2024-04-30 00:58:47
Last week the German president Frank Walter Steinmeier went to Ankara for the centenary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Germany and Türkiye. The visit which was supposed to focus on German-Turkish relations in the German media (and not only those) ultimately featured not the president but a 66kg kebab on his skewer.
Steinmaier, in fact, took it with him, frozen, on the presidential plane together with whoever had produced it: the Berliner Arif Keleş, owner of a shop selling doner kebabs, third generation of those “Gastarneiter” who arrived in Germany in the 1960s when, in the period of economic boom, the country was in desperate need of unskilled labour. That kebab, which Steinmeier helped cut by performing with a long sharp knife during a reception in Istanbul, interpreting it as a gesture of intercultural exchange to highlight the successful achievements of the 2.7 million Germans who have their roots in Turkey , sparked an uproar.
According to many Turks/Germans the president has reduced their contribution to Germany to an offensive cliché. Prominent figures from journalism, culture, research and business, with origins in Turkey but born and raised in Germany, have taken to social media to criticize what they see as a clumsy attempt to represent the descendants of the “guest worker” program ”, without taking them seriously or treating them as equals. Almost a joke. Ozan Demircan, Istanbul correspondent of the economic and financial newspaper Handelsblatt, pointed out that Steinmeier could have chosen to highlight numerous successful Turkish-German figures, such as Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, the founders of BioNTech, the company that together with Pfizer developed the first COVID-19 vaccine authorized in Europe, or director İlker Çatak, who received an Oscar nomination this year. “Millions of Gastarbeiter helped build the German Wirtschaftswunder,” he wrote on X/Twitter, referring to the post-war “economic miracle,” “and the German president brings a kebab maker to Turkey.”
Tuncay Özdamar, of the public broadcaster WDR, the public radio and television broadcaster of North Rhine-Westphalia, criticized the choice to highlight the popular streetfood, calling it “stuff from the past” and “banal”, adding: «If you visit Italy you will not sure bring the pizza.” Jörg Lau, international correspondent for Die Zeit, wrote simply: «Cringe», embarrassing. It didn’t go any better with Turkish-German politicians, former SPD Bundestag member Lale Akgün commented: “apparently the kebab has integrated better than the Turks who have to resort to the rotating spit to get the recognition they deserve” .
Akgün was born in Istanbul and, according to her own statements, came to Germany at the age of nine. “While people of Turkish origin fight for their identity and a place in society, the federal president, probably with the best intentions (!), places them behind the counter of snack bars.” Linke member of the Bundestag Gökay Akbulut would have liked another gift from Steinmeier for the Ankara government: “considering the sorry state of the Turkish constitutional state, I would have advised the president to bring Erdogan a copy of the European Convention on Human Rights in Turkish”.
In fact the same opinion as Deniz Yücel, the Turkish-German correspondent of the Tageszeitung and Welt, who from 27 February 2017 to 16 February 2018 was imprisoned in Turkey for alleged “terrorist propaganda”, a detention which the Turkish Constitutional Court later defined as illegal. Yücel underlined that Steinmeier did not say a word about the human rights situation in Turkey, a missed opportunity that is much more serious than the spit affair. But the kebab won over everything: the fact that Steinmeier was also accompanied by the mayor of Hanover Belit Onay, the director of DHL Mustafa Tonguc and by the writer Dincer Gucyeter, has ended up in the shadows behind the symbolism of streetfood meat preparation. The only one to rejoice in the situation was himself Arif Keleşthe owner of the place where the kebab came from, whose grandfather worked for years in a German factory before opening his restaurant in 1986. Keleş, even before leaving for Ankara, declared that he was proud that Steinmeier took him “to the homeland of my ancestors”, considering it a “great honor”.
2024-04-30 00:58:47