These photos taken on 12-9 of the memorial of Celalettin Kesim, a teacher and member of a leftist Turkish worker's union. I learned about this murder at the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum, and visited the memorial tonight at the corner of Kottbusser Damm and Reichenberger Straße, the site of the murder. His killer was never found, though seven members of the Turkish youth organization the Grey Wolves (attached to the political party MHP) were taken into custody. The memorial states (bottom photo) that he was killed by a right-wing extremist Turkish group. 

Celalettin Kesim's death is significant because it marks the conflict between fascist and antifascist Turkish groups in Germany on 5. January, nine months prior to the coup d'etat in Ankara. Kesim was in the area that night as part of a protest against the threat of a military dictatorship in Turkey, which would become a reality on 12. September that year. Born in 1943, Kesim came to Turkey in 1973 as a guest worker. 

The top picture is of a quote near the top of the memorial, which reads, "Onlar ümidin düşmanıdır," (they are the enemy of hope). This is a quote from Nazım Hikmet's letter to his wife Piraye. The full poem reads:

6 Aralık 1945
Onlar ümidin düşmanıdır, sevgilim,
akar suyun,
                meyve çağında ağacın,
                serpilip gelişen hayatın düşmanı.
Çünkü ölüm vurdu damgasını alınlarına :
                                — çürüyen diş, dökülen et —,
                         bir daha geri dönmemek üzre yıkılıp gidecekler.
Ve elbette ki, sevgilim, elbet,
dolaşacaktır elini kolunu sallaya sallaya,
dolaşacaktır en şanlı elbisesiyle : işçi tulumuyla
                                        bu güzelim memlekette hürriyet...

link: http://www.siir.gen.tr/siir/n/nazim_hikmet/piraye_icin_yazilmis_siirler.htm

They are the enemies of hope, my love, 
the enemies of a life 
that grows and develops 
of a tree that bears fruit 
of water that flows. 
Because death is stamped on their foreheads— 
their teeth rot 
their flesh decays— 
They'll disappear 
and never come back. 
And surely, my love, 
surely this lovely country of mine 
will be a garden of brothers 
without masters or slaves... 
December 6, 1945 

http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/nazim-hikmet/poems-for-piraye-9-to-10-o-clock-poems/

One Language

Dearest friends and family,

Welcome to my little blog (Blöglein, blog'cuğum). I'll be writing about my adventures -- academic and otherwise -- in Turkish Germany/Almanya* this year, and would be incredibly appreciative of any thoughts, comments, questions etc... that emerge for you as you read.  I'm hoping to use this space for a mixture of anecdotes and academic reflections to bring the theoretical and the personal a little closer together in my own life, i.e. if it gets jargony in here, let me know! The goal is, in part, to make my dissertation relevant and interesting to the lives and thought worlds of people I love, and to find out what is intriguing, confusing, infuriating, etc... to you. In other words, I'm using you all as free editorial staff. Just kidding. Sort of ;) Mostly I would just love your stories and life updates in return.

Thanks for stopping by!

Love,
Jill

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _


ARRIVAL: The clinking, clanking sounds of courtyard life -- a bike lock opened, keys jostled, glass bottles knocked against one another as they fall into an open bin -- told me that the neighborhood had already begun its day. Usually sleeping in and finding the world already awake and busy around me would make me feel slightly guilty. I like scrabbling for the light switch in the semi-darkness, putting on my shoes and wandering out into the new light and chilly air -- a chance to see the day before the crowd. I've had many of those mornings since arriving in Berlin last week, waking at dawn and enjoying the rare quiet moments with streets and sidewalks, bus stops and storefronts. But this morning, for once I was happy to let the world begin without me. I stayed up late last night watching a movie in hopes that I might push my body clock over the last thousand miles or so of the Atlantic and settle into its new Western European home. I stretched out an arm and found my phone on the ground beside me: 9:30AM. I had finally made it to Almanya.

*ALMANYA: Almanya is Turkish for Germany. When I arrived two weeks ago, the first sign I saw in the airport was for Turkcell, the company I had used for all of my long distance calls from Turkey when I lived there in 2008-09. The chatter around me on the bus ride from the airport was at first a Western European mixture -- the French, English, and German of newly arrivals like myself -- but became almost exclusively Turkish by the time I had reached the neighborhood of Neukölln. Emerging from the subway stop at Boddinstraße, I found myself surrounded by familiar sights from Turkey -- open air fruit and vegetable markets, clutches of women sipping tea in tiny hourglasses, dim internet cafes filled with young men playing fighting games, a myriad of little restaurants and cafes advertising börek, gözleme, döner, and künefe.

Every day I've been here I've spoken both Turkish and German. I notice that my conversations are always more intimate and personal in Turkish. This is in part because I am more comfortable with domestic and informal Turkish, and in part because people are surprised I speak Turkish at all, but mostly because it is much more normal to have that type of immediate personal interaction in Turkey and in Turkish. Sometimes I switch back and forth between languages in a single conversation. And on some rare, happy occasions I get to speak both at the same time. For example, when I bought a poetry book (Can Yücel's Portraits) from a young woman this afternoon, she asked me, "Sana bir Tüte lazım mı?" (Would you like a [bag]?)

ONE LANGUAGE: I like the idea that that sentence is actually in one language -- a third or other language with its own sensibilities and rules. Yesterday I heard a great lecture that made that point very clearly and simply. Volker Hinnenkamp, a linguist who studies Turkish-German language communities, gave a talk at the Berlin Literary Colloquium in which he argued that we need to stop talking about language mixing as a result of a language deficiency, i.e. saying that Spanglish or karaşık (Turkish-German) speakers code-switch as a result of forgetting or not knowing a given word or phrase in one language. He played recordings of Turkish-German teenagers joking around using word play that is only understandable in this third language -- not either Turkish or German, or even their sum, but something different, something more. My favorite author, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, who writes in her own version of Turkish-German, is often described as writing a German translation of Turkish, i.e. translating idiom "directly." This understanding of her work does not give credit to the originality and creativity Özdamar's language. We need new ways of thinking about her works as vehicles of purposeful linguistic invention. This "one language" theory might help.