The Limitation of Urban Space in Thomas Arslan's Berlin Trilogy

German immigrant cinema of the 1970s and 1980s is often characterized by critics as the Gastarbeiterkino (e.g. Bühler 16; Dehn 3). The Gastarbeiterkino explored the lives of immigrants from a number of different national backgrounds, but a significant proportion of these films concentrated on the Turkish foreign workers who came to Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. They were originally considered a temporary workforce that would eventually go home, but, as the Turkish-German poet and social commentator Zafer Şenocak remarks, "[w]hat at first appeared to be a harmless economic phenomenon soon developed into a momentous social phenomenon. The so-called guest workers violated the rules of hospitality, settled down, improved their economic status and became immigrants" (87). The Turkish-German Gastarbeiter films presented minority characters, in accordance with popular (mis)conceptions, as victims of incompatible "Turkish" and "German" ways of life. In many instances, this view was expressed by a concentration on the first generation and by spatial confinement – particularly of women, as seen in Tevfik Baser's 40m² Deutschland (1986). In this film, a young Turkish woman called Turna (Özay Fecht) is brought to Germany after an arranged marriage and promptly imprisoned by her husband Dursun (Yaman Okay) in their apartment. She has little opportunity for experiencing, much less integrating into, mainstream German society, and even when she escapes the confines of the apartment in the final scene, after Dursun dies, it is clear that she will remain in a marginalized position, owing to her status as an immigrant in Germany and her inability to communicate in this alien country. The few films that focussed on second-generation Turkish immigrants, for example Hark Bohm's Yasemin (1988), intimated that integration into "mainstream" German society was possible only if the younger characters removed themselves completely from their parents' (the first generation's) culture and traditional beliefs. In the film, Yasemin (Ayse Romey), a second-generation immigrant, is initially positioned as an independent young woman who appears to navigate successfully between her positions both in mainstream German society and in the Turkish community. However, her hybrid identity is revealed as a fragile construct when tensions erupt in the family after her sister's wedding and as her involvement with her German boyfriend Jan (Uwe Bohm) increases and Yasemin is forced to choose between her family's more traditional (and patriarchal) beliefs and her desire for a "modern" German existence. Eventually, she flees with Jan, but in doing so she does not achieve any greater liberation or integration; rather, she moves from one authority (her father) to another (her boyfriend).

Although the bulk of immigrant characters in these earlier Turkish-German productions experienced severe spatial constraints, in recent years a number of Turkish-German films by a new generation of filmmakers have attempted to cast off the victim images common in earlier films by focussing more closely on the second generation and on outwardly more integrated characters. The leading characters in these newer productions, such as Fatih Akin's Kurz und Schmerzlos (1998), Yüksel Yavuz's Aprilkinder (1998), and Kutlug Ataman's Lola und Bilidikid (1999), are young and mobile and have made their way outside to more open spaces such as the street, the disco, and the park. Three productions that have also been conceived and analyzed in these terms are the films that constitute Thomas Arslan's Berlin Trilogy – Geschwister-Kardesler (1996), Dealer (1998), and Der schöne Tag (2000). With these films, Arslan professes to have dissociated his characters from previous cinematic portrayals of Turkish immigrants in Germany. When asked about the inspiration behind Geschwister, he stated he was "unzufrieden damit, wie Türken bisher in deutschen Filmen dargestellt werden. Das war einer der Gründe, diesen Film zu machen" (qtd. in Basrawi and Mentrup 2). Similarly, in relation to Dealer, Arslan has commented on his desire to challenge the negative discourse surrounding Turkish immigrants in Germany and suggested that, although it may not be possible to circumvent clichés completely, still:

[M]an kann vielleicht versuchen, durch sie hindurchzugehen, das heißt, von ihnen auszugehen, sie...