By Katrin Dreher

Sinan has been living in Germany for eight years. But he never really arrived.

He has beautiful eyes with long, black lashes. The joung man is looking sternly at the judge of the district court of Tübingen. “How do you feel?”, asks the presiding judge. “I feel like an empty bottle”, answers Sinan. Two gruelling years of asylum procedures lie behind the politically persecuted Kurd from Haydarli, a small place in the East of Turkey. Today the state of Germany decides on his residence permit.

At Hacettepe university in Ankara he was one of the best students of his year, in Tübingen he is merely an onlooker. He spends whole days on the stairs leading to the alma mater and watches people. He wonders how they earn money, what they think of philosophy, and of Turkey.
Sinan is scared that he might lose his mind whilst he is condemned to doing nothing in his Swabian exile. He would like to study, work, meet people; “Just live normally”, in his words.

Instead, he queues for two hours each week awaiting a packet of food.
Once he went to Stuttgat by train and was arrested by civilian police. He had exeeceded the allowed limit of 30 kilometers to move away from the asylum seekers’ centre. Stuttgart is 45 kilometers away. Sinan expected freedom and democracy to be different.

There are over seven million people with foreign citizenship living in the FRG, among them are 190.000 ‘tolerated refugees’. This is stated in a survey by the Federal Office for Statistics in Wiesbaden, which was conducted for the first time in 2007. A toleration equals a “suspended expulsion” according to the Law Governing Residence. For the individuals concerned this means, that, often for several years, they lead a life witout secure future perspectives, thus living from one month to the next with the constant fear of being extradited.

“I experience that many families are afflicted”, sais Beate Campe, whilst she keeps an eye on what is happening around her.
A Madonna tape is playing and eight girls are passionately whirling around the room.
Beate Campe is a retired primary school teacher and has been a volunteer in charge of children’s leisure activities at the asylum seekers’ centre Hammerschmiedstraße in Freiburg for the past two years.

14 Roma families from Kosovo have been living there for the past ten years. “If we are forced to go back I will shoot my children and myself.”, is not an unusual statement for Campe to hear. Normality is near-impossible within the walls of the centre. “The families do not participate in German social life.”, complains the 64 year-old.

Orientation is difficult even for the children, who are almost all born in Germany and speak German well. 80 per cent of them attend a school for children with learning difficulties and they spend most of their free time among themselves on the grounds of the centre. However, they would like to do other things, too. “Like going to the swimming pool, to the cinema, to the lake, or anything else.”, says Campe, who fulfills one of their desires each weekend.
To be noticed, to be accepted is for those children, who are excluded from her community a new experience.

“Gooooal!” shouts Sinan. His roar of joy is meant for Lukas Podolski, who just scored in the European Championship-game against Poland. Six years have passed by since the hearing took place in the district court in Tübingen. The residence permit he yearned for was granted.

He “got accustomed”, sais Sinan in fluent German. He found work in a “Uni-Kebab” a take-away in the city centre of Freiburg. “I am sort-of the the boss”, explains Sinan and laughs. He wants to make his dream of the university-certificate come true next year. Did he pass the integration test? Germany is still strange to him, sais Sinan. “I never really arrived here”. The time he spend in the asylum seekers’ centre, the time of “toleration certificates”, the feeling to be unwelcome shaped him too much.

Beate Campe is familiar with the issue. “If someone experiences such maltreatment, he is lost for German society”, she is afraid. It seems as if she took a look into the future of “her” children from Hammerschmiedstraße.
Sinan is ecstatic. “Poldi” scored the 2:0. “You are Germany”- that’s Sinan’s motto for exactely 90 minutes.

24-year old Katrin Dreher is a scholar of the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation and will be studying European Ethnology at Berlin’s Humboldt University from autumn this year. She is a freelance jounalist for fiftyfifty, a magazine to help the homeless.