The integration of immigrants into a larger society begins at the local level. Turkish Berlin reveals how integration has been experienced by second-generation Turkish immigrant women in two neighborhoods in Berlin, Germany. While the neighborhoods are similar demographically, the lived experience of the residents is surprisingly different. Informed by first-person interviews with both public officials and immigrants, Annika Marlen Hinze makes clear that local integration policies—often created by officials who have little or no contact with immigrants—have significant effects on the assimilation of outsiders into a community and a society. Focusing on the Turkish neighborhoods of Kreuzberg and Neukölln, Hinze shows how a combination of local policy making and grassroots organizing have contributed to one neighborhood earning a reputation as a hip, multicultural success story and the other as a rougher neighborhood featuring problem schools and high rates of unemployment. Aided by her interviews, she describes how policy makers draw from their imaginations of urban space, immigrants, and integration to develop policies that do not always take social realities into consideration. She offers useful examples of how official policies can actually exacerbate the problems they are trying to help solve and demonstrates that a powerful history of grassroots organizing and resistance can have an equally strong impact on political outcomes. Employing spatial theory as a tool for understanding the complex processes of integration, Hinze asks two related questions: How do immigrants perceive themselves and their experiences in a new culture? And how are immigrants conceived of by politicians and policy makers? Although her research highlights the German–Turk experience in Berlin, her answers have implications that resonate far beyond the city’s limits.

This study of media and migrant communities in Germany’s capital city is a “model of clarity and rigor in its arguments” (Martin Stokes, University of Chicago). In this innovative and thought-provoking study, Kira Kosnick explores the landscape of Turkish-language broadcasting in Berlin. From twenty-four-hour radio broadcasting in Turkish to programming on Germany’s national public broadcasting and local public access channels, Germany’s largest immigrant minority has made its presence felt in German media. Satellite dishes have appeared in migrant neighborhoods all over the city, giving viewers access to Kurdish channels and broadcasts from Turkey. Kosnick draws on interviews with producers, her own participation in production work, and analysis of programs to elaborate a new approach to “migrant media” in relation to the larger cultural and political spaces through which immigrant life is imagined and created.

Kulkul presents her ethnographic work with Turkish Muslim women in Berlin as evidence that community is not an entity but is produced by instrumentalizing specific forms of identification and boundary-making. In examining the role of community in the case of her participants, Kulkul finds that religion and culture are important not for the values they perpetuate, but for their role in forming and sustaining the community. She looks at the importance of boundaries and especially their reciprocity. Social boundaries are a set of codes of exclusion often used against migrants and refugees, while symbolic boundaries are typically understood as the way one defines one’s own group. Kulkul argues that these two types of boundaries tend to trigger each other and thus be mutually reinforcing. At the same time, she presents a picture of everyday life from the perspective of migrants and the children of migrants in a cosmopolitan European city – Berlin. A valuable read for scholars of migration and culture, which will especially interest scholars focused on Europe.

Provides a rich examination of how Turkish immigrants and their children created spaces of belonging in West German society.

This book examines the construction and articulation of diasporic cultural identity among the Turkish working-class youth in Kreuzberg (Little Istanbul), Berlin. This work primarily suggests that the contemporary diasporic consciousness is built on two antithetical axes: particularism and universalism. The presence of this dichotomy derives from the unresolved historical dialogues that the diasporic youths experience between continuity and disruption, essence and positionality, tradition and translation, homogeneity and difference, past and future, 'here' and 'there', 'roots' and 'routes', and local and global.

The "Berlin Republic" has become the key concept of post-Cold War Germany and as such has been widely discussed inside as well as outside Germany. Symbolized by the move of the government from Bonn to Berlin it signals all the tangible and intangible changes in Germany's position in the world that have taken place during the 1990s. Well known German authors, decision-makers, and cultural leaders as well as internationally renowned experts on German affairs contribute to this volume, examining various aspects of the New Germany and its old/new capital, such as history, foreign policy, art, architecture, and culture. In this way, the reader gains a varied but comprehensive picture of Germany after unification as perceived by its neighbors, friends, and allies.