It’s completely natural for Engin to bring two cultures together – and finally play what was missing for far too long: German-Turkish indie rock. We met the band.
If you want to know exactly: The blue Benz that Engin poses in front of on the cover of their new album is a W126. It was built mainly in the 1980s, and in large numbers: the Mercedes-Benz W126 is considered the most frequently built luxury sedan of all time. A comparatively simple vehicle, at least compared to its S-Class predecessor, the W116. Anyone who still needed a little bling bought the so-called baroque rims. But they weren’t necessary to cover the two thousand kilometers between Germany and Turkey. And one can assume that the W126 has mastered this more often than any other automobile.
Because the W126 is more than just a means of transportation. He is a symbol. For a promise of advancement. For a much too repressed part of German history. But also for successful integration. Those Turks living in Germany, who were still called guest workers at the time, loved the W126. Anyone who arrived in their old home with a W126 signaled that their stay in their new home was a successful one. Even today, the W126 is an integral part of the streets of Turkish cities; The classic cars are kept fit for the present in special workshops.
A present into which Engin sends their third album SAG MIR ALMANYA. An album that can be read as a commentary on current conditions. But that also formulates a blank space, precisely because it captures a German-Turkish naturalness in tones that has never really been self-evident and is becoming less and less self-evident in these times – in society, in politics, but also quite mundanely in the pop music landscape of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2026.
From the Pop Academy to Anadolu Rock
Engin was founded in 2021 when guitarist and singer Engin Devekiran, who would give the project its name, completed a second degree at a very German institution after a master’s degree in psychology: the Popakademie Baden-Württemberg in Mannheim. The debut album was released two years later. NACHT was indie rock with German lyrics, trained at the Hamburg School, compatible with German mainstream pop. The fact that Devekiran’s father had come from Istanbul before he fell in love with a woman from Baden could only be heard in a few words.
A statement followed in 2024 with MESAFELER. Engin covered classics of Anadolu rock, Turkish folk songs and songs by Baris Manço, Erkin Koray, Özdemir Erdogan and Cem Karaca. The album was the result of a process in which Devekiran discovered not only Turkish pop culture, but also a buried part of his identity.
Devekiran was born in 1993 and grew up near Karlsruhe. As a small child he had learned Turkish, but then forgot it again; His father also spoke “perfect Baden” for a long time. When he began to immerse himself in Turkish pop past and present during his studies in Mannheim, he barely understood what was being sung. His Turkish was no longer good enough. But when he first heard “Resimdeki Gözyaşları,” the famous song by Cem Karaca, “I had to cry, even though I barely understood a word.”
“That triggered a process,” remembers Devekiran, “a process that continues to this day.” A process in the course of which the psychology master Devekiran overcame an “inner alienation” and “resolved an identity conflict” – and in the course of which the band Engin grew into the only truly German-Turkish rock band in this country. A process that ultimately led to “SAG MIR ALMANYA”, Engin’s new album, on which German and Turkish are on an equal footing. Some of the songs have Turkish lyrics, some German – and some are bilingual. Last but not least, Devekiran’s poetry became more emotive and lush with the rediscovery of Turkish.
“I had repressed and pushed away everything that had to do with Turkish. I was ashamed of my poor Turkish,” remembers Devekiran. “That’s why it was extremely liberating that through music I was able to reintegrate a part of myself that had been separated – just like Anadolu rock integrated traditional Turkish elements into Western rock music and came out with something super cool.”
Healing through music
For Devekiran, music became a “path of healing, of intercultural healing, but also of one’s own healing.” Bassist David Knevels and drummer Jonas Stiegler played an important role in this journey, musically developing the same fascination for Anadolu rock as their bandmate. How intensively tips and discoveries went back and forth between the three can now be clearly heard on SAG MIR ALMANYA. Engin have thickened their classic indie pop sound with heavy-blooded psychedelia. A song like “Dopamine” stands for further development: in the lyrics, Devekiran switches to the meta level and questions how the second verse came to be written in the first place, while the music turns arabesque loops back to the 70s.
“Why shouldn’t Turkish elements appear in German music? Why should that only be reserved for rap? Why does it always have to be linked to the street and the neighborhood?” Devekiran wonders. “I no longer had these questions.”
Too indie for German indie
Other questions now arise. Why only now? And: why only Engin? The fact that hip-hop and urban artists with Turkish roots are at the top of the German charts is an expression of a multicultural reality. So you can ask yourself: Why aren’t there more rock bands in this country in which people with this so-called migrant background play – and that can also be heard? And why don’t they reach the mainstream?
Engin also play today in front of a predominantly migrant audience. The streaming services’ algorithm ignores his band, says Devekiran – at least in Germany. In Turkey, on the other hand, they easily made it onto the relevant playlists. They started the current tour with performances in Mersin, Bursa, Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir, Isparta and Eskisehir, but at the classic German indie festivals, says Devekiran, “we keep encountering resistance. They often say: Yes, we think you’re pretty cool, but can we expect that from our audience? I didn’t think we were too indie for German indie.”
Anadolu rock merged traditional Turkish harmonies with influences from British and American rock and pop music. Of course it was also heard in the German diaspora and was in turn influenced by Krautrock. There were Turkish record stores and even labels in Germany; Cem Karaca had to flee the military dictatorship, lived in Germany in the 80s and even recorded a German-language album. All of this had virtually no impact on the German majority society; not even the world music hype could change that. “It was such innovative, forward-thinking music,” says Devekiran, “but it feels like no one in Germany even checks that it exists. How can it be that 70 years of Turkish influences only coexist in pop culture but don’t find their way into the mainstream?”
Devekiran doesn’t want to call the fact that Germany is rather uninterested in the cultural heritage of the country’s largest ethnic minority a matter of ignorance. “I was ignorant myself for a long time,” he says. But his band should change something about that. “We want to offer an attractive projection surface so that more and more people have the chance to discover it.”
A symbol of coexistence
In this sense, SAG ME ALMANYA is not an explicitly political album, even if Devekiran asks in the title song, referring to a former federal finance minister: “Do you really think problems are thorny opportunities?” For him, it’s more about the mood in society, about “getting away from this grumpiness that is rampant in Germany. Because day-to-day politics is not our topic, but of course we have an attitude. We stand for very basic democratic values. But if such self-evident things are controversial, then we are probably political.”
The very existence of Engin and the naturalness with which majority and minority, German and Turkish find each other on an equal footing in their music is a statement for an open, colorful idea of living together. An idea of which the Mercedes-Benz W126 is a symbol.
The blue W126 on the cover of SAG MIR ALMANYA naturally comes from relatives. “It belongs to a cousin of mine,” says Engin Devekiran. And has to laugh: “a German cousin”.
