Tour by Gülsah Stapel and Verena Pfeiffer

It was back in 1964/65 when the first Turkish men and women came to the “Telefunken”-company Berlin as guest workers to assemble transistors in its production halls. Strictly speaking this was in Kreuzberg, a quite central district of Berlin. This is where they worked and also where they were assigned to live. The assigned area consisted of unoccupied dwellings with over 100 year old houses, which were calculated to be demolished soon. There were plannings concerning the old Kreuzberg which aimed to dispose it of its old buildings as well as of the borrowed workers – beeing only “guest” workers they were expected to leave someday. Thus the “guests” remained more or less unnoticed, invisible in the city as well as in Kreuzberg.

However these plans did not come true. Guests became fellow citizens who made important contributions to the rehabilitation of Kreuzberg and to keep this district alive. Therefore they enhanced the value of Kreuzberg culturally, socially and economically. Over the past years Kreuzberg advanced to an attractive and vital district, a so called “Kiez” as the Berliner would say – a “Kiez” of variety.

Many of the old buildings have been restored now and put on the list of protected monuments in Berlin. Their absence is unimaginable these days.

Talking about monuments in Kreuzberg, one would think of sculptures, churches and Wilhelminian style architecture. It is beeing neglected, that the Turkish community might have adopted spaces, streets, monuments, houses and shops and that they might have influenced the city by building their own buildings and structures and therefore built their very own cultural heritage in Berlin.

This aspect of cultural integration has not received much consideration in the scientific state-of-the-art, yet. The heritage of Turkish immigrants – as well as of the other immigrant groups - is not very well known. In the course of a new research project conducted by the art historian Prof. Dolff-Bonekämper at the Technical University of Berlin this lack of knowledge and experience will be filled by analyzing and finding the places of commemoration and value of different immigrant groups. The two guides have worked on this project the past year and will show you some sites of this fairly new discovered places of cultural heritage.

On this tour we will show you several places, which are important to the members of the Turkish comunity of Berlin but unknown to most inhabitants of Berlin. We invite you to get to know these places and their stories and to sit in on the current state-of-art of sciences, which opens a different exposure to the history of migration.

The tour will be mainly located in Kreuzberg and includes two visits of turkish mosques. Participants will be asked to take their shoes off before entering the mosques.

• Date: Friday 27th
  
• Duration of tour:  2 hours, 15 minutes
• Tour 1: 1:30pm-3:45pm
• Tour 2: 5pm-7:15pm
• Start: U-Bhf Schönleinstraße (U8), Exit Schinkestraße or 12:30 at the Bebelplatz
  
• End point: U-Bhf Görlitzer Bahnhof (U1)
• Minimum number of participants per tour: 10
• Maximum number of participants per tour: 20
• Fee per person: 10,00 EUR / 14,00 USD
  
• Tour Code: S2
• To book this tour, press the "Sign Up" button at the end of the page.