Archival Notes

This song focuses on the figure of the ‘ausländer’ (foreigner) in Germany, and how this label is mobilised in everyday encounters, political rhetoric and the media to produce narratives of suspicion and criminality. Opening with a news clip that heightens anxieties around criminal deviance and “foreign perpetrators”, the track immediately exposes how fear of criminality is regularly racialised in Germany.

The repeated declaration,“yes I am a foreigner”, turns a label of exclusion into a form of confrontation, revealing how markers of stereotypical ‘foreign’ visibility - black hair, cash payments and expensive cars - are read as signs of deviance. Rather than presenting crime as an individual action, the song situates criminalisation within a social process shaped by surveillance, class and racialised assumptions. As highlighted by Mert and Alpa Gun, visibility itself becomes incriminating, regardless of action.

Alongside this, the lyrics articulate a conflicted relationship to German belonging. Mert and Alpa Gun identify as German while remaining persistently marked as foreign, captured in the imagery: “We are the crescent and star in the middle of the German flag”. References to Antep as their memleket (homeland), as well as Turkish food, language, football clubs and everyday gestures situate Turkish identity as a lived, present reality. By asserting a confident and unapologetic Turkish-German selfhood, the song challenges assimilationist expectations and reframes the ausländer not as an outsider, but as a central figure within contemporary Germany.