Berlin – There is a feeling that haunts me for a lifetime. I can’t back it up with facts, can’t provide evidence. But it’s there and I can’t shake it off.
At high school, in eighth grade, I got stuck. It was a terrible year – my family learned that my sister, then in her early twenties, had multiple sclerosis, a nerve disease. I spent most of my school holidays – from autumn to Pentecost – in the hospital and doctors’ offices by her side. My class teacher knew, there was no psychological support at my school. My grades got worse and worse and at some point it became apparent that I would not be able to take the school year. Not surprising and no end of the world.
One day my teacher took me aside and told me not to repeat the eighth grade, but to switch to a comprehensive school. High school would just not be the right path for me, it would be too tough. “You are doing a high school diploma, then an apprenticeship, for example in retail, and that’s enough for you too – it’s also much easier to start a family this way.”
How did she discover that my goal was to start a family? Why did she not back me up, but tried to convince me of a supposedly easier way of life? Did she see in me a Turkish woman who didn’t want to and couldn’t achieve much? Did my German classmates also receive such recommendations? Was that discrimination or am I telling myself that?
I didn’t ask myself these questions until years later. At that moment, I believed my teacher. As so often, my father stepped in, argued with my class teacher and the school principal, and made me repeat the class. “Don’t listen to her,” he said. I didn’t even lose a school year because I slipped from G9 to G8.
The feeling that everyone is against me because my name is Miray Caliskan and comes from an immigrant family still haunts me sometimes. I feel disadvantaged because I have had such negative experiences countless times. I was looking for a full year after a traineeship position for my bachelor’s degree, which I had completed with very good grades, and during this time I had to accept more than 20 rejections from various editorial offices before I was invited to an interview. There was never a reason, and that’s not common either. But the rejections hit me to the core, I cried a lot, worked on the side to kill the time, no longer understood the world and again I told myself that the problem had to be me, not the system.
Of course, other people from different backgrounds also have a hard time. But sometimes I have the feeling that I have to fight harder than my fellow men from German families to achieve my goals.
I am sure that after this text some will again accuse me of “swinging the club of racism”. As a woman from an immigrant family, I shouldn’t complain so much, as it is often said. That it would be good for me, that I would have to consider myself extremely lucky to be able to live in a country like Germany as a person of Turkish origin.
More columns by Miray Caliskan
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