that the ‘new’ Germany would never repeat. However, recent anxieties over national and European disintegration hardly contend with these pasts, and share the assumption that a sense of belonging is crucial to maintain social order in the face of increasingly visible cultural and religious difference and global flow of people, goods and capital. Underlying this assumption is the idea that unmanaged diversity, by definition, causes problems and leads to conflict. This focus on however contradictory, ill-defined and paradoxical concepts of managing diversity, controlled immigration and integration, in combination with anxieties about the shrinking white European/national populations has strengthened further in the 21st century, and in spite of ‘a banal and prosaic multiculture … has become a fact of life’ (Back, 2003: 342) in most major German cities. Such an overwhelming political consensus vis-à-vis a poorly defined set of issues – and non-issues – is indicative of a more general social anxiety over global political and economic change.

The discussion in the second part of this article focuses on playful and polemical activist interventions from the 1990s to today which uncover the contradictions within these powerful and violent constructions of cultural difference, immigrant ghettos, globalization and social cohesion. The examples are selected based on their ability to reflect the changing politics of multiculturalism from the mid-1990s to the early 21st century, and they clearly only illustrate a small fraction of the discourse and activism, so their capacity to transform racist attitudes should not be overestimated. However, the selected examples do draw attention to strategies of contestation and resistance. ⁷ Racism, often only barely disguised in concerns over Europe, national unity and social cohesion, is the main target of these critiques, and cities and public spaces in general are the stage for intervention. By employing, exploding and transforming the idea of the ethnic/cultural ghetto, these interventions draw alternative maps of German cityscapes that expose the changing politics of racialized exclusion and belonging in Germany, from the multiculturalism debates of the 1990s to the Leitkultur (leading or dominant culture) ⁸ and failed multiculturalism debates of the 21st century.

German spaces in the 1990s: ‘my world is a ghetto’

[There are] lots of Alis who play the gangster and have some kind of a stupid territory … you can’t trust the Germans in their ways either, because they have insights in a different direction and you’d rather die than go there. (Zaimoglu, 1995: 45)

This brief reflection on ‘playing gangster’, claim for territory and search for direction is an excerpt from Büjück Ibo’s narrative entitled ‘This Country Is Poisoned by Fucks’, published in the volume Kanak Sprak in 1995. The author, editor or translator of these ‘protocols’, Feridun Zaimoglu, described Büjück Ibo as ‘an eighteen year old packer’, and as one of his brothers from the ‘ghetto quarters’ (Zaimoglu, 1995: 15). In another protocol entitled ‘If you’re a lamb, they’ll eat you’, Bayram, 18, breaker, offers a similarly bleak analysis of the possible roles reserved for the ‘Other’. Bayram’s entrapment is spatial and linguistic and only allows for the role of the tragic victim who is stuck in inbetweenness. He describes these confining social roles as ‘being stuck in a corner’, stuck in some kind of ‘tragic’ situation where ‘solid roots’ are missing (Zaimoglu, 1995: 40), but he continues:

If you’re a lamb, they’ll eat you, if you’re a little fish, they’ll eat you, if you’re without an honor code, they’ll eat you and because the lowest rates are common, because it means: eat this or die, because there are very few who can keep a clear head, you have to say: here, with the breakers and rappers, with the brothers and sisters, cut that crap, we won’t go with the flow, we make our own flow, where everyone is a stream and not a goddamn trickle of water. (Zaimoglu, 1995: 41–42)

Similar to Büjück, Bayram’s descriptions are a defensive and bleak response to discrimination and stigmatization; however, he proposes ‘breaking’ and ‘rapping’ and claiming public spaces through movement and graffiti art as a form of movement, not just against the flow, but in a different flow altogether.

After Zaimoglu published his collection of ‘Dissonances from the Periphery of Society’, he issued a second volume in 1998, this time narrated by Turkish-German women and published under the title Koppstoff. Nersin, 24, female rapper and street-fighter speaks:

Friends with whom, ha? With the blondies? With the liberal who frisks me with homeland-speech and you-speak-German well? With intercultural and people against right-wing? Everything and everybody wants to talk me into stuff, make me feel weak and that stupid: ‘Where did you leave your headscarf?’ But I, man, I stand here, let them run up against my chick-toughness. I yell in their faces: here I am and here comes the good fight! Who will win, what do you think? (Zaimoglu, 1998: 15)

Nersin refuses to offer a foil for projection of intercultural and cultural instrumentalizations. She defends her space, yells and ‘fights’.

