I was incredulous. “Aren’t you worried about your sources? If you talk on the phone, don’t you think the intelligence services might listen, and your sources might get in trouble?”
The reporter gave me a dim look. Such threats were overestimated, he said. But I remembered how Woodward and Bernstein would make a point of meeting people in out-of-the-way places so as not to be overheard. I told him that I’d interviewed the European leader of the PKK in person for just this reason. Later, some of my classmates criticized me for speaking to their idol this way, but compared to Woodward and Bernstein, my fellow students seemed frustratingly uncritical.
In early 2001, shortly before graduation, our class organized a five-day trip to New York. Besides being excited to see the country I’d admired for its great movies and investigative journalism, I longed to eat a typical hamburger in a typical diner. The school gave us some money, but only enough for airfare and some of our accommodations. I used the money I’d put aside from working weekends at the radio station to cover the rest.
In New York, I wandered alone around the city. People were different than in Germany, busy but smiling. I went to the World Trade Center and stood in front of the Twin Towers. At a class visit to the New York Times, we looked at the Pulitzers on the wall and visited the newsroom, which was similar to the one I had seen in All the President’s Men. It was like a dream. I wondered what might have happened if things had been different, if my parents had settled in the United States instead of Germany, or if they’d been rich enough to send me to America or Britain for a year to learn better English. Might I have had a shot at working for the New York Times or the Washington Post?
I graduated from the journalism school in May and returned to Frankfurt, where I wanted to finish my university degree in political science and international relations and eventually apply for a correspondent’s job with a German radio station or write for a magazine based in the Middle East or North Africa.
That was the plan, but it all seemed very far away. I divided my time between studying and freelancing for local newspapers and the radio station. I was living with my parents to avoid paying rent, but I didn’t end up saving much. After years of punishing labor in a poorly ventilated kitchen, my father suffered from asthma, and back injuries had left him unable to stand for long periods. By the time I moved back home, he was working reduced hours and would soon retire. My mother had also retired early because of the pain in her back and shoulders from years operating the heavy clothing irons at the church laundry. My parents also suffered from depression, though they didn’t talk about it. Immigrants of their generation, the cleaners and cooks, worked hard and kept their heads down, never challenging the authority of the “German Germans.” For years, my mother visited a doctor who gave her painful injections for a ringing in her ears that never went away. She meekly accepted that the doctor knew what he was doing until the day I accompanied her to his office and asked why her condition hadn’t improved. The doctor was genuinely surprised. “Usually, people like your mother don’t ask me questions,” he said.
“We didn’t understand that we also had rights,” my mother told me later. “We never dared to question anything.”
My parents had left their homes and families, and they worked tirelessly to build better, easier lives for their children, yet we still struggled. When my father’s boss had died several years earlier, the owners of our building in the beautiful, affluent neighborhood where I’d grown up decided to sell, and we were asked to leave. We moved to a different part of the city and into a former U.S. military housing development where all the buildings looked the same. The barracks had been bought and turned into affordable housing, mostly for immigrants. In our new apartment, the door opened right into the living room, as is common in American homes, rather than the typical German layout with a foyer and hallway leading to a more private living space. The building managers extolled the apartments’ built-in shelves and cabinets, but we later learned that some of them contained poison from disinfectants that had been used to clean them.
My sister Fatma worked, but she didn’t get paid much, and because of her disability she needed support. My brother was still in high school. With my parents unable to work much, supporting the family fell to my sister Hannan and me. I still kept the photograph of Redford and Hoffman on my bedroom door, but I knew where my responsibilities lay: not in the glamorous world of American journalism, but here at home.
Shortly after I returned to Frankfurt, I learned that the radio station where I’d worked on the migrant and music shows was looking for a backup correspondent in Rabat, the capital of Morocco. During journalism school, I’d interned for six weeks with the station’s previous Rabat correspondent, Claudia Sautter, who had become a friend. Now she was leaving, and the station had chosen her replacement, but it needed someone else who would cover North and West Africa when the new correspondent went on vacation. I’d worked on a range of shows at the station, including political programs, and my internship and visits to my grandmother had made Morocco a kind of second home to me. I spoke Moroccan Arabic. Claudia encouraged me to apply.
I met with the editor, but things didn’t go as I’d hoped. The editor explained that he wouldn’t send someone who came from a particular country to be a correspondent there. I told him that I didn’t understand this logic, but that it didn’t matter, because I was from Frankfurt.
He was clearly uncomfortable. My roots were in Morocco, he said, and therefore he couldn’t nominate me for the post. My insides started to ache, and I felt tears coming. Don’t you dare cry, I told myself.
I repeated that I had been born in Germany and explained that my parents had actually come from two different countries, Morocco and Turkey. By his logic, I said, he would have to immediately fire all the “German Germans” who were covering Germany and bring in foreigners. He turned pale and said that we had nothing more to discuss. I stood up and dashed out of his office just as the tears began to slide down my cheeks. You will never be accepted as a full German, I thought. You don’t stand a chance in journalism.
Three months later, on a Tuesday in September, I was listening to my favorite international relations professor, Lothar Brock, lecture on … something. I don’t remember, because in truth I wasn’t really listening. At the beginning of the talk, I had turned off the ringer of my mobile phone, but for the past hour I’d felt it vibrating through my backpack. Something was terribly wrong; the only reason someone would be calling me over and over was that something had happened to my family.