Those who write, stay
Exclusion in discourse: For a long time, migrant voices and perspectives were barely recognised or included in many media and political circles.
Paternalistic or pedagogical media reports ranged from depictions of migrant workers as hard-working ‘guests’ to images of them as exoticised ‘foreigners’ and descriptions of them as victims, incapable of acting...
...the members of the Turkish Women's Association in Gelsenkirchen wrote about and for themselves using this typewriter. And the descendants of the former ‘guest workers’ are the latest to defend themselves, as in this flyer, against linguistic categories of distinction and political marginalisation that continue to mark them as ‘others’.
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Publication, 1966 -
Flyer, around 1995 & typewriter, late 1970s
Those who write, stay – background information
Contrary to all plans (and some wishes): Germany had long been a country of immigration in the 1990s. Migrants, their local and municipal representatives, but also politicians, trade unions, artists and people from public life were already committed to a new social self-image, just as they are today.
In the process, demands for participatory parity were raised, which for many – especially during so-called reunification – raised questions of belonging: Who is (also) the people and who is (also) German? The discussions about national identity that took place in 1999, for example, as part of the reform of citizenship law, led to a more modern approach to naturalisation issues despite various forms of resistance: being and becoming German became legally possible and recognised under simplified conditions from 2000 onwards with the introduction of the territorial principle.
Today, as in the past, various people, institutions and groups are committed to the representation and integration of social diversity in the media, but also in the areas of culture, business and politics.
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A beer mat as a ballot box seal: the ‘Salonika’ restaurant is briefly converted into a polling station for the Greek community in Cologne in the early 1960s. -
‘From Turkey’ became ‘in Germany’ - also in the name of the organisation and its focus. DOMiT Documentation Centre and Museum on Migration from Turkey e. V. was founded in 1990 and became the Documentation Centre and Museum on Migration in Germany in 2007. The photograph shows the beginnings around 1990 at a meeting of some members. -
A working group of the Türkisches Volkshaus Frankfurt in dialogue, 1980s.
