Colloquia Germanica
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/61
2014
471-2
Band 47 2014 Heft 1 - 2 Harald Höbus ch, Linda K . Worle y (Hr sg.) ISSN 0010-1338 Band 47 T h e m e n h eft: Fra ming I s la m: Faith, Fa s c in ation, a nd Fea r in Twe nty- F irs t- C e ntur y G e rm a n C ulture G a s th e ra u s g e b e r: H eidi D e n z el d e T ira do und Faye S tewa r t H eidi D e n z el d e T ira do a nd Faye S tewa r t: I ntrod u c tion D avid N . Cour y: Wa y s of B elon gin g: N a vid Ke r m a ni a n d th e M u s lim Tu r n in Conte m pora r y G e r m a n L ite ratu re Pri s c illa L ayn e: B etwe e n P la y a n d M imi c r y : T h e L imit s of H u m a ni s m in Ve r rü c k t e s B lut B e rn a G u e n eli: R efra min g I s la m: T h e D e cou plin g of E th ni c ity fro m R eligion in Tu r ki s h- G e r m a n M e dia O livia L a ndr y: “ D on ’ t Pa ni c , I ’ m I s la mi c ” : Voi c in g R e s i s ta n ce th rou g h D o c u m e nta r y H eidi D e n z el d e T ira do: " I s la m L ig ht ” : G irly M u s lim Powe r a n d M od e rate I s la mi c M e n in G e r m a n S it co m s L ind s ay J . L awton: Tr uth in A dve r ti s in g: R e p re s e ntation s of Faith a n d B elon gin g a rou n d “ M u s lim ” Wo m e n ’ s M e m oir s Faye S tewa r t: F ilmin g Faith a n d D e s ire : E n codin g a n d D e codin g I d e ntitie s in A n g elin a M a c c a ron e ’ s Fre m d e H a ut periodicals.narr.de C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a t i o n a l e Z e i t s c h r i f t f ü r G e r m a n i s t i k I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k Band 47 • Heft 1-2 Themenheft: Framing Islam: Faith, Fascination, and Fear in Twenty-First-Century German Culture Gastherausgeber: Heidi Denzel de Tirado und Faye Stewart InhalT Introduction Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3 Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn in Contemporary German Literature David N. Coury � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 9 Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in Verrücktes Blut Priscilla Layne � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 31 Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media Berna Gueneli � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 59 “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary Olivia Landry � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 83 “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms Heidi Denzel de Tirado � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 107 Truth in Advertising: Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs Lindsay Lawton � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 133 Filming Faith and Desire: Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone’s Fremde Haut Faye Stewart � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 157 Autorenverzeichnis � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 179 Introduction Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart Georgia State University Islam. Jihad. Koran. Sharia Law. Today these words are on the tongues of many, but few who utter them take into consideration the diverse forms of Islamic faith, beliefs, and practices around the world. Attending to different experiences and embodiments of Muslim being and belonging, this issue engages in a scholarly discussion about various dimensions of Islam and Muslim identities as they emerge in twenty-first-century German visual and literary culture. Central to the seven articles in this issue are both the ways in which Islam is constructed and framed through cultural texts, and the manifold reactions that Muslims— whether real or fictional—elicit in the popular German-language imagination, ranging from fascination to fear, from Islamophilia to Islamophobia. Since 9 / 11, the global turning point in public discourses about Islam, the open question of Muslim belonging has been at the center of increasingly heated debates around the world. Europe has found itself at the center of such discussions, largely due to its colonial legacies, asylum laws, and proximity to North Africa and the Middle East. Recent attacks in London, Madrid, Paris, and Istanbul have only intensified these debates and the concomitant focus on Islam and Muslims in discourses on migration, integration, assimilation, and ostracism. Like other European countries which have witnessed a discernible shift to the political right in the last two decades, Germany too has seen the evolution of an openly xenophobic and Islamophobic public culture, as evidenced by the dramatic rise of Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes ( PEGIDA ) and its multiple regional offshoots in late 2014. At the same time, despite the hypervisibility of such movements, Germany is also the world-renowned home of a highly mediatized Willkommenskultur and plays a leading role in endeavors to provide vital protections for Muslim refugees and integrate Muslim citizens. Since 2006, when Germany hosted the soccer World Cup, the emergence of new forms of patriotism has ushered in multifaceted discussions about how to reconceive German belonging in ways that include binational citizens and migrants from Muslim-majority countries such as Turkey, Bosnia, and Iran. 4 Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart Despite former President Wulff’s declaration in 2010, “der Islam gehört inzwischen auch zu Deutschland,” which implied that this is a relatively recent phenomenon by qualifying it with the adverb inzwischen, Islam in Germany is not a new theme in national discourse. Germany’s geographical position at the heart of the European Union, its short colonial history, and its comparatively low percentage of Muslims inhabitants notwithstanding, Islam has played a pivotal symbolic role in the German imagination since the eighteenth century. This is evidenced in the works of authors from Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to Nurkan Erpulat and Navid Kermani. Likewise, political leaders of the past and present, from Frederick the Great to Richard von Weizsäcker, have repeatedly acknowledged Muslim belonging in Germany. On the other hand, former politician Thilo Sarrazin asserted the incompatibility of European values and Muslim faith, capitalizing on Islamophobic sentiments in his 2010 bestseller Deutschland schafft sich ab. Sarrazin’s work is noteworthy for marking another turning point in the Islam debate by sparking scholarly and critical interventions in a wide range of academic disciplines and sociocultural contexts. The articles in this special issue of Colloquia Germanica were all written before the “crisis of migration” that escalated in and around the European Union in the second half of 2015. However, recent events have made scholarly investigations of these matters all the more crucial and pertinent. The problems and depictions that these articles analyze resonate deeply with current developments, even if there are differences between the historical and geographical factors in question. In contrast with earlier waves of migrants unilaterally perceived as “Muslim,” who came predominantly from Turkey in connection with West Germany’s Gastarbeiterprogram in the 1960s and early 70s and from Bosnia during the Yugoslav Wars in the early 1990s, more recent waves of “Muslim” immigrants and refugees are more diverse. While the majority of today’s asylum seekers are fleeing civil war, oppression, poverty, and otherwise unlivable conditions in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, their original citizenship status is often undocumented or unidentifiable. In this context, a simultaneously reductive and expansive notion of “the Muslims” has emerged as a catchall umbrella category for labeling the nationally and ethnically unspecified newcomers of Middle Eastern and North African origins. Here we witness a slippage of the identifier “Muslim” from a descriptor of religion and faith to a label for non-European cultures, physiognomies, and lifestyles. This seemingly recent rhetorical trend is interrogated by the various articles in this special issue, which demonstrate that the conflation of “Islam” with racialized stereotypes is no new phenomenon. Central to our contributors’ analyses are endeavors to diversify and differentiate among nuanced politics of representation and the ways in which particular discourses on Muslims are framed and reframed in cultural texts. Introduction 5 The focus of this special issue is on representations of Muslim being and belonging in Germany, with particular attention to negotiations of both religious and cultural Islam as a wide continuum of lifestyles, beliefs, and practices. In contrast with the trend in mainstream media of projecting Muslim migrants as threatening, uncontrollable masses, our contributions focus on individuals— whether real or fictional—and their personal experiences of living, working, writing, and seeking asylum in Germany and Austria. Moreover, the articles here emphasize not only the one-dimensional constructions of “Turks,” “Arabs,” and “Middle Easterners” in which the mass media relentlessly traffic, but also the specific valences of nationality and citizenship in the agency and mobility of Muslim Iranian, Palestinian, and Lebanese migrants and binationals. In addition to the overt focus on Islam in this issue, another common denominator among our contributions is the investigation of genre-specific narrative structures and strategies of representation. They examine how medium and form interface with politics of identity in literary, visual, and popular culture; their primary texts range from novels, children’s literature, dramas, and memoirs to television shows, fiction films, and documentaries, and on to activist rhetoric, branding, and marketing. Our point of departure in the first two articles is a return to Enlightenment traditions in order to build the framework for discussing Muslim-German citizenship by studying the intersections between literary conventions and contemporary texts. We begin with David Coury’s analysis of Navid Kermani’s essayistic and fictional writing, which locates the German-Iranian author within the “Muslim turn” in German literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Coury explores the intellectual contributions of scholars and critics who re-center Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Stari Most, deconstructing the prevailing discourse on der Islam as a one-dimensional, external reference point and positioning it as central to European self-understanding. By examining essays from Kermani’s collection Wer ist Wir? Deutschland und seine Muslime side by side with his fictional works, such as the novel Kurzmitteilung and the children’s book Ayda, Bär und Hase, Coury demonstrates that Kermani’s oeuvre participates in humanistic traditions challenging Islamophobia and valuing Islam’s cultural and religious legacies in Germany. Coury describes Kermani’s narratological and analytical interventions as explorations of “ways of belonging”—which are necessarily plural, shifting, and dialogically constructed—in post-secular, post-national Germany. While Coury’s article takes Islamophobia as its point of departure, Priscilla Layne frames her contribution as a critique of the “racialization of Islam.” Layne’s comparative analysis of the intersecting preoccupations of drama, cinema, and aesthetic critique brings Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje’s theater play 6 Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart Verrücktes Blut into conversation with the diverging politics of the film that inspired it, Jean-Paul Lilienfeld’s La journée de la jupe, and seventeenthand eighteenth-century intertexts by Molière and Schiller. Layne’s reading of the humanist integrationist politics of Erpulat and Hillje’s play stresses genre-specific techniques used to dissolve the conceptual boundaries between actor and role, Turkish and German identities, and Islam and Christianity. Layne draws on postcolonial theory to bring performance, embodiment, and agency to the fore in discussing the effects of racial profiling and discrimination on Turkish-German Muslims. Layne’s critical assessment of “racialization of Islam” resonates with Berna Gueneli’s interrogation of what she describes as the “entanglement of ethnicity and religion”—specifically Turkishness and Islam—in mainstream German culture. Surveying a range of progressive German-Turkish counter voices in various media, from Fatih Akın’s film The Edge of Heaven and an episode of Lars Becker’s Hamburg-based Tatort crime series, to the satirist Serdar Somuncu’s television appearances and Feridun Zaimoğlu and Günter Senkel’s play Schwarze Jungfrauen, Gueneli problematizes the presupposed link between Islam and non-German ethnicity. Gueneli also explores the workings of gender and sexuality in constructions of Muslim and Turkish-German identity that reframe mysogynistic and Islamophobic stereotypes, in particular as they come to expression in Zaimoğlu and Senkel’s play and the provocative music videos of rapper Lady Bitch Ray. Gueneli’s case studies map out a wide spectrum of Turkish-German relationships to religion in general and Islam in particular, including pro-secular and agnostic stances, as well as “Islamo-feminist” and radical “neo-Muslim” voices. Olivia Landry’s jumping-off point looks beyond Islamophobia to its amplified affect in panic and its reverberations in fear and familiarity in documentary film. Documentary, Landry argues, performs the double function of authenticating and performing, and is thus ideally positioned to reappropriate the visceral threat projected onto Muslims. Exposing Islamophobia as the West’s “new racism,” Landry demonstrates that the two 2010 documentary films Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited offer critical points of subversion for uncovering the devastating repercussions of anti-Islamic sentiments on vital asylum, citizenship, and belonging. Landry’s comparative analysis of the films’ intimate portraits of young, artistically inclined, and ambitious Muslim asylum-seekers in Austria and Germany attends both to the intersections of form and content in the documentary genre, and to the power of emotions and affect in fashioning resistance narratives against Western anti-Islamic panic. Heidi Denzel de Tirado, by contrast, highlights a countertrend to panicked reactions to threatening Muslims in German visual media, namely the strategic Introduction 7 defanging of Muslim protagonists in television sitcoms. Early twenty-first-century series like König von Kreuzberg, Alle lieben Jimmy and Türkisch für Anfänger, Denzel de Tirado argues, present characters that embody “Islam light,” a concept she borrows from Hamed Abdel-Samat to designate an “enlightened” Islam without jihad, sharia, proselytism, or pretension. Her analysis stresses gender and genre in locating these German series within the new global trend of the Muslim sitcom, arguing that the German variants follow identifiable patterns in constructing characters from Muslim-majority countries: whereas male protagonists are typically atheist, effeminate, and hyperassimilated, their intellectual and self-confident teenage daughters deliberately choose Muslim lifestyles. Denzel de Tirado mobilizes a comparative study of character development in the above-mentioned sitcoms to argue for a genre-specific interpretation of Islam as a rationally chosen spiritual sanctuary amidst the turmoil of post-secular German society. From Denzel de Tirado’s analysis of liberal and liberated Islam, we then move on to the deployment of Islam as a marketing brand, where it takes on distinctly precarious contours. Lindsay Lawton’s article discusses the emergence of the “post-Muslim woman” as a consumable commodity through the intersecting engagements of autobiographers, publishers, booksellers, reviewers, and activists. In her analysis of the book covers and marketing of several memoirs by female post-Muslim activists, Lawton finds that the autobiographies’ diverging representations of faith are glossed over by an entire industry with a vested interest in casting the female author as a gendered victim of male-embodied Muslim religious oppression. At the same time, Lawton demonstrates that the virtual networks that have evolved around post-Muslim women’s memoirs also provide an important public space in which tropes of Muslim faith and belonging can be discussed, complicated, and challenged. While Lawton’s article traces the commodified evolution of the Muslim female victim into the post-Muslim subject in a liberating Western environment, Faye Stewart’s contribution investigates the limitations of human rights and asylum laws in Germany by focusing on the more tenuous distinctions between Muslim and non-Muslim, heterosexual and queer, and agency and voicelessness. Stewart contends that Angelina Maccarone’s 2005 film Fremde Haut interrogates the perceived incoherence between homosexuality and Islam, instead asserting that Muslim faith and queer desires coexist, although sociocultural factors in both Western Europe and the Middle East can trouble their mutual expression. While German-embodied Islamophobia represents one object of the film’s critique, Stewart argues that homophobia plays a more central role in plot and character development, thus questioning Germany’s presumed liberalism. Her reading of Maccarone’s film highlights different dimensions of Muslim visibility 8 Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart and queer invisibility in the context of contemporary sociopolitical developments in Iran and in Germany. Taken together, the contributions in this issue contribute to the discussion on a politically, ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse Muslim population in twenty-first-century Germany. We anticipate that these kinds of studies will become all the more numerous and necessary with the influx of migrants from Muslim-majority countries and the rapidly changing demography of the Federal Republic of Germany and the European Union today. Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn 9 Ways of Belonging: navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn in Contemporary German literature David N. Coury University of Wisconsin-Green Bay abstract: Navid Kermani is one of Germany’s foremost writers and scholars of Islam. His essays and literary works illuminate the concurrent debates in the Federal Republic on immigration and multiculturalism as well as help counter a growing trend toward Islamophobia. His writing represents, drawing on Leslie Adelson’s theories, a new “Muslim turn” in contemporary German literature, which lends this body of writing a degree of worldliness and a global perspective that many post-war texts have lacked. In this essay, I argue that Kermani’s literary protagonists as well as his own essayistic positions explore ways of belonging for Muslims in a post-secular and post-national Germany. In particular, this essay analyzes two of Kermani’s fictional works, his 2007 novel Kurzmitteilung and the 2006 children’s book Ayda, Bär und Hase, as well as his essays and interviews in order to explore not only the Muslim turn in contemporary German literature but also narratological constructions and responses to questions of identity and assimilation. Keywords: Navid Kermani, Muslim turn, Iranian-Germans, postnational identity, cultural integration Navid Kermani has established himself as one of Germany’s foremost essayists, novelists and scholars of Islam. His scholarly interventions have helped counter a growing trend toward Islamophobia and his literary works reflect on and illuminate many of the recent polemics in the Federal Republic on immigration and multiculturalism, which, as a result of Thilo Sarrazin’s controversial bestseller Deutschland schafft sich ab, have in the last few years provoked great debate. 1 As a first-generation German-Iranian, Kermani has published a variety of texts that have explored questions of identity from the perspective of both a Muslim and a bicultural writer. While his own literature is, as he emphatically states, quintessentially German, 2 he nonetheless recognizes the struggles of those in 10 David N. Coury non-dominant cultures to find a sense of belonging in a country that has only rather reluctantly viewed itself as a land of immigration. 3 His prose works, along with those of Zafer Şenocak, Feridun Zaimoğlu, Abbas Khider, among others, have contributed to what Karen Yeşilada, following Leslie Adelson, has described as a “Muslim turn” in contemporary German literature, characterized by literary discourses and the appearance of Muslim protagonists who negotiate their identities in a globalized Europe. Kermani’s texts—both his literary and his essayistic writings—represent a significant contribution to this process, whereby his writing explores strategies and ways of belonging in a postnational Germany and a globalized Europe. In this essay, I will explore the challenges that his characters face in integrating into German (and by extension European) society by examining one of his early novels, Kurzmitteilung (2007), and his children’s book Ayda, Bär und Hase (2006), as well as recent essays which challenge preconceived notions of integration and assimilation and offer means of reconciling cultural and religious differences. While it is clear that there is no easy or simple solution, Kermani’s confrontations with these matters has propelled him to the forefront of German writers tackling contemporary cultural issues. To be sure, there has been a growing body of literature on Turkish-German culture and literature over the last several decades, but much less has been written on Islam in German writing or Muslim writers in Germany, of which Turkish-German literature is only a subset. In one of the first studies of German-Muslim writing, Georg Stoll argues that excepting studies by theologians or philosophers, the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century was the first in Germany to show evidence of “traces of encounters” with Islam. Lessing, Goethe, and later Heine all demonstrated what Stoll describes as a “learned-humanistic concern with Islamic culture and religion” (268). By the late twentieth century, however, Islam had received little attention by German writers and only played a “subordinate” role if at all: “Islam is interesting only to the extent that it forms part of the cultural background of the text and gives Muslim immigrants the stamp of foreignness, whereby most authors limit themselves almost exclusively to describing Islamic Turks” (269). When considering the literary production of immigrants, Stoll argues, the picture changes. Beyond forming part of the cultural background of the immigrant experience, this body of literature also presented Islam in the context of separation and potentially liberation, whereas the West provided both refuge and escape, but also necessitated a growing nostalgia for the homeland. Moreover, still other works explored the immigrants’ search for religious identity in the secular West (279-80). Whereas in the 1980s such literature was viewed primarily as documenting social change in the Federal Republic, by the turn of the millennium these literary works demanded to be taken seriously on aesthetic grounds, and many writers, including Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn 11 Kermani, have created characters whose relation to Islam and their country of origin is multifaceted and complex. Although there have been increasingly more studies of (im)migrant literature in Germany, Leslie Adelson posited in her seminal study that such works nevertheless require a “new critical grammar” of migration. She rejects the often applied metaphor of Turkish-German literature serving as a bridge between two cultures and she similarly finds approaches based on theories of diasporic or immigrant literature equally problematic given the multiple generations of Turks and Turkish-Germans who have been born and raised in the Federal Republic. Instead she argues for “medium-specific and context-specific vocabularies” that will allow for a greater understanding of the manifold cultural effects of Turkish immigration (13). Moreover, she maintains, “the center of Europe is no longer Eurocentric,” resulting in what she refers to as an “epochal sense of disorientation” in the literature of Turkish migration (13; 15). The same decentering certainly characterizes the works of Muslim writers in Germany, whose literary production similarly demands a context-specific analysis and one that is similarly predicated on a re-centering of Europe in the context of its growing Muslim population. Such a re-centering is necessitated by the changes in immigration patterns resulting from political conflicts and economic crises that have led to an increase in Muslim immigration into the EU . Moreover, Islam itself is one of the world’s fastest growing religions and this necessitates new ways of understanding the relationship between Islam and the West. 4 As the Turkish sociologist Nilüfer Göle has suggested, postcolonial and “postbloc” forces have also had a transformative effect at the turn of the millennium on Europe to the point that Islam is no longer “[…] an external reference point on the margins of Europe, [rather] it is becoming an indigenous and central factor in shaping processes of change and self-understanding” (665). In her call for a decentering of Europe, she considers two symbols of change and European transformation at the end of the twentieth century that have contributed to the Muslim turn—the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Stari Most, the Mostar bridge in the former Yugoslavia, four years (to the day) later. Whereas the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the end of Communism as a political force in Europe, the fall of the Stari Most announced the “Islamic problem” within Europe (667). The Old Bridge ( stari most ) in Mostar over the Neretva river had stood for over 400 years as a symbol of unity and cultural pluralism in the heart of Bosnia-Herzegovina and was one of the most celebrated examples of Islamic architecture in the Balkans. After it was repeatedly shelled by Bosnian Croats in 1993, it effectively separated the predominantly Bosnian Muslim eastern bank from the Bosnian Croat western bank. The destruction of the bridge ended what Martin Coward has called the 12 David N. Coury “tradition of plural coexistence” that Mostar had come to symbolize (6). While the former symbolized a closing of the past, the latter portended the start of a disoriented future for Europe, whereby Islam would come to appear “[…] as an ‘alterity,’ an incommensurable yet monolithic reality against which Europeans try to distinguish and separate themselves” (Göle, “Decentering” 668). Göle, like Kermani, conjures up but steadfastly rejects Samuel Huntington’s clash-of-civilizations thesis, yet nonetheless recognizes the tensions inherent in “post-Europeanity,” which she has argued can only be reconciled through a two-way adaptation ( Anverwandlung )� 5 This two-way adaptation (or “interpenetration,” to better approximate the original French term interpénétrations ) not only promotes closer contact between the two sides but also further emphasizes the commensurability of values between Islam and the West, one of the goals of Kermani’s writings as well. A fundamental part of recent discourses on integration and the “Islamic problem” in Germany centers around the anti-multiculturalist view of the incommensurability of world views. 6 This argument is promoted not only by Sarrazin and his supporters but also by the likes of Necla Kelek and Ayan Hirsi Ali, who have argued against the possibility of a harmonious integration of Muslims within Europe. Habermas takes issues with this position arguing that it is premised on “problematic background assumptions,” namely the supposition that “cultural ways of life [are] semantically closed universes, each of which keeps the lid on its own standards of rationality and truth claims” (25). By recognizing that Europe is in fact a post-secular society, he reiterates his position that it must “adjust to the continued existence of religious communities in an increasingly secularized environment” (19). With the rise of both immigrant and autochthonous Muslim populations in Europe, the necessity for a re-centering and re-thinking of European identity becomes essential. Such a re-centering naturally involves a process of inclusion and mutual respect for peoples of all cultures, religions, and backgrounds, for, as Habermas reminds us, “the identity of each individual citizen is woven together with collective identities, and must be stabilized in a network of mutual recognition” (Habermas, Postnational 74)� This is without doubt both a painful and precarious process but has important ramifications for the democratic process: “The majority culture, supposing itself to be identical with the national culture as such, has to free itself from its historical identification with a general political culture, if all citizens are to be able to identify on equal terms with the political culture of their own country” (74). This poses certain challenges for both Muslim and non-Muslim Europeans, as both must negotiate their own senses of identity. For Muslims this means embracing an identity as a European Muslim, whereas for non-Muslims this involves an acceptance of Islam as part of Europe. Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn 13 The difficulty on the part of the dominant culture in Germany of relinquishing historical identity constructions and accepting Islam as part of Europe is evident in a number of polemics in the first decade of the twenty-first century, which, as we will see, inform Kermani’s writings. In 2005, then Bundespräsident Norbert Lammert re-opened the debate over a German Leitkultur and the question of German identity. The following year, he asked forty-two leading artists, intellectuals and politicians their views on the concept and the question of its necessity. CDU politician Wolfgang Schäuble, who that same year would lay the foundation for the first Deutsche Islamkonferenz, stated in his response that at the heart of the matter was Germany’s search for an answer to an ageold question, which itself is reflected in many of the discourses in multicultural literature, namely: wie die Menschen, die aus unterschiedlichsten Teilen der Welt, und mit der Absicht, eine Heimat zu finden, nach Deutschland kommen und gekommen sind, mit all den Menschen, die in Deutschland bereits lange ansässig sind und sich heimisch fühlen, zusammenleben und gemeinsam ihr Land, ihre Heimat gestalten können. (Lammert 223) Schäuble’s main concern was with language and the need for immigrants to learn to speak German. Kermani shares Schäuble’s concern and in an essay entitled “Deutschland wird weltoffener,” he recounts an incident between his daughter and a young boy at primary school. He and his wife chose not to send their daughter to the school closest to their home in Cologne out of fear that she would be schooled in Turkish rather than German, noting that in the Catholic school his daughter attends (which still has a migrant population of over fifty percent) “die heimische […] Kultur nicht schamhaft in den Hintergrund gerückt, sondern gepflegt und selbstbewußt vertreten [wird]” ( Wer 61). In fact, he criticizes those schools and politicians who show an exaggerated caution and sensitivity toward the minority populations (or what in the U. S. is commonly referred to as “political correctness”) and instead argues for the necessity of mutual respect: “Wer sich selbst nicht respektiert, kann keinen Respekt erwarten” ( Wer 62). In many ways, his argument dispels a prevalent misconception that some people have, namely that firstand second-generation immigrant populations seek special treatment or are uninterested in German culture or in learning the German language. Kermani’s works, in fact, show a great appreciation for both the Persian and the German literary canons and as well as the intellectual histories of these two cultures. 7 Thus for Kermani, the Leitkultur debate should focus not on cultural difference but instead on the law and on the fundamental principles underlying the Federal Republic: “Leitend an Deutschland ist keine schwer definierbare Kultur, 14 David N. Coury sondern das Grundgesetz, das ich mehr als nur respektiere, sondern als eine der größten Errungenschaften der deutschen Geschichte verehre und verteidige” ( Verfassung 88). Unlike Zafer Şenocak, who calls for a reform of Islam in order to facilitate a greater integration of Western and Islamic values, 8 Kermani is a self-proclaimed “Verfassungspatriot,” who argues throughout his writings that the German Basic Law affords certain fundamental rights to all citizens and individuals living in Germany, which, if followed, would not only allow but also facilitate a peaceful coexistence of cultures and religions. Furthermore, he places the onus on the state to clarify new situations that arise as a result of immigration that could not have been predicated by the fathers of the constitution: Wo etwa muss der Staat eingreifen, wenn die Gleichheit von Frau und Mann nicht gegeben ist oder die Säkularität unserer Gesellschaft nicht akzeptiert wird? Wie geht man mit denen um, die diese Gleichheit der Geschlechter oder den säkularen Rahmen bestreiten oder gar aktiv bekämpfen? Orientieren sollten sich staatliche Vertreter daran, wie sie prinzipiell gegen Bürger oder Vereinigungen vorgehen möchten, die das Grundgesetz missachten, sei es Individuen oder als Angehörige einer Organisation, seien es gebürtige Deutsche oder Migranten. ( Verfassung 90) Here Kermani argues rather presciently for the state to hold not only non-German migrants but also German citizens and organizations accountable for anti-Constitutional activities, an issue that would arise five years later with the arrests of the NSU members accused of the so-called “Döner-Morde,” a topic he would address in Vergesst Deutschland! It therefore came as a surprise when, in October 2010, Chancellor Angela Merkel and CSU -head Horst Seehofer declared in a speech during the Deutschlandtag der Jungen Union that the project of multiculturalism in Germany had failed. 9 While Merkel’s comments stirred both debate and criticism, less commonly reported were her additional remarks—not unlike those made by Kermani—that the Berlin government needed to do more to integrate immigrants into German society. In her comments, Merkel also referenced a speech a few days earlier by German president Christian Wulff in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of German unification in which Wulff asks rhetorically whether Germany since unification has grown together into a unified Vaterland. In pondering the issue of immigrants and religious differences, Wulff famously affirmed that indeed “der Islam gehört inzwischen auch zu Deutschland.” 10 These two seemingly contradictory statements—that the project of multiculturalism is dead, yet Islam has nevertheless established itself as part of Germany—leave one to wonder how and if these perspectives are to be reconciled. Moreover, what exactly does it mean for the identities of German Muslims as well as for literature written by Muslims in Germany? Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn 15 These questions are certainly not new and Germany’s complex history of both religious tolerance and intolerance makes these matters not only more problematic, but also all the more important for the broader European context. Wulff’s comments, like Merkel’s, prompted both debates and criticism as to what that would mean for Germany’s cultural and political identity. Writing in Die Zeit, Ulrich Greiner criticized Wulff’s proclamation by claiming that such a statement erases Germany’s Judeo-Christian heritage and instead suggests that Germans now live in a Christian-Jewish-Muslim culture, which he evidently feels is incorrect. 11 Greiner goes on to cite the German Grundgesetz and the references to human rights (Article 1.1, “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar” and Article 2.2, “Die Freiheit der Person ist unverletzlich”), suggesting that Islam does not fully recognize these principles. Drawing a historical line to the origin of the separation of church and state, the realm of God and that of “das deutsche Volk” back to antiquity, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, he writes: “Der Islam jedoch kennt diesen Begriff der personalen Freiheit nicht in derselben Weise.” It is rather surprising that Greiner would not only further such a conception of Islam but also that he embraces the idea of Europe and Germany having as a fundament “Judeo-Christian values,” thereby overlooking centuries of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Further, while it is true that Islam sees the dignity of human life as being granted by God and not by a secular state, it has not always been the European and / or Western tradition to view the origins of human dignity as granted by law either. But Greiner’s broader contention that Islam cannot be integrated into the European or German system of secular values and society because of fundamental differences between the Christian and Islamic conceptions of what he terms “Gewaltenteilung,” (a separation of religious doctrine and secular governmental law) reflects a notion that has gained somewhat widespread acceptance in the West and particularly in Europe in the wake of controversies in the Netherlands and Denmark but also in Germany. 12 Perhaps in answer to Greiner and others who hold to this belief, Kermani takes up the question of the commensurability of Islam and the West in several essays in his book Wer ist Wir? Deutschland und seine Muslime. In an essay titled “Ist der Islam integrierbar? ” Kermani argues first and foremost that one cannot speak of “ der Islam.” Not only are there manifold manifestations of and practices within Islam, so that one cannot speak of a monolithic religion, so too is there no one person who can speak for the faith as a whole, as the Pope does in Roman Catholicism. Greiner too acknowledges this, as he terms it, “notorious” objection that “ der Islam” doesn’t exist, and consequently rejects Wulff’s claim that “ der Islam gehört inzwischen auch zu Deutschland” for if there is not one Islam, then it cannot be part of Germany. Greiner, however, doesn’t extend that line of thinking further to apply to the 16 David N. Coury multiplicity of practices and branches within Christianity and Judaism which he clearly understands to be fully part of German society. This type of thinking is typical of a Eurocentric viewpoint that seeks to underscore differences rather than acknowledge commonalities. Despite this objection, Kermani nevertheless notes that there are certain fundamental principles in Islam to which all practitioners can agree: the so-called five pillars of Islam. If one were to reduce the essence of Islam to these five duties required of all Muslims, then Kermani fails to see how anyone could argue that Islam cannot be integrated into a secular European society, given the personal freedoms and freedom of thought afforded by almost all constitutions ( Wer 116-17). Another fundamental objection that has been raised about the incompatibility of Islam and the West is the idea that Islam fails to recognize a separation of church and state, or more specifically secular and religious law. Kermani addresses this question too, by historicizing the Islamic concept of a unity between state and religion ( Al-Islam din wa-daula ). Ironically, he argues, this belief in such a unity among many Muslims is in fact a product of modernity, as the concept is not to be found in any Islamic text prior to the eighteenth century. He notes, for instance, that in the Islamic Middle Ages, unlike in the Christian medieval period, religious and political authorities were separate. To be sure, the caliph was a defender of the faith, he writes, but as a rule he did not have a religious education and was not permitted to issue religious opinions. Quite simply, the caliph was no mufti ( Wer 118). Only in more recent times have fundamentalist interpreters of Islam come to view the unity of faith and state as important, most often in reaction to colonialism and oppression which necessitated such a view to assert an identity. This would then be proof that Islam is not rooted or mired in medieval, pre-modern tribal thinking, as many critics have claimed, and is therefore not incompatible with Western modernity. Kermani similarly rejects the idea of a need for “cultural dialogue” as well as the more insipient Western concept of a “clash of cultures,” as both set up a false binary and suggest that the two cultures are mutually exclusive ( Wer 122). Where, for instance, does the westernized Muslim fit into this scheme, he asks, or a Bosnian, or a secondor third-generation Muslim immigrant? The problem, Kermani points out, is that the idea of incommensurability infects not only those in Westernized societies who come to believe false precepts but it can also radicalize those in Islamic societies who similarly come to believe in cultural antagonism and react violently. He cites several contemporary Muslim scholars (Mohammed Arkoun, Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid, and Abdolkarim Sorusch) who reject this kind of thinking and shows that it has been the instrumentalization and politicization of Islam that have led to false interpretations and theories on the relation between the West and the Islamic worlds ( Wer 123). In sum, he writes in closing: Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn 17 “Allenfalls ließe sich mit Blick auf die Historie sagen, daß Demokratie oder Menschenrechte Möglichkeiten des Islams sind” ( Wer 125). Such examples are then proof that Islam can be integrated into a secular state. But the question as to whether Muslims in Germany can be integrated—and if so, how—is different and this is the very matter that Kermani probes in his literary works. Two such works, Kermani’s 2006 children’s book Ayda, Bär und Hase and his 2007 short novel Kurzmitteilung, explore the challenges and struggles that Muslims face in locating themselves and their identity in contemporary German society. These two books, while markedly different, share many characteristics, including strong autobiographical parallels. The protagonists of both novels are Germans of Iranian descent who live in Cologne, but spend time both in Iran (Isfahan, the homeland of Kermani’s parents) and Spain. Both are Muslims who struggle to fit in and are in search of meaningful integration into German society. In the end, however, they find very different ways of belonging in a globalized Europe. Ayda, the young protagonist of the children’s book, learns lessons in friendship, perseverance, and acceptance of difference as a mechanism of belonging and integration. In Kurzmitteilung, however, Kermani explores the internal struggles that European Muslims face that could lead either to radicalization or a forced break with one’s traditions and heritage. The two works at once complement and contrast with one another by showing, on the one hand, an idealized world of integration and contentment and, on the other hand, the consequences of spiritual exile as a result of an inability to reconcile Islam and Western values. Ayda, Bär und Hase is perhaps the simplest and most straightforward narrative of integration that Kermani has written to date. Ayda, a five-year-old kindergartener living in Cologne with her Iranian parents, feels sad and alone as the story opens, in part because she does not have many friends in school or her neighborhood. Lisa and Paul, two of her classmates from school, like her, but never invite her to play or go on bicycle rides because she is too small, but also, she thinks, because she is different. One day, while exploring the city on her own, she encounters a rabbit and a bear whom she befriends and shares her feelings with and who accompany Ayda as she begins to explore her multicultural world, not only in and around her neighborhood but also on a family trip to Spain, where her parents vacation and meet up with their Iranian relatives from Isfahan and America. The story is told by a third-person omniscient narrator, who often speaks directly to the reader, bringing to mind not only the voice of a parent reading to a child but also the classical narrative strategies of Arabic and Persian literature. The story opens, for instance, with the standard Persian formula of the oral narrative tradition, “Yeki bud, yeki nabud, gheir az chodâ hietsch-kas nabud,” 13 which is repeated at the beginning of each of the 18 David N. Coury four sections of the book, positioning the story in the realm of the oral tale or, as becomes evident with the introduction of the rabbit and bear, the fable (11). That the storyteller is Persian is important in that it establishes an affinity between the narrator and Ayda, who is growing up bi-culturally in Germany. Throughout the story, the narrator gives insights into the Persian language by exploring pronunciation of names such as Ayda’s and vocabulary words for family members. In this way, the narrator introduces young readers of the book to the Persian language and customs of Iran as a way of making Ayda less foreign but also in order to underscore the similarities among all young children. However, the story itself reflects a child’s perspective on the issues of difference and exclusion in a multicultural society. After running away at the beginning of the story, Ayda tells her newfound friends Rabbit and Bear that she is sad that she has no siblings and feels abandoned by the other children. Rabbit and Bear promise to be her friends and tell her how they too had been lifelong friends despite their differences and the general perception that rabbits and bears are not by nature friendly or compatible. This constellation of figures, along with the narratorial interventions that establish a moral authority and commentary, 14 invites the reader to understand the story as a fable about difference and ways of belonging. In the spirit of the fable, Rabbit and Bear come to represent outsiders who themselves are different and marginalized from the mainstream population. Both express their intrigue when first encountering Ayda, as neither has met a human before. Afterwards they wish to meet Ayda’s family and friends and become more integrated into the human world. Rabbit in particular is presented as an especially polite creature who extols the virtues of helping others. He speaks in a manner different and more formal than the others but by the end of the story has even begun to imitate the local dialect by proclaiming in Kölsch, “Eschte Fründe ston zesamme,” the refrain of the song he has heard Ayda’s father and other fans singing at the 1. FC Köln soccer matches. This linguistic shift, as minor as it may seem, nevertheless symbolizes a move toward integration on the part of Rabbit, despite his differences as an outsider, and mirrors one of the most commonly contested points of the immigration debate, namely the supposed reluctance of foreigners and immigrants to learn and speak the native language. The narrator draws this parallel even more clearly toward the end of the fourth part of the story when Ayda’s family meets the rabbit’s family for the first time and Ayda’s father thanks the father rabbit for taking such good care of his daughter. When the rabbit family invites Ayda and her parents to their home, Ayda’s father, rather than decline, extends an invitation to the rabbit family instead. In detailing this polite negotiation, the narrator explains the Persian custom of taarof : Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn 19 Dass die Hasenhöhle viel zu klein ist für den Besuch von Menschen (oder gar Bären), konnte Bâbâ sich selbst denken. Das nennt man Höflichkeit oder taarof, wie man auf Persisch sagt. Für Hasen und Iraner ist taarof sehr wichtig. Taarof ist, wenn man etwas sagt, was man nicht meint - aber man meint es gut. (142) Cultural differences and practices like this are presented throughout the book and help to break down stereotypes that young readers might have formed in the wake of a growing multicultural population at their schools or in their communities. In the end, Ayda wins over Lisa and Paul in part with the help of Rabbit and Bear, 15 whom she now views as part of her extended family. The moral of the story, as would be expected both from a fable and a children’s book, is clear: we mustn’t judge others by their appearance, their background or the way they speak, acknowledging instead that each person is an individual deserving of respect and recognition of her individuality. The other message that the book sends to children is articulated by Ayda herself when she and her friends come to the rescue of a poor overworked donkey in Spain: “Wenn man unglücklich ist, muss man sich nicht damit abfinden, sondern versuchen, es zu ändern” (114). Whereas Ayda and her friends help the donkey find happiness, so too do Rabbit and Bear help Ayda befriend Lisa and Paul and break down the barriers of difference that the latter perceived. These themes of tolerance, perseverance, and the peaceful coexistence of cultures are common themes explored in all of Kermani’s texts, including both his narrative and essayistic work. While the question of religious tolerance is not explored in Ayda, Hase und Bär —the reader would assume that Ayda is Muslim, but this facet of her characterization never comes up explicitly—it does become a focal point of Kermani’s next work from 2007, the complex and enigmatic novel Kurzmitteilung. Dariusch, the first-person narrator, is a forty-something German-Iranian event manager from Cologne who at the opening of the book receives an SMS from a colleague informing him that a woman whom he had only briefly met for work has suddenly died. This news shakes him out of the complacency of his comfortable life in his second home in Cadaqués, Spain, and prompts him to return to Cologne to try to learn more about the woman, Maike Anfang, and the circumstances surrounding her death. Dariusch made her acquaintance through a contract he received to organize a farewell celebration for Patrick Boger, the American CEO of the Ford- AG in Cologne, who would soon be returning to the U. S. Perplexed and disturbed by the fact that someone so young could die so suddenly, Dariusch becomes drawn into Maike Anfang’s life as he tries to make sense of her sudden death. In the process, he comes to reflect on his own life and values and in the end questions his past and the choices he has made. The story concludes with a long email from Dariusch to Boger explaining that he 20 David N. Coury wrote the text detailing the events (which is, in fact, the novel itself) as a document of his former self, and that he is now quite ashamed of who he once was. Significantly (and symbolically), the novel is constructed of eleven chapters, with a postscript twelfth in the form of the email reflecting on the events of the preceding eleven. In an interview and reading at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, Kermani discussed with the panelists that the structure of the book parallels the story of the twelve Shi’a imams. Twelver Shi’as, the religious majority in Iran, believe that the twelfth imam, al-Mahdi, disappeared and will one day reappear to bring peace and justice to the world. Thus, Kermani notes, the final chapter of the story is similarly missing and supplanted instead by a postscript, offering Dariusch’s own attempt at internal peace and reconciliation. 16 This novelistic structure not only contextualizes the story within a Muslim tradition but it also sheds light onto Dariusch’s change. After having met Boger in Cologne, Dariusch followed him to the U. S. as a participant in seminars at his Center in Arkansas, a new-age, quasi-religious, pro-capitalist institute. Dariusch reveals that while in the U. S., he underwent a profound transformation in his life leading him not only to reject Islam but, at least in his mind, to become a better, more altruistic person in the process. 17 Unlike Ayda in the children’s story, who embraces her identity and finds strength in diversity, Dariusch struggles to come to terms with his identity, his heritage, and his religion. In fact, the reader is initially unaware of his Iranian heritage and his Muslim faith, which are only gradually revealed. The story takes place shortly after the 2005 London bombings and throughout the novel, Dariusch makes comments about the perpetrators and his disdain for political Islam. Nevertheless, it is clear that Islam has played an important role in his upbringing, so much so that, upon hearing the news of Maike Anfang’s death, he immediately begins to pray: Ich bin nicht gläubig, aber wenn ich etwas Wichtiges vorhabe oder jemand gestorben ist, spreche ich die Fatiha, die erste Sure des Korans, obwohl ich mich gar nicht mehr genau an den Sinn erinnere. Es hat nichts mit Frömmigkeit zu tun. Die arabischen Verse liegen gut auf meinen Lippen und helfen mir über die Sekunden hinweg, in denen ich nicht weiß, was ich tun oder denken soll. ( Kurzmitteilung 18) Moreover, he notes that since 9 / 11, there has been a proliferation of interest and even commercialization of Islam to such an extent that he could even profit from it in his business. 18 In fact, he proposes that the celebration for Boger have an “oriental” theme, albeit one that focuses on the secular and successful in Islam, concepts quite different from the preconceived notions that many have of religion (47). His relation to his faith is quite complex, whereby on the one hand he is drawn to the traditions and sayings of the Koran, while on the other Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn 21 he rejects the word “Islam,” because he associates it with his grandparents and good-hearted people, suggesting that the contemporary manifestation of political Islam stands in sharp contrast to the kindness of his extended family (34). Gradually he begins to question and reject Islam and other Muslims as a consequence of the actions of the London bombers as well as the perceived discrimination he feels from others and his own desire to feel more European. Dariusch himself is a successful, secular Muslim and a womanizer who enjoys drinking and the nightlife in his established homes in Spain and Germany. Nevertheless, he still struggles with his identity. While fully integrated into German society—and more specifically Cologne—he nonetheless finds himself spending more and more time in rural Catalonia, a region of Spain that rejects its Spanish-Castilian identity and seeks independence, suggesting an affinity toward a region with a similar identity conflict. As such, Dariusch moves in a third-space ( USA ) that is linked neither to his country of origin (Iran), nor to his country of birth (Germany), nor even to his adopted second home (Spain). Jim Jordan has suggested that Dariusch suffers from a Herkunftsbewältigung, which is typical of the “fundamental engagement of second-generation migrants with their ethnic, cultural and religious background” (177). Furthermore, Dariusch’s religious background provides him an even less steady anchor for his identity. Here too he is torn, for he is neither religious nor particularly pious, yet he notes that he is nevertheless increasingly categorized as such by others. Before visiting Maike Anfang’s mother in Cologne, he ponders his appearance and how he is generally perceived and stereotyped by others: Meinen Namen hatte ich auf dem Anrufbeantworter hinterlassen, aber wenn sie mich mit fünftägigem Bart, den langen Haaren und dem schwarzen Anzug sehen würde, wer weiß, vielleicht würde sie das irritieren. Ich merke, daß die Leute irritiert sind, wenn sie einen unrasierten Araber sehen, obwohl ich keiner bin. (53) Even more pointedly, he rants that the world is full of idiots like “die Araber, die sich in die Luft jagen, und die fetten Weißen, die uns deswegen alle für Araber halten” (53). While he never clearly states that he himself has been discriminated against, he nonetheless feels a sense of otherness from fellow Europeans (“die Weißen”) based on his ethnic and religious background. That he himself rejects his own heritage leaves him feeling disoriented and rootless, leading, as critics have noted, to his inability to maintain meaningful relationships and to his fixation on impersonal forms of communication like texting, cell phones, and email. 19 But it also makes him more susceptible to change and falling sway to Boger and his mysterious Center in America. Reviewers were initially divided on how to interpret the end of the novel and Dariusch’s self-reflections. 20 While most, if not all, question Dariusch’s true 22 David N. Coury intentions at the end of the novel, some feel his transformation was spurred by a conversion from Islam to a new-age cult, while others see him as having become an opportunistic manipulator who uses Boger’s methods to seek greater profits. Writing in Die Zeit, Jochen Jung views Dariusch as full of contradictions who has at the end become “ein entschiedenes Mitglied von Scientology,” while Jörg Magenau feels that this “irritierendes Buch” by the end devolves into a “Kitschroman.” 21 Jordan has maintained, however—and Frauke Matthes concurs—that Kurzmitteilung is much more, namely an “exhortation to the second generation [of migrants] not to try to ignore real issues arising from their position and their family past, and that Dariusch is intended as a cautionary tale in this respect” (177). However, Dariusch’s transformation into a postmodern materialist in a “post-ethnic and post-political lifestyle,” Jordan goes on to argue, represents only a deferral of his eventual “day of reckoning.” But this still begs the question as to what the cautionary tale really is. Has there been a rash of second-generation European Muslims converting to Scientology or other New Age religious cults? Or is there a fear that many Muslims will lose their identity and embrace a soulless materialism? A more logical ending and cautionary tale might have had Dariusch becoming more radicalized as a result of his inability to overcome his heritage ( Jordan’s Herkunftsbewältigung ) and embracing his roots and political Islam all the more. 22 This, however, would have only reinforced the stereotypes that many in the West on both sides of the political spectrum have about the causalities of the failure of integration and assimilation. 23 Still, this leaves unanswered questions about the puzzling ending of the novel and Dariusch’s personal transformation. Part of his change involves a strong rejection of Islam: Der Islam ist eine grausame, blutige Religion. Er bringt keinen Frieden, er erzeugt keinen Respekt, sondern immer nur neuen Terror. […] Da ist nur Haß. Ich wundere mich nicht mehr über die Zustände in Iran und sonstwo. Wo so viel Intoleranz und Aggression ist, kann sich die Gesellschaft nicht positiv entwickeln. ( Kurzmitteilung 150) He goes on to describe his quest for a peaceful spirituality that would lead to a sense of prosperity and well-being. This, he says, constitutes what he has found in the U. S., “das Zentrum des neuen, uralten Geistes” (150). The corporate success that Boger has enjoyed and that he proselytizes at his Center in Arkansas enables Dariusch’s self-evaluation and provides him with the confidence and satisfaction that he has sought: “Es ist so einfach, erfolgreich zu sein - und so gut. Ja, es ist gut, gut zu sein” (151). Clearly he equates success with a moral imperative for personal betterment and links it to an altruism that he finds lacking in Islam. Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn 23 Dariusch’s transformation can perhaps be best understood when the novel is contextualized within Kermani’s other nonfiction writings so as to gain a greater understanding of the complexity of the issues his work grapples with. The dust jacket of Kurzmitteilung quotes from the novel and Dariusch’s perplexity upon learning of Maike Anfang’s death: “Wieso stirbt jemand, dachte ich, wieso stirbt jemand einfach so? ” This deceptively simple, yet deeply religious question, also accounts for the origins of the novel. Kermani dedicates the book to the memory of Claudia Fenner, an actress who, much like Maike Anfang, died suddenly in the summer of 2005. Kermani knew Fenner only fleetingly but was taken aback by her sudden death, which he learned of via a SMS � 24 That same year, Kermani published a lengthy study on theodicy and the origins of suffering: Der Schrecken Gottes: Attar, Hiob und die metaphysische Revolte, 25 drawing on his expertise as a scholar of Islamic history and theology. Kermani begins his study on a very personal note, in which he recalls his Aunt Lobat and the suffering she endured leading to her slow, painful death. Watching this beloved and devout aunt suffer reminded Kermani not only of the story of Job but also of the writings of the Persian mystic poet Attar, whose The Book of Suffering is at the center of his analysis. As is typical of Kermani’s essayistic writing, his study draws on both German and Persian cultural and literary histories, a move which further underscores the intellectual connectivity of the East and West. He makes connections to modern philosophical thought and literary tenets and so considers the suffering and painful death that Heinrich Heine faced and draws parallels to the suffering of his Aunt Lobat. Heine, he reminds us, suffered terribly in the final twelve years of his life, but in the process, he also returned to his religion: “Before he can even refute it in the manner of Büchner, religion is brought forth by pain” ( Terror 23). Additionally, Kermani explores the tradition in all three of the monotheistic religions of rejecting God in the face of torment and suffering and how each religion treats this phenomenon from a theological perspective. He maintains, however, that as great as the promise of God’s reward is in Christianity and Judaism, there is “a very different answer, already formulated surprisingly vehemently in the Arab-Persian Middle Ages […] to questions of suffering, injustice and evil: to dispute the existence of God” (19). While disputing the existence of God has a long tradition as a response to suffering, the rejection of God can also be a survival mechanism and a more drastic, pessimistic means of integration for minorities. In many ways, this is where we find Dariusch at the opening of the novel: Maike Anfang’s sudden death is the catalyst which sets him on a course of questioning God, religion, and his heritage, as he finds in Islam no comfort for understanding suffering or injustice and even finds evil in the actions of those who have been radicalized by religion. By the conclusion of the story, he has 24 David N. Coury come to an outright rejection of God: “Weder glaube ich an einen Gott im Himmel, der alles zum Guten wendet, noch an die bösen Amerikaner, die alles zugrunde richten,” Dariusch writes to Boger ( Kurzmitteilung 150). In many ways, Dariusch undergoes the reverse of the transformation that Heine experienced; whereas Heine found God through suffering, Dariusch, in the long-standing Islamic tradition, rejects God. In contemplating Heine’s state of mind, Kermani quotes Heine’s first comments on his illness in 1849: “‘I am no longer a life-loving, somewhat portly Greek, smiling condescendingly at gloomy Nazarenes—I am now a mortally sick Jew, an emaciated image of misery, an unhappy human being! ’” ( Terror 204). Whereas Heine had gone from being a life-loving intellectual to a mortally sick Jew, Dariusch moves from being a morally sick Muslim to being a life-loving capitalist. Yet at the same time he has curiously not become morally bankrupt or corrupted at the end of the story. On the contrary, he seeks a broad sense of purity, charity, and fraternity, something he feels he has learned from Boger: “der wahre Sinn des Lebens liegt darin, für andere dazusein” ( Kurzmitteilung 149). He adds, “Ich möchte dahin gelangen, allen fühlenden Wesen nahezustehen. Die Liebe soll sich nicht beschränken auf die eigenen Freunde, die eigene Familie. Jeder Mensch ist liebenswert” (155). As Matthes has argued, Dariusch has found an alternative religion, a secular spirituality that provides stability and an identity (314). Whether or not this step is authentic is never made clear. But herein lies the cautionary tale, namely that the disenchantment that Muslims might feel as a result of both a commercialized and a radicalized Islam can lead to both disillusionment and a disengagement from society and religion. Whereas some are drawn to political Islam or even violence, others might be tempted to overlook the Koranic view of these issues. Kermani notes that in contrast to Christianity and Judaism, in Islam “the world is arranged in such a way that there is not even cause for critical questioning. The creation is not only God’s work, it is also good at all times and everywhere; all people need to do is look, then they will recognize and thank God” ( Terror 175). This is the simple lesson that Ayda learns and internalizes as she finally makes peace with herself and finds acceptance among her friends and those both like and unlike her. Ayda never questions her heritage or the goodness in the world; rather, she seeks ways of belonging and integration into her circle of friends and society as a whole that allow her to embrace who she is and fit into the multicultural world in which she lives. It is unclear whether Dariusch will again find his way back to his religion (after all, the final twelfth chapter, like the twelfth Imam, has yet to appear), but he has nevertheless found a path to clarity and a new life. But why, one might ask, would Kermani, a devout Muslim himself, choose to offer a moral or cautionary tale in which the protagonist loses his religion in order to find happiness? In interviews, Kermani has described Dariusch as Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn 25 a seeker (“ein Suchender”) 26 and he has emphasized that Kurzmitteilung was a novel concerned with the here and now and thus not an existential novel that would offer answers to deep theological questions. 27 Perhaps the answer lies again in Kermani’s reflections on theodicy and his discussions of counter-theology. In concluding his study of Attar and Job, Kermani explains that Attar teaches that “it is all the same to God whether we pray or not, whether we believe in Him, deny Him or insult Him” ( Terror 219). From this, Attar and many Western philosophers come to find an existential freedom from indifference—an indifference, Attar implies, which arises from a “theological apathy: if God is indifferent, it makes no difference what people say about him” ( Terror 219). This is not to say that Attar (or Kermani, for that matter) argues for atheism or a complete rejection of God. What saves us and what inevitably saved Job as well as Kermani’s Aunt Lobat is hope. Attar’s expressions of hope, derived from joy, suggests that the protagonist of Kermani’s open-ended novel might one day find his way back to his faith, not like Heine through suffering, but rather through joy, hope, and a belief in the goodness within humankind. Kurzmitteiling and Ayda, Bär und Hase, as representative of Kermani’s works, reflect the range of styles and possibilities in contemporary literature about Muslims in Germany. Whereas one portrays a young girl finding her way, her community, and herself in her multicultural world, the other depicts the difficulties that Muslims face both politically and existentially in the post 9 / 11 world and the challenges they confront in negotiating ways of belonging in a post-national but also increasingly post-secular world. The Muslim turn in contemporary German writing therefore offers a complexity and diversity of thought that resists reductive conceptions of national and religious identity. This growing body of literature will only enrich the West’s understanding of Islam and the relationship that it has to Germany and Europe today. Muslim writers, as Kermani asserts, must continue to play a role in shaping the West’s understanding of their cultures: “A culture proves its strength when it does not leave radical criticism to outsiders, but practices it itself—that is, when self-criticism is possible, and even institutionally supported” ( Terror 169). Kermani argues further that critical and institutionally supported voices are essential in this process and are as much a legacy of the Islamic tradition as of the Western Enlightenment: “most poets and mystics who attacked the dominant worldview and traditional conventions of their time saw themselves as devout Muslims. And not only that: they were an integral part of their own culture” ( Terror 169). Islam is indeed part of German society and culture today, and, whether or not the project of multiculturalism has failed, it will continue to be important for Muslim writers to explore the diversity of thought and ideas in Islam in order to create new ways of belonging for all citizens in contemporary German society. 26 David N. Coury notes 1 The debate over Sarrazin’s book alone has filled at least two volumes, see: Sarrazin: Eine deutsche Debatte and Hilal Sezgin, ed., Manifest der Vielen. 2 “Meine Literatur ist deutsch, Punkt, aus, basta - so deutsch wie Kafka” (Kermani, Wer 133)� 3 See Philip L. Martin, Germany: Reluctant Land of Immigration (Washington: AICGS , 1998). 4 The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life published a study in 2011 predicting that the world’s Muslim population will increase 35 % in the next twenty years. While Europe and the Americas will still be home to the smallest percentage of the world’s Muslims, both regions are expected to see sizeable growth in their Muslim populations. See “The Future of the Global Muslim Population,” www.pewforum.org/ 2011/ 01/ 27 / the-future-of-the-global-muslim-population. 5 She notes that the German translation of her book originally published in French as Interpénétrations: L’Islam et l’Europe is Anverwandlungen: Der Islam in Europa zwischen Kopftuchverbot und Extremismus. 6 See Coury, “Enlightenment Fundamentalism,” for a discussion of the polemic between anti-multiculturalists and integrationists as exemplified by the 2007 debate between Timothy Garton Ash and Pascal Bruckner. 7 See especially “Lob der Differenz” as well as the “Anhang” in Wer ist Wir? 8 See, for instance, “Deutschsein am Bosporus” in Şenocak. 9 “Integration: Seehofer und Merkel befeuern Leitkultur-Debatte.” 10 Christian Wulff, “Rede zum 20. Jahrestag der Deutschen Einheit.” 11 Greiner, “Unser Islam? Christian Wulff wagt eine große Geste in aufgeheizter Zeit. Aber noch gehört der Islam nicht zur deutschen Kultur.” 12 Tzvetan Todorov discusses the so-called Danish cartoon scandal and Ian Buruma’s lengthy essay deals with the murder of Theo van Gogh, both of which created unrest and debate in the Islamic world. 13 “Einen gab’s, den anderen nicht, niemand gab’s außer Gott” is the German equivalent that immediately follows the Persian. This formula is the equivalent of the English storytelling opening “Once upon a time,” although interestingly with a religious overtone. 14 As an example, in the second part of the story, a circus director comments that he didn’t believe three young children could help him out of a predicament. The narrator then speaks directly to the readers, presumably young children, saying “Erinnert ihr euch? Habe ich das nicht gesagt? Dass die Erwachsenen besonders dann streng mit den Kindern sind, wenn sie selbst Ärger haben. Und hier der Beweis” (75). Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn 27 15 The story takes an interesting twist when Ayda is confronted by a group of boys bullying her for being small. They challenge her to three feats of strength and athleticism and Rabbit and Bear come to her aide in a scene reminiscent of Gunther’s battle with Brünhild in the Nibelungenlied. Kermani has made his love of classic German literature clear in numerous essays so the parallels are striking. 16 Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, “Unterhaltung über Kermanis Text und über die Hauptfigur.” 17 In the discussion at the Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, Kermani emphasizes that Dariusch has become a better person as a result of his experiences in the U. S., a fact that tends to be overlooked or downplayed by most critics who view his change cynically or else do not believe that he has indeed become an altruistic person. 18 Matthes reads this passage as part of a larger debate that Kermani sets up regarding the marketing of Islam. She sees this in relation to the fact “that German audiences expect writers and artists with Muslim background to be practicing Muslims, or even Islamic, and to comment on Islam-related issues in their work” (311). As such the novel itself could be read as Kermani’s own commentary on Islam. 19 See Jordan’s and Matthes’s analyses of the novel, both of whom mention Dariusch’s objectification of women and his reliance on technology as a form of interpersonal communication. 20 Kermani’s website has links to many reviews in major publications. See: navid.kermani.de, “Pressestimmen.” 21 Jung, “Einer dieser Typen von Scientology”; Magenau, “Ein Ekelpaket auf der Jagd nach Liebe.” Scientology is never mentioned, but critics and reviewers have noted that Boger’s Center, which appears to link spirituality and business success, is similar to some of the tenets of Scientology. Clearly Kermani wanted this to be ambiguous and thus did not place Boger’s center in California. See Matthes for more on the similarities to Scientology. 22 Several émigré Muslim writers have written such cautionary tales, including Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Laila Lalami’s Secret Son. 23 See Buruma’s excellent study and analysis of this phenomenon. 24 Fink, “Die Verwandlung,” Frankfurter Rundschau � 25 Translated into English as The Terror of God: Attar, Job and the Metaphysical Revolt. I quote here from the English translation in keeping with my broader interpretive strategy. 26 Badke, “Unsympathisch und faszinierend.” 28 David N. Coury 27 See Kermani’s discussion at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. “Unterhaltung über Kermanis Text und über die Hauptfigur.” Works Cited Adelson, Leslie. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Badke, Christine. “Unsympathisch und faszinierend.” Kölner Stadtanzeiger. 1 March 2007. Web. 5 Jan. 2016. Buruma, Ian. Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance. New York: Penguin, 2006. Coury, David N. “Enlightenment Fundamentalism: Zafer Şenocak, Navid Kermani, and Multiculturalism in Germany Today.” Edinburgh German Yearbook 7. Ed. Emily Jeremiah and Frauke Matthes. Rochester: Camden House, 2013. 139-58. Coward, Martin. Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction. New York, Routledge, 2009. Deutschland Stiftung Integration, ed. Sarrazin—Eine deutsche Debatte. Munich: Piper, 2010� Fink, Oliver. “Die Verwandlung.” Frankfurter Rundschau. 21 Mar 2007. Web. 5 Jan. 2016. Göle, Nilüfer. Anverwandlungen: Der Islam in Europa zwischen Kopftuchverbot und Extremismus. Trans. Ursel Schäfer. Berlin: Wagenbach, 2008. —. “Decentering Europe, Recentering Islam.” New Literary History 43.4 (Autumn 2012): 665-85. —. Interpénétrations: L’Islam et l’Europe. Paris: Galaade, 2005. Greiner, Ulrich. “Unser Islam? Christian Wulff wagt eine große Geste in aufgeheizter Zeit. Aber noch gehört der Islam nicht zur deutschen Kultur.” Zeit-Online. 07 Oct. 2010. Web. 5 Jan. 2016. Habermas, Jürgen. “Notes on a Post-secular Society.” New Perspectives Quarterly 25�4 (Fall 2008): 17-29. —. “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy.” The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Cambridge, MA : MIT , 2001. Jung, Jochen. “Einer dieser Typen von Scientology.” Zeit-Online . 16 Aug. 2007. Web. 5 Jan, 2016. Jordan, Jim. “Identity, Irony and Denial: Navid Kermani’s Kurzmitteilung. ” Aesthetics and Politics in Modern German culture: Festschrift in Honour of Rhys W. Williams. Ed. Brigid Haines, Stephen Parker, and Colin Riordan. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. 165-77. Kermani, Navid. Ayda, Bär und Hase. Vienna: Picus, 2006. —. Kurzmitteilung. Zurich: Amman, 2007. —. “Navid Kermani.” Verfassung, Patriotismus, Leitkultur: Was unsere Gesellschaft zusammenhält. Ed. Norbert Lammert. Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 2006. 86-90. —. “Navid Kermani” and “Pressestimmen.” 4 Sep 2014. Web. Jan. 2016. —. The Terror of God: Attar, Job and the Metaphysical Revolt. Cambridge, UK : Polity, 2011� —. Wer ist wir? Deutschland und seine Muslime. Munich: Beck, 2010. Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn 29 Lammert, Norbert. Verfassung, Patriotismus, Leitkultur: Was unsere Gesellschaft zusammenhält. Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 2006. Literarisches Colloquium Berlin ( LCB ). “Unterhaltung über Kermanis Text und über die Hauptfigur.” Lesungen.net. 20 Mar 2007. Web. 5 Dec. 2013. Magenau, Jörg. “Ein Ekelpaket auf der Jagd nach Liebe.” Sueddeutsche.de. 19 May 2010. Web. 5 Jan. 2016. Matthes, Frauke. “Islam in the West: Perceptions and Self-Perceptions of Muslims in Navid Kermani’s Kurzmitteilung .” German Life and Letters 64.2 (April 2011): 305-16. Schäuble, Wolfgang. “Wolfgang Schäuble.” Verfassung, Patriotismus, Leitkultur: Was unsere Gesellschaft zusammenhält. Ed. Norbert Lammert. Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 2006. 222-27. Şenocak, Zafer. Deutschsein: Eine Aufklärungsschrift. Hamburg: Körber, 2011. Sezgin, Hilal, ed. Manifest der Vielen: Deutschland erfindet sich neu. Berlin: Blumenbar, 2011� Stoll, Georg. “Immigrant Muslim Writing in Germany.” The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam’s Impact on Contemporary Literature. Ed. John C. Hawley. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. 266-83. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fear of Barbarians. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. Wulff, Christian. “Rede zum 20. Jahrestag der Deutschen Einheit.” 3 Oct. 2010. Web. 22 Dec. 2013. <www.bundespraesident.de / SharedDocs / Reden / DE / Christian-Wulff/ Reden/ 2010/ 10/ 20101003_Rede.html> Yeşilada, Karin E. “How Radical Is It? Figurations of Islamists and the Muslim Turn in Contemporary German Literature.” Conference Paper. German Studies Association Conference, Milwaukee, WI . 5 Oct. 2012. Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn 31 Between Play and Mimicry: The limits of humanism in Verrücktes Blut 1 Priscilla Layne University of North Carolina abstract: In 2010, playwrights Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje used Jean- Paul Lilienfeld’s French film La journée de la jupe ( Skirt Day ) as a model for Verrücktes Blut , a play about one teacher’s unconventional methods of integrating Turkish-German Muslim youth in mainstream society. In this essay, relying on postcolonial theory, I read Verrücktes Blut as Erpulat and Hillje’s resistance to the racialization of Islam in Germany by dissolving the borders that allegedly exist between Turkish and German culture, and Islam and Christianity. The key to dissolving these borders is the playwrights’ use of Schiller as an intertext. For this reason, I compare this German adaptation with the original French film to explore how introducing Schiller as an intertext, in place of the original intertext of Molière, allows the playwrights to bring the themes of performance, embodiment and identity into constellation in a manner that critiques Western-centric debates about integration. Keywords: racism, humanism, gender, Islam, postcolonialism Das Einzige was in dieser Schule funktioniert, ist die Bühne. Theaterbühne! Wir spielen Theater. Aber was wird aus mir, wenn das hier zu Ende ist? Oberstudienrat, wie Sie Frau Kelich? Ein echter Erfolgskanake? Oder Ehrenmörder in Alarm bei Cobra 11. Tja, tut uns Leid, aber Erfolgskanakenkapazität ist gerade zu Ende. Der Kanakentatortkommissar ist schon besetzt. Wie viele Erfolgskanaken erträgt das Land? (Hasan in Verrücktes Blut 2�4) “Dirty nigger! ” or simply “Look! A Negro” […]. Locked in this suffocating reification, I appealed to the Other so that his liberating gaze, gliding over my body suddenly smoothed of rough edges, would give me back the lightness of being I thought I had lost, and taking me out of the world put me back in the world. But just as I get to the other slope I stumble, and the Other fixes me with his gaze, his gestures and 32 Priscilla Layne attitude, the same way you fix a preparation with a dye. (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks 89) In the first quote, which stems from Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje’s play Verrücktes Blut, a Kurdish student named Hasan laments that his teacher Frau Kelich’s theater lesson has been the only place where he feels free to step into any role he wishes. Though his teacher has become a successful example of integration—a Turkish woman who is married to a German man, speaks fluent German, and teaches literary classics—Hasan wonders whether there is room for one more “Erfolgskanake” in Germany. If there isn’t, the only roles that will be available to him, both on and off the theater stage, are those that perpetuate negative stereotypes. By lumping Frau Kelich together with the Turkish commissar on the German series Tatort, Hasan seems to suggest that an “Erfolgskanake” is anyone whose Turkish identity does not designate him or her to marginal roles. 2 Hasan’s repetitive and dismissive use of this term suggests that, rather than making an honest effort to give all Turkish-Germans equal opportunities, the German majority seeks to fill some set quota of successfully integrated Turks, so as not to appear biased. In the second quote, which is from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon reflects on the moment when French stereotypes about blackness call him into being as a black man. In an Althusserian act of interpellation, as soon as Fanon is called a “Negro,” he immediately embodies all of the stereotypes about Negroes. He is reminded of this fact in each and every interaction he has with whites. What these two quotes have in common is a problem at the intersection of racial stereotypes, embodiment, and freedom. Both Fanon the psychoanalyst and Hasan the fictional character feel paradoxically imprisoned in free societies, because, due to no fault of their own, their bodies simultaneously reflect negative images and are incapable of fitting positive ones. I begin with these two quotes in order to demonstrate the ways in which postcolonial theory can help unpack Turkish-German texts about racism, as in the case of Verrücktes Blut. 3 Fanon is clearly responding to French racism against blacks. But is Hasan describing racism, Islamophobia, or a combination of both? Since the end of the Second World War, the use of the term “race” in Germany has been taboo due to its associations with a Nazi ideology that sought to systematically murder those who were deemed of an inferior “race.” Because contemporary German society avoids using this term, not only does one not find the category of race in identification documents, but violence and discrimination against those who look different than the white German norm have historically been deemed xenophobia. Hasan represents thousands of second-generation Turkish-Germans Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 33 whose parents immigrated to the country, but who themselves were born and raised in Germany and who are therefore not foreign to Germany. Although these second-generation Turkish-Germans have been socialized in Germany, German society has attempted to externalize them, because they do not fit the white, Christian norms that define German and European belonging (El-Tayeb). 4 Although debates about Turkey’s suitability for the European Union and Turks’ ability or lack thereof to integrate in Germany are clearly marked by an anxiety around whiteness, the discussion is not acknowledged as such since race is not considered an issue in Germany. Thus, instead of openly debating Germans’ dependence on a white identity, German society has shifted the focus to Turkish-Germans’ religion, “racializing” Islam, in order to argue that Turkish-Germans and Turkish culture are incompatible with the German public discourse (Bayoumi; El-Tayeb). Rather than being specific to Germany, this racialization of Islam is a global phenomenon also at work in France, the UK and the US, to name a few examples. This racialized discourse about Islam paints it as misogynist, premodern, and homophobic in contrast to a tolerant, secular German (Western) culture. While differences in religion were not considered problematic during the first two decades of Turkish migration to Germany, Germans found it necessary to Other Islam once it was clear that Turkish guest workers, their families, and subsequent generations planned on staying (Chin 82). When Islam is Othered through race, Muslims and Turkish-Germans of all generations can be viewed as not belonging to the nation, regardless of their birthplace, language ability, citizenship status, and even religious convictions: while not all Turkish-Germans are Muslims, if the German public considers Islam a race, then even Turkish atheists are perceived as Muslims. This racialization of Muslims has become even more widespread due to rising fears of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism that have characterized the new millennium. It is because of this racist perception of Islam, and the way it works to externalize Turkish-Germans, that I find it useful to consider how postcolonial theory can help unpack texts like Verrücktes Blut. Racist thinking draws its power in part from racists’ attempts to lock individuals in a (negative) definition: “Under a racist regime, there is no escape from who you are (or are perceived to be by the power elite)” (Bayoumi 275). I read Verrücktes Blut as Erpulat and Hillje’s response to Othering Islam by dissolving the rigid borders that allegedly exist between Turkish and German cultures, and between Islam and Christianity. The key to dissolving these borders is their use of Schiller as an intertext in a way that reveals the relativity of both German and Turkish cultures. In Verrücktes Blut, secondary school teacher Sonia Kelich tries to free her students from the bind of a fixed identity with the help of her theater lesson. 5 Her students are a motley crew of youth who appear to fulfill every negative 34 Priscilla Layne stereotype about minorities in Germany. While most of the students are Turkish Muslims, it is important that one of the students, Bastian, is a white German. Although it is not plot-relevant, the inclusion of Bastian shows that, in a place like Kreuzberg, the Kanak identity performed by the students can cross ethnicities. Therefore, being a Kanak is more about an attitude and behavior than an ethnicity or religion, even though being Muslim can play an additional role in why some students have difficulty integrating. Sonia’s students are loud, rude, violent, and disrespectful. They pay no attention to their teacher’s attempts to educate them about German cultural staples, namely Sturm und Drang and Friedrich Schiller. Frau Kelich is unable to control her class, until she discovers a gun on one of her students and decides to use it against them. This turn of events allows her to take the class hostage and force them to act out scenes from Schiller’s plays. Sonia believes that through embodying literary figures from these plays, her students can learn to be more modern and rescind their parents’ traditional ways. Sonia’s educational project assumes a conflict of ideology between the Muslim minority and the German majority, which resonates with the cultural binaries Katherine Ewing describes in Stolen Honor : patriarchy and machismo vs. feminism and sensitivity, interdependence vs. independence, heteronomy vs. autonomy, and hierarchy vs. equality. In Verrücktes Blut, Sonia tries to replace the students’ supposed Muslim ideals with German ones, making her lesson an attempt at implementing integration through the arts. This play, which was voted best German-language play by Theater heute in 2011, 6 is a loose adaptation of French director Jean-Paul Lilienfeld’s film La journée de la jupe ( Skirt Day ) from 2008 . Yet Erpulat and Hillje only really adapted Lilienfeld’s core concept: a secondary school teacher takes her class of disobedient immigrant Muslim students of various ethnicities hostage and attempts to teach them humanist values. Beyond this main idea, the film and its German theatric adaptation are incredibly different, though they do share a few superficial similarities including the teacher’s name, Sonia. Skirt Day remains in the realm of melodrama: the students never break out of ethnic stereotypes, and the film ends with two tragic deaths. In contrast, Erpulat and Hillje add humor and irony to the narrative by inserting Brechtian song interludes and having actors break the fourth wall to allow the audience moments for critical reflection. Erpulat and Hillje employ these techniques to elevate the narrative to a metatheatrical level and thereby question the boundaries between performance and reality. In this essay I argue that, while Lilienfeld’s film ultimately suggests that minorities choose to be on the margins and should instead choose to submit themselves to dominant French culture, Verrücktes Blut asks whether so-called Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 35 “minoritarians” really have the freedom to embody what they choose, if they continue to be imprisoned by the image the majority has made of them. I take the term “minoritarian” from Fatima El-Tayeb, who describes minoritarians as “so-called immigrants who were born and raised in their countries of residence” (xxx). I rely on postcolonial theory and scholarship on Turkish-German culture in order to discuss the effects of racism, stereotypes, and racial discrimination on Turkish-German Muslims. Comparing the French film with its German adaptation helps get at the core of what Verrücktes Blut contributes to current debates about integration. 7 Erpulat and Hillje’s adaptation not only challenges ethnic and religious stereotypes, but also interrogates modern-day Enlightenment projects which aim to integrate immigrant youth through exposing them to “high” European culture. Most of all, Verrücktes Blut complicates Lilienfeld’s initial narrative and argument about integration by giving more importance to the students’ drama lesson. Hasan’s refusal to let the play end underlines the disconnection between the world within and the world beyond the play. Hasan asserts that, in the eyes of the German majority, Schiller’s ideas remain Western values that Turkish immigrants can playfully mimic, but never really embody, because Turks have been imprisoned in a racialized view of Islam. In order to demonstrate this, I first evaluate Lilienfeld’s film so that I may then highlight how and why Verrücktes Blut deviates from it. Second, I explore why Erpulat and Hillje chose to replace Lilienfeld’s use of Molière’s The Would-Be Gentleman as an intertext with several works by Schiller and what bearing this has on integration through art and the act of inscribing German citizenship onto the body of the Other. Finally, I elaborate on the importance of Schiller’s concept of Spieltrieb for Verrücktes Blut ’s arguments about role-playing and the authors’ general criticism of a Western-centric definition of integration that deems Islam incompatible with German values. When Erpulat and Hillje replace Lilienfeld’s intertext—Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme ( The Would-Be Gentleman )—with Schiller’s Die Räuber and Kabale und Liebe, the playwrights actually build on Schiller’s philosophy and his plays’ themes in order to support their broader criticism of Germany’s integration debates, rather than merely shifting the cultural reference for the audience from France to Germany. Erpulat and Hillje do not merely look to Schiller as a representative of the German Enlightenment. Schiller’s philosophy of aesthetic education allows the playwrights to bring the themes of performance, embodiment, and identity into constellation by invoking the Schillerian concept of Spieltrieb, a notion which Schiller used to propose that (role-)playing can help shape responsible democratic citizens. By incorporating this philosophical idea, Erpulat and Hillje briefly open up the possibility for a space in German society, 36 Priscilla Layne where, through role-playing, minoritarian youth can become a part, not only of contemporary German society, but also of a larger history of Western culture. The audience of Verrücktes Blut is initially led to believe that through acting out these canonical German plays, the students begin to embody Schiller’s roles, resolve their real problems, and learn something about tolerance. Locating the play’s roots in experimental theater of the 1960s and 1970s, Olivia Landry refers to this process as a “pedagogy of embodiment” (105). By forcing the students to adopt certain roles that correlate to their own lives, Sonia actively dissolves the border between actor and role. According to Landry, this “pedagogy of embodiment” ultimately fails on a metatheatrical level because of the gap maintained between the actors and the play’s typically white, middle-class, and middle-aged audience. Instead of focusing on how a pedagogy of embodiment fails on the level of performance, this essay looks for theoretical reasons for this failure by engaging more directly with Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters and drawing on postcolonial theory. In an interview with the English-language magazine Ex-Berliner, Nurkan Erpulat described why viewing Skirt Day initially motivated him to write Verrücktes Blut. He also shared what he found so questionable about the film: The idea came from the Ruhrtriennale. They have a three-year program with three religions. The second year [2010] was Islam, and for the school part of the festival, they wanted to do something about youth and they found this film. For me the film was problematic: these male youths are portrayed as violent, and as victims and criminals at the same time, and by the end they’re still the same. (Erpulat) As Erpulat asserts, part of the problem with Skirt Day is the film’s inability to move beyond a Eurocentric humanism that seeks to “save” immigrant Muslim youth from themselves and therefore paints them as uncivilized. In the film, the markers of barbarism are whatever tropes seem to oppose French values: machismo, sexism, violence, and purity, to name a few. Not only do these tropes only apply to certain bodies, namely the students’, but these bodies also have a permanence assigned to them, as opposed to their teacher, Sonia Bergerac, who is a more complex character. The students are guilty of misjudging Sonia as a racist French nationalist, when in fact, Sonia is exposed as having North African parents and therefore an intimate knowledge of the immigrant experience. In comparison, there are no hidden qualities about her students. They initially appear to be either violent thugs or staunch traditionalists, and that is what they ultimately reveal themselves to be. The film capitalizes on the stereotype of the angry, violent, North African Muslim immigrant, which had been widely circulated four years prior, when three weeks of rioting in the Parisian banlieues Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 37 raised alarm throughout Europe that Muslim youth were incited to violence by radical religious beliefs (El-Tayeb 15). The film’s title refers to Sonia’s decision to wear a skirt to school one day, a political act that breaks the school policy forbidding female teachers from wearing skirts in an attempt to make students view female and male teachers as equals. This is an example of the “complementarity of the sexes” of which Ewing speaks in her discussion of the headscarf ban in France in Stolen Honor. 8 In Ewing’s words, this is the “French ‘solution’” to the contradiction between sexual difference and the fact that “French national identity is based on the abstract principle that equality depends on sameness” (186). If men and women are biologically different and males and females are gendered differently, how can all French citizens be treated the same? Normally this contradiction is resolved by flaunting sexuality. Instead of trying to hide women’s physical difference, French society embraces the sexuality and nudity of all French citizens and this is intended to have an equalizing effect and stand in contrast to Islamic countries that insist on women’s modesty (Ewing 186). But the school at the center of Skirt Day takes an opposite approach: equality is performed by downplaying sexual difference and covering up femininity, a move that coincidentally aligns with Islamic values about female modesty. Thus, although school officials might be attempting to appease all cultures by enforcing an understanding of equality that downplays sexual difference, Sonia feels that by denying her right to wear a skirt, the school infringes upon her rights. She therefore accuses the school of giving in to Muslim students’ views towards clothing and femininity. Her feelings are further validated when her Muslim students tell her that by wearing a skirt she has made herself fair game for disparaging remarks about her sexuality. By highlighting the significance of Sonia’s skirt, the film implicitly addresses Islamic modesty and Muslima visibility, for the Muslim girls in her class all wear pants so as not to be labeled “whores.” Furthermore, while a male colleague defends the students’ bad behavior, insisting that one must try to better understand their culture by reading the Koran, he has no problem with condemning Sonia for wearing a skirt. He places the blame on her, claiming that her clothing has incited the students to verbally abuse her. By aligning the state with the Muslim youth against Sonia, the film suggests that, in contemporary French society, secular neoliberalism has mistakenly resulted in mollycoddling Muslim students—tolerating their sexist, premodern beliefs—and limiting the freedom of the French majority. This argument seems to have had appeal across the Atlantic: one American reviewer wrote that the school’s “no skirts” policy shows the faults of “well-meaning liberalism and the loonier aspects of contemporary political correctness” (Eley). 38 Priscilla Layne In Skirt Day, when Sonia takes her students hostage, she seizes the opportunity to confront them with their sexism, racism, and general bullying of her and each other. Sonia’s lesson for her students is that just because they’ve been victimized, this doesn’t give them the right to victimize others. In line with contemporary neoliberal attitudes, she demands that her students stop looking to others to solve their problems and instead take responsibility for themselves. The fact that Sonia herself is actually of North African descent indicates she knows that tough love is the best for these students. The film seems to suggest that Sonia’s students choose to misbehave, whereas they can just as well choose to integrate in French society through education, like their teacher has. They might have to give up the traditions of their homelands in order to do so, but didn’t they come to France to have a better life and succeed there in the first place? The irony that this authority figure uses violence to teach her students civility escalates at the end of the film, when Sonia has decided to give in to the police after insisting they seek justice for a female student who has been raped. Once Sonia drops the gun and attempts to usher the students to the door, the normally reserved student Memet models his teacher’s behavior by grabbing the gun and shooting a boy to death because he threatened Memet’s sister. The drama ends when Sonia tries to take the blame for the shooting death and is shot by the police while attempting to protect Memet. Thus, Sonia dies a martyr. Ironically, her act of martyrdom mirrors the Jihadist acts associated with suicide bombings. Like a terrorist, throughout the film Sonia positions herself in opposition to mainstream society and is willing to resort to violence in order to be heard. She risks her own life for a group of students and so that they will believe that she truly cares for them and therefore trust her beliefs about integration. The main difference between Sonia and the kind of Jihadist martyr that haunts the news is that she gives her life for a secular rather than a religious cause. And, unlike with Jihadist martyrdom, here the audience is supposed to sympathize with Sonia, as do her students, who pay tribute at the film’s conclusion, when we see several students at her funeral, with the young women donning skirts in her honor. The final shot of the film is a close-up of the girls’ skirts and bare legs. Without faces, they become anonymous symbols of the triumph of French liberation and sexuality over Muslim modesty. With this ending, the director implies that Sonia’s sacrifice was not in vain and assimilation has been accomplished. Many critics were turned off by this kind of populism. For example, the German reviewer Christina Nord states: “[D]e la jupe’ [ Skirt Day ] bleibt schematisch allein schon deshalb, weil die einzelnen Akteure sich wie Schachfiguren auf dem Spielfeld des Kulturkampfs aufführen” (Nord). But several reviewers of Skirt Day seemed to have no trouble accepting the stereotypes it perpetuates. Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 39 In a review in Variety, Derek Eley even refers to Sonia’s student and antagonist, Moos, as simply “the big black guy” (Eley). With this phrase, Eley turns Moos into a stereotype by erasing his name. This description also makes the conflict solely about race and gender: the black male student threatens to rape the white female teacher. While this gendered and racialized dynamic is important for the film, Eley takes for granted Moos’s religious identity as a Muslim. Although it is unclear whether all of the students are Muslims, those who speak up clearly are and constantly challenge each other by questioning who is truly devout, who can or cannot speak Arabic, and who is honorable. Regardless of a student’s nationality, language, gender, or race, in this class one’s familiarity with Islamic culture is the most important cultural capital. The film plays on the public’s fears of an Islamization of France by portraying only characters who feel it is not right to question Islamic beliefs or those who equate Islam with the oppression of women. And Lilienfeld clearly asks us to deride the former and have sympathy for the latter. This reductive binary does not reflect the reality of contemporary Muslims, many of whom encourage an ongoing debate about Islam (El-Tayeb). In contrast to Skirt Day, Verrücktes Blut succeeds in offering much more complex characters, which has a lot to do with the play’s structure. Certainly, the shift in medium from film to play brings noteworthy changes. But many of the changes in Verrücktes Blut are linked to Erpulat’s own criticism of the film and his claim that he in fact found only thirty seconds of the film interesting, and he and Hillje “took them and made them three fourths of the play” (Erpulat). Verrücktes Blut begins before the actors of the play have even taken on their roles, a decision that creates a critical distance between the actors and the characters they are playing. In the prologue to the English translation, Hillje and Erpulat describe the play as including “three styles or levels of acting”: The actors are themselves, actors preparing to take on their characters, aware of the audience, real time. Second, the actors take on their characters for this play, like when they put on the costume elements of their character and they take on the physical, vocal etc., qualities. The third level is when these Kanake characters “embody” the characters in several Schiller plays they read from in their drama class. (Erpulat and Hillje) By disturbing the illusion of the theater, and allowing the audience to see the actors transition from the first to the second level of acting, Hillje and Erpulat show the audience that the signs they are about to witness are not as natural or stable as one might believe. In contrast to the power that the word “Negro” holds in Fanon’s theory, permanently coloring him like a dye, Verrücktes Blut weakens the term Kanake because it is not meant to fix the characters it references in a stable, persisting identity. 40 Priscilla Layne By establishing these three levels of acting, Erpulat and Hillje engage with the instability of racial stereotypes. To quote Homi Bhabha, what makes a stereotype powerful is its “dependence on the concept of ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of otherness. Fixity, as the sign of cultural / historical / racial difference in the discourse of colonialism […] connotes rigidity and an unchanging order” (18). An allegedly fixed sign, the stereotype is “a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place,’ already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated” (Bhabha 18). Fanon uses the same language when he refers to how the “Other fixes [Fanon] with his gaze” (89). Although Bhabha specifically speaks of a colonial context, his theorization of the stereotype is also revealing for understanding the racialization of Islam. As a symbol of knowledge, the stereotype allows a racist to feel power over Muslims, the power to feel that he really knows them. Nevertheless, because the stereotype is not based on any inherent qualities, but rather is a construction, as soon as a Muslim subject fails to conform to this knowledge, the power of the racist is undermined. This is what causes the racist’s anxiety over needing to see the stereotype constantly repeated. The second level of acting points to the construction of the stereotype, because the actors must actively adopt these stereotypes and inscribe them onto their bodies. Landry refers to this process as “bodily mimicry”: “Playing with clichés about Muslim youths, these young actors are not simply meant to represent the ‘otherness’ that society projects onto them; instead, in a performative play on perception—that is, in an act of bodily mimicry—they also intentionally and subversively embody this ‘otherness’” (Landry 109). Although Hillje and Erpulat begin the play in this way in order to challenge a German audience’s stereotypes of students with immigrant backgrounds, this attempt was not always successful. In an interview, Erpulat insisted that despite the play’s dependency on a schism between the actor and the role, he expects that the audience will still forget this gap (Erpulat). For example, when the actors take on their roles as Kanaken in the second level of acting, 9 they accomplish this through a string of offensive behaviors: cursing, spitting, and crotch grabbing. As soon as the actors look their part and begin this behavior, the audience forgets the “performance,” because the actors have seduced them into accepting this as realism. And Erpulat’s assumptions are confirmed in the following review about a performance of the play in Karlsruhe. In the Badische Neueste Nachrichten, Andreas Jüttner beamed that “Das Ensemble [besteht] aus migrantischen Schauspielern,” which implies “dass hier authentische Schicksale verhandelt würden” ( Jüttner). However, Erpulat and Hillje use a variety of tactics in an attempt to counter the seduction of realism, such as including numerous German folk songs as interludes, which interrupt the action, serve as ironic commentary, and signal new scenes and acts. 10 Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 41 Aside from their anti-realism, Hillje and Erpulat also depart from the film by cutting all of the additional characters of the story who exist outside of the classroom. While Lilienfeld has a drama play out not only between Sonia and her hostages, but also between Sonia and the police trying to negotiate with her, and among Sonia’s colleagues, who cannot agree on the best way to deal with these students, Verrücktes Blut focuses all of the action in the classroom. By eliminating the additional teachers and the incompetent police force and Minister of Education, Erpulat and Hillje prohibit the audience from searching for ways that society has failed Sonia. Instead, while Sonia might begin the play as a victim, as the play progresses our sympathy shifts towards the students. In order to discuss a further significant difference between Skirt Day and Verrücktes Blut —when the actors break the fourth wall in the final scene—it is necessary to first consider Hillje and Erpulat’s decision to replace Molière with Schiller. In Skirt Day, before the theater lesson is derailed, Sonia has students act out scene iii from act IV of Molière’s The Would-Be Gentleman, which the students should have memorized for the lesson. During this scene, a man named Covielle deceptively convinces the main character, Monsieur Jourdain, that the son of the Turkish sultan is in love with his daughter. In actuality, this Turkish visitor is really the Frenchman Cléonte, a middle-class man whom Jourdain does not consider good enough for his daughter. Molière’s play demonstrates how Western Europeans’ views towards Islam have changed throughout history, for in The Would-Be Gentleman, religion is not as important as the positive value of wealth and power. Monsieur Jourdain’s acceptance of a possible Turkish sonin-law reflects a degree of religious tolerance during the Enlightenment which resulted in more nuanced portrayals of Muslim characters in European theater (Berman 127). None of the context for this scene is explained in the film. Sonia gives the students some biographical information about Molière, but there is no discussion of the play’s plots or the characters. Rather, Lilienfeld uses Molière as a backdrop. When Sonia forces the students to participate—role-play and interact with one another—this sets the stage for the conflicts between them that give her an opportunity to condemn their behavior. Verrücktes Blut, however, places greater emphasis on why the students are performing scenes from Schiller’s Die Räuber and Kabale und Liebe. In fact, the play places so much emphasis on these intertexts that soon after Sonia takes the stage, she has a rather long monologue during which she describes the Sturm und Drang period and its legacy of rebellion. Subsequently, at several crucial moments in the play, Sonia suggests that Schiller’s plays could possibly help the students better understand democracy, tolerance, and freedom. After the students read a scene from Die Räuber, Sonia 42 Priscilla Layne declares: “Ja Mörder, Räuber, das seid ihr jetzt - ohne Vater und ohne Liebe - das seid IHR ! Und jetzt könnt Ihr es endlich mal aussprechen” (I.i). This patronizing statement suggests that her students are incapable of expressing their feelings and must instead rely on a German classic to help them speak, ultimately letting German thinkers like Schiller speak for them. In the case of Kabale und Liebe, following a scene between the two lovers Luise and Ferdinand, Sonia asks Musa, a male Muslim student who is her main aggressor: “Was lernen wir aus dieser Szene? … Luise ist keine Nutte! … War sie noch nie! Und was lernen wir noch, Musa? Manchmal werden Menschen zu Dingen gezwungen, verstehst du das? Und es ist nicht fair, Menschen immer gleich zu verurteilen” (I.ii). From these brief examples, one sees that Sonia intends for the violent young men to see themselves reflected in Die Räuber, while the tragic love story in Kabale und Liebe is meant to teach them that “honor” is relative. 11 In particular, Sonia’s lesson about honor is supposed to challenge her Muslim students’ understanding of the term as it relates to modesty and women’s bodies. According to Werner Schiffauer, in Muslim Turkish families, “honor” indicates the clear border between the private sphere of the family and the public sphere, which is a specifically male space: “Die Ehre eines Mannes ist beschmutzt, wenn diese Grenze überschritten wird […]” (65). Just like in the film, in the play Sonia’s students criticize her for wearing a skirt, because she is perceived as flaunting her sexuality. Because they believe her skirt reveals parts of her body that should be kept private, her students condemn her for crossing the border between public and private and therefore behaving dishonorably. A female student, Mariam, gives the same reason for why she refuses to remove her headscarf: she does not want to reveal her hair in front of the boys and therefore lose her honor. By teaching students that “honor” can mean different things depending on the context, Sonia encourages them to be more tolerant of behaviors they might otherwise automatically reject. German popular opinion on headscarves is just one example of how a country that sees itself as tolerant of religious difference can run into a contradiction. As opposed to France, where a law bans headscarves in public schools, in Germany it is not illegal for students to wear headscarves. However, several German states have passed laws banning teachers from wearing them. And in Berlin, the ban even applies to civil servants (Ewing 187). [In Germany] the argument was made that since the headscarf is contested among Muslims and is associated with Islamic fundamentalism, which involves active proselytization, it is not simply a religious symbol but a political symbol. […] Many groups felt that banning the headscarf would promote the integration of Muslim youth because it was assumed that wearing a headscarf prevented a girl from fully interacting with her classmates and that it was likely that she was being forced to wear it. (Ewing 188) Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 43 The German headscarf debate has resulted in some unlikely alliances, uniting conservatives and feminists who believe that the headscarf is a symbol of oppression from which Muslim women must be freed. In Verrücktes Blut, Sonia believes she has succeeded in liberating Mariam when the student finally heeds her requests and removes her headscarf in order to tie up one of the boys. This act presumably symbolizes Mariam’s willingness to break with Muslim tradition and adapt to a German tradition of feminism. Her student’s physical transformation from wearing a headscarf to freely whipping around her hair in a dance of liberation exemplifies the “pedagogy of embodiment” Sonia attempts to use. Thus, by asking Mariam to step into the role of Luise from Kabale und Liebe and recite Luise’s powerful challenge to her alleged dishonor, Sonia uses Schiller’s play to inscribe a certain German understanding of freedom onto her students’ bodies. According to Schiller, an engagement with the arts is what makes a person fully capable of enjoying his or her freedom—a claim that Verrücktes Blut deliberately addresses when Sonia quotes a well-known line from Schiller’s Ästhetische Erziehung : “der Mensch soll mit der Schönheit nur spielen, und er soll nur mit der Schönheit spielen. Denn, um es endlich auf einmal herauszusagen, der Mensch spielt nur, wo er in voller Bedeutung des Worts Mensch ist, und er ist nur da ganz Mensch wo er spielt” (I.i). Sonia’s segue from an introduction of the Sturm und Drang era to this quote suggests a link between Schiller’s Sturm und Drang period and his Ästhetische Erziehung. However, Ästhetische Erziehung was written after Schiller had already become disenchanted by the violence of the French Revolution and turned his interests away from rebellion and towards Classicism. As was typical for the Classicist period, Schiller proposes in Ästhetische Erziehung how man can get closer to God and achieve a tolerant society through cultivating the arts. He argues: Alle Verbesserungen im politischen soll von Veredlung des Charakters ausgehen - aber wie kann sich unter den Einflüssen einer barbarischen Strafverfassung der Charakter veredlen? Man müsste also zu diesem Zwecke ein Werkzeug aufsuchen, welches der Staat nicht hergiebt […]. Dieses Werkzeug ist die schöne Kunst. (Schiller 33) And it is through “die schöne Kunst” that Sonia seeks to turn her “barbaric” students into ideal citizens. If one were to apply Schiller’s language in Ästhetische Erziehung to this classroom, Hasan would embody the ideal candidate for Schiller’s aesthetic education: man in a state of suffering. The other students defend themselves from others’ taunts. But when we are introduced to Hasan, he is a very meek character who merely allows things to happen to him. Through theater, more specifically by having Hasan step into the role of Franz Moor in Die Räuber, Sonia intends to build his confidence. For, to quote Schiller, “Der Übergang von dem leidenden Zustand des Empfindens zu dem thätigen 44 Priscilla Layne des Denkens und Wollens geschieht also nicht anders, als durch einen mittleren Zustand ästhetischer Freyheit” (90). If Hasan “plays” at being strong and confident, Sonia hopes he can imagine being so in real life and realize that he doesn’t have to be a victim. Yet, one must also acknowledge that the good intentions in Sonia’s Enlightenment project are also embedded in neoliberal discourse that ignores structural discrimination against Muslims and insists that in a tolerant, colorblind Western society, Muslims have the power to change their futures and should therefore stop whining about discrimination. Sonia’s attempts at encouraging Hasan to change reflect this attitude. She starts by mocking Hasan, adopting an offensive imitation of a Turk who speaks poor German: SONIA : Franz. Nix jetzt Hasan anymore. Und Franz hat ziemlich dicke Eier. Franz hat keine Angst. Franz hat ein ziemlich großes Selbstbewusstsein. Mariam, würde so ein Franz aussehen, den ich gerade beschrieben habe? Nein würde er nicht. Müssen wir dran arbeiten, Hasan. Wir fangen damit an, dass du den Kopf hebst. Kopf heben! ! Sehr gut, immer geradeaus schauen, nie auf den Boden gucken […]. (I.iv.) At first, Erpulat and Hillje lure the audience into accepting this feel-good story of awakening and integration. Sonia’s tactics involve getting students like Hasan to not simply half-heartedly read the words on the page, but to pronounce them correctly and really feel what they are saying. In Ästhetische Erziehung, Schiller stresses the importance of mastering the senses so that one might enjoy them: Solange der Mensch noch ein Wilder ist, geniest er bloß mit den Sinnen des Gefühls, denen die Sinne des Scheins in dieser Periode bloß dienen. Er erhebt sich entweder gar nicht zum Sehen oder er befriedigt sich doch nicht mit demselben. Sobald er anfängt, mit dem Auge zu genießen und das Sehen für ihn einen selbständigen Werth erlangt, so ist er auch schon ästhetisch frey und der Spieltrieb hat sich entfaltet. (109) For Schiller a Wilder merely feels, which is a passive, emotional, and haphazard activity. When a person is ruled by emotion, things happen to him. He waits for his senses to be engaged. In contrast, the cultivated man has control over his eyes, which are more objective than feelings. And with his eyes, the cultivated man seeks out objects to scrutinize and enjoy; he takes ownership over his environment. In German, the term “wild” has historically been used in reference to vegetation. The Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen describes “wild” as land that is “nicht gezähmt, nicht veredelt, unbewohnbar, grausam, roh” (1568). According to the Grimms’ Wörterbuch , the term was first applied to people in 1716 in regards to native Indians in the Americas, a use that has become most familiar as the “edle Wilde.” Schiller would have been familiar with this eighteenth-century use of the term. In fact, in 1793 he edited a poem entitled “Der Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 45 Wilde” by Johann Gottfried Seume, in which a “Wilder” is described as a Native American. While Schiller does not explicitly racialize Muslims in his use of the term Wilder, he does establish a hierarchy of the senses with racial implications by juxtaposing the rational European against the emotional non-European. One should note, however, that Schiller is not praising all cultured Europeans. In contrast to the modern understanding of barbarian as “a rude, wild, uncivilized person” ( OED ), Schiller actually uses the term barbarian to describe those who only adhere to science and reason. For Schiller, “Wildheit ist die absolut gesetzte Sinnlichkeit (das >Tier<), Barbarei die absolut gesetzte Vernunft” (Luserke-Jaqui 416), but neither state is ideal for mankind. The ideal can only be achieved by the cultured European who can appreciate aesthetics. European thinkers often invoked this notion of cultural superiority to Other Muslims during the eighteenth century. Nina Berman describes this attitude against the backdrop of the French Revolution and modernization: While the struggle for citizenship rights, summarized in the famous motto “Egalité, Liberté, Fraternité,” envisioned a new age of equality, the human being who was to profit from these new rights was defined as European, male, and […] Christian. The inclusive gesture of religious tolerance was contradicted by ideas of civilization and race […]. Modernization, too, became an ideological force, legitimating political, military, and economic action pursued by German and other European nations against those that were not seen as modern, including the Middle East. (143-45) By suggesting that her students’ Turkish background and their religion are what keep them from fully participating in German culture, Sonia perpetuates this eighteenth-century discourse that racializes Muslims. An example thereof is her interaction with Mariam, whom Sonia profiles on the basis of gender by only assigning her the roles that are linked to the issue of patriarchal violence. By asking Mariam to step into these roles, Sonia attempts to enrage Mariam over the female characters’ treatment at the hands of the male protagonists. Sonia hopes to prove that Mariam wears a headscarf not as a choice but because of her submission to Islam, and that by actively identifying with Schiller’s strong female protagonists, Mariam will gain the courage to remove her headscarf. Sonia’s first attempt occurs when Mariam and Hasan act out a scene from Die Räuber. In this scene, Franz Moor resolves to force his brother’s fiancée Amalia into marriage. Sonia taunts Mariam, who is in the role of Amalia: “Der will dich zur Kapelle schleifen, Dich zur Ehe zwingen, an den Haaren will er […]. Was bistn Du für ne Muslima? ” (I.iv). Sonia’s rhetorical question, “What kind of a Muslim woman are you? ” and her taunt that Hasan wants to touch Mariam’s hair are both meant to provoke Mariam into action. But at this point in the play, 46 Priscilla Layne Mariam does not want to give up her headscarf. She only agrees to do so when Sonia threatens to shoot Hasan. However, Sonia responds dissappointedly, “Du machst es doch wieder für einen Mann. Du solltest es doch für dich machen” (I.iv). Prior to this Sonia pleads with Mariam, “Ich möchte, dass du deine Angst besiegst. […] Ich möchte nicht, dass die Leute Dich wegen Deines Kopftuchs angucken” (I.iv.). Thus Sonia implies that Mariam only wears a headscarf because she is controlled by men and afraid to do what she really wants. Mariam’s reply, “Die gucken doch, sollen die doch” (I.iv.) could be read as a form of Muslim feminism which supports a woman’s freedom of choice, even if she decides to wear a headscarf. Mariam insists on wearing what she wants, including a headscarf, regardless of how the public reacts to her. As the play progresses, one by one Mariam and her fellow students are allegedly liberated through engaging with Schiller’s classics. After playing the role of Luise in Kabale und Liebe, Mariam finally takes off her headscarf in order to embrace Western feminism and even lectures the boys about their use of the word “whore.” Afterwards, she dances around, enthralled by the feel of her now exposed hair. In particular, Mariam’s supposed awakening reveals several stereotypes that Germans have about Islam and Muslim women specifically. First of all, the notion that Mariam must remove her headscarf in order to become an outspoken feminist is a gesture that suggests there is no Islamic feminism and resonates with Islamophobic claims made by second-wave feminists such as Alice Schwarzer. 