BERLIN: TRANSCENDING A CITY’S DIVIDES
By Katrin Bennhold International Herald Tribune
International Herald Tribune, France
Published: September 17, 2006
BERLIN For Hakan Sever, history comes with onions and garlic
sauce. From his family’s kebab cafe, not far from where the Berlin
Wall once stood, he has watched this city reinvent itself in one of
the most remarkable transformations of our modern world.
"Everything changes in this city all the time," says Sever, 34, as
his knife zigzags down a cone of lamb that weighs 30 kilograms, or
66 pounds, and is roasting on a vertical skewer. "The only thing that
doesn’t change," he adds, his blade resting for a moment in mid-air,
"is people’s appetite for doner kebab."
It is 5:05 p.m. and an Oriental breeze is blowing through Kreuzberg,
an eastern slice of what used to be West Berlin. The area is home to
about 26,000 of Berlin’s 142,000 residents of Turkish origin, among
them Sever, a wiry man with an animated smile. He arrived in 1977,
aged 6, when he stepped off a plane from eastern Turkey to join his
parents. Twelve years later, he looked on as the Wall fell and East
and West melded into one.
Now he spends his evenings crafting doner kebab, Turkish bread stuffed
with roasted lamb and a choice of vegetables and sauces. His cafe
bears the resolutely un-Turkish name of Bistro Bagdad. A colorful,
hungry crowd gathers outside his window, a microcosm of the city’s
3.4 million inhabitants.
"Look, today I sell doner to everyone," Sever beams, making a sweeping
hand movement. "Turkish people, German people, tourists – everyone
comes to eat doner.
If you want to meet this city, you don’t have to go anywhere. You
can just sit right here and wait. The city will come to you."
Doner kebab long ago replaced bratwurst as Germany’s favorite fast
food, and kebab vendors have become an immutable feature of Berlin’s
restless cityscape.
There are now an estimated 1,300 of them, more than in Istanbul,
according to the German Doner Federation.
They feed the city and transcend its many divides.
Five minutes into his shift, Sever has already stuffed, wrapped
and sold three kebabs: one with chili sauce to an American tourist,
one with no sauce to a Turkish woman in a Muslim head scarf and one
with an extra-generous helping of onions to a Western woman with more
tattoos than clothes.
"Next!" Sever cries. "With or without sauce?
Garlic-yogurt-chili-herbs?"
Doner kebab arrived in Berlin in the late 1970s after the first oil
shock, when tens of thousands of Turkish workers lost their jobs. Some,
like his uncle in 1977, found new work by opening kebab booths.
Sever served his first kebab in Kreuzberg as a teenager in 1983. Then
the area was the farthest edge of the Western capitalist world; now
it is an increasingly gentrified part of central Berlin. The subway
station across the road from the family cafe, Schlesisches Tor,
was the last stop before the Wall.
The street opposite leading to the River Spree was a lifeless
cul-de-sac.
It took Sever an hour to get to work in those days because buses and
cars had to follow the winding contours of the Wall. Today it takes him
10 minutes to arrive from Wedding, a neighborhood north of Kreuzberg.
"There were hardly any cars here and now it’s like the motorway,"
he recalls, his eyes wandering over the busy crossroad to the river
and into the past.
The Turkish grocery shop at the corner has been there as long as
Sever can remember. But the trendy cafes, the fusion restaurants,
the tourists and the students idly sipping their lattes are new. The
streets of Little Istanbul, as the area is still known, have changed
as history unfolded. So have Sever’s customers.
In the early years, he sold kebabs to an unlikely mix of Turkish
families and squatters from the leftist punk scene who had little more
in common than a life literally on the margins of West German society.
In 1989, he sold kebabs and Coca-Cola to some of the first East
Berliners to stream across the border. He watched their hopeful faces
appear on the Oberbaum Bridge, a majestic red-brick structure that
served as one of eight checkpoints during Berlin’s years as a divided
city. Crossing the bridge that had been the end of the world for them,
the East Berliners would empty the shelves in the nearby supermarket
and patiently line up outside the bank on the corner for their welcome
money – 100 Deutsche marks, or about $50.
Scores of them, whole families, slept on the pavement outside Bistro
Bagdad in the first few days of that memorable October, anxious not to
lose their place in line. One mother and her daughter ordered a Coke
with their kebab. When the girl tried to open the can, Sever recalled,
the mother grabbed her hand to stop her. "She told her it was for
Christmas, can you imagine?" he said. "I will never forget that."
Sever then headed east in a kebab van, eager to learn more about
the other half of his adoptive home country, a place that felt as
foreign to him as to any West Berliner at the time. But when angry
youths with shaved heads shouted racist insults at him during a wave
of xenophobia in eastern Germany in the early 1990s, he decided to
leave and never go back.
"They told me to go home and to stop stealing their jobs," he said. "I
offered one of them work in my van, by the oven. He lasted all of five
minutes. I told him, ‘See, you don’t want my job, it’s not a fun job.’"
Fun it is not, to cut meat beside an oven that radiates heat of more
than 80 degrees Celsius (175 degrees Fahrenheit). But Sever said he
loves his work because of the constant contact with people.
"In here," Sever tapped his chest bone, "I carry the life stories of
my customers." He likened kebab vendors to 24-hour psychiatrists who
provide succor for everyone from the lovelorn to those having trouble
digesting the tectonic shifts of the last two decades.
Backpacking tourists find their way to Sever’s booth after visiting
the so-called East Side Gallery on the other side of the river, which
is in fact not a gallery but the longest remaining stretch of the
Berlin Wall, adorned with paintings and graffiti. Taxi drivers stop in
before the evening shift. Techno aficionados come to eat when other
people sleep. There is Berlin’s legendary army of eternal students,
its growing unemployed population, its gangs of young Turkish men
and its many eccentric artists.
Many of them are poor and many would not want to live anywhere else.
Kebabs here are cheaper than in any other West European capital,
Sever says; indeed, the basic doner costs ~@2.50 in Berlin, ~@4 in
Paris. Lattes and rents are cheaper, too. International investors
are still buying property and half the world’s cranes are divided
between Shanghai and Berlin, tour guides will proudly tell you.
"All that building work," Sever said. "What will the city look like
when they are done?"
Sever does not have a German passport and Germany, he says, is not
home. Neither is Igdir, the Turkish village near the Armenian border
where he spent the first seven years of his life.
His home is Berlin.
"Ich bin ein Berliner," he joked, and he meant it.
He described his bond with his adopted home city as a happy arranged
marriage, like the one with his cousin Meleg. His father brought her
over from Anatolia 11 years ago and she is now the mother of his two
children, 9-year-old twins.
"There is no passion in an arranged marriage, but you face life
together, you share life, you build respect and your roots intertwine,"
he explained. "Then one day maybe you wake up and you love."
His roots go deep in Berlin. He was taught by the same primary school
teacher who is now teaching his children. He supported Germany in
the recent soccer World Cup; a small German flag still adorns his
Volkswagen. He wears socks in his sandals as only Germans seem to do.
But he is all too aware that many Germans still think of Turks like
him as guests, not permanent residents.
"When my father arrived in Germany in 1963 as a guest worker, he was
greeted with flowers at the airport – and now they want to get rid
of us," he said and broke into a self-confident chuckle. "But when
we Turks set up shop somewhere we don’t leave."
When Sever finishes his shift at 11 p.m., he counts his tips: a
disappointing ~@1.10, or $1.40. But then he becomes protective of
the city and his customers.
"People in Berlin have no money. It’s O.K.," he said, his smile back
in full force. "If they were rich, maybe they would stop coming to
eat my doner."