In Germany, it is usual for high school students to do brief internships in fields that interest them. When I was sixteen, I began calling local newspapers and asking if I could do an internship, even unpaid. I got one at the Frankfurter Rundschau, a daily paper that was more liberal than the Allgemeine Zeitung. I worked on the local desk, writing about elementary school students growing flowers in their school gardens and about disputes between neighbors over garbage pickup or where their dogs had peed. I did whatever came along, on top of schoolwork and my other part-time jobs.
Soon after, I was invited to be a guest on a public radio talk show for immigrants called Rendezvous in Germany. I seized the opportunity to ask the editor to let me intern there for two weeks. It was the beginning of my radio career. The show had guests who spoke Greek, Turkish, Spanish, and other languages, and they always needed two moderators, one an immigrant, the other a child of migrants like me. My Turkish wasn’t good enough to host a program. I can order food in that language but not more, and at the time they didn’t have Arabic programs. Ironically, I was useful on the show because I spoke fluent German, even if most Germans considered me a foreigner.
The shows were very political. We talked about integration, the role of women, and racism within migrant communities. Some people of Turkish descent wouldn’t let their children marry Moroccans, and some migrants discriminated against blacks. These people craved respect but, at the same time, they didn’t respect others. We talked about racism in soccer, about gay rights, and about hypocrisy in general.
After I’d been working part-time at the station for about a year, the head of a pop music program offered me a job moderating a call-in request show called The Wish Island. Sometimes I couldn’t even pronounce the names of the songs, which were mostly in English. I was taking English at school, but my teacher preferred casual conversation in German to teaching. Nevertheless, the head of the show told me I had a great voice. He wanted me to work on other programs as well. I felt that moderating a pop music show was fun and surely the best-paid job I’d ever had—it paid twice what I made hosting the migrant program. But it wasn’t what I was aiming for. The photograph from All the President’s Men still hung on my bedroom door. I gave up the music show after two months.
I was still freelancing for Frankfurter Rundschau, covering local neighborhood stories. One afternoon, a very nice assistant to one of the editors told me about a journalism school in Hamburg. “The Henri-Nannen School is one of the best in Europe,” she said. “You should look into it after your studies.” I still had half a year of high school to go, but she had planted a seed. There’s no harm in trying, I thought.
I learned that most of the people who went to Henri-Nannen already had careers in journalism; they had finished their university degrees and wanted to get access to big outlets such as Der Spiegel, Stern, or Die Zeit, all of which funded the school. Competition to get in was brutal. Applicants had to research and write a narrative and an editorial; we also had to select one of five topics chosen by the school and report and write a story about it. The year I applied, narrative topics included following a young athlete, spending a night at a gas station, or spending the day at a home for elderly people. I tried the gas station but didn’t like it, so I ended up spending a couple of days with a woman my mother knew who lived in a home for the elderly. For the editorial, I wrote about whether the private lives of politicians should be covered by the press. It was the height of the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky scandal. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but I do recall suggesting that if Bill Clinton had engaged in sexual activities with Monica Lewinsky somewhere other than in the Oval Office, the act would have been less publicly important. Because he did it on official turf, it was an abuse of power, and thus fair game for journalism. The topic was risqué for a nineteen-year-old. It got the school’s attention.
A few months after I applied, someone from the Henri-Nannen School called to tell me I had been accepted. I was overjoyed, but there was a problem. Sometimes the news organizations that funded the school would insist that a doctor or lawyer get preferential treatment over a high school graduate. I was asked to try again the following year. No, I thought. I’ll never do that.
Instead, I graduated from high school and started at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, working at the radio station when I could and living at home. I kept building my journalism skills and making contacts. While interning at a weekly paper in Hamburg, I traveled to the Netherlands to interview the primary European leader of the PKK, a Kurdish separatist militant organization that the United States and the European Union had labeled a terrorist group. I lied to my parents for the first time, telling them that I was going to interview a Kurdish painter.
The following winter, when I was caught up in my studies, I got another call from Henri-Nannen. Apparently someone in the class had received a job offer. “We want to offer you the spot,” the woman from the school said. “Can you be here in ten days?”
I put my university studies on hold and started at the Henri-Nannen School in Hamburg, nearly four hours by train from Frankfurt. Luckily I knew the city a little and had one close friend there, who had interned with me at the Hamburg weekly, working in the paper’s arts and style section. He had grown up in a conservative town and had been forced to leave after he came out as gay. He moved to Hamburg and, like me, he understood what it meant to be an outsider.
I even felt like an outsider in my journalism classes. Unlike most of my fellow students, my parents hadn’t been educated at universities. There was a lot of talk in my presence about oppressed Muslim women, and some of my fellow students asked ridiculous questions like “Will your parents choose your husband?” or “Are you going to marry one of your cousins?” I think if I had been the daughter of rich Arabs or if my parents had been doctors, things would have been different. The people who ran the school told me that I was one of the youngest students they’d ever admitted, and the first child of Muslim guest workers.
My classmates were the children of German parents, what my father’s coworker had called “German Germans.” They were older; some had studied in Britain, the United States, or France, and many had been journalists for a while. To make matters more difficult, I wasn’t interested in partying, nor was I afraid to question some of the established journalists who came to talk to our class. When a journalist who was considered one of the country’s top investigative reporters described his research on Iran, I couldn’t contain myself.
“Have you been there?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I do my interviews by phone.”