Regarding the question of space and ownership, compared to Kanak Sprak the narratives in Koppstoff offer a more direct response to the concept of the ghetto. This could be due to the fact that in the late 1990s, media discourses changed and alarmist accounts of ghettos forming in Germany increased. In April 1997 the news magazine Der Spiegel featured a cover headline ‘Dangerously Foreign: The Failure of the Multicultural Society’ (Der Spiegel, 1997) accompanied by an image of an angry female protester in the foreground and a group of veiled Muslim girls contrasted with a gang of rough-looking teenage boys in the background. In 1998, Berlin Senator Jörg Schönbohm fueled the debate about foreigner ghettos in Germany by suggesting: ‘Today there are neighborhoods where one has to say: this is not Germany anymore’ (quoted in Mennel, 2002: 139). In Koppstoff the ghetto, which is mostly described as a space of refuge in Kanak Sprak, emerges as a limiting and highly gendered concept. At the same time it becomes clear that cliché images of the ghetto-world not only serve a political function – they also sell.

Nazam, 23, hairdresser, explains how the German media appropriate and instrumentalize the ghetto-cliché:

For them we are Kanaken, entertaining, something like the life of the Bohemians or the harsh life on the streets, something like the ‘life of the party’, something like the Jewish tailor in the patched-up suit … In that way, this is the fear they wish for, they want the street-stuff and the ghetto shooters, to shoot their boredom off their streets. The first shot is very loud … then a lambs’ choir is chanting: we always knew it and now the Turk becomes cheeky in our country. (Zaimoglu, 1998: 27)

Similar to some of the voices in Kanak Sprak, Zeynep (28, tailor), adopts the ghetto concept and uses it to create an identity. However, her description reads like the direction for a film set:

What defines the ghetto and what happens ‘in there’? Who wants to know, whose business is it? Here is erosion and all quarters and battle-areas smell and throw up. The golden light comes from the lid of the cookie can. Only a few dogs and if dogs, they belong to the punks. (Zaimoglu, 1998: 80)

The fact that the police stands and watches and gets nervous is an important part of the setting:

The policeman looks at us sharply … In such a way the policeman goes nuts, when he sees something in the ghetto … The ghetto-image is our own fashion, one could say. (Zaimoglu, 1998: 81)

Zeynep seems to be aware of the commercial potential of the kind of cityscape that she describes. The ghetto in these quotes serves different functions, but in each case offers a direct response to media discourses and racialized, gendered clichés: the ghetto can still function as a space to claim or a stage to perform and mock, but it is also a space that seems to call for control, monitoring and policing. The realization that ‘ghetto sells’ distinguishes the Koppstoff-ghettoscapes most clearly from Kanak Sprak’s depictions.

Both of Zaimoglu’s texts allow for a voyeuristic and exploitative reading that stigmatizes these young protagonists as trapped in their ghettos, as victims and losers of society, and their defensive violent rhetoric and posture as a desperate but fruitless attempt to carve out an identity for themselves in Germany. In this sense, the voices are reactionary, but the narratives do not remain in the defensive: they expose, provoke, offend and claim, and propose spatial transgressions and collaborations. The agency remains in the realm of the performative, the positions are shifting and unstable and the space appears to be ambivalent, translocal and localized in Germany at the same time. The stories are about life in German cities in the 1990s: about media clichés, social exclusion and globalization, rage, representation and resistance.