12 Secondly, Mariam’s subsequent dance of empowerment reinforces the notion that headscarves are oppressive, premodern objects that restrain Muslim women’s true selves. With the stage directions suggesting that the headscarf has alienated Mariam from her body—“ berührt ihr Haar. Erschrickt davor ”—the play insinuates that only without her headscarf can Mariam get in touch with her body and embrace herself as a desired and desiring subject. After Mariam’s dance of empowerment, an additional turning point occurs when the class discovers that Hasan has been sexually abused by an unidentified student, which Musa filmed with his phone. This is another decisive moment where the play deviates from the film. In Skirt Day, it is a female and not a male student who is raped. By changing the gender of the rape victim, the play addresses a further stereotype about Muslim culture: homosocial violence. In the essay “Multiple Masculinities in Turkish-German Men’s Writing,” Moray Mc- Gowan claims that among young Turkish men there is often a need to penetrate other’s territories, which can include other’s bodies: The tender, often erotic physical exchanges—embracing, kissing, hand-holding— between group members are defined as ‘friendship’ and never linked to being ibne [faggot], a term of abuse reserved for those who do not defend their own territory, Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 47 that is, those who let themselves be penetrated. The decisive structural opposition is then not male / female or hetero / homo, but penetrator / penetrated. The penetrator’s heterosexual honour is not compromised by his participation in a mimed same-sex act, but indeed is confirmed by the role in it for which his greater manliness qualifies him. (295) According to McGowan, he who is penetrated is a homosexual because he has not defended his body (his territory). He who penetrates preserves his manhood because he is still in the dominant role. This claim, that in Muslim culture penetration between men can be separated from homosexuality and has more to do with showing dominance, has been portrayed in popular Western literature and film depicting Muslim culture, such as in Kutluğ Ataman’s film Lola und Bilidikid (1999) or in Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling book The Kite Runner (2003)� Despite the shocking revelation that Hasan has been victimized in this way, this scene concludes with a feeling of harmony, as the students and Sonia agree to have a democratic vote to decide how to punish Musa. Now Sonia’s reformed, newly-enlightened students are juxtaposed against Musa, who was a bystander to and therefore culpable for the barbaric act of rape. The apparent success of Sonia’s experiment is confirmed with a song that ends the act, a song that includes the lines, “Ich hab mich ergeben mit Herz und mit Hand / die Land voll Lieb und Leben, mein deutsches Vaterland.” “Ich hab mich ergeben” is a patriotic song written in 1820 by Hans Ferdinand Maßmann, an activist of the gymnastics movement (Richter 111). The roots of these lyrics in the nineteenth-century German nationalist movement make the song fitting for illustrating that the play’s Turkish students are now on the brink of giving themselves fully to German culture. However, Sonia’s “Enlightenment project” will soon be disrupted. When Sonia asks the students to vote on the appropriate punishment for Musa, she assumes that they have now adopted her thinking and will follow her lead. But when the students vote to pardon Musa, this upsets Sonia, who proposes they shoot him instead. Sonia’s suggestion not only registers as shocking to her students, but it shocks the audience members as well, who do not expect such a brutal suggestion from the same teacher who has spent most of the play educating her students about humanism. Thus, while her students have become ideal examples of Schiller’s aesthetic education, Sonia has actually become the very representative of Enlightenment thinking whom Schiller criticizes, and she therefore fittingly proposes the barbaric punishment of execution. If Sonia were to stay true to Schiller’s lessons of aesthetic education, she would suggest that there is still hope of taking Musa from violent criminal to responsible citizen. By instead insisting that Musa be killed, Sonia represents the brutal, dark side of Enlightenment thinking of which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer 48 Priscilla Layne warn in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Sonia’s reasoning is that, if Musa poses the threat of physical harm to the others, rather than attempting to rehabilitate him, why not just execute him, thereby removing him from society altogether? Sonia’s suggestion recalls the populist opinion that Turks who have committed crimes in Germany be deported. 13 According to this mindset, deportation is a faster solution to German society’s problems than integration efforts. Although this line of thinking goes against everything Sonia has until now instilled in her students, she can justify her opinion with recourse to notions of progress. If permanently removing Musa will make for a better community, why shouldn’t his life be sacrificed for the good of the group? Ironically, this line of reasoning makes the possible execution of Musa take on the guise of an honor killing. The purpose of an honor killing is to punish and remove the offending party, thereby protecting the honor and well-being of the collective. Further, with her proposal, Sonia comes to embody the hypocrisy of Germany’s dealings with racial Others since the colonial period: a country that presents itself as enlightened and respectful of human rights, but whose thinkers and politicians conveniently excluded racial Others from the national fabric, looked away from the exploitation and abuse in the colonies, and, even today, fail to provide safe and sanitary living conditions for refugees from Africa and the Middle East. By associating Sonia with barbarism, honor killings, and ostracization, Erpulat and Hillje have once again undermined the alleged divide between Western and Eastern cultures, poking holes in the arguments used to racialize Islam. To Sonia’s dismay, the students embrace the freedom they have gained from their aesthetic exercises, overrule her, and insist that Musa live. By learning from Schiller’s plays to resist Musa’s bullying and punish Musa in a humane way, Hasan in particular has moved through the three stages of development Schiller describes in Ästhetische Erziehung. “Der Mensch in seinem physischen Zustand erleidet bloß die Macht der Natur; er entledigt sich dieser Macht in dem ästhetischen Zustand, und er beherrscht sie in dem moralischen” (Schiller 95). Nevertheless, the fact that Sonia, the orchestrator of this lesson, would suggest the students kill Musa shows the hypocrisy of an Enlightenment that would champion humanism, but defend executions. One might expect the play to end here. At this point, instead of a narrative about a group of tough kids who are rehabilitated through art by a liberal do-gooder, as we have seen in Hollywood films like Dangerous Minds (1995, dir. John N. Smith) and Freedom Writers (2007, dir. Richard LaGravenese), we actually have a story of the hypocrisy of humanism. This could be read as a quite effective retort against Thilo Sarrazin, who claimed in Deutschland schafft sich ab that one’s acceptance of the Enlightenment is the definitive factor that should weed out who can and cannot successfully be integrated into German society (Sarrrazin 270). In West- Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 49 ern society, Islam has become a generic signifier for “irrational, morally inferior and barbaric masculinity and its passive, victimized, and submissive femininity” (Moallem 8), but the students’ resistance to Sonia’s verdict unveils that she is guilty of being just as violent as her allegedly crazy-blooded students. The key difference is that Sonia’s violence is sanctioned by her authoritative position, by the authority of the school and therefore the state. This begs the question, is there really a difference between street violence and state-sanctioned violence? In Skirt Day, Lilienfeld seems to argue that there is a difference and that Muslim youth would rather be subjected to the latter rather than the former. Towards the end of the film, Sonia drops the gun in order to check on Moos, the student she wounded, whom she believes to have fainted from his injury. This turns out to be a ruse that Moos uses to attack her until he is stopped by Latifa, who picks up the gun and attempts to return it to Sonia, ignoring the other students’ protests. Latifa exclaims, “If I don’t give her the gun, we all get outta here and then, then what? I get killed cuz I helped her? Akim too? Same ol’ shit goin’ down. I want us to be hostages for life! ” ( Skirt Day ). This statement places blame on the violent teens and not greater society. At least as a hostage, Latifa is under Sonia’s protection and can speak her mind. She prefers the freedom permitted by a violent authority figure representing the state rather than oppression at the hands of Muslim teen thugs. Memet has the same fear of retaliation, which is why he takes the gun in the end and demands he and his family receive money and a plane to Australia. Verrücktes Blut doesn’t justify state-sanctioned violence or street violence. In fact, the play doesn’t even end with this critique of violence. Rather, the play ends with the actors reverting back to the first level of acting and stepping out of their roles as high school students. The actress playing Sonia complains that her wig is coming undone. Another actor suggests, “Lass uns Döner essen gehen” ( II .iii.). However, one character refuses to end the play: Hasan. And here I’d like to turn to a reading of the play as a commentary on the limits of performance by engaging with Schiller’s concept of Spieltrieb. Schiller defines Spieltrieb as “das, was weder subjektiv noch objektiv zufällig ist, und doch weder äußerlich noch innerlich nöthig [ist]” (60). To paraphrase Schiller, play is what makes us human. When animals “play” it is instinctive: they are practicing their skills to survive on their own. Often when humans play, especially adults, it is intentional, not instinctive, and it is not essential for survival. But what is most important for Schiller is that through play we attempt to shape the world and become capable of imagining a new reality. Thus, play allows us to be independent enough that we do not let rules limit our imaginations. According to this concept of Spieltrieb, in Verrücktes Blut the students’ encounter with Schiller’s plays should not only channel their wild en- 50 Priscilla Layne ergy through creativity, but also make them capable of becoming free-thinking citizens liberated from traditions. In Schiller’s sense of the word, Spieltrieb, or aesthetic exercise, does not lead to a specific positive or negative outcome. The result of Spieltrieb is undetermined and that is why it is liberating: Durch die ästhetische Kultur bleibt also der persönliche Werth eines Menschen, oder seine Würde, insofern diese nur von ihm selbst abhängen kann, noch völlig unbestimmt, und es ist weiter nichts erreicht, als daß es ihm nunmehr, von Natur wegen möglich gemacht ist, aus sich selbst zu machen, was er will - daß ihm Freyheit, zu seyn, was er seyn soll, vollkommen zurückgegeben ist. (83) Schiller, indeed, asserts that “die ästhetische allein führt zum Unbegrenzten” (85). In actuality, however, Sonia’s goal is not to give her students room to think for themselves; rather, she wants to make them more “German.” She wishes to create them in her own image as the ideally integrated Turkish Muslim, for when the students actually come to a democratic decision on their own—a decision with which she disagrees—Sonia derides them for it and hopes to overturn it. One could argue that rather than active “play” in the sense of Spieltrieb, Sonia has actually been engaging her students in mimicry—they learn to mimic her notion of an ideal German citizen. In his essay “Of Mimicry and Man,” Homi Bhabha defines colonial mimicry as “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite ” (italics in the original, 86). The ambivalence inherent to this kind of mimicry is in place in order to secure the hierarchies of power. Teaching the colonial subject to be like the colonizer makes him or her easier to rule. For this reason, the colonial power imposes its language, laws, customs, and systems of belief onto its subjects. Nevertheless, the colonial subject may never succeed in being exactly like the colonizer, because this would allow for the two to be equals, and colonial exploitation only works if the colonial power can take from the colonized without being challenged. One could argue that in the German context, allowing for Turks and Muslims to be like Germans but not quite German maintains a society with second-class citizens who can be discriminated against for not properly embodying the nation’s ideals. This tension between Schein and Sein is actually central to Molière’s play, though he focuses on class rather than racial differences. Although Lilienfeld never explicitly highlights role-playing in Skirt Day, his choice of Molière’s The Would-Be Gentleman inadvertently brings this issue to light. Molière’s “wouldbe” gentleman Monsieur Jourdain is a man of recent wealth who lacks rank. Jourdain tries his best to fit in with the elite. He engages various teachers—a music master, a dancing master and a philosophy master—so that he may learn the Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 51 customs of the aristocracy. And his greatest concern is that his daughter marry into a noble family. He admits, “I have money enough for my daughter. What I want is rank. I wish her to be a marquise” ( II .iii.). For this reason, Jourdain refuses to let his daughter Lucile marry Cléonte, her middle-class love interest. In order to trick Monsieur Jourdain into granting his approval, as mentioned above, Cléonte disguises himself as Turkish nobility and asks for Lucile’s hand in marriage. Monsieur Jourdain believes Cléonte’s disguise, because he is generally ignorant about the world and knows nothing of Turkish culture. Rather than being discriminated against based on ethnic difference, the faux Turkish sultan is exoticized and celebrated because he is thought to have the appropriate wealth Jourdain requires from any possible suitor for his daughter. Throughout Molière’s play, the jokes are at Jourdain’s expense because, despite his arrogance and efforts to appear cultured by spending money, he always misses the mark completely, because in his society the kind of cultural capital valued can only be embodied and not bought or learned. In contrast to Jourdain, Cléonte voices disgust for people who do not know their place, stating: “I consider that to make a secret of one’s social position, to dress oneself up in borrowed robes and to attempt to pass for what one is not is the height of baseness” (Molière 309). By choosing to have the students read a play with such a clear message of biological determinism, Lilienfeld appears to suggest that Muslim problem youth cannot simply dress themselves up in French culture to change who they are, and thereby further implying that their racialization is unchangeable. While in Verrücktes Blut, performing Schiller is enough to turn the students around, in Skirt Day it takes a tragedy—the teacher’s death—for them to see the error of their ways. In Skirt Day, the Muslim students’ rigid identities and their inability to truly embody French culture are framed as their own fault. When Latifa seizes the gun and proclaims “I want us to be hostages for life! ” she condemns the behavior of her peers, behavior that has made the outside world more frightening than the hostage situation in the classroom. In contrast, when this scene is played out by Hasan in Verrücktes Blut, he condemns the German audience and charges them with placing limitations on his body. After grabbing the gun, Hasan first threatens the actors on stage: HASAN : Haltet die Schnauze. Wir spielen weiter. Räuber. SChUSS HASAN : Und ich werde Franz spielen. Ich bin Franz und ich bleibe Franz … Ich habe große Rechte über die Natur ungehalten zu sein … Warum musste sie mir diese Hässlichkeit aufladen? Gerade mir diese Hottentottenaugen? Was seht ihr in mir? Einen Schauspieler oder einen Kanaken? Immer noch? 52 Priscilla Layne Frisch also! muthig ans Werk! - Ich will Alles um mich her ausrotten, was mich einschränkt, daß ich nicht Herr bin. Wer hat wann wem was verweigert? Wer ist Schuld? Was wollen Sie von mir? Das Einzige was in dieser Schule funktioniert, ist die Bühne. Theaterbühne! Wir spielen Theater. Aber was wird aus mir, wenn das hier zu Ende ist? Oberstudienrat, wie Sie Frau Kelich? Ein echter Erfolgskanake? Oder Ehrenmörder in Alarm bei Cobra 11. Tja, tut uns Leid, aber Erfolgskanakenkapazität ist gerade zu Ende. Der Kanakentatortkommissar ist schon besetzt. Wie viele Erfolgskanaken erträgt das Land? Schwimme, wer schwimmen kann, und wer zu plump ist, geh unter! Solang wir spielen geht’s klar. Einziger Ort, der funktioniert. Und er ist schalldicht. Schalldicht! Hört uns jemand? Herr muß ich sein, daß ich das mit Gewalt ertrotze, wozu mir die Liebenswürdigkeit gebricht. ( II .iii.) Intermingling quotes from Franz in Die Räuber with his own frustrations, Hasan’s final monologue highlights the limits of Sonia’s humanist lesson. In her analysis of the play, Landry claims that Hasan’s final monologue indicts the audience because “Hasan declares that no matter how ‘integrated’ he is, he will never be ‘German’ enough to play the role of Franz Moor in a real theatre production of Die Räuber ” (113). However, what is at stake in the monologue is not whether Hasan can play Franz, but whether he can be free to play any role he chooses. In a way, playing Franz already typecasts Hasan. Quoting Franz directly, Hasan laments his “Hottentottenaugen,” a symbol of his racialization. In Schiller’s play, Franz’s unattractive appearance contributes to his lower status in comparison with his brother Karl. As a result of Franz’s jealousy over his brother’s charm and good looks, which have helped Karl win his fiancée Amalia and their father’s love, Franz grows bitter and vengeful, plotting to ruin his father and brother and force Amalia into marriage. Thus, Franz’s soul or his “inside” eventually reflects his unattractive “outside.” Likewise, Hasan believes that because he has features which German society deems unattractive and different, he will always be typecast as the evil Kanake. Despite evidence to the contrary, there are critics of multiculturalism in Germany who would rather not acknowledge the importance of colorism when it comes to integration. In Deutschland schafft sich ab, for example, Sarrazin questions why Turks have failed to integrate while other European immigrants like the French, Italian, and Poles have succeeded (312). He argues that Muslim immigrants aren’t discriminated against because of the color of their skin, but solely because of the headscarf. Once again, the headscarf becomes the sole symbol of Islam, premodern traditions, and oppression against women (Sarrazin 313). With these claims, Sarrazin conveniently blames Muslims for their own discrimination and refuses to acknowledge the ways in which Turks are racialized in the German media. Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 53 The culturalist thinking that positions Germany as white and Turkish-Germans as non-white, non-Christian Others is exactly what would make a German audience incapable of accepting Hasan in any role other than “der Ehrenmörder in Alarm bei Cobra 11.” Erpulat believes this narrow-minded thinking is especially a problem in the theater: In all other countries, the theater is more progressive than the government. Twenty-five percent of the people in this country [Germany] have Migrationshintergrund. That’s one in four. Germany had been dealing with this for a while but the theater scene hadn’t. It was already happening in dance and opera, usually much more conservative forms. Asian dancers have been around for 20 years, but there’s still no Gretchen in Faust that has black hair. (Erpulat) Erpulat’s contrast between the realm of government and that of the theater recalls Schiller’s Spieltrieb once more. Erpulat suggests that, as opposed to the political realm, which usually reflects a very real, white hegemony, the arts are supposed to be a space of experimentation and creativity, a space where one can imagine a black-haired Gretchen. Hasan’s refusal to let the play end is an argument that while he may be able to achieve equality within the world of Verrücktes Blut, beyond the play his physical appearance determines that he will only be offered violent, stereotypical roles even if he masters German high culture. If one reads Spieltrieb as a space of the undetermined—a space where one can have a black-haired Gretchen—then Verrücktes Blut employs Schiller’s philosophy to argue that German minorities, including Turkish-German Muslims, must be allowed the same space for experimentation and fantasy as their white peers, so that they may truly have the freedom to choose who they want to be. But even if the mainstream is not yet willing to allow them this freedom, Verrücktes Blut still provides room for the Muslim youths themselves to take control of the narrative of integration and move it in a positive direction. One of the ways the play achieves this is by getting past the kind of language that positions Turkish-Germans as being “stuck” between two cultures. Rather than seeking to bridge two cultures, Verrücktes Blut undermines the notion that a border between cultures even exists. On the surface, thanks to Sonia’s efforts, the students’ engagement with Schiller’s plays appears to fulfill the goal of Integration durch Bildung, an initiative introduced by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung to ease immigrants’ integration into society by improving their access to education. Thus, Sonia’s lesson ostensibly falls into line with federal initiatives underway in Germany. However, by highlighting the themes of honor, gender, and sexuality in both Die Räuber and Kabale und Liebe, Sonia inadvertently reveals these plays as addressing topics that contemporary Germany only associates with Muslim culture, namely forced marriage and 54 Priscilla Layne honor killings. By reframing German classics in this manner, Erpulat and Hillje delegitimize the critics of integration who claim that these “Muslim” practices are hindering integration. Instead, in the students’ engagement with these plays, we recognize a history of violence against women that spans time and space, which is a far cry from the solidification of stereotypes and cultural difference that we find in Skirt Day. In the process of making these transcultural connections visible, the Turkish-German students in Verrücktes Blut claim Schiller for themselves and the resulting interculturality momentarily dissolves the borders between Turkish and German cultures, as well as between Islam and secularism. notes 1 I’d like to thank Johanna Schuster-Craig, Anne Marie Rassmussen, and Richard Langston for their feedback on an earlier draft of this essay. 2 From 2008 until 2011, Turkish-German actor Mehmet Kurtuluş played the commissar Cenk Batu on Germany’s longest running detective series Tatort. See Berna Gueneli’s article in this issue. 3 I acknowledge that the relationship between Germans and Turks is not a (post)colonial one; Leslie Adelson briefly discusses the problems with using postcolonial theory to analyze relations between Germans and Turks in The Turkish Turn (Adelson 177: note 32). However, one can still argue that the German majority has an investment in insisting that Germans and Turks are inherently different and, for that reason, I believe that postcolonial theory resonates with the Turkish-German experience, because it seeks to better understand how Western societies define difference and why the Western subject has historically needed to define itself against an Other. Understanding this process of Othering helps dispel misconceptions and exaggerations about the alleged differences between German and Turkish cultures. 4 Though Germany has become increasingly secular since the 1960s, conservative politicians often invoke the country’s Christian roots in order to differentiate Germany as European in contrast to Turkey, a country with a secular state but for which Islamic culture is definitive. As one can see, the act of favoring one religion over others in an otherwise secular society is not just a German phenomenon, but a global one, occurring in France, Turkey, and the US , to name a few examples. Several conflicts are revealed when Germans insist that Turkey is not a part of Europe based on religious reasons. First of all, even if Germany as a nation understands itself as secular, its individual federal states with stronger religious ties can be problematic, such as in Bavaria, where teachers are banned from wearing Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 55 headscarves, while crucifixes are not only tolerated in the classroom, but were mandatory up until 1995. Furthermore, any attempt to draw a neat division between Europe and Asia based on Europe’s allegedly exclusive Judeo-Christian roots ignores EU countries with visible Muslim populations like those in the Balkans. 5 Verrücktes Blut is a German translation of the Turkish saying delikanlı, which refers to young men who behave recklessly. The play premiered on September 2, 2010, in Duisburg at the Gebläsehalle im Landschaftspark. Since then its main home has been the Ballhaus Naunynstraße in Berlin-Kreuzberg, where it is performed quarterly. The Ballhaus Naunynstraße Theater was founded in 2008 by theater director Şermin Langhoff under the patronage of award-winning Turkish-German film director Fatih Akın. Its plays are often referred to as postmigrant theater, a term which Erpulat disdains. See Landry. 6 Forty-four voters participated in the decision. The play was awarded this honor along with Elfriede Jelinek’s Winterreise. Theater heute is one of the most prominent theater magazines in the German-speaking world and it has been published monthly since 1960. 7 Olivia Landry points out that Verrücktes Blut premiered only days before Thilo Sarrazin’s controversial book Deutschland schafft sich ab was published (Landry 108). In Deutschland schafft sich ab, Sarrazin argues that Muslims have a poor ability to integrate, which he blames on their underemployment, lack of success in German schools, and their “starke Fixierung auf die heimatliche Kultur” (Sarrazin 262). 8 According to Ewing, the headscarf ban evolved from the fact that “in France, secularism is the common ground on which cultural citizenship rests. State institutions are rigorously secular, even if this means constraints on the freedom of religious practice” (186). 9 Originally a Polynesian word for “man,” Kanake has been reappropriated in the German language for the purpose of insulting the Turks who began migrating to Germany in the 1950s as guest workers. The term has since been reappropriated by Turks, a movement which is best exemplified by Turkish-German author Feridun Zaimoglu’s frequent use of Kanak in his literary debut Kanak Sprak. 10 This use of folk music is common for Erpulat. For example, folk music is used in a similar vein in the play Lö Bal Almanya. 11 In Erpulat’s words, during Sonia’s theater lesson “the students [are meant to] learn to adjust their idea of what girls are, that they’re not always sluts, through Kabale und Liebe, and they learn that they shouldn’t use violence through Die Räuber ” (Erpulat). 56 Priscilla Layne 12 See Schwarzer’s Die große Verschleierung. 13 One famous example is the case of Muhlis Ari (discussed under the pseudonym of Memet in the German press). Ari was born in Germany in 1984. In 1998 the German courts resolved to deport the fourteen-year-old after he had committed over sixty crimes. For more details, see Burger. Works Cited Adelson, Leslie. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration. New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2005. Bayoumi, Moustafa. “Racing Religion.” The New Centennial Review 6.2 (2006): 267-93. Berman, Nina. German Literature on the Middle East. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2013� Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” The Location of Culture. New York; London: Routledge, 1994. 85-92. —. “The Other Question.” Screen 24.6 (1983): 18-36. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Ed. John Richardson. New York: Greenwood Press, 241-58. Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung. Integration durch Bildung. Web. 28 December 2013. Burger, Jörg. “Der Mann, der Memet war,” Zeit Magazin 41 (2013). Web. 29 June 2015. Eley, Derek. “Skirt Day.” Variety. 23 February 2009. Web. 29 June 2015. El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Erpulat, Nurkan. Interview with Summer Banks. “There is No Such Thing as an Immigration Theme.” Ex-Berliner. 5 May 2011. Web. 30 November 2013. —. Personal Interview. 9 June 2012. Erpulat, Nurkan and Jens Hillje. Personal Interview. 10 June 2012. Ewing, Katherine. Stolen Honor. Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin. Stanford: Stanford UP , 2008. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Gerle, Jörg. “film-dienst, Nr. 19.” Filmportal. 16 Sept. 2004. Web. 8 October 2012. Jüttner, Andreas. Badisches Staatstheater Presse. 26 May 2012. Web. 8 October 2012. Landry, Olivia. “German Youth Against Sarrazin: Nurkan Erpulat’s Verrücktes Blut and Clash as Political Theatre of Experience.” 51 Jahre türkische Gastarbeitermigration in Deutschland. Ed. Şeyda Ozil, Michael Hofmann and Yasemin Dayioglu-Yücel. Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2012. 105-22. Luserke-Jaqui, Matthias (ed). Schiller-Handbuch: Leben—Werk—Wirkung. Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2005. McGowan, Moray. “Multiple Masculinities in Turkish-German Men’s Writing.” Conceptions of Postwar German Masculinity. Ed. Roy Jerome. Albany, NY : State U of New York P, 2001. 289-312. Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 57 Merz, Sybille. “Islam.” Kerben des Rassismus: Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern spricht. Ed. Susan Arndt and Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard. Münster: Unrast Verlag, 2011. 365-77. Moallem, Minoo. Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Moliere. Don Juan and Other Plays. Ed. Ian Maclean. Trans. George Graveley and Ian Maclean. Oxford: Oxford UP , 1998. Nord, Cristina. “Angstlust im Schulzimmer.” Tageszeitung. 6 February 2009. Web. 17 August 2012. Pfeifer, Wolfgang (ed.). Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen: M-Z. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993. Richter, Joachim Burkhard. Hans Ferdinand Maßmann, Altdeutscher Patriotismus im 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,1992. Sarrazin, Thilo. Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen. Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010. Schiffauer, Werner. Die Gewalt der Ehre: Erklärungen zu einem deutsch-türkischen Sexualkonflikt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983. Schiller, Friedrich. Über die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen: In einer Reihen von Briefen mit den Augustenburger Briefen. Leipzig: Reclam, 2000. Schurr, Amanda. Sarasota Herald Tribune (Sarasota, FL ) 28 January 2005: 14. Schwarzer, Alice. Die große Verschleierung: für Integration, gegen Islamismus. Cologne: Kiepenhauer & Witsch, 2010. Skirt Day. Dir. Jean-Paul Lilienfeld. Cinema Epoch, 2009. DVD � Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 59 Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media Berna Gueneli Grinnell College abstract: In Germany, ethnicity and religion—specifically Turkishness and Islam—are often viewed as one and the same in public discourse. 9 / 11 and recent violent events in Germany / Europe seem to have revitalized this link in the public imaginary. Current Turkish-German cultural productions offer critical reevaluations of this problematic automatism and provide a counter weight to the stereotypical popular imaginations about Muslims in Europe. My examples include work by Fatih Akın, Mehmet Kurtuluş, Serdar Somuncu, and Feridun Zaimoğlu. By problematizing an often-presupposed link between Islam and ethnicity and in tracing current media reactions to this issue, this article will contribute to the ongoing debate on a linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse Germany / Europe. As my examples suggest, for the debate on a diverse Europe to advance successfully, the diversity within religious beliefs needs to be acknowledged and Islam needs to be freed from ties to a particular ethnicity. Keywords: Serdar Somuncu, Feridun Zaimoğlu, Fatih Akın, Mehmet Kurtuluş, Lady Bitch Ray In Germany (as in other European countries), ethnicity and religion—specifically Turkishness and Islam—are often viewed as one and the same in public discourse. 9 / 11 seems to have revitalized this link in the public imaginary, as have other more recent violent events in Germany and Europe, such as the bombings in London on July 7, 2005; the killing of two US soldiers at the Frankfurt am Main airport in Germany on March 2, 2011; and the attacks in Paris on January 7 and November 13, 2015. This ethno-religious link can be seen in particular in public reactions toward an Islam that has increasingly become visible through fashion, lifestyles, and architecture. It is this visibility that different governments have tried to tone down—for example, through the ban on full-face hi- 60 Berna Gueneli jabs in France or on minaret-building in Switzerland. The perceived connection between Islam and Turkishness also has an effect on gender perceptions and expectations. Most stereotypically, this results in images of passive, submissive, and veiled femininities, and aggressive, virile, and violent masculinities. 1 Recent Turkish-German cultural productions, however, offer critical reevaluations of this problematic automatic fusion of religion and ethnicity. They provide a counterweight to the stereotypical, popular imaginations and xenophobic fantasies about Muslims in Europe. This article focuses on counter voices in German media. Counter voices, as I call them, generally come out of a diversity of media outlets that dismantle, disrupt, or merely unsettle mainstream media images, in this case about the imagined relationships between Islam, ethnicity, and gender. The counter voices in this article are progressive—and at times provocative—media representations of Islam that support the following two reconceptualizations of Islam: first, that Islam in Europe is not a homogeneous religion, and second, that ethnicity is not a correlate of religion. My case studies highlight a differentiated view of Muslims and Islam in Europe and emphasize that conceptions about Muslims, including gender, cannot be generalized. At the same time, some of my case studies criticize general assumptions about religion, gender, and sexuality in German and European media landscapes. In my analyses, I draw on examples that, in their renderings of this complex problem, vary drastically from previously established images of Islam and ethnicity: they go across a continuum from various forms of lived sexualities, to different practices of lived Islam, to modes of secularism across multiple ethnicities. Fatih Akın’s Auf der anderen Seite ( The Edge of Heaven, 2007) presents Islam as differentiated rather than monolithic and ultimately depicts religion as decoupled from ethnicity. In the Hamburg- Tatort series, especially in Der Weg ins Paradies (The Path to Paradise, 2011), the character of detective Cenk Batu actively tries to undo generalizing assumptions about Islam, masculinity, and Turkishness. Promoting secularism, satirist Serdar Somuncu directly attacks and rejects orthodox Islam and religious dogma as well as clichéd ideas about Turks, Germans, and gender roles in his interviews and shows. Finally, Feridun Zaimoğlu and Günter Senkel’s play Schwarze Jungfrauen ( Black Virgins, 2006) 2 stages a provocative, controversial view on Islam and femininity. By placing diverse female Muslim voices in conversation with one another as well as with traditions and current events, Black Virgins undoes generalizing conceptions about Islam and forces its audience to rethink their own misconceptions about religion, ethnicity, and gender. By problematizing an often-presupposed link between Islam, ethnicity, and the associated gender roles, and in tracing current media reactions to this com- Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 61 plex problem, this article aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on a linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse Germany and Europe. To successfully advance the socio-political and cultural discussion about a diverse Europe, the public discourse on these issues needs to acknowledge the diversity within religious and spiritual beliefs and it needs to free Islam (as other religions) from ties to any particular ethnicity. Today, Islam is often perceived as a religion whose place in a presumably secular Europe, a Europe whose culture is grounded in Judeo-Christian traditions, is still contested and cannot be assumed. Questions about Islam and its place in Europe are still under debate across the continent. After the French government banned religious symbols from state schools in 2004, former French president Nicholas Sarkozy (2007-2012) added the ban of the burka in 2009 from public places in France under the pretense of secularism (Chrisafis 2009). 3 This move simultaneously aligned “Frenchness” with secularism, a cultural policy since the French Revolution, and religious symbolism with foreignness and the Maghreb. The French ban was discussed in England as a “victory” for tolerance, as William Langley writes in the British newspaper The Telegraph. According to Langley, the French public sees the ban even as “beneficial to its Muslim communities and justified—if on no other grounds—as a statement in support of liberalism against darkness.” Langley himself justifies the ban by describing the French banlieues as repressive places for women in particular: “Women who refuse to wear the hijab, and, increasingly, the burka, are intimidated and brutalized by gangs whose ideas about female emancipation are on an exact par with those of the Taliban.” Reminiscent of Gayatri Spivak’s theories in the British colonial context, the French ban on the veil represents a mission to rescue oppressed “brown women” (Spivak 296). In other words, with the national ban on the veil, “white [French]men” free “brown women” from those [foreign] “brown men” who violently try to enforce the veil. While in France it was around a garment that the discourse about Islam in Europe was politicized and framed, in Germany it was a much more general political event that led to a public discourse on Islam’s place in the nation. When former Federal President of Germany Christian Wulff stated in his controversial speech for the twentieth anniversary of German reunification on October 3, 2010, that Islam belongs in Germany, he received much criticism from the center and conservative parties and opened up a debate in Germany about the role of Islam (Drobinski and Preuβ; “20 Jahre”). Yet, this Othering of Islam in a European context is not a recent development. Traditionally, Islam has been linked to the “Orient”: already in the Middle Ages, as the Ottoman Empire flourished, Islam was seen as an Other, as a threat to Europe. German religious leaders and politicians from Martin Luther to Thilo Sarrazin have propagated countless 62 Berna Gueneli fantasies and misconceptions about Islam and Muslims, many of which persist today (e. g. Uysal Ünalan 12, 44-46; Winkler 3). That is, Muslims, together with Islam as a religion, have been perceived as the absolute Other of Europe and Europeans for centuries, often taken to be opposed to Western civilization (Uysal Ünalan 12). Muslims today continue to be excluded from Europe, to be denied a European identity, even though they have been living on the continent for generations. Fatima El-Tayeb points out that “[t]he Muslim presence in Europe […] is acknowledged in order to define a new, unified Europe characterized by a tolerant secularism—a tolerance, paradoxically, that is manifest not in the inclusion but the exclusion of the continent’s largest religious minority” (El-Tayeb, European Others xxviii). As the reactions to Wulff’s remarks above exemplify and as Uysal Ünalan reminds us, European self-understanding is built on the foundations of Judeo-Christian tradition (54). This understanding of a Judeo-Christian tradition implies a particular religious background that is compatible with, or perhaps even a prerequisite for a modern, democratic lifestyle to flourish in Europe. At the same time, this understanding of a modern Europe also implies secularism. It seems to suggest that for a secular mode of living and a daily democratic operation within Europe, a Judeo-Christian background is necessary, while an Islamic background is not compatible with modern, democratic values. Paradoxically, it is precisely these preconceived ideas about the Otherness of Islam that have misguided democratic institutions in Europe in the past. A courthouse ruling that Yasemin Yıldız discusses shows how misconceptions about “cultural” and “religious” differences can even alter judicial opinions in democratic, secular Germany. In Yıldız’s case study, a German judge ruled in favor of an abusive Moroccan husband, who was beating his Moroccan-German wife, because of differences in “religion” and “culture” (Yıldız 70-71). Yıldız takes this controversial and much-discussed ruling as an example to state that gender and sexuality are the “crucial dividing line between liberal Christianity and conservative and repressive Islam” (74). Certainly, current media representations of Islam in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, particularly after 9 / 11, share responsibility for constructing today’s clichés about Muslims (Uysal Ünalan 51; Winkler 5). Media coverage often links certain stereotypical and gendered images when covering a topic about Islam or migrants from predominantly Islamic countries—images most prominently include women in headscarves and long, wide coats, and men with long beards. This focus on different attire and hairand lifestyles often foregrounds a cultural Otherness of Muslim migrants (Uysal Ünalan 51). Uysal Ünalan points out that such selective and one-dimensional perceptions of migrants with an Islamic background reduce their identities to a particular Muslim identity. However, Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 63 not all media representations are the same. There are, as I will discuss below, a wide variety of voices within the German media landscape. These counter voices challenge the one-dimensional, clichéd images about Islam; some do so in more subtle ways, while others quite vehemently undo the mainstream images and truisms about Islam, ethnicity, and gender roles within these diverse communities. The four case studies in this article consider images, videos, and texts from cinema, television, the internet, theater, and MP3s. Together they portray different forms of Islam in Germany. They differ from common stereotypes prevalent in German and European media and therefore could be framed as counter voices to the mainstream media images of Islam. 4 Although the individual media texts are very different from each other in form, style, genre, and narrative, they nevertheless develop similar messages by disentangling Islam from ethnicity and calling for a differentiated and diverse understanding of Islam within Europe, and of Islam and gender identities as well as gender roles. The first case study is Fatih Akın’s cinema. Since the success of Head-On ( Gegen die Wand, 2004), Akın has become the most renowned and internationally celebrated Turkish-German director. In mainstream media reception, he has long been a spokesperson and representative for Turkish-German issues through his films. While, in Akın’s earlier career, film critics and academic scholarship focused on the representational aspects of his films (Ezli, “Von der Identität”; Gallagher; Knopp; Pratt-Ewig; Schäffler), today, scholarship is rather dedicated to the aesthetics, that is, the music, sound, and mise-en-scène in his cinema (e. g. Göktürk, “Mobilität”; Gueneli, “Challenging” and “The Sound”; Hillman and Silvey; Mennel, “Überkreuzungen”; Kosta). I will mainly use Akın’s film The Edge of Heaven, and to a lesser extent Head-On and Short Sharp Shock ( Kurz und schmerzlos, 1998), to briefly demonstrate how his cinematic work dismantles a generalizing view on religion in general (and Islam in particular) and challenges any automatic link between religious and ethnic identities. Akın’s protagonists are defined through their actions, interpersonal relationships, and lifestyle choices—that is, through the music they listen to, the languages they speak, the clothing they wear, and the interactions they have. None is defined by an actively lived religion; none of the primary Turkish-German protagonists is overtly religious in dress or lifestyle: here we see none of the headscarves, beards, and five daily prayers so often imagined in a mainstream popular culture that links religion and ethnicity. The characters in Akın’s films are not very different from most other secular German filmic characters, who generally do not define themselves through Christian or other religious values in their daily lives. Akın’s cinematic universe is therefore one in which religion is decidedly disentangled from ethnicity. Explicit references to religion are gen- 64 Berna Gueneli erally depicted through minor characters or as part of a side story or subplot, as I show in my discussion of The Edge of Heaven. The non-linear, intertwined narrative of The Edge of Heaven seems to put very little emphasis on religious themes. Instead, the film depicts the stories of rather matter-of-fact realities: sex work, manslaughter, incarceration, illegal immigration, deportation, and human interactions and relationships. Telling the interwoven stories of three complicated parent-child relationships across generational, gender, national, and ideological lines, the film shows how the characters’ transnational paths cross (or fail to cross) between Hamburg, Bremen, Istanbul, and the Black Sea coast of Turkey. There are only two brief instances in which the film references religion. Within the context of Turkish-German cinema, I argue that this quasi exclusion within the filmic script already disentangles (gendered) ethnicity from religion. At the same time, aside from the lesser importance that is given to religion in character development, both ethnic masculinities and femininities are diversified in their modes of representation. This includes a lived Turkish-German female sexuality, whether as sex worker (Yeter, played by Nursel Köse) or in a same-sex romantic relationship (Ayten, played by Nurgül Yeşilada); the single-parenting of Nejat (played by Bakı Davrak) by a Turkish father, Ali (played by Tuncel Kurtiz), who says that he was both father and mother for his son; as well as caregiving across generational and ethnic lines, if we consider the German 68er, Susanne (played by Hannah Schygulla), who takes care of the Turkish activist Ayten, toward the end of the filmic narrative. In the two instances in which religion is mentioned or alluded to by the characters, it is quickly drowned in mockery or ignorance. The first instance is early in the film’s narrative, following the introduction of Yeter as a Turkish sex worker in Bremen. After her customer Ali, a retired guest worker, leaves the red light district, two young Turkish men—frequenters of the red light district, presumably procurers or suitors—overhear Yeter say good-bye in Turkish, thus exposing her heritage. A few minutes later, she is depicted in a train, where she is harassed by the same two men. They threaten her and demand that she abandon her profession as a sex worker. They dogmatically argue that as a Turkish and Muslim woman, she must refrain from such businesses. This is the only time that the words “Muslim woman” and “Turkish” are mentioned in the film directly and together. While both men are depicted as a serious and real danger for Yeter, their worldview, a stereotypically one-dimensional view of Islam, is ridiculed through their anachronistic, clichéd, macho enactment of religious dogma. According to Islamic doctrines, it would be as much a sin for the men to frequent the red light district as it would be for Yeter to engage in extramarital sexual activity. Their religiousness is therefore highlighted as hypocritical. Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 65 This particular type of religious machismo is similarly depicted in several scenes in Head-On. Here, it is the domineering brother (played by Cem Akın) of the female protagonist Sibel (played by Sibel Kekilli) and his friends who are shown in a comparably paradoxical manner. On the one hand, they speak about the honor of their presumably pious and asexual wives, and seem to be hiding behind Islamic doctrines. On the other hand, the men themselves blithely talk about prostitution and their experiences with sex workers in brothels. This lifestyle, just like the lifestyles of the two men threatening Yeter in The Edge of Heaven, would be considered sinful and dishonorable for an observant Muslim. The motivation for their declarations and actions is therefore not religion as such, but rather their clichéd, patriarchal machismo. They seem to uphold conservative gender norms differentiating between active, experienced men and passive, chaste women. This gendered double standard for Turkish men and women is, however, held up for ridicule in the next scene. A simultaneous conversation among their wives in an adjacent room destabilizes the men’s claim: the women are freely discussing and making fun of their husbands’ sexual performance, including details about oral sex. The second scene in which religion comes up in The Edge of Heaven is during a conversation in Istanbul between Susanne, a former German 68er, and Nejat, a former German professor from Hamburg. Susanne verbally addresses the topic of religion. In this particular scene, Susanne and Nejat look outside Nejat’s Istanbul apartment and see a group of men going to the mosque, following the call to prayer by a muezzin. Since it is a religious holiday, Nejat tells her the story of Ibrahim and his son. Susanne responds: “Diese Geschichte gibt es bei uns auch,” and not only points out a religious similarity between Christianity and Islam but understands this religious story as a dialogue of cultures. Nejat, on the other hand, ignores Susanne’s comment and the religious aspect of the story and instead is inspired by its father-and-son theme to remember his own father and his conflicted personal relationship to him (Ezli, “Von Lücken” 83; Tezcan 63-64). This scene suggests that filmic details in a Turkish-German production, even if they seem religious in nature, do not need to be read in religious terms. An ever-present religion, particularly a fundamentalist religion, does not play a significant role in the lives of many of Akın’s central Turkish-German filmic characters. This does not mean that religion in Akın’s films is represented solely either in a mocking tone, as with the machismo in the first example, or as a symbolic element that is only relevant as a reminder of a real-life relationship, as in the last example. Religion as such does occasionally play a role in characterization, but in these cases it is usually embodied by an elderly generation, especially men, who represent a sincere and pious religiousness. Older male piousness often 66 Berna Gueneli takes non-threatening forms, such as the religiousness of Gabriel’s (played by Mehmet Kurtuluş) father (played by Mustafa Enver Akın) in Short Sharp Shock. Gabriel’s father is depicted as an observant Muslim, and is shown praying at home, but he does not push his religiousness aggressively onto his children. Yet there are also depictions of religion in Akın’s films that are both earnest and serve to drive the plot forward: in Head-On, for instance, Sibel’s father (played by Demir Gökgöl) represents an Islamic piousness, but at the same time, his patriarchal practices are revealed as anachronistic and oppressive in juxtaposition with the libertine lifestyle of his daughter. Due in part to his faith, Sibel’s father thus functions as a character foil for the hedonistic Cahit through whom Sibel aims to escape from her family’s conservative expectations. Taken together, Akın’s films depict transnational protagonists as people whose emotional and personal relationships—and not their religion—are in the foreground. Islamic religion and lifestyles are largely irrelevant to them; this is true especially for the younger generations in his films. 