Jennifer A. Miller
In a May 1967 Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, Stasi or MfS) memo on the psychology of border crossers and policing them, an official notes that a crosser’s “position” is “predominantly determined by the societal system of the crosser’s homeland” and by the political relationship between his homeland and the GDR (“Zollverwaltung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik: Informationsmaterial über die Kontrollpsychologie in grenzüberschreitenden Reiseverkehr,” BStU 67/846, vol. 3, 21). Yet it also notes that the Stasi should distinguish all travelers as individuals who cannot be grouped together in a “homogenous mass that is only roughly divided into the categories of West German, Foreigner, Retired Person, and so forth” (67/846, vol. 3, 21).1 West Berlin–residing Turkish guest workers escaped easy categorization. After all which societal system applied to them—that of West Berlin or of Turkey? In 1979, years after regular Berlin-Berlin border crossings had become common, a Stasi operative justified the need for broad-reaching surveillance of “Turks” crossing from West to East Berlin. He explained, “Monthly, around 8,000 Turks arrive in the capital of the GDR . . . who have a multitude of contacts of an unexplained character to GDR citizens” (HA II 29668, 7). Interestingly, in contrast to their usual level of detail, the Stasi files used the term Turk without qualification, not always specifying whether the Turkish nationals were participating in the official guest-worker program or living in West Germany for other reasons, such as to study at West German universities.
The MfS’s Main Department II (Hauptabteilung II), tasked with surveillance of the economic and military sectors, took over this vital espionage mission to protect citizens from “criminal and subversive dealings against the GDR or the socialist community,” including drug smuggling, and in general to look for solutions to the ill-defined “Turkish Problem” (HA II 29668, 7). Fear of infiltration by right- and left-wing Turkish extremist organizations motivated the Stasi to act and emphasized the need to discover plans and intentions in advance (HA II 29668, 7). The GDR deemed it a matter of national importance “to secure via official and unofficial sources . . . an operational view of the Turkish concentration in [East Berlin]” (HA II 29668, 7). The Stasi report does not just focus on transgressors and “subversive dealings” but also demonstrates a more general concern over the growing Turkish concentration in East Berlin.
However, this operational outline was a poor fit for the reality at hand. A great many Turkish nationals crossed from West to East Berlin regularly, with ease, and for years, maintaining mostly intimate, cross-border relationships from the 1960s through the 1980s. These border crossers presented an interesting paradox. West Berlin society deemed them suspicious as foreign and “Eastern”—a cultural and ethnic distinction that created social outsiders. At the same time, the Stasi found them suspect because they not only came from West Berlin but also, in the eyes of the Stasi, embodied Western capitalist culture and as such offered a figurative and literal escape route to the West. Guest workers’ experiences in and perspectives of East Berlin complicate the divided city’s story, as many of them saw the East German state as a space to explore and enjoy greater social autonomy and acceptance among Germans, especially in contrast to feelings of social isolation in the West.
The 1979 Stasi report explicitly states that operatives were to observe Turkish men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five years. The Stasi’s files about these border-crossing Turkish nationals are almost all about foreign men meeting with East German women, adding a loaded gender dynamic. Considering the dubious nature of intimacy and privacy in a police state, scholars have since pointed out that the women of East Germany were uniquely positioned to understand how the state worked not just because of their participation in traditional gender roles at home but also often due to their intimate relationships (Merkel 2001). Various power dynamics charged these cross-border encounters politically with asymmetries of wealth, allegiance, access, and freedom of movement. The Stasi considered these men dangerous not just as foreigners but also as men with an ability to infiltrate a hard-to-police intimate space. Furthermore, as a group the men discussed in the Stasi files are necessarily a skewed sample—they had violated a regulation or engaged in suspicious behavior that had warranted the Stasi’s attention in the first place. Most of the Turkish nationals who ended up in the Stasi files missed the midnight deadline to cross back into West Berlin or were caught with illegal goods, involved in political organizations considered dubious, or suspected of assisting with the illegal departure of an East German citizen to the West. In short they were distrusted as rule breakers, and not necessarily singled out by their nationality, ethnicity, or religion.
This is a story of paradoxes—of suspicion and acceptance, love and manipulation, and transgression and compliance—that reveals unknown aspects of Cold War espionage, focusing on West Berlin–residing Turkish men and their own involvement with the Stasi. For decades a large population of West Berlin–residing Turkish nationals built social lives, business deals, intimate relationships, and transnational families across divided Berlin. The unusual cases provide a novel window through which to view the Berlin border, its crossing, and its definition and present a little-known Cold War spy story. Traditionally, economic and political histories have dominated the narratives of divided Berlin and the Cold War writ large (Bruce 2014, 47–58). The particular history of guest workers in Berlin tells a new narrative of divided Berlin, specifically one about how porous its borders were. This perspective reveals points of contact between foreign nationals and East Germans, the East German state’s opinion of the guest-worker program in West Germany, and, significantly, moments of integration and acceptance. Various personal interactions reveal different and moving allegiances, sometimes based on attraction and other times on exploitation. This study presents West Berlin–residing Turkish nationals from multiple vantages, each with its own bias: the recollections of border crossers, the concerned Stasi, and East German women whom the border crossers courted and sometimes married. Drawing on the Stasi’s documentation of Turkish citizens in East Germany and using the files held in the Stasi Archives (BStU), this work considers the Stasi’s point of view in identifying “suspects” among guest workers in its jurisdiction. This police surveillance folds guest workers into the larger narrative of the East German state’s gaze.
After a brief look at the larger historical context, this chapter explores guest workers’ roles in divided Berlin through three themes: lovers, border crossers, and transgressors. These lovers’ stories provide access to the private, intimate realm—a sphere with which historians of totalitarian states have long been fascinated (Richthofen 2009, 11). The idea of “Eigensinn,” or “self-will,” has dominated discussions of how individuals negotiated, in distinct and idiosyncratic ways, the dictatorship at the grassroots level (Lüdtke 1994; Lindenberger 1999). Johannes Huinink has highlighted “individual spaces for action,” in which GDR citizens negotiated personal dealings in ways that demonstrated their ability to exploit situations and behave tactically, and not just accept dictates and conditions. He points out that they always had “the potential to shape things themselves” (Huinink 1995, 38, quoted in Richthofen 2009, 15).
