Two Strikes, You're Out: Ethnic and Religious Boundaries On Turkish-German Identity

This paper will examine identity and belonging in Germany, in relation to Turkish-German identity. Based on interviews with German, Turkish-German and non-Turkish Muslim individuals, as well as media analysis of newspaper articles published over the past decade, it seeks to identify national boundaries of belonging. Moving beyond civil inclusion, it examines ethnic and religious boundaries of exclusion. Overall, it argues that Germany has a fuzzy national identity (specifically arising out of nationalism severely constricted by historical experience) and thus creates/maintains its identity vis a vis “the other.” While first identified as the other in terms of ethnicity after the guest worker program of the mid-20^th century resulted in permanent resettlement, “the Turk” has come to be perceived as a present manifestation of otherness in religious terms, with Islam increasingly posited as antithetical to Germanness (i.e. violent, aggressive, disorderly, criminal, lawless, anti-liberal etc.). 

While bounded from the outside by mainstream German society, Turkish German “insiders” also contribute to the construction of this identity. This paper thus argues that in reaction to/living with this paradigm, young Turkish-Germans have come to focus on their religious rather than ethnic identity, i.e. being Muslim as primary. Interestingly, counter-narratives are constructed utilizing parallel categorizations. This paper explores the motivations behind this identification, as well as current attempts to moved beyond it—to break down the walls between “being Muslim” and “being German”, effectively de-securitizing Islamic identity, making religious practice more transparent, fostering multicultural activities and contact between Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Throughout, it questions whether such “dual” or “multiple” identification is possible in the contemporary German state, characterized by a long-standing, stagnant national paradigm where “us” is defined versus—or perhaps even via—“them.”