Erkan Aikan doesn’t need a second invitation to share his story of fame. He grew up in a Turkish family in Gelsenkirchen, an industrial city in the heart of Germany’s Ruhr Valley. Better known as Ilkay Gundogan, the captain of the country’s football team. “I knew his cousins,” he says proudly.
His older brother, Talha, listened politely, perhaps a little indulgently, waited for Elkan to finish, then immediately took the upper hand. “He was in the same class as me,” Talha said of Gundogan. “We played football together when we were kids.”
Both men have quickly established themselves as linked with Gundogan, illustrating their pride in linking up with the Germany captain and their satisfaction in seeing him lead their country to the European Championship.
Yet the loyalty only goes so far. Both brothers say they wish Gundogan good results this month. But like millions of other Turkish-Germans, they want someone else to win. Asked which team they will support at Euro 2024, they answer in unison: “Only Turkey. We live here. We were born here. But our hearts are in Turkey.”
That shared pride – Turkish flags and jerseys were a common sight on German streets and in stadiums this month – reflects the size of Germany’s Turkish or Turkish-descended population, which at more than 7 million people is the largest minority in Europe’s largest country.
Across Germany, many Turkish-Germans have considered questions of loyalty and identity like the Aikan brothers and made the same decisions.
“When we qualified, I told my German friends that now they have two hosts,” said Hamit Altintop, a decorated Turkish soccer player and now technical director of the Turkish Football Federation. “We are now co-hosts.”
Germany’s Turkish community is a legacy of the years when the country opened its doors to guest workers, or gastarbeiter. — Helping rebuild the country after World War II.
Many of the workers stayed and started families that are now in their second, third or fourth generation. Every large city in Germany, and many smaller ones, has at least one neighborhood with a distinctly Turkish feel, where children grow up in homes similar to those of Altinterp in Gelsenkirchen.
“The conversation was Turkish, the food was Turkish, the culture was more Turkish,” he said, recalling his childhood. Now, he said, many people in Berlin “feel that the barbershop is Turkish, the supermarket is Turkish, and dinner is in a Turkish restaurant.”
So it was no surprise that when Turkey finally made their Euro 2016 debut, their first game had the feel of a home match: save for a single stand reserved for fans of their rivals, Georgia, Borussia Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion was a sea of Turkish red and white.
Like Gelsenkirchen, Dortmund has a sizeable Turkish community, large enough that Bulent Borekcilik, a popular Turkish pastry company that has only two locations in Germany, has opened a branch in the city. Restaurant staff confirm that people come from all over the Ruhr Valley just to get a taste of a place that feels like home but that they may have never been to.
Before the game began, thousands of fans dressed in the colors of the Turkish flag, including the Aikan brothers, arrived at a gathering point a little more than a mile from the stadium and swayed to Turkish dances and folk songs, including an ode to the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The crowd paused to sing the Turkish national anthem before beginning the long, slow and extremely loud march to the stadium.
Yet despite the patriotic fervor, members of the crowd often spoke in German rather than Turkish. As the crowd snaked through the city’s rain-swept streets, some drank Jagermeister, gin and canned stout. In almost every way, the scene had a distinctly German feel.
“For immigrants around the world, it is not uncommon to have two hearts in one chest,” said Aladin Elmafarani, professor of the sociology of migration and education at the Technical University of Dortmund.
“Turkish football is the one thing that connects different generations of Turkish immigrants: club football and, of course, the national team,” he said. “It’s part of your identity, your social bond. Most people of Turkish descent tend to support Turkey, but that doesn’t mean they are against Germany.”
That sentiment was evident in a survey, though unscientific, of the huge crowd that gathered to watch Turkey play. “Germany is our home, but our hearts belong to Turkey,” said Salih Halil, who travelled from Koblenz to watch the game with a group of 10 friends, all in their 20s.
Khalil is hedging his bets on the Euros: He says he will support both Turkey and Germany. But when pressed, he admits that — like most German-Turkish fans — he will support Turkey. “Emotions trump reason,” he says.
For those with a more direct connection, the phenomenon can be a little puzzling. Zeynep Bakan, 25, who works at the German Football Museum in Dortmund, wears German team gear, but only out of professional necessity: She’s from Istanbul.
“They go to German schools, they go to German clubs, they watch German football, they pay too much attention to German things,” she said of Germans of Turkish descent. “And then at the end of the day, they say they are Turkish.”
She used an exhibit from the museum to underscore her point: a photo of Mesut Ozil, a key member of Germany’s 2014 World Cup-winning team. Photo with the Turkish PresidentRecep Tayyip Erdogan, 2018.
The photo caused quite a stir at the time – so much so that Ozil quit the Germany national team because of it, saying he was tired of being treated “like a German when we win and an immigrant when we lose”.
Gundogan faced months of ridicule for taking a similar photo, but Ms. Bakan said she thought the picture itself summed up why so many second-, third- or fourth-generation Turks feel the pull of their ancestral homeland. “They are this picture,” she said.
Ms. Bakan downplayed key details of Ozil’s career and argued that he made a mistake by posing for the photo, which effectively ruined his career in Germany. But for some, Ozil’s description of how he was treated as a German of Turkish descent reflected their own feelings and explained why they supported Turkey rather than their home country.
Others, though, feel a different pull. All five of Turkey’s players at this World Cup were born in Germany. Like Gundogan, Turkey’s captain, Hakan Calhanoglu, grew up in Gelsenkirchen. (Several other Turkish players were born in the Netherlands and Austria, as were many Dortmund fans.)
Had the circumstances been different, they might all have taken a different path, or represented another country. It is a difficult, very personal decision for players, one that often has to be made in their teenage years.
Altintop, the Turkish Football Federation official, felt it was an easy decision. “I said, ‘Thank you, I’m Turkish,’ and that was it,” he said. But many people struggled with it.
However, for fans, being both Turkish and German, or Turkish and Dutch, or Turkish and Austrian, makes their football heroes more understandable.
“We identify more with players who are like us,” said Okan Odabas, 27, from Freiburg, near the German-Swiss border. “All these young people who are now playing for the Turkish team were also born and raised in Germany.” In the Turkish team, they can see a team that represents them, including players of all identities.
Professor El-Mafarani said the idea of having two allegiances – Germany and Turkey, Germany and the other – had long been “seen as a problem”. He said people thought it created a “conflict of interest”. However, those who have experienced it, those who have accepted themselves as Turks, Germans and Turkish-Germans, do not see it that way.
“We thought it was either one or the other,” Professor El-Mafaalani said, “not both.”
