Forget the moth-eaten cliché that beauty is more than skin-deep: pageant queens are simply not supposed to have bullet scars. For decades the judges of the Miss Germany contest have been surveying the plucked and the plumed and, after some token hesitation, they have usually settled - to nobody's surprise - for unblemished Nordic blondes.
Then along came Asli Bayram, a German Turk with a gun wound, and snatched the title. That was in 2005, and the Turks went wild, celebrating the coronation of one of their own. A Turk as Miss Germany! Suddenly she became a new role model in a society that has been pushing Turks to the margins since they arrived in Germany's industrial cities as “guest workers” in the 1960s. Now Asli is breaking another taboo. To critical acclaim, the young Muslim is playing the stage role of the young Jewish girl Anne Frank, and emerging as one of Germany's most convincing and subtle actresses. But what makes her special is that scar tissue. She was 12 when the bell rang in the family flat in Darmstadt. A neighbour was at the door, smelling of alcohol, complaining about the noise. Her father came and was promptly shot by the neighbour. One of the bullets hit Asli. The neighbour - who turned out to have a neo-Nazi pedigree - fled while Bayram's father bled to death in the hallway. “Afterwards our lives changed completely,” she says, her eyes darting around the lobby of Berlin's Adlon hotel. There is still a wariness about her.
“We locked ourselves in, into our lives, our new flat, too frightened to answer the door again,” she says, in a slightly high-pitched un-actressy voice. “The lights were left on all day and all night.” Fourteen years after the shooting, it is still difficult for Asli to talk about it, although she says she thinks about her father every day. The family closed ranks after the attack; there was no question of grief counselling or therapy; the act was digested in silence. Asli and her younger brother, 8 at the time, were the most emotionally vulnerable. They had been at the door. It was Asli who ended up testifying at the trial of the killer - sentenced to nine years in jail for manslaughter - and it was Asli who had called out to her father to come and talk to the menacing visitor.
Her three sisters went on to study law (one has just qualified as a barrister). Asli also started a law degree at Frankfurt University and is continuing at Germany's equivalent of the Open University. One sister practises karate at international level. Asli has a blue belt. It is as if the family has become a fortress. “We wanted to know how the law functions so that we would not be dependent on others if something happens,” says Asli. The Bayrams are part of the emerging German-Turkish middle-class, second-generation immigrants who are using their German education to break out of their urban enclaves. The German stereotype of Anatolian greengrocers and their drug-dealing children no longer holds water.
There are three million Turks in the country and they are starting to mould society, not just live parallel existences. There are Turks such as Emin Oezel, from Paderborn, who have become stalwart German burghers - in his case, a member of the Rotary Club, a sponsor of the city theatre and a top marksman in the local shooting club. Others such as Feridun Zaimoglu are making an impact as German writers, or as film directors. Slowly, very slowly, Turkish journalists are appearing on German TV as anchorwomen or announcers. The other day I saw a Turkish mother in a Mercedes 4x4 drop off her child, clutching a violin, at a Turkish music school; a routine sight in dozens of European cities, but still a novelty in Berlin.
“It takes two to integrate,” says Asli, and it is clear what she means: the energy and the will to integrate seems to be coming largely from the Turkish side rather than the German - despite repeated criticism from the German authorities that the Turks are not doing enough to learn the language or adapt their ways. But it is the upwardly mobile German Turks - such as the Bayram family - that are making the running. A Berlin friend of mine, Ayfer Durur, grew up as one of six children of a guest-worker - father in a factory, mother a cleaner - and discovered a talent as a hairdresser. She learnt her trade in top salons, including Vidal Sassoon, returned to school to complete her exams, then tried to set up her own salon. “It was hopeless, I was a credit nightmare for the banks - young, Turkish, female, single and a hairdresser,” she recalls. Then her parents came to the rescue: they surrendered their savings, put aside for a return to their family village in Turkey, to invest in the German future of their daughter. Today Ayfer Durur's salon is one of the most fashionable in Berlin and she employs four Germans.
In each successful immigrant story there is a similar turning point, a road taken. For Asli, the crucial moment came when her mother decided that they would stay in Germany after the killing of her husband. The Turkish-based wing of the family was urging them to return; there was a real sense of danger in staying put.
“My mother is a very strong woman,” says Asli. “In the bad times she never left us five children alone, always drove us to school and collected us, never abandoned the credo that one has to carry on in the face of adversity, focus on the good in people, not destroy yourself but realise yourself.” There was a second turning point for Asli, at a hairdresser's (though not Ayfer's salon). “She introduced me to hair modelling,” says Asli, touching a cascade of black hair. “That led to other modelling and to the beauty-show business. I just went along with it, I had no idea that I'd end up being the first Miss Germany of Turkish origin. I wasn't even really sure that I was pretty.”
Her mother encouraged her, though she is a traditional head-scarf-wearing Muslim. “In the lead-up to the finals of Miss Germany I was due to hand in a term paper to my law professor and thought I should do that - skip the contest rather than a lose a university term,” recalls Asli. “But my mother said, ‘No, this contest is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, do it'. And she was so proud when I won.”
The travel that came with the title was Asli's escape from the claustrophobia, from the fear of another neo-Nazi attack. Her mother had sensed that the beauty circuit - mocked by feminists and regarded sceptically by Muslims - could allow her daughter to deal with intimidation, to assert her Turkishness and at the same time defend her rights within German society. What nationalist radical would attack a Miss Germany?
Naturally Asli wanted to move on after her beauty contest career. She went to theatre school, has picked up roles in such films as the German comedy Short Cut to Hollywood and the British-Austrian production Jump!, in which she plays alongside Patrick Swayze. The German market is limited, so she has been auditioning in Los Angeles and commuting to London to develop a film project.
“Offers have been pouring in,” says her manager, Robert Hofferer. “The problem has been this German thing of wanting to make her into the token Turk.” As German Turks penetrate the German entertainment world, it is becoming ever more obvious that they are still seen largely as useful freaks rather than versatile equals of the native-born. Stand-up comedians such as Kaya Yanar and Django Asuel (who puts on a broad Bavarian dialect) are seen as funny because they are licensed to laugh at Turks; Germans making fun of Turks is still perilously close to racism.
So the role that is closest to Asli's heart remains that of Anne Frank. And not only because she can cock a snook at the neo-Nazis who so damaged her in the past. The Jewish schoolgirl, hidden for years in an Amsterdam flat, lost her childhood at 13 when she began her diary, yearned for adulthood but was cruelly denied it. Asli lost her childhood at the age of 12 when her father was gunned down, was imprisoned by fear - but is now savouring a special freedom, the sudden freedom from grief. “It is this feeling of being locked in that connects me with her,” says Asli.
This week, on a stage in Frankfurt, the birthplace of Anne Frank, she will read from the final entry in the diary in which she describes herself as “a bundle of contradictions”: by the time Asli reaches the climax of the perfomance, the audience is wondering how much is Anne, how much echoes the inner life of the actress. Behind her, on stage, flutters a black swastika on a red banner. It is a symbol that is banned from public display in Germany, except as a theatre prop, but still makes a German audience uncomfortable. For Asli Bayam, one suspects, the fluttering swastika is not a problem at all. Not any more.
