List of German people of Kurdish descent

This is a list of notable individuals who are of full or partial Kurdish origin who grew up and/or live in Germany.

Academia and Medicine[edit]

in German parties

Sevim Dağdelen, German politician and a member of the Left Party (die Linke)
Evrim Sommer, German politician
Gökay Akbulut, German politician and social scientist. She is currently serving in the Bundestag (federal parliament) as a member of The Left Party from the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg
Kassem Taher Saleh, German civil engineer and politician of the Alliance 90/The Greens
Kenan Engin, German-Kurdish political scientist
Leyla Güven, Kurdish Politician
Lamiya Haji Bashar, human rights activist. She was awarded the Sakharov Prize jointly with Nadia Murad in 2016
Ali Atalan, Kurdish-German politician of Yazidi faith. He is a former member of the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia with Die Linke in Germany, and the Turkish Parliament with the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP)
Cansu Özdemir, German politician of The Left from Hamburg. She is a member of the Hamburg Parliament
Muhterem Aras, German politician of the Alliance 90/The Greens party. She has been a Member of the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg for the constituency Stuttgart I since May 2011, and Landtagspräsidentin (speaker) since May 2016
Hamide Akbayir German politician
Hüseyin Kenan Aydın, German politician and member of Die Linke.

in foreign parties or organisations

Züli Aladağ, film director, film producer, and screenwriter (Kurdish and Turkish origin)^[2]
Ayşe Polat, script writer and film director^[3]
Yasemin Şamdereli, German film director, screen writer and actress
Düzen Tekkal, German author, television journalist, filmmaker, war correspondent, political scientist, and social entrepreneur of Kurdish–Yazidi descent
Nizamettin Ariç, film director

Hatun Sürücü, victim of a so-called "honor killing" by her youngest brother in 2005

^ ^a ^b "الحارس حسن يلتحق بالتمرين والعمري جديد المحترفين". الأخبار (in Arabic). Retrieved 30 June 2020.
^ "Züli Aladag, film director". Deutsche Welle. 2015. Retrieved 2 January 2021. Whenever I'm asked about my nationality, I say, "I'm a German of Kurdish and Turkish descent."
^ Cox, Ayça Tunç (2012), "Hyphenated Identities: The Reception of Turkish German Cinema in the Turkish Daily Press", in Hake, Sabine; Mennel, Barbara (eds.), Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens, Berghahn Books, p. 169, ISBN 978-0857457691, The second-generation filmmaker Ayşe Polat's response to a question about how she describes her identity underscores the complexity of the issue, for she states that she is simultaneously German, Turkish and Kurdish.
^ Eddy, Melissa (2018), "By Taking a Bullet, a Muslim Woman Finds Her Calling", The New York Times, retrieved 29 March 2021, Born in Istanbul to a Turkish mother and a Kurdish father, she emigrated with her parents to what was then West Berlin in the late 1960s, part of the first large wave of Muslim immigrants who came to fill the blue-collar jobs needed to rebuild the German economy after World War II. Ms. Ates was 6 when she and her four siblings moved into a one-room apartment with their parents.