Abstract
Walking along the banks of the river Spree, you reach the edges of Berlin’s largest green space, the Tiergarten.1 As you approach the park’s meadows in summertime, you smell the fragrance of barbecued chicken, lamb, or beef; boiling tea; and sweet tobacco. Many Berliners, and especially Turkish immigrant families, extend their lives and homes into the Tiergarten. As people of all generations gather here, picnic blankets, chairs, kitchen tables, hammocks, prayer rugs, teapots—and most importantly a small grill—are spread out on the grass. Only a few steps further, you encounter a spectacle of thin layers of smoke dancing in between tree branches (Figure 4.1).
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Notes
I am utilizing Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of the “invention of tradition” here in conversation with Andrew Warnes to point to the ways in which different groups claim barbecuing as a long-standing tradition. See Warnes, Savage Barbecue. Race, Culture, and the Invention of America’s First Food (Athens, GA and London, UK: University of Georgia Press, 2008); and
Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), 10; see also
Andrew Mathews, “Suppressing Fire and Memory: Environmental Degradation and Political Restoration in the Sierra Juàrez of Oaxaca, 1887–2001,” Environmental History 8, no.1 (2003): 77–108.
Steven Gregory, Black Corona. Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 125.
For example, in Nazi racial discourse, the mistreatment of animals as well as specific practices of meat consumption served as signifiers for an assumed antisocial mentality of Jews and the idea that non-Aryans disrespected the natural world. See Boria Sax, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust (New York and London, UK: Continuum, 2000). Historically, fantasies about “savage” meat practices, including the grilling of meat and cannibalism, had a high currency in colonial discourse and, in the case of an—often imagined—cannibalism, these played an important role in illustrating the primitiveness of non-Western people and thus in justifying colonial practices. See Warnes, Savage Barbecue.
As observers have argued, German media have consistently described neighborhoods with a high percentage of migrant population as “ethnic enclaves,” “problematic districts,” or “hot beds,” and as predominantly “Turkish spaces” that threaten to turn into “ghettos” and parallel societies. References to Black ghettos in America and the French banlieues after the 2005 riots at the edges of Paris abound. Together, these allusions illustrate that immigrant neighborhoods are imagined as dangerous spaces of otherness. As physical environments and spatial metaphors, these neighborhoods thus become markers of immutable difference and racialization. See Ayşe Çağlar, “Constraining Metaphors and the Transnationalization of Spaces in Berlin,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27, no. 4 (2001): 601–613;
Stephan Lanz, Berlin aufgemischt. Abendländisch—multikulturell—kosmopolitisch? Die politische Konstruktion einer Einwanderungsstadt (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2007); and
Ruth Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
Michael Bennett and David Teague, eds., The Nature of Cities. Ecocriticism and Urban Environments (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 6; and see also Andrew Ross, “The Social Claim on Urban Ecology,” in ibid., 15–30).
Uli Linke, “Formations of White Public Space: Racial Aesthetics, Body Politics, and the Nation,” Transforming Anthropology 8, no. 1 (1999): 129–161, 129; see also
Linke, German Bodies: Race and Representation after Hitler (New York and London, UK: Routledge, 1999).
As Ruth Mandel has pointed out, helal dietary rules—especially around the consumption of meat—have become an important concern for many people in exile in order to avoid “moral contamination” in Germany. Eating habits and the consumption of meat in public spaces can become not only a symbol for resistance and ethnic pride in Berlin, but also a strategy to overcome a form of “pollution” in the city based on everyday exclusion. See Mandel, “A Place of Their Own: Contesting and Defining Places in Berlin’s Migrant Community,” in Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe, ed. Barbara Metcalf (Berkeley / Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 147–166; see also Jennifer Wolch, Alec Brownlow, and
Unna Lassiter, “Constructing the Animal Worlds of Inner-City Los Angeles,” in Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations, ed. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (New York and London, UK: Routledge, 2000), 71–97.
Deniz Göktürk, Levent Soysal, and İpek Türeli, eds., Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? (New York and London, UK: Routledge, 2010), 16. As real estate values are very high for spaces along the water, residents of the upper class or public authorities tend to have privileged access to seaside properties: see Özkan, “The Misuse Value of Space,” 128.
For a discussion of the history of the gecekondular, see Orhan Esen, “Learning from Istanbul. Die Stadt Istanbul: Materielle Produktion und Produktion des Diskurses,” in Self Service City Istanbul, ed. Esen and Stephan Lanz (Berlin: b_books, 2005), 33–52, 37. Gecekondular are “places built over night.” They are illegal low-cost apartment buildings that rural migrants set up at the outskirts of many Turkish cities, such as Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, from the 1950s and 1960s onward. By building the houses in one night, the gecekondu families were able to take advantage of a legal loophole that maintains that if one builds a house overnight and moves into it before dawn, the city is not allowed to tear down a dwelling. As many families migrated from rural regions into Turkish cities at the time, gecekondu areas proliferated at the edges of many Turkish cities. They were simple in structure, usually with only one level and with courtyards, trees, and a small field for subsistence cultivation. Resembling the structures of Anatolian villages, they soon were situated in the middle of the sprawling city.
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© 2014 Jeffry M. Diefendorf and Janet Ward
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Stoetzer, B. (2014). “Wild Barbecuing”: Urban Citizenship and the Politics of Transnationality in Berlin’s Tiergarten. In: Diefendorf, J.M., Ward, J. (eds) Transnationalism and the German City. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137390172_5
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