Cross-border encounters in East Berlin, whether fly-by-night or long term, offered welcoming embraces and even, ironically, more privacy than could be found in West Germany, the Turkish guest workers’ true “host country.” These men found a sense of home across the border, under the watchful eyes of the Stasi. Some couples went to great lengths to form relationships that defied borders and showed an alternative social organization to the state. Other lovers’ motivations were more elusive, and answers to the following questions remain speculation: Were these trysts part of East Germans’ plans of escape or of exploiting access to Western goods? Did these cross-border lovers seek sexual outlets they could visit and leave at their own discretion or long-term partners? Not everyone crossed the border for love. Indeed, the border crossers reflected a unique and often bizarre social and cultural cross-border world. They offered multiple vantage points on relationships between foreign nationals and East Germans (including the Stasi officials tasked with tracking them)—all of which add a new dimension to our understanding of both the guest-worker program and Cold War narratives. These untold stories provide a fuller and, at times, paradoxical picture that demonstrates that the closed border was indeed crossed, that Turkish nationals and Germans socialized, and that these relationships threatened the GDR as well as pat concepts of what constituted the “West” and the “East.”
The final theme, transgressors, delves into a deeper level of human psychology: the complicity of collaborators, including Stasi-recruited Turkish nationals. In truth transgression is a theme woven throughout this chapter, as it is implied in myriad borders that are crossed—politically, culturally, bodily, and linguistically. Just crossing the inner-Berlin border was a transgression in the most literal sense. The search for fun, some freedom, and sexual and domestic comforts was another type of transgression, especially in light of the restrictions on private life that West German employers imposed in their workers’ dormitories (Eryılmaz and Jamin 1998; Miller 2018). However, there is also a larger level of transgression at work here, one more akin to betrayal, in the overt breaking of laws, flouting of regulations, and cooperation and formal collaboration with East German authorities to report on one’s countrymen. Betrayal, complicity, and coercion combine to some degree in transgression and collaboration. While not operating with total free will, collaborators were, at some level, both choosing and manipulating their collusion with the state. Questions of whether love is true and why people betray also dovetail with ideas of nationality and belonging. In short these border crossers were constantly renegotiating their statuses. They were both Eastern and Western. They were insiders in private relationships with East Germans, in economic relationships as West Germans’ employees, and as workers in West German companies. At the same time, they were outsiders as foreign nationals and—as collaborators—insiders within the Stasi, which tracked their compatriots, placing them outside their national community.
The border between West and East Germany, with Berlin as its symbol, defined the Cold War locally and internationally. When the two German states were founded in 1949, the contestation over who could be representative of “Germans” also began, adding a political classification to the blood-based one. The Federal Republic asserted that only it, with its freely elected government, could legitimately represent Germans. Indeed, under the Hallstein Doctrine (1955–70), the West German government could not, it argued, even recognize the GDR as a state (Hertle 2011, 30). When other states entered into diplomatic relations with the GDR, the Federal Republic reacted with countermeasures, breaking off diplomatic ties with such states and politically isolating the GDR. East Germany, in turn, also expressed the desire to unite all Germans, but only under the flag of socialism. However, the socialist state began to lose its population as it lost its appeal.
Once the socialist planned economy proved to be inefficient, partly because of the heavy burdens the Soviets placed on it, many East German residents fled for financial, political, and family reasons. Republikflucht (fleeing the republic), as the East German state referred to those immigrating to the West, caused the population drain that prompted, on the one hand, the Berlin Wall’s construction in 1961 and, on the other, the expansion of the West German guest-worker program to West Berlin to replace the missing workers from the East (Mushaben 2008, 46–47; Göktürk, Gramling, and Kaes 2007, 9; Mandel 2008, 6). The question of who and where the “real Germans” were—before and after the wall’s construction—was eerily prescient of the post–Cold War debates about German citizenship for guest workers and their descendants.
On August 13, 1961, the East German authorities constructed the Berlin Wall to stem the out-migration of their citizens. In the sixteen years before the wall’s construction, 3.5 million people had fled East Germany (Hertle 2011, 32). The West, however, considered this out-migration representative of people voting with their feet. Previously, West Berliners had also regularly traveled to East Berlin; in fact, until August 1961, about 80 percent of West Berliners had visited East Berlin at least once a month (Alisch 2000, 34). The inner-German border had an undeniable appeal for West Germans in general, and by the end of the 1950s, it had become a well-established tourist attraction, where visitors would hike, picnic, and take photos (Eckert 2001, 245–46). From the very first instance, the GDR saw “border tourism” as a provocation and an attempt at propaganda for the “better Germany” by the Federal Republic (245–46).
Like much of postwar Europe, East Germany also imported foreign workers to assuage its industrial labor shortage. Beginning in 1966 with a treaty with Poland, the GDR signed treaties through the 1980s with Hungary, Algeria, Cuba, Mozambique, Vietnam, Mongolia, and China, offering occupational training or employment for foreign “contract workers” (Milewski 2010, 8). These workers were relegated to unappealing shift work and low-skilled jobs, and the states involved further exploited the workers to relieve trade debts and improve production without investment. For example, according to the bilateral “Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation,” Mozambique received East German agricultural machinery, trucks, and training for its workers, and the GDR obtained grain, coal, and several thousand contract workers (Dennis and LaPorte 2011, 90). By the mid-1970s the focus on occupational training had waned, and the state increasingly viewed the workers in terms of their economic utility. East Germany limited contract to three to five years, workers primarily lived in company-owned hostels or community housing, and the government strongly discouraged contacts between these so-called Third World citizens and its own (Milewski 2010, 8). Contract workers lived throughout the GDR but were heavily concentrated in East Berlin and in the southern industrial cities of Chemnitz, Dresden, Leipzig, and Halle (Dennis and LaPorte 2011, 89). East Germany’s foreign nationals lived mostly in isolation from mainstream society, creating a monocultural society (Kurthen, Bergmann, and Erb 1997, 144–45).
Historians have long noted xenophobia’s prevalence in East Germany, which exploded into blatant violence after reunification in the 1990s (Kurthen et al. 1997). During the lifespan of the GDR, “socialist friendship among peoples” was the official party line, but acceptance of others was not always the norm (Kurthen, Bergmann, and Erb 1997, 144). The media were also forbidden to report on the numbers of foreign workers living in the GDR while at the same time encouraged to scorn West Germany’s guest-worker program as capitalist exploitation (Milewski 2010, 8). According to a sociological study of antisemitism and xenophobia in East Germany, in the 1980s—when actual conditions and government propaganda differed the most—public opinion on “friendly socialist countries” soured while sympathy for “imperialist enemies” grew (Kurthen, Bergmann, and Erb 1997, 144). On August 2, 1975 the Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) most important organ, its official newspaper, Neues Deutschland (New Germany), reported on West Germany’s guest-worker program two years after its official end with the double intention of exposing the exploitation of workers in the West and of pointing out the responsibility that receiving countries had to give them fair job options, job training, language training, humane living conditions, and much more (“Wirtschaftliche und soziale Aspekte der Wanderarbeit,” ZAIG 11129). Indeed, Turkish guest workers with West Berlin residence permits skated the line between constituting “imperialist enemies” with their consumer goods and belonging to the exploited working class.
