82 · Gökçe Yurdakul and Y. Michal Bodemann
in Germany responded to this slogan: a group of Turkish immigrants car-
ries a banner that reads, “We don’t want to be the Jews of tomorrow.”^44
In other words, the neo-Nazis use the Jewish narrative negatively, and
the immigrants respond by employing the cultural repertoire of German-
Jewish relations positively for their own objectives.^45
The Türkische Bund Berlin-Brandenburg (Turkish Federation of Ber-
lin-Brandenburg, TBB), the secular and social democratically oriented
immigrant association, applies the German Jewish trope as a master
narrative to show that racism in Germany today is an extension of anti-
Semitic history. On 22 November 2002, the TBB organized a commemora-
tion in Berlin for the tenth anniversary of the Mölln pogrom, one of sev-
eral racially motivated fire bombings in Germany to occur after the fall of
the Berlin Wall. On the night of 23 November 1992, Nazi skinheads fire-
bombed a house in the northern German town of Mölln. In the fire, three
members of a Turkish family were killed: a fifty-one-year-old woman, her
ten-year-old grandchild, and her fourteen-year-old nephew.^46 This attack
and others in Solingen, Rostock, and elsewhere brought about a broadly
based movement of protest in Germany, drawing attention to the increas-
ing number of racist attacks against immigrants. In 1993, Turkish shop
owners in Berlin closed down their shops for an hour. Banners in their
windows demanded safety and equal rights for immigrants in Germany.
The parallels to the commemoration of Kristallnacht, the Nazi po-
groms of November 1938, were apparent.^47 The Mölln commemoration
began with the laying of a bouquet of flowers at the National Memorial to
the Victims of War and Tyranny, the central German national memorial in
the Neue Wache on the Unter den Linden in Berlin—this memorial com-
memorates an array of victims ranging from fallen German soldiers and
the anti-Nazi resistance to murdered Jews. It continued with speeches
at Berlin City Hall. Guests included the minister of health for the state
of Berlin, Dr. Heidi Knake-Werner, Leah Rosh, chair of the Supporting
Committee for the Establishment of a Memorial for the Murdered Jews
of Europe, and the president of the Berlin Senate and the former mayor of
Berlin, Walter Momper. Leaders of the Jewish Community and the Jew-
ish Cultural Association were in the front rows. As the spokesman of the
TBB, Safter Çınar, began his speech, it was apparent that the presence of
people from the Jewish community was not coincidental.
At the same time, Çınar’s speech employed the Jewish trope: the
history of Jewish-German relations was evoked in order to assert that