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“We Don’t Want to Be the Jews of Tomorrow”
Jews and Turks in Germany after 9/11
Gökçe Yurdakul and Y. Michal BodemannIn its edition of 23 September 2004, the German magazine Stern pub -
lished a cartoon showing a heavily mustached man crawling through a
cat hole in a door labeled “European Union,” trying to gain entry into
Europe. Some imitation Arabic writing appears above the cat hole, and a
suitcase with a Turkish flag stands next to the man. This cartoon caused
an uproar in the German Turkish community. Vural Öger, a prominent
German Turkish businessman and a member of the European Parliament
from Germany’s Social Democratic Party, wrote an open letter to Stern
calling the cartoon defamatory, obscene, and welcome material for neo-
Nazi propaganda. Öger closed his letter as follows:
A young Turkish man with a German passport, not only born but
also raised here, had heard about Hitler’s beginnings in history
class and said that this drawing was just like ones in [the Nazi pa-
per] Der Stürmer. Except that the Jews would have received differ-
ent noses. Here in the Stern, the nose was replaced by the mustache.
But everything else is the same racist garbage. (Hürriyet, 2 October
2004).In this article, we attempt to show how interethnic relations play out
between Turks and Jews in Germany. We will explore how the numeri-
cally largest and most recent immigrant group, the Turks, take the small