In addition to political and social constraints, the Berlin Wall was a serious and dangerous border: between 1961 and 1989 at least 136 people were killed there (Hertle 2011, 124). This is the Berlin Wall story that is commonly told—the daring escape attempts from the East, the shoot-to-kill order, the tragic family divisions, and the state’s escalating surveillance and countermeasures. Less well known, however, is that the borders were also less dramatically crossed, often daily. Indeed, the border was porous. After August 13, 1961, a series of treaties and agreements regulated the border, starting in 1963 with a border-pass agreement between the West Berlin Senate and the GDR that allowed Christmas and New Year’s visits (Gieseke 2006, 108–17). That year 730,000 people put up with the long processing period and registered 1.2 million visits to East Berlin between December 19, 1963, and January 5, 1964 (Hertle 2011, 100). The agreement continued until 1966, when negotiations broke down and the Christmas visits ended. The 1970 Four Powers Agreement and the subsequent Transit Agreement between the Federal Republic and the GDR were significant for their regulation of border crossings, visa requirements, and exchange rates (Gieseke 2006, 108–17).
The Soviet Union, however, was not thrilled to see the two German states growing closer. The Soviet Communist Party’s general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, responded to the GDR’s general secretary, Erich Honecker, directly in July 1970: “Erich, let me tell you quite frankly, never forget this: the GDR cannot exist without us, without the Soviet Union, its power and strength. Without us there would be no GDR. . . . There must not be any process of rapprochement between the FRG and the GDR” (Hertle 2011, 135). Nevertheless, both German states acted in their own interests and agreed at the start of 1970 on pacts to ease travel; to open new border crossings; and to improve road, rail, postal, and telephone connections between the two countries (Hertle 2011, 134). After years of division, starting on October 3, 1972, the GDR allowed West Berliners to visit multiple times a year for up to thirty days for “humanitarian, family, religious, cultural or tourism” reasons, resulting in 44 million trips before 1989 (134).
East Germany also stood to gain financially from its relaxed border controls. It collected transit, postal, and visa fees in addition to the exchange of currency required of visitors (Zwangsumtausch) to the GDR—all paid in the hard foreign currency that Eastern Bloc countries desperately needed to operate in the world market.2 Starting in 1973 Honecker allowed West German visitors into the GDR with this mandatory currency exchange and allowed West Germans to transfer funds to East German relatives. This hard currency could then be spent in Intershops, or the government-run stores that sold select goods for Western currency (Zatlin 2007a). Between 1975 and 1979, border-crossing income had increased from almost 600 million DM to 1.56 billion DM, and it remained at this level for the following years (Hertle 2011, 136).
Guest workers, estimated to form almost 10 percent of the West Berlin population, were uniquely positioned within the divided city. On the one hand, because they were guest workers, their employment permits required that they have West German residency permits, and these allowed them to live in West Berlin. On the other hand, because they were foreign nationals, their passports allowed them into East Berlin with greater ease than West Berliners—as long as they crossed the border as foreign tourists and returned by midnight when their same-day visas expired (Henrich 1983). In 1977 the count of border crossers by street and by train, including West Germans, West Berliners, and foreigners, was 18,084,000 (Delius and Lapp 1999, 177). As a result guest workers and other foreign nationals who did not have the same historical ties and political motivations as West Germans also became part of the everyday landscape in East Berlin.
Significantly, East Germans often considered Turkish nationals as Western, not just because of their ready access to consumer goods but also because of their Western lifestyles. At the same time, many West Germans considered them as inassimilable “Easterners.” This East-West confusion mirrored ambiguity about the Turkish republic itself: a NATO member and U.S. ally but deemed by many to be at the heart of the “Orient,” with all the trappings of Orientalism. Yet this small case study, featuring seemingly trivial social interactions—between Turkish men and East German women—reveals layers of meaning that recast traditional narratives of restrictive Cold War Berlin and guest-worker experiences.3 For this group the Berlin Wall was easy to traverse, and East Germans seem to have been more welcoming to foreigners than extant literature has allowed us to believe.
Despite both the relaxation of the border regulations and the political and financial gains of border crossing, East Germany remained deeply concerned with ideological infiltration from the West in the form of packages, media, uncensored news, private messages, and contact with Westerners themselves. The Stasi, known as the “Shield and Sword” of the SED, took its mission very seriously. After détente with West Germany, it expanded its surveillance system considerably with the number of Stasi employees doubling to eighty thousand between 1970 and 1980 (Delius and Lapp 1999, 177). In 1972, in the midst of the “humanitarian” treaties, Honecker actually ordered new land mines installed at the inner-German border (Hertle 2011, 136).
It is not surprising that border crossing and the ensuing international relationships sparked suspicion among East German authorities. After all the East German state is well known for its close watch of its citizens. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Stasi employed 91,015 full-time employees and 173,000 informants, or roughly one in fifty East Germans between the ages of eighteen and eighty (Bruce 2014, 48). In short it was a highly policed state. Indeed, the GDR took foreign visitors’ potential to corrupt and influence its population so earnestly that it set up an Arbeitsgruppe Ausländer (Working Group on Foreigners), specifically for foreigners who resided in West Berlin. The Stasi, like many in West Germany, found guest workers in its territory marginal yet threatening. For many guest workers living in West Berlin, in sharp contrast to the countless negotiations, transnational bureaucracy, treaties, and visa applications that had preceded their residence in the city, Berlin’s own border proved easier to cross. Monthly, thousands of guest workers moved between West and East Berlin for their social lives—to go dancing, to eat out, and, for the largely male population, to meet women.
The theme of lovers explores the various types of intimate relationships between male Turkish guest workers from West Berlin and East German women. Though the literature reveals that cross-border relationships were much more varied, the Stasi files on guest workers assumed that it was primarily heterosexual Turkish men who represented the guest-worker population arriving from West Berlin. A diversity of relationships developed, with the potential grounds for these romantic trysts including attraction, adventure, manipulation, and for the East Germans access to the West, including escaping to the West permanently. Stasi operatives followed border-crossing guest workers with both great interest and much concern, especially the ensuing romantic and sexual relationships with their citizens. Their fears were broad based, ranging from concern that these men would negatively influence their citizens (especially their morality) and induce them into illegal activities to anxiety that they would assist citizens in leaving the GDR. More often than not, the Stasi considered foreign border crossers suspect because their intimate relationships with East German women could result in marriage and emigration out of East Berlin, a topic of perhaps the greatest concern for the Stasi.