5 His Turkish-German protagonists’ lives do not show a specifically religious, Islamic lifestyle. While they might or might not be religious as characters, religion does not take center stage in Akın’s films, and, therefore, a more secularized ensemble of filmic characters come to represent Turkish-Germanness. Their secularism decouples preconceived religious imagery from their ethnicities. The next case study in visual culture similarly disentangles ethnicity from religion, moving us from the cinema to television. While Akın’s films often make suggestions about lifestyles of both transnational masculinities and femininities that are not on par with common misconceptions about Muslim migrants (e. g. the lived female sexualities of Ayten and Yeter as well as the soft-spoken, timid masculinity of Nejat), my next counter voice example primarily focuses on masculinities and Islam. Though the film discussed below first introduces religious dogma as belonging to a particular masculinity and ethnicity, it slowly undoes this association by providing a more diversified perspective on Islam, Islamic terrorism, and a variety of ethnic masculinities. This analysis centers on an episode from the television show Tatort (Crime Scene, 1970-present), the quintessential feature-length German detective series that has a history of taking up socially critical and relevant topics since the 1970s (Brück et al. 11, 33). This section focuses on the representation of Islam in Lars Becker’s Tatort episode, Der Weg ins Paradies, with Mehmet Kurtuluş starring as the main character, an undercover police detective. By introducing the character Cenk Batu (played by Kurtuluş) to the Tatort roster of detectives (2009-2012), this show made an initial move to normalize non-white ethnicities on the German screen (Gueneli, “Mehmet Kurtuluş”). 6 While the show’s pilot Auf der Sonnenseite (On the Sunny Side, 2007) does not emphasize Islam, 7 this particular episode focuses Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 67 on explicitly religious themes such as Islamic religious devotion, conversion, and fundamentalism. In Der Weg ins Paradies, detective Batu directly speaks out against the stereotyping of Islam and any unreflected intermingling of ethnicities and particular forms of religion. In fact, Batu is portrayed as exposed to xenophobic generalizations about religion in general, and particularly about Islam and Turks, by colleagues and supervisors at work, which he is then shown to oppose. This initial, provocative association of Turkishness with Islam as well as the later connection to a white ethnicity (as portrayed by the German converts to a fundamentalist Islam) in this episode is to be expected: the episode’s title, Der Weg ins Paradies, is the same title of a YouTube video clip, in which Pierre Vogel, a German convert to Islam and Salafist, promotes an extremist and fundamentalist Islam, as (television) audiences might know from German media and news coverage of the time of airing. In the Tatort episode Der Weg ins Paradies, an Islamic terrorist group in Germany is being observed by the Hamburg police. The group consists of the leader, a highly intelligent and zealous German convert to Islam, ironically named Christian Marschall (played by Ken Duken), and his two followers, the Afghan student Akbar (played by Murali Perumal), whose family was killed by US soldiers during an attack on the Taliban, and the divorced, unemployed, overweight German Rolf-Peter Sperling (played by Tristan Seith), who is seeking meaning and guidance in life. The group is believed to be planning a major bombing in Hamburg to show their contempt for non-believers of Islam, especially Americans. Batu is assigned a new undercover role as a pious Muslim. In his undercover persona, who fulfills certain stereotypes about devout Muslim youths (he grows a beard, reads and cites the Koran, prays five times a day, and has a temper, among other things), he tries to get recruited to the terrorist group. Der Weg ins Paradies attempts to undo religious generalizations and preconceptions about Muslims. In the show, Batu’s reaction toward his new undercover character is uneasy. Batu differentiates between his own secular personality—the show does not characterize him as particularly religious—and a fundamentalist definition of religion. Batu has to explain to co-workers and supervisors who at times question his ability to cope with his undercover role that they must also make this distinction. At the same time, the show depicts a pious and devout imam as a moderate Muslim. The imam is in fact highly suspicious of Christian, the radical German convert who presumably tutors children in science while he essentially promotes a radical Islam in the imam’s mosque. Christian shows the children videos that propagate extremist activities. This Tatort episode has generally received positive reviews, in particular for its differentiated perspective on Islam. Popular reviews have praised the edu- 68 Berna Gueneli cational and diversified depiction of Islam, congratulating director Becker as well as actor Kurtuluş for the portrayal of this complex theme. The following review, for instance, conveys an appreciation of the show’s depiction of ethnic and ideological diversity: “Was Cenk Batu in diesem Milieu erlebt, geht auch gegen ihn selbst, gegen seine Herkunft und seine Überzeugung: ‘Das was ich hier lerne, hat nichts mit Spiritualität zu tun. Geschweige denn mit dem Islam,’ sagt er.” (Krüger). Though the writer of this comment assumes that Batu has a certain “Herkunft” and “Überzeugung,” these presumably religious beliefs coupled with his ethnic background are not overtly conveyed in the five Tatort episodes, as there are hardly any references to any particular form of religion in his character. However, it is correct to infer from the dialogue, and the quote above, that Kurtuluş’s character knows to differentiate between religious fanatics and observant Muslims. The educational and socially ambitious show thereby conveys this point of differentiation to the audience. Once more, ethnicity becomes separated from religion, in this case religious extremism. Ultimately, Der Weg ins Paradies variously links Islamic fanaticism with several ethnicities, including German, Arabic, and Turkish. On the one hand, the film manages to differentiate between radicalism and religiousness. On the other hand, it further shows the ambivalence of a link between any particular ethnicity and Islam. While Tatort engages in an enlightened dialogue to complicate the discourse on religion and ethnicity, I would like to end this case study by pointing out that the show chooses a Turkish-German male character, who is perceived as easily passing as a radical Muslim and possible future terrorist, and not a white German male or female detective to get the undercover assignment as an Islamic fundamentalist. Cenk Batu, a sexualized, enlightened figure in the other Tatort episodes, whose character is generally not portrayed with religious imagery, is still reduced to a one-dimensional construction of his body and color when he is tasked with passing for a religious extremist. Nevertheless, this show tries with good intentions to differentiate between ethnicity and religion. This point of differentiation is not only made in serious television shows and films like Tatort or The Edge of Heaven, but also in different genres such as comedy and satire. My next case study shows how Serdar Somuncu’s world of comedy, satire, and political commentary vigorously advocates the active decoupling of ethnicity from religion. Serdar Somuncu is a contemporary Turkish-German satirist, cabarettist, author, and singer, and has reached a status of critical public spokesperson for questions concerning Turkish-German issues. As an artist he appears on talk shows, in theaters, and across all sorts of media (print, internet, television, and radio). As a public figure, he is a regular guest on public television’s news channels as both a provocative critic and valued expert on Turkish-German Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 69 themes. Although Somuncu is mainly known for his satire within Turkish-German contexts, by now he is also recruited as a satirist beyond an ethnic context, as, for example in the ZDF ’s heute-show —the German equivalent of The Daily Show. His artistic work is particularly tied to “recurring debates on integration, immigration, and citizenship in Germany” (Bower 194). Somuncu, who started his career as an actor mainly cast for stereotypical roles as Turk, soon rejected this form of type-casting by leaving television acting for political cabaret and satirical comedy (Bower 198). He first became widely known through his notorious Mein Kampf tour (1994-2001), which saw more than 1400 performances in and around Germany. The tour demystified Adolf Hitler’s infamous book of the same title, combining Hitler’s own anti-Semitic and racist prose with Somuncu’s unique performance, mimicry, and critical interpretations during these satire shows (Bower 198). Today, Somuncu, “self-styled philosopher of transnational humanism in Germany” (Bower 194), is actively promoting his ideas of differentiation on a wide variety of platforms as a satirist, actor, critic, writer, host, and guest of internet shows. In order to illustrate Somuncu’s contribution to the decoupling of ethnicity from religion in Turkish-German media, I concentrate on four brief exemplary television appearances from 2012. In 2012 the discourse on issues related to Islam and integration of Germany’s minority population had reached new heights. It was the year of several dialogical meetings between Muslims, Turks, and state officials in Germany. One such meeting was the third plenary meeting of the German Islamic Conference ( Deutsche Islamkonferenz ) on April 19; another was the Hamburger Vertrag mit Muslimen, an official meeting that took place in November in Hamburg between city politicians and officials and religious delegates of several Muslim organizations who signed a treaty, including themes such as religious education in schools (Philipp-Claussen). At the same time, the public debates on Salafism and Islamic extremism in Germany were intensifying due to increased media attention to Salafist protest movements on German streets. These events coincided with Somuncu’s career peak. In each of these exemplary television appearances, Somuncu spoke about the current themes of Islam, religious education, and integration in Germany. The talk show clip from Anne Will and two clips from the news show Nachtmagazin are from the public television station ARD , and a fourth clip is from the private news channel NTV . In these shows, Somuncu was not performing one of the satirical characters he is known for, but rather appearing as himself. However, as a satirist and artist, he generally does not shy away from using his particular provocative and witty language and idiolect. His trademark style allows the audience to reflect on his intellectual prose, which alternates between eloquent, high standard language, street colloquialisms, and vulgarisms. 8 Although 70 Berna Gueneli Somuncu’s comments referred to different current events and stories at the time of airing, all of the four examples below highlight Somuncu’s advocacy of disentangling religion from ethnicity, as well as his call for a more diversified perception of Turkish-Germans. This advocacy can also be found in his artistic work: as Bower notes, “Serdar Somuncu stands out […] for his […] insistence on differentiation and balanced comparison when discussing integration ” (198, italics are mine). Ultimately, Somuncu’s satire and artistic performances overlap with his reactions and comments on the talk shows that turn him into a counter voice of common media depictions of Islam and ethnicity. That is, Somuncu’s Turkish-German public persona, with his stance on mosques, religious education, and religious groups, actively separates religion from ethnicity, as do his performances on stage. I will now illustrate this with television samples, all retrieved from YouTube. My first example is an episode of the Anne Will show entitled “Allah statt Grundgesetz: warum werden junge Muslime radikal? ” which aired on October 10, 2012, on ARD . The occasion for this special issue of the show is the sentencing of a young Salafist in Germany to six years in prison after attacking two police officers during a fight with members of a radical right-wing party. In discussing this event on Anne Will, the host and several of the other guests (politicians from the CDU , SPD , and Green party) focused on the Salafi protests and violence, while Somuncu repeatedly sought to destabilize their framing of the event as an escalation of Islamic extremism and violence in Germany. He opposed the generalization and over-problematization of individual events such as the Salafists’ protests. Instead, he tried to reframe the discussion on a meta level, asking the media to engage in a non-generalizing discussion about such instances. Somuncu perceived the discourse around the Salafist movement as creating overgeneralizing assumptions about Islam as a religion and, ultimately, hysteria in public discourse. Similarly, in the short YouTube clip, “ SERDAR SO- MUNCU wettert stark gegen Pierre Vogel und Islam! ! ” taken from a NTV news broadcast, Somuncu stated that he does not take religious extremists like Vogel seriously, because he considers them an unthreatening minority. Somuncu attacks and rejects fundamentalist beliefs, and this includes Islam. Acting as an “expert commentator” in such shows, Somuncu vehemently deconstructs the presumed ethno-religious Turkish-German-Muslim connection and thereby advocates a diversified view on Turkish-Germans as well as religion. In a Nachtmagazin interview on integration, for example, Somuncu appealed for an acknowledgement of a “Vielfalt der hier lebenden Menschen.” Somuncu highlighted that both Turks and Turkish-Germans are of diverse faiths and lifestyles: “es gibt ja nicht nur gläubige Türken, sondern auch Atheisten, Homosexuelle, buddhistische Türken.” Somuncu thereby rejects an essentialist Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 71 notion of Turks as Muslims. He pointed out that, even if it is true that most Turks or Turkish-Germans in Germany are Muslims, they are nonetheless still not a homogenous group. For each individual Muslim has a different relationship to Islam, and varying conceptions of what it means to be a believing, practicing, or nonpracticing Muslim. In addition to advocating a differentiated view on Turks and Muslims, Somuncu also proposes a secular education system. He voiced his critical perspective on religion in the Nachtmagazin episode on the Hamburger Vertrag mit Muslimen. Instead of integrating Islam into public schools, as recommended in a widely debated statewide proposal for Hamburg, Somuncu advocated an enlightened education of students, including the teaching of the concept of “secularism.” Opposing political measures that sought to bring Islam into the social fold by including it in the curriculum, Somuncu contends that religious education and religion in general have no place in classrooms. With this stance, Somuncu, who has a Turkish-German-Muslim background, voices his opinion against any religious education in schools, and proposes a secularization of all education; thereby he clearly strives to disentangle ethnicity from religion. For Somuncu, integration means active engagement in German and Turkish language classes, education about ethics, and the creation of a common value system. None of these, he claims, needs a religious basis. Somuncu’s recurring theme in terms of religion and integration is the vehement advocacy for a diversified and balanced view on Turkish-Germans and on Muslims. Somuncu unabashedly demands a decoupling of ethnicity from religion: in conversations with and in reactions to the media, politicians, and state officials, he promotes a non-generalizing view on Muslims, Turks, and Turkish-Germans living in Germany, one that both complicates and deconstructs the one-dimensional representation of the Turkish Muslim that is predominant in the entire public discourse. These views critically inform his stage performances, skits, and commentaries in television shows. Somuncu therefore forcefully demands that which is only subtly portrayed through the protagonists in Akın’s cinema and that which is more pedantically articulated but only partially actualized in the narrative of the Tatort episode Der Weg ins Paradies. What Somuncu voices through his provocative tone and biting satire, authors Feridun Zaimoğlu and Günter Senkel write, perhaps even more provocatively, for the German theater stage. Zaimoğlu, who began his literary career as the enfant terrible of German literature with Kanak Sprak (1995), Abschaum (1997), and Koppstoff (1999), has long moved to the foreground of contemporary German literature by receiving recognition through prestigious awards and scholarships ranging from the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize to the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo fellowship for artists. His collaboration with Günter Senkel on 72 Berna Gueneli Black Virgins, staged by Neco Celik, once more reminds his audiences of his literary beginnings: Zaimoğlu states that the play is the artistic outcome of several interviews conducted with “Neomuslims,” an artistic framing reminiscent of the imagined ethnographic voyeurism of his earlier work, such as Kanak Sprak (Uysal Ünalan 112). The expression “Neomuslims” seems to be an umbrella term Zaimoğlu himself uses to describe the diverse, self-confident Muslims he interviewed. Zaimoğlu’s cast of Neomuslims in Black Virgins defies classification into existing categories by combining the—at times fundamentalist—Islamic faith with modern, urban lifestyles that include living sexuality, praising terrorism, and being politically incorrect. I further suggest that, especially in the context of Zaimoğlu’s work, the term “Neomuslims” also refers to a dialogic identity that forms as individuals relate to each other through their very personal renderings and interpretations of Islam and their individual but socially embedded lifestyles. In Black Virgins, the last counter voice case study in this article, gender takes center stage. Although the titular word “black”—which might refer to darkness, to the unknown and mysterious, and to non-transparency—also connotes to race and ethnicity, as well as to the hijab and veil, which in itself has a large cross-section of connotations ranging from the exotic to the Islamist, the play does not seem to emphasize race over gender. The characters self-identify as German, Turkish, or Bosnian, for example, but their concern lies with their Islamic femininity, which goes beyond their ethnicity. This group of female characters performs through their voices and stories diverse and radical Islamic femininities that might provoke their audiences, with their at times paradoxical and violent ideas, images, and ideologies. Islamic theologist and journalist Nimet Seker uses the term “Islamo-feminism” to describe the characters of Black Virgins. The term seems to connote different radical, and even fundamentalist, interpretations of Islam by a variety of women, all of whom challenge previously prescribed religious rules as disseminated by Muslim men. The titular Black Virgins are female characters who identify as Muslim and give angry, violent, and occasionally vulgar monologues in colloquial discourse about their lifestyles and beliefs. 9 In other words, the provocative content of their monologues is voiced in a confrontational tone and language that runs throughout the play. Discussing femininities and sexualities, for example, several monologues include vulgarisms and street colloquialisms such as “Pornonutte” or “Fick” (24, 25). Others, talking about worldviews, express contested ideas such as praise and respect for Osama Bin Laden (60, 73) or their approval of the oppression of women whose opinions they disagree with (53-54). Although Zaimoğlu groups them in the same umbrella category of “Neomuslims,” they are all distinct from each other, and none of the stage characters believes in the Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 73 same Muslim lifestyle. They each speak in different ways about sexuality, love, family, the Germans, foreigners, the headscarf, female bodies, and various other topics. They also do not fit any existing clichéd categories of Muslim women, such as the obedient, silent, oppressed, and asexual Muslim daughter, sister, or wife of an oppressive brother, father, or husband in a patriarchal community. The provocative Black Virgins convey Zaimoğlu and Senkel’s critique of essentialist notions of Islam. They further help to expose what I call the “ethnovoyeurism” of audiences, who experience pleasure in looking at and observing the ethnic Other, particularly if it is a representation that they might perceive as “authentic.” An expectation of authenticity seems to be justified, especially when the representation of the Other is created by a “legitimate” Turkish-German insider, and particularly one who based the play on the biographical accounts of Muslim women whom he interviewed. Certainly, Zaimoğlu and Senkel’s piece explores the variety of Islamic positionalities, Islamic extremisms, and the so-called Western or non-Western lifestyles of his characters. However, I argue that the diversity and non-generic versions of these extreme voices from within Germany are not supposed to elicit sympathy for or an understanding of the Other, but rather to help the audience to see through their own judgments and generalizing attitudes regarding Islam and ethnicity. Julian Preece and Frank Finglay make a similar argument about the play in their introduction to Religion and Identity in Germany Today : This [ Back Virgins ] is pseudo-documentary theater because the point is not that these women somehow exist and dictate their speeches to the anthropologist dramatist whose role is to reproduce them. Zaimoğlu confronts German audiences with something like the inverse of what he perceives their perception of young female Turks living in their midst to be. It is a play about images reflected in images and as such shows how a literary treatment of an essentially ideological question cuts through that ideology. (5-6) Zaimoğlu and Senkel’s characters become examples that diversify and demystify the clichéd images about Muslim women. These protagonists are images of missing originals, they are poetic renderings of actual interviews. Nevertheless, by their violent and uncensored verbal interventions, the German, Bosnian, or Turkish characters destabilize the ethno-religious link on stage. They have different ethnicities and cannot be linked to any specific nationality group, any one religious practice, or any unified educational, professional, or familial background. They also challenge dominant gender stereotypes about Muslim women as headscarf-wearing, pious, silent, passive femininities. Some state in their monologues that they do not wear headscarves, or are proud of their veils, or that they are educated (one is a law student), have extramarital sex, support 74 Berna Gueneli terrorism, admire Osama Bin Laden, or use a wheelchair. These are just a few examples of the ways in which the play foregrounds the diversity within the characters who are grouped together as “Neomuslim.” The sheer range of differences in their opinions on disabilities, religious lifestyles, sexism, extremism, and terrorism challenges any gesture toward categorizing or generalizing any form of Muslim faith or culture. In this way, the titular Black Virgins connect radical Islamism with cosmopolitan lifestyles, defying stereotypical social gender roles. Seker also observes in this context that a differentiation between “traditional” and “modern” Islam does not function (Seker, “Feridun Zaimoglu: Islamo-Feminismus”). The play thereby serves as a counter voice that depicts a diversified view not just of Muslims and Islam, but also of religious extremism, women, and even Europeans. Scholars and critics agree that through this play Zaimoğlu and Senkel challenge clichéd ideas about Islam in Europe. Frauke Matthes observes that the play makes the audience “cringe, reject, disagree, or do the opposite of all that—by, effectively, making the audience react to the women’s voices” (210). It thereby connects the audience to an ongoing discussion of Islam in Europe (Matthes 210), while also criticizing preconceived notions of Muslims and Islam (Uysal Ünalan 14, 111, 112, 116 ff.). By now, Black Virgins has been staged multiple times and has consistently received praise by critics and commentators ( Bericht ; Meierhenrich; Schwankhalle; Schnell). The success and controversy of this play reinforces the need for a platform to discuss differentiated views on Islam. Additionally, this case study, like the others above, suggests that Islamic faith has long become a part of the global cities of Europe and cannot be linked to any particular ethnicity. The play’s realism, or perceived realism, is a major discussion point. While negative criticism might have come from audiences and critics expecting an inside view into a particular Islam (Matthes 201), theater critics, journalists, and scholars of Turkish-German and transnational studies showed positive interest in the work (Uysal Ünalan 112). Seker, for example, who sees a certain realism in the characters, states, “[Sie] sind böse, problematisch und widersprüchlich. Aber gerade das macht sie realistisch. Mit ihrem Islamo-Feminismus verleihen sie der Emanzipation und dem Feminismus gewiss neue Impulse.” While other scholars also discuss the play’s relationship to various forms of feminism, the accuracy of Seker’s statement about the realism of the characters is up for debate. I argue that the characters are art figures who are not realistic renderings of Muslim voices, but rather representations thereof who perform poetic and aestheticized versions of actual interviews. They thereby synthesize, respond to, criticize, and provoke discussions of Islam, religion, and gender in Europe. The question of feminism and Otherness, on the other hand, is at the foreground. Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 75 Claudia Breger, for example, states that in the Zaimoğlu / Senkel / Celik production of Black Virgins gender is pivotal to the Black Virgins ’ critical cultural intervention, which is positioned within a feminist framework of interrogating and deconstructing the social meaning and exchange value of “virgin” sexuality, among other feminized roles. The focus is on provocative difference and Otherness: “[T]he figure of difference dominating the public stage is no longer the ‘Turk’ (or ‘Kanaksta’) but the observant radical Muslim” (Breger 231). Breger continues that the women on stage, who “remain strangers even without folkloristic accessories,” comment critically on gender inequalities as experienced in contemporary expressions of Islam (236). They are “satirical ‘virgin’ voices” and “counter dominant conceptions of the presumed homogeneity of political Islam” (237). I suggest that their gender criticism goes beyond Islam-feminism, that is, that it is not limited to Muslim femininities, but also extends to the perception and exploitation of female sexuality beyond a Muslim context, one that resonates with the work of other contemporary Turkish-German artists. Of further interest in this context would be, for example, the controversial Turkish-German rapper Lady Bitch Ray, the stage name used by linguist Reyhan Șahin. In her academic professional life, Şahin is an award-winning scholar who has published on the semiotics of the headscarf, Muslim self-representation, as well as on youth language, culture, and hip-hop. She argues in Die Bedeutung des muslimischen Kopftuchs (2014), for example, that hijab-wearing Muslim women are a heterogeneous group of people and that the hijab in itself does not imply a state of repression. While in her academic work she criticizes the overgeneralizing opinions on Muslim femininities, in her performances as Lady Bitch Ray (LBR), she overtly criticizes sexism and misogyny by bringing an aggressive and provocative persona to the stage, television, and internet screens. Unlike her academic persona, LBR ’s stage persona creates a harsh polemic (“Lady Bitch Ray”; Sand; Welt-Bremen). In her rap performances—particularly through her lyrics, styles, and costumes—she re-appropriates sexist terminology and imagery widespread among misogynistic rap acts. With these controversial “anti-porno” performances foregrounding the exploitation of female sexuality, she is both entering and challenging a male domain—namely misogynist rap. To give an example, in her videos and photography, she replicates a transformed version of images known from rap videos such as “Candy Shop” or “Just a Lil Bit” by internationally successful American artist 50 Cent. LBR ’s reappropriated images known from such videos are empowering the females as subjects, rather than objects, of pleasure. Her performances unabashedly and provocatively demand sexual (and non-sexual) self-determination. Thereby, juxtaposed with 50 Cent’s music videos, LBR ’s bluntly sexualized performances create a castrating audio-visual aesthetic and intervention into sexist media. 76 Berna Gueneli LBR therefore unabashedly brings to the foreground the miscegenation and sexism that she perceives as dominating the media landscapes. 10 At the same time, her videos most forcefully defy any linkage between preconceived images about Turkish-German passive femininity and Islam in Germany (“Lady Bitch Ray”; Sand). In this regard, LBR not only espouses a differentiated view on Muslim and Turkish femininities, but she is also exposing the commercialization and exploitation of women’s bodies and sexuality in Germany in general. As a Turkish-German artist, she vigorously and consistently identifies and exposes the misogynist value system prevalent in German and European media (Sand). That is, a Turkish-German performer, LBR does not directly discuss Islam, she rather concentrates on more global issues of gender, empowerment, and pleasure, thereby disentangling religion from ethnicity in her performances. With her thusly politicized performance, LBR not only reappropriates and revalues images of sexualized and objectified femininities in misogynistic rap acts, but also tackles stereotypes and expectations of Muslim female passivity, thereby linking these two (very different) dimensions of contemporary media. By highlighting her ethnic background, for example with songs such as “Kanackenbraut,” LBR also makes a political statement about the post-religious and post-ethnic society that LBR herself belongs to. Her implied critique of the exploitation of female sexuality as well as the representation of Muslims—as expressed through her online and television performances—therefore resonates, even if in a far more frontal, direct, and inclusive way, with my previous case studies, such as Zaimoğlu and Senkel’s Black Virgins or Akın’s films. The counter voices examined in this article may be at times polemical, vulgar, or unnerving, but they articulate a much-needed critique of contemporary culture by addressing current events and calling for both progressive and radical measures such as nonsexist media and secular education. However, many do not share these views: counter voices on (general) religious symbolism in education, for example, do not seem to be well received by a general audience, as can be seen in the case of Turkish-German CDU politician Aygül Özkan. Like Somuncu, Özkan suggested that classrooms should be secular and free of religious symbolisms, including crosses. However, Özkan’s suggestion was heavily criticized and silenced by her own Christian Democratic Party: “‘Frau Özkan akzeptiert, dass in Niedersachsen in den Schulen Kreuze willkommen und gewünscht sind. Sie trägt diese Linie mit. Damit ist das Thema erledigt,’ sagte [Präsident Christian] Wulff” (Öztürker). While another European country, France, was more rigorous in its ruling against any religious symbolism in schools, in Germany this type of pan-religious ban proves to be more complicated, as the above response to Özkan shows. Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 77 Reactions toward LBR as well as Yıldız’s illustrations about her Moroccan case study referenced above also exemplify different ways of actively challenging or discrediting Turkish-German counter voices. LBR ’s mode of criticizing sexism in German media and society came itself under fire by German actress Michaela May, who stated in the Maischberger talk show episode “Keuschheit statt Porno: Brauchen wir eine neue Sexualmoral? ” on ARD that German women are already emancipated and do not need the type of intervention that LBR performs. May consequently opposed LBR ’s performances (“Lady Bitch Ray bei Maischberger 1”). LBR ’s work was similarly discredited by her former employer Radio Bremen / Radiowelle Funkhaus Europa, which labeled her work pornographic. Ultimately, she lost her job as moderator at the radio station due to her stage persona. In this context, let us recall the earlier discussion of Yıldız’s case study. The case of a Moroccan woman was discredited because it did not fit the preconceived images about Muslim women. Hence, the media told a flattened story, leaving out information that would have complicated the stereotype of the silent, passive, abused Muslim woman. 11 Ultimately, counter voices become important moments to intervene and diversify mainstream media coverage of Islam in Germany and Europe. Beyond the scope of my examples presented above, there are many voices in the German and European media landscape that challenge and in some cases even overrule mainstream media representations of Muslims, Islam, and migrants living in Germany and Europe. In an attempt to study European diversity and integration, future scholarship needs to further examine and discuss in depth these diverse counter voices within German media (including their growing presence in the internet). They highlight the vast array of different opinions and expressions that continue to shape contemporary Germany and Europe, both of which have long left behind the overbearing, hegemonic, monocultural, and monolingual fantasies of mainstream media. notes I would like to thank the guest editors Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart for their tireless editorial feedback and suggestions that tremendously improved this article. 1 In the case of Maghreb masculinities in France, Fatima El-Tayeb has made a similar argument (“The Birth”). 2 My discussion of Schwarze Jungfrauen is based on the 2008 audio book and the 2013 ebook editions of the play. All quotations are from the Rowohlt ebook. The play had its theater premiere in 2006. 78 Berna Gueneli 3 For a discussion of the 2004 ban regarding public schools but also of France’s relationship to its former colony and Islam, see Joan Wallach Scott’s 2010 book The Politics of the Veil. 4 This article adds to the discussion Claudia Winkler started in her 2013 article on Kübra Gümüşay’s blog ein fremdwörterbuch. Borrowing from Nancy Fraser, Winkler discusses the blog as a “subaltern counter public.” In this space, Gümüşay disseminates texts and opinions that are opposed to mainstream media representations of femininity and Islam in Germany / Europe. Gümüşay is an activist and journalist, and a cosmopolitan Muslim woman wearing a headscarf (in itself this is opposed to clichéd ideas about silent, passive Muslima). I use the term counter voice, to more generally refer to any voice, coming from a diversity of media outlets that dismantle, disrupt, or merely unsettle mainstream media images about Islam, gender, and ethnicity. 5 This is particularly explicit in the portrayal of the cosmopolitan travelers and their interfaith love stories in In July. 6 The ethnic normalization of a Turkish-German character in the script comes at the price of an overtly eroticized and sexualized masculinity on the screen (Gueneli, “Mehmet Kurtuluş”). 7 With the series’ pilot show, I am referring to the first episode with Mehmet Kurtuluş as detective Cenk Batu in Auf der Sonnenseite (2007)� 8 Bower describes Somuncu’s change in tone in his performances since his stage show Hitler Kebab as “Aggro-Comedy.” This type of comedy also includes crude insults and a particularly vulgar language (208 ff.). 9 For a detailed analysis and an insightful discussion of the play, see Maha El Hissy’s 2012 book Getürkte Türken (110-44). 10 In her videos, LBR uses lyrics, sounds, costumes, and body postures to promote her own brand of feminist criticism, which she calls “Bitchsm.” LBR ’s 2012 book Bitchsm further contributes to the multimedia distributions of her critique of sexism and provides a feminist life-style manifesto. Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle observe in the context of literary postfeminism that Bitchsm “employs the violent language of pornography and the sexist imagery of pop culture to create its pleasure-obsessed, hedonistic, and aggressive voice” (148). With her “Bitchsm lectures” the performer-critic LBR / Şahin introduces a new dimension of her performances (“Bitchsm”). 11 Yıldız pointed out that there seems to be a willful turning away from non-mainstream images of Muslims in the media. The abused Moroccan-German woman’s story was not framed as a case of domestic violence, as Yıldız reminds us, but as a story of an abused Muslim woman whose Arab husband was acting according to archaic Islamic rules. She describes the Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 79 paradoxical flattening of the ethnicity of the woman in question, despite her unstereotypically Muslim background and gender position: “a German citizen of Moroccan descent […] born and raised in Germany, presents herself as strong-willed and independent-minded. She emphasizes that she married her husband […] against the advice of her skeptical family […]” (Yıldız 80). In this example, the Moroccan-German woman did not completely fit the stereotypes of the silent, abused, female Muslim, whose Arab family forced her into marriage. Therefore the media did not focus on that part of her story that went beyond and complicated the image of the abused Muslim woman (Yıldız 80). Works Cited “20 Jahre Deutsche Einheit. Dokumentation: Christian Wulffs Rede im Wortlaut.” sueddeutsche.de. 3 Oct. 2010. Web. 12 Sept. 2014. “50 Cent—Candy Shop ft. Olivia.” Online video clip. YouTube. 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Rowohlt E-book Theater, 2013� Zaimoğlu, Feridun and Günter Senkel. Schwarze Jungfrauen: Hörbuch. Hofmann und Campe Verlag, 2008. MP 3� “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 83 “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary Olivia Landry University of Pittsburgh abstract: Confronting Islamophobia as the “new racism” in the West, resistance narratives have reappropriated interpolated forms of “threat” projected onto Muslims. The supposed threat of Islam and the often-exaggerated panic it evokes offer critical points of subversion for Muslims to expose the prejudice and its devastating repercussions on matters of citizenship and belonging. Here the resistance narrative takes on rigorously methodological articulation in documentary film. Expanding on the definition of documentary as a powerful medium of documentation, authentication, and even performance, this article considers the political force of the 2010 documentary films Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited. In these two films, form and content intersect to provide salient protestations against Islamophobia in the West. Keywords: Islamophobia, documentary, Germany, Israel, immigration Panic is a visceral reaction, something that is elicited by the sensation of fear or threat, or a feeling of being unsure and overwhelmed. It inhibits our ability to think and reflect rationally and impairs our judgment. Panic is often “a result of ill-defined fears that eventually find a dramatic and oversimplified focus in one incident or stereotype, which then provides a visible symbol for discussion and debate” ( Jenkins qtd. in Introvigne 48). Thus, it is not entirely surprising that narratives of panic, especially moral panic, converge with Western narratives of exclusion and hate with regard to race and religion. A rhetoric of “us” versus “them” finds footing in the circulation of panic. Furthermore, as a potentially collective sensation, panic, like hate or fear, “ works to bind the imagined white subject and nation together ” (Ahmed 118, emphasis in the original). Yet distinct from hate and fear, panic’s effect is immediate and often exaggerated to the point of ludicrousness. As Massimo Introvigne points out, “a concept of ‘moral panic’ was developed to explain how social problems become ‘overconstructed’ 84 Olivia Landry and generate exaggerated fears” (47). In this way, panic has come to characterize a hyperbolized Western response to Islam, which is all too often packaged in a media-fed imaginary of radicalism, misogyny, homophobia, and even terrorism. Taking the affect of panic and its ascendency in discourses about Islam in the West as a jumping-off point, I propose an exploration of means and media of resistance. How do we resist panic? And what does this resistance look like? Although this study takes us to several different national and transnational contexts, the two main nations under inquiry are Germany and Israel. Within these national and cultural folds, I propose a turn to documentary film. Two 2010 films, Love During Wartime by Swedish filmmaker Gabriella Bier and Neukölln Unlimited by German and Italian filmmakers Dietmar Rasch and Agostino Imondi, render rich elucidations of how panic and Islamophobia intersect. By way of these films, the following looks at the political, aesthetic, and ontological capabilities of the medium of documentary as a viable articulation and performance of resistance against Islamophobia in Germany and Israel. I begin with a brief consideration of the resonance of the slogan “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic.” From there, I turn to the two films and consider their cultural politics. By doing this, we can begin to glean the overt as well as the subtle scenarios and narratives of Islamophobia that the films work to displace. In the second half of the essay I examine the aesthetic and ontological qualities of these documentaries that not only complement but also inhere in a politics of resistance. In more general terms, the international Muslim community has directly and subversively reappropriated the anticipated panic—at least in popular culture— to generate slogans, such as “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic” or “I’m Muslim, Don’t Panic.” Such evocative verbal gestures have been taken in different directions, both meditative and artistic. They offer a platform for religious avowal and community, as can be seen, for example, on the open Facebook page “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”; a source for artistic expression, such as for the hip-hop performance by the Turkish rap sensation Ceza and the Turkish-German DJ Volkan T. in their 2010 collaboration “Happy Vibrations—Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”; and a popular slogan for T-shirts and other apparel. More indirectly, though, this backlash can be detected in a number of media and performance pieces whose political and artistic aim is to subversively confront Islamophobia in the West and provide perspectives of how Western panic about Muslims continues to negatively affect the lives of many individuals and communities. Effectively, these slogans serve as a means of subverting the anticipated panic reaction of non-Muslims based on negative stereotypes about Islam and Muslims. As Fatima El-Tayeb comments in her study European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (2011), already in the 1990s there was “a moral panic discourse “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 85 around male migrant and Muslim youths as delinquent” (99). Although El-Tayeb is writing from a European perspective, this slightly earlier phenomenon offers a precursor to what has become a widespread, certainly Western, affective crisis of panic with a new focus on the Muslim male as (always) a potential or even presumed terrorist after September 11, 2001, and again, more recently, as a resurgence with the emergence of the terrorist group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Without downplaying the real threat of terrorism, the slogan “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic” aims to expose the ideologies that form as a result of both the abuse of Islam and the over-emotional political response to acts of terror that can serve irrational and harmful generalizations about all Muslims. Responding to Lauren Berlant’s provocative claim in her monograph Cruel Optimism (2011) that the “‘war on terror’ is a war on an emotion and a war on and through the senses” (243), “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic” calls for an intervention. Such a polemical intervention of Islamic or Muslim reappropriation of “panic” as an articulation of resistance can be compared in some ways with the earlier work of the activist group Kanak Attack, 1 which likewise reappropriated the derogatory term “Kanak,” used pejoratively against people of color and Muslims in Germany. The aggression expressed in the word “Attack” also subversively plays with popular misconceptions of violence and aggression in Muslim communities; however, “attack” was part of this group’s strategy of resistance, that is, to attack racism head-on. With verve for comically subversive and bitingly sarcastic approaches, Kanak Attack created a polemic around the “label of ‘inauthenticity’”; in other words, it combated the idea that Europeans of color and Muslims cannot possibly be “European” (El-Tayeb xlvi). While “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic” is only a slogan with no activist group connection, it has certainly come to represent a new kind of anti-discrimination movement in the West, that explicitly addresses Islamophobia. Distinct from the methods of Kanak Attack, I propose a mapping of resistance to panic against Muslims through authenticity. However, the quality of authenticity I refer to is unrelated to normative identity; instead, it pertains to a reality and proximity of experience. Such an experience becomes possible through documentary film, which as I seek to show avails itself as a rigorous medium for both articulating and substantiating narratives against Islamophobia. Resisting harmful mainstream attitudes of panic against Muslims plays out in the personal and intimate dramas of a mixed couple and a Muslim family whose everyday lives are negatively affected in the two films I analyze here. Documentary’s exceptional concern with tracing the intimate and the authentic mobilizes the necessary means of exploring these dramas as potentially political scenes of resistance. Indeed, the documentary is more than just a form of representation; it is also a powerful medium of performance, contemporaneous doc- 86 Olivia Landry umentation, and authentication. As Bill Nichols has established, the conventions of the documentary tradition of filmmaking, “such as voice-over commentary, location shooting, the use of nonactors engaged in their daily lives as people, and the exploration of social issues like global warming or social justice,” give it a powerful sense of authentic representation of the world (xiii-xiv). At the same time, however, documentary filmmaking also serves to record and archive the performance of the everyday in an act of preservation and subsequently dissemination. Documentary filmmaking thus critically troubles the distinctions between representation and reality, archive and repertoire, past and present. The important paradox of the documentary—its connection to reality and immediacy as well as its mechanism of recording—is what makes it such a compelling artistic and especially political tool. These medial processes gain traction when coupled with the personal narratives of resistance to Islamophobia explored in and through Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited. These two 2010 films are essentially about the challenges of immigration and asylum for Muslims. Their shared main setting is Germany; however, in the case of Love During Wartime this also extends to Israel and more peripherally to Austria. While none of the figures in these films are devoutly Muslim in a religious sense, Islam is a marker of cultural and even political heritage with which the figures not only identify but also from which they are (often negatively) identified by society around them. Unique in the ways in which they encounter, narrate, and ultimately confront their struggles with immigration and asylum, these two films similarly condense the concomitant valence of Islamophobia that has been fueled by an antagonistic sensorium of overwrought fears and anxiety about that which is unfamiliar and estranged. These films’ subsequent resistance to Islamophobia is diffused in the form of intimate narration of the everyday that draws the viewer in and engages through experiences that feel real and close. A lesser-known film in a long line of documentaries set amidst the Israel-Palestine conflict, Bier’s Love During Wartime takes a slightly different approach to charged discourses and reveals and documents the struggle of a Jewish Israeli woman and a Muslim Palestinian man as they fight for the right to live together as a married couple. In the wake of the Second Intifada in 2003, Israel passed a law banning Muslim Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining citizenship. For the Jewish Israeli, Jasmin Avissar, and the Muslim Palestinian, Osama “Assi” Zatar, featured in Bier’s documentary, this law is not only a violation of human rights but also an almost insurmountable obstacle to their love. Even in a period when love—and especially marriage—is still not a right enjoyed by all, the troubled story of Jasmin and Assi seems as though it were a Romeo and Juliet tale of yesteryear. While characterized more definitively, then, as a love story “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 87 than as a film about Middle-Eastern politics, Love During Wartime does serve as a political tool in the young couple’s struggle for the right to settle together in Israel and then in Germany—a struggle that lasts nearly seven years and is ultimately lost. Read politically, the film works through a number of vectors. On one level, it seeks to bring attention to both the political and the religious conflict between Israel and Palestine, which are distilled here in the issue of unjust citizenship laws in Israel. It may be added that subsequently in 2012, the Supreme Court of Israel moved to uphold the discriminatory citizenship law that bans Muslim Palestinians (from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) from obtaining citizenship in Israel. This struggle overlaps with Jasmin’s and Assi’s failed attempt to alternatively find permanent residence in Germany, the outcome of which is highly ambiguous. Contemporaneous and decidedly personal, the political register of Love During Wartime is suffused with the everyday of personal experience, love, and hardship. When the film was released it only ran in festivals and almost exclusively in the presence of the filmmaker, and often with Jasmin and Assi too. One event included the “Voicing Resistance” festival at Berlin-Kreuzberg’s Ballhaus Naunynstraße theater. 2 As part of this screening, the director and nonactors were present and personally answered questions about the film, framing the viewers’ experience of the film with an added sense of directness and authenticity. During the post-screening discussion, the art director of the theater at that time, Shermin Langhoff, praised the film for its authentic portrayal of the discrimination and tribulations experienced by so many Muslim immigrants and refugees who come to Germany. 3 Offering a slightly different narrative of struggle for the “right to reside” ( Bleiberecht ) in Germany, the second documentary film I consider here, Neukölln Unlimited, focuses on three siblings—Hassan, Lial, and Maradona Akkouch—from a larger Shiite Muslim family originally from northern Lebanon and presently living in Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood. The family fled to Germany in the late 1990s following the mass devastation of the Lebanese Civil War, subsequent militarized conflicts with Israel, and persisting religious tension between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. As the documentary shows, over ten years later, only the two elder siblings have temporary visas and the rest of the family is merely geduldet, and can be deported at any moment. This film demonstrates the urgent problems with the German asylum laws, which have garnered much attention in recent years around the ongoing wave of protests among asylum seekers and their supporters, such as activist organizations Pro Asyl and Kein Mensch ist illegal, referred to as “Refugee Tent Action.” 4 Beginning in June 2012, these protests spread to twelve cities in Germany and asylum seekers fled their Asylbewerberheime to protest the residence requirements, the labor ban, the lack of transparency of asylum procedures, and the long bureaucratic delays—all of 88 Olivia Landry which place asylum seekers in a precarious legal position and severely restrict their freedom of physical and social mobility. 5 Given this loaded contemporary context, Neukölln Unlimited decidedly resonates with a political movement of resistance to anti-immigration and anti-refugee discourses. At the same time, this resistance extends to a politics of anti-Islamophobia that is directly indicated in its visual symbolism. As I will discuss further, one of the main figures dons a T-shirt with the slogan “Don’t Panik, I’m Muslim” (sic) for much of the film. This same T-shirt can be seen on the film’s official poster, thus immediately visually linking the film to a criticism of panic against Muslims. Neukölln Unlimited unambivalently bears out the collusion of anti-immigration and Islamophobia movements in Germany, which I will examine at greater length. With explicit narratives about citizenship, Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited also emerge from and influence anti-Islamophobia movements. Questions of citizenship precipitate a discussion of the binaries of inclusion, and exclusion becomes inevitable. In the case of both films, it is clearly Muslims who are not only ideologically but also legally excluded. Within this context of the exclusion of Muslims from Israeli and German configurations of citizenship, I ask: How does panic against Muslims operate? And, moreover, what exactly do these films in their performance of the polemic “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic” seek to subvert? The mobilization of panic can be seen as a disproportionate reaction to the pervasive discriminatory misconception of “the Muslim,” especially Muslim men, as always a potential threat. Cemented in the figure of the terrorist, this discourse of threat has roots that date prior to 9 / 11 and America’s inundating war on terror. Already in 1972 with the Munich Olympics Massacre, the image of especially the Palestinian Muslim terrorist took shape in the Western imaginary. After 9 / 11, however, the panic mobilized by the potential threat of the Muslim male found its focal point. The war on terror zealously drew on processes of Othering and fetishizing the Muslim in visible terms, for example, often erringly, as the turbaned Sikh (Puar and Rai 117). More recently, however, the Muslim is broadly perceived (especially in Europe) as supposedly posing a direct threat to liberal secularism. Religion per se does not play a major role in Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited, yet Muslim identity and especially the racialized identity of the Muslim are treated here with acute awareness. Racialized identity is of course almost always an interpolated identity—that is, an identity for others. Frantz Fanon has defined this in Hegelian terms as the person of color’s “being-for-others” (1). That Muslim identity has also been relegated to an identity marker divorced from religious practice, attests to the inescapable presence of the discourses of Islam, Islamophobia, and anti-Islamophobia in these films. El-Tayeb “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 89 elucidates this phenomenon in the European context in the following way: “Islam at times appears as a signifier almost as empty as race, ascribing a combination of naturalized cultural attributes to ‘Muslims’ that has little to do with religious beliefs or even with being a believer. Instead, the trope of the Muslim as Other offers an apparently easy and unambiguous means to divide Europeans and migrants” (xxx). The Othering of the Muslim thus takes on a form of racialization insofar as it offers up an empty signifier for oversimplifying a complex identity and community as a means of classifying and “quarantining” the threat of Islam in the West. 6 Journalist Carolin Emcke has also written provocatively about the growing problem of Islamophobia in the West, which she calls a form of “liberal racism.” In her award-winning essay “Liberaler Rassismus,” she makes the insightful claim that: Muslime im Singular scheint es nicht mehr zu geben. […] Jeder einzelne Muslim wird verantwortlich gemacht für Suren, an die er nicht glaubt, für orthodoxe Dogmatiker, die er nicht kennt, für gewalttätige Terroristen, die er ablehnt, oder für brutale Regime in Ländern, aus denen er selbst geflohen ist. (Emcke) 7 A kind of liberal racism, Islamophobia has become racism in another form, or as some might say: “the new racism.” But as we observe in the narratives of Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited, this racism carries its own particular social, legal, and emotional weight. In Love During Wartime, Jasmin and Assi fight the Supreme Court of Israel in an attempt to appeal the Citizen and Entry into Israel Law (2003) that forbids Assi as a Palestinian from the West Bank to permanently reside in Israel despite his marriage to an Israeli citizen—a battle they eventually lose. This law extends to a number of other Muslim countries, including Iran, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, and Yemen. While religious affiliation is not explicitly a factor, Jews from these countries (including Palestine) could legally circumvent such a law as mandated by the Aliyah (Law of Return). In a voiceover, Assi remarks at the beginning of the film that Israel claims that it must protect its borders from (especially Palestinian) Muslim terrorists, but perhaps in reality Israel is simply afraid that if Israelis get used to seeing Palestinians, the racist, ideological construct of “the Palestinian Muslim” in Israel (read panic against Muslims) will be shattered and Israelis will have nothing to fear. It is a fact that many Israelis have never even seen a Palestinian (from the Palestinian Territories). Assi’s simple yet highly evocative comment is accompanied by the image of a cityscape (Ramallah) and, just beyond, Israel. The provenance of the gaze is from inside a stone building looking out through a notably tiny window of what appears to be an abandoned or bombed out building. Engendering a visceral effect of longing and confinement, this powerful verbal declaration of 90 Olivia Landry separation aligned with a visual demonstration of geographical proximity strikingly exemplifies the condition of stasis of so many Palestinians. The main setting of Love During Wartime is, however, Berlin, where Jasmin and eventually Assi both wait out their Israeli court case and attempt to alternatively find refuge. Yet immigration to Germany becomes comparably challenging and even more bureaucratically confounded. According to Article 116 Paragraph 2 of Germany’s constitution, as the daughter of a Jewish-German mother who fled Germany during the Second World War, Jasmin has the right to (re)claim the German citizenship taken from her mother as a result of Nazi Germany’s Gesetz über den Widerruf von Einbürgerungen und die Aberkennung der deutschen Staatsangehörigkeit (1993)� 8 But once the German Auslandsbehörde discover that Jasmin is married to a Palestinian, the process becomes infinitely more difficult. There is suddenly no longer any record of Jasmin’s mother’s German citizenship. In the meantime, Assi applies and waits for a visa to study in Germany—a wait that lasts over a year. Even when the couple is finally reunited in Berlin, life is not easy. Assi is not permitted to work, feels isolated, and experiences discrimination. Jasmin explains to their lawyer in Israel: “It is difficult for [Assi] there, to be a foreigner, a minority, to be unwanted. The way they treat Muslims and blacks in Germany is revolting. Racism is completely open. They are careful when it comes to Jews. They have been brought up not to talk badly about Jews” ( Love During Wartime ). In the last published report by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (2006), 9 there is evidence of increased Islamophobic tendencies in all European countries. In Germany alone, these range from violent attacks (consider the NSU murders in Germany, only uncovered in 2011) 10 to discrimination in postsecondary education opportunities and on the job market. Finally, the emergence of the high-profile Islamophobic / anti-immigration movement PEGIDA in late 2014 offers yet another instance of open displays of definitively mainstream discrimination against Muslims in Germany. 