Zaimoglu’s ghetto-Turks, Kanaken and Kanakas, do not cast themselves as German, European or multicultural: they neither accept the assignment to integrate nor their role as victims; they do not like Germany, but they are in Germany to stay. Racism and exclusion are located in the very centers of the German cities. They speak up against both neo-conservative ideas of different cultural spaces that should contain and silence ‘Others’ in order to avoid conflict, and against the liberal mainstream dream of an intercultural and multicultural Germany that would be enriched by small pockets of contained and welcoming ‘otherness’. Europe and culture are completely absent in the protocols. By pointing out that ‘if you are a lamb, they will eat you’ and that ‘here comes the good fight’, the voices in Zaimoglu’s texts respond to and speak up against the promotion of a certain kind of appropriation and instrumentalization in the discourse of peaceful togetherness: the image of a victimized ‘Other’ in need of protection and Center-Right calls for assimilation. They claim and defend their ghetto-spaces as a space within Germany and as grounds for networked agency (Jacobs, 2004: 73). By making connections to translocal art forms, for example the ‘Hip-Hop nation’, Zaimoglu’s ghetto-brothers and sisters describe the ghetto as a confining, exclusive and restrictive space in Germany in the 1990s, but also as a space that connects these German spaces to the ghettos of the world – in Zaimoglu’s texts, mostly the non-white urban areas of large US cities. With their references to confining German spaces and to translocal urban forms of political expression, the voices in the texts constitute urban space as a chaotic and disjointed platform for translocal agency and activism. Zaimoglu’s angry voices rebel against a national appropriation of the ‘Other’ by suggesting networks of solidarity and identification that connect the German ghettos, however superficially, to the ghettos of the world.

German spaces in the new millennium: ‘your world is a ghetto’

As reflected in Zaimoglu’s literary responses, over the course of the 1990s the function of the ghetto in Germany shifted from a space that could showcase German tolerance to one that proved that multiculturalism had failed. In the late 1990s and at the beginning of the 21st century, when the EU continued to grow and discussions about who is or can become European and who has to remain ‘Other’ became increasingly contentious, discourses around Europe served a different function and ghettos evolved to signify borderlands within Europe. Ghettos in the major European cities became the site to define who and what is European, and who and what is not (see Stehle, 2006). Contentious discussions about urban poverty, crime and violence once again highlighted the tensions within and anxieties about the project of Europe. What does Europe stand for: a new kind of post-national worldliness, or the super-state that continues to guarantee western dominance?

Whereas during the Cold War, social developments in the USA that led to ghettos such as Harlem (see Stehle, 2006) had offered scary glimpses into a potential future for Western Europe, other western European countries have taken on this role in the 21st century. Social unrest and terrorist attacks in Western European countries that are more ethnically diverse than Germany were read as proof that the experiment of multiculturalism had failed; in order to avoid similar violence in Germany, preventive measures would be required. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Europe (Madrid, 2004, London 2005), the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh (2004), the riots in the Paris banlieux (2005) and subsequent discussions within Germany about growing violence at schools (Ruetli Schule, 2006), immigrant men were cast increasingly as religious fundamentalists, sexist and violent – the ultimate perpetrator and the ultimate ‘Other’. Female ‘Others’ embodied the victims of culture and religious fundamentalism (see for example, Weber 2004, 2005). Closely tied to cultural difference, religion emerged as one of the major obstacles to successful integration and preservation of social order. In this reading, migrants and post-migrants do not ‘have problems’ any longer, they ‘are problems’ (see Räthzel, 2006), as opposed to the early 1990s, when immigration and social diversity seemed to pose challenges or present opportunities, they too had evolved into ‘problems’. In discourses about youth violence, the figure of the disenfranchised East German Neo-Nazi vanishes almost completely, and roles for victims and perpetrators are recast. ⁹

German mainstream fictional films such as Knallhart (Tough Enough, dir. Detlef Buck, 2006) and the TV production Wut (Anger, dir. Züli Aladag, 2006) reflect this shift in discourse. They present the blond German boy or German educated liberals as victims of violent Turkish gangs in the urban ghettos of German major cities. Knallhart became a box office hit and Wut was screened on mainstream public television; both spurred controversial public discussions. In these films, Zaimoglu’s rebellious ghetto-Turk postures morph into the impersonated evidence that in the ghettos of the urban centers, integration has failed, and that the (liberal) mainstream should finally open their eyes to realize that the experiment of multiculturalism had failed.

What remains from the attempts to form a translocal political connection and a counter-discourse to the racist culturalisms of the 1990s, when in the context of a discourse about the crisis of multiculturalism, Kanak Sprak activists come to represent and impersonate the new sociopolitical problem (and proof) of failed integration, and the defiant gesture of the Kanaka women is rewritten as ‘dangerously Other’? While anxieties over difference and social cohesion remain the same, these discursive shifts require new strategies for political interventions and anti-racist activism.