Emigration through marriage thus put a figurative hole in the border and the officially coined eheähnliche Verhältnisse, or “marriage-like relationships,” between Turkish men and East Berlin women continued to preoccupy East German officials for decades. Concern over and the regulation of sex between those deemed to be “threatening outsiders” and “one’s own women” are age-old tropes and were equally true for both West and East Germany, but they still bear examination in this context. Communist prudishness was also nothing new. Despite the official rhetoric of socialist feminism that purported equality among the sexes as a counter to bourgeois, Western gender roles, the East German state, like the Soviet Union before it (and also similar to West Germany), actually took a repressive and conservative view of the body, sex, and relationships: abortions, though legal in the first trimester, were difficult to obtain; prostitution and adultery were socially condemned; homosexuality was banned; and the state promoted the traditional nuclear family (McLellan 2011). According to historian Josie McLellan, promiscuity and erotica counted as Western vices: “During the early Cold War, [the East German state] portrayed pinups, stripteases, and prostitution as typical of an Americanized, profit-oriented West German sexuality, contrasting them with the healthy sexuality of the East based in marriage and childbearing” (2011, 51).
In the eyes of the Stasi, political infiltration through the private realm was a real concern. Regardless of any moral code, intimate relationships can challenge belief systems successfully. According to one operative’s report, “often marriage-like relationships . . . between Turks living in West Berlin and female citizens of the GDR [arose],” which could lead to some of these female citizens being “pulled into the potential circles of the unlawful candidates for leaving the GDR” (HA II 22858, 335). By marrying a foreigner, an East German woman could apply for emigration (Ausreiseantrag) from the GDR. The operative above noted in the report that in 1980, seventy female citizens had applied to emigrate specifically through marriage with Turkish citizens (335). Highlighting the ubiquity of the problem, an East Berlin customs officer who routinely searched Turks crossing the border apparently found Turkish men in possession of “hundreds of contact addresses and telephone numbers of GDR female citizens per year” (335). The Stasi recognized, just as many East German women must have, that these foreign men provided a way out of the GDR for them.
Not all relationships were of convenience or for personal gain, however. In fact love-based relationships flourished, as evidenced by private photos of couples together. One man was reported to have attempted to go as far as to take up permanent residence in East Berlin because, according to the Stasi operative, he had developed an “intense love relationship” with his East German girlfriend; the file also included pictures of them on picnics and in bed together (HA II 27442, 314). In another case, a foreign man decided to divorce his West Berlin wife to marry an East Berlin woman instead (HA II 27962, 116). One East Berlin woman applied to marry a Turkish guest worker residing in West Berlin whom she had dated and from whom she had received financial support for twelve years since 1967 (ZKG 286, 40). The woman’s daughter considered the Turkish man a father figure as he had been in her life consistently since she had been six years old. The mother wished to marry and move with her fiancé to Turkey, but the GDR denied her request (ZKG 286, 40). Despite the border they had built a life and a family together. Significantly, these reports reveal an unmistakably high level of contact between the two groups that allowed relationships to develop over years despite the border.
On the whole Stasi officials found the relationships between foreign men and East German women to be dubious and continued to comment on whether these relationships were “real” and on what types of contact they were based, often noting the promiscuity of the people involved. Those relationships deemed “real” were often couples who had been together for one or two years, seeing each other once or twice a week—or communicating through daily telephone contact. One woman had a “close relationship” with a “Turkish citizen from West Berlin” who, at the time of the report, arrived every Friday and stayed through Sunday for a year, sending her daughter to stay with her grandparents each time (HA II 28084, 29). In another case an officer noted, “Because the Turk arrives almost daily from West Berlin, one can assume that it is a case of a steady relationship” (ZKG 286, 10). In a more common case, a woman appealed to the state to let her immigrate to Turkey with her West Berlin–living fiancé, but the Volkspolizei (People’s Police, VP) refused her request because of doubts about the relationship’s authenticity; they explained that she had “steadily changing relationships with men” (ZKG 286, 20). The VP’s impressions of her relationships’ genuineness had a major impact on her life.
The Stasi’s suspicion of the nature of these relationships was not unfounded. The case of two people, “Mesut” and “Corinna,” shows the slippery politics of cross-border relationships.4 “Mesut” met “Corinna,” an East German dancer, when her troupe was on tour in Turkey in 1954 (HA XX 18529, 26). In love with her, “Mesut” moved to Germany as a student in 1958 and studied in Bavaria (HA XX 18529, 10). In 1963 he began to petition the East German state for permission to marry “Corinna” and have her join him in the West (HA XX 18529, 10). He wrote moving letters, pleading to be with his fiancée, writing that their “destiny and future together hang in the balance” (HA XX 18529, 10). He appealed to the state’s sense of morality, writing, “Surely it cannot be in the interest of a state to get involved in the deeply personal affairs of its citizens” (HA XX 18529, 10), which ironically was a statement that the Stasi noted. “Mesut” also appealed to the state’s international reputation: “In my homeland, in which each citizen is entitled to every freedom, the GDR’s negative stance toward its own citizens will not be understood. It is of upmost importance to not hinder the positive image of the GDR to my fellow citizens” (HA XX 18529, 11). In the letter explaining the denial of his request, the East German authorities made two points: first, that Turkey did not recognize the state of East Germany and, second, that without state representation in Turkey, his future wife would have no political protection there (HA XX 18529, 13). The geopolitics of the Turkish Republic’s refusal to recognize East Germany is played out in this one man’s request to be with his love.
In the meantime his fiancée became pregnant with their child (leaving one to infer that they still had regular contact with each other), and she also lost her job, which implies that the East German state was punishing her for her wish to leave. Once again “Mesut” appealed to the international reputation of the East German state, writing, “The attraction of the socialist societal form on us developing countries is a certain factor” (HA XX 18529, 14). He also took an emotional tone, saying it did not make sense to give his bride false hope (HA XX 18529, 13). “Mesut” petitioned for help in the West German state as well, writing to the Bundesnotaufnahmeverfahren (Federal Emergency Department, BNV) for assistance. The BNV assisted refugees and those fleeing the East German state and did so based on a law from August 22, 1950, that stated that “Germans from other lands” who were in states of emergency would be accepted in the Federal Republic (HA XX 18529, 25). In 1967 the agency wrote back that what “Mesut” was asking for was extremely difficult to achieve (HA XX 18529, 18). Indeed, it noted, only those considered unable to work and the elderly were granted the right to leave the GDR (HA XX 18529, 17). After the construction of the Berlin Wall, leaving the GDR was nearly impossible.
“Corinna” applied for and was granted a travel visa to Turkey supposedly to search for her fiancé there, though she never traveled to Turkey. It is odd that the state would grant this visa in the first place, demonstrating a curious labyrinth of both bureaucracy and reasoning. “Corinna” apparently somehow traveled to Vienna and then to Munich, legally, and on June 28, 1967, she obtained a residence permit for the family in Kreuzberg, West Berlin (HA XX 18529, 26). It took almost five years of wrangling for the couple to come together in West Berlin.