11 In some ways, the scholarship anticipates this movement. Writing in 2011, El-Tayeb argues that Islamophobia has been “justified with the supposed threat […] to the secular, liberal Europe” (90). One year earlier in 2010, Emcke writes that Islamophobia “ist zunehmend ungehemmt ins Zentrum des medialen mainstream gerückt” 12 (150, emphasis in the original). According to the European Agency for Fundamental Rights (2013), anti-Semitism more recently has also been on the rise in European countries (especially in Greece, Hungary, and France). 13 However, anti-Semitism in Germany is generally speaking less open and often ensconced in a “politically correct” anti-Israel discourse. Jasmin’s lawyer comments that at least in Germany there are no laws upholding discrimination, whereas the Citizen and Entry into Israel Law has been condemned by critics as Islamophobic in nature. In 2008 Amos “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 91 Schocken, the publisher of the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, referred to the law as a call for an apartheid state. By the same token, supporters of the law have hailed it as part of an effort to preserve the Jewish nature of Israel. But Germany remains soldered to a history of the Shoah. The memory and trauma of Germany’s not-so-distant National Socialist past is strongly embodied by Jasmin’s taciturn mother, a German Jew and refugee of the Holocaust, who found asylum as a young girl with her family in Israel. Now an Israeli citizen, she is still legally entitled to her dispossessed German citizenship and tries to assist the couple as much as possible. At one point in the film, she is shown very reluctantly and uncomfortably calling the German embassy to inquire about Assi’s study visa. For nearly another year, Jasmin and Assi temporally wait for their court case in Israel and for Jasmin’s German citizenship in Berlin. The film evidences this drawn-out frustration and the tedium of waiting in transit with myriad shots of Assi wandering aimlessly through Berlin, restlessly sitting or even lying alone in their modest apartment. By the end of the film and after nearly two years in Berlin, Jasmin has still not been granted citizenship and their appeal to the Supreme Court of Israel has been overturned. With a stroke of luck, however, Assi’s artistic endeavors secure him admittance into the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the couple moves to Austria. I hesitate to surmise that there is more artistic mobility in Austria, as its visa laws generally align with other countries in the Schengen zone. It is more likely that Assi’s admittance to the Academy of Fine Arts secured him a student visa. Like Neukölln Unlimited, Love During Wartime is also a film about contemporary German, and to a lesser extent, Austrian, society and politics that recasts the country’s relationship to its past and postulates the problem of institutionalized discrimination, especially against Muslims and people of color. Neukölln Unlimited tracks racism and Islamophobia in a comparatively gestural manner. The German asylum system is not portrayed as being explicitly discriminatory, but certainly the general attitude toward citizens sans papiers and especially asylum seekers is shown as dubious. Scenarios demonstrate the patronizing way in which social workers, police officers, teachers, and politicians speak to the Akkouch siblings. Hassan relates an experience he had in the Bundeskriminalamt where he went to give a statement. The receptionist there sent him away for fear that he—“so ein junger, kräftiger Typ aus Neukölln” ( Neukölln Unlimited )—might scare the defendant. Here and elsewhere, Fanon’s delineation of indirect racist behavior finds a context, for instance, in the form of condescension: “A white man talking to a person of color behaves exactly like a grown-up with a kid, simpering, murmuring, fussing, coddling” (15). This also extends to a brand of racism veiled in politically correct politeness. In an early 92 Olivia Landry scene in the utterly confusing Auslandsbehörde in Berlin the camera rests its focus on a sign that unapologetically states: “Wir helfen Ihnen bei der Rückkehr in Ihr Heimatland” ( Neukölln Unlimited, my emphasis). 14 German bureaucracy thus conceals its own anti-foreigner rhetoric in a verbal gesture of supposed generosity and support, as if it were a friend ready to help non-citizens to achieve their goals of returning to their “real homes.” This attitude that refugees are only temporarily residing in Germany and therefore should neither be treated as fellow citizens nor be given the opportunity to integrate into society, but rather as guests that have overstayed their welcome, strongly echoes the ongoing debates about the social, political, and cultural place of the massive wave of postwar migrants, the so-called Gastarbeiter who came to Germany in the late 1950s, 60s, and 70s to work and were then expected to return to their country of origin. According to El-Tayeb, five decades later these debates still focus “on the moment of arrival and ‘what if ’ scenarios: namely, what happens to Europe if these people stay” (xii)? Although Germany took an important step forward with the legalization of dual citizenship in 2014, the fact that this law has been so controversial and long deferred attests to the country’s glaring reluctance to accept that it has become an “immigrant nation.” Germany ranks third in the United Nations report, Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2013 Revision. A densely populated nation, Germany’s number of immigrants makes up a substantial percentage of the population—nearly twelve percent. 15 Many attribute such a refusal to recognize the legal and social status of immigrants in Germany to an overall resistance to cultural and religious openness, that is, a denial of the place of Islam in German society. To this day, conservatives dismiss Islam as a foreign element in direct disavowal of former Federal President Christian Wulff’s famous claim that Islam belongs to Germany. Simultaneously politically active and openly critical and eager to find their place in German society, the two older Akkouch siblings perceive integration into German society as their ultimate goal and solution against social exclusion and discrimination. It is only the youngest of the three siblings, Maradona, who has no legal status in Germany and appears to feel most openly rejected by German society. Maradona also most visibly (at least in the film) embraces religious and political Islam and the Arab community. In one scene we see him performing the Salat (Muslim prayer) and on another occasion he participates in a protest march near the German Parliament against Israel’s role in the Gaza War (December 2008-January 2009). In this latter scene and many others, he dons the symbolically loaded T-shirt that states: “I’m Muslim, Don’t Panik” (sic) and a keffiyeh (a symbol for Palestinian nationalism) (Fig. 1). “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 93 Figure 1: Neukölln Unlimited movie poster 16 94 Olivia Landry By explicitly embracing the “Palestine Question,” Maradona demonstrates his participation in and self-identification with a broader Muslim consciousness. However, Maradona’s brother, Hassan, expresses concern that unfortunately in Germany there are few positive Muslim role models for his brother to follow, precisely because the imaginary of the Muslim in German society is explicitly pejorative. As Hassan explains, the media is replete with negative images of Muslims, especially as criminals or terrorists. Neukölln Unlimited underscores the inherent catch-22 for many first, second, and third generation Muslim Germans, who, on the one hand, are pressured to assimilate into German society, but, on the other hand, are perpetually treated like outsiders. 17 Emerging from and adding to this climate of exclusion and hate, Thilo Sarrazin’s notorious anti-immigration and Islamophobic manifesto, Deutschland schafft sich ab, was released the same year as both films. Directly attacking Turkish and Arab Muslims, Sarrazin postulates that through the immigration of Muslims, Germany is increasingly becoming more Islamic. He mobilizes panic through the employment of exaggerated scenarios; for example, he contends that, due to the alarming rate at which Muslim families reproduce, there will soon be more Muslims in Germany than non-Muslims and they will force “Germans” to live in compliance to their customs, which according to Sarrazin include a repertoire of misguided and uninhibited Islamophobic characteristics. Extremely controversial, the book was so popular in Germany that over 1.5 million copies were sold within the first two years of its publication. The overwhelming success of the book indicates this deeper problem of Islamophobia among the general German public, which as a result of the book’s social phenomenon has become increasingly more open and vehement about its Islamophobic sentiments. 18 Thus, a movement like PEDIGA in Germany, which has been publicly characterized as mainstream, does not represent the development of Islamophobia per se, but actually the increased normativization of Islamophobia. Amidst this new “normal,” Sarrazin has become a kind of poster boy for Islamophobic expression and behavior in Germany, and he has influenced other authors, such as Akif Pirinçci, who more recently published his own Islamophobic manifesto, Deutschland von Sinnen: Der irre Kult um Frauen, Homosexuelle und Zuwanderer (2014). Employing the affect of panic to promote Islamophobia, figures such as Sarrazin and Pirinçci, movements such as PEGIDA , and conservative politicians and mainstream media in both Israel and Germany appeal to the base instincts of the public. This panic is often not only misguided, it is also highly ambiguous. It feeds ideologies of hate by confounding our thoughts and senses. Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited seek to dismantle such mainstream ideologies about immigrants and Muslims in Germany and beyond. In her reading of Neukölln Unlimited, journalist Cristina Nord appropriately refers to the film as “Eine Gegenrede zu Thilo Sarrazin” ( taz online )� “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 95 What documentary film offers as an intervention and means of subversion is a respite from the excited yet equivocalness of panic and the flood of emotional intensity that averts reason and understanding. Documentary is the work of realistic (if not real) representation and performance. It assertively claims that we cannot be panicked about something with which we are intimately familiar. Documentary fills the distance of harmful rhetoric and draws us in to the unmediated stories of real people. In her article “The Promise of Documentary” (2009), Janelle Reinelt indicates that central to the documentary is the historiographical question of how to present a document or event without excessive narrative intervention and creative treatment. How can a story look and feel unmediated? Achieving representative transparency means finding a balance between reality and creativity. This is the challenge of the documentary: to carefully negotiate the intersections of art, politics, ethics, and reality. In the case of Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited such an ontology of documentary film as an authentically intimate mediation and documentation of reality is fitting. Documentary film serves a dual role as both the document, which “is predicated on realist epistemology,” and the experience, which “is dependent on phenomenological engagement” (Reinelt 7). Both of these qualities become apparent in a closer examination of the two films. Situated between performance and documentation, Love During Wartime explores, on the one hand, the political impact of everyday existence in Israel-Palestine and then in Germany and Austria, and, on the other hand and more importantly, the performative promise of documenting this everyday existence to film as a means of disseminating this story to a broader public and raising awareness. The latter becomes possible through the assertion of a way of life and identity that may be viewed by some as unthinkable. In many ways, it reflects the contemporary performative politics of same-sex marriage discourses. In an interview with the director and cast, Jasmin flatly states that the couple had been encouraged to participate in the film project because garnering attention to their situation might be able to help their case with the Supreme Court of Israel. The film does not present a dramatic battle for rights and freedoms; rather, it often presents a simple portrait of the banal daily lives of two young people who love each other—sometimes argue, sometimes tease each other, and call each other silly pet names. Despite the extremely challenging circumstances, what is actually foregrounded in this film is the average married couple over an extended period of five years. In a sense, the film attests to their normality. But of course this private portrait is at the same time politically loaded. Love During Wartime is ultimately about the attachment of two people across barriers / boundaries of religion, ethnicity, politics, war, and ideology. It bears noting here again that Jasmin and Assi are not devoutly religious themselves, which 96 Olivia Landry would have assuredly generated further challenges. Yet the distinct nations and cultures to which they belong and with which they identify are emphatically faith-based. Love During Wartime thus materializes a true-to-life narrative of the spatial, legal, and the rigidly ideological separation of Israel and Palestine. 19 This is underscored when, for example, Assi’s Palestinian friend half-jokingly comments in English, “How could you marry a Jewish [sic]? Is she like us? Is she human? ” ( Love During Wartime ). Even as a “Jewish”—and therefore a non-Muslim—woman who does not cover her hair as the women in Assi’s family do, Jasmin is caring, loving, and devoted to Assi and respectful to his family. Love During Wartime shows this aesthetically through intimate and “humanizing” close-ups of Jasmin and of the two in loving embraces. This applies to Assi as well, who even as a Palestinian Muslim speaks Hebrew fluently and does not adhere to the gendered divisions so often projected onto Islamic culture and practices. He is often shown cooking for Jasmin and remarks at the beginning of the film that he was immediately attracted to Israeli women’s freedom of dress and movement. In the German and to a lesser extent in the Austrian context, Assi displaces stereotypes of foreigners eager to immigrate but not contribute to society. Eager to be able to work, he takes up menial, part-time jobs, such as selling posters to businesses. The heavy political climate of the Israel-Palestine conflict and anti-immigration and Islamophobia in Germany are always present in the film, but against these crises the private everyday lives of Jasmin and Assi emerge as something that feels even more authentic in its intimacy. It feels “found” instead of “made” and it draws the viewer in through this intimacy. The film’s effort to filter the political through the private offers an alternative narrative that is tangible and identifiable. Berlant lucidly describes this method in the following way: “Intensely political seasons spawn reveries of a different immediacy. People imagine alternative environments where authenticity trumps ideology, truths cannot be concealed, and communication feels intimate, face-to-face” (221). Authenticity through intimacy is of course not always an element of documentary film. There are also impersonal and sensational documentaries with a categorical treatment of the material. But it is applicable here. In its focus on the everyday, then, Love During Wartime compellingly provides an additional account of historical and political events. Bier herself explains that she “wanted to make a love story”; in other words, she sought to return the human element to the news stories and media about the Israel-Palestine conflict (Interview with Laura Durkay). Yet the film’s political intervention is not only an exploration of a “minor” history; indeed, since the events of the film are unraveling simultaneously with the film, its status as history or archive is only evident post-production. Instead, the film serves as an “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 97 organ of contemporary political activity—a public and private protest against the unjust citizenship laws of Israel and eventually the bureaucratic nightmare of German immigration. The film’s “intimate public” or “private public,” to play with some of Berlant’s terms, adds an interesting dimension to documentary’s already established epistemology, what Nichols calls “the flagship for a cinema of social engagement and distinctive vision” (2). The dual role of presenting (performing for a larger audience) and documenting (recording and historicizing) of the documentary positions it at the forefront of political and social interrogation. An intimate narrative of refusal and resistance is also mobilized in Neukölln Unlimited. The Akkouch siblings are in many ways much like most young people their age—living out their daily routines. The opening scene of the film lends this impression: a typical familial scene of bickering about whose responsibility it is to vacuum the apartment. At the same time, this everyday “living” becomes an important practice both to bear the burden of future uncertainty and to resist a political system and society that essentially do not want them to live out their daily lives and rituals—at least, not in Germany. Beyond this, similar to Love During Wartime, Neukölln Unlimited has a direct political function: it seeks to awaken public interest to the unjust asylum laws in Germany. Furthermore, it reveals the precarious situation of the Akkouch family, and many like theirs, which must live with legal uncertainty and prejudice. In an open press conference with Berlin’s Senator of the Interior at that time, Ehrhart Körting, one sibling, Hassan, confronts him about the lack of transparency and arbitrariness of the German asylum system. As one reviewer suggests, Körting’s response to Hassan’s vociferious accusation echoes precisely the political goal of this film: “Ist es im öffentlichen Interesse des Landes Berlin oder der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, den Menschen hierzubehalten? ” ( Neukölln Unlimited )� 20 The film’s response is “yes.” With the ambition of securing a future for their family in Germany, the Akkouch siblings have much to offer. They tirelessly and determinedly juggle family, school, work, bureaucracy and—most importantly—their passion for music and especially dance. If the performative promise of Neukölln Unlimited is its presentation of living as a practice of preservation and resistance, this is also strongly accentuated through the film’s abounding dance performances. The film’s relationship to politics and art goes beyond the creative treatment of documents and (live) observations; it also offers regular spectacles of artistic performance, namely break dancing and hip-hop. All three siblings are professional or semi-professional dancers, with such troupes as Constanza Markus’s Dorky Park and the street dance crew FanatiX. Intensifying the viewer’s experience through direct spectacle, these dance scenes open up scenarios of “phenomenological engage- 98 Olivia Landry ment” (Reinelt 7). The struggle of these young people for their right to live the only lives they have ever known in freedom and security is perhaps most compellingly embodied in their dance forms—break dancing and krumping, which resonate with imperatives of resistance, freedom, and equality. Both are street dance forms that work against violence, racism, sexism, and inequality in extremely gestural and athletic ways; breakdance and krumping are sophisticated performances that trace their origins to the U. S. and marginalized youth of color. For Maradona especially, breakdancing is not only his escape but also his most viable means to a more secure future in Germany. He rigorously trains to perform on the talent show Deutschland sucht den Superstar. It is here, cut between scenes of Maradona’s physical training, that we see him praying. Edited this way, this act of religious performance appears to be part of his overall endeavor for self-improvement. It is only after he loses the competition that he defensively turns to transgressive behavior, such as skipping school and playing with toy guns. Directly positioned against the draws and dangers of gang culture and crime statistically higher among disenfranchised youth, dancing and religious observation thus embody meditative forms of both forgetting and survival merged with the hope for something better. Indicating a specific location and milieu, “Neukölln”—a Berlin neighborhood known for its cultural diversity—but also undoing any pretensions to isolation or ghettoization in its title, Neukölln Unlimited not only maps the ongoing work and survival of the Akkouch family, it also narrates how historical crisis has shaped the lives of this family. In 2003, the Akkouch family was abruptly deported from Germany to Lebanon. This event is central to the film and to the trauma and vulnerability of the family, whose members must live with the fact that at any moment they could be deported again—a reality that affects thousands of asylum seekers in Germany every year. In its performance of this particular history, the filmmakers chose to present the past neither through interviews nor talking heads but via animation. Neukölln Unlimited employs a style of animation seen in several recent political documentary films, such as Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Ali Samadi Ahadi’s Green Wave (2010). There is something surreal yet strikingly simplistic about this style of animation that so dramatically represents the archive of traumatized memories of the young Hassan, who narrates the event in a voice-over. The embedded violence of the event—a literal and forced uprooting—is registered as something in the past both in terms of its representation and its narration. However, past blurs into present as the film considers the event’s devastating and enduring consequences still experienced by the Akkouch family. It lives on, for example, through the mother’s epileptic attacks, one sister’s severe bulimia, one brother’s attention deficit disorder, and yet another’s paranoia. “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 99 Similar to Love During Wartime, the politics of Neukölln Unlimited lie most prominently in the film’s affective projections of what living amidst crisis—that is, past trauma and future uncertainty—looks and feels like. This is a quality expressly shared by Love During Wartime. Both films can be brought into conversation with Veena Das’s insightful examination of living on after disaster and rupture in her book Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (2007). Das proposes that the political event has the ability to attach itself “with all its tentacles into everyday life and folds itself into the recesses of the ordinary” (1). This, I propose, also offers an apt description of these films’ relationship to and treatment of the political. The intimacy of both films underscores the fact that the basic matter of survival is at stake. By communicating and mediating their intimate stories, the Akkouch family as well as Jasmin and Assi hope to find solutions through narration and public recognition of their struggle. For, as Berlant suggests, “collective mediation through narration and audition might provide some routes out of the impasse and the struggle of the present” (226). Escaping the impasse means escaping a paralysis—both emotional and physical—resulting in being in a crisis, either political or personal. In very literal ways, both documentaries serve this political purpose of bringing public attention to an important issue. At the same time, the performance and even reperformance of living in a crisis (for the camera) offers instances of assertion of identity and a means of working through pain and frustration. While documentary cannot necessarily take us out of the crisis, its expository nature does seem to provide a pathway out of the personal impasse caused by the crisis. There is something discerningly direct about the relationship between political and personal crises in Love During Wartime that is immediately highlighted in the paradox of its title. Similar to Neukölln Unlimited, there are no scenes of direct violence in the film, with the exception of brief live news footage of a street clash. However, violence is also not shown in any other medium either, such as the animation of the deportation of the Akkouch family; instead, it occurs offscreen in Love During Wartime. For instance, Assi’s arrest and subsequent violent mistreatment by the Palestinian police are not shown. Neither does the viewer witness the constant interrogation that Jasmin experiences every time she must pass through Israeli border checkpoints to enter and depart the West Bank, where she is treated like a “naïve terrorist,” as she refers to it in the film, as a woman easily manipulated by her “potentially” terrorist Muslim Palestinian husband. Not only would it be next to impossible to film these scenes for legal reasons, but the film also does not wish to sensationalize the situation of their hardship. It suffices that we hear Jasmin’s concerned voice over the phone as she relays the event of Assi’s arrest and torture to her parents, only to see Assi’s still shaven head several weeks after his arrest. This 100 Olivia Landry subtle visual sign may be curiously ambiguous to the viewer but it registers a change. Although the shaving of the head is an acceptable practice in Islam, and is especially common among Muslim men preparing for the Umrah or the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), the shaving of a man’s head is also a form of punishment and practice of shaming of non-conformist Muslim men as a forced means of personal hygiene. Excess hair is often seen as sinful under Islamic law. This practice of forced shaving is not uncommon in Palestine, especially in Gaza under the rule of the Islamic Hamas. 21 The effect of state-sanctioned religious conformism and the violence it can engender—its undisguisable, yet not fully understandable trace—not only clings heavily to their story but also to their bodies. Love During Wartime ’s relationship to both the event and the everyday is richly complex. Again, this is not a film specifically about the Israel-Palestine conflict, but rather about the effects of the conflict and the power of the state on real people. In the persisting so-called “state of war” within both Israel and Palestine, the management of life becomes an affair of the state. For the viewer, these documentaries give life to political discourse—make it real and tangible, not to mention identifiable; indeed, they give a face, as it were, to the devastating corollary of Islamophobia, which plays out in both the Israel-Palestine conflict and the deep-rooted problems of German immigration and asylum policies. But at the same time, these films are political without being ideological or dogmatic in their effort to ultimately convey a message of openness and heterogeneity. The blurring of mediality and performativity of the genre of documentary and between the public / political and the private / personal of Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited instead meets what Berlant has referred to as our desire for “the political to be routed through the affective eavesdropping that shapes the sense of immediacy among mass mediated intimate publics in the historical present” (228). The observational and even invisible style of documentary filmmaking that is apparent in both films quietly but willfully suffuses the political into the ordinary and vice versa. In their eavesdropping, these films’ mediation and presentation feel more truth-telling than story-telling in nature, akin to direct cinema methods of the early 1960s, whose goal was intimate, yet objective reportage and subsequently to remove all markers of the filmmaker from the film. There are no interviews or testimonials as such in these films, which are aspects of documentary that often dominate and give intentional structure. In both films, the nonactors only occasionally speak in the direction of the camera in a gesture of explanation, but for the most part the filmmaker is a fly on the wall to these enduring narratives. Especially in the case of Love During Wartime, Jasmin and Assi have explained in post-production interviews that the filmmaker had become such an important and integral part of their lives that they considered her as more of a close friend than anything “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 101 else. Bier would sometimes spend the whole day with them and only film for an hour. Often they never knew when the record button was actually switched on. The political resistance of Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited is thus extremely personal. Through these intimate portrayals of trauma and crisis interlocked with the normalizing cloak of quotidian banality, the authenticity of the documentary is underscored and personalized. The characters feel close and their crises feel real and present. Authenticity is not about essentializing identity, which the activist group Kanak Attack sought to destabilize by drawing a line between “authentic” Germans and “inauthentic” Germans. Here it refers to experience and possesses a quality of resistance. By strategically presenting stories and characters in their intimate settings, these films draw the viewer in and encourage proximities. Without employing melodramatic methods of over-emotional attachments, however, in the case of these films a subtler means of phenomenological enfolding emerges and endures. In this way, the panic induced by precisely a lack of intimacy and a lack of knowledge about Muslims can begin to be dispelled. Distinct from the ideological and aesthetic distance of narrative cinema, the documentary not only interrogates its subject matter head-on, but with its relationship to the present, insofar as what it presents is the unfolding of real-life action in present time, it keenly reinforces its ability to articulate and substantiate individual as well as collective narratives of resistance. As demonstrated in Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited, Islamophobia has enduring and devastating direct and indirect consequences for Muslims in Israel and Germany that are so often the result of unfounded fears. Panic, then, is the real problem. It characterizes the exaggerated way in which we react out of ignorance and superficiality to unfamiliar positionings. Such a reaction of course invokes lateral problems that extend to the social, the political, and even the legislative. These films provide much needed articulations and disclosures of real-life and identifiable experiences that work to overcome distance and alienation. notes 1 The activist group Kanak Attack (or “Kanak Attak”) formed in the late 1990s and was widely dispersed throughout Germany. While ideationally linked, it should not be confused with the 2000 film of the same name, directed by Lars Becker (based on the novel by Feridun Zaimoğlu Abschaum—Die wahre Geschichte von Ertan Ongun [1998]). Founded with the help of Zaimoğlu, the work of this group consists of texts, interviews, ad campaigns, and television shorts, and generally operates on a comically subversive level. Most famous among the group’s work is a series of TV shorts, entitled “Kanak TV .” 102 Olivia Landry In their manifesto, the group describes itself in the following way: “‘Kanak Attak’ is a community of different people from diverse backgrounds who share a commitment to eradicate racism from German society. Kanak Attak is not interested in questions about your passport or heritage, in fact it challenges such questions in the first place.” Quoted from the Kanak Attack website. 2 To download a full program of the festival, go to: http: / / p106499.typo3server.info / fileadmin / bilder / presse / PM -Voicing-Resistance-0612.pdf. 3 Shermin Langhoff’s former work as artistic director both at the Ballhaus Naunynstraße (until 2013) and presently at the Maxim Gorki Theater is strongly influenced by politics and the possibility that art has the power to educate and influence public opinion. See Langhoff. 4 For more information about the movement, see Refugee Tent Action. 5 The tragic refugee shipwreck off the coast of Lampedusa has played a significant role in urging European governments to rethink their refugee and immigration politics. In the early morning of October 3, 2013, a boat carrying migrants from Libya to Italy sank near the island of Lampedusa and nearly 400 people died. Another similar major shipwreck occurred on April 13, 2015, in which nearly 500 people drowned. It has become apparent to the member states of the European Union that such immense tragedies must be prevented. These shipwrecks are only two of many reported in recent years. Every year hundreds, if not thousands, of refugees lose their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe, and these numbers are on the rise. 6 Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai use the term “quarantining” in their article, “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots,” to describe the way in which Muslims were treated in the West, especially in the U. S., in the wake of 9 / 11. 7 “Muslim in singular does not seem to exist anymore. […] Every single Muslim is held responsible for the surahs (of the Qur’an), in which he does not believe, the orthodox dogmatists he does not know, the violent terrorists he repudiates, or for the violent regimes in countries from which he himself has flown.” (All translations from German to English are my own, unless otherwise indicated.) 8 “Law on the Revocation of Naturalizations and Denial of German Citizenship.” (Translation by Tes Howell.) Following the Second World War, it was declared that former German citizens who between January 30, 1933 and May 8, 1945 were deprived of their citizenship on political, racial, or religious grounds, and their descendants, shall upon application have their citizenship restored. For more information, see Göktürk et al. “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 103 9 For more details on this study and others, see EUMC , Muslims in the European Union: Discrimination and Islamophobia. 10 The NSU (National Socialist Underground) is an extreme rightwing terrorist group in Germany that came to the surface in November 2011. Known members included Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt, and Beate Zschäpe, but it is believed that there are over 200 other members. The group has been linked to, among other crimes, ten murders, of which eight of the victims were Turkish-German and one Greek-German. For over an eleven-year period these crimes not only went unsolved, they were also neither connected nor identified as hate crimes. 11 Short for Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, PEGIDA first began as a Facebook group that was incited by criticism of a pro- PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) demonstration in Dresden and quickly developed into a space for communal griping and hate-mongering against the state of European politics, the liberal press, and especially immigrants and minority groups (read Muslims and people of color) in Germany. Under the original leadership of Lutz Bachmann, the group eventually took to the streets of Dresden in the form of weekly demonstrations. Although the movement, which also spread to different cities in Germany with varying levels of success, was condemned by most politicians and the German press, it had an astounding pull among citizens who had apparently hitherto identified with the political center. While internal issues and increased radicalness eventually led to a significant petering out of attention and support of the movement in the spring of 2015, at its height in January 2015, PEGIDA allegedly drew in 25,000 protesters. It bears noting, however, that the movement also provoked counter protests, often far more significant in number than the PEGIDA protests themselves. For more information, see Machowecz. 12 “has increasingly moved unchecked into the center of mainstream media.” 13 See detailed results of this study on the webpage for the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. 14 “We help you to return to your homeland.” While Germany’s rate of acceptance for refugees is still considerably better than its neighbors to the south, such as Italy and Greece, compared to the Scandinavian countries, the number of refugees that Germany accepts annually is drastically low. For example, in 2013 Sweden accepted 4650 refugees and Germany only 950. See Billström. In response to the significant increase in asylum seekers in 2014 (over 200,000), Germany did raise its acceptance rate to 7253. However, this still only equals 5.6 % of those asylum seekers legally permitted to 104 Olivia Landry apply for asylum and even less compared to the overall number of persons seeking asylum. For more information and statistics, see BMI Nachrichten. 15 To see detailed results of this study, go to the United Nations report: Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2013 Revision. 16 “Neukölln Unlimited Movie Poster” by Indie Film (Clandestino1975) available at https: / / en.wikipedia.org / wiki / File: Neuk%C3 %B6lln_Unlimited_ Movie_Poster.jpg under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0. Full terms at http: / / creativecommons.org / licenses / by/ 2.0. 17 This often manifests itself in matters of language competence. For instance, Lial comments to a friend that when the police came to deport her family they were surprised how well the siblings spoke German, in spite of the fact that the family had resided in Germany for ten years. Even more recently, I attended the documentary theater play Asyl-Monologe. After the performance there was a public discussion with a young woman originally from Chechnya. She fled to Germany with her family over ten years ago to seek asylum. To this day she is still under threat of deportation. Several audience members commented on her “exceptional” competence in the German language. It clearly did not occur to them that having spent over half of her young life in Germany meant that she was likely more competent in German than any other language, because they still viewed her as an outsider. It is imperative that asylum seekers learn German, but for many adults this is a challenge because they are often not permitted and / or do not have the means to even take language courses. Children of school age, however, must attend school. 18 See, for example, Bade . 19 The philosophy of separation of Israelis and Palestinians, which has a long history in the Middle East, was politically and geographically concretized in the mid-1990s under Yitzak Rabin in response to terrorist attacks on Israelis. It gained overwhelming support following the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. The solution to the terrorist attacks was to build a barrier around the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with militarized checkpoints. While Israeli officials view the wall as a self-defense barrier, Palestinians and many others see it as an apartheid wall that sequesters and ultimately encroaches on Palestinian land and people’s freedom. This spatial as well as civil separation clearly creates an “inside” and “outside.” Furthermore, it “restrict[s] the presence of noncitizens to their living zone, while reducing their hold on their territory and preventing their assimilation among citizens” (Azoulay and Ophir 97). This domination model of what many people have referred to as a type of ghettoization not only represses the rights and freedoms of Palestinians, but also perpetuates the “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 105 rhetorical ideologies of “us” and “them,” “self ” and “other” that fuel the conflict between Israel and Palestine and severely hinders any kind of path towards peace. 20 “Is it in the public interest of Berlin or of the Federal Republic of Germany to keep the people here? ” 21 News reports from Gaza City recently have described the common police practice of arresting young men with long or spiky-gelled hair and mocking them by shaving their heads. See Laub and Daraghmeh. Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22.2 (2004): 117-39. Azoulay, Ariella and Adi Ophir. The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel / Palestine. Trans. Tal Haran. Stanford: Stanford UP , 2013. Bade, Klaus J. “Bürger in Angst vor den Fremden.” Die Zeit , 31 October 2013. Web. 10 November 2013. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC : Duke UP , 2011. Bier, Gabriella. Interview with Laura Durkay. Mondoweiss Online. 25 April 2011. Web. 2 May 2013. Billström, Tobias. “Wir sind stolz! ” Interview with Matthias Krupa. Die Zeit 17 October 2013: 11. BMI Nachrichten. “202.834 Asylanträge im Jahr 2014”. 3 July 2015. Web. 8 Jan. 2016. Das, Veena. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: U of California P, 2007. El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Emcke, Carolin. “Liberaler Rassissmus.” Die Zeit Online. 25 Feb. 2010. Web. 16 May 2012� European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. “Combatting Antisemitism: More Targeted Measures Needed.” 11 Aug. 2013. Web. 12 October 2013. European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. “Muslims in the European Union: Discrimination and Islamophobia.” Dec. 2006. Web. 12 October 2013. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008� Göktürk, Deniz et al., eds. Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955-2005. Berkeley: U of California P, 2007. Introvigne, Massimo. “Moral Panics and Anti-Cult Terrorism in Western Europe.” Terrorism and Political Violence 12: 1 (2000): 47-59. “About.” www.kanak-attak.de. 1998. 6 March 2012. Web. 12 October 2013. Lange, Nadine. “Tanzen, um zu bleiben.” Der Tagesspiegel Online. 8 April 2010. Web. 12 October 2013. 106 Olivia Landry Langhoff, Shermin et al. “Interview: Im besten Fall stürzt das Weltbild ein.” Freitext 22 (2013): 6-14. Laub, Karin and Mohammed Daraghmeh. “Hamas Shaves Heads of Gaza Youth with Long Hair.” Time World Online. 7 April 2013. Web. 15 April 2013. Love During Wartime. Dir. Gabriella Bier. Perf. Jasmin Avissar and Osama Zatar. Story AB , 2010. Machowecz, Martin. “Busen, Bier und Islamismus.” Zeit Magazin Online. 23 April 2015. Web. 8 Jan. 2016. Neukölln Unlimited. Dir. Agostino Imondi and Dietmar Ratsch. Perf. Hassan Akkouch, Lial Akkouch, and Maradona Akkouch. Indi Film GmbH, 2010. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington, IN : Indiana UP , 2010. Nord, Cristina. “Die Lust auf neue unbegangene Wege.” Die Tageszeitung Online. 11 February 2010. Web. 8 Jan. 2016. Puar, Jasbir K. and Amit S. Rai. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text 20.3 (2002): 117-48. Refugee Tent Action. The Action Circle of the Independent Non-Citizen Struggle, 2013. 10 November 2013. Web. 8 Jan. 2016. Reinelt, Janelle. “The Promise of Documentary.” Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present. Ed. Chris Megson and Alison Forsythe. Basingstroke, UK : Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. 6-23. Schocken, Amos. “Citizenship Law Makes Israel An Apartheid State.” Haaretz Online. 27 June 2008. Web. 8 Jan. 2016. United Nations Report: Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2013 Revision. 4 June 2014. Web. 8 Jan. 2016. “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 107 “Islam light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms Heidi Denzel de Tirado Georgia State University abstract: Whereas Germany has not yet produced a Muslim sitcom—like the Canadian Little Mosque on the Prairie or the British Citizen Khan —the last twenty years have witnessed an increasing number of Turkish-German recurring characters in German television series. While most of these protagonists are constructed as hyper-assimilated, secular, and liberal, two characters have been explicitly marked as Muslim in television sitcoms: Yağmur in Alle lieben Jimmy, and Fatma in Türkisch für Anfänger. In my analysis of these two teenage girls, whom I interpret as representatives of “Islam light,” which Hamed Abdel-Samad defines as an “ideal form of Islam” without jihad, sharia, proselytism, or pretension, I reveal that these sitcoms reflect common trends among the secondand third-generation of the Turkish-German Diaspora. I discuss the sitcoms within their historical contexts and examine to what extent the actions and decisions of these important symbolic Muslim counterfigures reflect current debates on Islam’s contested place in German society. Keywords: Muslim sitcoms, Leitkultur, Islam light, stereotypes, gender roles After 9 / 11, German mainstream media coverage presented quite a standardized image of Muslims, which illustrated the “old orientalist idea” that all men were hostile, dangerous, and threatening, and all women were victims of one monolithic fate (see, e. g., Heeren and Zick). Many scholars have described this homogenization of Muslims, which influenced and limited audiences’ views on Islam and all of its believers (see, e. g., Morey and Yaquin). These processes of Othering were also prominent in German film, as several productions of the twenty-first century linked Islam to violent men who imposed their old-fashioned traditionalist value systems on female and younger family members who had embraced Western culture. Honor killing, criminality, and machismo be- 108 Heidi Denzel de Tirado came staple themes in films like Zeit der Wünsche (dir. Rolf Schübel, 2005), Ayla (dir. Su Turhan, 2009), and Die Fremde (dir. Feo Aladağ, 2010), which seemed to visualize common characteristics for the whole Muslim community. In contrast to this extensive Othering, German fictional television series have introduced a small number of Muslim main characters that I interpret as necessary counterfigures, harbingers of pacification and symbolic resistance to common viewers’ expectations and paranoia. In this article, I analyze the presence and the sometimes even more telling absence of Islam as a plot-relevant theme in three German sitcoms, which focus on Turkish-German main characters: König von Kreuzberg (Sat1, 2005), Alle lieben Jimmy ( RTL , 2005-2007), and Türkisch für Anfänger ( ZDF , 2006-2009). I discuss the series within their historical contexts and examine to what extent the characters are constructed as Muslims, emphasizing the ways in which their actions reflect current debates on Islam’s contested place in German society. My study reveals that all of the male Muslim main protagonists exemplify hegemonic German narratives of integration by embodying a benign, discreet, and liberal form of Islam on the one hand, and assimilation to German mainstream worldviews and ideologies on the other hand. But I argue that the three sitcoms have become more and more audacious in creating an increasingly wider and more diversely populated spectrum of Muslim positionalities, espousing a sort of “Islam light.” The term “Islam light” describes an “enlightened Islam,” devoid of jihad, sharia, proselytism, or pretension, and was coined by Hamed Abdel-Samad, one of Germany’s most prominent “Islamkritiker” and “Vorzeige-Muslim der konservativen Politiker” (Follath). According to Abdel-Samad, “Islam light” is a form of the religion that is open to discussion, questions, and criticism. While he described his concept as a not-yet-existing utopia, I claim that German television has made this “imaginary” ideal of Islam a sitcom reality. 1 I demonstrate that the sitcoms do occasionally allow Islam to play a pivotal role in the male characters’ development, but only when it is introduced by the youngest—or, in a variation on this theme, the very oldest—female family member, who cannot be misinterpreted as threatening. While König von Kreuzberg does not feature an explicitly Muslim protagonist, it introduces cultural issues that are often associated with Islam, a tendency that continues with Alle lieben Jimmy. This family sitcom also introduces the first explicit Muslim recurring character, Jimmy’s little sister Fatma, who, however, is only rarely the focus of the plot. By contrast, the youngest sibling Yağmur in Türkisch für Anfänger, who can be described as the show’s main character, is more explicitly and visibly constructed as a Muslim, as she wears the hijab and goes to Koran School. The fact that only two German sitcoms have featured clearly defined Muslim characters is not extraordinary because the existence of Muslim recurring char- “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 109 acters in Western sitcoms is a rather new phenomenon. Minority sitcoms like the black-themed, Latino-themed or mixed-race-themed series (e. g., The Cosby Show, The George Lopez Show, or Ugly Betty ) were only recently developed after studies of scholars like Stuart Hall and George Gerbner had emphasized the important role of television as a cultural instrument that influences and constructs its viewers’ cognition of social realities and perception of minorities (see Hall and Morgan et al.; Denzel de Tirado). The Muslim-themed sitcom is the newest format of the minority sitcom and has become a rare but recurring format during the last decade. The first Muslim sitcom, which was critically acclaimed and quite popular, was Little Mosque on the Prairie (Canada, CBC , 2007-2012). Like its Canadian predecessor, the controversial Citizen Khan ( UK , BBC One, 2012-present) too features several members of a larger Muslim community, while focusing on one Muslim family. In the United States, the new series Halal in the Family ( USA , Funny or Die, 2015) introduces the Muslim Qu’Osby family, which is constructed as an obvious parody of the Cosbies. Until now, the show’s four episodes have only aired on the website Funny or Die, because its producer, writer, and star Aasif Mandvi feared that American networks and audiences were “not ready for a Muslim sitcom yet” (Mandvi quoted in Hale). While Germany has not yet produced a Muslim-themed sitcom, it should be emphasized that Fatma in Alle lieben Jimmy and Yağmur in Türkisch für Anfänger were trailblazing in the global context of recurring Muslim figures appearing in sitcoms produced in non-Muslim-majority countries. Introduced in 2005 and 2006, respectively, Fatma and Yağmur preceded other Muslim recurring characters like the Moroccan Muslims Abdullah “Ap” Bentarek and Leila in the quite successful Shouf Shouf! (The Netherlands, Nederland 3, VARA, 2006-2009) or Raja Musharaff, the sixteen-year-old Pakistani Muslim exchange student in the rather unsuccessful show Aliens in America ( USA , CW Network, 2007). Even if König von Kreuzberg does not explicitly address Islam, it needs to be mentioned in this analysis, as it was the first German sitcom that dared to focus on a Turkish-German lead character. The title König von Kreuzberg clearly echoes the nickname of Metin Kaplan, the notorious Kalif von Köln, who had haunted German justice and media since the 1990s. Kaplan was the leader of the clandestine radical Islamist movement Kalifatsstaat, or the Union of Islamic Associations and Communities, which was founded by his father, Cemaleddin Kaplan, commonly known as the Khomeini von Köln. In 2001, the Kalifatsstaat was banned in Germany after Kaplan advocated the killing of non-Muslims and it was revealed that he had sent his supporters to trainings in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia; he is also said to have sent emissaries to meet with Osama bin Laden in order to discuss an attack on Kemal Atatürk’s mausoleum in Ankara (Roy and Steir 366-67). In 2004, when König von Kreuzberg was filmed, 110 Heidi Denzel de Tirado there was renewed media attention on Kaplan because of the impending end of the Caliph’s prison sentence for inciting the murder of his Berlin-based rival. In this context, German authorities wanted to revoke Kaplan’s refugee status to facilitate his extradition to Turkey, despite a pending death penalty for him there (Farmer 43). Despite their similar-sounding names, however, the show König von Kreuzberg and its central characters have little in common with the Kaliph von Köln. While “The New World Order” advocated by the Kalif von Köln was explicit in demanding that Islam should control everyday life and “become the state” and that “the Koran should become the constitution” (Kaplan, quoted in Farmer 43), König von Kreuzberg disappoints any expectations of Muslim-themed issues and instead emphasizes the utter and complete assimilation of the titular König, kebab-shop owner Attila. All of the episodes—as well as many of the sitcom’s jokes—revolve around the unexpected fact that Attila and his best friend Hakan are so well integrated into German society that they are unable to understand the Turkish language and are alienated from the traditions of their ancestral homeland. König von Kreuzberg features the typical problems of young adults living in Berlin, while interspersing them with comical scenarios exposing linguistic and intercultural misunderstandings and misinterpretations. For the purposes of my analysis, it suffices to shortly analyze the first episode in order to reveal how the show created a harmless, fully assimilated counter-figure to the common stereotype of fundamentalist Turkish-German Muslim men so familiar to viewers of the news and other popular media. While the König von Kreuzberg is constructed as an obvious counter-figure to the Kalif von Köln, Attila’s religious identity remains unaddressed in the series, so we can at best speculate whether he is a representative of “Islam light,” an atheist, a Christian, or an agnostic. But what the show does emphasize is how fully the two Turkish-German friends Attila and Hakan have internalized the threatening stereotype of Turkish men as fundamentalist killers, which produces a comedic situation in which they overreact and are ultimately ridiculed for their hysteria. Hakan and Attila, who speak only rudimentary Turkish, misinterpret a letter from Hakan’s vacation flirt from Turkey and believe that her brothers are on their way to Berlin in order to force Hakan to marry their sister. Convinced that Hakan’s life is at stake, Attila agrees to marry his best friend in order to save him from the Turkish brothers’ wrath. In the end it turns out that Hakan’s Turkish summer flirt only wanted to invite him to her brothers’ double wedding in Berlin, and Attila and Hakan’s overreaction could be read as a fable about exaggerated fear, with the moral that many hysterical Germans should reconsider their own xenophobic and Islamophobic prejudices in order to avoid the devastating misunderstandings they can produce. “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 111 The sitcom was not successful and was relegated to a late-night timeslot in the middle of its first season. While we could attribute this lack of popularity to the screenplay’s superficiality, this is only part of the story. A full account of the show’s unpopularity must also consider the period in which it was broadcast: König von Kreuzberg was produced in the year in which the term Parallelgesellschaft —describing social collectivities like ethnic or religious minorities “with a high degree of ethno-cultural homogeneity”—became the second most common word, according to the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache. The term was coined in 1996 in recognition of Germany as a receiving country of international migration that faced the challenges of a culturally diverse society. With its distinctly negative connotations, Parallelgesellschaft evokes the hidden, dark side of the multiculturalism that some scholars saw as the most constructive model for German society (Geißler 19). The term Parallelgesellschaft suggested a lurking threat and was reminiscent of the Schläfer Mohammed Atta and other members of his Hamburg terror cell, who became key operatives in the 9 / 11 attacks despite their seemingly perfect integration into German society. Moreover, König von Kreuzberg was aired only two months after the young Turkish-German mother Hatun Sürücü was murdered in a highly publicized honor killing perpetrated by her youngest brother, Ayhan. When Sürücü’s murder was first reported, it did not raise a particular paranoia in the mainstream media. Only when it became public that several Turkish-German schoolboys had declared that the victim “only had herself to blame,” and “deserved what she got” did the media go into full alarm mode, with newspapers running exaggerated headlines like “The Death of a Muslim Woman: ‘The Whore Lived like a German’” (Biehl). This particular article in Der Spiegel informed its readers that “[i]n the past four months, six Muslim women living in Berlin have been killed by family members,” and that very often fathers—and sometimes even mothers—would “single out their youngest son to do the killing […] because they know minors will get lighter sentences from German judges” (Biehl). 