Where traditional young women start families and assimilated ones have trouble finding their social footing, the next generation is brought up — almost by definition — by those who are least assimilated themselves. You can blame Turkish attitudes if you want, but they arise from a certain objective truth: The closer one gets to German culture, the farther one gets from family. There are a lot of ways to measure this. In North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state and the one where Duisburg is located, 80 percent of Turks ages 25 to 34 are married; their average marriage age is 21 for women and 24 for men. Among non-Turks, only 32 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds are married; the average marriage age is 29 for women and 32 for men. Germans have one of the lowest fertility rates in the history of the world — 1.36 children per woman, according to 2004 figures. While it is hard to find precise figures for Turks in Germany, the rate is widely agreed to be higher. The rate in Turkey itself is almost twice as high, at 2.4 children per woman. If a good chance of childlessness and middle-aged solitude is the price of assimilation, it is for many Turks an exorbitant one. According to a study done by the Center for Turkey Studies in Essen, young Turkish women and men brought up in Germany view their fellow Turkish-Germans of the opposite sex as “distant from their own culture, or ‘degenerate.’ ”

You seldom meet young Turkish women of marriage age who describe themselves as either unambiguously traditional or unambiguously modern. Take Yasemin Yadigaroglu, for instance. A tight, traditional head scarf covers every last strand of her hair. But there is something bold and dashing about her, as well as conservative. At 26, she leads a campaign supported by the Duisburg city government to dissuade Turks from marrying their cousins. A German citizen born in Duisburg, she studied social science at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Unlike Kelek, Yadigaroglu is an observant Muslim. She says that cousin marriage is “a misrepresentation of Islam.” Yet despite her religious bent, Yadigaroglu’s preoccupations and even conclusions about the family overlap with Kelek’s. Yadigaroglu claims that marriage between cousins retards assimilation, that it contributes to parallel societies like the ones Ceylan describes in Hochfeld and that it is responsible for birth defects. In an academic paper, she even hints at a feminist critique of the traditional Turkish family. “Through marriage to a cousin,” she writes, “a new role orientation gets established within the family. The aunt and uncle become in-laws. The new daughter-in-law sinks to the lowest level of the family hierarchy, in marked contrast to her previous role as niece.”

One Friday afternoon just before evening prayers, I traveled to Wanheimerort, a dockside area just south of Hochfeld, to see four young women between 17 and 20 who meet there every week. All were born in Turkey but have spent much of their lives in Wanheimerort. At least two are German citizens. Esra is studying mathematics at a university nearby, Fatma and Meltem are on their way there and Guler studies dental hygiene. Esra, at least, spoke terrific English but wouldn’t use it, perhaps out of consideration for the several non-English speakers in the room. The Ditib mosque they attend is among the more liberal in the area, but all the girls except Fatma were wearing head scarves. I thought of Yadigaroglu, with her mix of tradition and eagerness to assimilate and decided to ask whether — given their career tracks — any of them might consider themselves feminists, if only in an unconventional way. Their answers were: Nein, nein, nein and nein. “Women think this word makes them more and more free,” one said scornfully.

Young men I met were often more sour and defensive in such discussions. It was as if they wanted to be clear about just who was rejecting whom in this battle between their egos and the wider society’s values. In the Duisburg neighborhood of Meiderich, I visited a German-literature class at the local high school and asked a room full of 18-year-olds to talk about marriage. Three-quarters had a Turkish background. One, Husayn, spoke of how he had already been betrothed to a cousin at a family celebration in Bielefeld and was looking forward to standing on his own two feet. Several said that brothers and sisters had married cousins from Turkey, yet each one of them presented that as a special case, an exception.

But one student, a sharp-tongued fellow named Yavuz, had noticed the erosion of the Turkish family model in Germany. It struck him as a catastrophe. “Father and son are no longer father and son,” he complained. “They’re buddies to one another. Your father becomes someone to go out and have a beer with.” And Turks’ tendency to marry their cousins did not look so bad, Yavuz said, with the air of one repeating something heard over a dinner table, when you consider that “one out of six Germans commits incest.”

I had heard similar things elsewhere in Germany. In the Comenius Garden in Neukolln, a particularly tough part of Berlin, Murat, Ali and Hakan, all in their late teens, were passing a freezing cold afternoon chatting and making up rap verses. Ali, whose family comes from the Black Sea port of Rize, is the son of a local NeukÃ¶lln imam. He is training to be a plumber but is not employed yet. He is betrothed to a “friend” in Turkey. The person who introduced me to Ali said Ali’s other friends had spoken of the woman as his cousin. So I started by asking him why he had looked for his wife in Turkey. “German girls are Schlampen,” he replied. They’re sluts.