Racism 2

Here I am no longer in my homeland; and they robbed me of it in a very specific way. The whole environment has become foreign (to me). It starts with the smell and goes all the way to the images on the streets.

David Clay Large (2002): Berlin. Biographie einer Stadt. STADT_VERLAG, p. 441.

Heinrich Lummer (1932-2019) was a CDU politician and was Senator for the Interior of Berlin state from 1981-1986.

The former Senator for the Interior of Berlin state, Heinrich Lummer, became notorious for the corruption scandals he was involved in and his support for the Federal Intelligence Service, as well as his inclusion of right-wing extremists in the CDU. Lummer also attracted attention with racist and anti-Semitic statements in which he campaigned against the “foreign infiltration” of the country, as this quote makes clear. These discourses also contributed to the image that persisted for many years amongst white Germans, of Kreuzberg neighbourhood as a dangerous criminal ghetto. The area was in fact a relatively safe environment for its residents, in that within it, they faced less persecution by the right-wing. Terms like “Türkenkinder”, “social impoverishment” and “Turkish colony” were used in a routine manner by the magazine Der Spiegel. This quote refers to Kreuzberg before its sweeping gentrification, and describes the area during the 1980s, when an estimated 30,000 people from Turkey lived there, for which reason it was called “Little Istanbul”. Kreuzburg has often been compared with the New York boroughs of the Bronx, Harlem and Brooklyn, which have been similarly stigmatised and criminalised.

*Iman Attia (2007): Orient- und IslamBilder. Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zu Orientalismus und antimuslimischem Rassismus, Münster: Unrast. *Çagrı Kahveci (2017): Migrantische Selbstorganisierung im Kampf gegen Rassismus. Die politische Praxis ausgewählter antirassistischer Gruppen türkeistämmiger Migrant*innen, Münster: Unrast.

1984