2 The months following Sürücü’s murder saw several other widely publicized crimes connected with Islamic extremism across Europe: the London Underground bombings ( July 2005), the murder of film director Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam (November 2005), and the riots in the suburbs of Paris (November 2005). While König von Kreuzberg certainly had some fans, many viewers saw it as a failed example of a “Comedy auf politisch-korrekten [sic] Multi-Kulti Niveau” (Ronny), which tried to convince German audiences that Muslim migrants in Germany would be eager to integrate and assimilate, while ignoring the rising dangers of the Parallelgesellschaft. In this context of rising pan-European fear and Islamophobia, Alle lieben Jimmy —a sitcom about a loveable, highly integrated, modern, and liberal Turk- 112 Heidi Denzel de Tirado ish-German family—invited viewers into this notorious Parallelgesellschaft and was the first of its kind in deconstructing the Parallelgesellschaft as a misconception. While the hyper-assimilated hero in König von Kreuzberg gets a German girlfriend and has more German than Turkish-German friends, RTL’s Alle lieben Jimmy differs from the short-lived Sat1 show in following the minority sitcom format. As is the case with the Cosby Show, Black-ish, or The George Lopez Show, viewers become familiar with a minority family in their own domestic space, get introduced to their lifestyle and culture, and understand that no one needs to be afraid of them because they are not so different from “white people” after all. In contrast to König von Kreuzberg, which emphasized the absolute Germanness of its Turkish-German characters, Alle lieben Jimmy promised more insights into the diasporic culture, the notorious Parallelgesellschaft : its Turkish-German writer and producer Tac Romey interrogated many contemporary stereotypes about Muslims and Turkish-Germans. The show is centered on the first-born son of the Arkadaş family, Jimmy, who has a truly telling name. Not only does the last name Arkadaş mean “friend” in Turkish, but through the assimilation of his first name Cem, the eponymous protagonist opts for a diminutive form of the English-language equivalent: Jim. Thuss, the main character unmistakably communicates that he has adopted Western values. The other members of the Arkadaş family are also very westernized; they inhabit the typical beautiful sitcom house with garden. In good minority sitcom tradition, stay-at-home mom Gül is the primary authority figure, and she constantly exercises power over husband Metin and son Jimmy, the disadvantaged subordinates who serve most of the time as the butt of jokes. But Jimmy is not only henpecked by his mother, he also becomes the victim of his two younger sisters, Leyla and Fatma. Leyla Arkadaş is an attractive, fashion-oriented, and naïve vamp and does whatever she likes: she has a new boyfriend every week and buys expensive miniskirts and makeup. While Leyla’s character has similarities with other sitcom Muslim girls of her age, like Leyla in Shouf Shouf! and Alia in Citizen Khan, she does not lead the double life that is characteristic of these other two Muslim teenagers, who play the obedient and devout daughter at home but transform into liberal, self-determined young women when their parents are not around. Mother Gül Arkadaş is very explicit here: “Leyla ist eine moderne junge Frau und so haben Metin und ich sie auch erzogen, absichtlich. Wir sind eine emanzipierte Familie […]” (“Die nackte Wahrheit”). This explicit depiction of the modern liberal Turkish family is at the core of all the episodes. But here it is important to point out that Tac Romey decided—nonetheless—to introduce one family member who is clearly marked as a practicing Muslim: the youngest daughter Fatma. In contrast to her eccentric and egocentric older brother and sister, she is very modest. She knows many “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 113 facts about Islam and reveals her knowledge of the Koran in various episodes, when she quotes full passages by heart, to the surprise and pride of her family. While it is never explained why she is so erudite on the subject of Islam, her character seems to be quite representative of the Turkish-German Diaspora. Several studies have claimed that many members of the second generation have a “cognitive” and “very intellectual approach towards Islam” (Sirseloudi 814; Kaweh 3). For instance, Matenia Sirseloudi explains that the second and third generation often feel the need to reorient themselves and that Islam “offers a lifestyle allowing them to cope with the challenges of modernity in a foreign country” (814). Such diasporic subjects read the Koran with a “new self-confidence” (Sirseloudi 813) and possess the conviction that it gives them a valuable additional perspective to the Western education system. Whereas the first generation practiced a form of “folk Islam” and participated in oral traditions of sharing their knowledge of popular Islamic practices in their homeland, the second generation gears towards “High Islam, which stands for an intellectual-rational approach to Islamic sources” (Sirseloudi 813). In Alle lieben Jimmy, we do not learn the history behind Fatma’s interest in Islam: it is left open to speculation whether Fatma simply decided one day to go to the mosque and to start reading the Koran, which she seems to quote like an interesting novel, or if all the Arkadaş family members went to a Koran School and just do not exhibit the same enthusiasm for their religion (anymore). The latter explanation seems to be more convincing, as the Arkadaş family members do not appear to see Fatma’s religious enthusiasm as something “foreign” or “strange,” but rather as a familiar experience or a phase. Even if Koran Schools have lost their popularity since the 1970s, they are still widespread in Germany, and Muslims commonly attend classes offered by associations like the Verband islamischer Kulturzentren ( VIKZ ), the Islamische Gemeinschaft Millî Görüş e. V. ( IGMG ), and the Türkisch-Islamische Union der Anstalt für Religion e. V. ( DITIB ). According to Silvia Kaweh, such classes are designed for all age groups, but students usually take them only for a short time period. In Alle lieben Jimmy, we never meet other members of the Muslim community, but we do learn that Fatma is very active in its outreach activities. While Muslim community outreach activities have often been associated with recruitment and radicalization in the news, Fatma is constructed neither as fundamentalist nor as radical, and, within the context of the other Turkish-German characters with Muslim backgrounds, she is not Othered at all. By contrast with them, and also in the wider context of a non-Muslim viewership, her religious benevolence resembles the Christian cardinal virtue of charity, and her actions give viewers insights into Islam’s similar philanthropic values. 3 Even when Fatma gives away her father’s best coat and her sister’s expensive dresses to the homeless, or when she nearly causes a fire 114 Heidi Denzel de Tirado by baking cookies for the poor, she does not come across as the kind of “missionary Muslim” who wants to strengthen “the moral order of Islam against the forces of unbelief ” within the German society (Sirseloudi 808). Viewers never have reason to fear that she might attract “marginalized outcasts” to join the ten thousand converts to Islam in Germany, whom experts of radical Islam often deem to be especially dangerous, a “potenzielle Bombe” (“Schlagloch Konvertiten: Deutscher Islam”). 4 Instead of embodying a zealot or a threat, Fatma is a perfect personification of Abdel-Samad’s concept of “Islam light.” Islam for her is a personal lifestyle and belief; she never tries to convince or convert anybody. Her family neither approves nor disapproves of her religious enthusiasm, and only her grandmother expresses her pride and happiness about her religious passion. In this liberal and “light” context, all of the episodes are centered on a systematic reversal of the common stereotype of subservient Muslim women as victims of Turkish patriarchy. Following typical genre conventions of suburban family sitcoms, Alle lieben Jimmy focuses on the family patriarch and the first-born son as “henpecked simpletons” (Haralovich 71). Like in other sitcoms about notoriously misogynist minorities—e. g., George Lopez and Black-ish, which constantly deconstruct the common stereotypes of the Mexican and African-American machos—these typical dynamics of sitcom family interactions gain even greater political and intercultural significance. Through the constant reversal of the patriarchal construction of the difference between masculinity and femininity as “political difference between freedom and subjection” (Pateman 207), the ethnic and religious gender stereotype of the frightening, potentially abusive, Turkish-Muslim man gets deconstructed and transformed into a harmless buffoon. The innocuous “henpecked Muslim family patriarch” has become an important new counterfigure in the media: other Muslim sitcoms like Citizen Khan, Halal in the Family, and Little Mosque on the Prairie also follow this pattern of characterization. In Alle lieben Jimmy, this already becomes clear in the first episode, “Weniger ist mehr,” when Jimmy’s grandma—not his grandpa—comes from Turkey to see Jimmy for his eighteenth birthday. She has a great present for him: a convertible Mercedes Benz from the 70s, a beautiful car that Jimmy would like to have. But there is one condition: Jimmy must first undergo circumcision. Jimmy tries to convince his grandmother that in Germany expectations are different: “Ach Mensch, Oma, wir sind hier in Deutschland und hier fahren doch fast alle unbeschnitten.” But Grandma remains firm: no circumcision, no Benz. By dictating circumcision as the condition of possibility, the Turkish matriarch functions not only as a guardian of Turkish-Muslim tradition and hegemonic masculine embodiment but also as the medium through which Jimmy can acquire the ultimate symbol of virility: an antique German car. “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 115 In this episode, like in others, Alle lieben Jimmy tackles contemporary debates over the cultural practices of Muslim migrants that differ from hegemonic traditions in Germany. Circumcision has been a popular trope and cultural marker in the depiction of Turkish-German men on German television and film of the twenty-first century: jokes about the removal of the foreskin and its presumed side effects of infertility or hyperfertility were also central to comedic scenarios in Meine verrückte türkische Hochzeit (dir. Stefan Holtz, 2006), Evet ich will (dir. Sinan Akkuş, 2008), and Ayla (dir. Su Turhan, 2009). Circumcisions—like honor killings and arranged marriages—are considered cultural practices but have often been directly associated with Judaism and Islam in the German media. This connection was at the heart of arguments that escalated in the year 2012, when Germany was haunted by the so-called Beschneidungsdebatte, or “circumcision debate,” over whether circumcision for boys under fourteen qualified as a Menschenrechtsverletzung. In December of the same year, the lower house of Parliament, the Bundestag, voted against this argument and for the right to circumcision, thereby affirming “that Jewish and Muslim life is clearly welcome in Germany,” according to Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, Germany’s justice minister at that time (Eddy). As its title might imply, the entire episode of “Weniger ist mehr” in Alle lieben Jimmy revolves around the removal of the foreskin and its association with ideas about masculinity and virility. The choice Jimmy must face—to circumcise or not—becomes all the more amusing when the viewer learns his father Metin’s deepest secret: he is not circumcised either. Metin escaped his circumcision against the odds, having evaded the man who was charged with performing the rite, “Machmud, dem Schrecklichen,” several times, and then deceived his friends and his parents. The only one who knows his secret is his wife Gül, and she uses her knowledge to hold sway over him in ways that symbolically emasculate him. Gül forces Metin to do domestic chores in exchange for her silence. The most humiliating scene for Metin takes place during Jimmy’s sünnet töreni, his circumcision party, when Metin must launder Gül’s undergarments while the rest of the family celebrates: “Alle feiern und ich muss Wäsche aufhängen.” In the end, Jimmy, his best friend Ben, and his father all get circumcised after finding out that circumcisions are supposed to increase their virility. But even after his circumcision, father Metin remains subordinate to his wife because, although Gül may have lost the power to blackmail her husband, she still has the power of seduction. Therefore, Metin still has to clean the bathroom and do other household chores in order to get rewarded in the bedroom (“Andersrum”), and his effeminate cleaning skills remain a running gag throughout the sitcom. For instance, in episode 10, Jimmy reprimands his father: “Du machst immer noch Frauenkram, seitdem du zum Mann geworden 116 Heidi Denzel de Tirado bist: Putzen, bügeln, Fotos kleben.” The sitcom thus dismisses the popular misconception that any relationship exists between circumcision and virility or masculinity. While circumcision is depicted as a practice important to (some) Turkish-Germans, the series does not explore the motivations behind it. We do not learn whether the liberal Arkadaş family’s insistence on Jimmy’s circumcision has to do with ethnic customs or religious rite, so it left open to speculation whether sünnet töreni matters more to them as a Turkish tradition, or whether they believe in the purification that is often associated with Khitān, the rite of male circumcision in Islamic cultures, which is not explicitly mandated in the Koran (see Newby). We can therefore read Alle lieben Jimmy as participating in a larger progressive, anti-Islamophobic trend of distancing cultural practices from religious traditions. Like in “Weniger ist mehr,” in which the humor revolving around masculinity and the male body touches on contemporary debates about multiculturalism, Muslim belonging, and German laws, the episode “Andersrum” uses jokes about misgendered bodies and sexual desire in order to assert that Muslim Turkish-Germans like the Arkadaş family members have internalized German values of openness and acceptance. In a comedic scenario that doubles as a litmus test for his family’s eligibility for German citizenship, Jimmy believes he might be homosexual because he misreads an attractive pair of buttocks as male. The reactions of his friends and family members recall debates about the liberal German Leitkultur and controversial questions on the citizenship test. As I want to show that the fictional televised Muslims of my analyses are meant to symbolize the potential of integration, I draw the attention to the controversial concept of the Leitkultur. Introduced into public discourse by Syrian-German sociologist Bassam Tibi in his book Europa ohne Identität, Leitkultur is defined as the “dominant or leading culture,” whose cultural values should be respected by immigrants: “The values needed for a core culture are those of modernity: democracy, secularism, the Enlightenment, human rights and civil society” (Tibi 154). In 2006, eleven of the twenty-four European countries had introduced naturalization tests. Prior to its official release in Germany, it was discussed whether the proposed test should be a purely knowledge-based Einbürgerungstest or a more culture-specific Gesinnungstest für Ausländer including questions about cultural core values in order to test the cultural integration potential of the migrants. The so-called Nackt-Test —confronting foreigners with photos of topless women and kissing gay couples, imitating the informational DVD for the Dutch naturalization test—was discussed but never introduced in Germany (see “Nackt-Test für Ausländer? ”). In the following analysis of two more episodes of Alle lieben Jimmy, I suggest that this sitcom played with some of the most controversial questions of the Gesinnungstests in order to convince the viewers that “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 117 there are Muslim families in Germany who would pass any kind of “difficult” question with summa cum laude. In the episode “Andersrum,” the Arkadaş family proves best that they are no threat to Germany’s neoliberalism. This episode deals with one of the most controversial Gesinnungstest questions, number 29: “Stellen Sie sich vor, Ihr volljähriger Sohn kommt zu Ihnen und erklärt, er sei homosexuell und möchte gerne mit einem anderen Mann zusammen leben. Wie reagieren Sie? ” (Schlandt). This particular question was considered but never appeared in the written version of the test. In contrast to written tests in The Netherlands, the German versions refrain from asking questions that are easily related to social norms and moral issues like marriage, family, and child education. But during the time when the show was conceived, this question was tested in oral interviews in Baden-Württemberg and Hesse, and Muslims and Germans complained that this particular question was only posed to Muslims. 5 In “Andersrum,” Jimmy thinks that he might be gay. During a visit to a hammam, Jimmy receives a massage from a man named Yussuf that he describes as “besser als Sex.” Afterward, Jimmy gets excited when he sees the buttocks of the friend of a friend, Alex. Confused, Jimmy convinces his best friend Ben to do a “Testkuss” in order to determine whether he is really attracted to men, but father Metin interrupts them before it even begins. The family members do not get upset, but instead try to help Jimmy through this process. Only father Metin wants to subtly influence him and takes his son to a strip club in hopes of arousing his heterosexual desires. Unfortunately, it happens to be ladies’ night, the male massage therapist Yussuf is working the stage as a stripper, and Jimmy’s mother’s friends see him and his father there and assume that the two are gay. After rumors of their homosexuality spread through the Turkish-German community, the episode ends with the revelation that Jimmy is in fact heterosexual: Alex, the owner of the attractive buttocks, is a girl, and everybody is relieved. This episode suggests not only that the majority of the Turkish-German community in this sitcom is “sexually liberated”—both men and women go to strip clubs—but also that all of them would have passed the hotly debated question 29 with flying colors. Instead of reacting with violence or contempt, they accept Jimmy’s feelings and try to help and understand him. While the topic of Ehre and perhaps even Ehrenmord —which has often been related to homosexuality, sex before marriage, promiscuity, and shame—has seemed to be a perennial obsession of German films like Ayla, Die Fremde, and Lola + Bilidikid (dir. Kutluğ Ataman, 1999), it is absent in Alle lieben Jimmy. 6 Tac Romey does not tackle this difficult issue in his sitcom, but he did write an episode about the concept of honor in connection with Muslim identity. By linking honor with Muslim femininity in the character of Fatma but troubling traditional gender expectations, the show negotiates representations of “Islam 118 Heidi Denzel de Tirado light” and interrogates Islamophobic stereotypes. In the episode “Der Pornostar,” the first-born son’s virility and sense of honor is satirized when everybody thinks that Fatma made a porn film featuring her brother, and Jimmy tries to convince the director of his school that he alone is responsible for it. What is interesting in this episode is that the director of the school never questions Fatma’s culpability and does not run to the rescue of “the oppressed Muslim girl” that has been dominating the media since 9 / 11; rather, he tries to save Jimmy from taking the blame for his sister. Jimmy cannot convince the director that he had found a video on his sister’s phone that showed him sleeping with his thumb in his mouth and that he had accidentally sent it to all her contacts, when he tried to delete it. He fails to make the director understand that he felt forced to send another video—which was supposed to represent him as “erwachsen, sexy und cool,” lying in bed with oiled-up muscles and an obviously fake erection—since the first video had made him the object of ridicule for all of his schoolmates. In this scene of confession and explanation, we can see an interesting play with stereotypes of the Turkish family. The director is still convinced that Fatma, Jimmy’s pious young Muslim sister, made and distributed the pornographic film and suspects that Jimmy, as the first-born male, just wants to save the family’s honor. When he tells Jimmy that taking the blame for Fatma’s films was a misinterpretation of the concept of honor, “falsch verstandener Familienstolz,” Familienstolz is seen not as an archaic, sexist, and dangerous atavism of a backwards-oriented Islamic culture, but rather as an altruistic and heroic self-sacrifice that the brother makes in order to save his sister’s reputation. In an attempt to exculpate himself by exposing the staged character of the “porn” video, Jimmy points out that nobody sleeps lubricated in oil, but the school director is not convinced and suggests that the explanation may really be Jimmy’s ethnic Otherness: “Andere Länder, andere Sitten.” This episode may come off as rather silly, but it touches upon deadly serious themes. Writer Romey constructs Jimmy as a victim of benevolent Othering on the director’s behalf, who traffics in the kinds of clichés about misconstrued honor and socio-ethnic difference that often make their way into discussions about honor killings (“falsch verstandener Familienstolz,” and “Andere Länder, andere Sitten”). While we could interpret the school director’s statements as a parody of cultural relativism and multiculturalism, which have often been criticized as being too tolerant in the context of honor killing, this connection is not explicitly developed and is left to the viewer to explore—or dismiss. I therefore read this primarily as a parody of stereotyping and the tendency to reduce the majority of Turkish-German men to one not very representative dimension of their culture. In the mid-2000s, Alle lieben Jimmy introduced us to a Turkish-German family whose members are probably all Muslims, but the show makes no issue of “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 119 their religious identity—even though the humor sometimes centers on jargon that evokes contemporary debates about Islam in Germany. The series thematizes its protagonists’ ethnicity and cultural traditions as Turkish-Germans who happen to also be Muslim, but these characters are nonetheless still able to integrate perfectly into the German Leitkultur. They fit Abdel-Samad’s utopia of “Islam light” and represented important counterfigures at the time when the sitcom was released. In times of rampant Islamophobia, Turkish-German writer Romey tackled controversial issues—often falsely—associated with Germany’s biggest minority, but he did not dare yet to exploit Islam as an important theme. Fatma, the only figure explicitly portrayed as Muslim, is the least developed character in the family, and we never learn whether she is too young, too moderate, or too liberal to wear the headscarf, or if the producers were just afraid of tainting the image of this friendly family that embodies “Islam light” with such a loaded symbol. While a woman in Germany might wear a headscarf for a variety of reasons—as Reyhan Şahin and Bassam Tibi have shown in their monographs Die Bedeutung des muslimischen Kopftuchs and Mit dem Kopftuch nach Europa —it has often been misperceived as a “marker of her ability to participate in a modern, Enlightened German or European society, defined by its values of secularism and tolerance” (Weber 109). The show is noteworthy for projecting an image of a pious Muslim woman without this visual marker, but viewers might also wonder whether this was part of a larger strategy of avoiding controversy by not depicting the headscarf. When Alle lieben Jimmy was aired, the so-called “headscarf debate,” the Kopftuchstreit, had been underway for several years, and in the mainstream media, “the hijab was alternatively seen as a threat to German secularism, Christian culture, feminist progress, Enlightenment, and European values” (Weber 106). 7 At the height of this debate, in 2006, when the famous second-wave feminist Alice Schwarzer called the hijab “die Flagge des Islamismus” and argued for the vital emancipation of Islamists’ daughters in Germany (Schwarzer), the ZDF production Türkisch für Anfänger introduced the young teenager Yağmur Öztürk to the screen. Yağmur is the sole explicitly Muslim character in this sitcom and practices Islam against the will of her father. Not only does Yağmur wear the headscarf, but her entire personality and lifestyle seem to be defined by her belief in Islam. Yağmur is a main protagonist in Türkisch für Anfänger and thus Islam is omnipresent throughout the sitcom. The muezzin’s morning call to prayer from an alarm clock in the shape of a plastic mosque is heard in several episodes, and Yağmur’s Muslim ideals play a distinctive role in the plot development. From the beginning, Yağmur is very proud of her Islamic values and shows contempt towards non-Muslims. Even at the first meeting with her new stepfamily in the first episode, she categorically insists that she cannot eat from 120 Heidi Denzel de Tirado a plate on which a pork dish might have been served. But Yağmur’s adherence to Islam is about more than what she wears and eats: in addition to wearing the veil and avoiding pork, she attends Koran School in order to learn more. While Yağmur is an assertive and proud Muslim, she is—like Fatma—a representative of “Islam light” and does not seek to convert anybody. This becomes clear when her stepmother Doris suggests that she take along her new stepsister Lena to the Koran School. In the sequences in the Koran School, the Turkish-German screenwriter and director Bora Dağtekin was very careful never to make fun of Islam. Instead, Lena’s ignorant behavior is the axis of the episode’s comedy when she makes every possible faux pas : not only does she bring a yoga mat with a naked man printed on it, but she also performs the “Ibiza Dance” when the Koran schoolmistress invites the girls to meditate. This angers Yağmur, and viewers understand why: Lena’s behavior would have been embarrassing in any other school or institution. But, interestingly enough, the Koran teacher simply accepts Lena’s extravagancies and does not intervene when Lena dances during silent meditation. The fact that Lena had brought the music to accompany her dance in her backpack might suggest that she had planned her performance in order to ridicule Yağmur and her religion. Indeed, after the class, Lena admits that she has no respect for Islam: “Hey, wenn Religion heißt Schleiereulen und Panflötenmusik, dann hab ich auch keinen Respekt davor” (“Die, in der ich keine Schwester will”). Lena’s behavior is so absurd, insensitive, and arrogant that the viewers are unquestionably on Yağmur’s side. So when Yağmur declares that she does not like Germans because they always think that they are “bessere Menschen,” viewers can sympathize with her and understand that she does not mean it as an attack against them. In contrast to Yağmur, Lena’s Turkish-German brother Cem is not religious at all. He is uncircumcised and does not fast during Ramadan, because he claims to be “ein Sportler.” Besides, as Cem explains to Yağmur, he cannot fast because he needs food for his muscles in order to be able to spank her. This highly provocative comment is uttered in Cem’s typical casual and self-ironic manner and is—like many other politically or ideologically contentious punch lines in the sitcom—immediately absorbed by a fast cut and the subsequent focus on a new sequence concentrating on something completely different. Nonetheless, it is worth elaborating on this particular remark because it represents one of the most common stereotypes related to Islam, the stereotype of violent patriarchy and the submission of women. 8 As commentator Thea Dorn suggested in the talk show “Literatur im Foyer: Frauenrechte, Liebe, Sexualität: Gibt es einen zeitgemäßen Islam? ” the “berühmteste and meist diskutierteste Sure aus dem Koran in Deutschland” is what she calls the “Prügelsure,” the Surat An-Nisā’, in which men are declared to be in charge of women and in which it is suggested to “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 121 first advise wives, then forsake them in bed, and finally strike them ( The Koran 4,34). 9 At first sight, Cem seems to fit the cliché of the typical “macho-youth […] that join the veiled women on the ‘stage’” and are “busy tyrannizing their sisters” (Stehle 91). But Cem is neither violent nor religious and even turns into the opposite of the patriarchal male, the aforementioned new favorite sitcom stock character of the hen-pecked man who does the chores and gets bossed around by the women in the house. Tellingly, this is also the case with Cem’s father Metin Öztürk, who—like his televised Turkish-German patriarch-predecessor Metin Arkadaş—is not violent at all. Metin Öztürk is as submissive to his girlfriend and later wife Doris as Metin Arkadaş is to his wife Gül. Both familial fathers are less patriarchs than subordinates: they are completely under the spell of their wives’ erotic charm, and it is also worth noting that both women seem to repeatedly and successfully follow the advice of the Surat An-Nisā’ of “forsaking them [their spouses] in bed” whenever their husbands do not exactly what they want. Like Cem, Metin is not religious either. As he explains in episode 4, he left Turkey because he did not agree with several of its traditions and did not have the right to speak his mind there: “Es gibt viele Dinge, die nicht richtig sind. Aber weil es im Koran steht, wagt niemand daran zu rütteln. Und jetzt hungerst du für diese Religion? ” (“Die, in der ich keine Freunde finde”). Moreover, he describes his agnosticism and emigration as a rebellion against his father, who was a drunkard who spent all the family’s money on prostitutes. So why did Yağmur choose to become a strict Muslim and to wear the headscarf, if nobody else in the family “forces” her to do so? In an interview with the Islamische Zeitung, the actress Pegah Ferydoni defines her sitcom character Yağmur as a young woman who wants to find her own identity. She declares that in contrast with the hijab’s purpose in constructing other fictional female characters—where it typically functions as a folkloric signifier to mark the woman as hailing from a Muslim country—for Yağmur it has a different meaning. Instead, the actress suggests interpreting it as the conscious gesture of a daughter who wants to emancipate herself from her liberal father. In addition, Islam and the headscarf also serve as links to Yağmur’s dead mother and as a shield against her new stepmother Doris. In an interview with the feminist magazine Emma, Ferydoni even goes a step further and describes Yağmur as a sort of juvenile rebel: “Ich habe Yağmur mehr als pubertierenden Punk gesehen. Ein Mädchen, deren Mutter früh gestorben ist und die mit 14, 15 anfängt, sich ihre eigene Identität zu basteln. Da muss sie natürlich gegen den liberalen Vater rebellieren” (Ferydoni 49). Is Yağmur therefore a sort of postfeminist girlie, who fashions an identity by “dressing up” in a headscarf, a gesture that is, in this context, subversive and yet reinscribes traditional values at the same time? There are many scenes 122 Heidi Denzel de Tirado that imply exactly that. In episode 4, when Metin asks his daughter why she refuses to eat, he immediately looks to typical “German” explanations for this quite common phenomenon among female teenagers: “Bist du magersüchtig? Nimmst du Drogen? ” Doris explains to Metin that Yağmur participates in the “Ramadings,” the fasting. This angers Metin, and Yağmur defends herself with another typical teenager argument: her girlfriend Szuna does it, too. Metin’s liberal answer suggests that he views his daughter’s fasting as a rebellious rather than a religious gesture—“Von mir aus kannst du dir den Sex und das Rauchen sparen. Das ist auch Ramadan”—and this outrages his daughter, who promises never to have sex in her life. Metin orders Yağmur to stop Ramadan immediately, but she rejoins with a simple but effective defense: “Von einem Deutschen lasse ich mir gar nichts befehlen! ” Metin is obviously flabbergasted and affected: “Komme ich deutsch rüber? ” In the above-described scene we witness a reversal of a typical “ethnic framing of the conflict between generations” (Sirseloudi 816). While the first generation of the Diaspora often remains Muslim due to its loyalty to Turkey, this is different in the case of Metin Öztürk, who has rejected Turkish and Muslim traditions in a total assimilation to the German culture. He is sad to learn that his daughter is starving herself for a religion that he feels oppresses so many people. But Yağmur explains to him that “diese Religion” is the religion of her mother, of his former wife, and of his fatherland. She rejects her father’s argument that they have a new and good life now, and explains to him that she still needs time to adapt to these new circumstances. In her statement that Islam is her only comfort since her mother’s death—“Alles ist anders. Du hast Doris, Cem hat seine Freunde und ich? Ich hab nichts außer Mamas Religion” (“Die, in der Cem keine Wurst sein will”)—many trends of the second and third generations come to the surface. According to recent studies, the Turkish-German demographic under the age of thirty appears to be “growing increasingly religious” (Diehl and König 242). Experts have attributed this phenomenon to an initial “Germanisation” among the youth, who first want to dissociate themselves from their parents, their religion, and their culture, but then return to Islam due to frustrating experiences of discrimination and constant Othering. The religious community speaks to their “feeling of futility, loss of identity, and forsakenness” and invites them be part of a group of people with similar backgrounds and experiences (Sirseloudi 813). Similar to father Metin Arkadaş, who joined his son Jimmy in getting circumcised after many years of resistance, Metin Öztürk not only allows his daughter to go on with Ramadan, but even joins her in the fasting, even if it goes against his own convictions. His supportive agnostic wife Doris is very proud of Metin’s sensitive and empathetic fathering skills and does everything she can to help “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 123 them. However, Metin and Yağmur accidentally eat German pork meatballs instead of the kofta that Doris was supposed to buy. Yağmur is devastated, but she defends her father and blames Doris for what she perceives as a damning mistake: “Sie ist Schuld! Sie hat das Schweinefleisch gekauft und dafür komme ich in die Hölle.” Yağmur castigates herself in order to avoid Allah’s punishment and berates her agnostic stepmother. As with the earlier sequence in the Koran School, screenwriter and director Bora Dağtekin focuses his mockery on Doris and not on the young Muslim girl, and their theologically explosive dispute is deflected into a parody of Doris in her role as psychoanalyst: “Toll, schrei dich mal frei! Mensch, du platzt ja vor negativen Gefühlen. Rauslassen, Yağmur, nicht rein! ” The ensuing sequences deal with Yağmur’s suffering and guilt, so Doris reaches out to Yağmur’s Koran School teacher for help. However, in this naïve attempt to help her stepdaughter, Doris unintentionally outs Yağmur’s sinful act to the entire school, and the other girls react by harassing her stepdaughter, insulting her, and ripping off her headscarf. This could have been an important narrative turning point in an ethnocentric Western sitcom: the Turkish-German girl might have come to see her Muslim friends as cruel and unreliable and Islam as a fanatical religion, and she could then have turned away from them and become happily assimilated to German norms. It would have been a logical closure of the reversal of the “ethnical framing of the conflict between generations,” in Yağmur’s case a movement from “Germanization” to Islam and then back to “Germanization.” But this is not the case: it is not Yağmur who understands that she was wrong; it is her stepmother Doris. Even if Doris sees in Allah nothing other than an “imaginary friend” and compares him to her own former imaginary friend Anke—“Anke hatte schütteres Haar, saß im Rollstuhl und hatte ganz furchtbar viel Akne auch am Rücken. Aber sie war meine Freundin und ich konnte ihr alles anvertrauen”—she wants Yağmur to be what she is. When Yağmur argues that Doris just wants her to be a “normal” girl—“Du freust dich doch, dass ich endlich normal bin und kein Kopftuch mehr trage”—Doris replies: “Yağmur, normal, das gibt es doch gar nicht” (“Die, in der ich leider erwachsen werde”). This episode develops a representation of “Islam light” by contrasting two adult female figures, one agnostic and one Muslim, who are both empathetic and respectful, but in different ways. I argue that the feminist, New Age psychotherapist Doris has not learned to respect Islam as a religion per se, but she respects it as a personal choice of self-fulfillment for Yağmur. Even if she sees her stepdaughter’s religion as a patriarchal system that discriminates against women, she does everything to help reintegrate her into the Muslim community, thereby showing empathy and intercultural competence, since she accepts Yağmur’s disposition, despite her own second-wave feminist convictions and 124 Heidi Denzel de Tirado predilections. An important character foil to Doris is Yağmur’s Koran teacher Mrs. Sismallooglo, who is depicted as a very understanding and tolerant Muslim. Male Muslims are not even mentioned during the sequences in the Koran School, and so it is the open-minded Mrs. Sismallooglo who most robustly comes to embody both Islam and tolerance in the series. In contrast to Yağmur’s classmates, who are unwilling to accept that their friend did not sin on purpose, she is forgiving and not at all strict. This contrast implies that strictly religious characters are immature, whereas more educated and older characters, like Metin and Mrs. Sismallooglo, live a form of “Islam light.” Mrs. Sismallooglo’s and Doris’s collaboration to teach the girls a lesson in forgiveness and tolerance is an interesting case of intercultural cooperation, as both women act against their own ideological convictions and worldviews: in order to reconcile Yağmur with a religion that Doris considers atavistic and misogynist, Doris gets Mrs. Sismallooglo’s permission to pretend that she put some pork meatballs among the kofta of the school’s buffet to celebrate the end of Ramadan. In the end, the girls welcome Yağmur back into their community, under the condition that Doris keep the “Kofta-Geheimnis” to herself. Screenwriter Dağtekin gives us several possible ways of interpreting this integration project. On the one hand, these sequences seem to follow a typical domestic sitcom narrative pattern: daughter gets bullied, mother solves the problem, and everybody is happy. Indeed, we can read the bullying sequences in the larger context of the bullying problem in schools, and compare them to studies that show that teachers are very often helpless to stop the bullies. Doris, who is in this case both a parent and a professional psychotherapist, is the one who solves the problem and confirms recent studies that stress the importance of “regular communication between children, parents, teachers and health care professionals with regard to bullying incidents” (Fekkes). Additionally, we can view Doris’s successful trick with the pork meatballs as one of the “new effective ways to deal with bullying incidents” that teachers could benefit from learning and implementing (Fekkes). But Yağmur’s exclusion from the community—because she brought “shame” to her fellow Muslims through her “sin”—also echoes discourses on honor killing. The fundamentalist behavior of her Muslim classmates recalls the claims made by the boys in the Berlin school who criticized honor-killing victim Hatun Sürücü and thought that she needed to be punished for rejecting Muslim traditions. It also resonates with studies of young Muslims of the second generation of the Diaspora, whose religiousness is not “necessarily violent” but “at the least very conservative” (Sirseloudi 815). Through the construction of Yağmur as a representative of “Islam light” who temporarily removes her headscarf but ultimately embraces it, the sitcom repeatedly emphasizes that integration is not a passive process but an active “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 125 and ongoing negotiation. When Doris finds out that Yağmur has contacted her grandmother in Turkey in order to arrange a marriage with a Turkish Muslim, she understands that her stepdaughter seeks comfort in the international Ummah, or Muslim community, but misunderstands “dass sie dominiert werden will,” as she calls it. Again, she intervenes and coaches Yağmur’s Greek-German ex-boyfriend Costa on how to reconquer her: “Du hast dich in ein ausländisches Mädchen verliebt, dann darfst du sie auch nicht mit soviel Rücksicht und Zärtlichkeit wie eine Deutsche behandeln … morgen will ich Bruce Willis sehen” (“Die, in der Schläge auch nichts bringen”). Costa’s seductive masculine victory ensures Yağmur’s protection from the marriage to an unknown Turkish Muslim, and her integration process seems to finally be complete when she removes the hijab because Costa asks her to do so. However, she soon puts it on again. “Für mich war es irritierend, als Yağmur das Kopftuch wieder aufzusetzen, nachdem man mir jahrelang versprochen hatte: Du darfst es dann abnehmen,” complained the actress Pegah Ferydony in an interview (Bonstein). But, according to Caren Toennissen, the sitcom’s editor-in-chief, Yağmur was “ohne Kopftuch schlicht unglücklich.” She states that this twist was not meant as a political statement: “Wir sagen damit nicht allen Muslima: Lasst eure Kopftücher auf! ” But she claims that for their story “it was just the right ending” (Bonstein). Even if it seems dubious to debate whether a fictional character’s decisions are “right”—especially when Yağmur’s well-rounded character could have been written as happy without the hijab—this was admittedly probably the “right” political and fictional decision. By breaking the well-known story pattern of a typical coming-of-age story of immigrants, one that travels from exoticism to assimilation, Türkisch für Anfänger created a new female Muslim television character that explores and celebrates a new possible way of being a “normal” Muslim Turkish-German girl: Yağmur is every bit as German as her assimilated father and her brother, even though she remains unassimilated and actively negotiates the terms of her own cultural belonging. She is a Muslim, and she is smart, brave, assertive, and enlightened, and, perhaps most importantly, she is not at all submissive. By ending the story with a young woman who wears the hijab and becomes a mediator between the cultures and religions, e. g. through her habit of purposely embellishing culturally insensitive remarks by German and Turkish politicians in order to avoid unnecessary intercultural misunderstandings, she becomes a new immigrant figure of successful integration beyond common notions of the Leitkultur and assimilation. She turns out to be a wise and witty, self-determined transnational woman who is proficient in multiple cultures, a sort of modern Scheherazade. These representations of “Islam light” in twenty-first-century German sitcoms notwithstanding, Islam still has little visible presence in fictional tele- 126 Heidi Denzel de Tirado vision series. This is the case even though contemporary visual media have introduced evergrowing numbers of Turkish-German characters since the mid- 2000s. Until this day, Yağmur is still the only recurrent practicing Muslim lead character on German television, even though recently we have seen more and more Turkish-German protagonists who have all been represented as perfectly integrated, modern, and even married to German spouses. Whereas the moviegoing public had to wait until the 2010s to see such representations on the silver screen with Evet, ich will and Einmal Hans mit scharfer Soße (dir. Buket Alakuş, 2013), German television series have been featuring Turkish-German relationships and weddings since 2005; some examples include Arzu and Philip ( In Aller Freundschaft, Das Erste, 2005), Yasemin and Raúl ( Marienhof, Das Erste, 2006), Semra and Daniel ( Rennschwein Rudi Rüssel, Das Erste, 2010), and Ayla and Philip ( Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten, RTL , 2012). Apart from feature-length interreligious culture-clash comedies like Zimtstern und Halbmond (dir. Matthias Steurer, ARD Degeto, 2010)—which features “einen muslimisch-katholischen Glaubenskrieg” during Christmas (Tittelbach), when a young female pilot introduces her Palestinian boyfriend from Bethlehem to her Catholic family—the representation of Islam in fictional television formats remained rather rare. In contrast to this scarcity, Islam and especially fundamentalist forms of Islamism have been popular topics of discussion and debate in German talk shows like Hart aber Fair, Anne Will, Menschen bei Maischberger, Maybrit Illner, and Markus Lanz, among others. Apart from Germans who converted to Islam—like the radical Islamist preacher and former boxer Pierre Vogel—liberal Muslims like Lamya Kaddor, author of the autobiography Muslimisch, weiblich, deutsch! Mein Weg zu einem zeitgemäßen Islam and co-founder and president of the Liberal-Islamischer Bund, have recently diversified the voices of Muslims in German media. 10 Talk shows like the Forum zum Freitag ( ZDF , 2007-present), which was inspired by the Christian Wort zum Sonntag and aims to give Germans and Muslims the chance to discuss current events from a religious perspective, continue to play an important role in the interreligious dialogue. However, the Forum is still not aired on television and only accessible on the website of the ZDF . In the face of recent developments—like the growth of the political movement PEGIDA ( Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes ) and the terrorist attacks in Paris and Istanbul—the visibility of moderate fictive and real Muslims has become more important. The challenge to integrate Muslims on Western television screens is on, as most popular sitcoms featuring Muslims, such as the popular Dutch series Shouf Shouf! and the successful Canadian sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie, have been canceled. The challenge of representing moderate Muslim characters is one that Western broadcasters should take seriously, as the relationship be- “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 127 tween the popular media and the underrepresentation of minorities has been an important issue for activists, psychologists, media monitors, and cultural theorists for several decades. Until this challenge is met head-on, German-speaking viewers seeking Muslim representation will find entertainment in reruns of Rennschwein Rudi Rüssel, which features Muslim guest characters who one after the other become interculturally and interreligiously competent by coming to see that the little piggy Rudi, the house pet of the Froehlich-Koray family, is not at all “unrein.” While all the Turkish-German Muslims finally understand that the piggy Rudi poses no threat to Islam, the German viewers are liberated from any form of Islamophobia, as all of the reputedly ominous members of the Koray family turn out to be friendly representatives of “Islam light” in the end. notes I would like to thank Faye Stewart for her eloquent suggestions that tremendously improved this article. 1 Hamed Abdel-Samad’s concept of “Islam light” has a lot in common with Bassam Tibi’s concept of “Euro-Islam.” However, I have chosen to work with the term “Islam light” instead of “Euro-Islam” because the latter has many different meanings and connotations: scholars like Tariq Ramadan ( To be a European Muslim, 1999), Jørgen S. Nielsen ( Towards a European Islam, 1999), and Maria Luisa Maniscalco ( „Islam Europeo.“ Sociologia de un incontro, 2014) have used this term and interpreted it in different ways. 2 While Ayhan Sürücü was sentenced to nine years in prison for the murder of his sister, his two older brothers, Mutlu and Alpaslan, were accused of having planned and incited the murder but could not be convicted due to lack of evidence. The brothers, who have since fled to Turkey, are now the defendants in a new trial against them there. 3 Almsgiving is authorized in the Koran and in the Hadith. Zakat is considered as one of the five pillars of Islam, and Sadaqa is a voluntary form of charity; “both are governed by the Sharia” (Campo). 4 Converts are often a topic in talk shows, and several scholars have analyzed the attraction of Islam for German outcasts: “Je mehr der Islam in der deutschen Gesellschaft marginalisiert und kriminalisiert wird, desto attraktiver wird er für marginalisierte Nichtmuslime” (“Schlagloch”). See also Berna Gueneli’s article in this issue. 5 See for instance, AbuMubarak, and the discussions on the Muslim website Ummah on this “controversial new law […] which requires Muslims to take an extra cultural test when applying for citizenship.” 128 Heidi Denzel de Tirado 6 While many activists and scholars refrain from using the term “honor killing” because it Others migrants, it remains an important theme in the European discourse on migration and integration of Muslims, even if many scholars have warned that it is falsely associated with Islam. Recep Doğan, the author of “Is honor killing a ‘Muslim phenomenon’? ” comes to the conclusion that Muslim communities are more vulnerable for “differing cultural interpretations of honor,” but explains the phenomenon in a more general way: “In communities where there is a high incidence of honor killings there is a powerful sense of the concept of honor and a shared belief that honor is the most fundamental value in life” (423). 7 The headscarf debate started when the young Muslim teacher Fereshta Ludin sought placement in a public school in Baden-Württemberg and did not want to take off her hijab . When she was refused a position in a state school of that province, Ludin appealed to municipal and state courts and initiated several years of passionate debates about the headscarf. Ludin lost all her cases: “The judges overruled Ludin’s private religious rights in favor of that of students’ right to secular education, citing the so-called negative freedom of religion act, which states that students must not be confronted with religious symbols against their will” (Batur 160). However, in September 2003, the Bundesverfassungsgericht —the Federal Constitutional Court, the highest court in Germany—ruled in favor of Ludin, because there was no unambiguous law in Baden-Württemberg that explicitly banned religious symbols in the classroom. Yet this ruling did not put an end to the debate, but instead initiated a controversy about the necessity of creating a legal basis for banning the hijab for teachers at public schools. 8 A Google search in February 2015 with the two keywords “Islam” and “violence” generated more than 90.5 million hits. 9 The Surat An-Nisā’ is a very controversial issue all over the West. Canadian scholar Ahmad Shafaat describes verse 34, about men and women, as “perhaps the one most often misunderstood or misused by both Muslims and non-Muslims,” and Asra Q. Nomani, the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam, suggests: “For critics of Islam, 4: 34 is the smoking gun that proves that Islam is misogynistic and intrinsically violent.” 10 Kaddor, who considers herself to be a representative of the majority of German Muslims, has invited Muslims in Germany to be more vocal and visible in the media and society in order to even out the so-called Meinungsführerschaft of a “fundamentalist minority,” mainly represented by associations like the DİTİB (Diyanet İşleri Türk İslam Birliği, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs) or the Milli Görüş. “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 129 Works Cited Abdel-Samad, Hamed. “Und es gibt ihn doch - den Islam! ” Der Tagesspiegel. 5 Jan. 2010. 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DVD � Stehle, Maria. “Gender, Performance, and the Politics of Space: Germany and the Veil in Popular Culture.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32.1 (2012): 89-101. Weber, Beverly M. “Hijab Martyrdom, Headscarf Debates: Rethinking Violence, Secularism, and Islam in Germany.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32.1 (2012): 102-15. Zeit der Wünsche. Dir. Rolf Schübel. 2005. DVD � Zimtstern und Halbmond. Dir. Matthias Steurer. ARD Degeto, 2010. TV � Truth in Advertising: Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs1 3 3 Truth in advertising: Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs Lindsay Lawton University of Minnesota abstract: Recent bestselling memoirs by “Muslim” women are categorized together by booksellers and cited in reports about Islam in Europe even though the authors describe very different experiences of Muslim faith. The divergent representations of faith in these memoirs are mediated by their uniform packaging and promotional campaigns, which depend on the exposure of the author as a gendered, racialized embodiment of the familiar figure of the Muslim woman as victim of religious violence. Authors are identified as Muslim despite building careers based on their rejection of Islam. Images of authors are prominently displayed on the covers of their books and some of them have become prominent activists, even though they write under pseudonyms for their own protection. Even as paratextual networks that have grown up around Muslim women’s memoirs reflect increasing conflation of marketing and consumption, the networks as well as the memoirs themselves also provide an important space where tropes of Muslim faith and belonging are complicated, challenged, and disputed. Keywords: Muslim, post-Muslim, women, memoirs, marketing The stories that audiences expect to find between the covers of books with dramatic titles such as Ich wollte nur frei sein: Meine Flucht vor der Zwangsehe (Hülya Kalkan, 2005) , Mein Schmerz trägt deinen Namen: Ein Ehrenmord in Deutschland (Hanife Gashi, 2005) , or Mich hat keiner gefragt: Zur Ehe gezwungen—eine Türkin in Deutschland erzählt (Ayşe, 2007) were familiar long before the turn of the twenty-first century. These popular works are characterized as Muslim women’s memoirs and share themes of forced marriage, honor killing, and the cruelty and violence to which the protagonist is subjected during her quest to pursue a “Western” lifestyle. Equally familiar are the stories about the books and about their authors: it is understood that the women whose experiences form 134 Lindsay Lawton the basis of these memoirs are taking enormous risks by “breaking their silence,” that Islam was the reason for their suffering, and that their rejection of such suffering was tantamount to a rejection of Islam and of their Muslim communities. Such beliefs are foundational components of the discursive context in which these books are produced and promoted. They are reflected in marketing across the genre, aligning a spectrum of politically, culturally, and spiritually diverse authors and obscuring the specificity of their experiences with and attitudes toward Muslim faith and belonging. These books are successful in part because of mainstream beliefs about the nature of Islam as inherently violent and about Muslim communities in Europe as independent from and inaccessible to non-Muslims. 1 The rhetorical substitution of a transnational Muslim community for Allah and the racialization of Islam also play an important role. But despite giving initial impressions of uniformity (and generic condemnation of Islam), the central stories in these memoirs vary significantly—especially on matters of faith. The heroine’s suffering is tied to the religious beliefs of her tormentors more overtly in marketing and other paratexts like titles, forewords and afterwords, or cover design than in the stories themselves. Authors also describe very different experiences of Muslim faith. Sabatina James’s story documents her search for God, while Ayşe writes that Islam actually didn’t play a very big role in her family, and Hülya Kalkan describes how she was taught as a child that to be Muslim “bedeutet ein Leben in ständiger Furcht” (30) without stating her current religious beliefs. How can we make sense of the apparent disconnect between text and paratext? One approach is to consider whether the paratexts that I examine here are actually generated by the individual narratives at all. In order to understand the relationships of paratexts to Muslim women’s memoirs, to other paratexts, and to the imaginary figure of the Muslim woman victim, I look at how publishers, activists, authors, and consumers position these books in the public sphere across a range of media. I draw a distinction between the figure of the Muslim woman victim and what I call the “post-Muslim woman”—women who are identified by their experiences with Islam even after their public rejection of Muslim faith, and whose subject status in the public eye depends on their continued denouncement of Islam. Because not every author participates in this sort of critique, and because the content of the memoirs in question focuses primarily on authors’ experiences before and during their break with Muslim faith rather than after, I still refer to these books as Muslim women’s memoirs. Even as new distinctions emerge, I also emphasize the blurring of boundaries between producer or promoter and consumer, as well as between the marketing and consumption of individual memoirs, the genre to which they belong, and larger narratives about the victimhood of Muslim women and the struggle Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 135 against Islam. Brian Massumi observes that “the difference between marketing and consuming and between living and buying is becoming smaller and smaller, to the point that they are getting almost indistinguishable” (229). The paratextual networks that have grown around Muslim women’s memoirs reflect this shift in the way that stakeholders seem stuck consuming and reproducing the familiar story of the Muslim woman victim. Though much of the paratextual content I examine here reinforces negative stereotypes about Muslims, I argue that the networks as well as the memoirs can also provide an important space where tropes of Muslim faith and belonging are complicated, challenged, and disputed. Let us begin by examining how the memoirs’ paratexts at first seem only to reinforce the very tropes of Muslim faith and belonging that are complicated in and around these narratives. Cover designs provide a useful point of entry for distinguishing between the figure of the Muslim woman victim and the post-Muslim woman. Beginning with the covers also lets us follow the steps of the general public, since covers are often the first point of contact for consumers—whether in stores, online, or as graphics appearing in advertisements, television interviews, or review articles. Visual and textual cues on the book covers converge in a culturally and temporally specific framing of female Muslim faith as blind obedience and lack of subjectivity, female Muslim belonging as violent oppression, and Islam as the reason for the suffering of Muslim women. It is no surprise that portraits of veiled women or women with their faces obscured by graphics resembling veils 2 are so often used for cover art, reinforcing the hijab’s status as “an important signifier of intersectional difference” (El-Tayeb 83). Two books of this kind even use the very same cover image. 