However, this story is no fairy tale. A statement in the file notes that someone overheard “Corinna” saying that once she was in the West, she would leave “Mesut” (HA XX 18529, 28). She had apparently fallen in love with a man she had met in a Pankow hospital in 1966, all the while waiting for permission to move to West Berlin with “Mesut” (HA XX 18529, 28). The witness also explained that “Corinna” and her family had ostensibly been economically exploiting “Mesut” for years (HA XX 18529, 28). Was he naive? Was “Corinna” trying to improve her image with her family by not admitting to being in love with this foreign man? In any case the couple began a messy divorce, in which custody of the son and possession of a Turkish rug were hotly debated. The Stasi concluded, however, that “Mesut” was the suspicious one, for having helped an East German citizen leave the country. It did not comment on “Corinna’s” apparent exploitation of “Mesut.”
The lines between intimacy and betrayal were often blurred. A Turkish man who worked unofficially for the Stasi, “Murat,” reported on an East German woman whose address men crossing into East Berlin regularly gave as a destination on the entry visa for years until 1988 (HA II 27002, 1). When the Stasi questioned her about her relationships with foreign men, she curtly replied that she “just couldn’t sleep with white men” (HA II 27002, 1). The Stasi reports indicate that she had a well-cared-for appearance and dressed primarily in Western clothing, obtained either from Intershop or from her “Western friends”—whom the Stasi identified primarily as “Arabs” who drove Mercedes (HA II 27002, 2). These border crossers’ status as foreign, as “Eastern,” and as cultural others apparently also played a role in how the Stasi perceived them. In short even men who had not broken any rules were dubious because of their intimate relationships, which were not necessarily illegal but nonetheless had great potential power to subvert the East German state.
Many East German women engaged in relationships with Turkish nationals also seized opportunities for personal gain. A case in point is a January 3, 1989, report from IM (inoffizielle Mitarbeiterin) “Ina,” who noted that a woman who had contact with “Arabs” had filed for an exit visa to leave East Germany for West Berlin (HA II 27081, 4). Starting in the mid-1980s, East German citizens exploited the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which guaranteed freedom of movement. “Ina” reported that the woman in question had had extensive contact with “Turks and other foreigners,” frequently meeting them in the popular Café Moskau on Karl-Marx Boulevard or the famous disco Lindencorso on Unter den Linden (HA II 27081, 5). The woman was suspected of prostitution and of taking advantage of her job at a travel agency on Alexander Square to provide customs declarations forms illegally. An earlier report notes that she was extremely interested in securing West German marks and would often use intimate relationships to do so. The Stasi watched her entire family, especially her parents, as a result of her actions but found that they had the correct political leanings (HA II 27081, 5). Since she lived with her parents, having men over was awkward. In the summer months, her parents would stay at their weekend cottage, which allowed her to have male visitors at home. This was a case not of romance but of financial transactions.
Unlike their lives in West Berlin, which were dominated by low status at work, poor living arrangements in company dormitories, and a general suspicion and dislike of foreigners on the part of many West Berliners, East Berlin provided a place for these men to socialize freely. One Turkish man residing in West Berlin, Cahit, who eventually married his East Berlin girlfriend, noted in a 1995 interview: “We had heard that in the East there were a lot of women, and there really were. So the Turks were always there. We were young, so naturally it was normal that men needed women” (DOMiD “Cahit” 1995).5 Cahit recalled: “The Western [West German] women didn’t really want to have much to do with the Turkish men” (DOMiD “Cahit” 1995). Cahit’s point about social exclusion in the West was genuine. For example, an archived photo of the front window of a Gelsenkirchen disco, taken in 1974, shows a handwritten sign that reads, “Für Ausländer Zutritt VERBOTEN” (Entry for foreigners is FORBIDDEN) (Eryılmaz and Jamin 1998, 310).6 The sign’s capitalization makes for an aggressive tone, and the sign itself is reminiscent of prewar signs forbidding the entry of Jews. Informal discrimination against guest workers in West Germany included refusal to rent to foreigners and exclusion from bars and clubs, and it escalated in the 1970s as German unemployment rose for the first time in the postwar era (Castles and Miller 2003, 215).
In contrast multiple files mention Turkish men eagerly crossing to dance for the evening with East Berlin women and girlfriends at Lindencorso or Café Moskau (HA II 28079, 10; 27962, 13; 27962, 50). The Stasi was less enthusiastic about the meetings, and it began to track and investigate the East Berlin women who met with foreign men. It was common for foreign crossers to provide a contact name and address, and often East Berlin women served this purpose, which placed many of them under suspicion with the Stasi—so much so that it often had notes in its files about these women’s suitability for “unofficial collaboration” with the Stasi (HA II 27962, 42; 27962, 77). Considering that historians now report that men dominated the Stasi informant network (between 80 and 90 percent), accessing potential female informants was noteworthy (Gieseke 2001, 113). One woman was reported to have “frequently changing [foreign] male acquaintances,” who would go home with her, have small parties there, and spend the night (HA II 27962, 28). Three different couples in her building were informing on her and her interactions with these foreign men (HA II 27962, 28). They reported, for example, that a man from West Berlin visited with his Mercedes and renovated her whole apartment, apparently bringing his own tools and materials (HA II 27962, 28). The woman later became engaged to a Bulgarian man, and when the Stasi questioned her about why Turkish men had given her address when they entered the GDR, she (dubiously) replied that a former female friend must have passed it on. Furthermore, she was pleased that the Stasi questioned her about it privately so that her fiancé would not learn about the Turkish men (HA II 27962, 49). Apparently, she had worked as a secretary for the Stasi and became alarmed when her relationship with a Turkish man had become known, so she implored him to provide various other addresses when he crossed the border; her file noted three different addresses. The report on her concludes with the point that she is “feminine and attractive” and a good potential candidate for “unofficial collaboration” with the Stasi (HA II 27962, 49). Her assignment would be to work at Café Moskau. It appears that her associations with the West Berlin Turkish men resulted in her (possibly coerced) decision to work for the Stasi. It is unclear what appeal the foreign men, especially the Turks, had for her—entertainment or material concerns. However, it is clear that her associations affected her standing with her neighbors and her state.
