Turks in Germany Bridge Two Worlds as Anti-Immigrant Voices Rise

When Avni Yerli and his two brothers started a computer-game company called Crytek in their Bavarian hometown of Coburg in 1999, it never occurred to them that their Turkish immigrant roots could hold them back. Germany was a digital “backwater,” Yerli says, so they set their sights on international success.

The brothers were well educated. Avni had been working as a building engineer; his brothers had business degrees. The family had put some money aside from when their father, Mustafa, worked in a furniture factory. So when venture capitalists refused to back them -- not because of their ethnicity, Yerli says, but because German VCs “didn’t understand what we wanted to do” -- the brothers and various family members came up with 100,000 euros ($136,020), Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Oct. 4 issue.