3 The women’s eyes are frequently the only exposed or visible part of the face; their mouths are often covered by their veils, and their expressions are difficult to read. They are mute, inscrutable, and trapped. These portraits are framed by author names and titles that give the images context. Names are often obvious pseudonyms that nonetheless highlight the authors’ non-German heritage—Ayşe, Leila, or Inci Y. come to mind—and these are displayed as prominently as the titles. Titles almost always refer to forced marriage, honor killing, and / or a loss or lack of agency such as being trapped or forced; some specifically reference Islam as well. This combination of visual and textual cues draws several connections. First, because the veil remains a salient reference to Muslim faith and belonging as well as a gender marker, while also suggesting that something hidden will be revealed, this type of cover design identifies the authors as post-Muslim women and refers, at least implicitly, to existing ideas about forced marriage, honor killing, and lack of female agency as inherent or essential characteristics of Islam. Second, by visually connecting 136 Lindsay Lawton Muslim belonging and violence with a pseudonymous author, these covers emphasize the risk to the author’s personal safety that comes from breaking codes of silence and sharing her story with the broader (and implicitly non-Muslim) public. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, these covers connect the female Muslim body with covering, victimhood, and oppression even as the book seems to also offer proof of the author’s agency, voice, and visibility. The bodies on these covers are marked as female and Muslim already by the veils and the sociocultural contexts that the titles evoke. The books’ proximity to one another in retail settings and reviews only reinforces the sense of vast differences between Muslims and the rest of the public, the impression of sameness among Muslims, and the notion that there are countless such tales waiting to be told. Even though the books are premised on the idea that authors have rejected Islam and become “Western,” the covers also illustrate the inescapability of “Muslim” as a category. In that sense, they contribute to the discursive production of “Muslim” as a kind of racial or ethnic group, a social category that connects ideology, class status, and phenotype. Muslim women’s memoirs tend to uncritically circulate in physical stereotypes of Muslim belonging with portraits of authors with dark eyes and hair, often combined with the ideological marker of the veil despite the fact that they are not likely—due to the circumstances necessary for the production of such a work—to have Muslim faith. The books reinforce rather than deconstruct the stereotype even when they defy convention. In attempting to draw consumers’ attention and interest by surprising them, some covers provide a photo negative of expectations. For example, the cover of Katja Schneidt’s 2011 memoir Gefangen in Deutschland (Fig. 1) reinforces the racialized stereotype by emphasizing the incongruity of a body coded as “Western European” embodying “Muslim victimhood”: it pictures a veiled, fair-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed woman, and bears the subtitle Wie mich mein türkischer Freund in eine islamische Parallelwelt entführte. Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 137 Figure 1: Cover image from Gefangen in Deutschland: Wie mich mein türkischer Freund in eine islamische Parallelwelt entführte © Münchner Verlagsgruppe GmbH 138 Lindsay Lawton The image is carefully composed and richly colored: Schneidt’s blond hair is cut into bangs which cover her forehead, and the veil that covers the rest of her hair as well as her mouth is a vivid blue that matches her eyes and evokes the blue mantle of the Virgin Mary even as it alludes to the silencing and lack of agency she experienced. She stares straight into the camera, and there is urgency in her expression. The colors are obviously digitally enhanced, such as that of Schneidt’s skin, which is considerably smoother and a lighter shade of pink than in other images of Schneidt or her live television appearances. Her face and the veil that surrounds it take up almost the entire cover. This cover summarizes her experiences as victim of kidnapping and imprisonment in an “Islamic parallel world,” constructing “German” and “Islamic” societies as fundamentally separate and distinct. Her boyfriend is specifically “Turkish” and therefore explicitly non-German, especially in light of his ostensible access to and significant power in the “Islamic parallel world” where he held Schneidt captive. Schneidt’s race, ethnicity, non-Muslim origins, and victimhood status are all implicit in the book’s title, cover image, and discursive context. The cover depends on producing a kind of cognitive dissonance among viewers by juxtaposing a Western European body with the imprisonment of the veil, which is coded as Muslim and as a tool of the oppressive Islamic parallel world. This world comes across as a threat not only to Schneidt’s German / Western European body, but also to Germany / Western Europe itself. These paratexts focus primarily on Schneidt’s suffering and clearly reinforce the equation of Muslim faith with the figure of the Muslim woman victim, who is trapped, silenced, and abused because of her tormentors’ religious faith. Although the very existence of the memoir suggests that Schneidt has left the role of victim, the paratextual emphasis rests squarely on her victim status. The transition to post-Muslim woman becomes much more apparent in and around the second books or sequels published by some of the more activist authors (i.e., James, Inci Y.). The title of Schneidt’s second book, Befreiung vom Schleier: Wie ich mich von meinem türkischen Freund und aus der islamischen Parallelwelt lösen konnte, overtly communicates the shift from victim to post-Muslim woman. The cover of this book (Fig. 2) depicts Schneidt in the act of freeing herself from what is clearly meant to be a veil. She is holding the same blue cloth that was her veil on the first book cover, which floats above and around her, as if she were throwing it off. The fabric that she holds evokes a hijab, but the stylized, dramatic shape of it billowing around her is at best a generous interpretation of throwing off a veil. Her entire face, head, and neck are exposed, and she offers the camera a half-smile. Next to the cover of her first book, and the other portraits of veiled women described above, the half-smile presents a striking contrast between the abject Muslim woman victim trapped behind a veil and the happy European subject freely demonstrating her agency. Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 139 Figure 2: Cover image from Befreiung vom Schleier: Wie ich mich von meinem türkischen Freund und aus der islamischen Parallelwelt lösen konnte © Münchner Verlagsgruppe GmbH 140 Lindsay Lawton Although the covers of Schneidt’s two books raise all kinds of questions, I would like to return here to the issue of race. While the typical portrait for memoirs of this type shows a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman readily identifiable by audiences as “Muslim” (whether or not she wears a veil), Schneidt’s pale, blond, blue-eyed image conveys not an oppressed Muslim woman, but a German woman oppressed by Muslims. This kind of cover design reflects the extent to which “Muslim” has become a catchall term in Germany, not necessarily referring to practices or experiences of religious faith so much as to a culturally, ethnically, and spiritually diverse group of people. Perhaps the only thing they all share is their perception or interpellation as “other” or non-German. Schneidt’s cover portraits are striking precisely because they reflect the assumption that audiences expect to see something else behind the veil, something that Schneidt is not. Inaccurate terms like Orientalin, Gastarbeiterin, or Türkin that have been used in the past to describe people who do not look like Schneidt have evolved into Frau mit Migrationshintergrund. 4 While critiques of these terms have focused especially on the issue of national origin and citizenship, some scholars have argued against the increasing racialization of Islam and the use of “Muslim” to refer to a group of phenotypic traits rather than religious faith (see Spielhaus, Sieg, El-Tayeb). Riem Spielhaus connects this growing trend to the 2000 change in German citizenship laws, since “ehemalige Türken” could no longer be identified simply by their (presumed) non-German citizenship (30). In her examination of the commonly cited statistic that 2.8 to 3.2 million Muslims live in Germany, Spielhaus found that these misleading numbers were based on statistics about migration to Germany from countries with majority Muslim populations, naturalized German citizens from predominantly Muslim countries, and Germans who chose to list their religion as Islam in the 1987 census. Of these three strategies, only the census self-identification actually reveals anything about the number of people in Germany with Muslim faith—in 1987. 5 Spielhaus argues that the terminology may have changed from “guest worker” or “Turk” to “Muslim,” but that its othering function and the visible minority to which it refers remain fundamentally the same; many people once incorrectly identified as immigrants are now incorrectly identified as Muslims. Visible markers of difference may constitute the basis of this identification, but “Muslim” connects physical traits with implications about the beliefs of those whom it describes, with added complexity depending on self-identification and social context. Tropes of Muslim faith are thus tied to a visible minority but also include a range of presumptions about faith, ideology, obedience, and patriotism. These include the notions that Muslims have greater loyalty to Islam or the transnational Muslim community than to the nations in which they Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 141 live; that they are either blindly and literally obedient to the rules set forth by the Koran and Hadiths or use their religious affiliation as a cynical excuse for misogyny and violence; and that Muslims are ideologically homogenous. Cover design and other paratexts around Muslim women’s memoirs reinforce and rely on these tropes of Muslim faith, but the racialization of Islam suggests a degree of permanence or inescapability that appears to contradict the narrative of personal change and escape that runs through this genre. The sense that “Muslim” is somehow an indelible characteristic is reflected in the role of the post-Muslim woman, who is defined by her vocal rejection of Islam and continued critical engagement with Muslim faith. I use the term “post-Muslim” specifically to describe those authors, like Schneidt, Sabatina James, or Serap Çileli, whose professional success is deeply connected to their experiences with Muslim faith and their continued critique of Islam. Their continued (albeit often negative) relationship with Islam grants them a certain subject status and differentiates post-Muslim women from those authors whose time in the public eye is focused almost exclusively on the suffering they endured, like Ayşe or Inci Y. Like Schneidt, many post-Muslim women have leveraged the success of their memoirs into second books as well as careers as public speakers and activists. Their status is evident in common cover designs for their second books, which often feature a full portrait of the author, bare-headed and in Western dress, with an expression of wistful courage and determination. These covers show empowered women, public figures whose work tends to include stories of their own experiences and those of other women who have suffered in similar ways. Compare, for example, the cover images from Sabatina James’s first and second books: on the cover of her first memoir, Sterben sollst du für dein Glück: Gefangen zwischen zwei Welten (Fig. 3) 6 , the author appears veiled to the left of the title, with only her eyes visible, and then, as if to demonstrate a transition, in a wider angle image and only slightly less cloaked by her long, dark hair on the right side. The title banner also suggests a sort of imprisonment, delimiting how much of the “before” and “after” faces we can see. James’s second book, Nur die Wahrheit macht uns frei: Mein Leben zwischen Islam und Christentum (Fig. 4) connects James’s personal experience ( “Mein Leben” ) with a larger narrative of struggle and liberation ( “macht uns frei” ). It also circulates in the visual tropes of the post-Muslim woman. It depicts the author with a more confident expression than her first book, directly confronting the viewer by making eye contact; the image has been artfully faded to the point that her dark hair appears to be touched with gray in places and her skin looks white. 142 Lindsay Lawton Figure 3: Cover image from Sterben sollst du für dein Glück: Gefangen zwischen zwei Welten © Knaur Taschenbuch Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 143 Figure 4: Cover image from Nur die Wahrheit macht uns frei: Mein Leben zwischen Islam und Christentum © Pattloch Verlag 144 Lindsay Lawton On their own, these cover images may not differ much from cover design of non-Muslim life writing, but given the books’ titles and their marketing and media contexts, they reinforce the currency of “Muslim” as a category. In media coverage of the genre and in brick-and-mortar or online stores, the books convey the impression of a shared experience of abuse and oppression of Muslim women in the West. This physical and virtual proximity, along with the similarity in titles, sharpens the contrast between the images of women coded as Muslim and as victims by their veils and their body language, and the post-Muslim woman, who remains defined by her experiences with Islam rather than her experiences after escaping abusive families, partners, or communities, and whose vocal critique of Muslim faith allows her a kind of critical agency in the public sphere. Regardless of when or whether they ever experienced Muslim faith as a personal conviction, post-Muslim women have been categorized as Muslim, primarily on the basis of the fact that their public (and often polemic) criticism of Islam has a great deal to do with their former positions as Muslim women victims. Their experiences as victims are intimately tied in their public images to deep knowledge of the religion; together, these legitimize their criticism. As Fatima El-Tayeb points out, it is this criticism which gains them a voice in public debates about the role of Islam in Europe (103). The juxtaposition of the Muslim and post-Muslim figures across Muslim women’s memoirs sets up a before / after dynamic; the familiarity of the genre, along with the information in the titles, ensures that consumers know that the veiled woman embodies the “before” and the book is proof of the “after.” These narratives are often placed in physical, virtual, and discursive proximity to polemics by (white male) political figures decrying the “false tolerance” of Germany. These other works, exemplified by the bestselling books of Thilo Sarrazin and Heinz Buschkowsky, also shape the meaning of the women’s memoirs described above. The two types of books are mutually reinforcing, ideologically opposing and demonstrating the existence of the dreaded Parallelgesellschaft. 7 The consequence of the physical and discursive proximity between these two complementary narrative genres is that images of veiled women are set in opposition to images like those of Schneidt or James that represent a particular kind of critical, activist subjectivity. Such memoirs constitute a metaphorical exposure—unveiling 8 —at both the autobiographical and the social levels, that is, of both the author herself and a secretive, scandalous Parallelgesellschaft otherwise inaccessible to many readers. Because the particular market context of these memoirs lacks images of veiled Muslim women in subject positions similar to those of post-Muslim activists, it is specifically the exposure which appears to grant the author subject status, implying a causal rather than correla- Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 145 tive relationship between unveiling and subjectivity. One effect of this rhetorical strategy is that it prevents an understanding of veiled women as subjects with agency, framing them instead as always already victims of Muslim oppression. It also relegates gendered violence to the parallel world, a realm that does not (or should not) touch Germany. At a time when post-Muslim women are quite prominent on national and international stages, the fact that practicing or veiled women are rarely acknowledged as active participants in debates about integration and Islam in Europe underscores the extent to which the “mainstream public persistently ignore[s] the work done by Muslim and minority women who struggle to change structures within their communities rather than condemning them wholesale,” such as the Aktionsbündnis muslimischer Frauen (El- Tayeb 102). These memoirs could not exist without the agency of their authors, whose work in bringing their stories to press is often framed as supporting Muslim women, yet the paratexts that surround them reinforce the widespread stereotype of Muslim women as mute victims. Despite their non-fiction status, the attention these books receive reflects much less about the actual subjectivity of Muslim women than about the appetites of a Western European reading public that fails to understand veiled women as agents in the same way as unveiled post-Muslim activists. Regardless of whether they feature images of oppressed or liberated women, these covers suggest that behind them are already-familiar stories about Muslim women victims, that the oppression and violence their authors suffered was motivated or justified by Islam, and that it was impossible for them to reject this oppression and violence while nurturing religious faith. Since Muslim faith is conflated with Muslim belonging, it is also understood to be impossible for these women to remain a part of their Muslim community after their break with Muslim faith. The memoirs themselves demonstrate their authors’ agency and ability to change, and in some cases, to continue to participate in a family or community even as they come to terms with their traumatic experiences (see, for example, Ich wollte nur frei sein: Meine Flucht vor der Zwangsehe by Hülya Kalkan). However, the covers reinforce a sense of Muslim identity as racialized and fundamentally inescapable by relegating authors to positions as perpetual victims of Islam or post-Muslim activists. These book covers, along with other paratexts, shape their own discursive context such that their authors seem to disappear entirely as individual and specific agents, and with them, the diversity of their experiences and beliefs. What is at stake in the way these individual narratives of personal experience are obscured by their paratexts? Book covers are just one example of how the marketing of Muslim women’s memoirs can subsume their authors as unique subjects and shift focus toward an overarching—and oversimplified—narrative 146 Lindsay Lawton of Muslim oppression and Western European salvation. Like book covers, other paratexts such as news reports, print advertising, and public service campaigns overshadow the individual subjectivity of the author and subvert the ostensible goals of bringing such stories to press in the first place. Instead of benefitting other women in similar situations, the paratexts described above and those that I examine below function as if promoting a brand and do more to incite moral panic than to promote integration. In the pages that follow, I show how a range of other paratexts reinforce an overarching narrative featuring the imaginary figure of the Muslim woman victim while obscuring the individual accounts of diverse experiences, putting the public recognition of Muslim women as unique subjects with agency at risk. I also highlight how the familiar story of the Muslim woman victim can shift in these paratexts into a transnational narrative about the threat of Islam to the West. While many of the same problematic tendencies evident in other paratexts also figure prominently in reader reviews, I argue that social media also offers a unique space to complicate the relationship between memoirs and paratexts by blurring the distinction between producer and consumer such that the memoirs begin to seem more like paratexts of another, larger narrative. Expanding the scope of this study to include paratexts such as news reports, print advertising, and nonprofit campaigns highlights new contours in the familiar story of the Muslim woman victim and the moral panic that accompanies it. Muslim women’s memoirs are framed explicitly as selfless gestures on the part of their authors, who risk their safety to educate the public for the benefit of others in similar situations. Although this is part and parcel of the post-Muslim woman’s public persona, even authors who disappear from the public eye must justify their brief self-exposure. For example, Renate Eder, who co-wrote Mich hat keiner gefragt together with Ayşe, explained that “Ayşe will aufklären, will anderen Frauen aus der Not helfen, aus der Anonymität herauszutreten, will ihnen sagen: ‘Schaut her, ich hab’s auch geschafft. Ihr könnt das auch. Ihr müsst nicht alles aushalten’” (Geiling). Positing this kind of selflessness in the authors diminishes the unique character of their experiences, their decisions, and their attitudes toward Islam. Moreover, it suggests that there is something inappropriate about an author telling her story primarily for her own benefit. The author’s value as an individual subject is further reduced by the way authors are positioned as a small part of a larger struggle. Verena Araghi’s 2005 article “Flucht aus der Ehehölle,” which appeared in the German news magazine Der Spiegel, offers a good example. The article included cover images of six memoirs sharing the single caption, “Erfahrungsberichte unterdrückter Frauen: ‘Da entsteht plötzlich ein Gefühl der Solidarität’” (119). Such collective appraisal suggests that the narratives are so similar that they do not merit separate re- Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 147 views. This paratextual information not only connects the individual personal narratives to one another, but also implies that they give voice to a shared experience and a shared dedication to a larger struggle, an inference that is also reinforced by cross-referencing in marketing and promotion. The suggestion of charitable or activist motivations on the part of authors is reinforced by the support of women’s aid organizations, which can also contribute to the impression of each memoir as a uniform part of a much simpler liberatory narrative. Terre des Femmes, a nonprofit women’s rights organization based in Berlin, makes a good example. The organization has provided material contributions to books, including afterwords in Mich hat keiner gefragt and Mein Schmerz trägt deinen Namen: Ein Ehrenmord in Deutschland, and has also mediated between authors, publishers, and readers by handling publicity and interview requests for authors. In addition to selling Muslim women’s memoirs through its website, frauenrechte.de, and sponsoring readings and talks by authors, Terre des Femmes hosts a film festival which has featured films in which authors of these memoirs were involved (notably Iss Zucker, Sprich Süss ). Other aid organizations are run by authors, as in the case of Sabatina e. V., which is led by Sabatina James, and peri e. V., led by Serap Çileli. These kinds of organizations arguably provide critical support to victims of abuse, but their involvement in promoting Muslim women’s memoirs situates each narrative as a small piece of a grand, transnational struggle to liberate oppressed masses of women around the world from their Muslim tormentors. When an author’s specific, individual experiences of violence and abuse are framed as standardized and generic, it reinforces negative stereotypes and limits the possibilities for recognizing her as a unique subject. When the standardized narrative about the figure of the Muslim woman victim is globalized, it transforms the genre of Muslim women’s memoirs into evidence of the threat that Muslim faith presents to Germany, Western Europe, and the world at large. This second shift, from the threat to Muslim women to the threat to the West, is especially evident in paratexts that characterize the violence and abuse described in Muslim women’s memoirs as Menschenrechtsverletzungen. Christa Stolle, director of Terre des Femmes, cites a number of human rights treaties in her afterword for Mich hat keiner gefragt, including the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women as legally binding agreements with the goal of “kulturellen Praktiken entgegenzuwirken, die Frauen diskriminieren und sie ihrer universellen Rechte berauben” (241). 9 Online reader reviews connect human rights violations with territorial rhetoric: a user writing as G. Lange on amazon.de notes in a review of Mich hat keiner gefragt that “fundamentale Menschenrechte werden in Deutsch- 148 Lindsay Lawton land in unmittelbarer Nachbarschaft mit Füßen getreten.” Another commenter on Buechereule.de connects both themes back to aid organizations by providing a link to the Terre des Femmes website and writing: “Für einen aufgeklärten Westeuropäer ist es nicht ganz einfach, diese Geschichte zu begreifen. Vor allem die Tatsache, dass so etwas sich in der unmittelbaren Nachbarschaft abspielt, erscheint auf dem ersten Blick absurd” (Aeria). Such comments reinforce cultural, territorial, and intellectual boundaries between the universe of the non-Muslim “Westeuropäer” where human rights are understood and respected and the “unmittelbare Nachbarschaft” of the Muslim parallel world. At the same time, they suggest that the image of the Muslim woman victim is so troubling and prevalent that it merits further study, although not necessarily interrogation or critique. They also create institutional presence in social media through individual contacts, producing a kind of viral marketing under the guise of personal communication. Finally, user-generated content of this kind builds additional overlapping and intersecting connections among memoirs and to the familiar figure or story of the Muslim woman as victim. The notion that legal rights and territory as well as Muslim women are being violated by adherents of Islam contributes to a sense of moral panic and global struggle between diametrically opposed groups. It is not surprising that this sense of moral panic is particularly clear in reader reviews and other social media, which present a number of methodological and theoretical challenges. 10 However, social media platforms have also provided an important venue for individuals to participate in shaping the discursive context of this genre. In many instances, the integral role of social media in the consumer experience has meant that those who stand to profit from the popularity of these books are not necessarily in control of the narratives that develop around them. Reader ratings and comments posted on product pages of online booksellers are especially significant because of the role they play in the purchasing process and in their obvious blurring between consumption and marketing, as ratings and quotes from user reviews are displayed next to the cover images of books at almost every stage of viewing. Authors might follow, like, or otherwise endorse one another; activists link to similar stories; readers review multiple books and recommend some over others in their comments. These gestures of liking and linking work to reinforce the commonly held belief that oppression and victimhood are not just experiences that are shared by some Muslim women, but rather that they form a uniform and universal dimension of the Muslim female experience. Such impressions are buttressed by assertions of authenticity outside of the authors’ own autobiographical experiences. Some contributors to the wealth of social media content related to Muslim women’s memoirs claim personal knowledge of authors, bypassing the book and its cast of producers Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 149 to bring an ostensibly more authentic version of the author into the social network. One especially interesting example is a review of Mich hat keiner gefragt on the popular Buechereule.de forum: Aufgrund meiner ehrenamtlichen Tätigkeit für Terre des Femmes hatte ich das RIESENGLÜCK , Ayse gemeinsam mit ihrer Journalistin Renate Eder, zu Lesungen zu begleiten und vorab einen kleinen Vortrag zum Thema Zwangsheirat zu geben. Dadurch habe ich das Buch natürlich mehrfach gelesen und noch öfter Ausschnitte daraus gehört. […] Da ich mich ja lange Zeit mit den Themen “Zwangsheirat” und “Ehrverbrechen” beschäftigt habe, habe ich entsprechend viel Lektüre konsumiert. Natürlich sind hier keine Pulitzerpreisverdächtigen Werke dabei, aber dies Buch gehört in dem Themenkomplex in meine Top 3. (bibihexe76) In addition to dismissing the possibility that the memoir might have aesthetic value, bibihexe76 reminds us that contributors to these narratives are also private citizens. Moreover, bibihexe76 emphasizes the importance of themes like forced marriage and crimes of honor in the genre’s discursive context. Other social media responses to Muslim women’s memoirs distill the problematic messages in other paratexts to pointed and sometimes blatantly xenophobic statements that identify Germany and Western Europe with Christianity, modernity, and the ability to understand and defend the natural and inherent rights of all humans. Islam, on the other hand, is often discussed as violent, sexist, backwards, and unthinking. In one review posted to the page for Mich hat keiner gefragt on amazon.de , a user with the screen name Edessa does not write a single thing about the memoir, focusing instead on Islam and the problems it has created in Germany: “Fast jede 2. Frau in deutschen Frauenhäusern ist eine Muslima. […] Trotz immer wieder vorgebrachter gegenteiliger Behauptungen von Muslimen ist die Frau im Islam dem Mann nicht gleichgestellt” (“Kundenrezensionen: Mich hat keiner gefragt ”). The reviewer then goes on to quote the Koran as evidence of her claim. In doing so, Edessa assumes religious authority and contributes to discourse equating Muslim faith with blind obedience to religious texts. Edessa reiterates the connection between Muslim faith and oppression of women, implying that a faithful Muslim adheres exactly to what is set forth in the Koran and glossing over the tradition of discussion and debate that surrounds the holy text and the practice of Muslim faith. It is perhaps ironic that Ayşe, the author of the memoir that Edessa is “reviewing” here, specified that “Islam spielte eigentlich keine Rolle” in her family (126). At the same time that many reader reviews conflate Muslim women’s memoirs with each other, with a larger narrative about the figure of the Muslim woman victim, and with a sense of moral panic about the global struggle against Islam, social media platforms have also offered some exceptional possibilities 150 Lindsay Lawton for users to publicly challenge this larger narrative and to evoke alternate social models in Muslim communities. User review pages are one of the only paratextual spaces where the connection between Muslim faith or identity and the violent oppression of women is actively and publicly disputed as part of the consumer process and made available to future potential consumers . In a comment for Sabatina James’s Sterben sollst du für dein Glück on amazon.de, a user writing as Isnija Musljija challenges the one-dimensional image of “the Muslim” by claiming a different and yet nonetheless Muslim viewpoint, asserting the existence and agency of self-identified Muslim women who neither feel oppressed nor condone violence in the name of religion: ich komme selbst aus einem islamischen background, aber bei uns geht es so überhaupt nicht zu. es macht mich krank, dass mitten in deutschland oder össterreich soetwas passieren kann, kaum zu fassen. und ich verachte menschen, die “ehrenmord” durch religion rechtfertigen. das sind keine moslems, dass sind teufelsanbeter. [sic] (“Kundenrezensionen: Sterben sollst du für dein Glück: Gefangen zwischen zwei Welten ”) Comments like Edessa’s or Musljija’s reflect the extent to which consumers consider themselves stakeholders in the familiar story of the Muslim woman victim, if not always in the specific narratives categorized as Muslim women’s memoirs. When commenters actively and consciously engage with the reception of a particular text by posting their reactions and opinions online as an extension of their purchase, they assert themselves as consumers as well as producers of the larger narratives that accompany the genre. “Producer” here means more than the creator of a material item for sale, and the above analysis of book covers, reviews, aid organizations, and social media responses shows that the product in question is more than the account of a specific author’s experiences. “Product” also refers to immaterial aspects of a thing and the interactions that take place around or because of it (Massumi 227), such as exchanges between stakeholders or the sense of collective action and belonging noted by producers and consumers of Muslim women’s memoirs. Conceptualizing the familiar story or figure of the abused Muslim woman as a product or what Massumi calls a “cultural node” (227) helps make sense of the somewhat disjointed relationship between the content of Muslim women’s memoirs and the networks that shape their discursive context. Treating the figure of the Muslim woman victim as the product also explains why the paratextual networks do not seem to “radiate out” from the more complex and diverse experiences that authors describe in their memoirs (Massumi 227). Yet it also makes the active participation of so many individuals and institutions—from authors to aid organizations to readers posting reviews on social media—in the Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 151 promotion and consumption of a product with such negative potential more complicated and troubling. As I have shown, book covers rely on and reinforce negative stereotypes about Muslim faith, belonging, and identity as well as the agency of Muslim women. Even the subject status of post-Muslim women is connected to their continued engagement with Islam. Reviews, print advertising, and aid organizations also obscure the unique subjectivity of authors and the diversity of their experiences, instead stoking moral panic about the threat of Islam to Germany and Western Europe. Even as social media platforms offer an opportunity for some users to challenge the dominant narrative, they also provide a venue for some of the most troubling rhetoric about a perceived global struggle against Islam. Much about the discursive context of Muslim women’s memoirs remains problematic. Since so much of it threatens to obscure the subjectivity of Muslim women, it is important to return to the authors themselves. What is at stake for them in the commodification of their experiences? If we regard the figure of the abused Muslim woman as a brand, product, or cultural node, parallels to more explicitly identity-based marketing begin to appear which can help make sense of Muslim women’s participation. Agency in the objectification and commodification of identity tends to belong primarily to the performers of that identity in such campaigns. But the gap between authors’ narratives and paratexts shows that the authors of these memoirs are not necessarily performing an identity as Muslim women victims, or even as Muslim women. Instead, the memoirs rely on the conflation of an actual, individual woman with the imaginary figure of the Muslim woman victim all the while providing opportunities for other participants in the circulation of the product to perform identities as non-Muslims and non-victims. Many authors decline to participate fully in such commodification, but the work of post-Muslim activists most clearly combines the role of native informant with that of entrepreneur. In their study of identity-based marketing in regional tourism campaigns, Comaroff and Comaroff describe similarly combined roles in the examples of a Shipibo shaman who offers “visionary consultation” for tourists and the Scotts employed by the organization “Scotland the Brand” (2-5). As native informants and survivors of Muslim violence, post-Muslim women demonstrate their agency as they claim to speak for a population of oppressed Muslim women, women who represent an otherwise inaccessible parallel world and upon whose existence they depend for their continued cultural relevance. Although post-Muslim activists’ work does not explicitly connect to any one ethnic group, it serves a purpose similar to that of Comaroff and Comaroff’s Shipibo shaman and branded Scotts in providing a glimpse into that parallel world even as they mark it as separate, distinct, and cohesive. Commodification of such stereotypes can, in some cases, 152 Lindsay Lawton provide better exposure for more complex and specific narratives: treating the familiar story of the Muslim woman victim as the product creates an opportunity for the actual content of Muslim women’s memoirs, as well as consumer responses via social media, to challenge it. While the memoirs in question here obscure or at least complicate agency, I argue that they also offer a kind of commodified identity as the basis of shared attitudes, lifestyles, and sense of belonging. The marketing of these memoirs may allow contributors to “(re)fashion identity, to (re)animate cultural subjectivity, to (re)charge collective self-awareness, to forge new patterns of sociality […] by ambiguating the distinction between producer and consumer, performer and audience” (Comaroff and Comaroff 26, emphasis original). Such an ambiguation highlights how the familiar narrative (product, cultural node) of the Muslim woman victim is instrumentalized by authors and users of social media alike, and rules out the possibility of understanding authors as simply victims—first of abusive Muslim men, then of exploitative industry professionals—or simply as producers, performing a role they know will sell to consumers who are absolutely separate from them. By enacting their own identity, “producers of culture” (here, the authors as well as other stakeholders) “objectify their own subjectivity, thus to (re)cognize its existence” (Comaroff and Comaroff 26). Much remains problematic about the marketing and consumption of these memoirs, but I argue for a more nuanced approach to the role of the authors that includes an awareness of the complexity of the roles they play and their agency even in the objectification of their own subjectivity. The ubiquity of Muslim women’s memoirs and the prominence of religion in their marketing both reference and reiterate an undefined, invisible threat of Islam to “Western civilization,” and therefore draw on existing tropes about the violent nature of the religion, the oppression of Muslim women, and the blindness or the cynicism of stereotypical Muslim faith. Although the marketing of these books depends heavily on one-dimensional concepts of “Islam” while standardizing the divergent representations of Muslim faith and belonging within the books being promoted, the ambiguity between twenty-first-century marketing and consuming opens the possibility for productive exchange among a range of stakeholders. The women whose experiences constitute the basis of such memoirs may disappear into the marketing conventions of the genre and the brand of the oppressed Muslim woman, only to reappear as less uniform in some paratextual retellings of their stories. It remains questionable whether memoirs of this type offer a true opportunity for survivors of abuse to realize their own subjectivity. But perhaps it is the pursuit of this opportunity that explains the sheer volume of paratextual content responding to the figure of the Muslim woman victim and the ideas of Muslim faith and belonging that surround her. Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 153 notes 1 Widely referred to in German media as a parallel world, Parallelwelt. 2 See, for example, authors Hanife Gashi or, doubly hidden by graphics and pseudonyms, Souad and Leila. 3 Schleier der Angst by Samia Shariff and Verschleppt im Jemen by Zana Muhsen. 4 Mit Migrationshintergrund may also be shifting to Pass-Deutsche (as opposed to Bio-Deutsche ). See, for example, Rennefanz 2008. 5 The fact that the 1987 census question about religion was optional and has not been repeated in the 2000 census also points to the fundamental difficulty of categorizing people by religious faith in Germany. 6 Sterben sollst du für dein Glück was originally titled Vom Islam zum Christentum: Ein Todesurteil and published by the tiny Austrian press Kleindienst Verlag. Soon after the first edition was printed, the book was licensed to Knaur Taschenbuch, a subsidiary of Droemer Knaur; the images used on the Kleindienst edition were simply rearranged for the first Knaur edition. 7 In fall of 2015, Sabatina James published her third book, Scharia in Deutschland: Wenn die Gesetze des Islam das Recht brechen. Although it is not a memoir and was published too close to the publication of this essay to fully address here, it seems to have had a similar effect on the discursive context of Muslim women’s memoirs as Buchkowsky’s or Sarrazin’s books. 8 In the case of Katja Schneidt, the unveiling is literal, if staged. It is worth noting that of all the memoirs of this narrative type which I studied for this essay, only the cover of Schneidt’s second book shows a woman in the symbolic act of unveiling herself. 9 These treaties, along with the German constitution, are also cited on the website info.zwangsheirat.de , run by Terre des Femmes as a resource for professionals dealing with forced marriage and crimes of honor. 10 Among the greatest of these challenges are questions of anonymity and authenticity also faced by the memoirs’ authors. Common knowledge though it might be, the New York Times reported in 2012 that “about one-third of all consumer reviews on the internet are fake” and consumers can rarely tell the difference (Streitfeld). Researchers have found that perfect reviews of five stars, which are critically important for sales, are likely to be the work of individuals with biases or ulterior motives: these include reviewers paid to write positive responses; biased users such as authors, publishers, and friends and family of the author; and parties otherwise invested in the book’s success (Liu; see also Mukherjee et al.). Interestingly, the risk of ratings manipulation points to their extreme importance in online book sales; 154 Lindsay Lawton otherwise, no one would go to the trouble of creating fake reviews. Online sales of books in Germany are not insignificant: in 2011, fewer than half of all books sold there were sold in brick-and-mortar stores, while Amazon alone controlled around twenty percent of the German book market after several years of exponential growth (“Amazon ist in Deutschland größer als bisher angenommen”). In addition to the rapidly growing importance of the online book market in the global publishing industry, increasing connectivity has allowed consumers who do not shop online to still research books via smartphone before purchasing them in a brick-and-mortar store, so the potential impact of online reviews goes well beyond available data about points of sale. Works Cited “Amazon ist in Deutschland größer als bisher angenommen.” www.buchreport.de. 5 Feb. 2013. Web. 13 Sept. 2013. Araghi, Verena. “Flucht aus der Ehehölle.” Der Spiegel 33 (2005): 118-20. Ayşe (pseudonym) and Renate Eder. Mich hat keiner gefragt: Zur Ehe gezwungen—eine Türkin in Deutschland erzählt. Munich: Blanvalet Verlag, 2005. Bernhard, Renate, and Sigrid Dethloff. Iss Zucker und sprich süß—Zwangsheirat, die sogenannte Familienehre und ihre Opfer. Berlin: CouRage, 2005. Aeria. “Ayse - Mich hat keiner gefragt.” Buechereule.de. 13 Sept. 2005. Web. 12 Aug. 2012� Bibihexe76. “Ayse - Mich hat keiner gefragt.” Buechereule.de. 15 Sept. 2005. Web. 12 Aug. 2012. Buschkowsky, Heinz. Neukölln ist überall. Berlin: Ullstein, 2012. Comaroff, John L. and Jean Comaroff. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. Çileli, Serap. Wir sind eure Töchter, nicht eure Ehre. Munich: Blanvalet Verlag, 2005. El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Gashi, Hanife with Sylvia Rizvi. Mein Schmerz trägt deinen Namen: Ein Ehrenmord in Deutschland. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rororo Taschenbuch, 2005. Geiling, Ursula. “Ayses Ehe: Arrangement des Schreckens.” Mathilde.de. Feb. 2006. Web. 12 Aug. 2012. James, Sabatina. Sabatina: Vom Islam zum Christentum: Ein Todesurteil. St. Andrä-Wördern: Verlag Kleindienst, 2003. —. Sterben sollst du für dein Glück: Gefangen zwischen zwei Welten. Munich: Knaur Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004. —. Nur die Wahrheit macht uns frei: Mein Leben zwischen Islam und Christentum. Munich: Pattloch Verlag, 2011. Kaddor, Lamya. Muslimisch weiblich deutsch! : Mein Weg zu einem zeitgemäßen Islam. Munich: dtv, 2011. Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 155 Kalkan, Hulya. Ich wollte nur frei sein: Meine Flucht vor der Zwangsehe. Berlin: Ullstein Taschenbuch, 2006. “Kundenrezensionen: Mich hat keiner gefragt. Zur Ehe gezwungen - Eine Türkin in Deutschland erzählt.” amazon.de. Web. 15 Sept. 2013. “Kundenrezensionen: Sterben sollst du für dein Glück: Gefangen zwischen zwei Welten.” amazon.de. Web. 12 Sept. 2012. Leila. Zur Ehe gezwungen. Munich: Droemer / Knaur, 2007. Liu, Bing. Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining. San Rafael, CA : Morgan & Claypool, 2012� Massumi, Brian. “Navigating Moments: A Conversation with Brian Massumi.” Hope: New Philosophies for Change. Ed. Mary Zournazi. New York: Routledge, 2003. 210-43. Muhsen, Zana and Andrew Crofts. Verschleppt im Jemen: Die verzweifelte Suche nach meiner Schwester Nadja. Munich: Heyne, 2005. Mukherjee, Arjun, Bing Liu, and Natalie Glace. “Spotting Fake Reviewer Groups in Consumer Reviews.” Lyon, France: International World Wide Web Conference ( WWW -2012), 2012. Rennefanz, Sabine. “Biodeutsche in der Parallelgesellschaft.” Berliner Zeitung. 2 Feb. 2008. Web. 12 Aug. 2012. Shariff, Samia. Der Schleier der Angst: Sie lebte in der Hölle bis die Angst vor dem Leben größer war als die Angst vor dem Tod. Trans. Monica Buchgeister. Cologne: Bastei Verlag, 2010. Souad, Marie-Therese Cuny and Anja Lazarowicz. Bei lebendigem Leib. Munich: Blanvalet Verlag, 2004. Sarrazin, Thilo. Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen. Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010. Schneidt, Katja. Gefangen in Deutschland: Wie mich mein türkischer Freund in eine islamische Parallelwelt entführte. Munich: mvg Verlag, 2011. —. Befreiung vom Schleier: Wie ich mich von meinem türkischen Freund und aus der islamischen Parallelwelt lösen konnte. Munich: mvg Verlag, 2013. Sieg, Katrin. “Black Virgins: Sexuality and the Democratic Body in Europe.” New German Critique 109 (2010): 147-85. Spielhaus, Riem. “Religion und Identität: Vom deutschen Versuch, ‘Ausländer’ zu ‘Muslimen’ zu machen.” Internationale Politik 3 (Mar. 2006): 28-37. Streitfeld, David. “The Best Reviews Money Can Buy.” The New York Times 25 Aug. 2012� Terre des Femmes. “Begriffsdefintionen.” ehrverbrechen.de. 12 Sept. 2012. Web. 12 Aug. 2014� —. “Zwangsheirat.de - Fachkräfteportal.” info.zwangsheirat.de. 23 Aug. 2013. Web. 12 Aug. 2014. Filming Faith and Desire: Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone’s 157 Filming Faith and Desire: Encoding and Decoding Identities in angelina Maccarone’s Fremde Haut 1 Faye Stewart Georgia State University abstract: Angelina Maccarone’s 2005 feature film Fremde Haut dramatizes the perceived incoherence between homosexuality and Islam through visual iconographies of desire and faith. This article studies the film’s protagonist Fariba, an Iranian refugee seeking asylum in Germany, with emphasis on the ambiguous, shifting, and entangled representations of various facets of her identity as a gay Muslim woman. The encoding and decoding of Fariba’s identity symbolically suggest a problematic coexistence for faith and queer desire, which become lost in translation between the Middle East and Western Europe. I investigate the film’s polysemic codes for gender, sexuality, religion, and ethnicity, with an eye to the Iranian and German sociopolitical climates of the 2000s. Through Fremde Haut ’s topographies and embodiments, director Maccarone interrogates the high stakes of migration and translation and their implications for human rights and survival at the start of the third millennium. Keywords: Angelina Maccarone, closeting, homosexuality, Islamic faith, Iran Several recent fiction films about the lives and experiences of gay and lesbian Muslims around the world dramatize the perceived incoherence between homosexuality and Islam. Dramatic and romantic films with queer characters from Muslim backgrounds—such as Lola + Bilidikid (dir. Kutluğ Ataman, 1999), set in Germany; The Bubble (dir. Eytan Fox, 2006), set in Israel; and Circumstance (dir. Maryam Keshavarz, 2011), set in Iran—thematize same-sex desire and relationships in Muslim societies, while also highlighting the ways in which homophobia, culture clashes, and violence can threaten the safety of gay and lesbian Muslims and disrupt their everyday lives. As these films demonstrate, Islamic faith and queer desires do coexist, but various cultural factors in both the global East and West trouble their mutual expression. German director Angelina Mac- 158 Faye Stewart carone’s 2005 drama Fremde Haut ( Unveiled ) follows in line with these trends but complicates them by representing religious faith ambiguously and intertwining the depiction of an indistinct Islam with the closeting of gender and sexuality. Maccarone’s film tells the fictional story of an Iranian refugee, Fariba Tabrizi (played by Jasmin Tabatabai), who leaves her homeland after she is caught having an affair with a married woman. Desperate to stay in Germany after being denied asylum there, Fariba secretly assumes the identity of a deceased male compatriot whose application for refugee status has been approved. The film thus emphasizes the closeting of femininity and homosexuality: tension builds because other characters in the story take Fariba’s convincing performance of heterosexual masculinity at face value, but the viewer knows all along that she is in fact a queer woman disguised in men’s clothing in order to avoid deportation and persecution. At the same time, Maccarone’s movie portrays Fariba’s faith only indirectly, through symbols and suggestion, so the spectator cannot unequivocally read her as a practicing or believing Muslim, even though she hails from an Islamic theocracy. In analyzing and contextualizing Fremde Haut ’s entangled depictions of religious, gendered, and sexualized identities, my study contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the representations and experiences of LGBTIQ (an acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, intersexual, and queer / questioning) Muslims in Europe and the Middle East. 2 Maccarone’s Fremde Haut tells a linear and seemingly straightforward story, but its complexity derives largely from the multivalent symbolism, sparse dialogue, and paucity of specific historical markers. This study therefore stresses Fremde Haut ’s iconography and the timing of its release in shaping an interpretation of the film as both a critique of homophobia and Islamophobia, and an exploration of the high stakes of migration and asylum in the early twenty-first century. I begin by discussing the director’s oeuvre and summarizing the film’s plot before, in the first half of this article, addressing the significance of the movie’s negotiation of identity, visibility, and transnational geographies in the early to mid-2000s. In the second half, I then investigate the film’s symbolic vocabulary for traces of Muslim faith and belonging. My close reading analyzes the multiple meanings of visual elements such as veils, hands, and alcohol, in an attempt to disentangle the layers of Fariba’s identity. Fremde Haut shares with director and co-writer Maccarone’s other cinematic productions an emphasis on intersections among gender, sexuality, citizenship, and social taboos. Born and raised in Germany with a transnational background, Maccarone often thematizes the crossing of borders in her stories. Films like Fremde Haut and the road movie Vivere (2007) depict journeys across national borders and through foreign spaces as opportunities for self-discovery and self-reinvention: Vivere narrates the existential struggles of three women, one German Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone’s „Fremde Haut“ 159 and two German-Italian, on intersecting voyages from Cologne to Rotterdam. The border geographies that characterize Maccarone’s work also extend to the social boundaries that divide individuals and communities along fault lines of race, class, religion, or generation. Films with these themes include Alles wird gut (1998), a made-for-television comedy about a budding romance between two Afro-German women who are surrounded by subtle and not-so-subtle racism, and Verfolgt (2006), a psychodrama depicting the high stakes of a sado-masochistic affair between a teenager and his married lover, a fifty-something female probation officer. In addition to making feature films, Maccarone has written and directed for the popular television crime series Tatort and Bukow und König. Her first episode of the socially critical show Tatort, with the provocative title Wem Ehre gebührt (2007), engendered such controversy with its representation of incest and notions of “honor” in the Alawi Muslim community that it has been shelved among the so-called Giftschrankfolgen, which no longer air. 3 Released in 2005, Fremde Haut is Maccarone’s most successful feature film: it won the Hessian film prize and earned its star Jasmin Tabatabai a German Film Award nomination for best actress. In Fremde Haut, like in Maccarone’s other productions, romance and intimacy feature prominently: here and elsewhere in her movies we see queer and straight women falling in love and negotiating erotic encounters, heartbreak, abuse, pregnancy, and motherhood. Sexual desires and practices take center stage in Fremde Haut, motivating much of the protagonist’s movement across borders as well as within Germany. The story begins and ends with Fariba’s journey from Iran to Germany and back; both voyages are precipitated by the revelation of secrets about her gender and sexuality. The Iranian translator flees persecution in her homeland, where she faces imprisonment, torture, and possibly execution, after authorities learn of her relationship with the married Shirin. At her German immigration interview, Fariba does not disclose the grounds for her persecution in Iran— she coyly cites “politische Gründe”—and is consequently denied asylum due to lack of documentation. However, we soon learn the real reason that Fariba fled Iran: during her brief stay in an immigration detention center by the Frankfurt airport, she confesses to fellow countryman Siamak Mustafai (played by Navíd Akhavan) that she had an affair with a woman. Fariba and Siamak confide in one another but their friendship is short-lived: haunted by skeletons from his past, Siamak commits suicide before his petition for political asylum is approved. Determined to stay in Germany at all costs, Fariba hides Siamak’s corpse, buries him in secret, and assumes his identity. Fariba’s performance of masculinity is so convincing that, for much of the narrative, no one suspects her masquerade. In order to refer to Fariba when performing Siamak and to distinguish this figure from the distinct identities of Fariba and Siamak, I use the designation 160 Faye Stewart “Fariba / Siamak” (shorthand for “Fariba as Siamak”) and the pronouns “s / he,” “her / him” and “her / his” in my analysis. These amalgamations call attention to identity as an effect, highlighting the optical and performative dimensions of identity production and emphasizing that, while the cinematic spectator sees Fariba in disguise, other diegetic characters see only the man they know as Siamak. Fariba / Siamak finds illegal work in a cabbage plant and a love interest in German coworker Anne (played by Anneke Kim Sarnau). But when Siamak’s refugee status is revoked and Fariba’s disguise is revealed, Fariba is deported to Iran; on the return flight, however, she once again dons the Siamak masquerade. The film’s sociopolitical commentary finds figurative articulation in the constant renegotiation of the troubled relationships among gender, sexuality, mobility, and nation: unveiled as a queer woman, Fariba cannot live in Iran or Germany; but disguised as a man, s / he has a chance of survival in both countries. As the above synopsis indicates, negotiations of gender and sexuality are more pivotal to plot development than those of religion and faith. Indeed, references to Islam in the film remain largely at the level of