German Turks, Turkish Germination

The explosions began exactly one and a half seconds before we really knew why, but we still knew why. The decrepit, ex-quasi-Soviet, East German apartments next to our café subscribed to a cable service that - and really, thank god for progress - spewed forth its contents several moments quicker than whatever shimmered through the air, through our bodies, and into the cockeyed coathanger antenna atop the television to which we ourselves were riveted. We saw only the image of a blue-and-white bedecked Turk on the receiving end of a short pass and then, as if this very second had come alive and reached nineteen years into the past to commune with something equally exciting, if only because we have become so simple in the meantime, a crack knifed out between the grizzly, old fourstories that lined the street. I turned. Firecrackers - more like small sticks of dynamite, really - poured forth from windows on the third floor of the building behind me. I sipped my coffee as they detonated on the pavement. A man of about twenty five stepped out from the door at the base of his home-husk, a pint in one hand, a rocket in the other. “TURKIYE!” he cried, loosing his payload towards the dimming sky. The missile blasted beyond the trees, hollered once, and became many stars, drifting back to earth.

So Turkey had beaten Switzerland in what was ultimately only one game in a long series culminating in the European soccer championship. And I guess that's the most illustrative fact in the bunch. Anyone can get a little nationalistic, a little overheated (and only if you consider launching fireworks in the middle of dense population centers overheated), but here, in the middle of the Fatherland, the middle of eins, zwei, drei, work, work, work, there exists an almost insular contingent of Turks who have absolutely no way of relating to the well-oiled Deutscheclockwork that ticks and tocks to perpetuity around them. Of course, there are occasional culture clashes. The soccer championship doesn't help.

Within minutes, (tiny) cars erupting with red and white flags were blasting horns while cruising at near-Italian velocities down the residential sidestreet on which I was having dinner. And so, with little else to do (except follow through on my commitment to taste-test the seven different half-liter beers I had purchased earlier that afternoon - a losing proposition for all involved, i.e., me), I made my way down Reichsburgerstraße until I figured out where everyone was going: the U-bahn station.

The street was, by this time, so jam-packed with cars, Turkish and otherwise, that nobody was really getting anywhere. And so the party, which they may have intended to unfurl elsewhere, had sort of evolved into the street itself. Plenty of people had simply set up camp on top of their own cars, though it seemed like most had possessed the foresight to leave one friend in the driver's seat to man the horn. Those who found this too confining were weaving in and out of cars, wearing flags like capes and shouting gibberish (I have since been informed that this is actually a language, and one rather widely spoken).

Something interesting immediately caught my eye: riot vans! Here and there, in between the revelers, I could see very uncomfortable looking policemen (polizei, they say here), wearing something between astronaut apparel and scuba gear. I didn't see anything gunlike, but they had gleefully nasty batons. However, despite the Ragnarok unfolding around the U-bahn station, Germany's democracy did not capsize in spasms of police heavyhandedness. In fact, when they were not looking wholly bored, the riot astronauts were far more interested in their own paisanos than the Turks. A small Deutschecrowd had amassed near the winner's circle. The closer I got, the more I could understand their shouting. “DEUTSCHLAND! DEUTSCHLAND!”

Fine, be proud. It's been seventy years. For lack of a less pedestrian way to put it: whatever. But Deutschland wasn't even playing today. And if they weren't playing, and if they really were shouting “Deutschland!” and not “Switzerland!” (a not-impossible mistake to make, after the hefeweizen campaign I waged over dinner), then only one possibility remained. They don't like Turks.

As mentioned earlier, the cultural tensions are understandable. You couldn't find two more different groups of people, one of which is still quite sore over not being let into what is, for all intents and purposes, the world's five star executive lounge (the EU).

And yet, I tug my collar, a bead of sweat on my brow, and wonder: too soon?

The Germans aren't hateful people, they aren't bad people. They don't seem to exclude anyone, they don't protest foreigners (the division of labor awards that responsibility to the French) - they even keep their public bathrooms clean, which is, if you think about it, the ultimate sign of mutual toleration.

And I guess nationalism, no matter who it's from, really isn't so bad. But it's like an amusement park ride, or eating nine eggs a day: you can do it for a while, but there's a good time to stop, and it's usually sooner rather than later. Of course, being an American, I'm tempted to mince words and try to fly under the radar, since I would be cream-pied royally on the world stage for suggesting to anyone else how he should conduct his business, but I can't help worrying a little.

Ultimately, I'm sure it'll never amount to anything. The Second World War just about neutered every last vestige of Viking in the European continental personality. But when you have riot police pushing back angry Germans in the streets of East Berlin because they want marauding bands of euphoric Turks shipped back across the sea, and you have Sarkozy running around Paris half naked while his volk give émigré Muslims a cosmic backhand, one is compelled to wonder. Could culture wars become something more serious? Or is our generation - those of us who will inherit the scepter and throne, anyway - too much a band of dilettantes to cause a real, fist-to-the-jaw ruckus?