Turkish nationals went to East Berlin for myriad reasons: exploration, adventure, and perhaps a feeling of greater social freedom. After the guest-worker program officially ended in 1973, very little changed in the Stasi’s tracking of Turkish nationals in the GDR. Indeed, the files continue through 1989. Regardless of the reasons stated in 1979, such as suspicions of drug smuggling, illicit political activities, and the sale of illegal passports, it seems that the Stasi deemed many of the men they tracked risky solely because of their contact with East German women. For example, the Stasi traced a Turkish man from Varto, in eastern Anatolia, for his encounters with four different East German women in 1979, as noted in a report titled “Summary of a Turkish Citizen Who Has Contact with Multiple GDR female Citizens” (HA II 29778, 7–8). The man apparently was reported on in the name of “political filtering activities,” a Stasi term for surveillance at the border train stations. Even under the guise of political suspicion, the contact with East German women always made it to the fore of the reports. When asked about the differences between East and West Berlin, a Turkish man noted that the widespread xenophobia common in West Berlin was not prevalent in East Berlin (HA II 28209, 9). He was not just trying to appease an East German friend; his answer was most likely sincere, since he followed with negative comments on the East German state, saying that it was not, in his opinion, “the real socialism” (HA II 28209, 9). According to a report three years later, this same Turkish national planned to marry his East German girlfriend and hoped to move to East Berlin to live with her. He reasoned that he did not think that “as a Turk” he had good employment chances in West Berlin, expanding his comfort level in the East to the economic sphere (HA II 28209, 50).
Reinforcing his East-West comparison, the same man also commented that former East Berliners who had moved to West Berlin were having difficulties socially and felt “as discriminated against as did the Turks” (HA II 28209, 50). The report concluded with the foreign man apparently saying that in the East he had enjoyed “hospitality toward foreigners,” even “as a Turk” (HA II 28209, 50). Indeed, an undercover agent noted in his report that this man had “known no form of xenophobia in the GDR,” and with an odd undertone, the writer also deemed him to be “intelligent” and “trustworthy,” with “clean” and “orderly” clothing (HA II 28209, 50). In other words it was a point of pride for the Stasi that these foreign workers, whom the West German state exploited economically, apparently found more social inclusion and economic freedom in East Berlin.
The Stasi tracked another Turkish national ostensibly for his participation in an extreme right-wing political group, the ultranationalist Gray Wolves (Bozkurtlar), yet his file concentrates mostly on his loose relationships with various East Berlin women (HA VIII 3506, 146). The officers noted that he had been involved in the “terrorist group” in West Berlin as well as in Turkey, and as a result a detail was assigned to him from October 22, 1985, through January 30, 1986. However, files on his activities in East Berlin mainly report that he was out for a good time, not engaged in political organizing. The man under suspicion, known in the file as “Number 279594” and also as the Objekt (target) lived with his wife in West Berlin, where he worked for the Ford Company (HA VIII 3506, 155). He was a thin man of around twenty to twenty-five years, with an olive complexion, dark hair, a mustache, and “straight and separated” eyebrows (HA VIII 3506, 155). The operative deemed his German to be “broken . . . foreign-speak” (HA VIII 3506, 155). During his frequent evenings out in East Berlin, he was in the company of women, including a woman given the cover name “Tunte” (HA VIII 3506, 155). “Tunte” was between eighteen and twenty-three years old, thin, blond, and blue-eyed, with full lips, a bit of a sunken chin that almost formed a double chin, and thin plucked eyebrows lined with black pencil (HA VIII 3506, 155).
A typical evening out for “Number 279594,” as reported by the Stasi, occurred on November 22, 1985, when he acted more like a womanizer than a political radical (HA VIII 3506, 155). The Stasi tracked his every move, minute by minute, once he entered East Berlin at exactly 5:24 p.m. At exactly 6:01 p.m., “Number 279594” greeted “Tunte” with a hug and went home with her. He was wearing a black leather jacket, black-gray speckled pants, and loafers. About ninety minutes later they emerged from her home, with “Tunte” having changed her clothes from black pants to red pants and a black Adidas jacket. They first stopped at Café Moskau before continuing on to Lindencorso. The informant reports that the target no longer showed any interest in “Tunte” once they arrived in Lindencorso. He sought out “other female companionship,” leaving “Tunte” at a table so that he could pick up women at the bar and then dance with them instead (HA VIII 3506, 155). Around 11:55 p.m., apparently “other foreigners” who were the target’s acquaintances pointed out the late hour—it was quickly approaching the midnight deadline—and they all left at 12:01 a.m. for the Friedrich Street border crossing, entering it at exactly 12:08 a.m. (HA VIII 3506, 155). More than a month later, this Turkish man had a similar evening out, arriving in East Berlin at 7:27 p.m. and then hanging out at Lindencorso to drink champagne with other “foreign men” while “openly searching for female companionship” (HA VIII 3506, 159). The report’s clinical tone adds an air of judgment to the target’s free-spirited evening, leaving readers to wonder whether this man was really followed for his political activities or for his philandering.
These border crossings are significant from different vantage points: to East Berliners, these visitors not only were novel but also served as a conduit for hard-to-obtain goods. In contrast to most narratives of ethnic Turkish guest workers—which feature uneducated, Anatolian or rural, and devotedly Muslim men—these border crossers were constructed as “Westerners,” not just with their West Berlin residence permits but also through their ready access to Western material goods and promiscuity. In many cases the Stasi primarily worried that these Turkish nationals served as representatives of West Berlin, of Western consumerism and political ideologies, and of the Turkish Republic’s alliance with the Western Bloc. Indeed, the history of material culture and consumerism in the Eastern Bloc is vast and draws on a wide range of sources; most socialist countries recognized both the spiritual alienation money creates and how poor material conditions contributed to their own demise (Bren and Neuburger 2012).
The categories in this chapter all involve a level of transgression—literally and figuratively—but this final section focuses specifically on the point of view of the state and its deep suspicion of foreign nationals who entered its territory and broke its rules. In many of the cases against Turkish men, the GDR invoked moral codes. Morality was indeed a Cold War weapon. The East German struggle to define not only new legal codes but also new social ones made morality a part of the revolutionary rebuilding of society (Poiger 2000; Evans 2003, 2005; Field 2007). According to Jennifer Evans decency mattered; “in East Germany, the struggle to define new social and legal maxims turned on the place that morality was to have in the revolutionary rebuilding of society” (2010, 554). For a case in point, in 1983 a Turkish man, Mr. Halil, who had come to West Germany to work at the Ford factory, was arrested in East Berlin for carrying a pornographic film and a pornographic keychain in the lining of his coat (HA II 27962, 57). Halil said in his defense that a friend had given them to him two weeks prior, and that he had carried them in his coat ever since, having apparently forgotten that they were there. While plausible Halil’s explanation is not very believable; it is more likely that he was smuggling the pornographic goods into East Berlin to sell them for a profit and that he had been doing so once a week for thirteen years, from 1970 to 1983 (HA II 27962, 57). This case prompts the question of which aspect bothered the state more: the unwholesome nature of pornography or the underground economy. Despite its official morality, the East German state often used sex to sell its own ideas, most famously in its monthly Das Magazin (McLellan 2011, 49–65). Das Magazin specialized in racy stories and articles and was authorized to publish a nude photo in every issue, being East Germany’s official source of publicly available pornography (McLellan 2011, 49–65). Maintaining the state monopoly on pornography was not easy, but keeping up the pretense of state morality remained a priority.
