7 - Mediated Memories of Migration and the National Visual Archive: Fatih Akın’s Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren

Summary

“I wanted to make a film about my family. I wanted to show, hey, these guys came over here, didn’t even have a loo … maybe that’s why I’m making this film … so that I can show my kids some day, hey, come on and have a look, these are your grandparents, that’s where they come from, their German sounded like this … this was their attitude.” Thus explains critically acclaimed director Fatih Akın in his documentary Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren (We Forgot to Go Back, Germany, 2001), which was commissioned for German television. According to the voiceover, Akın, who was born in Hamburg in 1973, decided to make the film after his parents told him stories and anecdotes about their early years in Germany. Only then did he realize how little he knew about the experiences of his father, who came to Hamburg from Turkey as a worker in 1965, and of his mother, a primary school teacher, who followed a few years later. The film takes the audience on the reverse journey from Hamburg-Altona via Istanbul to the little fishing village of Filyos on the Black Sea. Along the way Akın meets his family and friends in Hamburg, but also his relatives in Turkey, some of whom returned to their country of origin after spending many years in Germany. Akın interviews them about their experiences both abroad and upon returning to Turkey.

Akın’s film We Forgot to Go Back invites us to reflect on the mediation of cultural memory. Memories are not simply preserved on a storage medium, but emerge in the process of mediation. Autobiographical filmmaking is an interesting case because it challenges the alleged binarism of private and collective memories. While Akın simply could have made a home movie to bring the family memories for his future children alive, his autobiographical documentary creates “prosthetic” memories, allowing wider audiences to share experiences that are not their own. Whereas in home movies the family is at once the production unit, its subject, and its audience, autobiographical filmmaking complicates this notion because personal recollections also create new meanings upon entering the public sphere as circulating text.