In the 21st century, activist interventions work with an array of strategies. First, translocal references in German ghetto representations have shifted from a predominant US-orientation and have become increasingly dislocated, translocal and diffuse. In these interventions, Europe can be both an oppressive concept and a space for transnational solidarity and activist organizing. Second, as a response to commercialization and mockery, the self-representations of non-white ghetto-machos became more self-conscious and playful: they attempted to use ‘role-play beyond identity politics’ (Göktürk, 2004: 100) by sampling, mixing, mimicking, performing and talking back. This performative approach was complicated by the fact that the ‘Ghetto Turk’ and his macho performance had entered both commercialized rap performances and mainstream German comedy shows. As Tom Cheesman summarizes:

[T]he cultural political impact of his presentation of ‘kanak sprak’ has been recuperated by a series of German majority comedians who have developed acts in which they impersonate young, stupid, working-class migrants speaking broken German, a restricted slangy code peppered with grammatical solecisms, displaying grotesquely sexist, racist and materialistic attitudes and glorifying their own ignorance. (2002: 193)

As a reaction to essentialism and offensive mockery, anti-racist activists use double role-play similar to Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Ali G, for example, as a strategy to subvert essentialist understandings of the ‘Other’ as native informant, as the authentic voice from the ghetto or as mockery of them as uneducated and macho.

Third and directly connected to this, with new media technologies and increased accessibility to the internet, chatrooms, networking, filesharing and forums, strategies became increasingly interactive and the performers more media-savvy. Using different translocal media platforms simultaneously, activists and artists have formed a complicated net of resignification by responding to and contradicting each other; they disagree, argue, dispute and battle. Using these new platforms, female performers work with and through the contradictory politics of embodiment. On blogs, social networking sites, wikis and filesharing sites, instant and spontaneous responses are not only possible, but expected.

A few examples shall suffice to illustrate these strategies and tactics; however, it is important to note that because of this diversity, syncretism and playfulness, none of these examples are representative in any way. In 1998, the political activist group Kanak Attak disassociated itself from Zaimoglu’s earlier texts and performances and advocated a shift in activist strategies for the 21st century. The group engages with a variety of theoretical and intellectual positions and uses different media technologies, mostly the internet and film, for its activism. An often-cited and relevant example in this context is its mock-TV street interview in a ‘White Ghetto’ (www.kanak-attak.de/ka/kanaktv/volume1.html), an almost exclusively white German neighborhood in the multi-ethnic city of Cologne. In the 10-minute video, ‘reporters’ ask people on the street if they are comfortable in the white ghetto, if they feel well integrated and if they would participate in an integration measure where some people from the white ghetto would be moved into different neighborhoods in order to integrate better (see Stehle, 2006). This playful role reversal not only challenges the dominant perspective and insists that German cityscapes are translocal and multicultural spaces, but it also focuses racial discourse on a more critical perspective on whiteness. In its published statement, the group maintains:

Our project is caught up in a whirlwind of contradictions concerning the relation between representation, difference and the ascription of ethnic identities … we are working toward a new attitude for migrants of all generations – one that we want to bring to the stage, independently and without compromise. Whoever believes that we celebrate a potpourri of ghetto hip-hop and other clichés will be surprised. We sample, change and adapt different political and cultural movements that operate from oppositional positions. We go back to a mixture of theory, politics and cultural practice. This song is ours. (Kanak Attak, in Göktürk et al., 2007: 262)

The Kanak Attak manifesto critiques the performance of the ‘Ghetto Turk’ and stresses that the young angry migrant who endorses the ‘out-of-the-ghetto’ mythology fits perfectly into the cultural and racist clichés of mainstream German society. ¹⁰ An increasing commercialization of the ghetto posture and the rap and hip-hop scene in Germany further questions the political effectiveness and subversive potential of ‘Ghetto Turks’ in the 21st century. Anti-racist activist agendas are appropriated, commercialized and twisted, for example, by the emergence of a white German rapper such as Fler, who adopts a hard and violent masculine image and rewrites it as ‘German’ or even ‘Germanic’ in his ‘Deutscha Bad Boy’ image. The multi-ethnic reality of German cities features prominently in Fler’s performance, but he uses it to cast himself as a white minority among mostly Turkish and Arab youth in Berlin’s old working class districts, and to reclaim violent and marginalized ‘masculinity’ as German.