Another form of transgression was Turkish nationals who worked with the Stasi, challenging the view that they were only the Stasi’s targets. The relationships between the Stasi and the West Berlin–residing guest workers defied simple definitions. It is noteworthy as well that much of this information was gathered with the help of Turkish IMs reporting on their countrymen, calling into question loyalties on many levels. Many guest workers also sought to profit from their unique position as border crossers. In a few cases, marriages between Turkish guest workers and East Berlin women reportedly occurred for money. Reports in the files note Turkish men charging between 10,000 and 12,000 marks (and in one case up to 30,000 DM) to facilitate the smuggling of people out of East and into West Berlin through marriage (HA I 15176). In one case a border guard reported with exasperation that a Turkish man had been trying to befriend him and strike up a conversation with him whenever he crossed, wanting to know his address and offering him a pair of “real oriental slippers” from his homeland. It is hard to tell whether the Turkish man sought to befriend the border guard for a possible future benefit or simply out of cultural differences about appropriate familiarity. In another case extensive photographs demonstrated how a Turkish man rebuilt the inside of his car to hide a woman behind the dashboard and console; they were discovered and arrested in December 1973 (HA VI 441, 2-11). Another couple was discovered and arrested in 1979, and in 1987 an attempt to smuggle a man and a child out in the trunk of a Ford was also thwarted (HA I 15176, 1; HA VI 919, 14).
Foreign men also spoke informally with Stasi officials. Historian Gary Bruce (2008) has written that informal contacts, those the Stasi operatives sought for information but with whom they did not formalize the relationship into IMs, were integral to Stasi work (2008, 93–94). For example, Turkish Kontaktpersonen (contact persons, KP) were common in the files, as was the case with “Panther,” who reported on another West Berlin–residing Turk who had bragged to him about dating the tall, blonde daughter of a manager of the border crossing at Friedrich Street and therefore presumably knew when the “strictest” controls would be (the Stasi found the report dubious) (HA II 24068, 3–4). The fact that there were cases of guest workers functioning in a wide variety of roles for the Stasi, whether as informal contact persons or as official IMs, implies that the East German state viewed these men as useful, necessary, and competent.
According to Bruce today the archived Stasi files are organized into four categories of people, and these categories shed light on the various ways people worked with the Stasi. The archives avoid the loaded terms Opfer and Täter (“victim” and “perpetrator”) (HA II 2406893–94). As a result, the first category is the “affected,” known in German as Betroffene to avoid the tricky term of Opfer (victim). The “affected” category refers to those monitored, arrested, or controlled in some way and is the category containing much of the information on the border crossers in this chapter. However, the people in this category do not tell the whole story. The second group is “third party,” individuals on whom there was specific information in the Stasi files although they were not the targets of specific information-gathering operations. The third group is the “collaborators,” which included both official and unofficial collaborators; and, the fourth group is “advantaged persons” whom the Stasi supported with material or career gain (93–94). Reliable figures on the numbers of IMs who were foreign nationals do not exist, but some information can be gleaned from the records. According to historian Jens Gieseke, in 1988, for example, there were 1,553 West German citizens working as IMs. Gieseke reports that non-German foreign nationals served in even smaller numbers, despite the fact that from the mid-1970s onward the total number of IMs remained between 170,000 and 180,000 (2005, 198–202).
Informants played such a large role in the everyday dealings of the Stasi that some historians have even debated whether the GDR could count as a “participatory dictatorship” (Fulbrook 2005). Motivations for working as an IM were often linked to fear and having been arrested, as in the case of Hidir Ciçek, who had come to West Germany from Istanbul in 1968 to work as a mechanic. Even in an internal Stasi poll (with potential bias), up to 45 percent of IMs reported that “pressure and fear had played a role in their being recruited” (Fulbrook 2005, 203). Indeed, many of the Turkish guest workers who became unofficial coworkers of the Stasi did so after having been arrested and “turned,” though scholars remain divided on the relative roles consent and coercion played (Müller-Enbergs, 2007; Bruce 2014, 52). The recruitment and roles of Turkish contact persons and unofficial workers were diverse; in August 1980 one West Berlin–living Turk sought to help the Stasi because he thought it might aid his attempt to marry his East Berlin girlfriend, for example (HA II 28872, 3).
The Stasi typically tasked the Turkish IMs with reporting on other Turks who had contacts and relationships with East Berliners. They were to investigate whether people were planning on leaving the GDR. Hidir Ciçek, who had come to West Germany from Istanbul in 1968 to work as a mechanic, became an IM after his arrest. Ciçek had often visited the East Berlin cafés Sofia and Pressecafe, where he got to know a woman from Königs Wusterhausen (AIM, file 8196/78, vol. 1, 23). After missing the midnight deadline for the third time, he was banned from entering the GDR with an Einreisesperre (entry ban). As a rule the East German authorities fined and banned Turkish nationals who missed the midnight deadline, including those who did so because of intoxication (in one case for being both drunk and barefoot) (HA II 28084, 5); those who spent the night illegally; and those who tried to smuggle unauthorized goods across the border (often scarves, perfume, and tobacco) (HA II 28084, 35). Desperate to return to East Berlin, Ciçek borrowed a friend’s passport and forged the friend’s name on the currency exchange form. His plan failed; he was arrested and sentenced to fourteen months in jail (AIM 8196/78, vol. 1, vol. VII/2, 149).
During his incarceration Ciçek reported on illegal drug smuggling, the transport of an East Berlin woman out of the GDR over the Czech border, the selling of Turkish passports, and his “close relationship” with the woman from Königs Wusterhausen (AIM 8196/78, vol. VII/2, 26). The files contain no information on his treatment in jail or his motivations for providing these details. He spoke with the officials in German, as they noted that he understood German and spoke “broken German” (AIM 8196/78, vol. VII/2, 74). At the time of his release to West Berlin, on November 23, 1971, Ciçek had agreed to work as an IM under the code name “Tanju Abisch” (AIM 8196/78, vol. VII/2, 62). Ciçek apparently “wished to protect the GDR from harm” and wanted to “support the Stasi” in its mission (AIM 8196/78, vol. VII/2, 62). The same memo also noted that he would have to be surveilled to see whether he could be trusted and counted on to provide truthful evidence (AIM 8196/78, vol. VII/2, 62). During his tenure as an IM, he continued to live in West Berlin and was to report on ethnic Turks and other foreigners living there, especially those who started relationships with East Berlin women. In a 1971 report, a Stasi operative noted that the GDR required “high quality unofficial work” to protect its borders because its opposition had a “global strategy” to “infiltrate the socialist states and undermine them from within” (AIM 8196/78, vol. VII/2, 62). In particular Ciçek was to work to thwart “attacks on the border” that originated in West Berlin and to draw on his contacts in West Berlin to learn of anyone seeking to help an East Berliner leave. On July 9, 1972, the Berliner Zeitung (an East Berlin paper) reported that Ciçek’s place of employment in West Berlin planned to shut its plant by the end of the year—information that the Stasi included in his file, implying that he had little to compel him to stay in West Berlin (AIM 8196/78, vol. VII/2, 114).
