Love, Deutschmarks and Death…it sounds like the title of one of those acerbic Fassbinder melodramas of the 1970s. In fact, this is the name of the new feature documentary from director Cem Kaya about the Turkish music scene in Germany and which, last month, won the Berlinale’s Panorama Audience Award.
The film (sold by Taskovski Films) tells the story of the music created by Turkish ‘guest’ workers in Germany from the early 1960s onwards. These workers arrived expecting to find security, wealth and happiness. Many, though, were used as “factory fodder.” The locals weren’t welcoming. For the Turks in Germany, music was a way of expressing their homesickness and yearning for a better life – and for making light of the problems they faced in their day to day lives.
As for the title, that actually comes from a poem of that name written by renowned German-based Turkish author, Aras Ören. (The poem was later set to music).
Kaya’s inspiration for the film came when he heard a 2013 compilation album ‘Songs of Gastarbeiter’ (the term for ‘guest worker.’) “It [the music] was in all our collective memory [for] people who have Kurdish or Turkish backgrounds here in Germany,” Kaya notes.
The director has long been fascinated by Turkish (and by Turkish-German) pop culture. His earlier film, Remake, Remix, Rip-Off (2014), which premiered in Locarno, looked at Turkish cinema’s long tradition of copying and parodying other people’s movies, especially those made in Hollywood.
Kaya wrote the screenplay for Love, Deutschmarks and Death together with Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay. He had started researching the project in earnest in 2017.
“There was this Turkish music that surrounded us but there were also artists we, ourselves, had never heard of,” the director remembers, citing names of musicians like Metin Türköz and İsmet Topçu.
“And when we started doing the research, we realised how big it [the Turkish music scene] was and how different it was, even in the different cities of Germany. It’s not just one Turkish culture that we speak of…it is all kind of different cultures.” For example, the Yazidi community near Hanover in Germany has its own musical traditions.
The documentary was made through Cologne-based Filmfaust in co-production with Berlin-based Film Five. It was backed by both WDR/RBB and Arte – and so the filmmakers had access to the archives of “almost all German public broadcasters.” Kaya and his team were able to find huge amounts of old black and white footage of Turkish guest workers depicting their often dismal early experiences in Germany. There was a wealth of material but it wasn’t always correctly tagged. The German archivists had misspelled the names of some of the leading Turkish musicians – and that made tracking down the right clips akin to looking for the proverbial needles in haystacks.
Guest workers didn’t just come from Turkey but from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia and elsewhere. Some programmes, for example a show called ‘Your Homeland/Our Homeland’ were actually aimed at the guest workers and aired in their language.
“We just dived into it,” the director says of the archival material. The filmmakers were also looking for footage from the BBC and Pathé as well as from Swedish and Danish TV.
Although the Turkish music in Germany was initially available on vinyl, from the mid 1970s onwards, listeners were buying it primarily on cassettes. One reason for this was that they were often travelling long distances – and you could listen to cassettes while on the road.
“It’s not just the journey to Turkey,” Kaya points out. “Imagine you come to Germany. You make a friend on the train. You go to Hamburg and that friend goes to Cologne…I remember when I was a kid, we would visit friends and relatives all over Germany by car. Or we would go to a wedding 300km from where we lived…I come from a little town where we didn’t have any Turkish culture and so we drove the 300km just to listen to some music and see some other people.”
The music scene among the Turkish exiles in Germany was patriarchal. Nonetheless, several female performers achieved extraordinary levels of popularity, among them former factory worker Yüksel Özkasap, who became known as the Nightingale of Cologne, and, more recently, Berlin-based Derya Yıldırım. “There is a misperception about the roles of the women who came here [to Germany] anyhow. A lot of people think the women came after the men…that the workers, when they’d decided to stay here, brought their families over,” the director states. “But that’s not true.”
Right from the outset, one third of the workers coming to Germany from Turkey were women. “A lot of women came here by themselves,” Kaya points out. In cosmopolitan cities like Berlin, they had a new-found independence. They had money from their jobs and the freedom to go out.
The guest workers arrived in Germany in the early 1960s, just after the Berlin Wall went up. That was no coincidence. Many East German workers could no longer come west to work.
In spite of the Covid capacity restrictions, Kaya was able to reach big audiences with his documentary at the Berlinale last month. “The Berlin experience was great because, first of all, this film belongs to Germany, to a German festival,” the director says. “All the Germans were like, ‘oh, we didn’t know…this culture was happening all these years in front of us and we didn’t recognise it.’ For the Turkish side, it was like, ‘wow, you are speaking out of our hearts.’”
Viewers were “totally touched” by the film, laughing, crying and giving it standing ovations.
Now, the director is looking ahead to the German release of the film which is being handled by Rapid Eye Movies. They are looking at a late summer/early autumn date. Before then, Kaya aims to tour with the film, taking it to open air cinemas across Germany which can create the right atmosphere for celebratory screenings, complete with musical performances, which families as well as more traditional film lovers can attend and enjoy.
