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Turks constituted by far the largest non-German ethnic group in the city. By the late 1970s West Berlin had emerged as the second largest “Turkish city” after Istanbul. Of course this had not been the plan when Turkish laborers were invited to Germany in the early 1960s; they were expected to remain for only a year or two. But many stayed on with extended residency permits and brought their families over from Turkey to join them. Single men married and founded new families in West Berlin. Like immigrant groups before them, they settled in the poorer parts of town, such as Wedding, Neukölln, and above all Kreuzberg. At the turn of the century the streets around Oranienplatz in Kreuzberg had swarmed with Silesians and smelled of cabbage; seventy years later this area, with some 30,000 Turks, smelled (in the words of Turkish writer Aras Oren) “of mutton, thyme, and garlic.” Berliners called it “Little Istanbul.”

Most of the Turks living in “Little Istanbul” and other heavily Turkish parts of West Berlin did not in fact come from the old Ottoman capital but from villages in central and eastern Anatolia. Accustomed to the rituals and mores of rural village life, they sought to recreate their native environment in the gray streets and crumbling tenements of West Berlin. They established storefront mosques, cafés, restaurants, and countless kabob stands. They tethered their goats in the courtyards of their Mietskasernen. On Sundays they took over entire sections of the Tiergarten for community picnics. They set up small Turkish shops in the abandoned Bülowstrasse U-Bahn station and on weekends turned a stretch of the Landwehr Canal into a giant souk. Many Turkish women went around in their traditional garb of head scarves and wide pants under their skirts, a style which in Berlin became known as “Kreuzberg purdah.”

In reality, even “Little Istanbul” was not solidly Turkish. Kreuzberg itself, located in the southeastern corner of West Berlin and literally up against the Wall, became famous for its diverse population of punks, skinheads, Sixties radicals, students, and hip artists. It was said that if West Berlin was “the insane-asylum of the Federal Republic,” Kreuzberg was its “lock-down room.” But while its denizens thought of this scruffy district as the “real Berlin,” visitors from other parts of Germany tended to wonder if they hadn’t landed on the Bosphorus, or maybe Mars; the place sure didn’t look German to them. Nor, for that matter, did it seem much like home to conservative West Berliners, who complained about being “overrun” by people with whom they had little in common. Claiming to speak for his fellow citizens, Heinrich Lummer, West Berlin’s archconservative interior senator in the early 1980s, said of Kreuzberg: “I’m not in my homeland here; that’s been stolen from me by the foreigners. The whole environment is strange to me. The weirdness begins with the look and goes on to the smell.” While most Berliners who were bothered by the Turkish presence contented themselves with complaints to the authorities and irate letters to the newspapers, some openly insulted the Turks in the streets, calling them Kanake. The city’s young hipsters did not resort to such tactics, but even they rarely had anything to do with their Turkish neighbors. The British journalist Adam Lebor, who studied Muslim communities in Europe and America in the 1960s and 1970s, was shocked by the fact that his liberal friends in Kreuzberg “never once introduced me to a Turkish speaker.”

Tensions between natives and foreign workers increased dramatically when the German economy plunged into recession following the Arab oil boycott of 1973. As unemployment rates shot up, Turks and other foreigners were accused of holding down jobs that otherwise might have gone to Germans. Following the dictum “The Moor has done his work, the Moor can go,” Bonn instructed companies not to renew their Gastarbeiters’ contracts if German natives applied for these positions. The ruling had little effect, however, because few Germans wanted to take the menial low-paying jobs that the foreigners performed.