Turkish Newspapers Vie For Fluency In Two Societies

MÖRFELDEN-WALLDORF, Germany — Kerem Caliskan has what sounds like an impossible job. He is working to persuade people born in Germany, educated in Germany and living in Germany — many of them German citizens — to read Turkish newspapers.

Mr. Caliskan is the chief editor for the European edition of the top-selling Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, one of more than half a dozen Turkish dailies that jostle for space on newsstands around Germany, trying to attract the attention of the roughly 2.7 million ethnic Turks living in the country.

For decades, Turkish immigrants who came for jobs in everything from factories to restaurants have clung to the papers, which brought them news of home in their native language. Now, the newspapers are a highly visible symbol of what mainstream German society fears is the entrenchment of a Turkish-speaking “parallel society.” It is a fear that is heightened by the fact that a Turk and a German citizen with Turkish parents were among those arrested in connection with a recent terrorism case here.

But media experts say that the concept of a parallel society — at least in terms of newspaper readership — is a myth and that most Turkish people in Germany tend to mix and match among foreign and domestic sources of news. “The political theory of a media ghetto is contradicted by the research,” said Hans-Jürgen Weiss, a professor of media studies at Free University in Berlin.

Turkish newspapers in particular face a challenge holding their place in the market because they have less immediate relevance for immigrants’ descendants who have lived their entire lives in Germany.

“The first generation of Turkish people here is slowly dying or returning to Turkey,” said Mr. Caliskan, and the large majority of their children and grandchildren cannot read or write Turkish. “We have to find a way to attract the young people.”

If Hakan Yaman, 22, a student in nearby Frankfurt, is any indicator, Mr. Caliskan’s task might be difficult. Though born in Germany, Mr. Yaman is still a Turkish citizen, took voluntary Turkish classes offered by his school and says he is equally fluent in Turkish and German. He called it “a real shame” that many Turkish youths he knows in Germany cannot read Turkish.

For his news, however, Mr. Yaman prefers the German media. “The Germans are more precise,” he said. The Turkish media, particularly the television networks tend toward “a little too much propaganda for me,” Mr. Yaman said. He reads Hurriyet at most once a week.

Like newspapers the world over, Hurriyet faces stiff challenges from growing television and Internet offerings. But the demographics of immigration and assimilation here are also working against its continued success. Mr. Caliskan said that Hurriyet sold roughly 50,000 copies a day in Germany, down from some 70,000 in 2001.

The newspaper’s publisher, Dogan Media International, has not shied away from the fight for this foreign market; in 2001 the company built its own printing plant here.

On a recent morning, a cluster of women in bright patterned head scarves diligently bundled magazines on large palettes. The plant prints 25 different publications, including Dogan properties like Hurriyet, Milliyet and the sports publication Fanatik, as well as others, like the Financial Times and even the American military newspaper Stars and Stripes.

Early each evening, the plant begins churning out 130,000 copies of the flagship daily, Hurriyet, for delivery from this small Hessian town to newsstands around Europe.

The area just south of Frankfurt’s very busy and very central airport that includes Mörfelden-Walldorf has played host to Turkish newspapers since the ’60s, first receiving day-old printing plates from Istanbul for reproduction and distribution. In those days — before satellite dishes dotted nearly every balcony in apartment buildings in Turkish neighborhoods — workers would line up for day-old copies of the same papers their relatives had read back home.

“They sold like bread and cheese,” said Mr. Caliskan, 57, a longtime foreign correspondent who went to a German school in Istanbul, later studied in Germany and even translated poems by Bertolt Brecht into Turkish.

The facilities in Mörfelden-Walldorf are more than just for printing the same edition of Hurriyet found in Istanbul or Ankara. A local staff of reporters and editors prepares six or seven pages daily that focus on events of interest to Turks in Germany, from exhibitions by Turkish-German artists or the ups and downs of a Turkish soccer club in Berlin. To capture the non-Turkish-speaking youth, they have even begun publishing an insert in German every Friday, called Young Hurriyet.

Dogan Media is one of several Turkish media companies with German bases of operation here, including the dailies Sabah and Türkiye.

The town has attracted some unwelcome attention because of its Turkish media businesses.

Victor Homola contributed reporting from Berlin.

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