Till Kadritzke

Der Himmel über der Naunynstraße
Gastarbeit, Rassismus und Film im Westdeutschland der 1970er-Jahre
VOLUME 225

What do migrant films from the 1970s tell us about the Federal Republic that does not appear in the stories the Federal Republic told about itself? Films born of the experience of exile rarely enter national archives. Till Kadritzke's new FUNDUS volume Der Himmel über der Naunynstraße responds to this lacuna by making a forgotten television experiment – the film adaptations of Aras Ören's Naunynstraße poems – the point of departure for a voyage through a hitherto neglected archive on film from the 1970s. 

The writer Aras Ören, who arrived in Berlin-Kreuzberg in 1969, conceived the longform poem Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstraße? (What Does Niyazi Want on Naunynstraße?, 1973) as a panorama of the Turkish and German working class in West Berlin. He then worked with the director Friedrich W. Zimmermann on the television adaptation Frau Kutzer und andere Bewohner der Naunynstraße (Mrs. Kutzer and Other Residents of Naunynstraße). 

The film is a paradigmatic example of a transnational cinema that, beginning in the 1960s, addressed migration from a migrant perspective. It turned the spotlight on experiences of labor, racism, and belonging that ran counter to the majority discourse of the time – and that linger today.