suggestion. Maccarone’s movie may imply—but never states outright—that Iran’s status as an Islamic theocracy makes the country a hostile and potentially deadly place for known homosexuals. But, aside from references to the affair with Shirin, the film provides little detail about Fariba’s past, her family, or her relationship to Islam then and now. The filmic text does raise the possibility of Fariba’s Muslim identity through visual cues that evoke associations with Islamic practices. For instance, we see a veiled Fariba in the first and last sequences and in a photograph of her with Shirin. Fariba also abstains from drinking alcohol; wears a necklace with a Hand of Fatima pendant, which honors Fatima, daughter of the Muslim prophet Muhammad; and says an Islamic prayer over Siamak’s grave. However, these representations connote in multiple ways and the possibility of Muslim belief is but one of their potential meanings, partly due to the contexts in which they appear, which endow them with additional significance, and partly because they also signify at the level of Fariba / Siamak’s performance of masculinity and heterosexuality. Fariba’s spirituality is thus at best coded and ambiguous, even though other characters conflate religion with ethnic otherness by ascribing Muslim stereotypes to Fariba / Siamak. Maccarone’s picture explicitly polemicizes the oft-discussed invisibility of lesbian desire and hypervisibility of Muslim faith by reversing these tropes. On the one hand, lesbian desire has been theorized in other contexts as absent, effaced, or at best encoded by scholars like Terry Castle and Amy Villarejo, as well as by Rachel Lewis in her analysis of Fremde Haut, which Lewis reads as interrogating the invisibility of lesbian refugees. Fremde Haut reveals the lesbian Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone’s „Fremde Haut“ 161 and her problematic desires to the spectator while at the same time dramatizing her lack of agency and her erasure from public life through Fariba’s unwillingness to cite her reason for seeking asylum and her subsequent “disappearance” in gender masquerade. In addition, for much of the film, Fariba / Siamak can only articulate her / his attraction to new love interest Anne through a performance of heterosexual masculinity. On the other hand, the filmic image also calls attention to the visibility of Muslim faith, which typically takes hypervisual forms in contemporary Western cultures, most prominently in the stereotype of Muslim femininity as both marked by and hidden beneath the veil. The hijab, Fatima El-Tayeb reminds us, “in particular serves as the key symbol of Muslim difference, representing silenced, oppressed women living in parallel societies that are shaped by ancient and primitive rather than modern Western structures” (83). Various critical responses to this trope find articulation in the work of Alice Schwarzer, Joan Wallach Scott, and Alev Çinar. Maccarone challenges notions of the silenced Muslim woman by depicting Fariba as a fluent and well-spoken migrant who downplays her language skills to pass as her shy, quiet countryman Siamak, who speaks little German. In fact, the translator Fariba is so well-versed in German literature and culture that she even helps a German guard with a crossword puzzle by identifying the Romantic writer Novalis as the solution to a clue. Moreover, Maccarone’s cinematic strategy for addressing the loaded image of the veiled Muslim woman is to align veils with other kinds of head coverings, which serve a range of purposes in the film’s German settings, only one of which is to communicate religious affiliation. In Fremde Haut, veils and hats are also tools in the construction of gender, and since the film narrative is structured around the sustained closeting of gender and sexuality, it emphasizes revelations at this level over examinations of religious identity. In line with Jasbir K. Puar, who deconstructs the “Muslim or gay binary”—the fallacy that the two categories are mutually exclusive and “incommensurate subject positionings” (19)—I attempt to excavate the Muslim side of Fariba’s identity and bring Islam and homosexuality into conversation. An analysis of these politics of visibility, however, is complicated by two other kinds of invisibility: first, the invisibility of Iran in Maccarone’s film, and second, the invisibility of queer desires and practices in Muslim-majority cultures. In order to address these matters, I engage a perspective akin to Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick’s “cosmopolitan gaze,” which attends to the flows between symbolic geographies and imagined identities. Schindler and Koepnick encourage “critical perspectives that, rather than recognizing a nation’s boundaries as constitutive markers of individual and collective identities, explore the globe as a symbolic topography in which local, national, ethnic, religious, and transnational traditions penetrate, amalgamate, and contest each other through 162 Faye Stewart shifting configurations” (13). In my study of Fariba’s sexuality and religion, I emphasize that these facets of identity are effects of changing contexts and interlocutors, and that their construction through difference and similarity is an ongoing process within the globalized topographies in which they circulate. It therefore seems more significant within Fremde Haut ’s narrative that Fariba comes from a Muslim-majority country than that she is specifically Persian— unless, of course, we wish to read the film as disparaging Iran. A cosmopolitan gaze at its narrative structure and symbolism reveals that the parallels between the cinematic Iran and Germany are more numerous than one might imagine, as the film “actively queers the binaries that permeate and regulate the institution of the nation” (Stewart 600). Although the spectator may initially assume that Fremde Haut is critical of Iran and Islam, which produce the conditions leading to Fariba’s persecution and exile, its censure of Germany is much more explicit in revealing homophobia, as well as criticizing German bureaucracy, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and resistance to cultural integration. The narrative literally begins and ends in the air: it opens on a flight departing from Iran and concludes with a return, but its spectator sees no direct representation of Persia or its characters’ lives there. In fact, with the exception of the few documents that Fariba and Siamak take with them on their journeys—the false papers Fariba uses to enter Germany, a photograph of her Iranian lover Shirin, an envelope from Siamak’s parents, and Siamak’s Iranian passport—there is no visual evidence of their homeland aside from the gestures of their fellow airborne female travelers, who remove or don headscarves and long outerwear when planes cross the boundaries of Iranian airspace. The rest of the plot unfolds on German soil, and so the filmic Iran remains an imagined space, both for the characters, who remember their loved ones and the death threats they left behind, and for the spectators, who never see the protagonists’ mother country. Fariba’s Iranian nationality appears less important to the plot than her Muslim background. If Maccarone specifically wanted to point up homophobia in an Islamic society, a strategy that Puar calls “homonationalism”—racializing other states through “the frenzied fixation on the homophobia of [their] regime[s]” (xi)—then Fariba’s persecution as a homosexual could also have taken place elsewhere. She could have been Turkish, Moroccan, or Bosnian, nationalities that have historically been more heavily represented than Persians among Muslim migrants to Germany. According to Samar Habib, silencing of homosexuality is not limited to Iran: “Since Islamic states, like Massad, do not recognize that there is such a thing as sexual orientation in the Arab world, such states would not be amenable to a declaration recognizing groups falling under the rubric of sexual or gender minorities” (xxiii). Habib also asserted, in 2010, that “it has not been proven that sharia-abiding countries like Iran have executed individuals on Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone’s „Fremde Haut“ 163 the basis of homosexual behaviors alone” (xxiv). However, the timing of Fremde Haut ’s release places it in a historical context that could encourage a reading of it as critical of Iran. The film’s international premiere on July 4, 2005, took place shortly before the public execution of two Iranian teenagers, Mahmoud Azgari and Ayaz Marhoni, on July 19, 2005, for allegedly raping a younger boy. Puar describes the international criticism of Iran by gay rights and human rights groups in the wake of the execution, culminating in the recognition of July 19 as the International Day of Action Against Homophobic Persecution in Iran (ix-xi). That year also saw the August 3 transition of power from Reform President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), who advocated political and social democratization and liberalization, to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013), leader of the coalition Alliance of Builders of Islamic Iran. Ahmadinejad’s presidency entailed a return to hard-line Islamism and the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities, engendering rising international concerns over human rights violations. But, while these current events might have resonated with spectators seeking an interrogation of Iranian or Muslim homophobia in Fremde Haut, a closer look at its geographies suggests a more pointed attack on Germany. Fremde Haut may implicitly reflect on Iran’s failure to guarantee the civil and human rights of marginalized and persecuted individuals, but it places heavier emphasis on Germany’s shortcomings, underscoring anti-gay and anti-foreigner sentiments. In theory, Fariba could have applied for asylum in Germany under a new provision recognizing geschlechtsspezifische Verfolgung als Asylgrund, which was passed in 2004 and went into effect in 2005 after years of heated debate under the Red-Green coalition led by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (1998-2005). This revision allows refugees to gain asylum if they are persecuted because of their gender or sexuality, and its timing overlapped with a revision of the Lebenspartnerschaftsrecht to increase legal protections for registered samesex couples. However, the film’s setting suggests that these laws wouldn’t have helped Fariba. Though Fremde Haut contains few details that would allow a definitive identification of its temporal context, one isolated prop, shown briefly near the end, provides an exact time: the dates on the forged German passport Fariba purchases locate the setting in mid-2004. But even if the 2004 asylum revision had already gone into effect, there is still the problem that Fariba does not tell immigration officials the real reason why she seeks protection. We never learn why she lies; perhaps she fears anti-gay discrimination in Germany too. Were Fariba to have such fears, they would be confirmed in the film’s dramatic conclusion. Indeed, homophobia manifests itself as a devastating force far beyond the borders of the imagined Iran; it is also alive and well in Germany, where the violence Fariba experiences after she is outed as a lesbian culminates 164 Faye Stewart in her deportation. As Sandra Ponzanesi asserts, this critique in the film upsets the idealization of European openness toward homosexuality: Unveiled contests the notion that homosexuality is a Western concept which stands for emancipation and liberation while attempting to reconcile the idea of the immigrant, the stranger, with queerness. The model of Europeanness as accommodating sexual ‘strangerness’ is therefore deconstructed by placing heterosexism as one of Europe’s dominant formations in relation to its racist ideology. (84) The movie thus articulates a critique that resonates with Puar’s interrogation of homonationalism, the racialization of homophobia as Other. Indeed, instead of constructing a homonationalist Germany, Fremde Haut intertwines heterosexism and ethnocentrism: Maccarone links homophobia with xenophobia by bringing both forms of bigotry into the characterizations of German antagonists Uwe and Andi (played by Hinnerk Schönemann and Jens Münchow), Anne’s macho friends whose assault on Fariba precipitates her forced return to Iran. The victims of homophobic violence include not only the foreigner Fariba but also the Germans Anne, who is insulted and beaten by jealous ex-boyfriend Uwe and his closed-minded pal Andi, and Anne’s young son Melvin (played by Leon Philipp Hofmann), who is terrified and calls the police when he witnesses these events. Fariba’s refusal to out herself as queer to the German immigration officials may also be Maccarone’s way of acknowledging the differing sociocultural contexts in Western Europe and the Middle East. Fariba hails from a culture where sex is not often openly discussed, and where homosexuality is said to be invisible or even considered nonexistent. Fariba’s queer desires are lost in translation, not because she lacks the German vocabulary to express them, but because she is unaccustomed to speaking of such desires. When Iranian president Ahmadinejad set off a firestorm of criticism by asserting at a 2007 event in the United States that there were no homosexuals in Iran, defendants of his claim pointed out that the English translation was indirect and did not convey the cross-cultural challenges of labeling sexual practices. Scholars argue that “homosexuality” is a Western notion, and queer identities are not always visible to those who seek them in Islamic societies, where there “is a common Islamic ethos of avoidance in acknowledging sex and sexualities” (Murray 14). Female homosexuality appears to represent an even bigger taboo in Iran, where, Reza Baraheni claims, “to attest to lesbian desires would be an unforgivable crime” (48). But perhaps these matters are less significant to Fariba’s hesitation to call herself homosexual than the fact that few Iranians have been successful in gaining asylum abroad on the basis of sexuality-based persecution, likely because in Iran these offences are not often named as such. Suspects of perpetrating the Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone’s „Fremde Haut“ 165 illegal homosexual acts are typically accused of other crimes that are less taboo to name, which poses a challenge for refugees who must produce proof of genderand sexuality-based persecution. An interpretation of the representation of Islam, Iran, and female sexuality in Fremde Haut is further complicated by the fact that sharia law forbids not only homosexual acts, but all sexual relations outside of heterosexual marriage. Fariba, who has a relationship with a married woman, is doubly guilty of homosexuality and adultery. According to Iranian law, both are crimes punishable with imprisonment for life or the death sentence. Max Kramer maintains that in Islamic societies adultery is typically considered a greater offense than homosexuality: “the potential consequences of adultery […] are much more feared (at least, they were in the past) than a relationship between two people of the same sex” (146). While this may be true in some Muslim countries, the film suggests that Fariba’s persecution in Iran has more to do with her samesex affair than with her lover’s marital status. Though Fariba / Siamak at first tells Anne that s / he left Iran due to an adulterous relationship with Shirin, this partial truth can be explained by Fariba / Siamak’s gender masquerade in this scene: Fariba / Siamak wants to open up to Anne, but acknowledging homosexual desires would be tantamount to revealing gender. From the point of view of Iranian culture and Islamic law, Fariba’s homosexual acts may be perceived as even more troubling because she is unmarried and cannot be properly reformed by a return to the gendered role of wife. When Fariba makes a brief phone call to Shirin to inform her former lover of her safe arrival in Germany, Shirin says that her family blames Fariba alone for the affair. Much later, after Fariba finally comes out to Anne as a woman, she goes into more detail about the terrors she faced in Iran, including beatings, rape, and imprisonment. Maccarone’s cinematic representation corresponds to reality in Muslim-majority societies, which, Kramer asserts, provide “numerous examples of persecution, torture, and execution of people caught in a same-sex act, suspected of same-sex activity, or exhibiting a proclivity toward such behaviors in another way” (145). 4 Fariba, who could be executed for her crimes, does not benefit from the same protection as her married lover, who can recant and be forgiven. The spectator is thus led to believe that the homosexual dimension of the affair figures as the greater transgression. Fariba / Siamak’s return to Iran at the film’s close raises unanswered questions about the prospect of survival there. What kind of existence and future does this homeland hold? Although these concerns are outside the purview of Fremde Haut ’s narrative, which ends before the plane lands in Tehran, the possibilities that the conclusion entails are certainly problematic. The final plot twists of Fariba’s dramatic deportation and risky retransformation into Siamak 166 Faye Stewart in the airplane lavatory challenge viewer expectations, as they come just when things finally seem to be working out for Fariba in Germany: she has acquired a German passport, revealed her gender to Anne, and she and Anne have become sexually intimate. Unlike many exilees, Fariba has no romantic attachment to her homeland and does not wish to return, so the ending cannot be viewed as a homecoming in any traditional sense because it happens against her will. The only part of this forced repatriation that she can control is what identity she will perform upon arrival in Tehran. On the one hand, because Fariba chooses not to go home as herself, she has a chance of dodging the persecution that awaits her there. On the other hand, a return in men’s clothing brings with it the ever-present danger of being revealed as female, because in Iran it is also illegal for women to cross-dress as men. However, Iran also holds a chance, albeit slim, of acceptance, should Fariba / Siamak opt for an official gender affirmation as male. Some Islamic clerics see transsexuality as a form of heterosexuality, an illness curable with surgery: medical reassignment procedures have been legal since a 1987 fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini. But the possibility of this outcome is predicated on the assumption that Fariba identifies as or desires to be a man, an interpretation not supported by the filmic text. Lewis agrees that a construal of Fariba as “having assumed a transgender identity” at the film’s conclusion “can only be read ironically and poignantly so” (433). Fariba / Siamak falls back on gender masquerade out of necessity: it is a means of survival. How far will s / he go to ensure her / his continued existence? The ending leaves this question open. Populated by millions, the metropolis of Tehran may offer greater chances of survival to Fariba / Siamak simply because it can afford her / him a level of invisibility not available in the small Swabian town of Sielmingen where the German asylum home is located. Maccarone’s film thus takes the very real stakes of the lives of many LGBTIQ Muslims, who either closet their sexuality or face potentially devastating consequences, into the symbolic realm. This dimension of the film resonates with Hamid Naficy’s notion of “deterritorialization,” a characteristic of accented cinema: “the representation of life in exile and diaspora […] tends to stress claustrophobia and temporality, and is cathected to sites of confinement and control and to narratives of panic and pursuit” (5). Fremde Haut ’s poignancy derives largely from striking visuals and settings that emphasize the physical and emotional isolation of refugees, whose daily existence is characterized by limited privacy and mobility in overcrowded dorm rooms and illegal employment. In Fariba’s case, deterritorialization is further linked to “a crisis of the body” (Lewis 433), which is both alienating and imprisoning. Like many gay Muslims around the world, Fariba leads a secret life: enacting the “repeated negation and expulsion of the queer woman” (Stewart 599), she closets her femininity, Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone’s „Fremde Haut“ 167 homosexuality, and potential religious faith, all of which cause tension in her social relationships and put her at risk in conservative, rural Swabia. Execution, the punishment for homosexual acts in some Islamic countries, is figuratively represented in Maccarone’s film as the political death of a character who is stateless and has no rights or legal status anywhere, much like the biopolitical non-entity Giorgio Agamben characterizes in Homo Sacer as “bare life.” Indeed, Fariba barely lives, and she thus embodies the ultimate precarity, reduced to a form of “non-being” in that she is disenfranchised of all rights, recognition, and property (see Butler and Athanasiou 19). The emotional and social risks of being alienated from family and friends as a gay Muslim are conveyed through Fariba / Siamak’s exile, which is both national and local, for s / he experiences deterritorialization even within the refugee community. Fariba / Siamak cannot get too close to anyone, including her / his male roommate: the danger of discovery lurks in each encounter and every conversation, and s / he must plan her / his daily routine in such a way as to avoid nudity and intimacy at all costs. Her / His refusals to undress, shower, or drink in front of others, all of which make sense to the viewer, who knows about the masquerade, create numerous awkward situations and distance her / him from others in the asylum home as well as in the workplace at the cabbage plant. Notably, it earns her / him several insults regarding her / his personal hygiene, which are often paired with ethnic slurs. These xenophobic insults push Fariba / Siamak to the extreme margins of her / his already marginalized social position. As Fremde Haut ’s English title, Unveiled, suggests, there are many layers to its representation of identity. The double meaning of the English title evokes a literal unveiling—the removal of a headscarf—as well as a figurative one—the revelation of identity after a masquerade. Although it shares with the original German title a double meaning that emphasizes the body as a boundary, creating an external / internal dichotomy that is at once national and physiological, Unveiled differs in meaning from the German name Fremde Haut, which translates as “foreign skin” or “alien skin.” These interconnected layers drive the narrative forward, creating friction among mechanisms that closet and communicate the main character’s identity. Once Fariba begins to masquerade as Siamak, virtually every scene generates tension through her / his performance and negotiation of gender, desire, religion, and ethnicity. In order to flesh out the polysemic ways in which Islamic faith is encoded, decoded, and intertwined with queer sexuality, especially in scenes in which it is (mis)read within the diegesis, I now undertake a close reading of pivotal scenes and key visual vocabulary that carry significant hermeneutical value. I begin here with the veil, and then I shall discuss hands and the hamsa symbol, Siamak’s grave, praying, and alcohol. 168 Faye Stewart The titular veil frames the narrative, functioning literally and metaphorically to conceal and reveal identity. In Western European cultures, the veil is often read from an ethnocentric perspective as a visual marker of religious, racial, and gendered Otherness. In The Politics of the Veil, Scott analyzes the veil’s status as a metaphor for an ethnocentric Western fantasy of Islamic culture without regard to regional, philosophical, or political differences between forms of Islam: Scott criticizes the French government’s identification of the veil as a “conspicuous sign” of religion and an “icon of intolerable difference” (1, 5). In Fremde Haut, the veil does signify Otherness in some contexts, but its symbolic association with other kinds of headwear adds depth and nuance to this portrayal. At first, the veil appears almost exclusively in connection with non-German women: the film’s opening and closing scenes on planes mark the crossing of national boundaries with the gendered act of donning or removing the hijab. During these sequences, the veil marks Fariba as Muslim while also allowing her to disappear among her fellow travelers; with the aid of sunglasses, it protects her by hiding her identity. By contrast, scenes at the refugee detention center, where Fariba no longer wears the headscarf, distinguish her visually from other non-European asylum seekers who retain the garment. Together with the detail that Fariba appears to be an exception among the refugees because she speaks fluent German, this contrast recalls contemporary ethnocentric discourses that read the veil as a symbol of failed European integration: one need only think of Schwarzer’s volume Die große Verschleierung: Für Integration, gegen Islamismus, whose contributors conflate the veil with non-European race and ethnicity. The veil in Fremde Haut is also a reminder of Fariba’s Iranian past: shown in a photograph with Shirin, in which two smiling veiled women face each other, the hijab metaphorically signals the problematic coexistence of Islamic culture and same-sex desire. When Fariba / Siamak burns the half of the photo depicting her veiled self, s / he erases her past; this parallels her / his embrace of Siamak’s past by writing letters to his parents as if he were still alive. But in Fremde Haut, other kinds of veils and veilings are situated in a distinctly Western context. Anne, Uwe, and Fariba / Siamak wear different kinds of headgear—motorcycle helmets, knitted caps, and hairnets—while working at the cabbage plant and traversing its rural environs. Whereas the veil is typically a marker of femininity, other related costume elements are vital to the protagonist’s performance of masculinity: her disguise consists of clothing, accessories, and toiletry items like knitted caps, glasses, and the mascara she uses to mimic the appearance of stubble. Key scenes link real and symbolic veils through dialogue and image, such as Fariba / Siamak’s first close encounter with Anne in the factory restroom, when Anne, who has apparently forgotten that her hair is covered by a hygienic cap, tells Fariba / Simaka that she cannot imagine a society in which women must Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone’s „Fremde Haut“ 169 don veils. The scene’s humor entails two ironies: the veillike garment that Anne wears at work signals her gender and low sociopolitical status in Germany, and she is ignorant of Fariba / Siamak’s own identity as a woman veiled in men’s garments. The haircap forges a connection between Fariba / Siamak and Anne and reminds the viewer of Fariba’s femininity and Anne’s working class status. At times humorous, often harshly critical, in constructing multiple levels of meaning, the film’s imagery serves as a constant reminder of how veils and head coverings can both conceal and communicate identity. Emily Jeremiah notes in her analysis of Fremde Haut that hands “constitute a motif in the film” (598). I concur with Jeremiah, reading the hand as a leitmotif that brings together the film’s coded representations of sexuality and religion. Like the veil, the hand evokes several connotations, linking concepts of fixed identity—the hand as an indicator of gender or fingerprints as readable for legal status—and more fluid and less explicitly anchored notions of faith, religion, and cultural belonging. Depictions of and allusions to the hand take many forms in Fremde Haut, but the dominant symbol is a hamsa amulet, a decorative pendant representing a palm and five outstretched fingers, which Fariba wears around her neck. Human hands, particularly Fariba’s and Fariba / Siamak’s, are also loaded signifiers whose multiple meanings are emphasized in a number of scenes. This section of my article complements Jeremiah’s study of the film, which focuses on the hermeneutics of touching and communication, by unpacking the film’s visual iconography of Islam through a discussion of key scenes featuring hands, as well as meaningful spaces such as the restroom and the gravesite. The hamsa is a polysemic sign and a sacred symbol of protection to many religious and cultural traditions, where it typically functions as a talisman to defend against negative forces, heal pain, and ensure safety. Called the “Hand of Fatima” in Muslim cultures, the hamsa does not function as an exclusive signifier of Islam because it is also meaningful in Judeo-Christian iconography, where it is called the “Hand of Mary” or “Hand of Miriam,” as well as in other cultural traditions. As Scott indicates in citing the French headscarf ban that identifies the Hand of Fatima among the “discreet signs” of religious affiliation, it is considered a less obvious or direct symbol of Islam than the veil (1). I read the hamsa pendant that Fariba wears as the “Hand of Fatima,” and by extension as a feminized code for Islam, but one that does not signify coherently. The amulet produces a surplus of associations by signifying Muslim faith and femininity in conflicting ways and different contexts, while also functioning as a symbol of protection. The Hand of Fatima is visible in several scenes at the beginning of Fremde Haut that narrate Fariba’s arrival in Germany and brief stay in the refugee detention center. Throughout these sequences, the amulet hangs 170 Faye Stewart outside of clothing: it is visible as Fariba is introduced to the filmic spectator, who tries to make sense of her identity as does the German bureaucratic system that attempts to read her through fingerprints, photographs, and immigration interviews. The pendant helps to construct Fariba’s gender: not only does it signify an idealized femininity through reference to the iconic Fatima, the revered and exemplary favorite child of the prophet Muhammad, but the symbol also is visually linked with femaleness through Fariba’s performance of a female identity when she wears it. Among the many necessary outward changes that accompany her masquerade as Siamak—she cuts her hair, binds her breasts, and dons thick glasses and unostentatious masculine apparel—is the disappearance of the necklace, which Fariba now hides under her clothing, where it is no longer visible. Fariba’s performance of masculinity entails covering up the Hand of Fatima, effectively closeting the symbol and containing its potential excess of signification. Less directly, the symbol also reads as suggestive of the main character’s Islamic cultural belonging and the possibility of Islamic faith. Three filmic sequences in particular highlight the hamsa as a focal point and endow it with special meaning. The first two of these scenes unfold in restrooms, a setting that appears at least eight times in the film, emphasizing the very public and revealing dimensions of private hygienic and sexual acts that typically unfold there. During Fariba and Siamak’s first encounter in an airport restroom, Fariba’s hamsa pendant communicates to Siamak that they are kindred spirits and ushers in a moment of sincere and meaningful communication between the two asylum seekers. When Fariba accidentally drops her necklace on the floor, her laxity and inattention indicate vulnerability. Speaking Farsi, Siamak interprets the ornament as a sign of kinship—“My mother had one like it when I was little”—and Fariba acknowledges that they have something in common, the need for protection: “It will keep us safe.” This brief exchange establishes Fariba and Siamak as an alternative family under the protection of a figurative mother, the venerated Fatima, daughter of the prophet Muhammad; soon they will fulfill familial duties by comforting one another, forging a connection that persists even after Siamak’s death, when Fariba buries him and takes over the task of writing letters, as Siamak, to his parents. Their connection has queer dimensions, not only because of Fariba’s sexuality, which is the reason she leaves Iran, but also because the two characters later become symbolically one through Fariba’s gender masquerade. This symbolic and spiritually coded family model resonates with Gayatri Gopinath’s thesis that “queer diasporic cultural forms suggest alternative forms of collectivity and communal belonging that redefine home outside of a logic of blood, purity, authenticity, and patrilineal descent” (187). Fariba and Siamak’s first conversation also draws a spiritual connection between them, Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone’s „Fremde Haut“ 171 suggesting symbolic shelter under the divine maternal Fatima, who stands in for the presence—or perhaps suggests the absence—of faith. Read in this way, the bathroom scene with the amulet communicates to the viewer Fariba’s potential Muslim identity before the film discloses any information about her sexuality; the narrative can therefore be said to highlight an ambiguous construction of religion and faith over the clear articulation of sexual identity. Also set in a restroom, but this time at the cabbage plant, a later scene introduces the romance between Fariba / Siamak and Anne through the medium of the hamsa pendant. As seen in the above conversation with Siamak, the amulet functions to bring two people into close proximity and sets the foundation for intimacy between them; here it is again linked with Islam, albeit indirectly. After a near encounter with customs officials searching the factory for undocumented workers, whom Fariba / Siamak evades, with Anne’s help, by hiding in a vat of shredded cabbage, Fariba / Siamak goes to the locker room to clean up. The Hand of Fatima hangs over Fariba / Siamak’s shirt collar, an unintentional display, the accidental consequence of the panicked search for a hiding place. The visibility of the pendant makes possible a revelation or betrayal through its signification, and Fariba / Siamak intervenes and interprets its meaning in order to contain what it could communicate about her / his identity. A close-up shows Anne touching the amulet, and a surprised Fariba / Siamak seizes the amulet, pushes it out of sight, and turns away from Anne. These gestures demonstrate that Fariba / Siamak is hiding something that the amulet could communicate, and because of the hamsa ’s multiple connotations, we can read this as an indication not only of gender and sexuality, but also of Islamic faith. Seeking to contain the amulet’s meaning, Fariba / Siamak responds, “Hand von Fatima, zum Schutz.” The ensuing exchange between Anne and Fariba / Siamak on the subject of the veil, mentioned above, indirectly references Iranian law and Islamic traditions through a discussion of the different permissible kinds of veils while simultaneously bringing the two women together. The conversation ends with Anne asking Fariba / Siamak out for a drink; while the invitation demonstrates that Anne is still unaware of Fariba’s gender, the options she offers—first beer, then coffee as an alternative—indicate cultural sensitivity and an attentiveness to Fariba / Siamak’s potential faith. In this scene, Anne reads the hamsa as connoting Muslim belonging, but not as a symbol of femininity, because Fariba / Siamak successfully passes as a man. The Hand of Fatima comes up again in a later conversation between Fariba / Siamak and Anne, where it explicitly communicates femininity, but this time it is only mentioned and not seen. In this scene, Fariba / Siamak and Anne hold hands for the first time, and Anne compares her / his biological hand to the hamsa. This sequence is significant because it signals a turning point in 172 Faye Stewart the stakes of their romance and emphasizes the dangers Fariba / Siamak faces, with German-embodied racism posing a particular threat. At the end of their first date, Anne and Fariba / Siamak sit side by side in the back seat of a car; in the driver’s seat is Anne’s jealous ex-boyfriend Uwe, who has had too much to drink. The sequence begins with a close-up of Anne’s hand as she plays with Fariba / Siamak’s, which Anne describes as “wie dein Anhänger”; an extreme close-up shows Fariba / Siamak’s hand and then cuts to Anne’s face. The meaning of Anne’s statement is left open: What does she see that reminds her of the revered Fatima? The prophet’s daughter, who in the Islamic faith represents an idealized femininity in personifying the gendered values of chastity and moral purity, heterosexuality and fertility, and loyalty and respect, and whose husband is viewed in the Shia tradition as the infallible first Imam, would seem quite different from Fariba / Siamak. The focus on Anne’s expression as her smile fades into a serious look suggests a realization: she reads Fariba / Siamak’s hand, and its similarity to Fatima’s, as an indicator of femaleness, and perhaps nothing more than that. However, before Anne verbalizes this, the conversation is interrupted by flashing blue lights. The verbalization of gender and sexuality thus unfolds only indirectly and incompletely, while its potential consequences for Fariba, which include the very real possibilities of exposure, deportation, and death, are embodied by police officers who approach the car and single out Fariba / Siamak for interrogation. This scene points up racial profiling and double standards in German bureaucracy: though the police pull over the car due to the inebriated Uwe’s reckless driving, they instead target Fariba / Siamak for a cross-examination and reprimand her / him for leaving the district in which s / he was granted asylum. The white German Uwe, by contrast, gets off without a penalty, even though he endangered the lives of his passengers. Policing the movements of a refugee therefore seems a higher priority in law enforcement than penalizing those who threaten public safety. The Hand of Fatima appears for the last time at Siamak’s burial place, where Fariba / Siamak removes the necklace and leaves it on her / his fellow countryman’s grave. A semi close-up shot shows Fariba / Siamak’s hand releasing the amulet, thereby again linking the symbolic and the biological hand. But unlike the other two key sequences analyzed above, in which the hamsa facilitates conversation and brings people together, this grave scene features no dialogue. Its meaning, then, must be tied to what it communicates to the spectator, and its placement in the film provides contextual clues: the scene follows a shot of Fariba / Siamak and Anne riding down a country road in a stolen car that Fariba sells to buy a false German passport, and it precedes the one and only love scene between Anne and Fariba, who finally presents herself to her lover as a woman. Since theft is forbidden in Islam and Fariba abandons the hamsa just as she be- Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone’s „Fremde Haut“ 173 comes a documented “German,” the grave scene could signify a turn away from Muslim faith, perhaps as part of an assimilation with German cultural identity. But this seems too simple. Whereas the context implies that Fariba has, in a conversation not included in the diegesis, by now revealed her female identity to Anne (and, by extension, her homosexuality), and that Anne not only still desires her but is willing to break the law to help her stay in Germany, the relinquishing of the hamsa on the grave suggests that Fariba bestows it on Siamak as a gesture of love, respect, or gratitude, perhaps in recognition of their queer kinship and to thank him for the use of his identity. It could also note a symbolic death, that of Fariba / Siamak, who will now resume her identity as Fariba. We might recall that the Hand of Fatima is a protective talisman, and perhaps in leaving it at Siamak’s grave, Fariba unwittingly relinquishes the protection it provides and opens herself up to danger. Indeed, Fariba will soon encounter both physical and diplomatic violence when she is attacked and then deported. Siamak’s grave is also the site of the one isolated scene in Fremde Haut that reads as an unambiguous sign of Islam. Here, too, hands play a role, but they carry less symbolic weight than in the earlier grave scene; rather, it is the image of Fariba holding her hands up in prayer that gives them a spiritual meaning. After burying Siamak’s corpse in a field near the refugee home, Fariba is shown in silhouette standing over his grave: with hands held out, palms up, and head slightly bent forward, she recites a prayer in Arabic. This is one of the few parts of the film dialogue that are not translated in the subtitles, neither in the German version nor in the English, so the content of the prayer is unavailable to a non-Arabic-speaking spectator. Nonetheless, the attentive listener can hear one word repeated several times: “Allah.” Fariba’s stance, the position of her hands, and the repetition of the Arabic name for God indicate that the incantation is Islamic and imply that she is Muslim. The lighting and camera distance also suggest a spiritual moment: a long shot emphasizes Fariba’s surroundings, and the sky behind her colorfully displays the warm hues of a rising or setting sun. Although the mood is somber, the transitional lighting suggests a new beginning, a rebirth of Siamak in the body of Fariba, or a new life for Fariba as Siamak. Because Fariba is dressed in her friend’s clothing, it is possible to interpret her performance of Muslim identity as a part of her male masquerade; however, this is an insufficient explanation for her prayer, because Fariba is alone in the scene, and so she does not appear to be performing for anyone else. Rather, she is performing her spiritual duty as a new member of Siamak’s family, laying him to rest, or perhaps giving him the Islamic burial rites he might have wished for. The prayer raises the possibility that Fariba is a believing Muslim but practices her faith privately, when no one else is watching, possibly for fear of discrimination. This sets her apart from other refugees at the Frankfurt detention 174 Faye Stewart center who practice their faith more publicly, particularly a group of men who are shown praying in a community room and are seen doing so by both immigrants and German authorities. Having worked as a translator in Tehran, Fariba would likely have been familiar enough with German culture to know about rising xenophobic and Islamophobic violence in the 1990s and 2000s, directed especially at Muslim immigrants from Turkey and members of German-Turkish communities. With her linguistic fluency and knowledge of German culture, Fariba becomes a prime example of the kind of cultural pluralism defined by Bassam Tibi in Europa ohne Identität? Fariba thus represents a counterexample to the xenophobic stereotype of the unassimilated Muslim migrant that has featured so prominently in ethnocentric discourses. Though the most palpable violence Fariba encounters in the film is linked to her gender and sexuality, she certainly also encounters threatening anti-Muslim and anti-foreigner sentiments. While Fariba cannot hide her foreignness, especially when she is pretending to be Siamak, who does not speak German well, she does seem to downplay or perhaps even disavow her Muslim identity. To be outwardly visible as Muslim in a country where Muslims are a minority could make Fariba even more vulnerable than she already is as a closeted, cross-dressing asylum seeker using a false name. The film clearly demonstrates that avoiding persecution and ensuring her survival are Fariba’s primary goals, and, by including the prayer scene at Siamak’s grave, suggests that these priorities take precedence over Fariba’s spiritual life. She closets her religious identity, just as she closets her gender and sexuality, in an attempt to avoid becoming a target of violence or bureaucratic intervention. Although Fariba never openly or unambiguously articulates her Muslim belonging or faith, several references to Islam in the film serve to mark her and her entire identity as a refugee as Other under the label of religion. Indeed, the only times that Muslim identity surfaces at the level of dialogue, it takes the form of veiled insults voiced by others that serve to further marginalize Fariba / Siamak. The xenophobic attitudes and violent threats such labels entail are constructed as omnipresent, embodied in the figures of Uwe and Andi, Anne’s provincial friends who consistently antagonize Fariba / Siamak. Uwe, who is doubly motivated by his narrow-mindedness and jealousy of the attention that his ex-girlfriend Anne lavishes on Fariba / Siamak, serves as an especially vocal mouthpiece for ethnocentric and racist commentaries. For instance, he repeatedly calls Fariba / Siamak “Ayatollah,” a Shia Islamic title given to high-ranking clerics. The name indirectly suggests that Fariba / Siamak is Muslim, but though it is a sign of great respect in Islam, Uwe employs it as a slur. Uttered in the factory locker room, Uwe’s insult—“Na, Ayatollah, wasserscheu? ”—criticizes Fariba / Siamak’s avoidance of the workplace shower and conflates religion with Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone’s „Fremde Haut“ 175 ethnicity and hygiene. Although Uwe uses the name “Ayatollah” more than once, elsewhere in the film he uses other labels to express his cultural racism, for instance when referring to Fariba / Siamak’s ethnicity as Mexican or Tajikistani. Thus, the use of an Islamic title for Fariba / Siamak functions here less as a characterization of the refugee’s Muslim identity and more as a catch-all for all forms of otherness and ultimately works to construct Uwe as an embodiment of the devastating potential of provincialism and racism in contemporary Germany. Uwe’s intercultural incompetence and his disrespect for Islamic practices is demonstrated when he and his friends read Fariba / Siamak’s refusal of a cocktail as an indication of Muslim identity. They know that alcohol is forbidden in Islam, and if Fariba / Siamak were an observant Muslim, s / he would not drink or consume any intoxicants. His friend Sabine (played by Nina Vorbrodt), who herself does not partake because she is pregnant, embodies hypocrisy by pressuring Fariba / Siamak: “Auf ex, Ayatollah! ” Uwe takes this a step further and becomes physically threatening when he shoves a glass in Fariba / Siamak’s face and says, “Komm schon, Allah drückt heute ein Auge zu,” to which the refugee reluctantly responds by gulping down the shot. In other scenes, Fariba / Siamak refuses alcoholic drinks when they are offered, a repeated scenario that consciously plays with the possibility of Muslim faith. But because the motivations for not drinking are not directly addressed in the film, and because Fariba / Siamak sometimes breaks this rule, it is difficult to interpret reluctance to drink as a sign of faith. Indeed, it seems likely that Fariba / Siamak refuses alcohol not for spiritual reasons, but rather for fear of losing control over the masquerade, and that s / he is willing to drink when a refusal to do so would entail the threat of physical violence or exposure, as in this confrontation with Sabine and Uwe. The one and only scene in which Fariba willingly imbibes and shows pleasure in doing so is in an intimate setting with Anne, when having tea “deutscher Art” (with rum) and “persischer Art” (with sugar) is a medium for communication about their cultures. This scene signals a transition: it is the first time that Fariba partakes in the consumption of alcohol without being pressured to do so, and it thus distances drinking from her potential Muslim identity and brings it into closer association with her feeling safe and desiring to share something about herself with another person. Alcohol also accompanies a touching exchange between Fariba / Siamak and her / his refugee home roommate Maxim (played by Yevgeni Sitokhin). Though Fariba / Siamak turns down Maxim’s invitation to imbibe with him, the latter toasts him: “dass er wird auch eine freie Mann [ sic ].” By contrast with Uwe, who forces Fariba / Siamak to drink, Maxim only offers her / him a drink, thus bringing a more affirmative obligation to expression in his toast. The film’s end ele- 176 Faye Stewart vates Maxim’s toast to the status of prophecy: unable to live openly as a woman in Iran or Germany, Fariba retransforms into Siamak on the plane, presumably to return to Iran as a free man. The end of the film entails a metaphorical death for Fariba, who can now appear only under the veil of Siamak, and lays bare the ultimate paradox of identity with which she must live for the foreseeable future. The final words, spoken by the protagonist in a voiceover in Farsi, demonstrate this conundrum: “It’s hard for me to leave behind the woman I love but I’ll do everything I can to return to her again as soon as possible.” The woman to whom she alludes is a double-entendre: it is both Anne, who watches helplessly as Fariba is taken away, and Fariba herself, who dons the Siamak masquerade just as the voiceover is heard. The woman Fariba must leave behind also embodies the difficult coexistence of Fariba’s faith and desire. Fariba would clearly prefer to stay in Germany as a queer woman, which might have been possible with the fake passport she purchased, had she not been attacked by Uwe and Andi, reported by Anne’s son Melvin, and taken into police custody. But she must now return to Iran, where she either faces the death penalty or a life in disguise. While life in Germany entails hiding her Muslim faith and culture, a return to Iran requires closeting her femininity and her queerness. The ending of the film reads as an indictment of both countries, asking whether Muslim and lesbian identities can really only coexist covertly, symbolically, or in silence. Maccarone’s Fremde Haut is a rich and complex visual text that ultimately asks more questions than it answers, leaving matters of identity unresolved and open for viewers to decode. I have attempted to solve some of these mysteries by reading visual clues as indications of the multiple ways in which queer and Muslim identity symbolically dovetail while signifying differently. Whereas Fremde Haut overtly thematizes the closeting of gender and sexuality, the mediation of religion and belief, although less explicit, plays an important role in the story. Ultimately, I read Fariba as the embodiment of a potential—and at best partial—“Muslim turn” that is polemical in its openness and interpellates the film spectator in determining its meaning. By examining recurring symbols in the film, the viewer can trace a narrative of identity, but even a well-substantiated interpretation of such multivalent signs is open to debate. None of the film’s symbols function unambiguously, so the many facets of Fariba’s and Fariba / Siamak’s identities still remain something of a mystery to be solved anew. We could interpret the film as taking up Tibi’s notion of cultural pluralism, indicating fluency in multiple cultures, and complicating it by suggesting a form of queer Muslim pluralism. Muslims, and specifically LGBTIQ Muslims, are not always readable or visible as such; they take on diverse and multifaceted identities and embodiments. Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone’s „Fremde Haut“ 177 notes 1 Special thanks to Hajir Khoshbou for translating unsubtitled parts of the film. This essay benefited from Simone Pfleger’s and Heidi Denzel de Tirado’s valuable feedback. Thank you to the participants in my Fall 2011 graduate seminar for their contributions to a discussion of the film, in particular Chris Fowler, India Karapanou, Chaka Mason, and Chad van Gorden. 2 The number of recent documentaries about LGBTIQ Muslims also attests to a growing interest in the real-lived intersections of Islamic faith with queer identities and desires, particularly as they are shaped by intercultural flows between Western Europe and the Middle East. These include the British television movie Gay Muslims (dir. Cara Levan, 2006), the Norwegian Gender Me (dir. Nefise Özkal Lorentzen, 2008), two documentaries about transsexuals in Iran, Inside Out (dir. Zohreh Shayesteh, 2006) and Be Like Others (dir. Tanaz Esheghian, 2008), Parvez Sharma’s international and American productions A Jihad for Love (2007) and A Sinner in Mecca (2015), and an American production set in Jerusalem, City of Borders (dir. Yun Suh, 2009). 3 For Tatort, Maccarone also made Erntedank e. V. (2008) and Borowski und die Sterne (2009)� 4 Badruddin Khan verifies that there have been “incidents of death threats, and actual executions, of Iranian gay students who had gone back to Iran” (288). However, such claims do not necessarily include gay women. Scholars suggest that such penalties are more likely to be carried out against men than women. According to Roshanak Kheshti, “homosexuality (when interpreted by the courts as sodomy) is punishable by death, according to shari’a law” (164). Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP , 1998. Baraheni, Reza. The Crowned Cannibals: Writings on Repression in Iran. New York: Vintage, 1977. Butler, Judith and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge, UK : Polity, 2013. Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia UP , 1993. Çinar, Alev. “Subversion and Subjugation in the Public Sphere: Secularism and the Islamic Headscarf in Turkey.” Visualizing Secularism and Religion: Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, India. Ed. Alev Çinar, Srirupa Roy and Maha Yahya. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2012. 25-46. El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe . Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. 178 Faye Stewart Fremde Haut ( Unveiled ). Dir. Angelina Maccarone. Perf. Jasmin Tabatabai, Anneke Kim Sarnau, Navíd Akhavan. MMM Film Zimmermann, 2005. DVD � Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke UP , 2005. Habib, Samar. “Introduction: Islam and Homosexuality.” Islam and Homosexuality. Vol. 1. Ed. Samar Habib. Santa Barbara, CA : Praeger, 2010. xvii-lxii. Jeremiah, Emily. “Touching Distance: Gender, Germanness, and the Gaze in Angelina Maccarone’s Fremde Haut (2005).” German Life and Letters 64.4 (October 2011): 588-600. Web. 24 April 2012. Khan, Badruddin. “Not-So-Gay Life in Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s.” Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature. Ed. Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe. New York: New York UP , 1997. 275-96. Kheshti, Roshanak. “Cross-Dressing and Gender (Tres)Passing: The Transgender Move as a Site of Agential Potential in the New Iranian Cinema.” Hypatia 24.3 (Summer 2009): 158-77. Web. 10 October 2011. Kramer, Max. “Sexual Orientation: The Ideological Underpinnings of the Gay Advance in Muslim-Majority Societies as Witnessed in Online Chat Rooms.” Islam and Homosexuality. Vol. 1. Ed. Samar Habib. Santa Barbara, CA : Praeger, 2010. 133-62. Lewis, Rachel. “The Cultural Politics of Lesbian Asylum: Angelina Maccarone’s Unveiled and the Case of the Lesbian Asylum-Seeker.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 12.3-4 (December 2010): 424-43. Web. 4 October 2011. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Disaporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton UP , 2001. Murray, Stephen O. “The Will Not to Know: Islamic Accommodations of Male Homosexuality.” Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature. Ed. Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe. New York: New York UP , 1997. 14-54. Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke UP , 2007. Ponzanesi, Sandra. “Europe in Motion: Migrant Cinema and the Politics of Encounter.” Social Identities 17.1 ( January 2011): 73-92. Schindler, Stephan K. and Lutz Koepnick. “Against the Wall? The Global Imaginary of German Cinema.” The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present. Ed. Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 2007. 1-21. Schwarzer, Alice, ed. Die große Verschleierung: Für Integration, gegen Islamismus. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2010. Scott, Joan Wallach. The Politics of the Veil. Princeton: Princeton UP , 2007. Stewart, Faye. “22 October 2005: Winner of Hessian Film Award Fremde Haut Queers Dual Binaries of Sexual and National Identity.” A New History of German Cinema. Ed. Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson. Rochester, NY : Camden House, 2012. 596-601. Tibi, Bassam. Europa ohne Identität? Die Krise der multikulturellen Gesellschaft. Munich: Bertelsmann, 1998. Villarejo, Amy. Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire. Durham: Duke UP , 2003. The authors Heidi Denzel de Tirado Georgia State University Langdale Hall 836 33 Gilmer Street SE Atlanta, GA hdenzel@gsu.edu Faye Stewart Georgia State University Langdale Hall 832 33 Gilmer Street SE Atlanta, GA fayestewart@gsu.edu David N. Coury University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Humanistic Studies, TH 331 UW-Green Bay, 2420 Nicolet Dr Green Bay, WI 54311-7001 couryd@uwgb.edu Priscilla Layne Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures Campus Box 3160, Dey Hall 426 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599- 3160 playne@email.unc.edu Berna Guenelli Grinnell College 31A Alumni Recitation Hall Grinnell, IA 50112 guenelib@grinnell.edu Olivia Landry University of Pittsburgh 1518 Cathedral of Learning Pittsburgh, PA 15260 olandry@pitt.edu Lindsay J. Lawton University of Minnesota 320 Folwell Hall 9 Pleasant St SE Minneapolis, MN 55455 ljlawton@umn.edu Band 47 2014 Heft 1 - 2 Harald Höbus ch, Linda K . Worle y (Hr sg.) ISSN 0010-1338 Band 47 T h e m e n h eft: Fra ming I s la m: Faith, Fa s c in ation, a nd Fea r in Twe nty- F irs t- C e ntur y G e rm a n C ulture G a s th e ra u s g e b e r: H eidi D e n z el d e T ira do und Faye S tewa r t H eidi D e n z el d e T ira do a nd Faye S tewa r t: I ntrod u c tion D avid N . Cour y: Wa y s of B elon gin g: N a vid Ke r m a ni a n d th e M u s lim Tu r n in Conte m pora r y G e r m a n L ite ratu re Pri s c illa L ayn e: B etwe e n P la y a n d M imi c r y : T h e L imit s of H u m a ni s m in Ve r rü c k t e s B lut B e rn a G u e n eli: R efra min g I s la m: T h e D e cou plin g of E th ni c ity fro m R eligion in Tu r ki s h- G e r m a n M e dia O livia L a ndr y: “ D on ’ t Pa ni c , I ’ m I s la mi c ” : Voi c in g R e s i s ta n ce th rou g h D o c u m e nta r y H eidi D e n z el d e T ira do: " I s la m L ig ht ” : G irly M u s lim Powe r a n d M od e rate I s la mi c M e n in G e r m a n S it co m s L ind s ay J . L awton: Tr uth in A dve r ti s in g: R e p re s e ntation s of Faith a n d B elon gin g a rou n d “ M u s lim ” Wo m e n ’ s M e m oir s Faye S tewa r t: F ilmin g Faith a n d D e s ire : E n codin g a n d D e codin g I d e ntitie s in A n g elin a M a c c a ron e ’ s Fre m d e H a ut periodicals.narr.de C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a t i o n a l e Z e i t s c h r i f t f ü r G e r m a n i s t i k I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k
