Was fehlt – Eksik Olan - What's missing

(English version)

Mir geht die Luft aus. Boğuluyorum. I can't breathe.
In April 2022, my friend Navina dies of emphysema. It is said that constant humiliation can affect the lungs. And she smoked a lot. Half her life. On camera and off. Navina describes herself as a 'Nehru child', unconditionally secular, anti-colonial and internationalist. She is from a prominent Indian family of artists. "Heavy baggage!," she comments. Her escape takes her to Hamburg, that's in 1964, three years before I was born. Navina is a flickering light in the labyrinth of my fragmented identity between North and South, Germany and India.
Jenseits des schwarzen Wassers. Kala Pani.

Our last phone call is about my writing a novel about the darkest moment of her career, about a missing broadcast tape, about her own disappearance.
She laughs. It sounds a bit bitter.
Go, fictionalize me, darling!

On Thursday, 25 August 1983, the life paths of Indian journalist Navina Sundaram and the Turkish student activist Cemal Kemal Altun cross for the first and only time. They both live in the Federal Republic of Germany. The encounter takes place in a West Berlin courtroom. I wonder if the accused is aware of the presence of the journalist and her camera team. She is a political editor at NDR and has fought to cover this case. Altun has officially been granted asylum in Germany as a victim of political persecution by the Turkish military regime. Despite this, he is to be extradited to Turkey at the instigation of Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann. The German government has no interest in a political conflict with Ankara. A draft is being negotiated:
das Gesetz zur befristeten Förderung der Rückkehrbereitschaft von Ausländern.

One week later, Cemal Kemal Altun is dead. He jumps to his death from the window of the Berlin Administrative Court. On the same evening, the television programme "Panorama" reports on it. Shortly thereafter, Navina Sundaram finds herself in the firing line of an entire national television audience: reprimanded by the Programme Directorate, by the Broadcasting Council. The reason is a 90-second, uncommented scene in which Sundaram tells his sister Sultan Dursun of Altun's death. Misanthropy and sensationalism! That's the accusation.
"Remark. The "Panorama" team came to Adalbert street 85 on Tuesday, 30.08.83 at about 3:30 pm to conduct an interview with Mrs. Dursun, the sister of the deceased Kemal Altun, in which she was to describe her reaction to the death. On arrival, the relatives and neighbours present explained that Sultan Dursun would "despise the bearer of the bad news for life". After a very long conversation, Navina Sundaram offered to break the news to Sultan Dursun.”

Ölüm Habercisi.
Todesbotin
Yaşadığım sürece senden nefret edeceğim.

When I look at this scene today, I feel uneasy. I would like to meet Sultan Dursun and ask her how she felt at that moment. How she felt about the young NDR reporter suddenly standing in her living room. Whether she wondered, as I did, why no one from the court, from the city of Berlin, from the federal government had come instead. Maybe she's still living in Berlin-Kreuzberg. I moved here two years after Altun's death.
Wir könnten Nachbarinnen gewesen sein.

I try to see beyond the wave of indignation that is engulfing Navina Sundaram. I see
Zorn. Anger. Öfke.

Anger that spreads among the demonstrators on the evening of 30 August 1983, at the memorial service a week later, in Berlin, throughout Germany. Anger that is leading more and more people to raise their voices against the government's harsh deportation policies.
I try to hear the echo of these voices.

I can't hear you!
Neredesin?

Was fehlt?
This is the question with which all my stories begin.

What's missing is a studio conversation recorded live during Navina Sundaram's television programme on 30 August 1983. In this conversation, Navina says, she was
aç kurtların ōnūne atildiǧim.
thrown to the wolves.
zum Fraß vorgeworfen.

The conversation was broadcast between the two parts of the report that survived. Exactly where there is now a black hole in the archive.

Eksik olan ne?
A trace of Kemal Altun's sisters and their families. They no longer live at Adalbert Street 85. The gentrification of Berlin-Kreuzberg does not stop at this street, which no longer ends at the Wall, but leads right into the New Berlin Republic. A report in the Berlin newspaper "Die Morgenpost" on 1 September 1983 portrays Altun's two sisters, Fatma Ipek and Sultan Dursun, who live there. Correspondingly, Sultan Dursun, the woman in Sundaram's news programme, is 43 years old in 1983. She is reduced to a girl, a defenceless victim, degraded and depoliticised. She does not get a chance to speak, not in this article and not in any other.

What's missing?
The first female political journalist of colour on German television. Two months after the broadcast, Navina Sundaram suggests using the programme as an opportunity for a conference.
As point 1, she raises the question of journalistic ethics, referring to another report. This piece shows at length the image of an African woman, fleeing from hunger, trying to breastfeed her child in a camp. A woman who has no name, no right to privacy. A woman who serves only to illustrate the subsequent overlay asking for donations. Sundaram notes in her letter "that there is agreement on one situation of desperation, in the Sahel, but that the limits of decency have been reached in another, in Berlin-Kreuzberg".
As point 2 of the conference, she proposes the topic of journalistic honesty. "All of us in this profession make a difference, manipulate, direct, orchestrate. We intervene, change and sell the resulting image as reality. This claim is at least contestable. If I had concealed the fact that I was the bearer of the news of death, which should have been delivered long before by the authorities, if I had first cut where Altun's sister collapses and said in the commentary, quite factually-cool: This was the sister’s reaction when she learnt of Altun's death, I think the backlash would have been only half as harsh.”
The conference never takes place.
Klausurtagung.

Unlike Cemal Kemal Altun, Navina Sundaram doesn't disappear from one moment to the next, but gradually: from the First to the Third Programme, from the domestic political magazines, she is only allowed to report on Asia, and then at some point not at all. She fights for more migrants in the media, gives lectures, focuses on the next generation. She fights against her own invisibility.

I can't see you.
Neredesin?

Eksik olan ne?
Cemal Kemal Altun. The brother, the student, the political activist, the immigrant in Germany. His future. A protest movement is born in his name, songs are written, an attack is carried out, a book is dedicated to him, a square is named after him, a monument is erected on the spot where he died, alone in a meadow among white flowers. The person disappears behind his own image.

What's missing?
A film by the well-known director Raoul Peck. In 1983, he studies at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin. Looking back in 2017, he says: "I wanted to make a film about Kemal Altun's suicide. Funding for the film was refused on the grounds that the reference to Germany was not visible. For me it was like being banned from filmmaking. After that, I decided to leave.”

Was fehlt?
A narrative in which this connection is irrefutably established. The connection between a murder committed for political reasons by the state institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany, a woman whose pain was unbearable, a vanished recording, a film that was never made, and a journalist who became invisible before everyone's eyes.
As an author, however, I resist the desire to fill every gap, to fictionalise to completeness, to replace every black frame with an image. What's known can be ticked off. We must keep the black holes open, breathe into them so as not to suffocate.
To understand collectively,
was fehlt - eksik olan ne - what's missing.

Translation and Editing: Rubaica Jaliwala

Merle Kröger

Was fehlt – Eksik Olan - What's missing