But let me return to my magazines. Meine Freundin Wellfit ran an article in 2009 about four women who successfully transformed their lives. The piece begins: “Finding spirituality. Loving your body again. Being free, finally.” The first portrait describes a woman who, after outwardly fulfilling work in international politics, moves to a “Tibetan-Buddhist” monastery to live and study. She founds a charity in support of “little monks,” teaches English, and helps out at the hospital. “I am happy every day to have found the life that fits me,” she says, summarizing her transformation. The second portrait presents to us a nurse who lost weight with the help of Weight Watchers, Pilates, and a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, while the third is of a former successful lawyer who finds love with a goat-herder in an Alpine village. The last portrait tells the story of a woman who, as the child of “Turkish guest-workers,” had to break radically with her controlling parents to be freely herself and find romantic love where she wishes.
In German folk-ethnology as Chantal Munch and her colleagues Marion Gemende and Steffi Weber-Unger Rotino demonstrated in Eva ist emanzipiert, Mehmet ist ein Macho, the non-German Turkish other is profoundly linked with a sexually-restrictive Islam. It seems clear that the image of a controlling Turkish family evokes a vision of negative religion. In fact, since the 1970s, it has been a trope in German discourse about immigration to contrast the “emancipated” German against patriarchal migrant sexuality. Thus, it would be highly unlikely to find in magazines like Meine Freundin a testimony of a teacher who, based on her “spirituality,” for example, began piously wearing a veil in her classroom. Instead, in subtly playing on the trope of allegedly “traditional Islamic migrant sexuality” this portrait re-inscribes the boundary between German and migrant culture. Moving from the later to former requires a radical break with traditional (read: Islamic) origins.
For the article in Meine Freudin, spirituality is not only a central ingredient of the politics of the makeover. Rather, it also plays a subtle role in differentiating socially acceptable religion that enhances a positive transformation (Tibetan Buddhism) from unacceptable religion (the Islam of the “Turkish-guest workers”). In both functions, “spirituality” contributes to sending clear signals about what we need to do in order to be transformed into good Germans. In other words, attention to “spirituality” teaches us that the privatization of religion is only one move in its intricate dance with the modern state and society. Privatized religion’s contribution to the policing of citizenship via market forces is the other.
Waiting my turn at the stylist and reading about spiritual transformation and emancipation in Amica and Meine Freundin, I wonder: How will a woman who works in or frequents this salon, and who is also a daughter of Turkish immigrants, receive this story of emancipated sexuality? What will the other middle-class customers make of it? It seems clear to me that we who linger at the salon learn not only about the latest fashion but also take home an important lesson about what it takes to “integrate” oneself into what German newspapers call the “majority society.” Spirituality will make you free and help you become, at last, a “true” German.
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