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Two days ago, at the opening of the 72nd edition of the Berlin Film Festival, there were a couple of high-ranking officials from the cabinet of the German government of Olaf Scholz. One of them was Cem Özdemir, who on December 8, 2021 was sworn in as Minister of Food and Agriculture. And perhaps he will be one of those who will closely follow the future of competing titles bearing the names of Argentine filmmakers and artists. For him, Argentina is a geographically distant country but not at all unknown. To such an extent that he might suggest to a German a list of the so-called notable Buenos Aires bars to visit and highlight something more than his café, his history or that they are a trench once morest the hipster advance that he detests. “In any café in Buenos Aires there is better Wi-Fi than in the entire Bundestag (the German parliament),” he often says to highlight the critical quality of his country’s internet system. But that is just a detail of a topic – the internet – that Özdemir carried in the German election campaign of 2021. He is also enthusiastic regarding Sarmiento’s texts, the life of several of the Argentine heroes, he crossed the mountain range on horseback for ten days the Andes, and drink mate.
Music and politics. Cem Özdemir’s link with Argentina began or was strengthened in 2001, when he met Pía Castro, whom he married two years later and today they are the parents of two children, Mía, 12, and Vito, 16. She was born and He grew up in Palermo, being much younger he won an exchange scholarship and chose Berlin because he considered, he told PROFIL, “that with the fall of the wall, Germany would become the economic engine of Europe.” He fell in love with the city, asked for a second scholarship, studied Political Science, also learned German –he didn’t speak it when he arrived–, and started doing radio. “It was a ten-year morning show on Berlin radio RBB, I was ‘the voice with a Latin accent’ in Germany. Likewise, it wasn’t politics that brought Cem and me together, but music. It was 2001, the Twin Towers had happened and to change the climate a bit we started talking regarding music on the radio and that’s how everything started to happen”. Pía dedicated herself fully to journalism, she has a weekly interview program on Deutsche Welle (in Spanish) called Here I am, for which she is well known, especially in Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, Chile and in Argentine Patagonia. . Her topic is to show stories of Latin Americans who stand out in different areas in Europe. And to that she adds more journalistic content through “unaargentinaberlinesa”, her Instagram account.
In the sight. In a Germany where the resurgence of the right and extreme right in the social fabric does not escape what is happening in other parts of Europe or America as a whole, this couple generates media curiosity. Pía Castro is Argentine and Cem Özdemir is the first son of immigrants – in his case from a Turkish family – who became the head of a party with parliamentary representation in Germany, Los Verdes. As reported in an article in the Spanish newspaper El País, Özdemir, born in Germany in 1965, “represents the generation of children of ‘guest workers’ (to Germany) who had to break through the glass ceilings to reach employment positions. responsibility”. This categorization of “guests” was applied at the time to immigrants and “it seemed to carry implicitly the idea that they would return to their country when the invitation expired.”
Özdemir was a former MEP, and in 2017 he was almost elected vice chancellor to Angela Merkel. Although politics occupies his professional agenda and that of his wife, “that does not mean that what I say or think regarding current or international issues is the same as my husband thinks; Those are things that in Germany are not confused, those individuals of thought are respected and understood”, explains Pía Castro to PROFILE.
