We've seen her walking slowly with her shopping bags down the streets of Bochum, Bremen, or Berlin, a heavy woman wearing a headscarf, eyes downcast as she makes her way through the throngs of shoppers. She is one of Thilo Sarrazin's dreaded Turkish Koptuchfrauen, an alien life form taking up precious space on German soil. What about this pathetic woman could possibly be of interest to us?
Quite a bit, actually, in the hands of the Turkish-German writer Selim Özdogan. We learn that this woman has a name – Gül – ,that she has had a very rich life, and that she is the blacksmith's daughter: Die Tochter des Schmieds.
Özdogan takes us back to the Anatolian village of Gül's birth. We learn about Timur, the village blacksmith and Gül's father, a strong, proud man who takes a beautiful wife. Through hard work Timur accumulates enough to move his family to a nearby town – still light-years from the bright lights of Istanbul, but there is a cinema and a school. Özdogan introduces the reader to rhythms of village life, the joys and sorrows of the family, the small triumphs and setbacks. Poverty is rule, life is hard, but there are many happy moments.
Gül is the oldest child – and Timur's favorite. She is a shy – almost fearful – girl, so unlike her spirited sisters. She is afraid of succeeding in school and soon drops out. But Gül has an enormous capacity for hard work; she is exploited as a workhorse by her stepmother and mother-in-law and – much later – by her German employer. At fourteen she dutifully marries a much older man whom she doesn't understand, much less love. Despite her unhappy marriage, Gül would have been content to stay close her sisters and beloved father forever, but the modern world – in the form of Hollywood movies – intrudes. On the silver screen Gül's brooding husband sees the western luxuries – the cars, washing machines, clothes, whisky – that he will never be able to have if he stays in his town. The only option is to follow his friends and leave for cold and distant Germany. Die Tochter des Schmieds ends with Gül – the dutiful wife – leaving the only world she has ever known, the world of the blacksmith, for a new life in Germany.
The great Swiss writer Max Frisch wrote of the Gastarbeiter phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s:
Gesucht wurden Arbeitskräfte – und es kamen Menschen.
(We called for workers, and people came.)
Selim Özdogan has given us the story of one such person, and it a great pleasure indeed to know her.