However, in the context of the discussion about multiculturalism and its failure, the figure of the macho-Turk and hypermasculine foreigner has not completely lost its political function. The voice and/or presence of the violent ghetto-macho, the Kanake, remains a factor to contend with on stage and as part of the ‘potpourri’ appropriated by the German mainstream, held up as the ultimate ‘Other’ by mainstream media, liberals and liberal feminists, mocked, performed and reclaimed. ¹¹ Since the late 1990s, for example, the hip-hop collaborative Brothers Keepers has offered a different version of the tough guy ‘taking back the streets’. Similar to other mostly male rap and hip-hop artists, they adopt an assertive, masculine posturing, but they explicitly use their art and performances to fight against spatial confinement, ghettoization, ghetto clichés and exclusions. Their most popular song, ‘Adriano: Letzte Warnung’ (‘Adriano: Last Warning’), for example, responds directly to an act of political violence: the African German Alberto Adriano, who was murdered by a gang of neo-Nazis in 2000 (for a detailed analysis, see Klein and Friedrich, 2003). In the song and accompanying video clip from 2001, the group of mostly male artists join forces as they walk through the city streets, subway tunnels and empty lots to confront neo-Nazi violence, reclaiming the street and public spaces. The chorus consists of a clear ‘warning’:

This is something like a last warning

Our retaliation has long been planned

We appear (attack) where you stand out

and finally stop your Nazi bullshit.

As the group moves through the streets, train stations and subway tunnels and across parking lots and backyards, more people join in and at the end of the song, a large group walks swiftly through the urban jungle. By reclaiming the German cityscape and interpreting this claim within a translocal, cosmopolitan context, the artists create a soundscape that promotes an assertive and transgressive relationship to German spaces. ¹²

Cityscapes, as shown in the video and described in the lyrics, convey a feeling of narrowness: not because they are ethnic ghettos, but because certain parts of Germany are experienced as provincial, violent and racist white ghettos. Their multivocal, multilingual performances

make claims to the ‘non-ethnic’ spaces of the city from which they had been excluded. They are struggling to inscribe their presence in the urban space beyond the given terms (namely ethnic) and conditions of visibility available to them. (Caglar, 2001: 609)

The large group of non-white men roaming the city streets at night is supposed to look threatening. However, the question this poses is: ‘Threatening to whom?’ Similar to the film White Ghetto, they ask the question of who is ghettoizing whom, and reverse the perspective by placing neo-Nazis and racists on the defensive. ¹³

In 2007, the Turkish-German radio journalist, rapper, actress and PhD student, Reyhan Sahin, began her career as a multimedia rap artist. In her pop excesses, Sahin used the tools of the internet to create the character of ‘Lady Bitch Ray’: a hypersexual, post-feminist ‘ghetto bitch’. Her texts mock German men, the police and Turkish-machos and ‘diss’ her male colleagues in the porn-rap business. As Lady Bitch Ray she published her songs and interviews mostly via the internet on YouTube and her personal websites. Her post-feminist porn-aesthetic provokes with songs entitled ‘German Rap – You Are Sick’, ‘German Dicks’ or ‘I Am a Bitch’:

To smoke a cigarette wearing a headscarf

Not to believe everything your father says

To live a life from affair to affair

To make a living by bitching … I do what I want and I stay the way I am …

I know it will be hard, but I will win

I don’t care if the world understands.

Her beats sample Prince’s song ‘I Want Your Sex’ and most of her videos are intentionally trashy, provocative and indexed as pornographic. She refuses to participate in the culturalist and religious discourse by reinterpreting the headscarf as a fashion accessory, and casts herself as an outsider because she is too krass (extreme), not only for the radio station Radio Bremen, but also for supposedly cutting-edge record labels. ¹⁴ Lady Bitch Ray’s performances, choice of dress and controversial use of sexual imagery aim to expose the contradictory politics of racialized and gendered embodiment. Her characters and performances are fluid, and she tries to avoid any kind of clear label to challenge the gendering of ghetto spaces, the idea that immigrant women are the ultimate victims in the ghetto, and the circulating clichés about Turkish women. With her over-sexualized and vulgar performances, Lady Bitch Ray provokes German feminists and avoids the possibility of being read and/or cast as a spokesperson for a new generation of upwardly mobile, integrated and educated Turkish-German women. Opposed to Zaimoglu’s Kanaka voices, Lady Bitch Ray does not try to resist or counter clichés; she works with and through them in a (more or less successful) attempt to expose their contradictions.

Conclusion