From the very beginning, the migration to Germany was accompanied by music. Workers’ dormitories and teahouses were the first offhand stages for socially critical musicians like Aşık Metin Türköz, who performed improvised songs in the tradition of Central Asian folk poetry. These amateur musicians composed and sang songs that reflected their harsh living conditions far-off their homeland – some- times melancholic, sometimes cheerfully sarcastic texts and melodies about new beginnings and a thirst for adventure, but also about the crude working conditions and rejection by the Germans, cultural uprooting and homesickness for the old country, that lived on in their imagination. Time and distance had created an image of Turkey out of memories and longings.
Cem Kaya
Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay
Florian Schewe
Marcella Jelic
n/a n/a
