Hours after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7th, 2023, Berlin woman Güner Balci watched in horror as young men took to the streets of the German capital to celebrate.
Amid shouts in Arabic of “kill the Jews”, members of the Samidoun network “for the defence of Palestinian prisoners” appeared in the Neukölln district, home to many Arab families. On the main Sonnenallee boulevard they handed out free baklava and other sweet treats, posting images online of their party “to celebrate the victory of the resistance”.
Balci was born in the Neukölln district in 1975 to parents from rural Turkey, but this didn’t feel like her home any more. The journalist and documentary maker is now the district’s integration officer and, feeling a sense of duty, she took several deep breaths and went on national television.
In careful, measured sentences she sounded the alarm about turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism in Germany’s migrant communities.
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“You see it when young people interviewed on the Sonnenallee make no secret about how they find it right that Hamas slaughtered those people,” she told Germany’s Tagesthemen news show, days after the 2023 attacks.
Her clear words caused ructions in Neukölln, as did a subsequent civil society declaration she initiated, condemning the terrorist attacks – and those who use it to “divide Neukölln and carry this terrible conflict directly on to our streets”.
The resulting slurs and threats are why three police officers stood guard on Thursday evening when Balci read from her new book, Heimatland (Homeland) in Neukölln.
What should have been a good-natured home engagement – music, drinks, a book-signing afterwards - had a palpable edge.
Balci smiled tightly and coughed through the evening, reading from her lyrical memoir about a vanished world.
Her corner of west Berlin, near the wall, she remembers as an urban village where ethnic distinctions mattered far less than the everyday joys and tragedies of working-class life.
Balci grew up in a two-room Neukölln apartment with a sister and parents whose mother tongue is Zaza, spoken by about 1.5 million people mostly of Turkey’s Alevist minority.
Her parents left rural Turkey for Germany in the 1960s, seeking a better life like many of their generation, and worked in factories and as hospital cleaners.
Balci credits her parents’ curiosity towards – and respect for - the society around them for her independent life and career. She also credits the progressive MaDonna girls’ club on the ground floor of their apartment block.
“After school I’d press my face to the window and see inside girls walking barefoot through paint - your typical 1970s hippy ideas - but I couldn’t get over it and wanted to be like that, a free woman,” she said.
Her memoir relates how a carefree childhood segues into troubled teen years, where patriarchal violence and precarious economic circumstances pushed the first of her friends into drink, drugs and prostitution.
A post-school job as a social worker opened her eyes still further to a new reality of Neukölln, where a 1980s wave of Arab migration – largely civil war migrants from Lebanon - created a new, aggressive dynamic.
These new arrivals were largely neglected and fell back on patriarchal clan structures that, in some cases, can be seen in mafia-like organised crime structures in Berlin today.
Balci noticed how the girls disappeared from the streets or were only allowed out accompanied by their brothers. Bikes and swimming were out for them while headscarves were in.
“Gender apartheid crept in,” she writes, “and these families’ honour was to be found between the legs of these girls.”
Balci saw first-hand what other Germans only know from horror headlines: forced marriages or so-called “honour killings” of young women who challenged expectations of their fathers and brothers.
The horror show continues today in Neukölln, she says, when “people who came from Syria seeking protection go on the street and call for the [Middle Eastern] Druze minority to be slaughtered”.
For Balci, a troubling common denominator in these migration failures is a wider German society that views its migrant communities with either hostility, complacency or well-meaning tolerance coloured by post-war German cultural insecurity.
The resulting “racism of low expectations” sees politicians, like many of their voters, treat migrants like “animals in a petting zoo“.
Even in her progressive, leftist world, she says, too many are unable or unwilling to see the dangers of strict patriarchal structures – often under cover of Islamic beliefs.
Critics have challenged what they see as Balci’s sweeping statements, but she points to her record in Neukölln and on feedback as the district’s migrant officer.
Even people here who sought asylum in Germany in the last decade, she said, are often shocked at how much leeway Germany gives problematic groups and views they recognise from their homeland.
She argues this leeway has, in turn, created fertile ground for far-right parties to scoop up voters concerned about the direction of their communities.
“A free democratic society is the best thing that we have, the best thing in the world, and it’s something no one should give away easily,” she said. “But our tolerance could yet be our downfall.”
