Recommendations of the Editorial team
Where I come from, in the suburbs of Hamburg, there was a chicken grill and people went to the Christmas market during Advent. There was a museum and Christmas fairy tales in the local theater, which in turn was housed in a hall of the museum. There was an indoor swimming pool that always played “Greek Wine” and later Kool & The Gang and “Sussudio” by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey. People spoke of “guest workers”.
If you were progressive, you later bought “from the Turks”. Me, for example, licorice and wine gum. Even more progressive people bought vegetables. The Balkan spit in the Blue Adriatic was a stunner. The S-Bahn route in the suburb was extended to Hamburg. We became cosmopolitans.
Back in the late 1970s, when we temporarily lived in a high-rise housing estate in Kirchdorf-Süd, my mother told two narratives that were not yet called that: The young people must be taken off the streets. The Mean Streets of Kirchdorf. They then hung out outside the youth club, where there was a ping pong table, listening to Smokie and having a brush in their John Travolta jeans.
The even cooler ones re-enacted “Star Wars.” We went to training on the soccer field, and when it was winter and it was dark early in the evening, we were afraid that the robber Hotzenplotz was coming around the corner or a fellow rascal.
The other narrative was that whoever wasn’t hardworking and didn’t have a job would eventually end up sleeping under the bridge. Now the place was on the Elbe, but there were no bridges of this kind. There were huge motorway bridges and rest areas for truck drivers, places like those we knew from “file number XY… unsolved”.
Today there are kebab shops everywhere
The two narratives appear again in the coalition’s politics today. Friedrich Merz is worried about the “cityscape”. The mythical pedestrian zone of the 1970s, this former idyll of encounters and trade between department stores and shoe shops, between the North Sea and Budnikowsky, is considered dilapidated and looks that way. Today there are kebab shops everywhere. But people work there, just like people used to work at the snack bar. And others eat.
Merz probably means the unemployed subsidiaries who gather in groups around the city fountain. Or the young people who are bored near the parking lots at Aldi, Lidl and the local gas station at the gates of small towns.
Let’s put it this way: We know what he means, but the wording is a bit rough, and there was still a lot of outrage about it. At the end of his statement on the “problem in the cityscape,” Merz speaks of “repatriations.” They were “agreed upon in the coalition”. And he has nothing to take back!
Is Tahsim Durgun from Oldenburg, author of the bestseller “Mama, please learn German”, not wanted in the cityscape, as he suspects? Of course he is welcome. Because he, who wanted to become a teacher, is one of those who get up every morning and work diligently, i.e. the ideal bourgeois type that Lars Klingbeil has in mind when he repeats these sentences like in the last Hubertus Heil cabinet: “We need hard-working hands and clever minds.”
And if Tahsim Durgun doesn’t get up in the morning, it doesn’t matter because he is now a successful writer. And he never had any doubts about his parents’ work ethic. Now, at the age of 28, he has moved out of his parents’ apartment and rented an apartment next door. It is perhaps not an exemplary narrative for an integration story. But in any case, it’s better to hang around at the Frankfurt Book Fair than to sleep under bridges.