It is hard to tell why Ciçek initially risked arrest by trying to cross the border with a borrowed passport and what his true motivations for becoming an informant were: Was he so determined to get back to his East German girlfriend? Was he really dissatisfied enough with the capitalist systems in his life to turn to espionage work? Did the prospect of unemployment frighten him? Did he feel so threatened by his imprisonment in East Germany that he felt he had no alternative? We can only guess at definitive conclusions, but we can assume that Ciçek and many more like him had become quotidian parts of the suspicious, permeable border landscape of the divided city.
Other Turkish men flouted or tried to skirt the border laws of the East German state, often resulting in their arrest. If emigration through marriage was not possible, some Turkish nationals attempted to sneak their girlfriends out of the GDR illegally (HA II 27838, 2). “Georg,” a contact person, reported that a Turkish national, who was no longer allowed into the GDR because of previously overstaying a visa, planned to smuggle out his East German girlfriend, her three children, and an unknown acquaintance (plus the acquaintance’s wife and two children) who had lost his job because of applying to leave the GDR (HA II 27838, 3). The extraordinary plan was to build a balloon to fly everyone out, and an East German citizen had implored “Georg” to bring books from West Berlin on how to construct such a balloon (HA II 27838, 3). It was of immediate significance to find out more about these acquaintances who had grand plans of escape, so a separate IM, “Mehmet,” who was noted as being Turkish Kurdish, was assigned to the case (HA II 27838, 28,29).
The family who had hoped to escape via a balloon is a significant case for multiple reasons. They were already under suspicion in 1982 for their involvement in illegal trade union organizing at work in East Berlin and, especially, for their connections with the famous and historically significant Polish trade union Solidarity just across the border (HA II 27838, 16). The Stasi was also suspicious of the family because of their connections with “imperialist countries” seen in their application to leave the GDR. Last, the Stasi watched the family due to the fact that their daughter’s boyfriend was a West Berlin–residing Turk. Indeed, the files note that the family’s “contact with foreigners” should be closely monitored. Significantly, three different Turkish nationals—the boyfriend in West Berlin and the informants “Georg” and “Mehmet”—were working on different sides of the Iron Curtain in n historically significant moment of rising dissent. Their seemingly personal histories overlapped with the larger themes of the Cold War—dissent, deception, and political maneuvers.
The relative ease with which West Berlin–residing Turkish nationals could maintain relationships with East Germans was fraught with political implications and irony. The surprising conclusion that this chapter’s stories suggest is that—despite the Stasi’s attention and the distrust they faced in West German society—these men were able to satisfy the most ordinary of human desires for connection, personal gain, and fulfillment and to operate in the two societies in a remarkably diverse and contradictory range of ways. Unexpectedly, even though they lived on the margins of West Berlin and West German society, these men represented Western consumer culture for East Berliners; despite their limitations of language, employment status, and social standing, they epitomized the successes of Western capitalism. It is also ironic that behind the Iron Curtain they gained increased social liberty, demonstrated with their successes with East German women.
Writ large these examples highlight unique but important actions of minorities in Europe, show how integration can occur, and comment on Cold War interactions between the two Germanys. Border crossers both exemplify and complicate the Cold War climate—one of division, suspicion, and espionage. These stories also highlight constructions of gender in this period: Were East Berlin women informants? What role did controlling their morality and sex lives play in state decisions? Did they risk their standing with the state and with their families for relationships with foreign men? Were their relationships with foreign men a form of escapism or protest? Could their view of the state and their opinion of its ideas be gauged from their choices in their personal lives?
Many Turkish nationals who traveled to East Berlin invested in new lives and families there that spanned decades. In the Stasi files, they were, for the most part, a monolithic group of “foreigners” whose status was not decided by work visas, the guest-worker program, applications, or relationships with West Germans in any way. The workers in these peculiar cases had no intention of leaving when the program officially ended in 1973 or of having merely a temporary stay in Germany—West or East. Their personal relationships complement policy documents on immigration, citizenship, and labor laws in important ways by providing a view from the margins that changes our understanding of Cold War history as a whole. Private relationships between Turkish citizens living in West Berlin and East German citizens continued well into the 1980s, demonstrating a participation and investment in a life—a personal one—in Germany.
1. Unless otherwise noted all translations are mine.
2. Communist countries had large debts to the World Bank, the IMF, and private bankers for hard currency with which to purchase consumer goods they needed and that their citizens would buy. Historian Tony Judt notes that by its last years the GDR admitted to spending over 60 per cent of its annual income on interest on Western loans (2005, 582).
3. Important early work empathetically exposed guest workers’ miserable conditions, though such depictions have also effaced complex human experiences. See, among others, Berger and Mohr 1975; Steinen 1985; Gunter Wallraff 1985; Fassbinder 1974; Aladağ 2010. For important studies on xenophobia in East Germany, see Zatlin 2007b.
4. I have chosen these two pseudonyms to ease reading this couple’s narrative. In the files their names are completely redacted.
5. Cahit was one of several men whom the Documentation Center and Museum of Migration to Germany interviewed and whose interview is now housed in their archives in Cologne, Germany. DOMiD Interview 15, Berlin, August 30, 1995.
6. Photo by Manfred Vollmer, Essen in Eryılmaz and Jamin 1998, 310.
BStU (Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik [Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic]), Archive der Zentralstelle (Central Archive). 67/846.
—. MfS, AIM, file 8196/78 1/1.
—. MfS, AIM, file 8196/78 1/2.
—. MfS, AIM, file 8196/78 1/3.
—. MfS, AS 9/73.
—. MfS, GH, file 73/78.
—. MfS, HA I, file 15176.
—. MfS, HA II, files 22858; 24068; 27002; 27081; 27084; 27442; 27575; 27836; 27837; 27838; 27962; 28079; 28084; 28209; 28872; 29717; 29668; 29778; 40416.
—. MfS, HA VI, files 441; 919.
—. MfS, HA VIII, file 3506.
—. MfS, HA XX, files 10221; 18529.
—. MfS, Sekr. Mittig: 63.
—. MfS, Sekr. Neiber: 225.
—. MfS, ZAIG, file 11129.
—. MfS, ZKG, file 286.
—. MfS, ZKG, file 11540.
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