Muslim’s Playboy strip stokes integration debate in Germany
A YOUNG woman removing her clothes for Playboy magazine would not normally stoke the passion of Germany’s dry-as-dust intellectuals.
Their minds are usually fixed on higher things — more Nietzsche than nudity.
But next month’s cover girl will, for the first time, be a Turkish German and her glistening, coconut-oiled presence is stirring eager debate about the limits and challenges of ethnic integration. How else to explain the sudden rush of the country’s top brains towards their local newsagents?
“These photographs are a liberation from the restrictions of my childhood,” says Sila Sahin, the 25-year-old star of a television soap opera called Good Times, Bad Times.
Born in Berlin, she has been regarded until now as a model of how a well-integrated Turkish German should behave. But stripping off for Playboy?